'Where you have friction, changes can occur'

"Molecular diversity underpins both the structural intricacy of biology, as well as the complexity of our ideas and dreams," Lynn says.

By Carol Clark

"My brother liked to build models. And I liked to blow them up," recalls David Lynn, chair of Emory's chemistry department and the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Chemistry and Biology.

Their childhood experiments led to his brother's career as a building contractor and Lynn's as a groundbreaking chemist who is not afraid to make sparks fly. "The joke in the family is, it's a good thing that we no longer collaborate," Lynn says.

Lynn received the 2011 University Scholar/Teacher Award, selected by Emory faculty on behalf of the United Methodist Church Board of Higher Education and Ministry. He was recognized for his contributions to plant chemical biology, dynamic molecular self-assembly, chemical evolution and chemical education.

Lynn's chemical interests grew beyond explosions while he was a college student in North Carolina. "One day, I walked out of an organic chemistry class and I noticed a leaf on a tree branch that was hanging over a banister," he says. "I thought, ‘That leaf is coordinating billions of reactions going on all the time.' I remember marveling at that, and I've never stopped marveling."

That simple insight drove Lynn to focus on how order comes from chaos. After joining Emory in 2000, he helped establish the Center for Chemical Evolution, a collaboration between Emory, Georgia Tech and other institutions, funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA. The center is testing theories for how chemical reactions may have led to life emerging from Earth's primordial soup, some 3.5 billion years ago.

In 2002, he received the Howard Hughes Medical Institute award, worth $1 million. He used the funds to create a program called On Recent Discoveries by Emory Researchers (ORDER), a series of seminars where graduate students teach freshmen.

"Rather than just spending 24/7 in a lab, graduate students need to put their research into a broader context and learn to explain it to the public," Lynn says of the philosophy behind ORDER. An added benefit of the program is exposing freshmen to the possibilities of a career in academia, nurturing growth of the research community, Lynn says.

Lynn is also committed to helping the lay public understand the ongoing research into the evolution of life, and its relevance to modern-day life. Atlanta is an interesting location to focus on this goal, he says, since it is the epicenter of the debate between science and religion.

"This is where the friction is, and where you have friction, that's where changes can occur," he explains.

Both religion and science strive to make sense of the world, Lynn says. Rather than reciting facts that demonstrate evolution, Lynn believes that the best way to help people understand it is through compelling stories. He has helped pioneer collaborations between Emory scientists and playwrights, dancers and other artists. The recent performances of a science flash mob in downtown Atlanta, using a group of people to show how molecules evolve, is one example of this daring convergence of science and art.

"Sixty percent of Americans don't accept the tenants of evolution because they don't see them as part of their experience," Lynn says. "So somehow we need to find ways to create space for a dialogue. If there is one lesson that emerges from the study of chemical evolution, it is that molecular diversity underpins both the structural intricacy of biology, as well as the complexity of our ideas and dreams."

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Doctorate's ORDER: Teach your research

Doctorate's ORDER: Teach your research

In a recent class, graduate student Flora Anthony pushed younger students to help shape her research project on Egyptian artifacts, which she will present at a national conference. Photos, above and below, by Kay Hinton.

By Paige Parvin, Emory Magazine

A psychologist, a neurologist, an immunologist, and an Egyptologist walk into a classroom . . .

No, this isn’t the start of a joke. It’s an undergraduate course with the tantalizing title Blood, Brains, Death, and Disease, led by four graduate students with research interests in different academic fields. Part of a series of seminars called On Recent Discoveries by Emory Researchers, or ORDER, the course bridges the gap between undergraduates and graduate students and also between the arts and the sciences. Graduate student instructors collaborate across their disciplines to provide specific insight into how to conduct a project, walking the younger students step-by-step through their own research efforts.

The ORDER courses were conceived by David Lynn, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Chemistry and Biology, who was selected as one of 20 inaugural Howard Hughes Medical Institute professors to receive $1 million to bring scientific research to the undergraduate classroom.

“Graduate students represent the next level after undergraduate training in the career path of a scientist,” Lynn says. “Seeing that graduate students—who were themselves taking undergraduate classes only a few years earlier—are contributing to our scientific knowledge base is both very motivational to the undergraduate students and empowering for the teacher-scholars.”

This year, Lynn is partnering with Leslie Taylor, chair of the Department of Theater Studies, to lead the seminars. “David has been really interested in having scientists figure out ways to tell their stories,” Taylor says. “I’m here to talk about creativity—the idea of embedding creativity into teaching and thinking creatively about doing research. It’s not just A-B-C-D, but a series of leaps and hunches. And you need to be able to engage your audience with narrative.”

As the course unfolds, undergraduates in the class see firsthand how research is conducted and use this experience to lead a project of their own. They also learn about the career goals, life stories, and the research obstacles that the graduate students face.

“I was pleasantly surprised by the interest these students expressed in what I spend most of my time doing. The highlight of my year so far was when groups of my students created goofy songs that synthesized all of the information presented to them in a creativity workshop,” says Flora Anthony, a graduate student in Egyptology and one of the scholar-teachers. “In class, chemistry undergraduate students really helped push the boundaries of an art history inquiry.”

Anthony’s project is focused on evaluating a set of Egyptian artifacts to determine their authenticity, using both historical research and chemical testing processes supported by staff at the Michael C. Carlos Museum. The students were given a guided tour by Anthony and a walk-through of how artifacts are restored in the museum’s conservation lab.

They also got the opportunity to perform an experiment in a neuroscience wet-laboratory, guided by Jacob Shreckengost, a neuroscience graduate student. “I was amazed by the freshmen, who, after an introduction to a very complex area of spinal cord research, were able to independently devise some of the very experiments I had proposed and performed upon entering graduate school,” Shreckengost says.

Next, students visited capuchin monkeys at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, home to groundbreaking studies on the origins of fairness. Psychology graduate student Erin Robbins gave them the chance to participate in her human versions of these experiments to see how their concepts of fairness compare to those of children and adults in cultures like Samoa and Vanuatu.

The course ended with an up-close look at blood transfusions led by Justine Liepkalns, a scholar-teacher who is studying immunology. The class saw how blood is stored and used at the Emory Blood Bank and spoke to the director of the Center for Transfusion and Cellular Therapy and to the nurse in charge of patients treated for various blood ailments.

“Research has sudden twists and turns, just like our life stories,” Robbins says. “Post-college, I thought my interests and career choices were too diverse, but through research I came to see that there was a common theme.”

The research topics the undergraduates pursue for their own projects reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the class, ranging currently from obesity trends to Sanskrit to cell chemistry. But they are nearly always personally meaningful to the students, which is, says Lynn, what drives discovery.

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How college shapes health behaviors

A new study finds that students at more selective colleges are less likely to smoke. Credit: iStockphoto.com.

David Glenn writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a forthcoming Economics of Education Review paper:

Jason M. Fletcher, an assistant professor of public health at Yale University and a scholar at the Columbia University Population Research Center, and David E. Frisvold, an assistant professor of economics at Emory University, looked at nearly 4,000 people who have participated in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. They found that people who attended selective colleges (defined as those whose median SAT scores were in the top quartile) were less likely to smoke, to be obese, and to eat fast food than were those who attended less-selective colleges, both while they were in college and when they were in their mid-20s. (To those who might object that students at selective colleges are more likely to have been socialized into healthy habits as children, Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Frisvold controlled for a long list of individual variables, including smoking and obesity during high school. They believe that they have isolated the effects of the colleges themselves.)

As in [another Economics of Education Review study], binge drinking was an exception here. Selective colleges seem, if anything, to be associated with more drinking.

Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Frisvold are most interested in discovering the mechanisms through which education might influence health behaviors. Their new paper did not find any clear patterns, but they suggest that "health literacy and health knowledge as well as peer effects during college" are the most likely channels.

Read the whole article.

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Grandma was right: Infants wake up taller

Dreams of reaching great heights: A new study shows that daily growth and sleep patterns are inextricably linked. Credits, above and below: iStockphoto.com.

By Robin Tricoles

Science is finally confirming what grandma knew all along: Infants wake up taller right after they sleep.

Findings from the first study of its kind measuring the link between daily growth and sleep show the two are inextricably linked. Specifically, growth spurts are tied to an increase in total daily hours of sleep as well as an increase in the number of daily sleep bouts, the time from the onset of sleep until awakening.

“Little is known about the biology of growth spurts,” says Emory anthropologist Michelle Lampl, lead author of the study. “Our data open the window to further scientific study of the mechanisms and pathways that underlie saltatory growth.”

Practically speaking, however, the study helps parents understand that irregular sleep behavior is a normal part of growth and development.

“Sleep irregularities can be distressing to parents,” says Lampl, associate director of Emory’s Predictive Health Institute. “However, these findings give babies a voice that helps parents understand them, and show that seemingly erratic sleep behavior is a normal part of development. Babies really aren’t trying to be difficult.”

The study, published today by SLEEP, was co-authored by pharmacologist Michael Johnson of the University of Virginia.

The researchers also found that longer sleep bouts in both girls and boys predicted an increase in weight and body-fat composition tied to an increase in length. In other words, not only does sleep predict a growth spurt in length, but it also predicts an increase in weight and abdominal fat, implying an anabolic process—growth.

What’s more, the study showed differences in sleep patterns related to growth depending on the sex of the baby. “Growth spurts were associated with increased sleep bout duration in boys compared with girls and increased number of sleep bouts in girls compared with boys,” Lampl says.

In general, boys in the study exhibited more sleep bouts and shorter sleep bouts than girls. But neither the sex of the infant nor breastfeeding had significant effects on total daily sleep time. However, breastfeeding as opposed to formula feeding was associated with more and shorter sleep bouts.

Unlike previous studies, this study did not rely on parental recall of infant sleep patterns and growth. Instead, data on 23 infants were recorded in real time over a four- to 17-month span. Mothers kept daily diaries detailing sleep onset and awakening and noted whether babies were breastfeeding, formula feeding, or both and whether their infant showed signs of illness, such as vomiting, diarrhea, fever or rash.

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Prairie voles aid in search for autism treatment

Researchers at Emory’s Center for Translational Social Neuroscience (CTSN) are focusing on prairie voles as a new model to screen the effectiveness of drugs to treat autism.

They are starting with D-cycloserine, a drug Emory researchers have shown enhances behavioral therapy for phobias and also promotes pair bonding among prairie voles. Giving female voles D-cycloserine, which is thought to facilitate learning and memory, can encourage them to bond with a new male more quickly than usual. The findings will be published in Biological Psychiatry.

“The prairie vole model has enabled us to learn about complex neural pathways in social areas of the brain,” says Larry Young (at left) director of the CTSN. “We believe these insights will be useful in identifying drugs that enhance social cognition and learning. Drugs with these properties, particularly when combined with behavioral therapies, may be beneficial in the treatment of autism spectrum disorders.”

The prairie vole is one of the few species in nature that is monogamous and that creates deep social bonds while mating. The basic mechanisms of voles’ and humans’ social learning are similar enough that the learning that occurs during voles’ pair bonding can model complex human social interactions. Young and his colleagues have used voles to show the importance for social interactions of hormones such as oxytocin, which has also been proposed as a treatment for autism spectrum disorders.

The first author of the paper is Emory graduate student Meera Modi. She showed that D-cycloserine promotes pair bonding in prairie voles when it is injected peripherally. By infusing the drug directly into specific regions of the brain, she also showed the importance of two regions linked to social learning and reward, the nucleus accumbens and amygdala.

"We think D-cycloserine interacts with the brain's social information processing circuits to enhance the natural learning processes that occur there,” Modi says.

Emory researchers have shown D-cycloserine can be used to treat psychiatric diseases such as phobias and social anxiety. It is now in clinical trials for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. D-cycloserine is thought to enhance learning by acting on receptors for the neurotransmitter glutamate.

Autism spectrum disorders affect one in 110 children in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Currently there are no drugs that specifically target social deficits found in individuals with autism, Young notes. Most drugs now prescribed for individuals with autism were originally developed for other disorders such as depression or schizophrenia.

The research was supported by a fellowship from Autism Speaks and by the National Institutes of Health.

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