Ghosts of the past leading to modern science

Detail from the cover of "History Lessons: A Memoir of Madness, Memory and the Brain," by Clifton Crais.

Among the raft of recent books by Emory faculty are three from historians that draw heavily from science to tell their stories. Below are summaries of the volumes from the latest issue of Emory Magazine.

HISTORY LESSONS: A MEMOIR OF MADNESS, MEMORY AND THE BRAIN, by Clifton Crais.  For those moved to tears easily, prepare for a river. Crais offers a haunting account of his childhood—the parts he can remember. He suffers from chronic childhood amnesia, the most common and least understood form of the disorder. Crais grew up in New Orleans with an alcoholic mother who tried to drown him in the bathtub at the age of three. A year later, she tried to kill herself.

As Crais notes of his training as a historian, “I have spent a lifetime sifting through the records of others . . . revealing the hidden patterns of our common past.” And yet—“It’s my own life I can’t remember.” He turns to plane tickets, postmarks, court and medical records, and crumbling photo albums for answers. And he consults experts about the neuroscience of memory. In the end, Crais reaches, if not an epiphany, at least accommodation with what is. “There is something different now,” he writes. “It’s not memory but still powerful: the knowledge that helps fill in the blank spaces where a child once walked all those lost years ago.”

A CLIMATE OF CRISIS: AMERICA IN THE AGE OF ENVIRONMENTALISM, by Patrick Allitt.  Although environmentalism has been widely reported for more than four decades, this is the first general intellectual history of the movement. Allitt takes readers back, well beyond the first Earth Day in April 1970. In his mind, the movement owes its birth to the “mood of crisis created by the first atom bombs and the Cold War arms race,” which influenced ideas about population, resources, and climate change. 

Does the media hype the dangers to the planet? The answer is almost certainly, in part because the science is complicated. As Allitt notes, “Only when scientists’ cautious conclusions were turned into thrilling headlines predicting disaster would citizens take notice.”

VACCINE NATION: AMERICA'S CHANGING RELATIONSHIP WITH IMMUNIZATION, by Elena Conis.  The sugar cube that many of us remember containing our polio vaccine was a treat for the tongue. The recent history of vaccination in the US is more bitter, but it wasn’t always so.

As Conis reports, in 1943 New York health official Leona Baumgartner reported results of a poll exploring Americans’ attitudes toward immunization: more than 90 percent trusted in vaccines. This is a far cry from conditions in the new millennium, as the role of the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine in autism is debated endlessly; the vaccine against HPV (human papillomavirus) sparked controversy when lawmakers attempted to require it for sixth graders; and parents marched on Washington. As Conis points out, “The larger debate over vaccination . . . wasn’t just about vaccine risks. At a deeper level, it was a debate about the roles of children in our society, our heath care politics, gender relations, chronic disease risks, and more.”

The search for alternative chemistries of life heats up

Research into alternative chemistries of life has implications for everything from the health of humans to the health of Earth’s ecosystems. (NASA photo)

By Carol Clark

Ideas about directing evolution of life forms on Earth and finding life on other planets are rapidly morphing from science-fiction fantasy into mainstream science, says David Lynn, a chemist at Emory University.

“These areas of science are rapidly coming of age because of our increasing knowledge and advancing technology. It’s an exciting time. We’re on the threshold of answering fundamental questions including: What is life? Are there forms of life that we haven’t even yet imagined? Are we alone in the universe?”

A panel discussion, “Searching for Alternative Chemistries of Life on Earth and Throughout the Universe,” is set for Friday, February 13, at 3 pm, during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Jose. Lynn co-organized the panel with Jay Goodwin, an Emory research fellow and an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow.

In 2012, Lynn, Goodwin and four other scholars led the “Workshop on Alternative Chemistries of Life: Empirical Approaches,” supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They pulled together an international group of nearly 40 scientists working at the boundary of non-living and living systems for the Washington workshop. The group included microbiologists, marine biologists, biochemists, geochemists, synthetic chemists, atmospheric chemists, and virologists.

The resulting report, now available online, developed a set of research findings and next steps for exploring the concept of alternative chemistries.

The AAAS panel session will discuss many of the main ideas outlined in the workshop report, and the key question: How do we unravel the complex interplay of planetary, chemical and biological evolutionary networks, and what might we gain from the confluence?

“We’re at a critical point where we need to mobilize resources and bring together different research realms and take a holistic approach to this question,” Lynn says. Such research could have implications for everything from the health of humans to the health of Earth’s ecosystems as the planet undergoes climate change and a sixth mass extinction of life’s diversity, he adds.

Lynn is one of four speakers set for the AAAS panel. He will discuss his own research, which involves a bottom-up approach to exploring how organisms evolved from non-living to living systems.

Caltech geo-biologist Victoria Orphan will discuss taking a top-down approach to studying alternative chemistries of life by tracing the biological diversity back through time to its origins.

Biochemist John Chaput, from Arizona State University, will talk about his work at the interface of research into alternative chemistries of life, where the bottom-up and top-down approaches meet.

Astrophysicist Carolyn Porco, from the Space Science Institute, will discuss efforts underway to answer one of the most beguiling questions facing humankind: Is there life beyond Earth?

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Interstellar: Starting over on a new 'Earth'

Amazonian study quantifies key role of grandparents in family nutrition

A Tsimane grandmother (right) provides support for her infant daughter, her adult daughter (left), granddaughter and grandson.

By Carol Clark

Anyone who has ever loved a grandmother or grandfather knows the nurturing role that grandparents can play. A study of indigenous people in Amazonia, who survive on food they hunt, forage or cultivate, quantifies the evolutionary benefit of that role. The results show that grandparents contribute a biologically significant amount of food calories to their extended families.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B published the results of the study of the Tsimane people of Bolivia, led by Paul Hooper, an anthropologist at Emory University.

“We quantified the net flow of calories among individuals in an environment where access to food is limited and depends on people generating it themselves,” Hooper says. “The results support the theory that grandparents are key to our relatively long childhood and long lifespan, which are a big part of what makes us human. Their efforts have likely been underwriting human society for hundreds of thousands of years.”

The study found that fathers and mothers contributed the most net calories to their nuclear family unit, followed by grandfathers and grandmothers, then uncles, aunts and children above the age of 12.

Relative to other primates and mammals, humans mature later and live longer, including many post-reproductive years. Evolutionary theories have proposed that intergenerational resource transfers bolster these distinctive features of human life history. This new study is the first to fully unite the production of resources over a lifetime with inclusive fitness theory, and then test the unified model in an empirical analysis.

Members of a family work together to prepare a meal from ingredients they have gathered from their environment. "About 95 percent of their food comes directly from their own labor," Hooper says.

“Our data give a clear picture of how the life history of our species is supported by high surplus food production in older age and the redistribution of that surplus to younger kin,” Hooper says. “Beyond showing that food resources flowed from older to younger generations, we were able to predict how much each person gave to each other, based on their relative productivity and the closeness of their relationship.”

Hooper led the research as a graduate student at the University of New Mexico and then as a post-doctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. His co-authors include anthropologists Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven and Jeffrey Winking.

The researchers spent five years collecting data on 239 Tsimane families from eight villages. The Tsimane (pronounced Chee-mahn-AY in Spanish) live in small, isolated communities along the Maniqui River in the Amazonian rainforest that are only accessible by canoe or logging roads. These communities speak their own language, lack modern sanitation and electricity, and have access to few consumer goods beyond axes, machetes and other basic supplies.

The Tsimane clear small patches of forest to cultivate cassava, plantains, rice and corn. They also forage plants and fish and hunt meat in the form of peccary, deer, tapirs, monkeys and capybara (a large rodent). “About 95 percent of their food comes directly from their own labor,” Hooper says. “It’s an isolated, small-scale society that gives us an idea of the way humans lived before modern industrialization.”

The study broke down average caloric intake by various age groups of the participants, ranging from about 700 calories per day for an infant to more than 3,000 calories per day for adults. They also quantified the amount of calories each family member contributed to the household, from a bushel of plantains or a kilo of rice to the meat of a butchered deer.

The evolutionary value of grandfathers has been largely overlooked, Hooper says.

The results showed that Tsimane parents and grandparents provide net economic contributions to kin into the seventh decade of life. Households with higher food productivity and fewer dependents provided net transfers to closely related, usually younger, households with lower productivity and more dependents.

The value of grandmothers had been highlighted in previous studies linking them to improved outcomes for grandchildren. The contribution of grandfathers, however, has been largely overlooked, Hooper says.

While food is a limiting resource among the Tsimane, Hooper notes that in order to conduct a similar study in an industrialized society the focus should shift from food to money and time.

“Whether you’re a hunter-gatherer or an accountant, you’re good at what you do because someone supported you while you developed and learned skills,” Hooper says. “The economics of learning are what makes grandparents so important to humans compared to other primates.”

In modern, fast-paced societies, undergoing rapid technological change, the value of grandparents may be overlooked, he adds. “When technology moves at a fast rate, it can shift the age of competence to younger ages. We’re in danger of not recognizing the wisdom of older people, accumulated over lifetimes.”

Hooper, who lost his last grandparent, his maternal grandmother, a few weeks before the study was published, says she influenced his career choice. “She completed a graduate degree in biology during the 1930s, so she was way ahead of her time,” he says. “I learned about Darwin and evolution from her. She taught me the importance of biology for understanding ourselves and our place in the universe.”

Photos courtesy of Paul Hooper

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How 'Fifty Shades' is coloring views of fantasy

Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and Christian Gray (Jamie Dornan) in the movie version of "Fifty Shades of Grey," which is only rated R but reportedly shows at least 20 full minutes of sex.

Emma Green writes in The Atlantic about the social implications of the blockbuster fantasy novel and movie "Fifty Shades of Grey." Below is an excerpt from the article:

"In some ways, it’s remarkable that a phenomenon like 'Fifty Shades' has even been possible. 'Oral sex, anal sex—those are all things that were at one time illegal,' said Paul Wolpe, the director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University. Sodomy, for example, was considered a felony in every state until 1962, and until the Supreme Court ruled against sodomy bans in its 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, it was still illegal in 14 states.

"Today, 'there are lots of differences in the moral composition,' he said. 'There’s no unified moral view, so … the argument then becomes: My morality is different than yours—what right do you have to oppose me?'

Read the whole article in The Atlantic.

The other butterfly effect

Humans have come up with many ways to protect ourselves from infectious diseases.

“We used to think we were alone with this, but now we know we’re not. Now we know there’s a lot of animals out there that can do it, too,” says Emory biologist Jaap de Roode in a TED talk. (TED is currently featuring de Roode's talk from last November on its national Web site.)

In recent decades, scientists have learned that chimpanzees can use plants to treat their intestinal parasites, as can elephants, sheep, goats and porcupines. “And even more interesting than that is the fact that recent discoveries are telling us that insects and other little animals with smaller brains can use medication, too,” says de Roode.

For the past 10 years, de Roode has studied monarch butterflies and how they get sick from parasites. He discovered that female monarch butterflies are able to use medicinal milkweed plants to reduce the harmful effects of the parasites on the butterflies' offspring.

“This is an important discovery, I think, not just because it tells us something cool about nature, but also because it may tell us something more about how we should find drugs,” de Roode says. “Most of our drugs derive from natural products, often from plants. In indigenous cultures, traditional healers often look at animals to find new drugs. In this way, elephants have told people how to treat stomach upset and porcupines have told people how to treat bloody diarrhea. Maybe one day we will be treating people with drugs that were first discovered by butterflies. And I think that is an amazing opportunity worth pursuing.”

De Roode is one of the featured speakers for the 2015 Darwin Day Dinner in Atlanta on Sunday, February 15. The title of his talk is "How Darwin laid the groundwork for understanding infectious disease." Tickets for the event, sponsored by Atlanta Science Tavern, sold out within days after they came available a few weeks ago.

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