A voice for the science of sustainability

Emory anthropologist Peggy Barlett studies the intersection of economic, ecological and demographic change among farmers around the world. She is also a key player in moving higher education to the forefront of sustainability.

“There are so many ways that our culture right now is in transition,” she says. “As an anthropologist I see a whole shift in the challenges we face and the ways in which universities, governments and faith communities are trying to contribute. Higher education has so many tools and so many talents to offer, I think it’s incredibly important to make sure that what we know is available to the general public.”

Barlett is part of the Public Voices Thought Leadership Fellowship at Emory. A collaboration with The OpEd Project, the program is designed to cultivate a sense of social responsibility and to increase the number of women involved in public debate. Check out the web site of the program’s lead sponsor, the Center for Women at Emory, to learn more.

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A taste of traditional Italian medicine

Medical Ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave collecting plant specimens in Italy.

By Carol Clark

“Ethnobotany is the science of survival,” Cassandra Quave told a group of Emory students when they visited her field research site in southern Italy recently.

Quave, a medical ethnobotantist with Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health, is documenting the traditional ways that people use plants in the Vulture-Alto Bradano region of Basilicata province, a landscape of rolling hillsides dominated by the dormant volcano Monte Vulture. She is also collecting specimens of medicinal plants that she will take back to her Emory lab for her drug discovery research projects.

The students were in Italy this June as part of the “Italian and Medical Humanities” course, a collaboration of Emory’s Italian Studies Program, the School of Medicine, the Center for Ethics and the Center for the Study of Human Health.

Their itinerary included a day with Quave, who immersed the students in the local life of the village of Ginestra. She took them on a walk through the surrounding countryside, identifying the traditional medicinal uses of plants they encountered along the way. A fourth-generation shepherd told the students about pastoral life, and truffle hunters demonstrated how they use dogs to hunt these gourmet delicacies.

Cassandra Quave takes students off the beaten track, to learn about agrarian life.

“The students got to see first-hand how important traditional knowledge of environmental resources can be to a community,” Quave says. “It would be very difficult for these people to survive without it.”

During a visit to a vineyard, Quave made a point of having the students pick and eat ripe mulberries off a tree. “Today, especially in the U.S., people are very disconnected from their environment and food sources,” she says. “For many of the students, this was the first time that they had ever eaten anything that they had harvested themselves.”

Basilicata is home to the Arbereshe ethnic minority in Italy, the descendants of Albanians who fled the Ottoman invasion of Albania five centuries ago. “They have maintained their language, which is very different from modern-day Albanian, and adapted to a new environment, while still keeping some of their homeland traditions alive,” Quave says. “Unfortunately, many of these practices are in a state of rapid decline. The Arbereshe language is listed as an endangered language and as the language disappears, so does much of the culture.”

Quave currently has a $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to pursue her research into how an extract from the elm leaf blackberry, a tree common in forests across Europe, might help fight antibiotic-resistant staph. Click here to read more about her research.

Here are more photos of the students in Basilicata. 

Photos courtesy of Cassandra Quave.

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'Omic astronauts' blast off into a new genetic era

By Carol Clark

Ready or not, the ability to rapidly and cheaply sequence the human genome is set to shape our species, both biologically and socially. Some people are early adopters of the technology, eager to jump into this brave new world.

Kristopher Hite, a bio-chemist and a post-doctoral fellow working in a biology lab at Emory, is among these “omic astronauts.” He is heading into unknown territory, full of potential risks and rewards, by having his genome sequenced and added to the public database of the Personal Genome Project (PGP).

Are we on the road to “Gattaca?” The 1997 film is set in a future where genetic databases are used to bio-engineer “ideal” children and sort out the less ideal members of society. In the above video of a Google + Hangout, Hite discusses some of the potential scenarios of the emerging genetic era with Paul Root Wolpe, a bioethicist and director of the Emory Center for Ethics.

Hite’s interest in the Harvard-based PGP is both scientific and personal. He wants to learn more about his own ancestry while also adding to our general knowledge of genetics.

He checked with his closest family members before joining the project, and they all gave him a green light. Even future family members, however, could be affected by his decision.

“If I have kids, maybe they’ll think I’m crazy for doing it and maybe they’ll resent me,” says the 30-year-old Hite, adding that he could not resist the opportunity of having his genome sequenced for free.

Here is how the PGP sums up its aims on its Web site: “We are recruiting volunteers who are willing to share their genome sequence and many types of personal information with the research community and the general public, so that together we will be better able to advance our understanding of genetic and environmental contributions to human traits.”

Hite has yet to decide whether he will allow the PGP to attach his name to his genetic data. It was among the concerns he discussed in his conversation with Wolpe.

The truth is, no one knows all of the future implications, Wolpe says. On the one hand, genetic data will likely boost opportunities for tailor-made medical treatments that will make today’s health care seem crude by comparison. But every new technology comes with a dark side.

“With your whole genome available to someone, and 20, 30 years from now with really more sophisticated DNA synthesizers, somebody could potentially clone you without your knowledge or consent,” Wolpe says. “As I tell my students, there is no science fiction anymore. There’s virtually nothing that I read about as a kid that I thought was whacky and way out that we’re not doing or trying to do. So I think that we’re opening up a whole new world of not only opportunity and potential but also legal problems and medical problems and certainly security problems.”

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A medical exhibit that won't put you to sleep

"Medical Treasures at Emory" is an exhibit of historical artifacts that serve as reminders of the days when doctors had a rudimentary understanding of human anatomy, performed surgery without antiseptic and used primitive forms of anesthesia for operations and dental work.

The above video gives a peek at some of the objects on display through October at the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library. Notable artifacts include one of the earliest stethoscopes from the 19th century, and a kit of Civil War surgeon's instruments, primarily used for amputation.

Among the historical books on display are volumes about Civil War field surgery practices, an 1881 book that incorporates early medical photography to show the ravages of syphilis, a copy of "Notes on Nursing: What It is, and What It Is Not" (1865) by Florence Nightingale, and an 1849 obstetrics book by Charles D. Meigs, an obstetrician who opposed anesthesia and the introduction of sanitary practices during childbirth on the theory that "doctors are gentlemen and a gentleman's hands are clean."

Also on display is a rare copy of  "One the Workings of the Human Body," or "de Humani corporis fabrica," a 1543 book containing the first accurate representations of human anatomy.

Read more about the exhibit.

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Objects of our afflictions

Star Trek and the ethics of space exploration

Who owns the moon? Is it fair to send people on a one-way trip to Mars? Can doctors safeguard medical experiments in other environments? These are just a few of the ethical questions confronting the human race as we continue to explore space.

The Emory Looks at Hollywood series examines these questions in context of the new Paramount Pictures movie "Star Trek Into Darkness," the latest in the long-running Star Trek story. Watch the video above as Paul Root Wolpe, Director of the Center for Ethics at Emory and the first Senior Bioethicist for NASA, discusses the ethics of space exploration.

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'Iron Man' and the future of nanotechnology

How do you take a golden suit of armor to the next level? Tony Stark turns to nanotechnology in “Iron Man 3.” He undergoes injections of a super-soldier serum called Extremis that enhances strength and can regenerate limbs and cure wounds, so that he has super powers even when he’s not wearing his Iron Man suit.

While Extremis is an invention of comic books and Hollywood, scientists are actually working to develop similar “super serums” in the real world.

“Some of the features in the movie 'Iron Man' may be far-fetched, but other features will probably become a reality,” says Shuming Nie, chair of biomedical engineering at Emory and Georgia Tech and the director of the Emory-Georgia Tech Cancer Nanotechnology Center.

He cites a project supported by the U.S. Air Force involving nanoparticles that can amplify optical-detection sensitivity by 10 to the 14th fold.

Another promising area is targeted nanoparticles therapeutics, including a project under way at Emory, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania, to develop nanoparticle contrast agents.

“These are agents that you can inject into the human body two or three hours before surgery,” Nie explains. “A surgeon can then visualize where the tumors are, because they’re glowing. The surgeon can identify where the boundaries are, where to cut, and whether there is any residue tumor left.”

Major efforts are ongoing to develop nanotechnology applications for use in medicine, biology, energy and environmental science.

“The most amazing applications are probably going to be in the medical field,” Nie says. "To design anything that works inside the human body is enormously challenging, because the human body is immensely complex. However, our imaginations are also unlimited. So if we work together, I think certainly in the next generation we'll have some of these nanoparticles with specialized functions able to do very unusual things in the human body."

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Hydroponic lettuce offers a taste of 'green' food

Video via Quad Talk 

Much of the lettuce sold in the eastern United States comes from California and Arizona. Emory students, however, are getting treated to fresh, campus-grown salads through a hydroponic system developed by Alex Boettcher and Jai Seth, both undergraduates majoring in economics and minoring in sustainability.

Their hydroponic system is currently growing about 50 heads of lettuce in 15-square-feet of the Dobbs University Center (DUC).

California lettuce “has to travel 3,000 miles to get here so it’s about 8 to 10 days before it’s served onto our plates,” Boettcher says. “It’s constantly losing nutrients, plus it takes massive amounts of fossil fuels to get it here.”

Conventional farming needs about three months to produce a crop of lettuce “but here we grow it in about six weeks,” Seth adds. “And because we’re growing it indoors we can have eight different crops cycles as compared to three or four crop cycles at a conventional farm.”

The students aim to promote sustainable, local food and good nutrition through the hydroponic project, which was supported by the Center for the Study of Human Health, the Foundations of Sustainability class and Food Services.

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Objects of our afflictions

A hand-drawn arrow shows the trajectory of the bullet that passed through Private Ludwig Kohn in this detail of a Civil War surgical card. These cards, from the Army Medical Museum, Surgeon General's Office, document Union army doctors’ most interesting cases.

By Mary Loftus, Emory Magazine

The US National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, began in 1836 as a shelf of books in the Office of the Surgeon General and evolved to become the largest biomedical library in the world, concurrently housing millions of physical items and serving electronic data to millions of online users around the world.

An x-ray of Hitler's skull.

“My fantasy holiday,” writer Mary Roach, author of the books "Stiff," "Spook" and "Bonk" has said, “is a week spent locked in the archives of the National Library of Medicine.”

Jeff Reznick, who received his PhD in history from Emory in 1999, is chief of the library’s History of Medicine division. He serves as a steward of some of the medical library’s rarest, oldest, and yes, quirkiest items – from palmistry guides to Civil War surgical cards to the first published illustration of Watson and Crick’s double helix.

“We’re not a lending library in the traditional sense,” Reznick explains, “but a contemporary research institution that is home to an amazing historical collection as well as an extensive exhibition program.”

The collections contain medieval manuscripts, rare first editions, silent films, paintings, photographs, postcards, lantern slides, original drawings, hospital records, and laboratory notebooks—17 million artifacts that range from the famous to the obscure, the sublime to the repulsive.

A cuttlefish, valued for its "bone," which could be ground up to make a tooth powder, from the pages of "Materia Medica Animalia" a rare 1853 book.

A selection of the library’s most captivating artifacts is highlighted in the newly published "Hidden Treasure," edited by Reznick’s colleague and library historian Michael Sappol. The coffee-table book is filled with 450 vivid illustrations and essays. Within its pages are sketches of conjoined twins, Hitler’s x-rays, autopsy illustrations, midwife dolls, Darwin’s sketches, a grand atlas of skin diseases, public health warning cards, and malaria pinup calendars. "Hidden Treasure" is available free as a downloadable e-copy at http://collections.nlm.nih.gov/HiddenTreasure, or as a hardbound book.

A review in The Lancet reads, “Each selection is truly intriguing and informative, reminding us that medicine is inherently connected to the human experience and all of its attendant complexities. As the images show, there are few, if any, areas of life that medicine does not affect.”

A young boy displaying Hirsutism, increased growth of facial hair, from the 1856 "Atlas of Skin Diseases."

The book’s introduction, cowritten by Reznick, notes: “These are things that are not entirely reducible to ‘information,’ that are only partly susceptible to digitization. They have a feel and texture and smell and color; they are strong or brittle, clean or dusty; they have been taken from place to place, bought or sold or bartered or stolen or issued or given away as gifts. They have been treasured or neglected, defaced or mended, added to or pruned back. Each object has lived a ‘social life,’ sometimes several lives.”

A 19th-century lantern slide.

Emory Professor of English Benjamin Reiss, author of "Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture," says the library contains “an extraordinary collection and is underused as a scholarly resource.”

Reiss was invited to contribute an essay for "Hidden Treasure" on a set of magic lantern slides that were exhibited to mental patients in a 19th-century insane asylum. “The assignment led me on a really interesting historical detective mission, trying to figure out who made the slides, what the exhibits were like, and what role the exhibits played in the treatment of patients,” he says.

He found that many of the slides were part of patients’ “moral treatment,” meant to impress rational, orderly imagery—such as snowflakes—upon their minds, while others, such as a giant flea attacking a man in a chair, were for entertainment.

“Given that many patients were delusional and/or medicated with dream-inducing opiates, one wonders about the wisdom of serving up these ready-made hallucinations, magnified to terrifying proportions,” Reiss writes.

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Penicillin, not the pill, may have launched the sexual revolution

The 1950s were not as prudish as they seemed on the surface, says economist Andrew Francis. 

By Carol Clark

The rise in risky, non-traditional sexual relations that marked the swinging ‘60s actually began as much as a decade earlier, during the conformist ‘50s, suggests an analysis recently published by the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

“It’s a common assumption that the sexual revolution began with the permissive attitudes of the 1960s and the development of contraceptives like the birth control pill,” notes Emory University economist Andrew Francis, who conducted the analysis. “The evidence, however, strongly indicates that the widespread use of penicillin, leading to a rapid decline in syphilis during the 1950s, is what launched the modern sexual era.”

As penicillin drove down the cost of having risky sex, the population started having more of it, Francis says, comparing the phenomena to the economic law of demand: When the cost of a good falls, people buy more of the good.

“People don’t generally think of sexual behavior in economic terms,” he says, “but it’s important to do so because sexual behavior, just like other behaviors, responds to incentives.”

Syphilis reached its peak in the United States in 1939, when it killed 20,000 people. “It was the AIDS of the late 1930s and early 1940s,” Francis says. “Fear of catching syphilis and dying of it loomed large.”

Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but it was not put into clinical use until 1941. As World War II escalated, and sexually transmitted diseases threatened the troops overseas, penicillin was found to be an effective treatment against syphilis.

“The military wanted to rid the troops of STDs and all kinds of infections, so that they could keep fighting,” Francis says. “That really sped up the development of penicillin as an antibiotic.”

Right after the war, penicillin became a clinical staple for the general population as well. In the United States, syphilis went from a chronic, debilitating and potentially fatal disease to one that could be cured with a single dose of medicine.

From 1947 to 1957, the syphilis death rate fell by 75 percent and the syphilis incidence rate fell by 95 percent. “That’s a huge drop in syphilis. It’s essentially a collapse,” Francis says.

In order to test his theory that risky sex increased as the cost of syphilis dropped, Francis analyzed data from the 1930s through the 1970s from state and federal health agencies. Some of the data was only available on paper documents, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) digitized it at the request of Francis.

For his study, Francis chose three measures of sexual behavior: The illegitimate birth ratio; the teen birth share; and the incidence of gonorrhea, a highly contagious sexually transmitted disease that tends to spread quickly.

“As soon as syphilis bottoms out, in the mid- to late-1950s, you start to see dramatic increases in all three measures of risky sexual behavior,” Francis says.

While many factors likely continued to fuel the sexual revolution during the 1960s and 1970s, Francis says the 1950s and the role of penicillin have been largely overlooked. “The 1950s are associated with prudish, more traditional sexual behaviors,” he notes. “That may have been true for many adults, but not necessarily for young adults. It’s important to recognize how reducing the fear of syphilis affected sexual behaviors.”

A few physicians sounded moralistic warnings during the 1950s about the potential for penicillin to affect behavior. Spanish physician Eduardo Martinez Alonso referenced Romans 6:23, and the notion that God uses diseases to punish people, when he wrote: “The wages of sin are now negligible. One can almost sin with impunity, since the sting of sinning has been removed.”

Such moralistic approaches, equating disease with sin, are counterproductive, Francis says, stressing that interventions need to focus on how individuals may respond to the cost of disease.

He found that the historical data of the syphilis epidemic parallels the contemporary AIDS epidemic. “Some studies have indicated that the development of highly active antiretroviral therapy for treating HIV may have caused some men who have sex with men to be less concerned about contracting and transmitting HIV, and more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors,” Francis says.

“Policy makers need to take into consideration behavioral responses to changes in the cost of disease, and implement strategies that are holistic and longsighted,” he concludes. “To focus exclusively on the defeat of one disease can set the stage for the onset of another if preemptive measures are not taken.”

Images are vintage health messages from NIH National Library of Medicine.

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Ethicists to wrestle with zombies on Halloween

Among the questions the "Walking with the Dead" conference will tackle is why many people have embraced the zombie fad, such as these enthusiasts in Marietta Square on Saturday. 

By Carol Clark

Karen Rommelfanger’s husband got her hooked on “The Walking Dead.” She had resisted, but finally succumbed to the AMC TV series when her husband was watching an episode on zombie neurobiology set at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“He called out to me, ‘You’ve got to see this,’” says Rommelfanger, a neuroscientist and director of the Neuroethics Program at the Emory Center for Ethics.

The fictionalized researchers were gathered around a glorified brain scanner, discussing the “you” part of a brain, where thoughts reside, and whether the “you” part was gone.

“This is exactly the kinds of questions we talk about in neuroethics,” Rommelfanger says. “Is the brain the seat of personhood? What does ‘brain dead’ really mean?”

It wasn’t long before the Emory Center for Ethics coined the term “zombethics” and created a public forum to discuss them. “Walking with the Dead: An Ethics Symposium for the Living” is the brainchild of Rommelfanger and Cory Labrecque, a scholar of bioethics and religious thought at the Center for Ethics. All the reserved seats for the event on Wednesday, October 31, are filled, but people can still participate in the campus Zombie Walk, starting at the center at 11:30 am and proceeding up to Asbury Circle.

Zombies are becoming as emblematic of Atlanta as the Varsity drive-in. 

“The Walking Dead,” filmed in and around Atlanta, has resurrected zombies and turned them into visceral symbols of all sorts of modern-day fears.

“The show is full of ethics questions dressed up in zombie suits,” says Labrecque, who wrote his dissertation on radical life extension and teaches courses on personhood theory and religion and medicine.

A close friend recommended the series to him. “I was initially reluctant about wasting my time on a series about zombies, but was hooked after the first episode,” Labrecque says. “I watched the whole first season in one sitting.”

His fiancée was too afraid to watch the show. But after he described it to her, Labrecque says she wanted to know: “Would you shoot me if I was bitten by a zombie?”

(Apparently, he gave a satisfying response because the wedding went as planned on October 13.)

Since “The Walking Dead” is set in Atlanta, it seemed especially fitting to launch a zombethics conference here, Rommelfanger says.

Harvard psychiatrist Steve Schlozman will be among the panelists at the Emory conference. In the video below, he describes a zombie brain autopsy:

Zombies touch on fears beyond death, such as slowly disappearing to Alzheimer’s, or wasting away in a coma. “We are not equating real-life patients with zombies, we’re using zombies as an entry point to start a conversation about really difficult subjects,” Labrecque says.

The conference panelists include psychiatrists, philosophers, religious scholars, physicians, CDC officials, historians, ethicists and neuroscientists. They will grapple with questions like: When is a human being no longer a person? What is free will? What does end-of-life care look like for those for whom biological death is not the end? How should healthcare resources be allocated when pandemics hit? 

And, finally, what’s behind the public obsession with a gory series like “The Walking Dead?”

“Some scholars have suggested that it’s massive group therapy,” Rommelfanger says. “Zombies are a way to experience fears of death, degeneration and other scary things in ways that you can manage.”

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Photos by Carol Clark

'No offense to anyone,' except women scientists

Karen Rommelfanger, program director of the Neuroethics Program at the Emory Center for Ethics, wrote an opinion piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education. An excerpt:

"What does it mean when a highly successful neuroscientist … states that he is disappointed there aren’t more “super model types” at a major conference? Here’s what he wrote:

My impression of the Conference of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. There are thousands of people at the conference and an unusually high concentration of unattractive women. The super model types are completely absent. What is going on? Are unattractive women particularly attracted to neuroscience? Are beautiful women particularly uninterested in the brain? No offense to anyone. 

"There are some who will say that it is no surprise, given the large number of attendees (30,000 plus), that an ugly statement appeared on an individual’s Facebook page. Some might say it’s inevitable, and perhaps inconsequential, given how large the membership is, that you will find a bad seed. But dismissing [his] comments would be a mistake and represents part of the problem for women."

Click here to read the full article.

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Sharing ideas about the concept of fairness

You've got just two pieces of Halloween candy left in the bowl. Who are you going to give them to?

By Carol Clark

Ask a three-year-old to divide pieces of a favorite candy between himself and two other children and he will likely question why he should share any at all. “At that age, children basically self-maximize. They have a guiltless selfishness,” says Emory psychologist Philippe Rochat, who studies the emergence of a moral sense in children.

By the age of five, children tend to be more principled in the way that they regard others. A five-year-old, for example, may go so far as to split the candies in half to ensure everyone gets an equal share.

“Something else interesting happens around the age of seven,” Rochat says. “The earlier tendency to self-maximize regains power as children start aligning themselves with groups. They generate inequity by favoring their own group when it comes to sharing.” 

Emory is inviting the public to an October 18-19 event, the "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." An international group of scholars, from psychology, law, anthropology, ethics, philosophy, economics and politics will offer their views on the concept of fairness. Click here to see the full schedule and to register for the free event, to be held at the Silverbell Pavilion of the Emory Conference Center.

Fairness is the foundation of what makes us sociable and able to live together, but it can be hard to define.

“It is something that we often take for granted, as ingrained into our being,” Rochat says. “But ideas about what’s fair change through child development, across cultures and amid different political and economic circumstances. The conference aims to bring light and clarity to the subject from multiple scientific perspectives.”

Jerome Bruner, an educational psychologist from New York University, will give the keynote entitled “The Ambiguities of Fairness.” His presentation will cover how the violation of fairness was handled by the ancient Greeks, a group of islanders in remote Melanesia and in contemporary Sicily – the source of the proverb “Vengeance is a dish that must be served cold.”

In addition to Emory researchers, the speakers include scholars from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, Lebanese American University, and the Universidad Autonoma de Entre Rios, Argentina.

President Jimmy Carter will give a presentation at the conference entitled “Fairness and Equity in Politics and Human Affairs.”

The issue of fairness will grow increasingly important as the human population increases, Rochat says. Climate change, pollution, diminishing resources, global commerce and immigration are just a few of the issues that will put more pressure on the question of fairness.

“We want to give a scientific rooting to a problem that affects every part of society,” Rochat says. “Much of the tension in the current U.S. presidential election, for example, boils down to different views of what is fair. How much tax should the rich pay? How much support should the poor get?”

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Images: iStockphoto.com.

Democracy works for Endangered Species Act

The Bald Eagle, a living symbol of democracy as the national bird of the United States, was on the "threatened" list for the lower 48 states until 2007. Photo by Saffron Blaze via Wikipedia Commons.

By Carol Clark

When it comes to protecting endangered species, the power of the people is key, an analysis of listings under the U.S. Endangered Species Act finds.

The journal Science is publishing the analysis comparing listings of “endangered” and “threatened” species initiated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that administers the Endangered Species Act, to those initiated by citizen petition.

“We found that citizens, on average, do a better job of picking species that are threatened than does the Fish and Wildlife Service. That’s a really interesting and surprising finding,” says co-author Berry Brosi, a biologist and professor of environmental studies at Emory University.

The "threatened" gray wolf. Photo by FWS.

Brosi conducted the analysis with Eric Biber, a University of California, Berkeley School of Law professor who specializes in environmental law.

Controversy has surrounded the Endangered Species Act (ESA) since it became law nearly 40 years ago. A particular flashpoint is the provision that allows citizens to petition the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to list any unprotected species, and use litigation to challenge any FWS listing decision. Critics of this provision say the FWS wastes time and resources processing the stream of citizen requests. Another argument is that many citizen-initiated listings are driven less by concern for a species than by political motives, such as blocking a development project.

The study authors counter that their findings bolster the need to keep the public highly involved.

“There are some 100,000 species of plants and animals in North America, and asking one federal agency to stay on top of that is tough,” Biber says. “If there were restrictions on the number of citizen-initiated petitions being reviewed, the government would lose a whole universe of people providing high-quality information about species at risk, and it is likely that many species would be left unprotected.”

Only about 2,000 American Crocodiles, an ESA-protected species, remain in Florida. Photo by Tomas Castelazo via Wikipedia Commons.

The researchers built a database of the 913 domestic and freshwater species listed as “threatened” or “endangered” under the ESA from 1986 on. They examined whether citizens or the FWS initiated the petition, whether it was litigated, and whether it conflicted with an economic development project. They also looked at the level of biological threat to each of the species, using FWS threat scores in reports the agency regularly makes to Congress.

The Northern Spotted Owl. Photo by FWS.

The results showed that listings resulting from citizen-initiated petitions are more likely to pose conflicts with development, but those species are also significantly more threatened, on average, than the species in FWS-initiated petitions.

“The overriding message is that citizen involvement really does work in combination with the oversight of the FWS,” Brosi says. “It’s a two-step system of checks and balances that is important to maintain.”

The public brings diffuse and specialized expertise to the table, from devoted nature enthusiasts to scientists who have spent their whole careers studying one particular animal, insect or plant. Public involvement can also help counter the political pressure inherent in large development projects. The FWS, however, is unlikely to approve the listing of a species that is not truly threatened or endangered, so some petitions are filtered out.

“You could compare it to the trend of crowdsourcing that the Internet has spawned,” Brosi says. “It’s sort of like crowdsourcing what species need to be protected.”

Many people associate the success of the ESA with iconic species like the bald eagle and the whooping crane.

The Mojave Desert population of the Desert Tortoise is in the highest threat category of the ESA. Photo by FWS.

“To me,” Brosi says, “the greater accomplishment of the act is its protection of organisms that don’t get the same amount of attention as a beautiful bird or mammal.”

For example, the FWS turned down a petition to list the Mojave Desert population of the Desert Tortoise, Gopherus agassizii, but that decision was reversed. The Desert Tortoise is now in the ESA highest threat category, and populations of the entire species are thought to have declined by more than 90 percent during the past 20 years.

“One of the biggest threats it faces is urban and suburban expansion, which could have made it politically challenging for the FWS,” Brosi notes. “And yet, the Desert Tortoise is a keystone species that helps support dozens of other species by creating habitats in its burrows and dispersing seeds.”

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'Blade Runner' blows past our ideas of 'disability'

Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics, wrote about Oscar Pistorius, the South African amputee who is running in the 2012 Olympics, as a guest blogger for CNN.com. Dubbed the “Blade Runner,” for his high-tech, carbon-fiber “Cheetah” legs, Pistorius assembled his own legal and scientific team to make a successful bid to compete in the Olympics. But, as Wolpe writes, the story is far from over, with no general guidelines about the future use of “adaptive sports equipment.” An excerpt from the article:

Photo by Elvar Paisson/Wikipedia Commons.

“The issue will have to be revisited by each new athlete who wants to use artificial mechanisms in competition. …

“We do not ultimately know the degree to which technology mimics true physiological function. What if an amputee high jumper wants to use Cheetahs; what level of springiness is "fair" against able-bodied athletes? What about a swimmer who wants to use prosthetic hands or legs? Or an archer whose prosthetic arm does not tremble like an arm of flesh and blood? We do not have metrics that can determine true equivalence with able-bodied athletes.

“Then there is the issue of fairness. In this year's U.S. Olympic trials, Dathan Ritzenhein, the two-time Olympian and 5k American record holder, was eliminated from the marathon team because of leg cramps. Pistorius cannot get cramps in his calves because he does not have any, and so he can never be eliminated based on this criterion.

“The Pistorius case confronts us with two important questions. What is a disability? And what is the rationale for elite sport?”

Read the whole article at CNN.com.

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The placebo effect and psychogenic illnesses

In the above video, Karen Rommelfanger talks about the emerging field of neuroethics, and why neuroscience and technology are affecting both health-care policy and the legal system.  

Karen Rommelfanger, director of the Neuroethics Program at the Emory Center for Ethics, wrote about the placebo effect and psychogenic movement disorders as a guest blogger for Nature.com’s Soapbox Science. Below is an excerpt:

“’It’s not all in my head.’

“This is the sentiment resonating among the 18 teenage girls in Le Roy, New York, who had sudden onset of mysterious symptoms of intrusive and involuntary tics and body movements. …

“Ultimately, the girls were diagnosed with Conversion disorder or mass psychogenic illness, conditions wherein psychological stressors versus ‘organic’ pathology are thought to be literally converted to physical manifestations of symptoms (some more dramatic than others, ranging from paralysis and tics, to blindness and seizure-like movements). …

“Conversion disorder and psychogenic movement disorders (terminology which is often used interchangeably amongst physicians) are paradigmatic of 'medically unexplained illnesses,' estimated to cost the U.S. healthcare system upwards of $100 billion annually.

“However, many of the girls from Le Roy seemed to prefer the diagnosis advanced by pediatric neurologist Dr. Rosario Trifiletti, who suggested the patients were afflicted with PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcus). …

“In re-considering the diagnosis of PANDAS, Dr. Rosario admitted that it would be hard to tell whether some of his patients’ recovery was from the antibiotics he prescribed or a belief in getting better – the ‘placebo effect.’ In the case of the girls from Le Roy, perhaps receiving ‘real medicine’ like antibiotics provided relief because it was consistent with the belief that they had a ‘real’ illness like PANDAS.”

Read the whole article at Soapbox Science.

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The ethics surrounding placebo effects

Neuroscience and a whale of a legal case

Brandom Keim writes in Wired Science about a movement by some animal advocates to give legal rights to whales and dolphins, collectively known as cetaceans. An excerpt from the article:

 “’We have all the evidence to show that there is an egregious mismatch between who cetaceans are and how they are perceived and still treated by our species,’ said evolutionary neurobiologist Lori Marino of Emory University during a February meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“’These characteristics make it ethically inconsistent to deny the basic rights of cetaceans.’ “The discussion at which Marino spoke was titled ‘Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Ethical and Policy Implications of Intelligence,’ and its presence at the AAAS annual meeting, a sort of all-star game for science, signifies a sea-level change in how cetaceans are understood.

“Just a few decades ago, cetacean rights would have been considered a purely sentimental rather than scientifically supportable idea. But scientifically if not yet legally, evidence is overwhelming that cetaceans are special.

“At a purely neuroanatomical level, their brains are as complex as our own. Their brains are also big — and not simply because cetaceans are large. Dolphins and whales have brains that are exceptional for their size, second only to modern humans in being larger than one would expect. They also possess neurological structures that, in humans, are linked to high-level social and intellectual function."

Read the whole article in Wired Science.

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The ethics surrounding placebo effects

Karen Rommelfanger, assistant director of the neuroethics program at the Emory Center for Ethics, wrote about the placebo effect in the Huffington Post. An excerpt:

“Placebos are generally inert substances, like sugar pills, thought to relieve patient symptoms through an expectation of getting better. It seems that, in some reported cases, simply the act of taking medicine or believing that medicine might work can impact patient outcomes. Because of this, placebo effects have historically been discounted as effects that aren't medically ‘real.’

“But what if placebos and their effects were not as ‘inert’ as we once thought, that they might really provide therapeutic benefit? This raises a new ethical question: Are we harming patients by withholding treatments like placebo therapy that might actually help them? …

“Indeed, while placebos are generally defined as having no inherent effectiveness in physically curing illnesses, a growing body of neuroscientific evidence challenges this assumption. Accumulating data suggest that placebos have measurable effects on the brain as well as objective (physicians can measure improvement in patients) and subjective (patients report feeling better) benefits for patients. …

“Some have called placebo effects ‘the endogenous (or your body's own) healthcare system.’”

Read the whole article in the Huffington Post.

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The placebo effect and psychogenic illnesses

Image: iStockPhoto.com 
 

Health law stands, but debate rages on

The Supreme Court ruling that largely supports President Obama’s health care overhaul will not end the contentious debate over health care in the United States.

Health care reform is more complicated than a single piece of legislation, said Kenneth Thorpe, chair of the Department of Health Policy Management at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health, in an interview shortly before the court’s decision.

"A lot of the increase in health care spending over the last two decades is because we've had an explosion in the number of people who have chronic health conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, pulmonary disease, and more," says Thorpe.

"We need to have a better prevention system in this country," says Thorpe, "but we also need to do a better job of caring for chronically ill patients, to keep them out of hospitals, nursing homes and clinics. Three quarters of what we spend in health care is on chronically ill patients. We need to do a better job of engaging them to keep them healthy."

Nurses go into fields to serve 'invisible' people

Each summer, nurses from Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing head to international sites in the developing world – and U.S. sites with conditions similar to the developing world – to spend several weeks caring for “invisible” people mired in abject poverty.

"Service learning trips teach students more than just clinical care,” says Linda McCauley, dean of the nursing school. “They offer students the opportunity to develop respect for unfamiliar cultures while facing real-world health-care challenges such as working with interpreters and medical supply shortages."

Just four hours south of Atlanta in Moultrie, Georgia, the nurses join the Migrant Farm Worker Family Health Program, where they treat adult farm workers in the evening and their children during the day. Watch the video reports from past trips, above and below, to learn more.



The migrant workers “are very appreciative, this may be the only health care they get during the year,” says Judith Wold, director of the Farm Worker Family Health Program. “And it’s a life-changing experience for many of these students, who don’t know where their food comes from.”

The experience is “a reality check,” agrees Maeve Howett, assistant professor in the school of nursing. For many Emory students, she says, “it’s hard to know what it’s like to work 16 hours in 100-degree temperatures. These are the people who bring the food to our table.”

The nurses are the first contact many of the migrant children have to a health care professional. “Especially, working with the children you realize while their parents may be undocumented, these children are the next cohort of our citizens," Howett says. "Reaching out to them and making sure they have good health care and food and housing is just a really important piece of our stewardship to the community.”

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Suprising nuggets about poultry farming

Tom Philpott writes in Mother Jones about a new report on poultry farming from a group called Georgians for Pastured Poultry. An excerpt from Philpott's story:

"The poultry industry has alighted upon Georgia in a way it hasn't in any other individual state. According to the report, which is lavishly footnoted and was prepared with the help of grad students from Emory University's Department of Environmental Health, the U.S. now produces 8.84 billion broilers (meat chickens) every year—of which 1.4 billion, or nearly one in six, are produced in Georgia.

"The state's annual broiler flock, roughly equal in number to the human population of China, takes place on just 2,170 farms—meaning that each one produces a mind-numbing 640,000 birds, collectively churning 2 million tons of chicken litter (feces plus bedding and other waste).

"Concentrating so much waste, laced as it is with arsenic and antibiotic-resistant pathogens along with algae-feeding nitrogen and phosphorpus, is bound to cause problems, which are well laid out in this report."

Read the whole article on Mother Jones.

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Nurses go into the fields to serve migrant workers 

Photo: iStockphoto.com.