The ripple effect of a Nobel in Economics

Tracy Yandle was vacationing in the Smoky Mountains when Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics. “I had the radio on in the cabin, and when I heard the news I went outside and started jumping up and down,” says Yandle, associate professor in environmental studies. “Intellectually, and personally, it’s just a wonderful thing to me.”

Ostrom, a leading scholar of how communities can effectively regulate common resources, was Yandle’s dissertation advisor at Indiana University. Yandle focused on the market forces of fisheries in New Zealand – one of the only systems in the world that had privatized to allow fishermen to buy and sell the rights to catch a certain amount.

After she began her research, in 1999, the fishermen started using their fishing rights as leverage. “They realized, ‘If we have catching rights, we own a part of the fishery and we want a say in it,’” Yandle recalls.

In a panic, Yandle called Ostrom to report: “I’m doomed, the entire system is changing. It’s not a market system anymore.”

Ostrom advised her to go with the flow. “She said, ‘This is exciting, a self-governing organization is forming before your eyes,’” Yandle says. “She helped me to see that clearly, and to figure out a way to study it.”

After joining Emory in 2001, Yandle continued to dig deeper into this new angle of research. She is currently studying the quantity and quality of property rights required to get people involved in managing a natural resource.

Ostrom “is a wonderful example of an interdisciplinary thinker,” Yandle says. “She’s one of the key people in forming natural resource economics, through her work at the boundaries of economics, political science and organizational thinking."

The Nobel laureate’s mentees in the Emory environmental studies department also include Lore Ruttan, who was a post-doctoral fellow under Ostrom.

In his NYT column, John Tierney describes Elinor Ostrom's work disputing "the tragedy of the commons" theory.

Can neuroscience read your mind?

Paul Root Wolpe, director of Emory Center for Ethics, wrote about neuroimaging and personal freedom for Forbes.com:

"Neuroscience has, for the first time, demonstrated that there may be ways to directly access human thought--even, perhaps, without the thinker's consent. While the research is still preliminary, the science is advancing at an astonishing rate. While many obstacles need to be overcome and the technology is not yet practicable, the implications for our current state of knowledge are profound. ...

Watch an earlier "60 Minutes" interview with Wolpe, on the science of mind-reading.

"Neurotechnology is making its way into business, politics and other civic realms as well. The booming field of neuromarketing has been peering into the brains of consumers as they think about products or look at advertising. Political scientists have used fMRI to try to determine voter preferences, and a book by Emory psychologist Drew Westen, titled "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation," drew on such research and played a prominent role in the Democratic strategy in the last presidential election. ...

"While our abilities in these areas are still quite limited, and while there is always the possibility that the technology will never progress to the point where it can extract truly useful information from anyone, the time to think about the implications of this endeavor is now, before the technology is upon us. The appeal of the technology to the state is obvious. So we need to ask ourselves: What are the limits of the use of this technology? Should we ever allow the courts, or the state, to demand access to the recesses of our minds?"

Read the full article.

Warning to campus squirrels

With thousands of people and cars swarming about the Emory campus, it is easy to lose sight of the daily dramas of wildlife going on all around us. An observant visitor captured this photo of a hawk that swooped in near the Asbury Circle bridge on Wednesday, hunting squirrels. Andrew Harwood, assistant pastor of United Methodist Church, used a Nikon D40 to get the shot.

And who better to comment on the photo than Gary Hauk – vice president of the University. “This reminds me of a startling moment some years ago when my office was on the Quad side of the fourth floor in Administration,” Hauk said. “My computer was set up next to the window, and one afternoon I was typing away and happened to look up and out the window, just as a red-tailed hawk swooped up in front of the window toward the roof, beating its wings frantically while carrying the heavy load of a squirrel in its talons. Awesome!”

Unless you're a squirrel.

Related:
Scenes from our wild campus

The science of love

Can love potions move from fairy tale to fact? Studies are showing the potential to chemically manipulate affection and social bonding.

“A single molecule can have a profound effect on relationships,” said Emory neuroscience Larry Young, during his recent “Life of the Mind” talk. His research involves prairie voles, highly social animals that tend to form life-long bonds with their mates.

An infusion of oxytocin, a hormone associated with neural rewards and addictions, can cause female prairie voles to become attached to the nearest male, while the hormone vasopressin spurs males’ interest in a female. Male prairie voles with a genetically limited response to vasopressin were less likely to bond to a mate. Other researchers have identified similar behavior in human males with this genetic trait.

But what about plasticity of the brain, asked religion scholar Bobbi Patterson, who led a conversation with Young, following his lecture. Patterson studies how ancient contemplative communities practiced shaping their minds. Their ultimate goal was for love and compassion, minus the intense hormonal urges. “The biochemistry of the brain, they thought of that as the juices of human behavior, the passions – things that would get you in trouble by sexual behaviors or violence – they would try to block that by training the mind,” Patterson said. “When humans are involved in love and compassion, there’s this sense of making a choice.”

Studies have revealed that even prairie voles have a great deal of plasticity, and that their experiences can shape their hormone levels and their behaviors, said Young. He also cited Emory research showing that women who were seriously abused as children have low oxytocin levels as adults.

“Much more of our behavior is probably determined by cortical structures that are sort of integrating what is the social structure, what is expected of me,” Young said. “You can inhibit or activate certain of these components much more easily than a vole.”

Still, biology plays an undeniable role in our ability to love and form social bonds, he said. “A lot of people say, ‘Doesn’t that take away a lot of the magic?’ But, to me, it’s even more beautiful to think that love is being produced through neurotransmission.”

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Shining a light on green energy

Graduate student Chantelle Anfuso works with lasers in Lian's lab.

The physical chemistry lab of Tim Lian specializes in ultra-fast spectroscopy, electron transfer processes and quantum dots – nano-particles that hold promise for everything from electronics to medicine and renewable energy.

In collaboration with scientists at Emory and elsewhere, Lian's team is studying ways to convert the sun’s energy into cheap and clean solutions to the global energy crisis. “Solar energy conversion is very complex,” he says. “Spectroscopy allows us to break it down into small, fundamental steps that you can study carefully.”


Quantum dots (in above photo) are good at absorbing light and could provide energy to drive reactions needed for solar energy conversion processes.

“These are all very challenging scientific problems,” Lian says, adding that it will take many people, working across disciplines, to make solar energy go mainstream. “We have to solve these problems, because using fossil fuels is not sustainable."

Read more.

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A biochemical path to solar energy
Chemistry's crucial catalyst