Why plants represent untapped potential for innovative drug discovery

Northeastern chemistry graduate student John de la Parra poses with an aloe plant. He is collaborating with Emory ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave to explore the medicinal properties of plants. Photo by Matthew Mondoono/Northeastern University.

By Allie Nicodemo,
Northeastern University

The field of medicine has come a long way from using heroin as a cough remedy or magnet therapy to improve blood flow. These outdated methods were put to bed decades ago. But there are plenty of ancient medicinal practices that have stood the test of time. In fact, many of the life-saving pharmaceuticals we rely on today are derived from plants first discovered by indigenous communities.

Ethnobotany is the scientific study of traditional plant knowledge. It’s what gave us morphine, aspirin, and ephedrine, to name a few. And there is still untapped potential.

In a new paper published by Trends in Biotechnology, Northeastern University doctoral candidate John de la Parra and Emory University medical botanist Cassandra Quave described a new field called ethnophytotechnology. It’s the use of plant biotechnology to improve the plant-based drug discovery pipeline.

“New production, engineering, and analysis methods have made it easier to meet scientific challenges that have confronted traditionally used plant-derived medicines,” says de la Parra, who is earning his doctorate in chemistry. “It is our hope that as the field expands, rich troves of indigenous knowledge can find prominence within innovative drug discovery and production platforms.”

Quave and de la Parra are examining the vast opportunities for ethnobotany and ethnophytotechnology to promote new drug discovery and solve health challenges.

Read the full story about their recent paper on the Northeastern news site.

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What UFO conspiracy theories reveal about American culture

Last spring, historian Felix Harcourt taught a class at Emory on how conspiracy theories about UFOs have shaped American culture. He began the class with a question: “How many people believe alien life exists?”

Most people in the class raised their hand. “I think so, too,” Harcourt said. “Stephen Hawking thinks so. In a giant universe there is a distinct probability that somewhere alien life has evolved. It probably looks pretty different from us, but it might be out there.”

But what about the idea that aliens have visited Earth? And stories of human complicity in those visits — usually of government complicity?

The multitude of UFO conspiracy theories are considered laughable and serious discussion of them is labeled as a cultural taboo, Harcourt said. “Even as they are treated as laughable, they’re some of the most widely believed conspiracy theories. If we go back to the sixties, Gallup polls find 96 percent of Americans had heard of UFOs, 46 percent believed that they were real. By 1973, 57 percent believed that UFOs were real. By the nineties, 71 percent believed that the government was at least hiding information about UFOs: 'They may or may not be real, but there’s definitely more going on there than the government is letting us know.' And those numbers remain relatively stable.”

A 2015 poll showed that 56 percent of American believe that UFOs are real and 45 percent believe aliens have visited Earth. “To put that into context,” Harcourt said, “in that same survey, 57 percent said that the Big Bang theory was real.”

Harcourt goes on to discuss how various UFO conspiracy theories in the 20th century have changed, often paralleling societal anxieties at the time. Click here to watch the entire class on C-SPAN’s lectures in history series.

Harcourt taught the class as part of a course, “Politics and Paranoia,” while he was a post-doctoral fellow at Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry.

A disarming comedian interviews an Emory psychologist loaded with facts about the brain

Comedian Jordan Klepper, center, takes a break from filming in the Emory psychology department. He interviewed Emory psychologist Stephan Hamann, left, about the brain science involved in trying to understand the U.S. political divide and culture wars. (Photo by Carol Clark)

By Carol Clark

Why do some people have a liberal mindset while others seem set on conservatism? And what makes it so difficult to find common ground? Those are some of the questions explored in a one-hour special, “Jordan Klepper Solves Guns,” which aired recently on Comedy Central.

Comedian Jordan Klepper and a camera crew came to the Emory campus last October to film part of the program in the Department of Psychology. Klepper interviewed psychologist Stephan Hamann about his research into how the brain may influence whether people are on one end of the political spectrum or the other, and how we might use this knowledge to better understand one another. 

“People develop their beliefs over a lifetime,” Hamann explains, “and when you tell them something that they feel challenges those core beliefs, they can have a threat response and just shut down. Brain research shows how they stop processing information on a rational level and begin operating on a more emotional level. Of course, that’s the exact opposite of what you want them to do.”

The best way to try to discuss an idea that counters someone’s convictions is to go slow and lay the ground work, he adds. “You have to be as empathetic and compassionate as possible. That’s the first step. You have to earn someone’s trust before you jump to the argument.”

Klepper also underwent an fMRI scan of his own brain in Emory’s Facility for Education and Research in Neuroscience (FERN).

“The program did a good job of conveying a little bit of the science involved in brain imaging,” Hamann says. “These are challenging times, so it’s gratifying to be part of something aiming 5o help Americans find common ground. I like the way the program ended on a positive note, trying to get people to connect up with the political process.”

If you missed the broadcast, you can watch it on Klepper’s web site, JordanKlepperSolves.com.

Students advocating for academic science

PhD candidates Crystal Grant, left, and Joshua Lewis are vocal advocates for scientific research at universities, but neither is ready to commit to academic careers due to uncertainty about good jobs. Last summer, they made their case to congressional aides from the Georgia delegation. (Kay Hinton)

By Hal Jacobs
Emory Magazine

Call it the 800-pound gorilla in the lab.

Crystal Grant, a graduate student in Emory's Genetics and Molecular Biology program in the Graduate Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (GDBBS), faced it while studying how people’s DNA changes with age.

Graduate student Joshua Lewis of the GDBBS Biochemistry, Cell and Developmental Biology program saw its shadow while researching how cells stick to neighbor cells— information that could lead to understanding how cancer cells metastasize.

The problem weighed so heavily on Chelsey Ruppersburg, who graduated with a PhD in 2016, that she changed career directions after racing to earn a doctorate in cell biology in only four years, rather than the usual six or seven.

The situation is readily apparent to anyone who works in an academic lab. Research is a slow, steady, incremental process; funding is erratic, inconsistent, boom and bust. Principal investigators must tear themselves away from working with students to chase fewer National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants. Hiring new students and staff is fraught because funding for their positions is a moving target.

Meanwhile, a steady stream of graduate students—vital to every academic lab—compete for rarer faculty positions while being tempted by more lucrative private industry jobs or opportunities abroad.
Postdoctoral fellowships, an important transitional step from student to professor, have become a port of call that may stretch into years of low pay and uncertainty for scientists who hoped to settle down after a decade-plus of intense schooling.

But as the challenge grows steeper, the same young scientists who are most affected are also trying to solve it.

Read more in Emory Magazine.

Dads show gender biases, in both brain responses and behaviors, toward toddlers

“Our study provides one of the richest datasets for fathers now available,” says Emory neuroscientist Jennifer Mascaro. (Stock image) 

By Carol Clark

A toddler’s gender influences the brain responses as well as the behavior of fathers — from how attentive they are to their child, to the types of language that they use and the play that they engage in, a new study by Emory University finds.

The journal Behavioral Neuroscience published the study, the first to combine brain scans of fathers with behavioral data collected as fathers interacted with their children in a real-world setting.

One of the more striking behavioral differences was the level of attention given a child.

“When a child cried out or asked for Dad, fathers of daughters responded to that more than did fathers of sons,” says Jennifer Mascaro, who led the research as a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Emory anthropologist James Rilling, senior author of the study. “We should be aware of how unconscious notions of gender can play into the way we treat even very young children.”

Mascaro is now an assistant professor in Family and Preventive Medicine at the Emory School of Medicine.

In addition to being more attentive, fathers of daughters sang more often to their child and were more likely to use words associated with sad emotions, such as “cry,” “tears” and “lonely.” Fathers of daughters also used more words associated with the body, such as “belly,” “cheek,” “face,” “fat” and “feet.”

Fathers of sons engaged in more rough-and-tumble play with their child and used more language related to power and achievement — words such as “best,” “win,” “super” and “top.” In contrast, fathers of daughters used more analytical language — words such as “all,” “below” and “much” — which has been linked to future academic success. 

“It’s important to note,” Rilling says, “that gender-biased paternal behavior need not imply ill intentions on the part of fathers. These biases may be unconscious, or may actually reflect deliberate and altruistically motivated efforts to shape children’s behavior in line with social expectations of adult gender roles that fathers feel may benefit their children.”

The study showed that fathers of sons engaged in more rough-and-tumble play with their child, a finding consistent with previous research by others. (Stock image)

Most parental studies draw from data gathered in a lab, where parents answer questions about their behavior and where they may be observed briefly as they interact with their children. This study collected behavioral data in a real-world setting through an electronic activated recorder (EAR), which was developed in the lab of co-author Matthias Mehl at the University of Arizona.

The participants included 52 fathers of toddlers (30 girls and 22 boys) in the Atlanta area who agreed to clip a small personal digital assistant equipped with the EAR software onto their belts and wear it for one weekday and one weekend day. The fathers were also told to leave the device charging in their child’s room at night so any nighttime interactions with their children could be recorded. The device randomly turned on for 50 seconds every nine minutes to record any ambient sound during the 48-hour period.

“People act shockingly normal when they are wearing the device,” Mascaro says. “They kind of forget they are wearing it or they say to themselves, what are the odds it’s on right now. The EAR technology is a naturalistic observation method that helped us verify things about parental behavior that we suspected based on previous research. It also uncovered subtle biases that we didn’t necessarily hypothesize in advance.”

In addition, fathers underwent functional MRI brain scans while viewing photos of an unknown adult, an unknown child and their own child with happy, sad or neutral facial expressions. Fathers of daughters had stronger responses to their daughters’ happy expressions in areas of the brain important for processing emotions, reward and value. In contrast, the brains of fathers of sons responded more robustly to their child’s neutral facial expressions.

“Most parents really are trying to do the best they can for their children,” Mascaro says. “A take-home point is that it’s good to pay attention to how your interactions with your sons and daughters may be biased." (Stock image)

The study focused on fathers because there is less research about their roles in rearing young children than mothers. “Our study provides one of the richest datasets for fathers now available, because it combines real-world assessments of behavior with brain responses,” Mascaro says. “It appears that men’s brain responses to their children may be related to their behaving differently with sons compared to daughters.”

The findings are consistent with other studies indicating that parents — both fathers and mothers — use more emotion language with girls and engage in more rough-and-tumble play with boys. It is unclear whether these differences are due to biological and evolutionary underpinnings, cultural understandings of the way one should act, or some combination of the two.

“We also don’t know the long-term child outcomes,” Mascaro says. “But future research can test the hypothesis that these differences have demonstrable impacts on things like empathy, emotional regulation and social competence.”

The use of more emotion language with girls by fathers, for example, may help girls develop more empathy than boys. “The fact that fathers may actually be less attentive to the emotional needs of boys, perhaps despite their best intentions, is important to recognize,” Mascaro says. “Validating emotions is good for everyone — not just daughters.”

Restricted emotions in adult men is linked to depression, decreased social intimacy, marital dissatisfaction and a lower likelihood of seeking mental health treatment.

Research also shows that many adolescent girls have negative body images. “We found that fathers are using more language about the body with girls than with boys, and the differences appear with children who are just one-to-three years old,” Mascaro says.

And while they use more words about the body with girls, fathers engage in more physical rough-and-tumble play with boys, an activity that research has shown is important to help young children develop social acuity and emotional regulation.

“Most parents really are trying to do the best they can for their children,” Mascaro says. “A take-home point is that it’s good to pay attention to how your interactions with your sons and daughters may be biased. We need to do more research to try to understand if these subtle differences may have important effects in the long term.”

The American Psychological Association contributed to this story.

Related:
How dads bond with kids: Brain scans link oxytocin to paternal nurturing
Testes size correlates with men's involvement in toddler care

A Reddit Science Q&A on medical ethnobotany

What does a medical ethnobotanist have growing in her home garden? Is it possible to patent the berry of a plant? What's the difference between a natural and a synthetic product?

Emory ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave answered these questions and many more during her popular Reddit Science Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) session last Friday. The lively session sparked more than 400 comments within a few hours. Quave, assisted by members of her lab, answered most of the questions posed to her. "I've enjoyed the opportunity to discuss our research with so many interested people," Quave told the Reddit community.

Click here to read her archived Reddit AMA.

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Brazilian peppertree packs power to knock out antibiotic resistant bacteria
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Atlanta Science Festival celebrates 'frontiers of the unknown'

Participants in the Zombie Outbreak Game scoured Peavine Creek on the Emory campus in 2016 for clues to the cause of a mock epidemic. The popular game returns this year on Sunday, March 19.

By Carol Clark

Watch for an astronaut, zombies, a hovercraft and liquid nitrogen ice cream to pop up on the Emory campus during the Atlanta Science Festival, March 14 to March 25. Thousands of science enthusiasts, of all ages, are also expected to appear for the fourth annual event – which includes lab tours, talks, a planetarium show, movie screenings, science-themed dance and games and lots more interactive fun.

The festival blasts off at Emory this year with a talk by NASA astronaut Mark Kelly. Tickets are going fast in the countdown to the event, set for 7 pm on Tuesday, March 14 at Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church.

“Emory University is proud to be a founder and strong supporter of the Atlanta Science Festival, which is just one example of the university’s engagement with our city and region,” says Emory President Claire E. Sterk. “We welcome the local community to our campus for the launch of the 2017 festival and to hear astronaut Captain Mark Kelly. Captain Kelly is an inspiration to all of us who are seeking to push the frontiers of the unknown.”

Name the ASF mascot

The title of Kelly’s talk is “Endeavor to Succeed.” He will give an insider’s perspective on space travel and the year-long NASA experiment he is participating in with his twin brother, also an astronaut, on how space affects the human body.

The public is invited to enter a contest to name the festival's new astronaut mascot. Entries are due by Friday, March 10 at 5 pm, and the winner will receive four VIP tickets to Kelly's talk.

Following are highlights of other festival events set at Emory.

“STEM Gems: Giving Girls Role Models in STEM Careers,” brings together women leaders from business, academia, NASA and more for a panel discussion on Thursday, March 16. They will offer advice aimed at girls ages 10 and up, who are interested in careers involving science, technology engineering or math.

The “Zombie Outbreak Game” returns to campus this year, on Sunday, March 19, giving participants ages 12 and up a chance to investigate a mock zombie disease outbreak, using real-world tools employed by scientists at Emory and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Actors from Out of Hand Theater will play the patients as participants don masks and gowns and follow a trail of clues through streams, woods and labs across campus.

A dance performance, “Creating a New Normal: Race, Identity, Health and Activism,” will explore the themes involved in working towards an AIDS free generation, on the afternoon of Monday, March 20. The performance will be followed by a conversation with scientists and public health researchers — hosted by the Emory Center for Ethics — on the past, present and future of viral diseases.

“Investigating Our Human Past,” the evening of Monday, March 20, will allow visitors to examine the Emory Anthropology Department’s cast collection of fossilized skulls of our ancestors. Scientists will be on hand to discuss recent advances in our understanding of how the human brain evolved.

The Mathematics and Computer Science Department will present “Unveiling the Internet,” geared for teens, on the evening of Thursday, March 23. Participants will meet in a computer lab to tinker with code and learn concepts like how Snapchat snaps move through space.

Physics Live! set for Friday, March 24

The ever-popular “Physics Live!” returns to the Emory Math and Science Center on Friday, March 24. Children will be entertained with giant soap bubbles, a hovercraft and liquid nitrogen ice cream, among other activities. This year, the physics fun will be joined by a “Chemistry Carnival” at the Atwood Science Center. Chemists will turn into midway barkers, awarding prizes to visitors who play games like Peptide Jenga and Bacterial Telepathy, based on ongoing research in Emory labs.

The Oxford Campus will host a “Critter Crawl” through Oxford Forest on Sunday, March 19, to learn about wildlife native to Georgia. And on Sunday, March 21, an event called “It’s About Time” will bring guests and local researchers together to share scientific and social concepts of time.

In addition to on-campus events, members of the Emory community will be featured in Atlanta Science Festival activities happening throughout metro Atlanta:

“Science and Spirituality” will explore the intersections of physics and faith, biology and belief. The panel of local scientists and theologians will include Arri Eisen, a biologist from Emory’s Center for Ethics. On Thursday, March 16 at First Christian Church of Decatur.

“The Science Behind Tremors, the Movie,” features Emory paleontologist Tony Martin who will provide a lively discussion about real animals that inspired giant fictional worms. On Sunday, March 19 at Fernbank Science Center.

A live show and podcast called “You’re the Expert” will bring together a panel of comedians and podcast host Chuck Bryant, who will good-naturedly grill Emory chemist Cora McBeth about her work. On Tuesday, March 21 at 7 Stages Theatre.

The Exploration Expo, the culminating event of the festival, will include scientists from Emory biology, chemistry, environmental sciences, the Emory Herbarium and the Emory Center for the Study of Human Health. They will be among the hosts of 100 booths offering science-themed activities for families during the culminating event of the festival, set for Centennial Park on Saturday, March 25.

How dads bond with toddlers: Brain scans link oxytocin to paternal nurturing

The findings show that "fathers, and not just mothers, undergo hormonal changes that are likely to facilitate increased empathy and motvation to care for their children," says Emory anthropologist James Rilling.

By Carol Clark

Fathers given boosts of the hormone oxytocin show increased activity in brain regions associated with reward and empathy when viewing photos of their toddlers, an Emory University study finds. 

“Our findings add to the evidence that fathers, and not just mothers, undergo hormonal changes that are likely to facilitate increased empathy and motivation to care for their children,” says lead author James Rilling, an Emory anthropologist and director of the Laboratory for Darwinian Neuroscience. “They also suggest that oxytocin, known to play a role in social bonding, might someday be used to normalize deficits in paternal motivation, such as in men suffering from post-partum depression.”

The journal Hormones and Behavior published the results of the study, the first to look at the influence of both oxytocin and vasopressin – another hormone linked to social bonding – on brain function in human fathers.

A growing body of literature shows that paternal involvement plays a role in reducing child mortality and morbidity, and improving social, psychological and educational outcomes. But not every father takes a “hands-on” approach to caring for his children.

“I’m interested in understanding why some fathers are more involved in caregiving than others,” Rilling says. “In order to fully understand variation in caregiving behavior, we need a clear picture of the neurobiology and neural mechanisms that support the behavior.”

Researchers have long known that when women go through pregnancy they experience dramatic hormonal changes that prepare them for child rearing. Oxytocin, in particular, was traditionally considered a maternal hormone since it is released into the bloodstream during labor and nursing and facilitates the processes of birth, bonding with the baby and milk production.

More recently, however, it became clear that men can also undergo hormonal changes when they become fathers, including increases in oxytocin. Evidence shows that, in fathers, oxytocin facilitates physical stimulation of infants during play as well as the ability to synchronize their emotions with their children.

In order to investigate the neural mechanisms involved in oxytocin and paternal behavior, the Rilling lab used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to compare neural activity in men with and without doses of oxytocin, administered through a nasal spray. The participants in the experiment were all healthy fathers of toddlers, between the ages of one and two. While undergoing fMRI brain scans, each participant was shown a photo of his child, a photo of a child he did not know and a photo of an adult he did not know.

When viewing an image of their offspring, participants dosed with oxytocin showed significantly increased neural activity in brain systems associated with reward and empathy, compared to placebo. This heightened activity (in the caudate nucleus, dorsal anterior cingulate and visual cortex) suggests that doses of oxytocin may augment feelings of reward and empathy in fathers, as well as their motivation to pay attention to their children.

Surprisingly, the study results did not show a significant effect of vasopressin on the neural activity of fathers, contrary to the findings of some previous studies on animals.

Research in prairie voles, which bond for life, for instance, has shown that vasopressin promotes both pair-bonding and paternal caregiving. “It could be that evolution has arrived at different strategies for motiving paternal caregiving in different species,” Rilling says.

Co-authors of the study include Ting Li (Emory Anthropology), Xu Chen (Emory Anthropology and the School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences), Jennifer Mascaro (Emory School of Medicine Department of Family and Preventive Medicine) and Ebrahim Haroon (Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences)

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Brazilian peppertree packs power to knock out antibiotic-resistant bacteria

The weed whisperer: Ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave uncovered a medicinal mechanism in berries of the Brazilian peppertree. The plant is a weedy invasive species in Florida, but valued by traditional healers in the Amazon as a treatment for infections. (Photos by Ann Bordon, Emory Photo/Video)

By Carol Clark

The red berries of the Brazilian peppertree – a weedy, invasive species common in Florida – contain an extract with the power to disarm dangerous antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria, scientists at Emory University have discovered.

The journal Scientific Reports published the finding, made in the lab of Cassandra Quave, an assistant professor in Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health and in the School of Medicine’s Department of Dermatology.

“Traditional healers in the Amazon have used the Brazilian peppertree for hundreds of years to treat infections of the skin and soft tissues,” Quave says. “We pulled apart the chemical ingredients of the berries and systematically tested them against disease-causing bacteria to uncover a medicinal mechanism of this plant.”

Brazilian peppertree, Schinus terebinthifolia

The researchers showed that a refined, flavone-rich composition extracted from the berries inhibits formation of skin lesions in mice infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus auereus (MRSA). The compound works not by killing the MRSA bacteria, but by repressing a gene that allows the bacteria cells to communicate with one another. Blocking that communication prevents the cells from taking collective action, a mechanism known as quorum quenching.

“It essentially disarms the MRSA bacteria, preventing it from excreting the toxins it uses as weapons to damage tissues,” Quave says. “The body’s normal immune system then stands a better chance of healing a wound.”

The discovery may hold potential for new ways to treat and prevent antibiotic-resistant infections, a growing international problem. Antibiotic-resistant infections annually cause at least two million illnesses and 23,000 deaths in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The United Nations last year called antibiotic-resistant infections a “fundamental threat” to global health and safety, citing estimates that they cause at least 700,000 deaths each year worldwide, with the potential to grow to 10 million deaths annually by 2050.

Blasting deadly bacteria with drugs designed to kill them is helping to fuel the problem of antibiotic resistance. Some of the stronger bacteria may survive these drug onslaughts and proliferate, passing on their genes to offspring and leading to the evolution of deadly “super bugs.”

In contrast, the Brazilian peppertree extract works by simply disrupting the signaling of MRSA bacteria without killing it. The researchers also found that the extract does not harm the skin tissues of mice, or the normal, healthy bacteria found on skin.

“In some cases, you need to go in heavily with antibiotics to treat a patient,” Quave says. “But instead of always setting a bomb off to kill an infection, there are situations where using an anti-virulence method may be just as effective, while also helping to restore balance to the health of a patient. More research is needed to better understand how we can best leverage anti-virulence therapeutics to improve patient outcomes.”

Quave, a leader in the field of medical ethnobotany and a member of the Emory Antibiotic Resistance Center, studies how indigenous people incorporate plants in healing practices to uncover promising candidates for new drugs.

Cassandra Quave with her lab manager James Lyles, a co-author of the Brazilian peppertree study and a post-doctoral fellow at Emory.

The Brazilian peppertree (Schinus terebinthifolia) is native to South America but thrives in subtropical climates. It is abundant in much of Florida, and has also crept into southern areas of Alabama, Georgia, Texas and California. Sometimes called the Florida holly or broad leaf peppertree, the woody plant forms dense thickets that crowd out native species.

“The Brazilian peppertree is not some exotic and rare plant found only on a remote mountaintop somewhere,” Quave says. “It’s a weed, and the bane of many a landowner in Florida.”

From an ecological standpoint, it makes sense that weeds would have interesting chemistry, Quave adds. “Persistent, weedy plants tend to have a chemical advantage in their ecosystems, which may help protect them from diseases so they can more easily spread in a new environment.”

The study's co-authors include Amelia Muhs and James Lyles (Emory Center for the Study of Human Health); Kate Nelson (Emory School of Medicine); and Corey Parlet, Jeffery Kavanaugh and Alexander Horswill (University of Iowa). The laboratory experiments were conducted in collaboration between the Quave and Horswill labs with funding from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, National Institutes of Health.

The Quave lab is now doing additional research to confirm the safest and most effective means of using the Brazilian peppertree extract. The next step would be pre-clinical trials to test its medicinal benefits. “If the pre-clinical trials are successful, we will apply for an application to pursue clinical trials, under the Food and Drug Administration’s botanical drug pathway,” Quave says.

The Brazilian peppertree finding follows another discovery made by the Quave lab in 2015: The leaves of the European chestnut tree also contain ingredients with the power to disarm staph bacteria without increasing its drug resistance.

While both the Brazilian peppertree and chestnut tree extracts disrupted the signaling needed for quorum quenching, the two extracts are made up of different chemical compounds.

“The latest classes of antibiotics introduced to the market were actually discovered between the 1950s and 1980s,” Quave says. “Scientists have just been building off the same building blocks of earlier classes and modifying them slightly to create new antibiotics. Examining the extracts of plants used by traditional healers for infections may open up discovery of new chemical scaffolds for drug design, and provide important pathways for battling antibiotic-resistance.”

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Chestnut leaves yield extract that disarms deadly bacteria
Tapping traditional remedies to fight modern super bugs
A future without antibiotics?

Companies pushing 'toddler milk' for 'growth' need oversight, experts warn

"Parents are commonly concerned about the size of their children and how well they are doing developmentally," says Emory's Michelle Lampl, MD, PhD, adding: "Not all kids who are smaller than average have a problem."

By Carol Clark

Liquid-based nutritional supplements, originally formulated for malnourished or undernourished children, need more regulatory oversight as they are increasingly marketed to promote growth in children generally, warn researchers at Emory University.

The journal Healthcare published their commentary article, citing the lack of scientific evidence to support marketing claims of the benefits for growth of giving healthy children liquid-based nutritional supplements, commonly known as “toddler milks.”

“A plumper baby is not necessarily a healthier baby,” says Michelle Lampl, who is the lead author of the article, director of the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University and an internationally recognized expert in human growth.

In fact, toddler milk supplements may actually be doing harm by fueling rapid, unnecessary weight gain in young children in the midst of a global obesity epidemic, she adds.

She notes that the liquid supplements may have as much as 240 calories per serving and have the potential to turn a healthy, lean toddler into an overweight one. “Healthy developmental growth does not mean gaining weight and getting fat,” she says. “It is primarily measured by whether a child is growing a stronger, longer skeleton.”

Liquid-based nutritional supplements fall into a regulatory loophole, because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not consider supplements to be a drug or a “conventional” food. “When a mother goes into a store and sees a toddler milk supplement on a shelf, she has no idea that it falls into a less rigorous FDA category than those covering so-called conventional food and medicine,” Lampl says. “We have a product aimed at a vulnerable population – infants and young children – that does not have adequate oversight.”

Co-authors of the commentary article are: Meriah Schoen, a research assistant at Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health and a graduate student focused on nutrition at Georgia State University; and Amanda Mummert, who recently received a PhD in Anthropology from Emory's Laney Graduate School.

The commentary appears in a special issue of Healthcare, dedicated to the physician-scientist David Barker, who died in 2013. He originated the Barker Hypothesis, also known as the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease model, linking fetal and early infant experiences to an individual’s health status across the lifespan.

“David Barker opened the door to the importance of early influences, including nutrition and other environmental factors, for lifelong health,” Lampl says. “He believed that we have an ethical responsibility to ensure that the next generation is as healthy as it can be.”

Companies have marketed infant formulas for decades. In 1981, however, the World Health Organization (WHO) voted to recommend banning marketing of formulas for babies under six months, since the formulas were associated with lower rates of breastfeeding, and increased disease and malnutrition in the developing world.

Countries around the world adopted the rules and breastfeeding rates went up globally. The formula industry responded by focusing on toddler milk supplements, aimed at children ages six months and up.

Liquid-based supplements containing vitamins and minerals may be beneficial to children that are malnourished, or suffering from chronic diseases that prohibit their ability to consume solid foods, Lampl says. The problem, she adds, is that toddler milks have grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry that is expanding internationally to encompass healthy children.

Rapidly boosting the weight of children who are simply smaller than average but healthy could have lifelong consequences, she says. Barker, for instance, found a direct link to higher rates of metabolic disorders among individuals who were born relatively small and grew rapidly in the first few years of life.

“Parents are commonly concerned about the size of their children and how well they are doing developmentally,” Lampl says, adding that the growth charts used in pediatrician offices are often misunderstood. “Not all kids who are smaller than average have a problem.”

Busy mothers on the go, who may be consuming “energy drinks” and liquid supplements themselves, are primed to buy toddler milk for young children under the assumption that they are healthy choices, particularly for children who may be picky eaters.

“Although it can take a picky eater up to 20 times of trying a food to decide if they like it, most mothers offer a food fewer than five times before switching to something more convenient,” Lampl says. “It’s much easier to hand your child a sugary ‘toddler milk,’ thinking it’s healthy and it helps them grow.”

The WHO is set to consider recommendations concerning calorie amounts and ingredients for liquid-based nutritional supplements marketed to toddlers and older children during a meeting in early December.

Those recommendations will not have teeth, however, and it will be up to individual governments whether they decide to adopt them and enforce them.

“We are really behind when it comes to regulatory oversight for the marketing of these supplements, and for rigorous scientific research showing the impact of their widespread use on children,” Lampl says.

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Status drives men's reproductive success across non-industrial world

The reproductive benefits of status reached their peak in pre-modern empires. A genetic study, for instance, found that 8 percent of men in populations spanning Asia shared nearly identical Y-chromosome sequences with Mongolian ruler Genghis Khan (shown entering the city of Beijing).

By Carol Clark

The reproductive success of men in non-industrialized societies is closely tied to their social status, finds a new meta-analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The analysis looked at studies of 33 non-industrial societies from around the globe, including hunter-gatherers, nomadic pastoralists and agriculturalists.

“We were surprised to learn that the correlation held up for a range of societies and their different measures for status,” says Adrian Jaeggi, an anthropologist at Emory University focused on primate and human behavioral ecology. “It doesn’t matter whether a man is a better hunter, owns more land or more livestock – men with high social status had more children compared to men with low status.”

Jaeggi co-authored the study with Christopher von Rueden, an anthropologist specialized in leadership studies at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia.

Their findings go against the egalitarian hypothesis, the idea that status was a relatively weak target of selection for modern humans, since most of that evolutionary period involved living as egalitarian hunter-gatherers.

The !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari serve as a classic example of the egalitarianism associated with hunter-gatherer societies. “They are not allowed to brag about their hunting success, it’s not culturally acceptable,” Jaeggi says. “When one of them kills a large animal, he comes back to camp and sits down quietly by the fire and he is modest about it. Their society is built on mutual help. Sometimes a hunter may only be successful one out of every 10 days. But if they all support each other and share their game, on average they eat every day.”

Bushmen in Botswana demonstrate how to start a fire by rubbing sticks together. Such hunter-gatherer societies do not amass material wealth and are built on mutual help and support. Photo by Ian Sewell.

The egalitarian hypothesis posits that it was not until humans shifted from primarily hunter-gatherer societies toward pastoralism, agriculture and industrialization that status became a key driver for male reproductive success. “Once you start acquiring property and other forms of material wealth, you have assets to transmit to your offspring, so you would expect to see status more closely tied to reproductive success,” Jaeggi explains.

In humans, these reproductive benefits of status reached their peak in pre-modern states and empires that enabled powerful rulers to have access to large numbers of women. A genetic study, for instance, found that 8 percent of men in populations spanning Asia shared nearly identical Y-chromosome sequences with Genghis Khan, the Mongolian ruler who died in 1227.

The current meta-analysis suggests that status-seeking was not just a consequence of more formal social hierarchies and the rise of greater inequalities, but an evolved trait.

While a good hunter may not have material wealth, he carries “embodied capital,” measured by qualities like intelligence, skill, good health and reliable social connections, Jaeggi explains.

“Hunter-gatherer societies may actively work towards leveling any hierarchy, but at the same time people are aware of which men are better hunters and that appears to give them a reproductive edge,” he says. “And the relationship between status and reproductive success is as strong for a hunter as it is for a farmer or pastoralist. That indicates a biological basis for striving for status: It’s universally rewarded with the only currency that matters in biology – children.”

Wealthy men across most of the modern, industrialized world, however, tend to have fewer children than poor men. The link between male status and reproductive success is broken, due to women’s rights and access to contraception.

“Women can be more independent and successful in modern society,” Jaeggi says. “They get to decide if they want to continue to reward status-seeking in men by allowing them to have more children. Or whether they want to reward men who are more compliant with what women want.”

Related:
Conspicuous consumption may drive fertility down

Set phasers to stun: Star Trek turns 50

Star Trek blasted audiences with important social messages and fired up enthusiasm for space exploration and science. Among the iconic characters in the series are, from left: Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Montgomery “Scotty” Scott (James Doohan). 

Sidney Perkowitz, Emory emeritus professor of physics, wrote an article for Nature about the impacts of Star Trek on science, technology and society as the science fiction series turns 50. Below is an excerpt:

“Half a century ago, in September 1966, the first episode of Star Trek aired on the US television network NBC. NASA was still three years short of landing people on the Moon, yet the innovative series was soon zipping viewers light years beyond the Solar System every week. After a few hiccups it gained cult status, along with the inimitable crew of the starship USS Enterprise, led by Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner). It went into syndication and spawned 6 television series up to 2005; there are now also 13 feature films, with Star Trek Beyond debuting in July this year.

“Part of Star Trek's enduring magic is its winning mix of twenty-third-century technology and the recognizable diversity and complexity enshrined in the beings — human and otherwise — created by the show's originator Gene Roddenberry and his writers. As Roddenberry put it, ‘We stress humanity.’ The series wore its ethics on its sleeve at a time when the Vietnam War was raging and anti-war protests were proliferating, along with racial tensions that culminated in major US urban riots in 1967–68.”

Read the whole article in Nature.

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Fantastic light: From science fiction to fact

Chimpanzees choose cooperation over competition

Video shows chimpanzee cooperation task. All chimpanzees must manipulate the handles at the same time in order for the food to be delivered. Video from Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

From Woodruff Health Sciences Center:

When given a choice between cooperating or competing, chimpanzees choose to cooperate five times more frequently, Yerkes National Primate Research Center researchers have found. This, the researchers say, challenges the perceptions humans are unique in our ability to cooperate and chimpanzees are overly competitive, and suggests the roots of human cooperation are shared with other primates.

The study results are reported in this week’s early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To determine if chimpanzees possess the same ability humans have to overcome competition, the researchers set up a cooperative task that closely mimicked chimpanzee natural conditions, for example, providing the 11 great apes that voluntarily participated in this study with an open choice to select cooperation partners and giving them plenty of ways to compete. Working beside the chimpanzees’ grassy outdoor enclosure at the Yerkes Research Center Field Station, the researchers gave the great apes thousands of opportunities to pull cooperatively at an apparatus filled with rewards. In half of the test sessions, two chimpanzees needed to participate to succeed, and in the other half, three chimpanzees were needed.

While the set up provided ample opportunities for competition, aggression and freeloading, the chimpanzees overwhelmingly performed cooperative acts – 3,565 times across 94 hour-long test sessions.

Read more about the study.

A dog's dilemma: Do canines prefer praise or food?

Chowhound: Ozzie, a shorthaired terrier mix, was the only dog in the experiments that chose food over his owner’s praise 100 percent of the time. “Ozzie was a bit of an outlier,” Berns says, “but Ozzie’s owner understands him and still loves him.”

By Carol Clark

Given the choice, many dogs prefer praise from their owners over food, suggests a new study published in the journal Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. The study is one of the first to combine brain-imaging data with behavioral experiments to explore canine reward preferences.

“We are trying to understand the basis of the dog-human bond and whether it’s mainly about food, or about the relationship itself,” says Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University and lead author of the research. “Out of the 13 dogs that completed the study, we found that most of them either preferred praise from their owners over food, or they appeared to like both equally. Only two of the dogs were real chowhounds, showing a strong preference for the food.”

Dogs were at the center of the most famous experiments of classical conditioning, conducted by Ivan Pavlov in the early 1900s. Pavlov showed that if dogs are trained to associate a particular stimulus with food, the animals salivate in the mere presence of the stimulus, in anticipation of the food.

“One theory about dogs is that they are primarily Pavlovian machines: They just want food and their owners are simply the means to get it,” Berns says. “Another, more current, view of their behavior is that dogs value human contact in and of itself.”

Berns heads up the Dog Project in Emory’s Department of Psychology, which is researching evolutionary questions surrounding man’s best, and oldest friend. The project was the first to train dogs to voluntarily enter a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and remain motionless during scanning, without restraint or sedation. In previous research, the Dog Project identified the ventral caudate region of the canine brain as a reward center. It also showed how that region of a dog’s brain responds more strongly to the scents of familiar humans than to the scents of other humans, or even to those of familiar dogs.

Praise Pooch: Most of the dogs in the experiments preferred praise over food, or liked them both equally. Kady, a Labrador-golden retriever mix, was the top dog when it came to the strength of her preference for praise.

For the current experiment, the researchers began by training the dogs to associate three different objects with different outcomes. A pink toy truck signaled a food reward; a blue toy knight signaled verbal praise from the owner; and a hairbrush signaled no reward, to serve as a control.

The dogs then were tested on the three objects while in an fMRI machine. Each dog underwent 32 trials for each of the three objects as their neural activity was recorded.

All of the dogs showed a stronger neural activation for the reward stimuli compared to the stimulus that signaled no reward, and their responses covered a broad range. Four of the dogs showed a particularly strong activation for the stimulus that signaled praise from their owners. Nine of the dogs showed similar neural activation for both the praise stimulus and the food stimulus. And two of the dogs consistently showed more activation when shown the stimulus for food.

The dogs then underwent a behavioral experiment. Each dog was familiarized with a room that contained a simple Y-shaped maze constructed from baby gates: One path of the maze led to a bowl of food and the other path to the dog’s owner. The owners sat with their backs toward their dogs. The dog was then repeatedly released into the room and allowed to choose one of the paths. If they came to the owner, the owner praised them.

“We found that the caudate response of each dog in the first experiment correlated with their choices in the second experiment,” Berns says. “Dogs are individuals and their neurological profiles fit the behavioral choices they make. Most of the dogs alternated between food and owner, but the dogs with the strongest neural response to praise chose to go to their owners 80 to 90 percent of the time. It shows the importance of social reward and praise to dogs. It may be analogous to how we humans feel when someone praises us.”

The experiments lay the groundwork for asking more complicated questions about the canine experience of the world. The Berns’ lab is currently exploring the ability of dogs to process and understand human language.

“Dogs are hypersocial with humans,” Berns says, “and their integration into human ecology makes dogs a unique model for studying cross-species social bonding.”

Related:
Dogs process faces in specialized brain area, study reveals
Scent of the familiar: You may linger like perfume in your dog's brain

Photos by Gregory Berns

Adding anthropology to genetics to study ancient DNA

Kendra Sirak, an Emory PhD candidate in anthropology, is working as a visiting researcher at the Earth Institute at University College Dublin.

By Leslie King
Emory Report

Kendra Sirak, a PhD candidate in anthropology in the Laney Graduate School, is currently working in Ireland, testing the DNA of people ranging from medieval Nubians to an ancient Chinese specimen to an Irish rebel.

Originally from the small town of Dallas, Pennsylvania, Sirak attended Northwestern University on an athletic scholarship for field hockey. "Starting out in psychology, I was inspired by an amazing young professor and became hooked after writing a research paper about the allegedly extinct subspecies Homo sapiens idaltu," Sirak recalls. "I wanted to study the past of humanity so I added anthropology for a double major."

Sirak came to Emory in 2012, drawn by the opportunity to work with George Armelagos, Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology (who passed away in 2014).

"I emailed George, who was one of the gods of anthropology, not expecting an answer," she says. "He responded in 37 minutes."

Now, Sirak is working as a visiting researcher at the Earth Institute at University College Dublin. Her research has also taken her to Russia, Hungary, Romania, China, India and Italy to access DNA in human skeletons and train other researchers in those techniques.

In an interview from Ireland, Sirak talks about her work and how she came to add genetics to anthropology, resulting in fascinating research and career paths.

What led you to add genetics to anthropology? 

I had no interest in genetics, being totally dedicated to the study of human osteology and paleopathology. But George [Armelagos] believed DNA was going to become a critical part of anthropological research — and he couldn’t have been more right.

He proposed that I take some Nubian skeletal remains he had excavated in the 1970s to Ireland and learn how to do ancient DNA analysis at Trinity College Dublin.

I went home and cried because I didn’t want to say no, but I really, really did not want to go. However, I decided to just go anyway. It was the best academic decision I could have ever made. I stepped into the ancient DNA lab at Trinity and realized that I had been spelling “chromosome” wrong for as long as I could remember, which was where my knowledge of DNA was then.

What do you gain by combining anthropology with genetics in your research?

Genetics provides really fantastic, concrete data. However, it doesn’t provide the context that anthropology does. I like to think of genetics giving me the hard scientific data that I want, but anthropology adding in the human context and making the molecular data a human reality.

At Emory, I have learned how to think from a “biocultural” point of view. While many other anthropology programs stress only either a “biological” or a “cultural” approach, Emory combines the two.

I study the biology of past populations and I think about the way their culture and social environment could have influenced individual health and well-being, population demographics, patterns of morbidity and mortality, etc.

What have you been working on in Ireland? 

Primarily extracting and sequencing DNA from skeletal remains from two socially disparate medieval cemeteries at the site of Kulubnarti in Sudanese Nubia. I am also part of a collaboration between University College Dublin and Harvard Medical School’s Department of Genetics lab.

We were recently contacted by the Irish National Police to help identify the remains of Thomas Kent, executed by the British for his part in the Easter Rising insurrection in 1916 and buried in a shallow grave on the grounds of Cork Prison; however, his body could not be positively identified. Collaborating with another team, we came up with this novel method to compare genetic data collected from two of Kent’s known living relatives and confirm his identity. He was given an honorable burial and a big state parade.

What other projects do you have in the works? 

We hope to become involved in the Duffy’s Cut Project. Duffy’s Cut is the location of railroad tracks west of Philadelphia built by 57 Irish immigrants in the mid-1800s. All 57 are thought to have died from cholera. However, forensic evidence suggests that some might have been murdered, perhaps because of fear of contagion. We are hoping a DNA analysis on these samples will help identify these men and their family relationships.

We are in conversation with an Irish human rights group about identifying the remains of more than 800 Irish babies uncovered in a mass grave in western Ireland. This grave was a consequence of the period when it was not socially acceptable for a woman to have a baby out of wedlock. The ultimate goal would be a database of the unidentified infants’ genetic information. Then people who believe they might have some relative in this mass grave could be tested for a genetic match. This project was presented at the United Nations.

What are your post-Emory plans and goals?

My goal is to start writing my dissertation, a bioethnography of the ancient Nubians, this fall and be graduated from Emory in June 2018. Post-Emory, I can see myself applying for a postdoc position to expand my research, or I might like to get involved with scientific communication to the lay public. After taking a human genetics course taken at Emory, I’m really interested in genetic counseling. I’ve been thinking about becoming a certified genetic counselor.

What do you like to do in your “off” time? 

I am a world traveler, marathon runner and craft beer connoisseur. Studying anthropology and working in ancient DNA has given me incredible opportunities to travel around the world to collect samples for our analyses.

Related:
Bone to be wild: Every skeleton has a story to tell

Kenya and 'the double life of kale'

Kale’s discovery by affluent consumers in the United States is an example of how much high-income societies can learn from the dietary habits of the poor, says Emory anthropologist Peter Little.

Emory anthropologist Peter Little wrote an article for Sapiens about how the trendy American health food of kale is similar to a variety with humble origins in Africa, where the poor depend on the leafy green vegetable as a staple. Below is an excerpt:

"Nutritional and health benefits aside, kale’s recent popularity and the premium prices kale-based products command in the United States might seem comical, if not downright ridiculous, to many East Africans. In Kenya and Tanzania, kale is a key staple in highland farming communities, where it is referred to as sukuma wiki, which in Swahili means “to push the week.” (East African kale is slightly different from the varieties that are grown and eaten in the U.S., but still very similar.) Eaten with a thick, maize-based porridge called ugali, kale is what allows many East African families to get through the week, often with little more than a sprinkling of tomato, onion, or, in better-off families, a few pieces of meat mixed in. When an individual is invited to eat with a rural Kenyan family, as I have been on many occasions over the past 30-plus years, it is almost certain that at least one of the dishes will be sukuma wiki. Indeed, the poorer the family is, the more likely kale, along with ugali, will be the main part of the meal."

Read the whole article in Sapiens.

Related:
What we can learn from African pastoralists

Bridging ancient Tibetan medicine and modern Western science

Tawni Tidwell amid Tibetan prayer flags in eastern Tibet. Photo by Shane Witnov.

By Carol Clark

Tawni Tidwell is the first Westerner to be certified in Tibetan medicine by Tibetan teachers in the Tibetan language. The PhD candidate in Emory’s Department of Anthropology is now working on a dissertation about how Tibetan physicians diagnose diseases, especially cancer.

“I see myself as a bridge between Tibetan medicine and Western science,” says Tidwell, who became a Tibetan physician in 2015. “I feel like each has something to offer the other.”

Tidwell was born in Colorado but lived from the ages of two to five in South Korea, where her father was a U.S. Army surgeon. Tidwell and her mother lived in mainstream Seoul, which gave her an affinity for Asia when she returned to Colorado. She was also influenced by the Native American ancestry on both sides of her family and by the ecology of Colorado, where she became involved in rock climbing and winter mountaineering.

Tidwell has trained as an animal tracker, worked as a ranger at a biological preserve, taught wilderness survival lessons, and led gap-year students on trips to learn about traditional cultures through the “Where There Be Dragons” program.

Tidwell studied at the premier Tibetan medical school outside of Tibet, in northern India (the cultural and intellectual capital of the displaced Tibetan community). In order to enroll, she had to pass a five-day exam of memorized Tibetan grammar and Buddhist logic, as well as general Tibetan cultural knowledge. From there on, each year she had to recite from memory 115 pages of a medical textbook in Tibetan, considered one of the most difficult languages for non-native speakers to master. She also had to complete written exams, coursework and attend classes, all in the Tibetan language among Tibetan peers.

Below is an interview with Tidwell, covering some of the milestones of her long and winding road to becoming a certified Tibetan medical practitioner.

Where did you spend your undergraduate years? 

I went to Stanford, where I started out majoring in physics and pre-med, with the idea of a career focused on aerospace medicine, exploring questions like how the body adapts to space.

In physics, you take the extremes of a problem to understand how an average system operates. I thought if you studied how humans respond to extremes, then maybe you could find out more about how the human body works and responds to illness.

I was also really interested in the relationship between our bodies and the land. I eventually switched my major to Earth Systems. Stanford has a 2,000-acre biological preserve – ranging from redwoods to chaparral and perennial grasslands – where I worked as a docent and a ranger. I learned to identify dozens of different species of grass. I wanted to know why this grass species survives in the desert and another one doesn’t, and why the bobcat patrols this area and not another.

While ascending Illimani, a peak in western Bolivia, Tidwell pauses to take in the view.

When did you become interested in Tibetan culture?

I took a gap year after my freshman year and went to the Emory Tibetan Studies Program in north India, led by Tara Doyle (senior lecturer in Emory’s Department of Religion). I studied Buddhist philosophy and the Tibetan language, which is exquisite and poetic. The word for computer translates as “brain of light.”

The Tibetan language pays special attention to the sacred. It reminds you of the pursuit of understanding the reality we all experience and how one should live. It’s very specific about cognition and the mind and provides a much more detailed description of the trajectory of perception.

I feel different when I speak in Tibetan. People have told me that my whole body language changes.

Why did you enroll in an animal-tracking course?

I went to Washington, D.C., to work with an environmental organization. I realized that most of the environmental specialists in our nation’s capital had no time to spend in the natural world. They are completely disconnected from it. I wondered, what were humans like as foragers and what have we lost by being academic specialists without first-hand experience?

I went to New Jersey for a 10-day course taught by Tom Brown, Jr., an animal tracker and wilderness guru. He basically teaches what it takes to survive when you are butt naked in the woods and have nothing. In just the first class, you learn about wild edibles, how to make fire by friction, how to make two different traps and two different snares, and how to tan a hide. Other classes build on those basics.

What was your favorite part of your survivalist training?

Fire. There is something so enigmatic about making fire by friction. The experience ignites something deep in our past. It’s almost like creating life. You have to get a feel for the spindle and the fireboard. You apply just the right speed and pressure and when the fire comes out it’s like magic. And you realize that you can have a relationship to everything like that in the natural world.

After I finished the initial course, I realized it was really about putting in the experiential “dirt time’ to learn the skills. I took more courses and helped with teaching. I lived in the New Jersey pine barrens for about a year in a pit shelter, which was dug about four feet into the ground and was about 10 feet in diameter. It was full-on immersion in ecology.

I saw how some people’s lives changed as their wilderness survival skills accumulated. It gives you a certain freedom. People realize they don’t necessarily have to live in the way that they thought they had to live.

Tidwell with classmates, gathering native plants from the Tibetan plateau.

Do you ever get scared being alone in the wilderness? 

Scary movies make me scared, but not being alone in the forest. I imagine, though, that I would be scared in grizzly bear or polar bear territory, since they hunt humans.

Wolves don’t scare me because I read everything I could about the Arctic wolf when I was in elementary school – I was that kind of kid – and I knew they weren’t a threat to humans.

It’s actually part of Buddhist philosophy: The more you learn about the world, the more you learn about what you should, and should not, fear.

How did you wind up in Tibetan medical school?

In 2008, Tara Doyle asked me to return as assistant director of the Emory Tibetan Studies Program in north India.

While working in South America, I had met a curandero in Bolivia who told me that his grandmother had known more than 5,000 healing plants, he knew 2,000 and his daughter would know a few hundred or even fewer. I realized that Tibetan medicine is really unique in that it is this ancient medicinal system connected to the land – using medicines made from plants and minerals gathered from the Tibetan plateau, the highest place in the world – and it is also written down.

I thought that if I had a chance to study Tibetan medicine I could really do something with it. Dr. Khenrab Gyamtso, the vice principal of the Men-Tsee-Khang medical institute in north India, agreed to tutor me for a few hours at the end of every day, after he and I had already put in a full day of work. He eventually encouraged me to apply for enrollment.

What did your studies involve?

Medicinal herb from the Tibetan plateau

The first few years were mainly memorization of parts of the medical canon, more than 100 pages a year. And then at the end of every year you recite them. At first I didn’t value memorization but I eventually realized that it’s an amazing technology. It feels like a profound meditation. It’s clever in the sense that it forces you to focus while also giving your mind a break. The text is written poetically and you start noticing associations and layers of meaning. Layers of your mind also start emerging. It’s a fascinating thing to observe.

After five years of classes, I transferred to eastern Tibet’s Tibetan Medical College of Qinghai University in Xining, China. Under the mentorship of senior doctors, I was able to do patient rounds in the gastroenterology department of the hospital there. All that memorization prepared my mind to have a strong presence with each patient and really focus on what each one said to me.

What are some of the distinctive aspects of Tibetan medicine? 

Tibetan medicine co-evolved with Buddhism. Contemplative introspection into the mind is complemented by introspection into the body. For example, in the case of chronic pain, Tibetan medicine prescribes medication along with recommendations for diet and ways to reduce mental distress and suffering. Research has shown that some meditators can identify physical pain locales on their body but they don’t have the same mental response that a lot of other people have to it.

We’re one of the few species in the animal kingdom that can evoke stress just by thinking about a threat. What are the changes in the mind when you become afraid, jealous, angry or sad? These emotions create biological changes in the body. Tibetan medicine treats the mind and the body at the same time. If you have diabetes or hypertension, it can get worse if you are highly reactive to circumstances in your life. This phenomenon is related to a concept called rlung (pronounced loong). These are wind pathways in the body that the mind rides on, which in Western medicine is related to the neuroendocrine system.

Connecting the mind and body to treat patients is ancient practice in Tibetan medicine, but it has only started gaining importance in Western medicine in the past decade or so.

Do you think Tibetan medicine is superior to Western medicine?

No. I feel like there is a lot of learning to do on both sides. My dad is an orthopedic surgeon. There are some things that Western medicine does very well.

Modern Tibetan medical practitioners don’t do surgery but they may advocate it at times – historically, we performed minor procedures like cataract surgery. Our canon says that anything that benefits a person is Tibetan medicine. So if the results of an X-ray or blood test could give you valuable information about a patient, you would welcome that. It’s a realist perspective more than anything else. And I would also say that it’s more holistic.

Some people have such a suspicion of anything that’s not Western medicine, they just refuse to consider it. I find that non-scientific. The research done on other medical systems is so poor we can’t say that we know whether these things don’t work on some level. Westerners sometimes forget that a human connection is healing and we try to operationalize everything. We’re not allowed to have art in medicine, but sometimes that art is what makes it more effective.

All photos courtesy of Tawni Tidwell

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Measuring happiness and well-being across cultures and incomes

Emory anthropologist Peter Little visits with a family in Baringo, Kenya. He is studying low-income communities to understand the relationship between material well-being and reports of overall well-being.

By April Hunt, Emory Report

How is it that people living in rural, poor areas of the globe can report being happier than those who live in the relative affluence of the United States?

Emory anthropologist Peter Little and philosopher Mark Risjord aim to answer that question as part of a team that has been awarded a “Happiness and Well-Being” grant. Funded by the John Templeton Foundation and St. Louis University, their work is part of a larger research program in the growing field of well-being.

“The idea is to compare the subjective meaning of the good life and see if that affects the relationship between material well-being and reports of happiness and overall well-being,” says Little, the project’s principal investigator.

The project, which includes economist Workneh Negatu of Addis Ababa University, will study two specific low-income communities: South Wollo, Ethiopia, and Baringo, Kenya.

Little has long studied the politics, economy and ecology of eastern Africa. When he was completing his dissertation in 1983, there was only one college graduate in the Chamus Maasai community of Baringo, Kenya, where he studied. Since then, there have been significant social changes and there are now dozens of college graduates among the Maasai-related pastoralists population, he says.

That makes that area in Kenya a good place to understand relative well-being and poverty where, as in the U.S., people are poor relative to their neighbors. South Wollo, by contrast, remains populated by those in absolute poverty. A bad harvest there, or lost jobs, still can lead to dire hardships and even starvation.

The United Nations’ annual World Happiness Report this year ranked Ethiopia a dismal 115 out of 147 countries according to citizens’ happiness levels. The United States ranked 13th in the analysis, which looked at factors such as life expectancy, health and freedom from corruption in government and business.

Yet Ethiopia ranked 94th on the 2012 Happiness Index, the most recent available from the New Economics Foundation. The United States ranked 105th in that study, which included a factor called “life satisfaction.”

Kenya, likewise, ranked poorly in the U.N. report, at 122nd, but also bested the United States with a rank of 98 on the Happiness Index.

“This is huge for public policy,” Little says. “Kenya’s therapy industry is starting to emerge, because people’s expectations of what the good life is have changed drastically, and they’re not meeting those expectations.”

Risjord’s role will be to help provide a philosophical framework for the qualitative study. In his section of the project proposal, Risjord wrote that past study of well-being seems to take sides on longstanding philosophical disputes on whether it is a universal sense or different in different contexts.

Risjord, who is teaching philosophy of science in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in southern India as part of the Emory-Tibet Sciences Initiative, says his role will be to understand how the feeling varies with context based on historical, cultural and economic data gathered in both Ethiopia and Kenya.

“The philosophical contribution of this project will be to develop a more robust and articulate conception of how human well-being varies with social, economic and environmental context,” Risjord writes in his proposal section.

The study will become part of the larger Happiness and Well-Being project at St. Louis University, which is designed to promote dialogue and collaboration among well-being researchers across a broad range of disciplines. Little, whose proposal was one of just 21 funded from a pool of 300, says he hopes to begin travel under the $248,000 grant by August.

He will build upon that work back in Atlanta, too. Long-term, he plans to get students to look at the Ethiopian diaspora here, to gauge if their sense of well-being changes when they arrive in the U.S.

“To me, it’s really exciting to do cultural interpretations of well-being and poverty,” Little says. “It’s a fascinating way to look at culture.”

Related:
The economics of happiness