Peachtree to Paris: Emory delegation headed to U.N. climate talks

On a recent Saturday, 30 students represented a country, or block of countries, to simulate the U.N. talks. Naomi Maisel, right, made the case for India. "You have to rethink your reality based on all the countries involved and figure out how to make it work," she says. (Beckysteinphotography.com)

By Carol Clark

More than 40,000 people from around the world are expected to descend on Paris, France, from November 30 to December 11, for what many see as the best chance yet for a universal climate agreement. The goal of the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) is to keep global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Everyone from President Obama to Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed will be on the ground in Paris for high-stakes conversations about the fate of the planet. Ten Emory undergraduates and two faculty are also joining the historic event with the status of official U.N. observers.

“This is an unprecedented time,” says Taylor McNair, a senior majoring in environmental sciences and business. “People are coming into this conference with a mindset they have never had before. I’m optimistic that there will be some progress coming out of Paris, and that we will see some serious change during the next few years.”

McNair and three other Emory students will actually spend part of COP21 inside the main hall where delegates from 195 countries will negotiate reductions of their greenhouse gas emissions. And all 10 of the students will be gathering information from the milieu of related conferences, demonstrations, exhibits and informal discussions that will be humming around the main COP21 meeting.

The students will post photos and dispatches on a special web site they are creating for the event (http://climate.emorydomains.org), through the Emory Writing Program's Domain of One's Own. And they will use social media to further connect Emory and the Atlanta community to what’s happening in Paris, as it happens. You can follow their conversations on their Twitter handle @EmoryinParis, and via their hash tag: #PeachtreeToParis. Senior Tyler Stern is helping develop the team's social media platforms, which also include Instagram (EmoryParis15) and Snapchat (EmoryInParis).

After four hours of tense negotiations, students participating in simulated U.N. talks were only able to achieve caps on greenhouse gas emissions for a temperature rise of 3.5 degrees Celsius, short of the 2 degrees goal. 

“Climate change is not an issue that is coming in 100 years. It’s happening now,” says Naomi Maisel, a junior majoring in anthropology who will be making the trip. “We want to convey the sentiments of the people that we meet and give Emory students a sense of how the rest of the world is thinking about and dealing with climate change."

The students plan to also bring back lessons for what everyone can do to get involved. They will help organize an Emory “Climate Week” and a series of COP21 related events on campus in the Spring – including art exhibits, panel discussions and special lectures – in conjunction with the Climate@Emory initiative.

Debating the fate of the planet.

“I’m optimistic that some kind of meaningful deal will be reached in Paris,” says Mae Bowen, a senior majoring in environmental sciences and political science, who is headed for COP21. “But once a deal is made, that’s when the real work starts, making that deal come to fruition.”

The Paris trip is the capstone to a Coalition of the Liberal Arts (CoLA) course, aimed at integrating the liberal arts experience across the humanities and sciences. The course, “Paris is an Explanation: Understanding Climate Change at the 2015 United Nations Meeting in France,” was developed and taught by three faculty: Wesley Longhofer, an expert in organization and management at Goizueta Business School; Eri Saikawa, an expert in climate science in the department of environmental sciences and Rollins School of Public Health; and Sheila Tefft, senior lecturer in the Emory Writing Program. Bowen and another undergraduate, Adam Goldstein, also helped develop the course.

Both Longhofer and Saikawa will accompany the students on the trip to Paris.

Throughout the fall, the students are exploring climate change from environmental, business, media and political perspectives. Saikawa led discussions about the complex atmospheric science surrounding emissions. Longhofer organized mock UN negotiations so that the students could better understand perspectives of the various countries involved. Tefft focused on issues of communications and trained the students in journalistic techniques and technology, including podcasting and social media.

The Emory students have a range of research interests that they plan to hone in on as COP21 is underway. Below are brief bios, and a guide to their plans for Paris.

Taylor McNair

BUSINESS: Taylor McNair is a senior from West Port, Connecticut, majoring in business and environmental sciences. “I have a big interest in renewable energy,” he says. “I’ve had some work experience in that field and it’s helped shape what I think will be the defining challenge of the future: How will we switch from cheap fossil fuels and power our lives and economies with renewable energy?”

He notes that major companies like Google and Facebook have already announced they will be moving toward renewable energy sources for their datasets.

“We need more market-based solutions for addressing climate change,” he says. “It’s beginning to make economic sense to make investments in energy efficiency and renewable fuel sources. I think more people are waking up to the fact that this transition can not only be beneficial from an environmental and health aspect, but also from a financial aspect.”

POLICYMAKING: Mae Bowen is a senior majoring in environmental sciences and political science. Bowen, who is from Panama City, Florida, personally experienced the social and ecological impacts of hurricanes and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Even after the beaches near her home were cleaned and declared safe following the spill, tourists did not return for years due to public perceptions and media coverage.

Mae Bowen

“I was fascinated and frustrated by that,” Bowen says. “I’ve been thinking about the best ways to communicate environmental issues ever since.”

Bowen’s other passion is policymaking. She is a member of the Emory International Relations Association – a team of students that travels to universities across the country to participate in simulations of U.N. negotiations, based on real-world situations and research. While these exercises help Bowen see the challenges of policymaking, they have not made her cynical. “The fact that we have people from different countries and cultures coming together to try and solve a global problem like climate change – that’s kind of awesome,” she says. “I’m just so excited to go to COP21 and get to hear the actual deliberations over the issue I care most about.”

The Paris talks may not achieve the goal of reducing emissions to reach the goal of 2 degrees, “but it’s going to take us forward,” Bowen says. “I’m a big picture person. I would rather have a deal that goes part of the way than to have nothing at all. You have to take things one step at a time.”

Savannah Miller

EMORY AND ATLANTA: Savannah Miller, a senior majoring in environmental sciences and creative writing is focused on climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts at the local level. She is currently an intern for the city of Atlanta, working with the team developing a major climate action plan. “Emory was an early supporter of the Atlanta Better Buildings Challenge,” Miller says. “The university has been a leader in sustainability for years and our efforts keep gaining momentum.”

While at the Paris talks, she will be researching how other communities from around the world are implementing adaptive technologies and strategies for increasing energy efficiency. “One of our biggest goals is to bring back information about environmental policies and communicate them in a way that reaches our generation,” Miller says.

In addition to contributing to the Emory group web site for COP21, Miller has developed her own site, sustainable-directions.com, for communicating environmental issues. Her first post looked at the connections between climate change and recent historic flooding in her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina.

Naomi Maisel

AGRICULTURE: Naomi Maisel, a junior majoring in anthropology, is researching the impact of climate change on agriculture and food security. “Farmers are starting to see effects faster and more intensely, especially in the developing world,” Maiesel says. “We don’t know if a lot of food systems can withstand more or less rainfall, more or less heat, and higher concentrations of carbon dioxide.”

Maisel contacted a farmer outside of Paris who has agreed to give the students a tour of his farm and explain his experience of climate change.

While growing up in San Diego, Maisel recalls that many discussions about climate change were debates about whether it was happening. “Now, most of the conversations I’m hearing revolve around questions like, how bad is it going to be and what are we doing about it,” she says. “People are finally starting to take it seriously. And they realize that it is not just a science problem. It’s an economic issue, a security issue and a public health issue. Everybody is going to be affected, so everybody needs to be involved.”

Clara Perez, a junior majoring in sociology and sustainability, is focused on how climate change will disproportionately impact lower socio-economic groups.

Caiwei Huang (a junior majoring in interdisciplinary studies and political science) and Siyue Zong (a senior environmental sciences major) both want to follow the crucial negotiations of the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters: The United States and China. (Huang is developing a web site to introduce students to the fundamentals of Chinese politics: thecapitalc.org.)

Samuel Budnyk, a junior majoring in comparative literature and music, is especially interested in communicating to the general public and hopes to write a post a day for the Emory Wheel during the talks.

Adam Goldstein and Mark Leone (both seniors majoring in business) will be focused on gathering information about climate finance – the move toward investing in low-carbon and more resilient economies.

Lionfish study explores idea of eating an ecological problem

"Some areas where lionfish have taken over reefs show a marked decrease in biodiversity," says Emory fisheries expert Tracy Yandle.

By Carol Clark

The lionfish is a ferocious ocean carnivore with a flamboyant “mane” of venomous spines. This exotic maroon-and-white creature, native to the Indo-Pacific, made its way west through the aquarium trade. During recent years, however, wild lionfish became established in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic. Releases of lionfish and their eggs from aquariums have been blamed for this invasion.

While the long-term impact of the lionfish is unknown, fisheries experts are worried. The lionfish, from the Pterois genus of venomous marine fish, reproduces rapidly and has few natural enemies outside of the Indo-Pacific to keep its population in check. Meanwhile, lionfish are devouring small crustaceans and the young of commercial fish species like snapper and grouper, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).

“Some areas where lionfish have taken over reefs show a marked decrease in bio-diversity,” says Tracy Yandle, an associate professor in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences. Yandle studies issues around the regulation of the fishing industry and the governance of natural resources.

Luckily, the invasive lionfish is not just ecologically “evil.” It is also tasty. Many describe lionfish meat as a mildly flavored, nicely textured white fish, similar to snapper.

Yandle recently received a $300,000 grant from the NMFS to research the opportunities and challenges of creating a market for lionfish as food in the U.S. Virgin Islands, one area where the invader is proliferating. Co-investigators on the grant include Emory post-doctoral associate Jennifer Tookes, Emory environmental sciences lecturer Michael Page and Sherry Larkin from the University of Florida.

About 30 percent of people in the USVI live below the poverty line and food can be expensive in the islands. The fishing industry is also a traditional part of the USVI’s economy, as well as its cultural heritage, so finding ways to control the lionfish population is especially critical.

“The traditional goal of fisheries regulation is to try to avoid overfishing and to preserve a species,” Yandle says. “In the case of the lionfish in the USVI, the lionfish is invasive, so the concept of over-fishing doesn’t really apply.”

Some people in the Caribbean have already acquired a taste for lionfish and are experimenting with ways to prepare the invader. Photo by Scott Crosson.

As part of the project, Emory undergraduates will spend classroom time next spring learning about fisheries management, research methods and the culture of the USVI. They will then travel to the islands to work in the field.

The students will survey seafood consumers at local markets. and the tourists who often patronize restaurants, to help access the social and economic viability of the lionfish as a food fish. A graduate student from the Masters in Development Practice program will spend a summer practicum in the USVI coordinating efforts between this research project and The Nature Conservancy’s reef preservation efforts.

“Lots of great natural science work has already been done on lionfish,” Yandle says. “This is a human project. We want to talk with the local people and understand how they think about lionfish and whether they are interested in fishing and eating them.”

Lionfish have already started popping up as an “eco-chic” option on a few select U.S. coastal restaurant menus, from Miami to Maine, and in parts of the Caribbean.

“There’s the sustainability factor,” Michael Schwartz of Michael’s Genuine Food and Drink in Miami, told Garden and Gun Magazine, “but also just that the meat tastes good. We make a great lionfish sandwich.”

So what’s the catch?

Lionfish, which grow to about 15 inches, are rarely reeled in by hook and line. They are most often taken by more labor-intensive methods, such as a spear or a hand-held net, or as bycatch in trap fisheries.

Then, there are the long, venomous spines jutting out from every lionfish. Special care must be taken during their handling because these spines can cause painful injuries.

The good news is that the flesh of a lionfish is not poisonous.

The bad news: It does not have much flesh compared to other species like grouper. “Lionfish are bony and the yield rate is about 30 percent, which is less meat than some species,” Yandle says. 

The project will analyze whether there are viable ways to deal with these challenges in the local context of the USVI and create a new market for sustainable seafood.

In addition to consumers, the research team will also survey local fishermen. The fishermen will be asked their knowledge of where lionfish are most prevalent in the local waters, and whether those areas overlap with sites known for ciguatera. Ciguatera is a naturally occurring toxin found in Caribbean waters that can accumulate in coral, algae and seaweed, contaminating fish stocks and leading to food-borne illness.

Page, an expert in geo-spatial analysis, will combine the information from the surveys of the fishermen with previous data gathered by scientists to create maps of the safest and best places to harvest lionfish. The local fishermen will be given books of these maps, as well as a kit with tools to assist fishing for lionfish, at the end of the project.

The findings of the study will be shared in local meetings and added to the online lionfish portal of the Gulf and Caribbean Research Institute, so that the public may benefit.

“At the end of the project, we will figure out if there can be a viable market for the lionfish, and if so, we will provide guidance for how the market could be developed,” Yandle says.

Related:
The case of the golden crabs: Cracking mysteries of how fishermen stay afloat
Fishing for a living comes with a catch

Chemistry Center ignites celebration of science

“Why do I have a garbage can full of liquid nitrogen? Because I’m a chemist,” Doug Mulford, director of undergraduate education for Emory’s Department of Chemistry, told a crowd of enthralled children and adults.

Decked out in safety glasses and a red lab coat printed with flames, Mulford conducted a ribbon immolation ceremony on Saturday, to officially open Emory’s Sanford S. Atwood Chemistry Center addition. The crowd gasped and cheered in the courtyard as Mulford ignited a thermite reaction, a pyrotechnic mixture of aluminum and iron oxide. The reaction shot off sparks and smoking-hot globules of molten iron to sever the ceremonial ribbon.

Rain did not dampen anyone’s enthusiasm for the grand opening, which included fun science demonstrations by students from chemistry, biology and physics.

In fact, chemists love water droplets and clouds. Graduate students from Emory’s Pi Alpha Chemical Society showed how to make both, using liquid nitrogen.

“We’re pouring really hot water into really cold liquid nitrogen, causing it to expand into a plume of air that comes up as a cloud,” explained Daniel Collins-Wildman, who braved nature’s drizzle in the courtyard along with fellow graduate student Amanda Dermer.

In fact, Collins-Wildman said, the liquid nitrogen is so cold (77 Kelvin) that ice particles form in the cloud, creating what is known as a nucleation site where water drops can form.

“I conducted an experiment with this by accident once, when I was making macaroni and cheese,” he said. He brought the water to a roiling boil. As usual, bubbles formed along the sides of the pot, where the temperature is higher and the pot’s irregular surface creates the potential for nucleation. Then the power went out. The bubbles on the sides of the pot disappeared. The water was still hot when he turned the heat back on. Without the small bubbles acting as nucleation sites the water boiled violently, a phenomenon known in chemistry as "bumping."

"I heard this weird sound," Collins-Wildman said. "All those little bubbles that had formed slowly before, this time formed immediately as one huge bubble that came to the surface with a BLURP!”

Related:
Chemistry Center turns up the heat for grand opening

Why women rule, and other hot science topics at the Decatur Book Festival

Illustration: Don Morris

Women can forget about equality with men, warns Emory anthropologist Mel Konner.

It’s even better than that. Why should women embrace mere equality when their movement is toward superiority? It is maleness that has Konner worried in his latest book, “Women After All: Sex, Evolution and the End of Male Supremacy,” which looks at the history and future of gender and power dynamics.

Konner will be one of the featured authors in the ever-popular Science track of the Decatur Book Festival this weekend. He’ll take the stage at 3 pm on Saturday, September 5, at the Marriot Conference Center.

The last line of Konner’s book jacket reads: “Provocative and richly informed, ‘Women After All’ is bound to be controversial across the sexes.”

As Konner acknowledges on his personal web site, the first murmurings came about after a short adaptation of the book ran in the Wall Street Journal. Hundreds of angry men responded within a couple of days. His wife, home alone during that period, double-locked the door. Konner’s editor at the Wall Street Journal apologized for failing to instruct him not to read the comments.

For his part, Konner is hiding in plain sight, saying “Clearly, I’ve touched a nerve, and I’m happy about that.”

Konner talks about a future that his grandson will inhabit, a “new world” that “will be better for him because women help run it.”

You can read more about Konner’s book in the latest issue of Emory Magazine.

Another provocative issue at the intersection of science and society is explored in “Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationships with Immunization,” by Emory historian Elena Conis. She will discuss her book at 4:15 pm on Saturday at the Marriott Conference Center.

Emory's Ken Ono trumpets U.S. win at International Math Olympiad in Thailand

Elphie selfie: Ono stopped in at an elephant sanctuary and snapped this photo during his visit to Thailand for the International Math Olympiad.

Emory mathematician Ken Ono delivered a special lecture recently at the International Mathematical Olympiad, an annual world championship for high school students from more than 100 countries. The trip to Chiang Mai, Thailand, for the event proved more than worthwhile when the six-member U.S. team took first place.

“This is a super big deal,” Ono says. “It has been 20 years since the USA has won the IMO. We should be super proud of the great work done by these six high schoolers under their coach, Po-Shen Loh.”

In addition to his talk, Ono treated the math Olympians to clips from an upcoming film about Indian math genius Srinavasa Ramanujan. Ono served as the math consultant for the film, titled “The Man Who Knew Infinity.”

Watch a highlight reel of the IMO event below. (Ono is the one wearing the Hawaiian shirt.)


Related:
Doing math with movie stars

How a paleontologist got his career on track

Ichnology is a subdiscipline of paleontology that focuses on tracks and traces. "This way of seeing prehistoric life has no greater champion than Emory University paleontologist Anthony Martin," writes Brian Switek on the National Geographic site Phenomena. "Martin has pondered over the meaning of dinosaur burrows, cataloged how traces of modern life can help us interpret the past, and eloquently expressed why no picture of the past is complete without considering what trace fossils tell us."

Watch the above video to learn more about Martin's philosophy on developing "ichnovision."

Related:
Bringing to life 'Dinosaurs Without Bones'
Polar dinosaur tracks open new trail to past

Biologist Berry Brosi on Obama's 'plan bee'

"The fate of bees will affect people very viscerally," says Berry Brosi, shown tending his hive on the roof of Emory's Math and Science Center.

By Carol Clark

President Obama recently launched perhaps the most ambitious national plan ever aimed at protecting insects. The National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honeybees and Other Pollinators calls for an “all hands on deck” approach to slow their alarming declines. “Pollinators are critical to our nation’s economy, food security and environmental health,” notes the plan, prepared by the White House Pollinator Health Task Force.

“It’s an important wake-up call,” says Berry Brosi, an Emory biologist and ecologist whose research encompasses both managed honeybees and wild bees. “It’s past time for us to realize the vital links between biodiversity, our environment and our own well-being. Ultimately, that’s what this national plan is about.”

Honeybee pollination alone is worth more than $15 billion to U.S. agriculture, “providing the backbone to ensuring our diets are plentiful with fruits, nuts and vegetables,” the plan states. “Pollinators, most often honeybees, are responsible for one in every three bites of food we take.”

“This isn’t about saving an exotic animal in a faraway place, like the panda,” Brosi says. “We’re talking about the possibility of not having nuts and fruits for our breakfast, shortages of tomatoes and melons, and rising milk prices due to a lack of alfalfa pollination.”

Bees are important to more than just food crops, he adds. Cotton plants, for example, need pollination to produce the fibers that are a cornerstone of the garment industry.

“The fate of bees will affect people very viscerally,” Brosi says.

Pollinators are responsible for one out of every three bites of food we eat.

Many pollinators, including bees, birds, butterflies, bats and other animals, are in serious decline in the United States and worldwide. Brosi is one of 75 authors working on a global assessment of pollinators for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

“In some places in China, people are hand-pollinating apple trees because they don’t have enough of an insect workforce to do it,” Brosi says. “Examples like that should be sobering. Pollination is an extremely labor-intensive task that bees are specially evolved to do.”

Currently, about 2,000 commercial U.S. beekeepers manage their bee colonies as “livestock,” traveling across the country to service pollination contracts with farmers and honey producers. Each year, however, the number of bee colonies has gone down even as beekeepers struggle to rebuild them. Since the 1940s, when there were about 5.7 million colonies in the United States, the number of managed colonies has shrunk by nearly half, according to the USDA.

“Wild bee populations are also declining wherever we look, although we don’t have good long-term data,” Brosi says. “Several species of bumble bees, for example, are declining at alarming rates, and we’ve seen the extinction of at least one species in the United States during the last 20 years.”

The reasons for these losses appear to be myriad and complex, ranging from shrinking habitats to parasites, diseases and pesticide use.

Monarchs need milkweed to survive.

The phenomenon of the winter migration of the monarch butterfly, from across the United States to Mexico, is also imperiled. The three lowest overwintering populations of the Eastern monarch on record have occurred during the last 10 years. The all-time low was recorded last winter, when the monarchs occupied just 0.67 hectares, or 10 percent of the habitat in Mexico that they did two decades ago.

Emory evolutionary biologist Jaap de Roode, who runs one of the few labs in the world focused on monarch butterflies, says that most of this decline is due to disappearing habitat, especially the milkweed plants that monarchs feed on as caterpillars. “Preservation of remaining milkweed and restoration of habitat are key to maintaining the spectacular migration of this iconic insect,” de Roode says.

The White House pollinator strategy outlines specific aims and a timeline to achieve them, including:

Reduce honeybee colony losses during the winter to no more than 15 percent within a decade. 

Boost the overwintering population of the Eastern monarchs by 225 million butterflies occupying approximately six hectares (15 acres) of habitat in Mexico by 2020. 

Restore or enhance seven million acres of land for pollinators over the next five years. 

The strategy recommends an additional $20 million in funding for the USDA specifically for pollinator research and an additional $1.5 million for the Environmental Protection Agency’s pesticide research programs.

“It’s great that the strategy has specific goals and recommendations, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough, particularly in the area of pesticides,” Brosi says.

Ninety percent of flowering plants and many other animals, not just humans, depend on pollinators for their survival.

A class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, for example, are widely used in the United States but banned in Europe due to their effect on bees. While neonicotinoids may not kill bees outright, they can have devastating sub-lethal effects, Brosi says. Even minute doses of these pesticides have been found to hamper bees’ learning, memory and navigation skills.

The national pollinator plan calls for an expedited review of the use of neonicotinoids in the United States, to be completed by 2018. “That’s not soon enough,” Brosi says, adding that the plan’s recommendation for $1.5 million for the EPA’s pesticide programs is a drop in the bucket.

“We need to do serious assessments of the effects on pollinators for a wide range of pesticide types,” Brosi says. “We don’t know much about alternatives to neonicotinoids. Farmers could replace them with something even worse.”

Ninety percent of flowering plants and many other animals, not just humans, depend on pollinators for their survival. “There could be a lot of hidden declines occurring in association with declines in pollinators that we won’t pick up on for a long time,” Brosi says. “A lot of trees are long-lived, for example, so if their populations are not regenerating normally we may not notice it right away. That’s frightening, and one of the areas I’m most concerned about.”

One optimistic note is that bees and other insect pollinators tend to be highly resilient, Brosi adds. “They can thrive in places you wouldn’t expect, such as cities. It’s an interesting conundrum that pollinators do the worst in industrial agriculture areas where we need them the most. A bigger solution to this problem needs to be re-imagining the ways in which our agricultural system functions. When you limit the diversity of plant species and douse fields with pesticides, it can have a lot of unintended negative consequences.”

Related:
Bees 'betray' their flowers when pollinator species decline 
Emory to ban bee-harming pesticides
Mystery of monarch migration takes new turn
Pumping wings: Muscles make migrating monarchs unique
Democracy works for Endangered Species Act

BEINGS launches work on global consensus for ethical course of biotech

Novelist Margaret Atwood on stage at BEINGS with cognitive scientist Steven Pinker (center) and Thierry Magnin, who is a physicist, Catholic priest and professor of ethics.

By Carol Clark

Some of the world’s preeminent scientists and bioethicists gathered with leaders of philosophy, sociology, law, policy and religion in Atlanta May 18-20 for BEINGS 2015. The landmark summit launched work on a global consensus for the direction of biotechnology for the 21st century.

The setting for this futuristic event: The Tabernacle, an historic former church turned music venue, with red walls swirled with murals and wood floors that creak like the deck of a ship. Novelist Margaret Atwood, creator of fictional laboratory creatures such as the pigoon, gave a keynote.

“The lid is off the Pandora’s Box of genetic modification,” Atwood said. “This is a pivotal moment. Deliberate well. Keep the bar high. Take precautions.”

And with that, the tumultuous voyage began.

BEINGS, short for Biotech and the Ethical Imagination: A Global Summit, was organized by Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics. “The idea is audacious,” Wolpe admitted of their plan to write global guidelines for the aspirations, ethics and policies of biotechnology within the next eight months.

Paul Root Wolpe on the potential and perils of biotechnology:


The BEINGS delegates are up to the task, he added. About 135 delegates from 25 countries joined the summit to take up the challenge of charting a course for how biotechnology can best contribute to human flourishing while navigating the potential perils and ethical pitfalls.

Tensions soon emerged as delegates from different perspectives took the microphone.

Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker threw down the deregulatory gauntlet. “Stay out of the way” of biotech innovation, he urged, as scientists seek to prevent, treat and cure diseases. He cited major improvements in life expectancy around the world largely due to biomedical breakthroughs.

Pinker downplayed fears of eugenics and “designer” babies, while others countered that we are living in a world of competition and should be extremely concerned about the potential power to “edit” the genes of the human germline.

Princeton’s Ruha Benjamin, author of “People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier,” called for the inclusion of those who identify as disabled in discussions about the goals and policies of biotechnology. “Anything less is presumptive and paternalistic,” she said.

It’s important to think about how to distribute benefits, added Benjamin, an assistant professor of African American Studies focused on issues of science and health. “There is no such thing as trickle-down biotech.”

Benjamin and three other delegates summarized their thoughts in an opinion piece for the Guardian: “As we pursue promising treatments, we should also be asking what we are trying to treat; whether it is best treated biomedically; who is included as funders, patients, donors and scientists; who is left out; who profits; and whether or not the treatment masks, depoliticizes, or exacerbates political and social inequality.”

By the afternoon of the first day of the summit, Wolpe said he knew the gathering was going to be a success. “I could tell by the tone of the conversation, and how people were lining up at the microphones to speak, that we had struck a chord,” he says. “We need to bridge a tension in philosophies, but both sides believe that curing human diseases and stopping suffering is an important goal. We have to get outside of the theoretical arguments and start talking about practical, specific issues.”

BEINGS divided discussions into the following major topic areas.

Aspirations and Goals: How should we think about differing goals of biotechnology, from making money, to curing disease, to understanding the basic nature of the organic world, to promoting human flourishing?

Alien Organisms and New (ID)entities: Cellular biotechnologies enable us to engineer novel organisms for industrial, environmental or therapeutic purposes. How might these organisms modify existing social systems and ecosystems, and how do we balance innovation with responsibility?

Bioterror/Bioerror: What are the potential dangers of synthetic biological materials and pathogens in terms of accidents or criminal intent?

Ownership: Should custom-designed genetic material or organisms be subject to patents and copyright?

Donorship: How can government and private sector entities collaborate to protect donors and create standards for bio- and stem-cell banks?

“All voices have a place,” Wolpe stressed. “We don’t have to agree on everything. Wherever we have honest, important disagreement in an area, we will note it in the final document.”

At the end of the summit, more than 80 delegates committed to actively working on writing the guidelines for the five major topic areas. Another 30 agreed to serve as reviewers and editors as drafts are ready. Their goal is to have a final document by next January, which they will submit for publication by a major journal.

“We do not represent just a single segment of society or government body or special interest,” Wolpe says. “We’re a group of global citizens who believe that for biotechnology to be used successfully it has to be used ethically. We as a group can create a document that is persuasive and has value.”

Related:
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Blurring the lines between life forms

A physicist's guide to foam and fortune

From foam to Frankenstein: Sidney Perkowitz enjoys a cappuccino (extra foam) at the Ink and Elm in Emory Village. So far this year he has published his first e-book, Universal Foam 2.0, and started work on a new book project, "Frankenstein 2018." (Photo by Carol Clark)

By Carol Clark

You never know what’s going to bubble up on the agenda of physicist Sidney Perkowitz, Emory Candler Professor of Physics Emeritus. Since the 76-year-old Perkowitz retired in 2011, he seems to pop up everywhere, from the Atlanta Science Festival to South Korean national television to a high-level policy meeting in Washington DC.

After 42 years of research and teaching at Emory, he has shifted his focus from the lab and classroom to the wider world. His mission: Communicating science in ways that get people interested and better informed.

“You’re doing something good for society if you can convey science well to a lay person,” Perkowitz says. “You can have an influence over everyone from a child to a congressman.”

Perkowitz began writing about physics for a general audience when he was about 50. “It forced me to be humble because I had a lot to learn,” he says. “Several editors really helped improve my writing. One gave me this great tip: “Remember, you don’t want to simplify the science. You want to simplify the writing.’”

Perkowitz has written six books about physics geared for a lay audience. His most successful, “Universal Foam,” was published in 2001 and remained in print through 2008, including five foreign editions. The book describes the myriad incarnations and inherent mysteries of foam, from densely packed bubbles floating atop a cappuccino to ocean white caps, soap bubbles, and exotic foamy materials used in aerospace and medicine.

Watch a clip from an English-language version of a South Korean documentary inspired by Perkowitz' book on foam, including interviews with Perkowitz:


Last fall, the book brought a Korean television film crew to Perkowitz’s door. “The filmmakers had contacted me out of the blue and said they wanted to make a documentary for children based on the book,” he says. “They sent over a cameraman, a sound guy, a director and a translator.”

So that’s how Perkowitz found himself in his kitchen, brewing a cappuccino as he was being interviewed about the wonders of foam. “We had a wonderful time,” he says of the experience. “The most amazing part was they paid me! It wasn’t a lot, but I was just doing it for fun. So that was a pretty great deal.”

The documentary, “Bubbles That Can Change the World,” was funded by the South Korean government and shown throughout the country as a way to inspire children’s interest in science.

After the publisher stopped putting out new editions of “Universal Foam,” Perkowitz obtained the rights so that he could update it himself as an e-book in January. He titled it “Universal Foam 2.0” “It’s amazingly easy,” Perkowitz says of the process of producing an e-book. He adds that he primarily did it to gain experience with e-books, and doesn’t expect it to sell many copies at this stage. “I just love learning something new and being engaged,” he explains. “And I want to feel that I’m doing something useful for science.”

During the past four years, Perkowitz has also written 20 magazine articles, given public talks, and serves on the science outreach committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which takes him to Washington DC occasionally.

A selection of some of the many editions of Mary Shelley's classic "Frankenstein." (Andy Marbett)

Perkowitz is now at work on this seventh book, which has the working title "Frankenstein 2018." He is both contributing a chapter and co-editing the book, an anthology due out March 11, 2018, the bicentennial of the publication of Mary Shelley’s novel.

“There is something in humanity that wants to find a way to create life and to live forever. But that same desire is also full of fear,” Perkowitz says of the enduring appeal of Frankenstein.

The subject is more relevant than ever. Emory’s Center for Ethics is hosting a major international gathering in Atlanta May 17 to 19, to discuss both aspirations and guidelines for the era of synthetic biology. Biotechnology and the Ethical Imagination: A Global Summit (BEINGS) will bring together delegates from the top 30 biotechnology producing countries of the world.

“The idea of genetic engineering and creating an entirely new being is the 21st-century version of Frankenstein,” Perkowitz says. “Earlier, creating life was envisioned as stitching together dead body parts and zapping them with electricity. Now it’s about getting a micro-scalpel and moving around genes. Some people are afraid of genetically modified food. Imagine how they’ll feel about genetically modified animals and people.”

Perkowitz’ co-editor for the book project is Eddy Von Mueller, an Emory lecturer in film and media studies. The two have already rounded up a dozen contributors for the project, from religion, the arts and sciences, and secured a contract from Pegasus Books.

“Frankenstein is taught often in college classrooms, so we think this anthology might be a good seller as a textbook,” Perkowitz says. “The publisher agreed.”

Graduate strives to help female scientists in Africa

Emory graduate Kwadwo "Kojo" Sarpong, a native of Ghana, felt compelled to do something about the opportunity gap in Africa between men and women scientists. Emory Photo/Video.

By Kimber Williams, Emory Report

When a White House invitation to the first U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit showed up in his email last year, Emory senior Kwadwo Sarpong didn’t give it much thought. “I honestly thought it was some kind of a joke,” says Sarpong, who graduated from Emory this month with a degree in neuroscience and behavioral biology (NBB). 

But when a second invitation soon followed, Sarpong took notice.

“The Obama Administration’s Office of Public Engagement was interested in what I was doing to bridge the opportunity gap between male and female scientists in Africa,” explains Sarpong, who is known to his friends as “Kojo.”

That’s how Sarpong, who is from Ghana, found himself attending an event with top African officials, international leaders and U.S. cabinet members, where he represented the African Research Academies for Women (ARA-W), an organization that he co-founded to nurture the interests of aspiring female scientists in Africa by providing hands-on experience in research laboratories.

Sarpong arrived in Atlanta in 2009 with one goal: education.

Growing up in Ghana, the youngest of four boys, he was deeply aware of shortcomings within the nation’s healthcare system. When one of his brothers became ill with paralytic polio, he recalls that some blamed it on evil spirits.

Stricken with severe fevers while growing up, Sarpong spent considerable time in hospitals himself, an experience that would feed a budding interest in medicine.

During his first year of studies at the University of Ghana, Sarpong was thrilled to learn he’d “won a green card” and the chance to travel to the U.S. “Like a lot of African students, I had very high hopes and dreams — I was going to transfer directly into an American university,” he recalls, smiling. “Instead, I ended up living with my cousin in Atlanta and working as a housekeeper at a medical center and a cashier and warehouse associate at Walmart.”

As friends back in Ghana were preparing to graduate from college, Sarpong studied their Facebook photos. While their lives were moving forward, his seemed stuck. “Everybody thinks that you come to America and your life will change,” Sarpong says. “I was beginning to wonder if I had made a mistake.”

In time, he began taking classes in chemistry at Georgia Perimeter College. Motivated by his brother’s experience with polio, “I became very interested in neuroscience,” he says.

With the help of Emory’s Initiative to Maximize Student Development — a program funded by the National Institutes of Health to expand scientific workforce diversity — Sarpong arrived as a transfer student in Fall 2013.

Talking about his experiences one day with a friend who had graduated from the University of Ghana, he was shocked to learn that she had taken a job as a bank teller — the only position she could find. “There is nothing here for women in science,” she told him.

Sarpong felt compelled to do something about the opportunity gap that exists in Ghana — and much of the developing world — between men and women in the sciences. “Ghana is still a male-dominated culture,” he explains. “I began thinking about what I could do to create social change with something I really love — research.”

Read more in Emory Report.

'BEINGS' set to generate global biotech guidelines

By Carol Clark

The recent news that China is trying to “edit” the genes of human embryos, in a way that would permanently alter their DNA, was met with alarm by many in the scientific community. Researchers from the United States were among those who called for a halt to such experiments until the safety and ethical implications are fully considered.

“We’re at the point where we can manipulate life in ways that have great promise to cure some of our most dreaded diseases, expand agriculture and clean up the environment,” says Paul Root Wolpe, director of Emory’s Center for Ethics. “But the ability to create new forms of life also holds the potential to cause disease or create organisms that could be environmentally toxic. So we need to be really careful when we’re trying to change some of these basic building blocks of life that we do so thoughtfully. We need to have boundaries around what should and shouldn’t be done.”

The Center for Ethics is hosting a major international summit in Atlanta May 17 to 19, to discuss both aspirations and guidelines for the era of synthetic biology. Biotechnology and the Ethical Imagination: A Global Summit (BEINGS), will bring together delegates from the top 30 biotechnology producing countries of the world.

Heading up the discussions will be a faculty of 25 distinguished scholars, including leaders in science, law, ethics, industry, philosophy, religion and the arts and humanities. Among the luminaries: Novelist Margaret Atwood, synthetic biologist George Church and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker.

The public is also encouraged to register and attend BEINGS. “The kinds of decisions that we need to make about biotechnology should not just be made by scientists,” Wolpe says. “I think it’s everybody’s responsibility to participate in this conversation.”

Regulations have not kept pace with rapid advances in biotechnology, he says. “We are currently dealing with a kind of regulatory chaos, not only among different countries but even within the United States. Different states, for example, have different standards for how to use stem-cell research.”

BEINGS 2015 will kick off with a key question: What are the major goals of biotechnology?

“We want to articulate the most important aspirational principles of biotechnology and how it can contribute to human flourishing,” Wolpe says. “Once we agree on where we want to go, then I think it becomes easier to talk about how we create boundaries to get there safely.”

In the months following the summit, the delegates will work on developing an international consensus document for biotechnology guidelines, the first of its kind. “Our hope is that it will serve as a kind of touchstone, and a model for ethical principles and policy standards worldwide,” Wolpe says.

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Blurring the lines between life forms

WaterHub recycles wastewater to heat and cool buildings

Click here if video does not appear on screen.

Emory's WaterHub replicates the natural system of a wetland to recycle and treat sewer water so that it can be used to heat and cool the campus buildings. The facility is the first of its kind in the nation. You can take a tour of the facility this Friday, located behind the sorority houses on Eagle Row, as part of the grand opening of the WaterHub. Watch the video to learn more.

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Tapping nature to clean wastewater

Climate@Emory: Change is in the air

Steve Sclar, left, recently demonstrated on the Emory campus how he gathers indoor air quality data. (Emory Photo/Video)

By Carol Clark

Steve Sclar traveled to Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in China last summer to research the indoor air quality of nomads, who burn yak dung in their stoves for warmth and to cook their food. His measurements showed high levels of fine particulate matter in the smoked-filled tents and homes of some of the nomads. But Sclar also caught a glimpse of how global pollutants from industrialization may be impacting the isolated realm of the Tibetan plateau.

"The Tibetans are noticing changes in their climate and they're worried about the effects," says Sclar, an MPH student in Rollins School of Public Health's Department of Environmental Health. "Their grassland is getting poorer in the summer months and they see the snow pack getting smaller on the holiest mountain range in the region, known as Amnye Machen.

"I asked one nomad, 'What happens if Amnye Machen loses all of its snow?' He told me, 'Then it's the end of the world.'"

Climate change "is the biggest environmental health problem we face," Sclar says, "and yet it is so hard to pin down. There's no one country or entity to blame, and there is no one field of study that has the solution. We need to figure out how to reconcile all this."

Climate@Emory is an initiative made up of more than 50 faculty and staff from 20 departments across the university. Its goal is to harness Emory's strengths to help it play a leading role in the global response to perhaps the most complicated and pressing problem of our time. Since its launch last fall, the initiative has worked to support, connect and expand Emory's climate-related scholarship, teaching and community engagement.

"It's really not possible to understand climate change from the standpoint of any one discipline," says Eri Saikawa, who is Sclar's adviser and one of the founders of Climate@Emory. She is an assistant professor at Rollins and in the Department of Environmental Sciences. "We want to connect the dots to improve the quality and impact of Emory's research and provide a platform for intellectual engagement on climate change."

Read more in Emory Report.

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Creating an atmosphere for change

Physicist's research of glassy materials nets NSF CAREER award

Physicist Justin Burton at work in his lab, where he studies amorphous matter. (Emory Photo/Video)

By Carol Clark

Emory physics professor Justin Burton received a $625,000 award from the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. The five-year CAREER grants, among the NSF’s most prestigious awards, support scientists who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research integrated with excellence in education.

Burton will apply the award to his research into amorphous matter, or substances made up of granules in jumbled, irregular states. These substances include everything from the foam on your cup of cappuccino to the vast, slushy mélange of a glacier as it breaks down and flows into the sea. Amorphous matter also encompasses soft condensed matter such as toothpaste, shaving cream, plastic and glass, which are collectively known as “glassy” materials.

“Amorphous material is everywhere, it’s among the most common states of solid matter,” Burton says, “and yet, there’s a lot that we don’t understand about it.”

Crystalline material, by contrast, is relatively rare but well understood by physicists. Crystals have a structural order that makes them easier to conceptualize and define mathematically. “Research into the thermodynamic behavior of crystals at ultra-low temperatures led to our understanding of how they conduct heat,” Burton says. “That’s one of the fundamental triumphs of quantum mechanics. It helped lay the foundation for a lot of important tools of the modern world, from computers to cell phones.”

Lacking the well-defined order of crystals, amorphous materials often behave in peculiar, unpredictable ways. Burton uses the example of a pile of sand at the bottom of an hourglass. “What seems stable enough can suddenly avalanche upon the addition of a few extra grains,” he says. “Or even a traffic jam: What determines the boundary between a flowing state and a rigid one? Our world is full of similar examples where systems exist in a region near marginal stability.”

A view inside the vacuum chamber, where colloidal particles are suspended in a flat disc, lit by the green light of a laser. Photo by Justin Burton.

Burton’s lab is creating model systems to simulate the dynamics of the microscopic granules of amorphous, glassy matter at ultra-low temperatures of below 1 degree Kelvin. That’s colder than the deepest reaches of space.

In a vacuum chamber, filled with argon gas, the lab conducts experiments. The chamber is filled with ionized argon gas. “It’s a plasma, or a gas that has had its electrons ripped away from its atoms,” Burton explains. “The electrons are constantly being ripped away and resembling.”

Colloidal particles, tiny as dust specks, are suspended in the plasma of the vacuum chamber, to stand-in for the molecules of an amorphous material. By altering the gas pressure inside the chamber, and varying the size of the particles, the lab members can study how the particles behave as they move between an excited, free-flowing state into a jammed, stable position.

They can also simulate how molecules in a stable position react to a disturbance. “We want to create a wave, like dropping a pebble into a still pond to make ripples, and study that dynamic,” Burton says. “That could help us understand, for instance, how sound moves through a glassy material.”

Burton’s lab will use another model, involving polymer hydrogel particles that expand or shrink in response to salt concentrations, to study Casimir forces, a special type of long-ranged force that can arise between objects in a highly fluctuating medium.

In addition to opening a window into the molecular motions common in glasses, the research could shed light on the connection between the dynamics and disorder in a broad range of physical systems, Burton says.

In parallel to his research effort, the CAREER award will also fund the creation of an after-school science club at an elementary school in Dekalb County. Burton and his graduate students will lead children in hands-on activities and experiments that give insights into basic principles of physics.

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The physics of falling icebergs
Physicists crack another piece of the glass puzzle

Atlanta Science Festival offers formula for fun

Emory chemist Doug Mulford gets kids fired up for science during a demonstration at last year's Atlanta Science Festival. Emory Photo/Video

By Carol Clark

Start with a beaker as big as metro Atlanta. Add scientists, artists, music, dance, robots, games, movies, lab tours and chances to try new technology and conduct fun experiments. Throw in some liquid nitrogen ice cream, giant soap bubbles and Tibetan momos. Now mix with hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers and thousands of curious people of all ages. Finally, jump in yourself.

The Atlanta Science Festival is back, March 21-28, with its ever-evolving formula for fascination and fun. The eight-day celebration of local science and technology encompasses more than 120 events at 70 venues throughout Atlanta, including many on the Emory campus. The festival culminates in the Exploration Expo at Centennial Park on Saturday, March 28.

“We want to help our community become proud of the resources, research and discoveries happening here, and all the opportunities for careers,” says Jordan Rose, co-director of the festival and associate director of the Emory College Center for Science Education. “The more we can connect people to local scientists and their innovations, the more people can get excited about science in general.”

Last year, 30,000 people attended the week-long inaugural Atlanta Science Festival, including 16,000 who came to the Exploration Expo, which was chaired by Emory chemist Monya Ruffin. "It’s hard to predict attendance this year for all of the events over eight days, but we’re expecting at least 20,000 people for the Expo alone,” Rose says. “It’s going to be a busy day at the park.”

About 20 booths at the Expo will feature Emory science faculty and students. ChEmory, for example — the outreach group made up of Emory chemistry undergraduates — will return with its popular dance pit. Kids can kick their shoes off and experience moving to music through a non-Newtonian fluid.

Several events are scheduled on the Emory campus on Saturday, March 21, targeting both adults and children. You can find details about all the Emory events here.

Read more in Emory Report.

Taking hands-on mentoring to new heights

Click here, if video does not appear on screen.

By Marsha Walton, via AAAS

Emory biology professor Patricia Marsteller makes it clear to students of all ages that they can change the world at any time. And it doesn’t have to be a big gesture.

At the Center for Science Education (CSE), she helps create hands-on research and curriculum for students and teachers at the pre-college, college and postgrad levels. With one local grant, for example, her team of science educators worked with high school students to make connections between science and the arts.

Pat Marsteller

Another school wanted to use science to learn more about homelessness in metropolitan Atlanta. “The students actually went out and talked with homeless people under bridges, with help from grad students and teachers. But then they decided they wanted to do something about it. They used their science class to build little solar heaters for homeless people. So they could see right there where they could make a difference,” she said.

Marsteller, a AAAS fellow, joined the Emory faculty in 1990 with a focus on bringing more women and minorities to biology and medicine. Today, her mission has broadened to improving science education by mentoring learners from “K through gray.” And she says doing that well literally takes a “hands-on” approach.

One of her liveliest examples? On day one of the class Biology, Physics, Chemistry and Design Principles of Coffee and Beer, Emory students dissected the workings of coffeemakers rescued from yard sales. “We had them take them apart, and try to explain how they worked,” said Marsteller. “They were just astonished. None of them had ever done anything like that before. But it grabbed them.”

She says students who are academic stars—but who have never taken apart a tractor, car or other machinery—may be missing the problem-solving experience that’s crucial for developing a scientific mindset. “They can learn facts and spit them back at you, but that is not what we want them to do. We want them to find new ways of doing things. The science changes all the time and they need to learn to investigate claims on their own,” she said.

Marsteller grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania, the oldest of 11 children. All those siblings and animals gave her plenty of chances for hands-on, unscripted learning. Although she was first headed toward a career as a physician, her interest began shifting toward research and science education after a discouraging undergraduate experience. “I encountered some really bad teaching,” she said.

Her search for her own scientific future became a wide one, ranging from clinical research in pediatric cardiology to analyzing cattle nutrition.



But it was volunteer work with alligators at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory in South Carolina that intrigued her so much that it galvanized her scientific focus on research and teaching. She studied evolution of animal behavior and genetics for her graduate degrees, including the study of an alligator’s ability to use celestial navigation. “We kept finding that if you relocated an alligator, even hundreds of miles away, they would find their way back home. Well, how do they do that?” she said.

Her own captivation with reptile research early in her career inspires her to guide students to find their passion, even if it takes them in a whole new direction from where they started. She describes herself as a “change agent” and “transformer.”

As director of CSE, she helps undergraduates with that quest with a simple exercise. “It’s like a Venn diagram. There are three circles: What are you good at? What do you like to do? What will make a difference in the world?”

She says students who soar in the sciences often are channeled into medical careers, for financial security or to make their parents happy. She stresses that scientists in other specialties can make practical things happen through research.

One of her proud creations is the SURE program, the Summer Research Experience at Emory. Undergrads from Emory and other schools are paired with grad students for summer projects. Most go on to succeed in graduate programs.

While attracting women and underserved students has shown success, Marsteller says creating diversity among science faculties has been painfully slow and frustrating. “People on the search committees write to their friends, and their friends all look like them,” she said, adding that more of an effort needs to be made by major institutions to stay in touch with successful alumni with PhDs and bring them back to join the faculty.



Marsteller is convinced that mentors are the key to success at every level of STEM education. “There needs to be a kind of cascade of mentoring, from faculty to postdoc to undergrad to high school. And not just for research, but for professional development, for strategy in launching a career,” she said.

Marsteller also helps her students bring scientific understanding to the public about some of today’s critical issues, including climate change, population growth and sustainable energy. She encourages them to reach out in coffee shops, bars, or botanical gardens. She says podcasts, websites, and public talks have just “taken off” with popular support. “I think we can engage people from all walks of life into thinking about these issues,” she said.

Whether it is staring down a baby alligator, reimagining a coffeemaker, or embarking on a nontraditional scientific quest, Marsteller is a vocal advocate and example of the rewards of following the path that is most inspiring. “Students need that nourishing and pushing a little bit,” she said.

Copyright by AAAS, used with permission.

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Cultivating brains for science
Bringing new blood to high school science

Why debunked autism treatment fads persist

The emotional appeal of facilitated communication is "very powerful and understandable," says psychologist Scott Lilienfeld. "The problem is, it doesn't work."

By Carol Clark

The communication struggles of children with autism spectrum disorder can drive parents and educators to try anything to understand their thoughts, needs and wants. Unfortunately, specialists in psychology and communication disorders do not always communicate the latest science so well.

These factors make the autism community especially vulnerable to interventions and “therapies” that have been thoroughly discredited, says Scott Lilienfeld, a psychologist at Emory University.

“Hope is a great thing, I’m a strong believer in it,” Lilienfeld says. “But the false hope buoyed by discredited therapies can be cruel, and it may prevent people from trying an intervention that actually could deliver benefits.”

Lilienfeld is lead author of a commentary, “The persistence of fad interventions in the face of negative scientific evidence: Facilitated communication for autism as a case example,” recently published by the journal Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention. Co-authors of the commentary are Julia Marshall (also from Emory) and psychologists James Todd (from Eastern Michigan University), and Howard Shane (director of the Autism Language Program at Boston Children’s Hospital).

The authors describe a litany of treatments for autism that have been attempted with little or no success over the years, including gluten- and casein-free diets, antifungal interventions, chelation therapy, magnetic shoe inserts, hyperbaric oxygen sessions, weighted vests, bleach enemas, sheep-stem-cell injections and many more.

As a case study, however, the article focuses on one intervention in particular: Facilitated Communication, or FC.

FC purports to allow previously nonverbal individuals with autism and related disorders to type by using a keyboard or letter pad. A facilitator offers support to the individual’s arms, allowing him or her to type words and complete sentences.

Soon after its introduction into the United States in the early 1990s, however, FC was convincingly debunked. Studies overwhelmingly demonstrated that facilitators were unconsciously guiding the hands of individuals with autism toward the desired letters, much as individuals using a Ouija board unknowingly guide the planchette to certain numbers and letters.

“The emotional appeal of FC is very powerful and understandable,” Lilienfeld says. “And no doubt the overwhelming majority of people who use FC are sincere and well-meaning. The problem is, it doesn’t work.”

In some cases, the authors note, FC has resurfaced with minor variations in the technique and a new name, such as “rapid prompting,” or “supported typing.”

By reviewing published surveys of practitioner use and canvassing the popular and academic literatures, Lilienfeld and his co-authors show that FC continues to be widely used and widely disseminated in much of the autism community despite its scientific refutation. They examine a number of potential reasons for the surprising persistence of FC and other autism fads. They note that the inherent difficulties in treating autism may give rise to an understandable desire for quick fixes of many kinds.

Lilienfeld and his colleagues underscore the pressing need for experts in the autism field to better educate the public about not only what works for the condition, but what does not.

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Poison power: From Cleopatra to Cyclops

Why did Cleopatra choose to be bitten by a poisonous snake when she had access to any number of plant poisons to commit suicide?

In the video above, Emory ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave explains how the Egyptian queen experimented before picking her poison. She also describes how the myth of Cyclops may have originated from the effects of a medicinal herb.

Poison has shaped history, myth and medicine in myriad ways. Over time, people have discovered ingenious ways to transform and make use of plant poisons for use in agriculture, fishing, hunting and medicine. Learn more about how poison plants are used in medicine in the video below.

Quave, an expert in the interactions of people and plants, and an assistant professor of dermatology in Emory’s School of Medicine, is among a lineup of guest lecturers at the Fernbank Museum, in conjunction with the special exhibition "The Power of Poison," continuing through May 1.


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The hunt for alien life forms, on Earth and beyond

Thermophiles, a type of extremophile, produce some of the bright colors of grand Prismatic Springs in Yellowstone National Park. Extremophiles may provide clues about how life formed in the extreme environmental conditions of early Earth. (Photo by Jim Peaco, National Park Service.)

Emily Conover attended the session at the recent annual meeting of the AAAS on "Searching for Alternative Chemistries of Life," co-organized by Emory chemist David Lynn. She wrote about the session's panel discussion for Science Magazine. Below is an excerpt from her article:

"Rather than searching for new forms of life on Earth or in the stars, other scientists study the question from the bottom up, looking for possible precursors of life. Chemist David Lynn of Emory University in Atlanta points out that misfolded proteins—like the those implicated in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's—show some similarities to life, namely that they can generate diversity in the different ways that they fold, and can undergo chemical evolution, in which those folded proteins are selected not genetically, but chemically. Such precursors could form complex chemical networks, which might be the foundation of radically different life elsewhere in the universe."

Read the whole article in Science.

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Emory math ranks second in Discover Magazine's 'People's Choice' awards

The people have spoken: An Emory discovery, “Mother Lode of Mathematical Identities,” is Discover Magazine’s second most popular science story for 2014, based on readers’ votes.

Emory mathematician Ken Ono, working with Michael Griffin and Ole Warnaar, found a framework for the celebrated Rogers-Ramanujan identities and their arithmetic properties, yielding a treasure trove of algebraic numbers and formulas to access them. The editors of Discover had previously ranked the find 15th on their list of the 100 most important stories for 2014.

The editors opened up the top 16 stories to a “People’s Choice” contest, allowing people to pick their favorites through several rounds of voting. A social media campaign by the Emory community and others helped the math discovery garner second place, just behind a Harvard story about stem cell therapies.

“Michael, Ole and I were pleased just to be among the final 15,” Ono says. “All of these scientific breakthroughs were important. We were honored that so many people wanted to support math. We’re especially grateful to members of the Emory Community and the University of Chicago, my alma mater, for participating and spreading the word.”

Ono’s newest discovery, “Mathematicians prove the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture,” will be generating buzz in 2015. Ono will be presenting the proof of the conjecture, including the work of collaborators, on January 11 at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Antonio, the largest mathematics meeting in the world.

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