“To some people it may seem that the very strangeness of Martian life precludes for it an appeal to human interest. To me this is but a near-sighted view. The less the life there proves a counterpart of our earthly state of things, the more it fires fancy and piques inquiry as to what it be.” Percival Lowell, Mars and Its Canals
On a Thursday afternoon in early February, in a residential neighborhood of Chevy Chase Heights, the dingy-brown building of Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory looms from the top of a steep and grassy hill. At the bottom of the hill is a wooden entrance sign, just 20 feet from a pile of logs and tree stumps. On one branch of one naked magnolia a gray hooded sweatshirt hangs forgotten. The grass of the grassy hill is dead, and crunches when you trudge through it. The lab houses one hundred and fifty of the nation’s best scientists, but only a handful of cars are parked along the edge of the driveway that winds up sharply to the front door. When the elderly secretary enters the door’s security code, you can hear the slow punch of the buttons, and the soft shuffle of her shoes on polished linoleum as she escorts you down the empty corridor. In short, it’s everything you might expect from a Martian-life-detection lab.
In 1996, NASA triumphantly announced the find of ALH84001, the meteorite that supposedly harbored fossils of ancient Martian life. Andrew Steele was the young Brit who showed, just months after the announcement, that meteorite ALH84001 was contaminated with Antarctic bugs. But even after undercutting NASA’s triumphant find, Steele still believed we might one day find life on the Red Planet. In the last decade, with the help of groups who study the biological workings of extremophiles on Earth, many astrobiologists and astronomers have tried various approaches to the hunting of life beyond Earth’s orbit. Steele’s group, focused on making life-detection instruments for both rover and manned missions to Mars, finds a home in a few of the microbiology labs in the creepy building on the hill.
Though a decade has passed since he trumped NASA’s claim, Steele still looks like a grungy twenty-something. He’s tall, lean, and slightly apish. His wavy blonde hair covers the letters printed on the back of his t-shirt, so you can’t quite read the name of the garage band that’s printed on it; his blue jeans are so faded they’re white. He’s dirty, but wears jewelry—rainbow bracelets on his wrist and a heavy Celtic cross around his neck. He walks lightly on old green sneakers, the same ones he had in August, when he traveled to the other side of the world to test his gadgets.
In August of 2003, 2004, and 2005, Steele and his colleagues went to the Arctic Circle island of Svalbard. Svalbard is not only cold—dropping down to -12 degrees Celsius (10 degrees Fahrenheit), even in August’s 24 hours of daylight—but dusty, and dangerous. (Steele’s crew, armed with shotguns, had to switch between crushing up rock and watching for polar bears.) The island is the only place on Earth with a volcano that has the kind of rock that was sampled on the Viking missions. And most important, the rock harbors microorganisms that Steele’s gadgets can try to detect.
The gadgets are called microarrays, matchbook-sized glass chips coated with different kinds of antibodies. Each antibody recognizes in a rock different life-specific molecules—like nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA), amino acids, proteins, or certain carbon isotopes—and when it finds them, it glows. Steele says the chips will be used on NASA’s next big rover project, the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). The MSL, part of NASA’s larger Mars Exploration Program, plans to send a nuclear-powered rover to Mars, much larger than the golf-cart sized Spirit and Opportunity rovers that are up there now. In their two years of exploring, Spirit and Opportunity have each traveled about three miles. By comparison, the MSL is a tank; it will travel up to 90 miles per hour, roll over obstacles 30 inches high, and will have a full on-board laboratory for testing climate changes and geological samples.
But to gain a true understanding of the landscape and really probe for life, Steele says, rovers aren’t enough; you need men. “Rovers are pretty easy now, we could send rovers all over the place for about $900 million a shot,” he says. “But a human being is a thousand times more capable than any robot.” Rovers have to stay on a horizontal plane, for instance, so they often don’t have the right visual perspective to find subtle-yet-important geological features, like bedrock. Also, their controllers on Earth can’t manipulate the machines in real time; they’re eight minutes behind. But the biggest problem, according to Steele, is that a rover doesn’t have object recognition. “An elephant could run in front of it,” he says, “and it wouldn’t know the difference.”
To make his point, Steele cites one rover story NASA hasn’t released. A few months ago, a wire broke on Spirit’s arm. “So the engineering team spent a few days fixing it, slowly working the arm to loosen the dust they thought got into the motors,” he explains. Since Spirit was immobile for a few days, the scientist team decided to take high-resolution photographs of the landscape, instead of the usual low-resolution ones. And the result was amazing: Steele says the new photos gave them an incredible view of the surrounding geological features, including those that might indicate an ancient flow of liquid water. As he explains: “They said, ‘oh my god, those crossbeds are fantastic. This is just brilliant,’ but normally, the rovers would never have caught all of that detail. A human would have seen it right away.” And the detail, in this case, was crucial: “it was evidence,” Steele says, “of water-induced features in the rocks.”
In addition to tweaking the rover machines, Steele’s also working on what he calls the next generation of gadgets: those that would allow planet exploration by astronauts. “We’re making computing technology, like GPS and camera systems, and a barcode system that automatically labels samples,” he explains. This would have been nice for the astronauts of the Apollo missions because, as Steele says “the geezers don’t have time to get everything—on the Moon they often forgot to record locations and label properly.” But with the new toys, he says, “the astronaut merely needs to bag it, tag it, and the rest is done.”
This emphasis on creating technology for astronauts spurs Steele to visit extreme environments like Svalbard over and over again. He plans to go back for the next three Augusts, until the MSL is launched. “It’s good for the scientists to think they’re on Mars,” he says, “because you think: where is my next meal coming from? It makes you realize you have to make the science as easy as possible for the astronauts, because they’ve got to concentrate on staying alive.”
Detecting “Habitable” Worlds
Iain Neill Reid is an astronomer at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the birthplace of the Hubble Telescope. Though Reid had been using the Hubble to study dwarf stars for many years, in 2003, he switched gears. “A few of us here just started looking at how we could work in astrobiology,” he says, “partly because the emphasis was switching at NASA, but also because at that time there was a lot of effort going into thinking about the Terrestrial Planet Finder.”
The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), a telescope project conceived by the brains at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is new, and hasn’t been built yet. It was only in 1995, after all, that astronomers used high-powered telescopes to discover that solar systems besides our own even exist. Since then, astronomers have found over 100 planets orbiting other stars. But the TPF won’t look for just for any old planet. Its job is to look for habitable planets like Earth. A planet like the Earth, Reid says, is about 100 million times fainter than its star. So to make a planet visible, you need to use telescopes (very elaborate, expensive telescopes) that block the light from the star. And once an astronomer can see clearly the planet in question, Reid says, “we could tell the microbiologists ‘here’s what the conditions might be like,’ and then, they could tell us what could live there.”
In 2003, Reid joined Frank Robb and a few other extremophile experts at the Center of Marine Biotechnology and submitted a proposal to the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI). He says they wanted to “ask if there are particular places in the galaxy that are more favored to life than others.” But the NAI Committee at the time, Reid recalls, said the project—searching the entire universe for Earth-like planets—was too ambitious. So for the next couple of years, Reid’s group funded what they could themselves. “We had a small amount of research money here at Space Telescope, only like 50 or 60K,” Reid says, “but it was enough to pay for a grad student and get equipment.” The shoestring operation became the basis of a new, scaled-back NAI proposal the team submitted in October of last year, where they suggested to look only at stars within 25 parsecs of our Sun.
While Reid and his team were searching for planets, others were looking for stars—stars that would be best suited to host a planet with intelligent life. Though intelligent alien life has long been the stuff of popular science fiction, a large group of scientists, involved in a project called the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI), is seriously hunting for real ETs beyond our solar system. This February in St. Louis, a panel of astrobiologists from SETI and elsewhere held a press conference at the meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The panel explained how to go about looking for intelligent life—that is, how to send messages to beings that could, in turn, send messages back to us.
The task is a big one: 100 billion galaxies are thought to exist, each with 100 billion stars—a gazillion places that could potentially receive and acknowledge our messages. Astronomer Maggie Turnbull of the Carnegie Institute is starting to narrow down the astronomical list. As she announced at AAAS, Turnbull has identified a mere 19,000 stars whose solar systems might provide a “habitable zone”, and of these, has made a top-five list from which to begin searches.
“When I was given the charge of making the target list for SETI,” Turnbull explained to National Public Radio, “I asked myself, just what is it about the Sun that makes it a good parent to life forms on Earth?” Most important, she said, is stability—she sought stars that didn’t change their level of brightness too “quickly” (sometimes quickly meant billions of years) for life to evolved on their surrounding planets. This requirement ruled out all of the massive stars in the galaxy, because they don’t live long enough. Because SETI is interested in intelligent life, Turnbull’s second requirement for a good “star parent” was a practical one: “Close stars are better than further stars,” she explained, because we wouldn’t be able to send radio signals to stars too far away. These eliminations brought the list down to 19,000. “Obviously 19,000 is quite a lot of stars and it will take quite a long time to go through all of those,” Turnbull explained. So she then arbitrarily whittled 19,000 to five, “for the purposes of communicating it to the public.”
With the star list thus narrowed, SETI has set up the Allen Telescope Array (named for and mostly funded by billionaire Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft), a cluster of 350 radio antennas in northern California. The antenna network, which should be built by 2008, is designed to “listen” for radio transmissions sent from intelligent civilizations in the solar systems of Turnbull’s chosen stars. Jill Tartar, head of the SETI Institute, says that old systems were able to scan about 1,000 stars in a decade; in the next ten years, the Allen Array will scan at least a million.
These searches are based on finding life as we know it—i.e., self-sustaining chemical systems that undergo evolution at the molecular level. But some scientists and philosophers think this is the wrong approach. “What we really need to do is to search for physical systems that challenge our current concept of life,” says Carol Cleland, a philosophy professor and fellow at the NASA-funded CU-Boulder Center for Astrobiology, “systems that both resemble familiar life and differ from it in provocative ways.” Cleland says looking for life different from ours may not be as difficult as one might think. Life on Earth works using only about 20 basic proteins (called amino acids), even though nature provides more than 100. This means that, as Cleland argues in the January 16 issue of the International Journal of Astrobiology, an “alternative microbial life” could exist on Earth, and therefore, could also exist on other planets.
Cleland says the latest life-detection instruments, based on our current definition of life, limit our ability to find life on other planets. “If the DNA in an alien organism was even slightly different than the DNA in life on Earth,” she says, “we probably wouldn’t be able to recognize it. Instead of looking for life as we know it, scientists may be better served to look for anomalies, which amounts to looking for life as we don’t know it.”
NASA Pulls the Plug
No matter what kind of life they’re looking for, all of these scientist-hunters recognize that some of the biggest mysteries are found right here on Earth. Steele says of finding Martian life: “If we find it—fantastic! Brilliant! Superb! Let’s go get it, let’s study the hell out of it, let’s classify it. But actually, I’d be more interested if we don’t find life on Mars, and then why there isn’t life there. What went wrong? Why is Earth special? For me, that’s the biggest reason for going.”
On January 14, 2004, following reports of the success of Spirit and Opportunity, President Bush made a speech outlining his new “Vision for Space Exploration.” Reminiscent of Kennedy’s 10-year Moon challenge in 1960, Bush proclaimed that rovers were necessary, at first, to serve as “trailblazers,” and “the advance guard to the unknown.” But ultimately, he said, we need to go the next step: “The human thirst for knowledge ultimately cannot be satisfied by even the most vivid pictures or the most detailed measurements. We need to see and examine and touch for ourselves.” Bush’s exact plan called for the development of a new spacecraft, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, which would fly by 2014, carry men to the Moon no later than 2020, and then eventually, carry them to Mars. Bush said the main purpose of the Crew project is to take astronauts beyond our orbit, “to other worlds.”
All of this life-detection work—Steele’s life-detection chips, Reid’s TPF telescopes, Turnbull’s Earthshine—began, and continues, on the promise of financial support from Uncle Sam. But this February, two years after announcing his new vision, the President’s budget didn’t give NASA as much money as it was hoping for, causing NASA head Michael Griffin to funnel money into manned space flight and out of astrobiology. Consequently, all three of these life-detection projects have been put on hold.
Which begs the question: If a manned missions does find life on Mars, will the Earthlings in charge then put more funding into astrobiology? “Maybe, maybe not,” Reid says wryly. “We might get cut off for getting the wrong answer.”
4.19.2006
4.02.2006
New Clips!
Some newbies from Hopkins Mag…
http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0406web/alumnews.html#kahn http://www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0406web/wholly.html#egypt http://www.son.jhmi.edu/jhnmagazine/pages/otp7_dyingchldrn.htm
http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0406web/alumnews.html#kahn http://www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0406web/wholly.html#egypt http://www.son.jhmi.edu/jhnmagazine/pages/otp7_dyingchldrn.htm
3.31.2006
Lion Manes Are Just for Show
A lion’s mane may look like a shaggy security blanket, but new research from the plains of the Serengeti shows the long locks offer no protection when two rival males fight for the chance to mate. The study suggests the male lion’s mane serves mostly as a lioness magnet, and played an important role in the way male fighting strategy evolved.
The purpose of the male lion’s mane has long perplexed biologists. Because female lions roam in groups of three or four, and allow only one male to reside with them, competition between males is fierce. Rival males often fight to the death—with their enormous teeth and claws—to gain coveted access to a pride. This led many biologists to assume that the function of the thick manes was to make it harder for attackers to reach the vulnerable throat area. But over the years this assumption has been questioned, because field biologists who actually saw lion fights in action noticed the mane area was rarely targeted.
Evolutionary biologist Peyton West and her colleagues from the University of Minnesota used life-size lion dummies to test if manes indeed offered protection. The researchers first lured some big cats to the testing area by playing tapes of hyenas feeding at a kill, then presented them with the fake rivals. “Of course we worried that the lions wouldn’t be fooled,” West says. But many of the real lions attacked the fakes with a vengeance. (Sometimes the fakes worked so well, in fact, that even after the real lions knocked them over, according to West, “they tended to stick around and maul them some more.”)
The real lions attacked the models not at the neck, but on the back and hindquarters, putting a serious snarl in the protective mane hypothesis. To see if the males were avoiding the neck because the mane was acting as shield, the researchers repeated the tests with “maneless” fakes. But even with these exposed-neck models, the real lions went first for the backside. “We were pretty surprised to find so little evidence for protection,” West says, because “it’s so intuitive that the mane would work that way.”
But it turns out those shaggy manes are used for attracting females. In previous research published in 2002, West had shown that males with longer and darker manes were older, better fed, and better fighters. And because females rely on males to protect their cubs, it makes sense that females would prefer males with large manes. “Just as songbirds can advertise their quality though visual cues, so, apparently, do lions,” says field biologist Jon Grinnell of Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota. Grinnell says West’s study is “new and interesting, because it forces us to look at lions differently.”
Even though manes don’t offer protection now, West says a protective role could have been the reason the trait evolved in the first place. In the early evolution of the trait, she says, males may have gone straight for the neck, making individuals with manes harder to attack and thus more favored by natural selection. As evolution continued and more and more males developed manes, attacking the neck area would no longer have been an effective fighting strategy—leaving our modern lions with manes.
“The lion is an intensively studied species and probably the best known wild cat on earth,” says field biologist Luke Hunter of Wildlife Conservation Society-International, “but this study shows that good science is still revealing new things about the species and turning over popular misconceptions.”
Journal reference: Animal Behaviour, March 2006 (vol 71, p 609)
The purpose of the male lion’s mane has long perplexed biologists. Because female lions roam in groups of three or four, and allow only one male to reside with them, competition between males is fierce. Rival males often fight to the death—with their enormous teeth and claws—to gain coveted access to a pride. This led many biologists to assume that the function of the thick manes was to make it harder for attackers to reach the vulnerable throat area. But over the years this assumption has been questioned, because field biologists who actually saw lion fights in action noticed the mane area was rarely targeted.
Evolutionary biologist Peyton West and her colleagues from the University of Minnesota used life-size lion dummies to test if manes indeed offered protection. The researchers first lured some big cats to the testing area by playing tapes of hyenas feeding at a kill, then presented them with the fake rivals. “Of course we worried that the lions wouldn’t be fooled,” West says. But many of the real lions attacked the fakes with a vengeance. (Sometimes the fakes worked so well, in fact, that even after the real lions knocked them over, according to West, “they tended to stick around and maul them some more.”)
The real lions attacked the models not at the neck, but on the back and hindquarters, putting a serious snarl in the protective mane hypothesis. To see if the males were avoiding the neck because the mane was acting as shield, the researchers repeated the tests with “maneless” fakes. But even with these exposed-neck models, the real lions went first for the backside. “We were pretty surprised to find so little evidence for protection,” West says, because “it’s so intuitive that the mane would work that way.”
But it turns out those shaggy manes are used for attracting females. In previous research published in 2002, West had shown that males with longer and darker manes were older, better fed, and better fighters. And because females rely on males to protect their cubs, it makes sense that females would prefer males with large manes. “Just as songbirds can advertise their quality though visual cues, so, apparently, do lions,” says field biologist Jon Grinnell of Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota. Grinnell says West’s study is “new and interesting, because it forces us to look at lions differently.”
Even though manes don’t offer protection now, West says a protective role could have been the reason the trait evolved in the first place. In the early evolution of the trait, she says, males may have gone straight for the neck, making individuals with manes harder to attack and thus more favored by natural selection. As evolution continued and more and more males developed manes, attacking the neck area would no longer have been an effective fighting strategy—leaving our modern lions with manes.
“The lion is an intensively studied species and probably the best known wild cat on earth,” says field biologist Luke Hunter of Wildlife Conservation Society-International, “but this study shows that good science is still revealing new things about the species and turning over popular misconceptions.”
Journal reference: Animal Behaviour, March 2006 (vol 71, p 609)
3.17.2006
Beginning of Time
Once upon a beginning of time, there was a Big Bang. At the exact moment of the Bang, a “cosmic egg” was conceived. Over time, it would cool down, spread out, and grow into the Universe. It would never stop growing.
One-tenth of a second after the Bang, there was enough energy to create matter: neutrons, protons, and electrons, some stable, some unstable. The Universe had a temperature of 30 billion degrees Kelvin and a density 30 million times that of water.
One and one-tenth of a second after the Bang, the Universe had a temperature of 10 billion degrees Kelvin and a density 380,000 times that of water.
Just under fourteen seconds after the Bang, it had cooled to 3 billion degrees Kelvin. This made the neutrons and protons and electrons move more slowly; slowly enough, in fact, to stick together if they happened to collide. So, at this point in the egg’s development, one proton and one neutron and one electron could collide and form the first atom, deuterium.
Three minutes and 2 seconds after the Bang, the temperature dropped to below one billion degrees Kelvin. It was then cool enough for two deuterium atoms to collide and form another kind of atom, helium.
Thirty-four minutes after the Bang, the Universe was 300 million degrees Kelvin. It was only 10 percent as dense as water. The deuterium and helium atoms were still bouncing around, usually too much to form stable entities for significant periods of time.
Seven hundred thousand years after the Bang, the Universe was the same temperature as today’s Sun—about 4,000 degrees Kelvin. This was finally cool enough for all of the atoms to be stable. For the next few billion years, they morphed into stars and galaxies.
Fifteen Billion years after the Bang, the Universe exists as it does now. Now.
Now.
One-tenth of a second after the Bang, there was enough energy to create matter: neutrons, protons, and electrons, some stable, some unstable. The Universe had a temperature of 30 billion degrees Kelvin and a density 30 million times that of water.
One and one-tenth of a second after the Bang, the Universe had a temperature of 10 billion degrees Kelvin and a density 380,000 times that of water.
Just under fourteen seconds after the Bang, it had cooled to 3 billion degrees Kelvin. This made the neutrons and protons and electrons move more slowly; slowly enough, in fact, to stick together if they happened to collide. So, at this point in the egg’s development, one proton and one neutron and one electron could collide and form the first atom, deuterium.
Three minutes and 2 seconds after the Bang, the temperature dropped to below one billion degrees Kelvin. It was then cool enough for two deuterium atoms to collide and form another kind of atom, helium.
Thirty-four minutes after the Bang, the Universe was 300 million degrees Kelvin. It was only 10 percent as dense as water. The deuterium and helium atoms were still bouncing around, usually too much to form stable entities for significant periods of time.
Seven hundred thousand years after the Bang, the Universe was the same temperature as today’s Sun—about 4,000 degrees Kelvin. This was finally cool enough for all of the atoms to be stable. For the next few billion years, they morphed into stars and galaxies.
Fifteen Billion years after the Bang, the Universe exists as it does now. Now.
Now.
3.12.2006
Maria Mania
“The chief difference between it and a spider’s work is one of size, supplemented by greater complexity, but both are joys of geometric beauty. For the lines are of individually uniform width, of exceeding tenuity, and of great length. These are the Martian canals.”-Percival Lowell, Mars and Its Canals
Today, Percival Lowell is remembered as the founder of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, the place where, in 1930, astronomers first discovered Pluto. But Lowell Observatory was originally built to showcase a different planet: Mars. It all started in 1877, when an Italian astronomer drew a new map of Mars with dozens of black lines, called ‘canali,’ which came to be translated as canals. This, paired with the new Suez and Panama Canal projects, seeded a Mars canal mania in the American public, a frenzy whose flames were only fueled in the following decades by sensational newspaper headlines and popular books. Percival Lowell, the fabulously wealthy writer of the Boston Lowells, would in his middle age suddenly succumb to his lifelong curiosity in the bodies of the sky. He opened his observatory in 1894, primarily to study Mars, and in 1906, wrote what would become the most famous tome on the subject: Mars and Its Canals. In every chapter, Mars and Its Canals hits upon the reason the canals were titillating: they imply an artificial, complex infrastructure that must have been made by some kind of intelligent inhabitants. And though now we know Mars has no canals, many historians suggest the frenzy never stopped, and in fact continues to drive scientists in their unremitting search for extraterrestrial life today. Strangely enough then the canal myth, its easy public reception, and its lasting reverberations, all came about from but one word’s mistranslation.
In the late August of 1877, from the roof of Milan’s Brera Palace, a colorblind astronomer set the sights of a new Merz telescope on the surface of Mars. The astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, had made his reputation on the study of meteors and comets, and wasn’t particularly interested in Mars. But his new telescope, an instrument made especially for yellow and red light, was ideal for viewing the Red Planet. Moreover, he knew the next month Mars would be coming into opposition. Mars opposition—when the Sun is on one side of the Earth, and Mars is on the other—shows us the planet at its brightest, and only happens once every two years. So Schiaparelli merely wanted to take advantage of a favorable viewing opportunity, as he later explained, “to verify for myself what the books of descriptive astronomy expounded about the surface of Mars, its spots and its atmosphere.” His September observations roughly matched the few contemporary sketches of Mars. But because Schiaparelli felt these existing drawings were rudimentary at best, he assumed the daunting task of making a new and improved map of Mars, and of naming all of the prominent features of its geography.
Schiaparelli’s labeled map, comprised of bright spots of “terrae,” or land, and dark spots of “maria,” or sea, reflected his maritime view of the martian landscape--a “clear analogy” of Earth. But though Schiaparelli realized the martian “land” may not have held dirt, nor the “seas” water, he defended his Earth-centric labels by writing, in 1878, “Do not brevity and clarity induce us to use such words as island, isthmus, strait, channel, peninsula, cape, etc.?...After all, we speak in a similar way of the maria of the moon, knowing very well that they don’t consist of liquid masses.”
Along with islands, isthmuses, and straits, Schiaparelli denoted dozens of canali on his map as dark streaky lines, and described them as “a complex embroidery of many tints.” In Italian, canali means “channel,” and Schiaparelli often used it interchangeably with fiume, or river. But a few years later, when the news of his map finally made its way through Western Europe and across the Atlantic, canali was translated to the general public as neither channel nor river.
French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps had completed the formidable Suez Canal in 1869, and had begun work on the Panama Canal in 1880. So by the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Western world had canals on the brain. On April 24, 1882, betraying this certain civil engineering fever that had just begun to sweep the nation, the New York Times wrote of the “assiduous” Italian astronomer’s dark streaks that he “styled as ‘canals,’ for they bear the appearance of long sea-ways, dug through the martial continents, as if a mania of shortcuts seized the inhabitants of the planet, and everybody residing there had become an active M. de Lesseps.” And these kind of sensational accounts were still running rampant a decade later. In the summer of 1892, the director of Harvard astronomical observatory William Pickering, telescope in arm, climbed the Andes in Peru to get a good look at Mars. In a series of telegraphs he sent to the New York Herald, Pickering told a receptive public of his hasty new observations, which included forty martian lakes and detailed weather reports with the dates and locations of martian snowfalls. (The quick publishing and quicker reception of Pickering’s telegrams may serve as a lesson on the importance of peer-reviewed scientific journals.)
The craze wasn’t limited to the smudged columns of daily tabloids. Two years later, the English translation of Popular Astronomy, a book written by founder of the French Astronomy Society Camille Flammarion, was released, in which he states: “Henceforth the globe of Mars should no longer be presented to us as a block of stone revolving in the midst of the void…but we should see in it a living world, a new world which no Columbus will ever reach, but on which, doubtless, a human race now resides, works, thinks, and meditates as we do on the great and mysterious problems of nature.” As psychiatrist and noted Mars historian William Sheehan says, “the whole phenomenon resembled in many ways a case of mass suggestibility or hysteria,”—and all from just a few smeary, dark lines.
Schiaparelli’s lines, as it turns out, were not canals, or even natural water channels, but an artifact of his color-blindness. Those with red-green color-blindness—a genetic disorder harbored by about 10 percent of men of European descent—have trouble seeing all colors, but especially red and green. For Schiaparelli, this meant that he missed the slight color variations that both his fellow astronomers and more modern ones saw on the martian surface. By his own admission, Schiaparelli wrote: “My eye doesn’t distinguish well the gradations of red and green colors. The general appearance of the planet for me was almost that of a chiaroscuro made with Chinese ink upon a general bright background.” Schiaparelli saw the gradations as distinct contrasts, which he denoted as hard and fast lines. And in the decade following his first map, he received wide criticism in the scientific literature for these oversights (or perhaps, undersights). But the criticisms were too few, too late—the image of a canalled mars had already dug deep into the public’s imagination. And Percival Lowell’s.
In 1892, 37-year old Percival Lowell was on his way to Japan to research a series of articles he would write for the Atlantic Monthly about Japanese art and culture. But just before he left, he made a stop in Cambridge to tour Harvard’s observatory, and asked director Pickering for copies of Schiaparelli’s maps. These maps, and a small telescope, went with Lowell to Japan. Still there a year later, Lowell heard that Schiaparelli's deteriorating eyesight was forcing him into retirement and, as the oft-repeated story goes, immediately decided to continue the blind man’s legacy.
Historians may never know exactly when Lowell’s Mars interest was spurred, but by early 1894 he was interested enough to move to the Arizona Territory and open an observatory. A mile went of downtown Flagstaff, Lowell set up shop on a steep bluff he named Mars Hill. And the idea that Lowell saw himself as Schiaparelli’s successor is not so hard to fathom, especially considering the dedication of 1906’s Mars and Its Canals:
To
G.V. SCHIAPARELLI
THE COLUMBUS OF A NEW PLANETARY WORLD
THIS INVESTIGATION UPON IT
IS APPRECIATIVELY
INSCRIBED
Unlike Schiaparelli, Lowell’s eyes could see the subtle color variations on the martian surface. Though, as the title of his book suggests, this in no way deterred his belief in the existence of the canals, nor the existence of intelligent martian life. Lowell knew that Schiaparelli’s thin lines, in order to be seen with his telescope on earth, would have to be over thirty feet wide and thus much too big to be canals. So Lowell proposed that the dark lines were not the canals themselves, but rather bands of vegetation growing along their banks. And he further argued that lush vegetation grew thanks to a fairly mild climate, with little wind or rain storms: “That we can scan the surface as we do without practical interruption day in and day out proves the weather over it to be permanently fair. In fact a clear sky, except in winter, and in many places even then, is not only the rule, but the rule almost without exceptions.”
In addition to tree-lined canals and a mild climate, Lowell saw from his telescopes evidence of intelligent life. This evidence came mostly from logical inferences. He argued that the super-straight lines, many running for thousands of miles, were too ordered and too complex to be naturally-occurring geological features—they had to have been engineered. As he explained: “From the fact that the reticulated canal system is an elaborate entity embracing the whole planet, we have not only proof of the world-wide sagacity of its builders, but a very suggestive side-light to the fact that only a universal necessity such as water could well be its underlying cause.” The inhabitants of Mars, Lowell wrote, used the canals to direct flowing water as it melted from the planet’s polar ice caps, effectively fending off starvation on the otherwise arid planet. And by doing so, Lowell felt they surpassed even the best of our own technological feats.
Lowell’s book dedication to Schiaparelli is appropriate for another reason: he didn’t really advance the study of Mars beyond where his Italian mentor had left it (and, as we know now, Lowell’s ideas were flat out wrong.) His various theories about martian life activities, though prolific, were entirely speculative. Astronomers of the day were not blind to this; on the contrary, just as Schiaparelli did decades before, Lowell received much criticism in scientific literature. Academic journals shunned his papers, so that his technical articles were only accepted by magazines for the layman like Popular Science and Popular Astronomy, or in the journals published in-house by his observatory. Some of his critics managed to air their slams in newspapers—one warned against Lowell’s "reckless theorizing" that was misleading "non-professional readers”—but nothing seemed to stick in the eye of his adoring public. He wrote three high-selling books, wrote frequently for the best-selling science magazines, and gave sold-out lectures on college campuses across the nation. His contribution to our study of Mars today lies not on the details of his theories or their rejection by scientific journals. Percival Lowell was a beloved American icon, and popularized Mars as only an icon can.
Not long after he opened Mars Hill in 1894, Lowell wrote a poem titled “Mars,” in which he reveals a desire that he would never fulfill: to leave Mars Hill and take the red safari “to that other island across the blue.” The poem continues:
Against hope hoping that mankind mayMankind wouldn’t make the voyage for another six decades. The dawn of our modern space age came in 1960, when John F. Kennedy challenged America to put a man on the moon. In the same year, Russia would send the first probe to Mars. And in the next 46 years, after 37 more missions to Red Planet, we would find out that our blushing neighbor is much less charming than Lowell had imagined.
In time invent some possible way
To that longed for bourne that while I gaze
Through the heaven's heaving haze
Seems in its shimmer to nod me nay.
3.10.2006
2.28.2006
Jargon Alert!
Jargon, I’m learning, is a fundamental element of philosophy. Here are some especially confusing terms from today’s 3-hour Philosophy of Time seminar:
-relational construct
-mode of being/comes into being
-physical reality
-quasi-absolute
…and my favorite:
-precondition for the possibility of experience
(I'm thinking about doing a jargon of the week post, so email me if you find any good ones!)
-relational construct
-mode of being/comes into being
-physical reality
-quasi-absolute
…and my favorite:
-precondition for the possibility of experience
(I'm thinking about doing a jargon of the week post, so email me if you find any good ones!)
2.24.2006
More about St. Louey (and my hilarious mother)
My sister has a different St. Louis story:
http://chars-on-mars.livejournal.com/
http://chars-on-mars.livejournal.com/
2.18.2006
Getting Jiggy in St. Louey
Five thousand scientists and reporters are here in St. Louis this weekend for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. So I thought my Downtown Pavilion Hotel—five blocks from the convention hub—would be full of scientists and reporters. Eager scientists, divulging their new research only to me. A flurry of science reporters, offering me fabulous jobs. Nope. I entered the lobby last night to find it packed with…girls. It was full of energetic, giggling girls, aged 3 to 18, wearing sequined corsets, long socks, and noisy shoes. Most of them had freckles, and covered their frizzy red hair with an inflexible wig of tight blonde curls. I saw the lobby sign, and had that Aha! / this-can’t-be-for-real epiphany. It read: The Pavilion Welcomes Irish Arts Feis. I was stuck in an Irish dancing competition. And boy, did they dance.
They were everywhere, dancing dancing everywhere. As I walked the long, circuitous path from the west to the east wing elevator shaft, I saw them around every corner, in every ballroom. In every inch of available red velvet carpet they were practicing. They clumped in groups of three or four, jigging down the hallways as if they were Dorothy and the Tin Man following a red-velvet brick road. I walked past the pool room. Hasn’t anyone ever told them NO DANCING near the pool?!
This morning, I was waiting for an elevator down to the lobby. A middle-aged couple waited with me, with their two daughters. The parents looked pathetic, equipped with schedules and snacks. “Sweetie,” the mother said with exasperation, “we’ve got a long time before you dance.” The sweetie was about 6, in full purple, hideous costume, dancing in place. The other girl was too young to talk, sitting in her stroller. But her feet were tapping rhythmically against her hard plastic seat—I swear to god, exactly in sync with her sister!
Who are these parents? Who, in their right mind, thinks that carting the fam to a hotel in St. Louis to dance in the ballrooms is a fun weekend activity? Maybe it’d be ok if your daughter always won. And I don’t mean any honorable mention or crappy yellow ribbons. I mean if she got a gigantic trophy every single time—or better—prize money! But hundreds of girls are littering about, and they can’t all be winners. So not only do you have to watch this dancing all day long, but you have to watch all the other daughters jigging their asses better than your Sweetie? No thanks.
And another thing…lots of girls in elaborate dresses, wearing wigs, and make-up (yes, on the 3-year-olds, too)…doesn’t this seem just a little too much like a beauty pageant? All these blonde curls and rouged cheeks…and all I can think is Jean Benet Ramsey.
And isn’t there some risk of neurological damage if you go hours on end without moving your arms?
They were everywhere, dancing dancing everywhere. As I walked the long, circuitous path from the west to the east wing elevator shaft, I saw them around every corner, in every ballroom. In every inch of available red velvet carpet they were practicing. They clumped in groups of three or four, jigging down the hallways as if they were Dorothy and the Tin Man following a red-velvet brick road. I walked past the pool room. Hasn’t anyone ever told them NO DANCING near the pool?!
This morning, I was waiting for an elevator down to the lobby. A middle-aged couple waited with me, with their two daughters. The parents looked pathetic, equipped with schedules and snacks. “Sweetie,” the mother said with exasperation, “we’ve got a long time before you dance.” The sweetie was about 6, in full purple, hideous costume, dancing in place. The other girl was too young to talk, sitting in her stroller. But her feet were tapping rhythmically against her hard plastic seat—I swear to god, exactly in sync with her sister!
Who are these parents? Who, in their right mind, thinks that carting the fam to a hotel in St. Louis to dance in the ballrooms is a fun weekend activity? Maybe it’d be ok if your daughter always won. And I don’t mean any honorable mention or crappy yellow ribbons. I mean if she got a gigantic trophy every single time—or better—prize money! But hundreds of girls are littering about, and they can’t all be winners. So not only do you have to watch this dancing all day long, but you have to watch all the other daughters jigging their asses better than your Sweetie? No thanks.
And another thing…lots of girls in elaborate dresses, wearing wigs, and make-up (yes, on the 3-year-olds, too)…doesn’t this seem just a little too much like a beauty pageant? All these blonde curls and rouged cheeks…and all I can think is Jean Benet Ramsey.
And isn’t there some risk of neurological damage if you go hours on end without moving your arms?
2.12.2006
The Fall of the House of Steele
In early February, looming from the top of a grassy hill, the dingy-brown building of the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory is Chevy Chase Heights’ very own House of Usher. Smack in the middle of a residential neighborhood, the wooden entrance sign appears abruptly at the bottom of the hill, just 20 feet from a pile of logs and tree stumps. A gray hooded sweatshirt hangs forgotten from one naked magnolia. The grass of the grassy hill is dead, and crunches when you trudge through it. One hundred and fifty of the nation’s best scientists work here, but only a handful of cars are parked along the edge of the driveway that winds up sharply to the front door. You can hear the slow punch of the buttons when the elderly secretary enters the door’s security code, and even the soft shuffle of her shoes on linoleum as she escorts you down the empty corridor. Desolate, cold, a vestige of past greatness—in short, it’s everything you might expect from a martian-life-detection lab.
The idea of martian life detection was challenged in 1996, when the young Brit Andrew Steele showed that meteorite ALH84001—though maybe also harboring martian life—was certainly contaminated with Antarctic bugs. But even after undercutting NASA’s triumphant find, Steele still believed we might one day find life on the Red Planet. Today, he’s focused on making life-detecting instruments for both rover and manned missions to Mars, in a few of the microbiology labs of the creepy building on the hill.
Though a decade has passed since he trumped NASA’s claim, Steele still looks like a grungy twenty-something. He’s tall, lean, and slightly apish. His wavy blonde hair covers the letters printed on the back of his t-shirt, so you can’t quite read the name of the garage band that’s printed on it; his blue jeans are so faded they’re white. He’s dirty, but wears jewelry—rainbow bracelets on his wrist and a heavy Celtic cross around his neck. He walks lightly on old green sneakers. They’re probably the same ones he had in August, when he traveled to the other side of the world to test his gadgets. But the Arctic Circle is way too cold for t-shirts.
In August of 2003, 2004, and 2005, Steele and his colleagues went to the Norwegian island of Svalbard. Svalbard is not only very cold—dropping down to -12 degrees Celsius, even in August, when there’s 24 hours of daylight—but dusty, and dangerous. (His crew, armed with shotguns, had to switch between crushing up rock and watching for polar bears.) The island is the only place on Earth with a volcano made up of the same kind of rock that was sampled on the Viking missions. And most important, the volcano harbors microorganisms that Steele’s gadgets can try to detect.
The gadgets are called microarrays, matchbook-sized glass chips loaded with different kinds of antibodies. Each antibody recognizes life-specific molecules in a rock sample, like nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA), amino acids, proteins, or certain carbon isotopes, and glows when it finds them. Once all of the kinks are sorted out, Steele says the chips will be used on NASA’s next big rover project, the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory. The MSL, part of NASA’s larger Mars Exploration Program, plans to send a huge, nuclear-powered rover to Mars. In their two years of exploring, the six-wheeled, the golf-cart sized Spirit and Opportunity rovers have each traveled about three miles. The MSL is a tank by comparison; it will travel up to 90 miles per hour, roll over obstacles 30 inches high, and will have a full on-board laboratory for testing climate changes and geological samples.
But to gain a true understanding of the landscape and really probe for life, Steele says, you need men. “Rovers are pretty easy now, we could send rovers all over the place for about $900 million a shot,” he says. “But a human being is a thousand times more capable than any robot.” Rovers have to stay on a fairly horizontal plane, for instance, so they often don’t have the right visual perspective to find subtle-yet-important geological features (like bedrock). Also, their controllers on earth can’t manipulate them in real time; they’re eight minutes behind. But the biggest problem, according to Steele, is that they don’t have object recognition. “An elephant could run in front of it,” he says, “and it wouldn’t know the difference.”
To make his point, Steele cites one rover story NASA hasn’t yet released. A few months ago, a wire broke on Spirit’s arm. “So the engineers spent a few days fixing it, slowly working the arm to loosen the dust they thought got into the motors,” he explains, “and meanwhile, the scientists had nothing to do.” Since Spirit was immobile for a few days, the scientists decided to take high-resolution photographs of the landscape, instead of the usual low-resolution ones. And the result was amazing: Steele says the new photos gave them incredible detail of the surrounding geological features. “They said, ‘oh my god, those crossbeds are fantastic. This is just brilliant,’ but normally, the rovers would never have caught all of that detail. A human would have seen it right away.” And the detail, in this case, was crucial: “it was evidence,” Steele says, “of water-induced features in the rocks.”
So in addition to tweaking the rover machines, Steele’s also working on what he calls the next generation of gadgets: those that would help astronauts explore the planet. “We’re making computing technology—like GPS and camera systems, and a barcode system that automatically labels samples,” he explains. This would have been nice during the Apollo missions because, as Steele says “the geezers don’t have time to get everything, on the moon they often forgot to record locations and label properly.” But with the new toys, he says, “the astronaut merely needs to bag it, tag it, and the rest is done.”
This emphasis on helping astronauts do their job spurs Steele to visit extreme environments like Svalbard over and over again. He plans to go back for the next three Augusts, until the MSL is launched. “It’s good for the scientists to think they’re on Mars. You think: where is my next meal coming from? It makes you realize you have to make the science as easy as possible for the astronauts, because they’ve got to concentrate on staying alive.”
But will American astronauts ever land on Mars? On January 14, 2004, following reports of the success of Spirit and Opportunity, President Bush made a speech outlining his new “Vision for Space Exploration.” Reminiscent of Kennedy’s 10-year moon challenge in 1960, Bush proclaimed that rovers were necessary, at first, to serve as “trailblazers,” and “the advance guard to the unknown.” But ultimately, he said, we need to go the next step:
“…the human thirst for knowledge ultimately cannot be satisfied by even the most vivid pictures or the most detailed measurements. We need to see and examine and touch for ourselves…”
His exact plan called for the development of a new spacecraft, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, by 2008, with plans to have the first manned mission no later than 2014. The Crew Exploration Vehicle (which NASA Administrator Michael Griffin pegged “Apollo on steroids”) will be a cone-shaped capsule that can carry three men to the International Space Station, four to the Moon, and six to Mars. Bush said the main purpose of the Crew project is to take astronauts beyond our orbit, “to other worlds.” Yet despite the hype of this announcement, Steele says the new plan has actually “crippled science” at NASA, because it has diverted so many funds away from those astrobiology groups “whose labs aren’t absolutely aligned with Crew.”
One such group is led by Iain Neill Reid, an astronomer at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (the birthplace of the Hubble telescope). Though he had been focused on studying dwarf stars for many years, in 2003, Reid switched gears. “A few of us here just started looking at how we could work in Astrobiology,” he says, “partly because the emphasis was switching at NASA, but also because at that time there was a lot of effort going into thinking about the Terrestrial Planet Finder.”
The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) program, conceived by the brains at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is new. It was only in 1995, after all, that astronomers used high-power telescopes to discover that solar systems besides our own even exist. Since then, astronomers have found over 100 planets orbiting other stars. But the idea of TPF is to look not just for any ol’ planet, but for planets like earth—i.e., habitable ones. Reid says the basic idea of TPF is to use two complementary “observatories” floating in space: a coronagraph, observing visible wavelengths, and an interferometer for infrared wavelengths. A planet like the earth, he says, is about 100 million times fainter than its star. You use the coronagraph to block the light from the star and make the planet more visible. The interferometer, meanwhile, does the same kind of eclipsing, but in a slightly different way, called nulling out. “Essentially you’ve got two wave patterns from the light from the central star,” Reid explains, “and if you combine them in the right way they’ll cancel each other out.” Here’s the connection to Biology: If an astronomer finds a planet-like object circling a star, Reid says, “we could kind of tell the microbiologists ‘here’s what the conditions might be like,’ and they could tell us what could live there.”
So in 2003, Reid joined Frank Robb and a few other extremophile experts at the Center of Marine Biotechnology and submitted a proposal to the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI). “Our idea,” he says, “was to look at the galaxy as a whole, and ask if there are particular places in the galaxy that are more favored to life than others.” But the NAI Committee at the time, Reid recalls, said “well, this is really too ambitious, and we don’t think you can do it.” So for the next couple of years, they funded what they could themselves. “We had a small amount of research money here at Space Telescope, only like 50 or 60K, but it was enough to pay for a grad student and get equipment.” The shoestring operation was the basis of the proposal they submitted a couple of years later, in the next round of NAI applications.
In October of last year, Reid and Robb joined with more scientists from Princeton and the Carnegie Institution to refine their TPF-like project, and create a scaled-back version of what they had proposed the first time around. “We said we’ll just look at the solar neighborhood, and try and essentially put together a kind of stellar encyclopedia of all the stars within 25 parsecs of the sun,” Reid says, “We want to try and figure out, if you’re thinking about finding life, which ones would be the best to look at.”
At the same time, one member of the Carnegie group, Maggie Turnbull, took on a related project of particular interest to Reid: Earthshine. When light from the Sun hits the Moon and then reflects to earth, we seen Moonshine, and it’s usually very bright. Similarly, when light from the Sun hits the earth, is reflected onto the Moon, and then reflected back to the earth, we see Earthshine. Because some light gets absorbed at each reflecting surface, Earthshine is much dimmer than Moonshine, and we can only see Earthshine during certain Moon phases—like young crescents—when Moonshine is especially faint. If you observe the light of Earthshine, Reid says, you’re effectively seeing features of the earth. “Suppose you were an alien from another planet,” he further explains, “and you get this spectrum. The question then becomes, can you tell from the spectrum if there’s life on earth?” As Turnbull is finding out, Earthshine shows you certain atmospheric features in the earth, like the presence of oxygen, or the chlorophyll produced by plants. By observing the Earthshine spectrum at different points of the earth’s rotation—that is, by taking a telescope around the world and observing the Moon from different places—Turnbull wanted to map how the spectrum changes based on the predominant landscape. As Reid explains, “you can tell if most of light that hits the moon is coming from oceans or deserts,” Reid says. “And then, you need to take the next step: If I look at the light distribution from some other planet, how do I know if there’s life there?”
Finding life on other planets using Earthshine means comparing the earth’s light spectrum to that of planets that have yet to be discovered. “It’s planning way into the future,” Neil admits, “but certainly you want to be able to build the right kind of instrument to do this work.” When TPF is finished, for instance, Reid points out that there will be a giant telescope, four or five meters across, launched into orbit to take data. He says some fundamental questions—like whether it would be better to look in optical wavelengths or infrared—must obviously b e sorted out before a single data point is recorded. “If you take this thing and shove it up there into orbit,” he says, “you really don’t want to have to go up and monkey around with it afterwards.”
Steele’s life-detection chips, Reid’s terrestrial-planet-finding telescopes, Turnbull’s Earthshine spectra—it all began, and continued, on the promise of financial support from Uncle Sam. But on February 6, 2006, almost two years to the day after the announcement of his Vision for Space Exploration, President Bush proposed a new $2.77 trillion budget plan calling for increased spending on the military and domestic security and substantial cuts in domestic programs, including NASA. “Astrobiology seems to have been cut by 50 percent,” Neill says. “So it's pretty much what we expected, although a bigger cut than Andrew had been expecting. We'll just have to persevere as best we can for the moment and see whether the wind will change again.”
Despite the large NASA cuts, Steele’s lab isn’t likely to shut down soon. “We’ve already been funded by Astrobiology Instrument Department for developing instruments until 2009, .so we’ve got another three years,” Steele says. And if they don’t fund him after that, Reid says Steele’s work is important enough to find sources outside of the Astrobiology Institute. “But it doesn’t make it any better,” Reid laments. “It means that you’re going to have to go back and scramble to get other funding and meanwhile the people that you’ve assembled, they’re not just going to hang around there and wait in the optimistic hope, on the off chance that you’re going to get funded again. It’s wrenching, but it’s just the way it works.”
Assuming he finds a way to carry on his work, so what if Steele’s instruments—either by rover or man—do find life on Mars? Steele responds, “If we find it—fantastic! Brilliant! Superb! Let’s go get it, let’s study the hell out of it, let’s classify it. But I’m actually more interested in if we don’t find life on Mars, and then why there isn’t life there. What went wrong? For me, that’s the biggest reason for going.”
If life was found on Mars, would the earthlings in charge then put more funding into Astrobiology? “Maybe, maybe not,” Reid says wryly. “We might get cut off for getting the wrong answer.”
The idea of martian life detection was challenged in 1996, when the young Brit Andrew Steele showed that meteorite ALH84001—though maybe also harboring martian life—was certainly contaminated with Antarctic bugs. But even after undercutting NASA’s triumphant find, Steele still believed we might one day find life on the Red Planet. Today, he’s focused on making life-detecting instruments for both rover and manned missions to Mars, in a few of the microbiology labs of the creepy building on the hill.
Though a decade has passed since he trumped NASA’s claim, Steele still looks like a grungy twenty-something. He’s tall, lean, and slightly apish. His wavy blonde hair covers the letters printed on the back of his t-shirt, so you can’t quite read the name of the garage band that’s printed on it; his blue jeans are so faded they’re white. He’s dirty, but wears jewelry—rainbow bracelets on his wrist and a heavy Celtic cross around his neck. He walks lightly on old green sneakers. They’re probably the same ones he had in August, when he traveled to the other side of the world to test his gadgets. But the Arctic Circle is way too cold for t-shirts.
In August of 2003, 2004, and 2005, Steele and his colleagues went to the Norwegian island of Svalbard. Svalbard is not only very cold—dropping down to -12 degrees Celsius, even in August, when there’s 24 hours of daylight—but dusty, and dangerous. (His crew, armed with shotguns, had to switch between crushing up rock and watching for polar bears.) The island is the only place on Earth with a volcano made up of the same kind of rock that was sampled on the Viking missions. And most important, the volcano harbors microorganisms that Steele’s gadgets can try to detect.
The gadgets are called microarrays, matchbook-sized glass chips loaded with different kinds of antibodies. Each antibody recognizes life-specific molecules in a rock sample, like nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA), amino acids, proteins, or certain carbon isotopes, and glows when it finds them. Once all of the kinks are sorted out, Steele says the chips will be used on NASA’s next big rover project, the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory. The MSL, part of NASA’s larger Mars Exploration Program, plans to send a huge, nuclear-powered rover to Mars. In their two years of exploring, the six-wheeled, the golf-cart sized Spirit and Opportunity rovers have each traveled about three miles. The MSL is a tank by comparison; it will travel up to 90 miles per hour, roll over obstacles 30 inches high, and will have a full on-board laboratory for testing climate changes and geological samples.
But to gain a true understanding of the landscape and really probe for life, Steele says, you need men. “Rovers are pretty easy now, we could send rovers all over the place for about $900 million a shot,” he says. “But a human being is a thousand times more capable than any robot.” Rovers have to stay on a fairly horizontal plane, for instance, so they often don’t have the right visual perspective to find subtle-yet-important geological features (like bedrock). Also, their controllers on earth can’t manipulate them in real time; they’re eight minutes behind. But the biggest problem, according to Steele, is that they don’t have object recognition. “An elephant could run in front of it,” he says, “and it wouldn’t know the difference.”
To make his point, Steele cites one rover story NASA hasn’t yet released. A few months ago, a wire broke on Spirit’s arm. “So the engineers spent a few days fixing it, slowly working the arm to loosen the dust they thought got into the motors,” he explains, “and meanwhile, the scientists had nothing to do.” Since Spirit was immobile for a few days, the scientists decided to take high-resolution photographs of the landscape, instead of the usual low-resolution ones. And the result was amazing: Steele says the new photos gave them incredible detail of the surrounding geological features. “They said, ‘oh my god, those crossbeds are fantastic. This is just brilliant,’ but normally, the rovers would never have caught all of that detail. A human would have seen it right away.” And the detail, in this case, was crucial: “it was evidence,” Steele says, “of water-induced features in the rocks.”
So in addition to tweaking the rover machines, Steele’s also working on what he calls the next generation of gadgets: those that would help astronauts explore the planet. “We’re making computing technology—like GPS and camera systems, and a barcode system that automatically labels samples,” he explains. This would have been nice during the Apollo missions because, as Steele says “the geezers don’t have time to get everything, on the moon they often forgot to record locations and label properly.” But with the new toys, he says, “the astronaut merely needs to bag it, tag it, and the rest is done.”
This emphasis on helping astronauts do their job spurs Steele to visit extreme environments like Svalbard over and over again. He plans to go back for the next three Augusts, until the MSL is launched. “It’s good for the scientists to think they’re on Mars. You think: where is my next meal coming from? It makes you realize you have to make the science as easy as possible for the astronauts, because they’ve got to concentrate on staying alive.”
But will American astronauts ever land on Mars? On January 14, 2004, following reports of the success of Spirit and Opportunity, President Bush made a speech outlining his new “Vision for Space Exploration.” Reminiscent of Kennedy’s 10-year moon challenge in 1960, Bush proclaimed that rovers were necessary, at first, to serve as “trailblazers,” and “the advance guard to the unknown.” But ultimately, he said, we need to go the next step:
“…the human thirst for knowledge ultimately cannot be satisfied by even the most vivid pictures or the most detailed measurements. We need to see and examine and touch for ourselves…”
His exact plan called for the development of a new spacecraft, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, by 2008, with plans to have the first manned mission no later than 2014. The Crew Exploration Vehicle (which NASA Administrator Michael Griffin pegged “Apollo on steroids”) will be a cone-shaped capsule that can carry three men to the International Space Station, four to the Moon, and six to Mars. Bush said the main purpose of the Crew project is to take astronauts beyond our orbit, “to other worlds.” Yet despite the hype of this announcement, Steele says the new plan has actually “crippled science” at NASA, because it has diverted so many funds away from those astrobiology groups “whose labs aren’t absolutely aligned with Crew.”
One such group is led by Iain Neill Reid, an astronomer at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (the birthplace of the Hubble telescope). Though he had been focused on studying dwarf stars for many years, in 2003, Reid switched gears. “A few of us here just started looking at how we could work in Astrobiology,” he says, “partly because the emphasis was switching at NASA, but also because at that time there was a lot of effort going into thinking about the Terrestrial Planet Finder.”
The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) program, conceived by the brains at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is new. It was only in 1995, after all, that astronomers used high-power telescopes to discover that solar systems besides our own even exist. Since then, astronomers have found over 100 planets orbiting other stars. But the idea of TPF is to look not just for any ol’ planet, but for planets like earth—i.e., habitable ones. Reid says the basic idea of TPF is to use two complementary “observatories” floating in space: a coronagraph, observing visible wavelengths, and an interferometer for infrared wavelengths. A planet like the earth, he says, is about 100 million times fainter than its star. You use the coronagraph to block the light from the star and make the planet more visible. The interferometer, meanwhile, does the same kind of eclipsing, but in a slightly different way, called nulling out. “Essentially you’ve got two wave patterns from the light from the central star,” Reid explains, “and if you combine them in the right way they’ll cancel each other out.” Here’s the connection to Biology: If an astronomer finds a planet-like object circling a star, Reid says, “we could kind of tell the microbiologists ‘here’s what the conditions might be like,’ and they could tell us what could live there.”
So in 2003, Reid joined Frank Robb and a few other extremophile experts at the Center of Marine Biotechnology and submitted a proposal to the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI). “Our idea,” he says, “was to look at the galaxy as a whole, and ask if there are particular places in the galaxy that are more favored to life than others.” But the NAI Committee at the time, Reid recalls, said “well, this is really too ambitious, and we don’t think you can do it.” So for the next couple of years, they funded what they could themselves. “We had a small amount of research money here at Space Telescope, only like 50 or 60K, but it was enough to pay for a grad student and get equipment.” The shoestring operation was the basis of the proposal they submitted a couple of years later, in the next round of NAI applications.
In October of last year, Reid and Robb joined with more scientists from Princeton and the Carnegie Institution to refine their TPF-like project, and create a scaled-back version of what they had proposed the first time around. “We said we’ll just look at the solar neighborhood, and try and essentially put together a kind of stellar encyclopedia of all the stars within 25 parsecs of the sun,” Reid says, “We want to try and figure out, if you’re thinking about finding life, which ones would be the best to look at.”
At the same time, one member of the Carnegie group, Maggie Turnbull, took on a related project of particular interest to Reid: Earthshine. When light from the Sun hits the Moon and then reflects to earth, we seen Moonshine, and it’s usually very bright. Similarly, when light from the Sun hits the earth, is reflected onto the Moon, and then reflected back to the earth, we see Earthshine. Because some light gets absorbed at each reflecting surface, Earthshine is much dimmer than Moonshine, and we can only see Earthshine during certain Moon phases—like young crescents—when Moonshine is especially faint. If you observe the light of Earthshine, Reid says, you’re effectively seeing features of the earth. “Suppose you were an alien from another planet,” he further explains, “and you get this spectrum. The question then becomes, can you tell from the spectrum if there’s life on earth?” As Turnbull is finding out, Earthshine shows you certain atmospheric features in the earth, like the presence of oxygen, or the chlorophyll produced by plants. By observing the Earthshine spectrum at different points of the earth’s rotation—that is, by taking a telescope around the world and observing the Moon from different places—Turnbull wanted to map how the spectrum changes based on the predominant landscape. As Reid explains, “you can tell if most of light that hits the moon is coming from oceans or deserts,” Reid says. “And then, you need to take the next step: If I look at the light distribution from some other planet, how do I know if there’s life there?”
Finding life on other planets using Earthshine means comparing the earth’s light spectrum to that of planets that have yet to be discovered. “It’s planning way into the future,” Neil admits, “but certainly you want to be able to build the right kind of instrument to do this work.” When TPF is finished, for instance, Reid points out that there will be a giant telescope, four or five meters across, launched into orbit to take data. He says some fundamental questions—like whether it would be better to look in optical wavelengths or infrared—must obviously b e sorted out before a single data point is recorded. “If you take this thing and shove it up there into orbit,” he says, “you really don’t want to have to go up and monkey around with it afterwards.”
Steele’s life-detection chips, Reid’s terrestrial-planet-finding telescopes, Turnbull’s Earthshine spectra—it all began, and continued, on the promise of financial support from Uncle Sam. But on February 6, 2006, almost two years to the day after the announcement of his Vision for Space Exploration, President Bush proposed a new $2.77 trillion budget plan calling for increased spending on the military and domestic security and substantial cuts in domestic programs, including NASA. “Astrobiology seems to have been cut by 50 percent,” Neill says. “So it's pretty much what we expected, although a bigger cut than Andrew had been expecting. We'll just have to persevere as best we can for the moment and see whether the wind will change again.”
Despite the large NASA cuts, Steele’s lab isn’t likely to shut down soon. “We’ve already been funded by Astrobiology Instrument Department for developing instruments until 2009, .so we’ve got another three years,” Steele says. And if they don’t fund him after that, Reid says Steele’s work is important enough to find sources outside of the Astrobiology Institute. “But it doesn’t make it any better,” Reid laments. “It means that you’re going to have to go back and scramble to get other funding and meanwhile the people that you’ve assembled, they’re not just going to hang around there and wait in the optimistic hope, on the off chance that you’re going to get funded again. It’s wrenching, but it’s just the way it works.”
Assuming he finds a way to carry on his work, so what if Steele’s instruments—either by rover or man—do find life on Mars? Steele responds, “If we find it—fantastic! Brilliant! Superb! Let’s go get it, let’s study the hell out of it, let’s classify it. But I’m actually more interested in if we don’t find life on Mars, and then why there isn’t life there. What went wrong? For me, that’s the biggest reason for going.”
If life was found on Mars, would the earthlings in charge then put more funding into Astrobiology? “Maybe, maybe not,” Reid says wryly. “We might get cut off for getting the wrong answer.”
2.07.2006
Archaeology Professor Finds 3,400-Year-Old Egyptian Treasure
(to appear in the April issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine)
On her recent trip to southern Egypt, Professor Betsy Bryan would sometimes look up to see a hot air balloon, filled with tourists, hovering above the clusters of tall yellow grasses and taller archaeology students. She spent some evenings watching birds on the nearby lake, perched on reeds waiting eagerly for dinner to surface from below. These occasional lulls undoubtedly gave the seasoned archaeologist a much-needed respite, after long days of digging on the ancient temple grounds.
On January 3rd, Bryan and her 17-member team of Hopkins graduate and undergraduate students began the sixth round of excavations behind this sacred lake, in the ancient Nile city of Luxor. For the better part of three weeks they worked in adjacent trenches, about 15-feet square, digging a bit more every day to slowly uncover the ruins of a temple to the goddess Mut. By January 21st, the trenches were about 12 inches deep, and exposed the tops of some of the temple’s interior walls. The crew had already found a bronze-handled vessel, and decorated blocks of limestone and sandstone. But while sifting through the rubble on the temple’s platform that chilly morning, they unexpectedly unearthed a treasure of far greater value: a 3,400-year-old life-size statue of a beautiful Egyptian queen.
The crew had actually seen the first part of the facedown figure—an inscription from 1000 BC that ran along its back pillar—the day before, but didn’t realize what it was. After cleaning it more thoroughly, though, they realized they had found something much grander, and older, than the inscription indicated. Before them was a full-size, finely carved statue. Two cobras, representing the goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt, were carved on her headdress, next to a vulture whose feathers surrounded her face. She also bore the telltale signs of Egyptian female royalty: her left hand, resting on her chest, held remnants a fly whisk; and more importantly, she donned a large cylindrical crown inscribed with the name of one of the period’s most powerful pharaohs, Amenhotep III.
Amenhotep III ruled Egypt for almost 40 years in the 14th century BC, a time of unprecedented prosperity and splendor. Because the statue has multiple inscriptions of his name, Bryan theorizes the beauty is none other than Tiy, the chief queen of Amenhotep III and the grandmother of Tutankhamun. “Tiy was so powerful that, as a widow, she was the recipient of foreign diplomatic letters sent to her from the king of Babylonia,” Bryan says. “Some indications, such as her own portraits in art, suggest that Tiy may have ruled briefly after her husband’s death, but this is uncertain.”
When news of the find spread to the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, Bryan reports a large crowd arrived to see it, and even lifted it up from the rubble in enthusiastic cheers. After a thorough cleaning, it was wrapped in plastic and carried in a processional ritual through the temple gates to a truck headed for the Luxor Museum. On the team’s daily-updated website (http://www.jhu.edu/neareast/egypttoday.html) Bryan wrote: “We later rode to the museum, and I reluctantly signed the release papers turning over the statue to the museum. We hope that she will stand on display very soon.”
On her recent trip to southern Egypt, Professor Betsy Bryan would sometimes look up to see a hot air balloon, filled with tourists, hovering above the clusters of tall yellow grasses and taller archaeology students. She spent some evenings watching birds on the nearby lake, perched on reeds waiting eagerly for dinner to surface from below. These occasional lulls undoubtedly gave the seasoned archaeologist a much-needed respite, after long days of digging on the ancient temple grounds.
On January 3rd, Bryan and her 17-member team of Hopkins graduate and undergraduate students began the sixth round of excavations behind this sacred lake, in the ancient Nile city of Luxor. For the better part of three weeks they worked in adjacent trenches, about 15-feet square, digging a bit more every day to slowly uncover the ruins of a temple to the goddess Mut. By January 21st, the trenches were about 12 inches deep, and exposed the tops of some of the temple’s interior walls. The crew had already found a bronze-handled vessel, and decorated blocks of limestone and sandstone. But while sifting through the rubble on the temple’s platform that chilly morning, they unexpectedly unearthed a treasure of far greater value: a 3,400-year-old life-size statue of a beautiful Egyptian queen.
The crew had actually seen the first part of the facedown figure—an inscription from 1000 BC that ran along its back pillar—the day before, but didn’t realize what it was. After cleaning it more thoroughly, though, they realized they had found something much grander, and older, than the inscription indicated. Before them was a full-size, finely carved statue. Two cobras, representing the goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt, were carved on her headdress, next to a vulture whose feathers surrounded her face. She also bore the telltale signs of Egyptian female royalty: her left hand, resting on her chest, held remnants a fly whisk; and more importantly, she donned a large cylindrical crown inscribed with the name of one of the period’s most powerful pharaohs, Amenhotep III.
Amenhotep III ruled Egypt for almost 40 years in the 14th century BC, a time of unprecedented prosperity and splendor. Because the statue has multiple inscriptions of his name, Bryan theorizes the beauty is none other than Tiy, the chief queen of Amenhotep III and the grandmother of Tutankhamun. “Tiy was so powerful that, as a widow, she was the recipient of foreign diplomatic letters sent to her from the king of Babylonia,” Bryan says. “Some indications, such as her own portraits in art, suggest that Tiy may have ruled briefly after her husband’s death, but this is uncertain.”
When news of the find spread to the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, Bryan reports a large crowd arrived to see it, and even lifted it up from the rubble in enthusiastic cheers. After a thorough cleaning, it was wrapped in plastic and carried in a processional ritual through the temple gates to a truck headed for the Luxor Museum. On the team’s daily-updated website (http://www.jhu.edu/neareast/egypttoday.html) Bryan wrote: “We later rode to the museum, and I reluctantly signed the release papers turning over the statue to the museum. We hope that she will stand on display very soon.”
1.31.2006
My Old Friend Freddy
(to appear in the April issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine)
When Fred Kahn looks back upon his early years, growing up in a Jewish household in Germany at the dawn of the Second World War, certain scenes spring to his mind. He remembers neighborhood children riding on sleighs, and the blare of the trumpets coming from the nearby Biebrich castle. But no memory is more vivid than the eve of October 1, 1938, when he left the town of Wiesbaden and the home of his aunt and uncle—the only parents he had ever known.
Kahn spent his childhood hiding in Belgium, and moved to America after the War. He graduated from SAIS in 1963, with an M.A. in Advanced International Studies and a fiancée. After 30 years of civil service, Kahn says it was his childhood memories that motivated him to give back to society. In September, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich appointed him to the new Task Force to Implement Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance Education. But Kahn attributes all of his success to his dramatic escape, at age 5, from Nazi Germany.
In the middle of that fateful October night, Kahn’s Uncle Siegfried awakened him and told him to put on his best suit. The sleepy boy was taken out to the porch of the house he had lived in for four years, ever since his biological parents and older brother had fled to Belgium. The night before, when the Munich Agreement was signed, Germany gained the political momentum that would eventually lead to world war. When Kahn’s parents heard to news, they called Siegfried with one urgent message: Get the boy out of Germany. Kahn still remembers what was said on that porch, under the full moon: “My uncle told me I was about to go on a big trip.”
Siegfried took him to a Christian German, Maria, who would accompany him to the German-Belgian border. But first, Siegfried took Maria aside and gave her his most valued possession: a gold pocket watch. “He gave it to her on the condition that if he didn’t survive,” Kahn says, “she would make sure I would get it.” Maria took the boy by tram to the border—to no-man’s land. “They assumed that nobody would pay attention to me,” Kahn explains, “but when I arrived there they wouldn’t let me in because I had no papers—nothing.” While the officers made phone calls, he could see his family calling to him from the other side. “My father was yelling ‘C’est mon fils!’—That’s my son!” he recalls, “but of course I didn’t know who he was.” Eventually, the five-year-old was admitted as a political refugee.
Within six weeks, Siegfried and his wife, Rosa, had been deported to concentration camps, never to be seen again. Kahn and his parents, using the old identity papers of a Catholic family, survived the rest of the war in Belgium, storing their valuables in friends’ basements and moving every six months to avoid being listed on the registry of Jewish families. When the Germans left Belgium in 1944, the Kahns were finally able to go back to their home. “I ran into my old friends, kids on the street,” he recalls, “and they couldn’t believe I was still alive.”
Kahn moved to the United States at 19, and was quickly drafted to the U.S. Army. After his military service, he attended the University of Maryland, and in 1960 he received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at SAIS. Kahn sat with fellow classmate Madeleine Albright in the popular “Wide Wide World” course, and took part in off-the-record lounge sessions with government VIPs like Director of the CIA Allen Dulles, and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. After graduating in 1963, Kahn was recruited by the federal Office of Economic Opportunity to launch Job Corps. He worked as a political economist for the Department of Labor until his retirement in1992.
His childhood experience and lifetime commitment to civil service made Kahn an ideal member of Maryland’s new Task Force to Implement Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance Education. Kahn says the mission of the group is to advise the state University System on the creation of workshops for how to promote tolerance and sensitivity when teaching Holocaust history. The 13-member group’s first meeting was in December, and they plan to submit a report to the governor in 2007.
Today, Fred Kahn still treasures his uncle’s gold watch. He says his story gives life lessons that apply to everybody, not just Jews. Tolerance education is crucial, he says, “so that you learn not to pick up a gun just because someone is different from you.” Kahn shares his story by moderating a Yahoo! internet group, called Remember the Holocaust, for about one hundred members from around the world. “It is my major hobby now,” he says, “and an education in itself.”
When Fred Kahn looks back upon his early years, growing up in a Jewish household in Germany at the dawn of the Second World War, certain scenes spring to his mind. He remembers neighborhood children riding on sleighs, and the blare of the trumpets coming from the nearby Biebrich castle. But no memory is more vivid than the eve of October 1, 1938, when he left the town of Wiesbaden and the home of his aunt and uncle—the only parents he had ever known.
Kahn spent his childhood hiding in Belgium, and moved to America after the War. He graduated from SAIS in 1963, with an M.A. in Advanced International Studies and a fiancée. After 30 years of civil service, Kahn says it was his childhood memories that motivated him to give back to society. In September, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich appointed him to the new Task Force to Implement Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance Education. But Kahn attributes all of his success to his dramatic escape, at age 5, from Nazi Germany.
In the middle of that fateful October night, Kahn’s Uncle Siegfried awakened him and told him to put on his best suit. The sleepy boy was taken out to the porch of the house he had lived in for four years, ever since his biological parents and older brother had fled to Belgium. The night before, when the Munich Agreement was signed, Germany gained the political momentum that would eventually lead to world war. When Kahn’s parents heard to news, they called Siegfried with one urgent message: Get the boy out of Germany. Kahn still remembers what was said on that porch, under the full moon: “My uncle told me I was about to go on a big trip.”
Siegfried took him to a Christian German, Maria, who would accompany him to the German-Belgian border. But first, Siegfried took Maria aside and gave her his most valued possession: a gold pocket watch. “He gave it to her on the condition that if he didn’t survive,” Kahn says, “she would make sure I would get it.” Maria took the boy by tram to the border—to no-man’s land. “They assumed that nobody would pay attention to me,” Kahn explains, “but when I arrived there they wouldn’t let me in because I had no papers—nothing.” While the officers made phone calls, he could see his family calling to him from the other side. “My father was yelling ‘C’est mon fils!’—That’s my son!” he recalls, “but of course I didn’t know who he was.” Eventually, the five-year-old was admitted as a political refugee.
Within six weeks, Siegfried and his wife, Rosa, had been deported to concentration camps, never to be seen again. Kahn and his parents, using the old identity papers of a Catholic family, survived the rest of the war in Belgium, storing their valuables in friends’ basements and moving every six months to avoid being listed on the registry of Jewish families. When the Germans left Belgium in 1944, the Kahns were finally able to go back to their home. “I ran into my old friends, kids on the street,” he recalls, “and they couldn’t believe I was still alive.”
Kahn moved to the United States at 19, and was quickly drafted to the U.S. Army. After his military service, he attended the University of Maryland, and in 1960 he received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at SAIS. Kahn sat with fellow classmate Madeleine Albright in the popular “Wide Wide World” course, and took part in off-the-record lounge sessions with government VIPs like Director of the CIA Allen Dulles, and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. After graduating in 1963, Kahn was recruited by the federal Office of Economic Opportunity to launch Job Corps. He worked as a political economist for the Department of Labor until his retirement in1992.
His childhood experience and lifetime commitment to civil service made Kahn an ideal member of Maryland’s new Task Force to Implement Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance Education. Kahn says the mission of the group is to advise the state University System on the creation of workshops for how to promote tolerance and sensitivity when teaching Holocaust history. The 13-member group’s first meeting was in December, and they plan to submit a report to the governor in 2007.
Today, Fred Kahn still treasures his uncle’s gold watch. He says his story gives life lessons that apply to everybody, not just Jews. Tolerance education is crucial, he says, “so that you learn not to pick up a gun just because someone is different from you.” Kahn shares his story by moderating a Yahoo! internet group, called Remember the Holocaust, for about one hundred members from around the world. “It is my major hobby now,” he says, “and an education in itself.”
1.26.2006
New Clip
Read ya some giant earthquake business:
http://www.firstscience.com/SITE/ARTICLES/earthquake2.asp
http://www.firstscience.com/SITE/ARTICLES/earthquake2.asp
1.19.2006
May Spring Bring Hope
(soon to be published in the Hopkins School of Nursing Magazine….and no, writing about death and kids is NOT fun.)
From the January day six-year old Lucas Livingston was diagnosed with leukemia, to a time three months later when his body rejected his father’s transplanted bone marrow, his family and caregivers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center had but one resolve: treat to cure. But in the next two months of fighting, Lucas’ condition only got worse. His father Gordon Livingston, in his memoir Only Spring, recalls spending the last 11 days in intensive care, watching his son fade in and out of consciousness. “When your child dies,” says the Hopkins-trained psychiatrist, “it’s just an inconceivable loss. It’s not the order things are supposed to go in, and people have no preparation for this.”
Dr. Livingston never once lost hope in the five-month ordeal, but fears too many of his son’s doctors and nurses did. “If anything, the doctors were afraid to be hopeful,” he says. “But it wasn’t helpful to us to see them dragging in on rounds like funeral directors.”
That was in 1992. Since then, Hopkins has taken many strides to give better care to its dying patients, and especially its young ones. “Sometimes people think that when we start speaking about palliative care it means we’ve given up hope,” says Dr. Cynda Rushton, Johns Hopkins associate professor of nursing and Program Director of Harriet Lane Compassionate Care, Hopkins’ pediatric palliative care program. “But instead of focusing on the death, we want to help them to live as well as they can, for as long as possible.”
In the fall of 2004, Rushton and her colleagues brought together more than 40 healthcare professionals and parents who have lost their children at the Maryland Pediatric Care Summit at the SON. A detailed report of the Summit, which tackled problems noted in both Hopkins patient surveys and national data, was published this September. The participants discussed making palliative care more family-centered, improving systems of care and education, and changing state financing guidelines so families don’t have to choose between end-of-life treatments and skilled nursing. Also discussed was the construction of a new Children’s Center, with all private rooms, to give healing spaces for families to gather while a child is dying.
Some problems are specific to children. In order to receive hospice services, for instance, patients have to be expected to die within a six-month time period. But as Rushton explains, “children’s diseases are usually not that predictable.” This regulatory barrier prevents some families from receiving the benefits of hospice until close to the child’s death. Ideally, Rushton says these specialized services could be integrated with curative treatments from the time of diagnosis.
The most noticeable progress at Hopkins has been educating doctors and nurses in compassionate communication and decision making. “Everybody involved in the child’s treatment has a responsibility to have these skills,” Rushton says. To this end, on March 12-14 the Children’s Center will co-sponsor an intensive training program for professionals, focusing on how healthcare providers can work together with parents in these emotionally draining situations.
Dr. Livingston agrees this caregiver education is desperately needed, as the pessimism of even one individual can make the entire experience more painful. “We had one nurse in the PICU who actually told us: ‘if I thought of them as children I couldn’t work here,’” he says, “but then we had other nurses who wept with us.”
“Those who work everyday with dying kids just need more help in the way of training,” he says, “to know what things work with parents and what don’t.” Indeed, with the continued efforts at Hopkins to improve the quality of palliative care, dying children and their families may soon feel the hope of spring.
From the January day six-year old Lucas Livingston was diagnosed with leukemia, to a time three months later when his body rejected his father’s transplanted bone marrow, his family and caregivers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center had but one resolve: treat to cure. But in the next two months of fighting, Lucas’ condition only got worse. His father Gordon Livingston, in his memoir Only Spring, recalls spending the last 11 days in intensive care, watching his son fade in and out of consciousness. “When your child dies,” says the Hopkins-trained psychiatrist, “it’s just an inconceivable loss. It’s not the order things are supposed to go in, and people have no preparation for this.”
Dr. Livingston never once lost hope in the five-month ordeal, but fears too many of his son’s doctors and nurses did. “If anything, the doctors were afraid to be hopeful,” he says. “But it wasn’t helpful to us to see them dragging in on rounds like funeral directors.”
That was in 1992. Since then, Hopkins has taken many strides to give better care to its dying patients, and especially its young ones. “Sometimes people think that when we start speaking about palliative care it means we’ve given up hope,” says Dr. Cynda Rushton, Johns Hopkins associate professor of nursing and Program Director of Harriet Lane Compassionate Care, Hopkins’ pediatric palliative care program. “But instead of focusing on the death, we want to help them to live as well as they can, for as long as possible.”
In the fall of 2004, Rushton and her colleagues brought together more than 40 healthcare professionals and parents who have lost their children at the Maryland Pediatric Care Summit at the SON. A detailed report of the Summit, which tackled problems noted in both Hopkins patient surveys and national data, was published this September. The participants discussed making palliative care more family-centered, improving systems of care and education, and changing state financing guidelines so families don’t have to choose between end-of-life treatments and skilled nursing. Also discussed was the construction of a new Children’s Center, with all private rooms, to give healing spaces for families to gather while a child is dying.
Some problems are specific to children. In order to receive hospice services, for instance, patients have to be expected to die within a six-month time period. But as Rushton explains, “children’s diseases are usually not that predictable.” This regulatory barrier prevents some families from receiving the benefits of hospice until close to the child’s death. Ideally, Rushton says these specialized services could be integrated with curative treatments from the time of diagnosis.
The most noticeable progress at Hopkins has been educating doctors and nurses in compassionate communication and decision making. “Everybody involved in the child’s treatment has a responsibility to have these skills,” Rushton says. To this end, on March 12-14 the Children’s Center will co-sponsor an intensive training program for professionals, focusing on how healthcare providers can work together with parents in these emotionally draining situations.
Dr. Livingston agrees this caregiver education is desperately needed, as the pessimism of even one individual can make the entire experience more painful. “We had one nurse in the PICU who actually told us: ‘if I thought of them as children I couldn’t work here,’” he says, “but then we had other nurses who wept with us.”
“Those who work everyday with dying kids just need more help in the way of training,” he says, “to know what things work with parents and what don’t.” Indeed, with the continued efforts at Hopkins to improve the quality of palliative care, dying children and their families may soon feel the hope of spring.
1.11.2006
When night is almost done
When night is almost done,
And sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the spaces,
It’s time to smooth the hair
And get the dimples ready,
And wonder we could care
For that old faded midnight
That frightened but an hour.
-Emily Dickinson
And sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the spaces,
It’s time to smooth the hair
And get the dimples ready,
And wonder we could care
For that old faded midnight
That frightened but an hour.
-Emily Dickinson
12.22.2005
Some Old Poems....so you MFA poets can laugh laugh
Big Smiles on Cheshire Cats
That grin taunts Alice
flaunts logic (philosophical)
haunts my little girl dreams.
Which way ought I to go from here?
Steady pace it’s 7:16
Stairs winding first
through the kitchen
second doorknob, twist
stairs winding second, land with a thump
Twist, step-step-step, out. out.
of options.
Firemen grazing on Menthols while
Slothful see-men lie.
It’s curious—a
grin without a cat.
Like a dream without a sleep.
Big Smiles in a Central Park
Wind flaps saffron flaps two focused faces beam
Her face is round, but round back in ’03 they called
her pretty gray eyes match a peacoat proper.
Rosy cheeks betray bravado
Bundled up in nervous-wind-flapping saffron
Eyes hopeful,
Smiles fixed-posed-set-forever celluloid
Call back to my moment of wonderful awkward
Turned warm against the wind—
foreground, left—
heart skip-skipping when
mittened fingers brushed his cheek.
She was warm but
knows the cold is sweeping through the saffron
Chasing the Cold White
There—a cold white within her. A doctor who travels
by airplane and they talk about
New York City models,
she laughs.
Beauty in boniness and pallor.
There is a sickness inside, consumes halfway; makes
blood redder
skin whiter.
Suffering does not localize.
Wind, low rocks, icy water
breed familiarity and bacterium.
He worries about her children.
Later she will die and later he will too,
maybe he will cry. He will take off and
land and take off and land, following
the cold white as it grows.
Phillip Copper
Protruding plastic tubes
exit: left: elbow crook
over the river and through the woods to the blinking white ATM machine
Digital displays
A minute passes, as does 465 milliliters
“my body can’t handle 500”
Dirty blood—out. Clean blood—in.
Beep beep. be-eee beeeeeeep.
She’s dozing—the loud talker,
under faded afghan
below Bob Barker.
That grin taunts Alice
flaunts logic (philosophical)
haunts my little girl dreams.
Which way ought I to go from here?
Steady pace it’s 7:16
Stairs winding first
through the kitchen
second doorknob, twist
stairs winding second, land with a thump
Twist, step-step-step, out. out.
of options.
Firemen grazing on Menthols while
Slothful see-men lie.
It’s curious—a
grin without a cat.
Like a dream without a sleep.
Big Smiles in a Central Park
Wind flaps saffron flaps two focused faces beam
Her face is round, but round back in ’03 they called
her pretty gray eyes match a peacoat proper.
Rosy cheeks betray bravado
Bundled up in nervous-wind-flapping saffron
Eyes hopeful,
Smiles fixed-posed-set-forever celluloid
Call back to my moment of wonderful awkward
Turned warm against the wind—
foreground, left—
heart skip-skipping when
mittened fingers brushed his cheek.
She was warm but
knows the cold is sweeping through the saffron
Chasing the Cold White
There—a cold white within her. A doctor who travels
by airplane and they talk about
New York City models,
she laughs.
Beauty in boniness and pallor.
There is a sickness inside, consumes halfway; makes
blood redder
skin whiter.
Suffering does not localize.
Wind, low rocks, icy water
breed familiarity and bacterium.
He worries about her children.
Later she will die and later he will too,
maybe he will cry. He will take off and
land and take off and land, following
the cold white as it grows.
Phillip Copper
Protruding plastic tubes
exit: left: elbow crook
over the river and through the woods to the blinking white ATM machine
Digital displays
A minute passes, as does 465 milliliters
“my body can’t handle 500”
Dirty blood—out. Clean blood—in.
Beep beep. be-eee beeeeeeep.
She’s dozing—the loud talker,
under faded afghan
below Bob Barker.
12.19.2005
12.14.2005
12.12.2005
More Fun with Google
Another fun Google game, courtesy of Ryan James Wilson. To play, google your name with “is” and write down what comes up. Then google your name with “believes” and write down what comes up. Then combine them. Hehehheheehe soooo fun.
Ginny is not yet left to languish, therefore she believes in waiting for sex ‘till after marriage.
Ginny is a painted last strung doll, therefore she believes in old-fashioned service.
Ginny is hiding in front of the car, therefore she believes in giving back to her community at every level.
Ginny is very powerful magically, therefore she believes that looking good on the dance floor requires not so much a knowledge of memorized moves but instead a knowledge of movement.
Ginny is a dynamic workshop leader, therefore she believes in the “bloom where your planted” theory.
Ginny is not yet left to languish, therefore she believes in waiting for sex ‘till after marriage.
Ginny is a painted last strung doll, therefore she believes in old-fashioned service.
Ginny is hiding in front of the car, therefore she believes in giving back to her community at every level.
Ginny is very powerful magically, therefore she believes that looking good on the dance floor requires not so much a knowledge of memorized moves but instead a knowledge of movement.
Ginny is a dynamic workshop leader, therefore she believes in the “bloom where your planted” theory.
Einstein vs. The Nobel Committee
When Albert Einstein listed the most important honors of his life, he did not include the one with the highest profile and pay: the Nobel Prize. But perhaps this omission isn’t so surprising. The Nobel nod—17 years after Einstein published his special theory of relativity—came long after recognition by the rest of the world. Even more bizarre, the gold medallion was given to Einstein not for his relativity revolution, but for the relatively obscure discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. Now, in this 100-year anniversary of Einstein’s “annus mirabilis,” or miraculous year, one historian thinks he knows why. After years of sifting through letters and diaries of the Scandinavian archives, Robert Marc Friedman of the University of Oslo says it was an intentional snub, fueled by the political atmosphere of post-war Europe.
In 1905, while working as a patent clerk in Switzerland, 26-year-old Albert Einstein published five seminal papers on the nature of space, light, and motion. Until that point, most physicists viewed the cosmos through Isaac-Newton-colored glasses: the planets and the stars obeyed the same rules as apples falling from a tree. Space was inflexible and could be described with Euclidean geometry; time ticked by at the same steady rate everywhere in the universe. But one of Einstein’s 1905 papers, the special theory of relativity, he did away with the notion of absolute space and time—effectively turning the standard Newtonian model on its deterministic head.
In the next decade, Einstein built upon these ideas to include the concept of gravity. In 1915, his general theory of relativity proposed that gravity was not some mysterious force of attraction between bodies, but rather the result of the space distortions caused by massive bodies like the Sun and the planets. Moreover, it proposed that this curving of space affects not only particles, people, and planets—but light, too. Today, general relativity is celebrated as Einstein’s most impressive work. But Friedman says that in Germany after the First World War, Einstein was despised as a pacifist Jew who renounced his German citizenship, went to meetings of radical groups, and publicly supported socialism. His theories were dismissed as “world bluffing Jewish physics” by some prominent German physicists, who claimed to practice “true” German science based on observations of the natural world and hypotheses that could be tested in a laboratory.
Luckily for Einstein, British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington believed there was a way to test the general theory. If space was curved, as Einstein proposed, then light traveling through it should too follow a curved, rather than straight, path. Moreover, its path would be curved most around a very strong gravitational force like that of the Sun. This bending of light could be observed, it was thought, if photographs of stars that appeared very close to the Sun were compared to photographs of the same stars when they were not near the Sun. The only problem was that from an earthly vantage point, the Sun’s brightness blinded that of nearby stars. But on May 29, 1919, six minutes of a total solar eclipse ironically provided enough obscurity for Eddington to measure the positions of the stars that appeared next to the eclipsed Sun. And sure enough, they followed the predictions of Einstein’s general theory.
Almost overnight, Einstein became a household name throughout the world. Nominations for Einstein poured into the laps of the members of the Nobel Committee as they were reviewing candidates for the 1920 prize. But the Committee’s objections to relativity went beyond its theoretical nature. According to Friedman, the Committee did not want a “political and intellectual radical, who—it was said—did not conduct experiments, crowned as the pinnacle of physics.” So the 1920 prize was given to the Swiss Charles-Edouard Guillaume for his ho-hum discovery of an inert nickel-steel alloy. When the announcement was made, Friedman says the previously-unknown Guillaume “was as surprised as the rest of the world.”
By the next year, what Friedman calls “Einstein-mania” was in full bloom. As his quirky personality (and untamed tresses) gained more popularity with the general public, his theory gained more credibility in the scientific community. In 1921, swarms of both theoreticians and experimentalists again nominated Einstein for his work on relativity. Reporters kept asking him, to his great annoyance: Would this finally be the year that he received a Nobel Prize?
But 1921 was not the year, thanks to one stubborn senior member of the Prize Committee: Allvar Gullstrand. Trained as an ophthalmologist, Gullstrand’s knowledge of theoretical physics left much to be desired; nevertheless his arrogance, according to Friedman, led him to challenge Einstein’s theories. (As Friedman jokes, “In a small, isolated but locally prestigious academic environment, arrogance, like mold in a damp cellar, tends to thrive.”) In a 50-odd-page report, Gullstrand collected every published article—no matter how obscure—that even slightly doubted relativity, while omitting the far greater number that saluted it. One private remark by Gullstrand, which Friedman found buried in a diary, sums up his sour attitude: “Einstein must never receive a Nobel Prize, even if the whole world demands it.” Gullstrand’s arguments, however biased, convinced the rest of the committee. In 1921, no one was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Two prizes were thus available in 1922. By this time, Einstein’s popularity was so great that many members of the committee worried about their international reputation if they didn’t recognize him in some way. Like the previous two years, he received many nominations for relativity. But this year there was one nomination—from a certain Carl Wilhelm Oseen—not for relativity, but for the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.
The photoelectric effect was, along with the special theory of relativity, one of the five papers Einstein published in 1905. Before this, light was known to come in waves. But Einstein was the first to propose that light actually had a dual nature: it acted as both a wave and a particle. At first, this theory faced just as much controversy as special relativity. But there was a big difference: laboratory experiments conducted in 1916 showed the validity of the photoelectric effect. Friedman was the first historian to emphasize that Oseen wanted the Committee to recognize the photoelectric effect not as a theory, but as a fundamental law of nature. Why? Not because he cared about recognizing Einstein, but because he had another theoretical physicist in mind for that second available prize: Niels Bohr.
Niels Bohr had proposed a new quantum theory of the atom that Oseen felt was “the most beautiful of all the beautiful” in recent theoretical physics. In his report to the Committee, Oseen exaggerated the close bond between Einstein’s proven law of nature and Bohr’s new atom. “In one brilliant stroke,” Friedman explains, “he saw how to meet the objections against both Einstein and Bohr.”
After reviewing Friedman’s research, Bruce Hunt, an Einstein historian at the University of Texas at Austin, was especially intrigued by the way Oseen changed the emphasis from the theory of the photoelectric effect to the law of the photoelectric effect. “What Friedman brings out particularly well,” Hunt says, “is how deftly Oseen used the other Swedish physicists' worship of empirical results, and their denigration of ‘mere theory,’ to win them over.”
The Committee was indeed won over. On November 10, 1922, the Nobel Prize for Physics was given to Niels Bohr, and the delayed 1921 Prize awarded to Albert Einstein, “especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” Einstein, en route to Japan, wasn’t able to attend the official ceremony to accept his award. But according to Friedman, it wasn’t the medal that he cared about, anyway—it was the money. As the German mark decreased in value after the war, Einstein needed a hard foreign currency for alimony payments to his ex-wife. Moreover, the terms of his 1919 divorce proceedings dictated that she was already entitled to all the money “from an eventual Nobel Prize.” Hunt says calling attention to these financial arrangements “brings out the fact that Einstein was a much more worldly and savvy man than his later public image would suggest.”
Einstein gave his official Nobel lecture one year later, to a large and attentive audience that included the Swedish King, Gustav Adolf V. Einstein was told to speak about the photoelectric effect. But the speech—which began: “If we consider that part of the theory of relativity which may nowadays be regarded as bona fide scientific knowledge…”—focused instead on the subject for which he clearly thought he should have won the prize.
Robert Marc Friedman’s story leaves another attentive audience with a new history lesson: “Einstein understood that the golden Nobel medallion is etched with human frailties…and like Einstein, perhaps we should also avoid the temptation of dancing around this modern golden calf.” Hunt says Friedman’s tale gave an oft-overlooked perspective on the way science was practiced and praised in the early 20th century. “The decisions of the Nobel committees are often treated by the press and public as the voice of god,” Hunt says, but Friedman’s research brought to light “how political the deliberations of the Nobel committees sometimes were—and presumably still are.”
In 1905, while working as a patent clerk in Switzerland, 26-year-old Albert Einstein published five seminal papers on the nature of space, light, and motion. Until that point, most physicists viewed the cosmos through Isaac-Newton-colored glasses: the planets and the stars obeyed the same rules as apples falling from a tree. Space was inflexible and could be described with Euclidean geometry; time ticked by at the same steady rate everywhere in the universe. But one of Einstein’s 1905 papers, the special theory of relativity, he did away with the notion of absolute space and time—effectively turning the standard Newtonian model on its deterministic head.
In the next decade, Einstein built upon these ideas to include the concept of gravity. In 1915, his general theory of relativity proposed that gravity was not some mysterious force of attraction between bodies, but rather the result of the space distortions caused by massive bodies like the Sun and the planets. Moreover, it proposed that this curving of space affects not only particles, people, and planets—but light, too. Today, general relativity is celebrated as Einstein’s most impressive work. But Friedman says that in Germany after the First World War, Einstein was despised as a pacifist Jew who renounced his German citizenship, went to meetings of radical groups, and publicly supported socialism. His theories were dismissed as “world bluffing Jewish physics” by some prominent German physicists, who claimed to practice “true” German science based on observations of the natural world and hypotheses that could be tested in a laboratory.
Luckily for Einstein, British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington believed there was a way to test the general theory. If space was curved, as Einstein proposed, then light traveling through it should too follow a curved, rather than straight, path. Moreover, its path would be curved most around a very strong gravitational force like that of the Sun. This bending of light could be observed, it was thought, if photographs of stars that appeared very close to the Sun were compared to photographs of the same stars when they were not near the Sun. The only problem was that from an earthly vantage point, the Sun’s brightness blinded that of nearby stars. But on May 29, 1919, six minutes of a total solar eclipse ironically provided enough obscurity for Eddington to measure the positions of the stars that appeared next to the eclipsed Sun. And sure enough, they followed the predictions of Einstein’s general theory.
Almost overnight, Einstein became a household name throughout the world. Nominations for Einstein poured into the laps of the members of the Nobel Committee as they were reviewing candidates for the 1920 prize. But the Committee’s objections to relativity went beyond its theoretical nature. According to Friedman, the Committee did not want a “political and intellectual radical, who—it was said—did not conduct experiments, crowned as the pinnacle of physics.” So the 1920 prize was given to the Swiss Charles-Edouard Guillaume for his ho-hum discovery of an inert nickel-steel alloy. When the announcement was made, Friedman says the previously-unknown Guillaume “was as surprised as the rest of the world.”
By the next year, what Friedman calls “Einstein-mania” was in full bloom. As his quirky personality (and untamed tresses) gained more popularity with the general public, his theory gained more credibility in the scientific community. In 1921, swarms of both theoreticians and experimentalists again nominated Einstein for his work on relativity. Reporters kept asking him, to his great annoyance: Would this finally be the year that he received a Nobel Prize?
But 1921 was not the year, thanks to one stubborn senior member of the Prize Committee: Allvar Gullstrand. Trained as an ophthalmologist, Gullstrand’s knowledge of theoretical physics left much to be desired; nevertheless his arrogance, according to Friedman, led him to challenge Einstein’s theories. (As Friedman jokes, “In a small, isolated but locally prestigious academic environment, arrogance, like mold in a damp cellar, tends to thrive.”) In a 50-odd-page report, Gullstrand collected every published article—no matter how obscure—that even slightly doubted relativity, while omitting the far greater number that saluted it. One private remark by Gullstrand, which Friedman found buried in a diary, sums up his sour attitude: “Einstein must never receive a Nobel Prize, even if the whole world demands it.” Gullstrand’s arguments, however biased, convinced the rest of the committee. In 1921, no one was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Two prizes were thus available in 1922. By this time, Einstein’s popularity was so great that many members of the committee worried about their international reputation if they didn’t recognize him in some way. Like the previous two years, he received many nominations for relativity. But this year there was one nomination—from a certain Carl Wilhelm Oseen—not for relativity, but for the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.
The photoelectric effect was, along with the special theory of relativity, one of the five papers Einstein published in 1905. Before this, light was known to come in waves. But Einstein was the first to propose that light actually had a dual nature: it acted as both a wave and a particle. At first, this theory faced just as much controversy as special relativity. But there was a big difference: laboratory experiments conducted in 1916 showed the validity of the photoelectric effect. Friedman was the first historian to emphasize that Oseen wanted the Committee to recognize the photoelectric effect not as a theory, but as a fundamental law of nature. Why? Not because he cared about recognizing Einstein, but because he had another theoretical physicist in mind for that second available prize: Niels Bohr.
Niels Bohr had proposed a new quantum theory of the atom that Oseen felt was “the most beautiful of all the beautiful” in recent theoretical physics. In his report to the Committee, Oseen exaggerated the close bond between Einstein’s proven law of nature and Bohr’s new atom. “In one brilliant stroke,” Friedman explains, “he saw how to meet the objections against both Einstein and Bohr.”
After reviewing Friedman’s research, Bruce Hunt, an Einstein historian at the University of Texas at Austin, was especially intrigued by the way Oseen changed the emphasis from the theory of the photoelectric effect to the law of the photoelectric effect. “What Friedman brings out particularly well,” Hunt says, “is how deftly Oseen used the other Swedish physicists' worship of empirical results, and their denigration of ‘mere theory,’ to win them over.”
The Committee was indeed won over. On November 10, 1922, the Nobel Prize for Physics was given to Niels Bohr, and the delayed 1921 Prize awarded to Albert Einstein, “especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” Einstein, en route to Japan, wasn’t able to attend the official ceremony to accept his award. But according to Friedman, it wasn’t the medal that he cared about, anyway—it was the money. As the German mark decreased in value after the war, Einstein needed a hard foreign currency for alimony payments to his ex-wife. Moreover, the terms of his 1919 divorce proceedings dictated that she was already entitled to all the money “from an eventual Nobel Prize.” Hunt says calling attention to these financial arrangements “brings out the fact that Einstein was a much more worldly and savvy man than his later public image would suggest.”
Einstein gave his official Nobel lecture one year later, to a large and attentive audience that included the Swedish King, Gustav Adolf V. Einstein was told to speak about the photoelectric effect. But the speech—which began: “If we consider that part of the theory of relativity which may nowadays be regarded as bona fide scientific knowledge…”—focused instead on the subject for which he clearly thought he should have won the prize.
Robert Marc Friedman’s story leaves another attentive audience with a new history lesson: “Einstein understood that the golden Nobel medallion is etched with human frailties…and like Einstein, perhaps we should also avoid the temptation of dancing around this modern golden calf.” Hunt says Friedman’s tale gave an oft-overlooked perspective on the way science was practiced and praised in the early 20th century. “The decisions of the Nobel committees are often treated by the press and public as the voice of god,” Hunt says, but Friedman’s research brought to light “how political the deliberations of the Nobel committees sometimes were—and presumably still are.”
12.09.2005
Google Game!
To play this game (which I stole from Ryan James Wilson!), just Google your name with the word "need." Then you'll find out what you've always expected is true: You do need that!
Ginny Needs:
1. a wig
2. three cute cover-ups to keep her warm!
3. some form of defense against her growing attraction to her new DADA teacher
4. the money to get the message out
5. to be pushed into the spotlight
6. a special home or office environment where she does not have access to soft material furniture such as a bed or couch
7. robes and a wand and everything
8. a day in the sun
9. another dimension
and finally….
10. to be an only pet
Ginny Needs:
1. a wig
2. three cute cover-ups to keep her warm!
3. some form of defense against her growing attraction to her new DADA teacher
4. the money to get the message out
5. to be pushed into the spotlight
6. a special home or office environment where she does not have access to soft material furniture such as a bed or couch
7. robes and a wand and everything
8. a day in the sun
9. another dimension
and finally….
10. to be an only pet
11.21.2005
Clip Clip
So I finally got published…..even if there is absolutely no style in the piece. It’s on Science magazine’s online news site. Check it out at:
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/1121/1
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/1121/1
11.18.2005
Finding New Bugs in an Old Broth
Charles Dickens gave it to Tiny Tim; Hippocrates described it as the most widespread disease of his day; paleontologists even found traces of it in 5,000-year-old Egyptian mummies. Tuberculosis is an old disease. And the diagnostic tests for TB, in contrast to the “cutting-edge” progression of most medical technologies, are similarly ancient. The majority of the world’s hospitals use a “sputum smear test” that has remained unchanged since its invention in 1881: your suspect phlegm is placed in a glorified Petri dish of nutrient broth, where the lung-eating bacteria can grow, though very slowly. After many weeks, when they’ve grown into visible clumps, a microscope can identify the killer bug. But to how many will you spread it while waiting for test results?
Tuberculosis diagnosis, “is as old-fashioned as it gets,” says Dr. Richard Chaisson, the founder of the Johns Hopkins Center for Tuberculosis Research. Faster, cheaper and more accurate diagnostic tools are desperately needed, Chaisson says, to curb the growing epidemic of TB—a curable disease that still kills 5,000 people every day. This summer, three biotech companies announced partnerships with FIND, the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, to develop better TB-testing products. But a large-scale study is about to be released suggesting the most effective diagnostic method is not a product at all, or at least not a patentable one. It’s just a new way of looking at an old broth.
The global TB crisis made U.S. headlines on October 17, when pharmaceutical kingfish Bayer announced it will allow one of its best-selling antibiotics to be tested against tuberculosis. Chaisson, who was instrumental in the deal, says the drug will reduce treatment time from six months to four. Still, he has reservations about its effect on the epidemic’s spread through the population. “The individual cure rate is awfully good,” he says, “but the number of cases is still going through the roof.” This is partly because of the increase in HIV infections; those with HIV have compromised immune systems and are thus more vulnerable to TB. But it also stems from the bug’s ability to adapt: strains have evolved that are resistant to every major antibiotic. Because TB is often spread more quickly than it is identified, Chaisson says the answer lies not in faster drugs, but faster diagnostics.
Today’s sputum smear test takes far too long. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where both TB and HIV run rampant, patients can expect to wait 12-16 weeks for test results, according to FIND. And the sputum smear has other problems, too. Making the broth requires electricity—unavailable in most clinics of the third world—for mixing and refrigeration. Moreover, it can’t reliably detect the presence of multi-strain TB.
Since 2003, FIND’s mission has been to tackle these problems. This summer, three international biotech companies announced financial partnerships with FIND to develop new tests that use color-changing strips or simple test-tube reactions to detect proteins that are found in many strains of TB, getting results in hours or even minutes. One promising product is called “TK medium.” When the medium, a red substance, is mixed in a test tube with active TB bacteria, the color turns green. “Nobody knows yet why it works,” Chaisson says. “They’re about a buck each, and you could sell tens of millions of them a year.”
But no fancy new products are needed for what seems to be the best test of all. In the early 1990s, a lab tech in Peru noticed that TB bugs can be detected—using a common broth medium and a regular light microscope—weeks before the bugs grow into visible clumps. Chaisson finds it remarkable that no one had thought of the method—now called MODS—before. “The only drawback,” he says, “is that it’s not patentable.” So for now, FIND won’t fund MODS.
Compared to most bacteria, the growth of TB bugs is interminably slow. And according to Chaisson, slow too is the technological progression of its treatment and diagnosis. He describes, with obvious disdain, the conventional wisdom of most TB doctors: “My god, if it was good enough for my grandfather, then it’s good enough for me.” So perhaps MODS—using old tools and an old broth—is exactly what’s needed to unite the old and new medical philosophies, to keep the bug from staining future pages of human history.
Tuberculosis diagnosis, “is as old-fashioned as it gets,” says Dr. Richard Chaisson, the founder of the Johns Hopkins Center for Tuberculosis Research. Faster, cheaper and more accurate diagnostic tools are desperately needed, Chaisson says, to curb the growing epidemic of TB—a curable disease that still kills 5,000 people every day. This summer, three biotech companies announced partnerships with FIND, the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, to develop better TB-testing products. But a large-scale study is about to be released suggesting the most effective diagnostic method is not a product at all, or at least not a patentable one. It’s just a new way of looking at an old broth.
The global TB crisis made U.S. headlines on October 17, when pharmaceutical kingfish Bayer announced it will allow one of its best-selling antibiotics to be tested against tuberculosis. Chaisson, who was instrumental in the deal, says the drug will reduce treatment time from six months to four. Still, he has reservations about its effect on the epidemic’s spread through the population. “The individual cure rate is awfully good,” he says, “but the number of cases is still going through the roof.” This is partly because of the increase in HIV infections; those with HIV have compromised immune systems and are thus more vulnerable to TB. But it also stems from the bug’s ability to adapt: strains have evolved that are resistant to every major antibiotic. Because TB is often spread more quickly than it is identified, Chaisson says the answer lies not in faster drugs, but faster diagnostics.
Today’s sputum smear test takes far too long. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where both TB and HIV run rampant, patients can expect to wait 12-16 weeks for test results, according to FIND. And the sputum smear has other problems, too. Making the broth requires electricity—unavailable in most clinics of the third world—for mixing and refrigeration. Moreover, it can’t reliably detect the presence of multi-strain TB.
Since 2003, FIND’s mission has been to tackle these problems. This summer, three international biotech companies announced financial partnerships with FIND to develop new tests that use color-changing strips or simple test-tube reactions to detect proteins that are found in many strains of TB, getting results in hours or even minutes. One promising product is called “TK medium.” When the medium, a red substance, is mixed in a test tube with active TB bacteria, the color turns green. “Nobody knows yet why it works,” Chaisson says. “They’re about a buck each, and you could sell tens of millions of them a year.”
But no fancy new products are needed for what seems to be the best test of all. In the early 1990s, a lab tech in Peru noticed that TB bugs can be detected—using a common broth medium and a regular light microscope—weeks before the bugs grow into visible clumps. Chaisson finds it remarkable that no one had thought of the method—now called MODS—before. “The only drawback,” he says, “is that it’s not patentable.” So for now, FIND won’t fund MODS.
Compared to most bacteria, the growth of TB bugs is interminably slow. And according to Chaisson, slow too is the technological progression of its treatment and diagnosis. He describes, with obvious disdain, the conventional wisdom of most TB doctors: “My god, if it was good enough for my grandfather, then it’s good enough for me.” So perhaps MODS—using old tools and an old broth—is exactly what’s needed to unite the old and new medical philosophies, to keep the bug from staining future pages of human history.
11.12.2005
Can Science Save The Holy Wisdom? (And Does It Need Saving?)
So why has it been ages since Ginny has updated her blog? Well, a certain feature story (and its associated interviews and background research) about earthquakes, architecture, and the Byzantine Empire has taken most of my writing energies. Here’s the first paragraph…..perhaps more of the 4,000-word treatise will come later. Lots of love to all my bloggers! Mwa
Every year, thousands flock to Istanbul to see the church that scholars through the ages have called the most magnificent structure on earth: the Hagia Sophia. Greek for “Church of the Holy Wisdom,” in 537 AD the 180-feet-tall domed basilica became the most visible symbol of Justinian’s new Byzantine Empire. For 1,500 years, in a land notorious for political instability, the Hagia Sophia has stood tall and resilient, transforming even, when the Muslim Ottomans invaded in 1299, from a basilica to a mosque. And sitting on top of a major fault line—one that has caused no fewer than three dozen major earthquakes to shake Sophia—the monument has also survived serious geophysical instability. International teams of civil engineers and earthquake scientists are using computer models of today’s church to figure out how it has already withstood such seismic stress. But after the most recent devastating quake in 1999, head researcher Ahmet Çakmak told the New York Times: "The fault that runs closer to Istanbul is still very dangerous…The newspapers are saying we survived the big earthquake, but that's silly. It's a big mistake. What we should do is learn from this one, expect a bigger one and be prepared." If Istanbul is to be hit with a quake of unprecedented size, the big question is whether the Holy Wisdom needs some 21st century technology to—literally—back it up.
Every year, thousands flock to Istanbul to see the church that scholars through the ages have called the most magnificent structure on earth: the Hagia Sophia. Greek for “Church of the Holy Wisdom,” in 537 AD the 180-feet-tall domed basilica became the most visible symbol of Justinian’s new Byzantine Empire. For 1,500 years, in a land notorious for political instability, the Hagia Sophia has stood tall and resilient, transforming even, when the Muslim Ottomans invaded in 1299, from a basilica to a mosque. And sitting on top of a major fault line—one that has caused no fewer than three dozen major earthquakes to shake Sophia—the monument has also survived serious geophysical instability. International teams of civil engineers and earthquake scientists are using computer models of today’s church to figure out how it has already withstood such seismic stress. But after the most recent devastating quake in 1999, head researcher Ahmet Çakmak told the New York Times: "The fault that runs closer to Istanbul is still very dangerous…The newspapers are saying we survived the big earthquake, but that's silly. It's a big mistake. What we should do is learn from this one, expect a bigger one and be prepared." If Istanbul is to be hit with a quake of unprecedented size, the big question is whether the Holy Wisdom needs some 21st century technology to—literally—back it up.
11.09.2005
Hitting the "Maleness" JAKpot
We all learned it in grade school: Boys have a Y chromosome, and girls don’t. A genetic switch turns on maleness or femaleness. But actually, it’s not so simple. A developing embryo’s search for its sexual destiny follows a long and windy road. “I don’t like the term sex determination,” said Mark Van Doren, an Assistant Biology Professor at Johns Hopkins University, because “it implies one moment. But it’s actually a very long process.”
The process starts with the germ cells that have the unique ability to create a new organism; male germ cells go on to produce sperm, while female germ cells produce eggs. But how is the sex of the germ cell determined? In Drosophila fruit fly experiments published in the July 28 issue of Nature, Van Doren and his colleagues found that when activated by neighboring tissue, a certain chemical pathway—JAK/STAT—develops male, but not female, germ cells.
By the time a young germ cell starts down the road to sexual identity, its gonad neighbors—called somatic cells—are already different in males and females (male somatic cells express a specific gene called doublesex). And previous studies had shown that these differentiated neighbors somehow influence the germ cell’s sexual destination. As Van Doren explained, “Germ cells can’t do it on their own...they need a specialized soma” to tell them how to develop.
To find out how exactly the germ cells are influenced by their somatic neighbors, Van Doren’s team first looked at fruit fly gonads with a male germ cell surrounded by male somatic cells. In these situations, the JAK/STAT chemical pathway was always activated—that is, a specific molecule set off a chain of reactions that ended in the expression of a protein called “STAT” in the germ cell. They knew STAT was expressed because they had added molecules with fluorescent tags to find and bind to STAT proteins, in effect “lighting them up” for anybody peeking through the microscope. For the next set of experiments, this fluorescent presence would indicate germ cell maleness.
Their next step was to see what would happen to the sex of the germ cell if they broke one of the links on the reaction chain. When they inhibited JAK/STAT in gonads with male germ cells surrounded by male somatic cells, the germ cells no longer expressed the STAT protein and thus, as Van Doren said, “Male germ cell identity was lost.”
Their most remarkable experimental manipulations, however, observed the function of JAK/STAT in female germ cells. They placed female germ cells in surrounding tissue that expressed the doublesex gene (and was therefore male). These male somatic neighbors triggered the JAK/STAT pathway, telling the female germ cells to express the STAT protein. “We took a female and made it look male,” Van Doren said, “And that’s really the wow factor.”
Van Doren and his team have now shown that activation of JAK/STAT leads to the development male germ cells and thus, a walk down the road to Spermville. But, he stressed, this doesn’t mean females take the path of least resistance. Soon the biologists will look for somatic signals that point to Eggdom instead. Whether flies or humans, though, these signals are just early signposts along the long and torturous road to true sexual identity.
The process starts with the germ cells that have the unique ability to create a new organism; male germ cells go on to produce sperm, while female germ cells produce eggs. But how is the sex of the germ cell determined? In Drosophila fruit fly experiments published in the July 28 issue of Nature, Van Doren and his colleagues found that when activated by neighboring tissue, a certain chemical pathway—JAK/STAT—develops male, but not female, germ cells.
By the time a young germ cell starts down the road to sexual identity, its gonad neighbors—called somatic cells—are already different in males and females (male somatic cells express a specific gene called doublesex). And previous studies had shown that these differentiated neighbors somehow influence the germ cell’s sexual destination. As Van Doren explained, “Germ cells can’t do it on their own...they need a specialized soma” to tell them how to develop.
To find out how exactly the germ cells are influenced by their somatic neighbors, Van Doren’s team first looked at fruit fly gonads with a male germ cell surrounded by male somatic cells. In these situations, the JAK/STAT chemical pathway was always activated—that is, a specific molecule set off a chain of reactions that ended in the expression of a protein called “STAT” in the germ cell. They knew STAT was expressed because they had added molecules with fluorescent tags to find and bind to STAT proteins, in effect “lighting them up” for anybody peeking through the microscope. For the next set of experiments, this fluorescent presence would indicate germ cell maleness.
Their next step was to see what would happen to the sex of the germ cell if they broke one of the links on the reaction chain. When they inhibited JAK/STAT in gonads with male germ cells surrounded by male somatic cells, the germ cells no longer expressed the STAT protein and thus, as Van Doren said, “Male germ cell identity was lost.”
Their most remarkable experimental manipulations, however, observed the function of JAK/STAT in female germ cells. They placed female germ cells in surrounding tissue that expressed the doublesex gene (and was therefore male). These male somatic neighbors triggered the JAK/STAT pathway, telling the female germ cells to express the STAT protein. “We took a female and made it look male,” Van Doren said, “And that’s really the wow factor.”
Van Doren and his team have now shown that activation of JAK/STAT leads to the development male germ cells and thus, a walk down the road to Spermville. But, he stressed, this doesn’t mean females take the path of least resistance. Soon the biologists will look for somatic signals that point to Eggdom instead. Whether flies or humans, though, these signals are just early signposts along the long and torturous road to true sexual identity.
11.04.2005
10.14.2005
Dead Stars Captured by a Dying Hubble
On some nights, Astronomer Andrew Fruchter is jolted from sleep by a Prokofiev theme blaring from his cell phone. The urgent message: a massive star died at the edge of the universe—several billion years ago. Unable to fight the force of gravity, the star collapsed into a black hole, setting off a huge supernova explosion, and releasing a jet of high-energy light. And now, after traveling billions of light-years, the jet’s extraordinary blaze has been spotted by satellite telescopes. The star’s collapse was long over, but the astronomer’s work had just begun.
For four years, Fruchter and his colleagues at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD, have worked to pinpoint the source of these stellar explosions, called long gamma ray bursts, or LGRBs. Packing enough energy to supply the world’s electric needs for a billion billion billion years, a LGRB in our galaxy could obliterate the planet. But Fruchter’s most recent research, soon to be published in Nature, radiates good news: LGRBs don’t occur in our kind of galaxy. Based on photographs taken by the aging Hubble telescope, his work might also give reason for its contested, expensive repair.
With photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between February 1997 and October 2004, Fruchter compared the luminescence of galaxies containing LGRBs to those with core collapse supernovae, the celestial phenomena that spawn LGRBs. Core collapse supernovae are gigantic explosions that occur throughout the universe when a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel. But Fruchter’s photos indicate that the select few supernovae that produce LGRBs go off in specific types of galaxies—those that are small, non-spiral, and have clumps of very bright stars rather than an even distribution. They’re “scruffy little things,” Fruchter says, “not your normal, pretty galaxies.” In other words, they’re not like ours.
But why do LGRBs occur in these particular galaxies? Fruchter says LGRB galaxies are not very chemically evolved. That is, they’re made up of mostly hydrogen gas, while other galaxies—like ours—contain life-giving elements like carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Fruchter speculates that in evolved galaxies, these ions interact with the stream of protons and electrons that normally encircle a star, causing the star to lose a lot of mass. What’s more, he thinks the ions create a magnetic field that keeps the star from spinning as fast as it would in a galaxy made of only hydrogen. With less mass and slower spins, this means the stars in our galaxy are less likely to form the black holes that lead to LGRBs.
Astronomers detect a LGRB using the three telescopes of the “SWIFT” deep-space satellite. First, one of the telescopes detects the gamma rays of the LGRB. Within seconds, the other two “swiftly” look for the x-rays and visible light rays of the afterglow, to determine the LGRB’s exact position. The data relays to ground computers, which then pass it on to Fruchter’s cell phone. Prokofiev blares, and as Fruchter explains, “then I have to get ground-based telescopes to go follow these things.” And finally, the Hubble can take a picture. In recent months, NASA has been debating whether to give the 15-year-old telescope and its aging parts a $700 million tune-up. Fruchter is optimistic, speculating, “If they can get the shuttle working again, I think they’ll service Hubble.” If the Hubble is put to bed, Fruchter’s research will be too. But at least he’d get a good night’s sleep.
10.09.2005
Adderall Abuse on College Campuses
Gavin balances the metal tray on his lap, completely focused at the task at hand. He grinds the three orange pills to powder—slowly, steadily—with the bottom of a heavy cocktail glass, while eight sets of eyes watch in eager anticipation. Sitting in the middle of the room, he is quite literally the center of attention—and loves it. He babbles excitedly without purpose or pause.
“Did you see that guy downstairs?”
“When are we leaving—wait, wait, where are you going?”
“Who sings this song?”
Someone tells a joke. Gavin giggles.
After about ten minutes of compulsive mincing, he uses the edge of a dollar bill to form thin, uniform lines of the white powder.
He says jokingly, “look, I’m using dirty money like a cokehead.”
But it’s not cocaine that Gavin and the eight other Brown seniors are about to snort for a late-night energy rush. It’s what many doctors refer to as “kiddy coke,” and it is sweeping the dormitories and libraries of colleges throughout the nation.
It’s called Adderall, and can be bought for as little as $3 a pill. But Gavin gets his supply for free, from his best friend Ben.
Adderall is an amphetamine, a fast-acting stimulant in the same chemical family as cocaine and the infamous crystal meth. But unlike those narcotics, Adderall’s legal.
A tablet prescription, it effectively curbs the restless tendencies of many hyperactive children. It makes it easier to function in social and educational situations, which is especially beneficial to kids who have trouble paying attention at school.
Before he started Adderall, no one ever told Ben he had a learning disorder.
“I was always a very good student, you know, always got my stuff done,” he said. “But, after I started taking the pill, I was smarter. I could read for a long time, and got really interested in what I read.”
Since the early 1960s, close to 200 studies involving more than 6,000 children have investigated the efficacy of stimulants like Adderall for the treatment of inattentive kids. And according to a 1998 review article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the meds work: stimulants significantly reduced hyperactivity and increased focus in more than 70 percent of the children tested.
But why use a stimulant to decrease hyperactivity?
Dr. Ronald Cohen, a clinical neuroscientist who specializes in attention at Miriam hospital, said it’s because of the precise workings of the brain’s frontal lobe, the seat of our attentional processes.
“It may seem paradoxical,” he said. “But really, there’s an inhibitory system in the frontal lobes that tells you: stop, look listen. So the stimulant better activates this system, making kids less hyperactive.”
Today, Adderall is America’s most widely prescribed drug for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (surpassing the better-known Ritalin in 2000).
ADHD is the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorder of childhood, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The neurologically-based disability affects between three and five percent of school-age children—that’s three million kids nationwide—and it occurs three times more often in boys than in girls.
No one knows exactly what causes ADHD, but twin and cross-generational studies have shown that it does have a genetic component. In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association set specific criteria for the accurate diagnosis of ADHD, which include the persistent symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.
The diagnosis of the disability has been a controversial topic in the U.S. in the past few decades, mostly because there’s no blood chemical, no brain protein, no physical blemish of any kind that definitively marks an ADHD kid from any other squirmy elementary schooler.
Ben now believes that he was originally misdiagnosed with ADHD by a psychiatrist he saw for depression and anti-anxiety problems.
“He started asking me questions, like, ‘when you’re reading a long and boring book for school, do you put it down in the middle?’ and I’d say, ‘yeah, sometimes.’ And then suddenly I had Attention Deficit Disorder,” Ben recalled.
So Ben started taking Adderall. He now takes two orange pills, 20 mg each, as soon as he gets up in the morning. Because the drug is time-released, his body absorbs it slowly all day long. He usually feels it start to wear off by nightfall.
Since the early nineties, American doctors have diagnosed more and more cases of ADHD. According to a 2000 study from the Journal of the American Medical Association, the use of stimulants by 2- to 4-year-olds increased three-fold from 1991 to 1995.
Cohen partly attributes the increase on the pressures of modern society, where so much emphasis is placed on academic achievement.
“Parents are looking for reasons why their kid isn’t doing as well as the next-door neighbor’s kid,” he said. “There are many kids with mild attention problems, who are singled out because they are only getting B’s in school but may have the IQ potential to get A’s. So do you call it ADD?”
And because children diagnosed as toddlers often take the stimulants well into adolescence and adulthood, the number of college students who pick it up weekly at the local pharmacy is also on the rise, making the drug readily available on any college campus.
Attesting to this, the scientific journal Addiction published a study earlier this year that surveyed over 10,000 randomly-selected college students across the nation. The reports were telling: 6.9 percent of respondents admitted to non-medical use of prescription stimulants like Adderall, and at some colleges this number reached as high as 25 percent.
Why do so many college students seek out Adderall?
“They call it the ‘academic steroid,’ you know,” Ben explained. “I don’t think it’s usually recreational. It’s just a shortcut, a way for them to get by without working as hard.”
The survey also found that non-medical use was higher among males, whites, fraternity and sorority members, and students who earned the lowest grade point averages. Students abused the drug most at colleges with competitive admissions standards in the northeast.
At Brown, especially in this season of lengthy term papers and tough exams, it’s Adderall’s ability to increase focus and motivation that appeals to students under a lot of academic pressure.
Gavin, a senior English major, has used Adderall dozens of times at Brown to write long academic papers.
“You take it and half an hour later, all you want to do is write,” Gavin said. “You pretty much finish the task in front of you. It lasts for like 12 hours, so you get done whatever you need to get done.”
Because it’s a prescription given to children, many college students perceive it as harmless. But this is far from accurate. For those with ADHD, the drug’s side effects may include decreased appetite, insomnia, increased anxiety, and irritability.
“I don’t eat when I’m on Adderall,” Ben said. I can’t—it’s gross to see food, especially four or five hours into it. But then I get really hungry at night when it starts to wear off.”
And for those without ADHD, the drug can take an even harder toll. Dehydration, hot flashes, stomach pains, marked aggression and even personality changes are possible side effects, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
What’s more, Cohen warned that users without prescriptions may have unknown pre-existing conditions that would make consuming the drug especially harmful.
Without taking a full medical history, he said, taking Adderall is like “playing Russian Roulette.”
“If someone is relatively stable they might not have a reaction to it,” he explained. “But if you give it to someone who has a predisposition toward schizophrenia or manic episodes, there’s a big risk of going over the edge.”
With the recent increased rates in U.S. Adderall prescriptions, many experts worry about the potential for abuse due to increased availability.
And worry they should. The Addiction survey of 10,000 students stated that 54 percent of undergraduates who were legally prescribed stimulants for the treatment of their ADHD had been approached to sell, trade, or give away their meds within the past year.
The same survey showed—unsurprisingly—that non-medical use of stimulants correlated highly with the use of other illegal drugs. Of those who admitted to non-medical use of stimulants, 84.6 percent also used marijuana, 51.7 percent used ecstasy, and 34.6 percent used cocaine in the past year.
The potency and dangers of Adderall’s non-medical use exponentially increase when it is snorted or injected because it enters the bloodstream directly. Snorting Adderall, like any stimulant, may cause damage to the nasal and sinus cavities, respiratory problems, irregular heartbeat, psychotic episodes, and even death by toxic shock.
Cohen explained, “Even though you’re taking the same amount of drug, more of it is getting into the blood, and quickly, so its as if you were taking a much higher dose.”
The term “kiddy coke” is an appropriate one, then, for Adderall is chemically very similar to cocaine. Both drugs block the brain’s natural dopamine receptors, elevating mood and alertness using the same mechanism as anti-depressants.
Gavin snorts it when he’s feeling sluggish before a long night of partying.
“When I snort it, he said, “it has more of an energy effect. You’re just wired and you want to talk and have a good time.”
Also like cocaine, the Adderall crash can be quite extreme.
“Coming down is the worst,” said Gavin. “You definitely can’t eat, can’t go to bed...I have to drink or smoke [pot] if I want any chance of sleeping. So you’ve got to make sure to do it only when you don’t have anything important the next day.”
With the large rise in Adderall use—both medically and recreationally—there is a growing fear of a new generation growing up addicted to these “study drugs.”
Though he takes Adderall exactly as his doctor recommends, Ben still worries about what the drug does to him.
“It’s a drug I’m addicted to now, not just something that I’m being prescribed. They tell you you’re not changing yourself, that it makes you more like your normal self, but I’m not the same person I was.”
Gavin, too, recognizes the dangers of Adderall addiction.
“There is that risk, yeah. I mean, 20 mg every three weeks is very different than Ben’s 40 [mg] a day. But I realized that in the real world I won’t able to just take an Adderall to get my work done. It won’t be as easy to get.”
Ben hopes for a time in the future when he will no longer feel Adderall dependency.
“This summer I want to switch to a new drug—Strattera—it’s not a stimulant,” Ben said. “I figure it’s a good time to get off now that I’m done with school, and yeah, I wonder what it’ll be like to get off of it. But I think it’s the right thing to do.”
If caught with non-prescribed Adderall at Brown, the administration would generally follow state mandates as if it was cocaine or marijuana.
But Brown policies on use and distribution would depend on individual situations, said Associate Dean of Campus Life Terry Addison.
“It is an illegal drug. The student would have a judicial involvement, an internal investigation,” he explained.
Addison also said that distribution of the drug is more egregious than mere consumption, and that the amount exchanged would be a factor.
“We would ask if it was it just a couple of pills or a hundred,” he said. “Were they giving it to their whole floor or just one or two of their friends?”
The punishment would be still more severe, he said, if the student was uncooperative or combative when apprehended.
Regardless of how effective or fun the prescription drug may be, students should realize that when used without a prescription, Adderall is ultimately an illicit drug like any other.
Beyond the risk of disciplinary action, there are serious and long-term physical dangers that far outweigh any short-term academic advantage or single night of energy.
So this exam season, think of your health and try a Red Bull instead.
“Did you see that guy downstairs?”
“When are we leaving—wait, wait, where are you going?”
“Who sings this song?”
Someone tells a joke. Gavin giggles.
After about ten minutes of compulsive mincing, he uses the edge of a dollar bill to form thin, uniform lines of the white powder.
He says jokingly, “look, I’m using dirty money like a cokehead.”
But it’s not cocaine that Gavin and the eight other Brown seniors are about to snort for a late-night energy rush. It’s what many doctors refer to as “kiddy coke,” and it is sweeping the dormitories and libraries of colleges throughout the nation.
It’s called Adderall, and can be bought for as little as $3 a pill. But Gavin gets his supply for free, from his best friend Ben.
Adderall is an amphetamine, a fast-acting stimulant in the same chemical family as cocaine and the infamous crystal meth. But unlike those narcotics, Adderall’s legal.
A tablet prescription, it effectively curbs the restless tendencies of many hyperactive children. It makes it easier to function in social and educational situations, which is especially beneficial to kids who have trouble paying attention at school.
Before he started Adderall, no one ever told Ben he had a learning disorder.
“I was always a very good student, you know, always got my stuff done,” he said. “But, after I started taking the pill, I was smarter. I could read for a long time, and got really interested in what I read.”
Since the early 1960s, close to 200 studies involving more than 6,000 children have investigated the efficacy of stimulants like Adderall for the treatment of inattentive kids. And according to a 1998 review article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the meds work: stimulants significantly reduced hyperactivity and increased focus in more than 70 percent of the children tested.
But why use a stimulant to decrease hyperactivity?
Dr. Ronald Cohen, a clinical neuroscientist who specializes in attention at Miriam hospital, said it’s because of the precise workings of the brain’s frontal lobe, the seat of our attentional processes.
“It may seem paradoxical,” he said. “But really, there’s an inhibitory system in the frontal lobes that tells you: stop, look listen. So the stimulant better activates this system, making kids less hyperactive.”
Today, Adderall is America’s most widely prescribed drug for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (surpassing the better-known Ritalin in 2000).
ADHD is the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorder of childhood, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The neurologically-based disability affects between three and five percent of school-age children—that’s three million kids nationwide—and it occurs three times more often in boys than in girls.
No one knows exactly what causes ADHD, but twin and cross-generational studies have shown that it does have a genetic component. In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association set specific criteria for the accurate diagnosis of ADHD, which include the persistent symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.
The diagnosis of the disability has been a controversial topic in the U.S. in the past few decades, mostly because there’s no blood chemical, no brain protein, no physical blemish of any kind that definitively marks an ADHD kid from any other squirmy elementary schooler.
Ben now believes that he was originally misdiagnosed with ADHD by a psychiatrist he saw for depression and anti-anxiety problems.
“He started asking me questions, like, ‘when you’re reading a long and boring book for school, do you put it down in the middle?’ and I’d say, ‘yeah, sometimes.’ And then suddenly I had Attention Deficit Disorder,” Ben recalled.
So Ben started taking Adderall. He now takes two orange pills, 20 mg each, as soon as he gets up in the morning. Because the drug is time-released, his body absorbs it slowly all day long. He usually feels it start to wear off by nightfall.
Since the early nineties, American doctors have diagnosed more and more cases of ADHD. According to a 2000 study from the Journal of the American Medical Association, the use of stimulants by 2- to 4-year-olds increased three-fold from 1991 to 1995.
Cohen partly attributes the increase on the pressures of modern society, where so much emphasis is placed on academic achievement.
“Parents are looking for reasons why their kid isn’t doing as well as the next-door neighbor’s kid,” he said. “There are many kids with mild attention problems, who are singled out because they are only getting B’s in school but may have the IQ potential to get A’s. So do you call it ADD?”
And because children diagnosed as toddlers often take the stimulants well into adolescence and adulthood, the number of college students who pick it up weekly at the local pharmacy is also on the rise, making the drug readily available on any college campus.
Attesting to this, the scientific journal Addiction published a study earlier this year that surveyed over 10,000 randomly-selected college students across the nation. The reports were telling: 6.9 percent of respondents admitted to non-medical use of prescription stimulants like Adderall, and at some colleges this number reached as high as 25 percent.
Why do so many college students seek out Adderall?
“They call it the ‘academic steroid,’ you know,” Ben explained. “I don’t think it’s usually recreational. It’s just a shortcut, a way for them to get by without working as hard.”
The survey also found that non-medical use was higher among males, whites, fraternity and sorority members, and students who earned the lowest grade point averages. Students abused the drug most at colleges with competitive admissions standards in the northeast.
At Brown, especially in this season of lengthy term papers and tough exams, it’s Adderall’s ability to increase focus and motivation that appeals to students under a lot of academic pressure.
Gavin, a senior English major, has used Adderall dozens of times at Brown to write long academic papers.
“You take it and half an hour later, all you want to do is write,” Gavin said. “You pretty much finish the task in front of you. It lasts for like 12 hours, so you get done whatever you need to get done.”
Because it’s a prescription given to children, many college students perceive it as harmless. But this is far from accurate. For those with ADHD, the drug’s side effects may include decreased appetite, insomnia, increased anxiety, and irritability.
“I don’t eat when I’m on Adderall,” Ben said. I can’t—it’s gross to see food, especially four or five hours into it. But then I get really hungry at night when it starts to wear off.”
And for those without ADHD, the drug can take an even harder toll. Dehydration, hot flashes, stomach pains, marked aggression and even personality changes are possible side effects, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
What’s more, Cohen warned that users without prescriptions may have unknown pre-existing conditions that would make consuming the drug especially harmful.
Without taking a full medical history, he said, taking Adderall is like “playing Russian Roulette.”
“If someone is relatively stable they might not have a reaction to it,” he explained. “But if you give it to someone who has a predisposition toward schizophrenia or manic episodes, there’s a big risk of going over the edge.”
With the recent increased rates in U.S. Adderall prescriptions, many experts worry about the potential for abuse due to increased availability.
And worry they should. The Addiction survey of 10,000 students stated that 54 percent of undergraduates who were legally prescribed stimulants for the treatment of their ADHD had been approached to sell, trade, or give away their meds within the past year.
The same survey showed—unsurprisingly—that non-medical use of stimulants correlated highly with the use of other illegal drugs. Of those who admitted to non-medical use of stimulants, 84.6 percent also used marijuana, 51.7 percent used ecstasy, and 34.6 percent used cocaine in the past year.
The potency and dangers of Adderall’s non-medical use exponentially increase when it is snorted or injected because it enters the bloodstream directly. Snorting Adderall, like any stimulant, may cause damage to the nasal and sinus cavities, respiratory problems, irregular heartbeat, psychotic episodes, and even death by toxic shock.
Cohen explained, “Even though you’re taking the same amount of drug, more of it is getting into the blood, and quickly, so its as if you were taking a much higher dose.”
The term “kiddy coke” is an appropriate one, then, for Adderall is chemically very similar to cocaine. Both drugs block the brain’s natural dopamine receptors, elevating mood and alertness using the same mechanism as anti-depressants.
Gavin snorts it when he’s feeling sluggish before a long night of partying.
“When I snort it, he said, “it has more of an energy effect. You’re just wired and you want to talk and have a good time.”
Also like cocaine, the Adderall crash can be quite extreme.
“Coming down is the worst,” said Gavin. “You definitely can’t eat, can’t go to bed...I have to drink or smoke [pot] if I want any chance of sleeping. So you’ve got to make sure to do it only when you don’t have anything important the next day.”
With the large rise in Adderall use—both medically and recreationally—there is a growing fear of a new generation growing up addicted to these “study drugs.”
Though he takes Adderall exactly as his doctor recommends, Ben still worries about what the drug does to him.
“It’s a drug I’m addicted to now, not just something that I’m being prescribed. They tell you you’re not changing yourself, that it makes you more like your normal self, but I’m not the same person I was.”
Gavin, too, recognizes the dangers of Adderall addiction.
“There is that risk, yeah. I mean, 20 mg every three weeks is very different than Ben’s 40 [mg] a day. But I realized that in the real world I won’t able to just take an Adderall to get my work done. It won’t be as easy to get.”
Ben hopes for a time in the future when he will no longer feel Adderall dependency.
“This summer I want to switch to a new drug—Strattera—it’s not a stimulant,” Ben said. “I figure it’s a good time to get off now that I’m done with school, and yeah, I wonder what it’ll be like to get off of it. But I think it’s the right thing to do.”
If caught with non-prescribed Adderall at Brown, the administration would generally follow state mandates as if it was cocaine or marijuana.
But Brown policies on use and distribution would depend on individual situations, said Associate Dean of Campus Life Terry Addison.
“It is an illegal drug. The student would have a judicial involvement, an internal investigation,” he explained.
Addison also said that distribution of the drug is more egregious than mere consumption, and that the amount exchanged would be a factor.
“We would ask if it was it just a couple of pills or a hundred,” he said. “Were they giving it to their whole floor or just one or two of their friends?”
The punishment would be still more severe, he said, if the student was uncooperative or combative when apprehended.
Regardless of how effective or fun the prescription drug may be, students should realize that when used without a prescription, Adderall is ultimately an illicit drug like any other.
Beyond the risk of disciplinary action, there are serious and long-term physical dangers that far outweigh any short-term academic advantage or single night of energy.
So this exam season, think of your health and try a Red Bull instead.
10.02.2005
Risky Business
Imagine a woman with little financial savvy, who after saving some cash is looking for a good investment. For a safe bet with small payoffs, she could buy government bonds. But if she’s willing to lose it all for a chance at fortune, she could instead buy shares of a volatile stock. Either way, her brain must somehow evaluate her economic circumstances and take action. As Daniel Bernoulli, the Dutch physicist and mathematician who is perhaps best known for his principles of fluid dynamics, explained in a 1738 paper on economic theory: “…there is no doubt that a gain of one thousand ducats is more significant to a pauper than to a rich man, though both gain the same amount.” The woman’s choice might depend upon her job security, for instance, or the number of children she has to support, or even the number of years she has left to enjoy those potential earnings. New research in monkey brains is coming closer to decoding the brain signals that ultimately drive such decisions. In a study published in this month’s Nature Neuroscience, researchers at Duke University found patterns of neural signaling that reliably indicate the riskiness of a choice. Their findings may lead to mathematical models of human risk behaviors and a better understanding of why we sometimes make irrational and even harmful decisions.
How do researchers watch and manipulate monkey decisions? Most begin by teaching them to play a simple game on a computer screen, called a visual gambling task. Two circles appear on the screen, and the monkeys are trained to pick one of by looking directly at it. Eye tracking sensors attached to their heads tell the researchers which circle they have chosen and connect to a feeding tube that instantly pays them a fruit juice reward. Old studies have focused on the objective factors that influence their decision, like the size of the reward, because they’re much easier to measure than subjective factors like how thirsty the monkey is or how much it enjoys the thrill of taking a risk. In 2003, for instance, neuroscientist Allison N. McCoy found that when given the choice between a circle that gave a small juice reward and another that gave a large reward, monkey brain responses were stronger when they chose larger rewards. These results are perhaps not so surprising—a $20 million jackpot is, after all, more exciting than a $20 scratch card.
But little had been done on the more difficult testing of subjective factors–until now. In the new Duke study, McCoy collaborated with Michael L. Platt to tackle the question of what choice would be made if they kept constant the objective value of the reward—i.e. the amount of juice the monkey would get after many trials—but varied the riskiness of its choice. By looking at one of the circles, the “certain target,” the monkey would always get a fixed amount of fruit juice. By looking at the other “risky target,” though, it had a 50:50 chance of getting a shot of juice that was either smaller or larger than the certain target. In other words, to look at the risky target was to take a gamble.
And McCoy and Platt were able to systematically change the size of the gamble. Say the certain target paid out a 50-ml reward and--because it’s certain-- this was paid every single time the monkey looked at it. But the risky target, remember, didn’t always give the same reward. On”high-risk” trials, a monkey choosing the risky target got either a 75-ml reward or a 25-ml reward. In contrast, in “low-risk” trials, looking at the risky target reaped either a 45-ml or a 55-ml dose. In all cases, the average pay-off over many trials was the same—using these hypothetical numbers, 50-ml. So you wouldn’t expect the monkeys to prefer one option over another. But here’s the kicker: McCoy and Platt’s monkeys overwhelmingly chose the risky target. What’s more, they chose it more often on the high-risk trials.
In the next part of the study, the neuroscientists looked for patterns of neuron firing that correlated with these preferences. They inserted an electrode—a tiny needle that records the number of electrical signals produced by a single neuron-- in a long and narrow brain region spanning the top of the skull to the top of the ear, called the posterior cingulate cortex. This area was chosen for recordings because it was known from previous studies that its cells were highly responsive during the activities—seeing shapes on a screen, moving the eyes quickly, receiving a reward—involved in the visual gambling task. McCoy and Platt recorded the electrical patterns generated while the monkeys performed the visual gambling game. Not only were the neuronal firings higher when the monkeys took risks, but they also fired in a predictable code: as risk was systematically increased, so too was the firing frequency. In short, they were exquisitely sensitive to risk.
These primate results could be easily translated into human terms: monkeys prefer risk, therefore humans prefer risk. But human behavior is complex, and the temptation to assume that these findings will lead to the ability to predict human behaviors should be squelched. As Daeyeol Lee put it in a Nature commentary, “an individual might insure a car used to drive to the casino.” Moreover, even given identical circumstances, every brain has a slightly different inclination toward risk; not every casino patron becomes a pathological gambler, and not every teenager who picks up a cigarette goes on to smoke a pack a day. Like most of today’s neurological research, these results are remarkable mostly because they expose systematic and surprising patterns at a microscopic level; though the authors did hint their study may have some human application “as an important model for probing the neural processes that underlie pathological risk taking in individuals with addictions to drugs, sex, food or gambling.” As for the woman looking to invest—nothing ventured, nothing gained?
How do researchers watch and manipulate monkey decisions? Most begin by teaching them to play a simple game on a computer screen, called a visual gambling task. Two circles appear on the screen, and the monkeys are trained to pick one of by looking directly at it. Eye tracking sensors attached to their heads tell the researchers which circle they have chosen and connect to a feeding tube that instantly pays them a fruit juice reward. Old studies have focused on the objective factors that influence their decision, like the size of the reward, because they’re much easier to measure than subjective factors like how thirsty the monkey is or how much it enjoys the thrill of taking a risk. In 2003, for instance, neuroscientist Allison N. McCoy found that when given the choice between a circle that gave a small juice reward and another that gave a large reward, monkey brain responses were stronger when they chose larger rewards. These results are perhaps not so surprising—a $20 million jackpot is, after all, more exciting than a $20 scratch card.
But little had been done on the more difficult testing of subjective factors–until now. In the new Duke study, McCoy collaborated with Michael L. Platt to tackle the question of what choice would be made if they kept constant the objective value of the reward—i.e. the amount of juice the monkey would get after many trials—but varied the riskiness of its choice. By looking at one of the circles, the “certain target,” the monkey would always get a fixed amount of fruit juice. By looking at the other “risky target,” though, it had a 50:50 chance of getting a shot of juice that was either smaller or larger than the certain target. In other words, to look at the risky target was to take a gamble.
And McCoy and Platt were able to systematically change the size of the gamble. Say the certain target paid out a 50-ml reward and--because it’s certain-- this was paid every single time the monkey looked at it. But the risky target, remember, didn’t always give the same reward. On”high-risk” trials, a monkey choosing the risky target got either a 75-ml reward or a 25-ml reward. In contrast, in “low-risk” trials, looking at the risky target reaped either a 45-ml or a 55-ml dose. In all cases, the average pay-off over many trials was the same—using these hypothetical numbers, 50-ml. So you wouldn’t expect the monkeys to prefer one option over another. But here’s the kicker: McCoy and Platt’s monkeys overwhelmingly chose the risky target. What’s more, they chose it more often on the high-risk trials.
In the next part of the study, the neuroscientists looked for patterns of neuron firing that correlated with these preferences. They inserted an electrode—a tiny needle that records the number of electrical signals produced by a single neuron-- in a long and narrow brain region spanning the top of the skull to the top of the ear, called the posterior cingulate cortex. This area was chosen for recordings because it was known from previous studies that its cells were highly responsive during the activities—seeing shapes on a screen, moving the eyes quickly, receiving a reward—involved in the visual gambling task. McCoy and Platt recorded the electrical patterns generated while the monkeys performed the visual gambling game. Not only were the neuronal firings higher when the monkeys took risks, but they also fired in a predictable code: as risk was systematically increased, so too was the firing frequency. In short, they were exquisitely sensitive to risk.
These primate results could be easily translated into human terms: monkeys prefer risk, therefore humans prefer risk. But human behavior is complex, and the temptation to assume that these findings will lead to the ability to predict human behaviors should be squelched. As Daeyeol Lee put it in a Nature commentary, “an individual might insure a car used to drive to the casino.” Moreover, even given identical circumstances, every brain has a slightly different inclination toward risk; not every casino patron becomes a pathological gambler, and not every teenager who picks up a cigarette goes on to smoke a pack a day. Like most of today’s neurological research, these results are remarkable mostly because they expose systematic and surprising patterns at a microscopic level; though the authors did hint their study may have some human application “as an important model for probing the neural processes that underlie pathological risk taking in individuals with addictions to drugs, sex, food or gambling.” As for the woman looking to invest—nothing ventured, nothing gained?
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