The rare book that changed medicine

In 1543, Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius published “On the Workings of the Human Body,” or “de Humani corporis fabrica,” containing the first accurate representations of human anatomy.

Only 60 original copies remain of the seminal work, including one housed in Emory's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.

The book's publication was not just a monumental feat of science and art, it was an act of bravery, says Robert Gaynes, a professor in the Emory School of Medicine. Vesalius’ book debunked the preceding 1,200 years of anatomical knowledge, which were based on the work of Galen of Pergamon, a prominent Roman surgeon. “At that time, criticizing Galen was essentially heresy,” Gaynes says.

Vesalius was a surgeon and professor of anatomy who was the first to perform human dissections as a teaching tool, inviting his students to gather around the operating table and observe first-hand as he worked. “He began to have this disquieting feeling that many of the things that Galen said in his anatomical text were wrong,” Gaynes says. “He realized that Galen had never dissected a human and was inferring human anatomy from animal anatomy.”

Vesalius worked with a leading artist to produce the stunningly detailed and accurate drawings, some of which include Renaissance-style landscapes as background. The drawings were used to produce fine woodcuts, which were then printed on linen pages. The result is a work of science and art that survives more than 450 years later, and remains relevant.

The title page of the book shows Vesalius standing over a cadaver in an elaborate lecture hall, jam-packed with observers. You have to look closely to notice a dog in one corner of the drawing has a human foot for its left hind paw – a dig at Galen.

“Observation, and believing what you could see, was the watchword that Vesalius worked by, and it changed everything in medicine,” Gaynes says. “Medicine finally began to move forward because of this book.”

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How a natural leader bloomed

"Ultimately, the goal is to help prepare students to be leaders in a different world," says anthropology professor Peggy Barlett.

By Carol Clark

Peggy Barlett has this advice for graduates: "Don't listen to the people who say ‘conform to the rules and stay practical.' Listen to your inner wisdom about where this country needs to be and what you can do to help it get there."

Barlett, the Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology and faculty liaison for the Office of Sustainability Initiatives, embodies that advice. She is the recipient of this year's Thomas Jefferson Award, the University's premier honor for significant service to the institution through personal activities, influence and leadership.

Barlett joined the Emory faculty in 1976. The campus, the city and the world had a much different mindset. Many people appreciated natural beauty and worked to maintain it. But broad-based approaches to sustainability were largely confined to specialists like Barlett, who studied the intersection of economic, ecological and demographic change among farmers.

Entering the 21st century, amid growing awareness of the greenhouse effect, attitudes began shifting. A pivotal moment at Emory occurred in 1999, when the decision to build a shuttle route in Lullwater forest sparked controversy. "I began to see more energy on campus around environmental concerns," Barlett recalls. "I decided to take a year off from research and spend that time seeing if we could galvanize some of that momentum."

It was a risky move, since sustainability work on campus didn't fit into the conventional role of faculty. "I thought I was going to run into a brick wall," Barlett recalls. "One person urged me, ‘Just keep calling the meetings, Peggy. Things will change.' To my surprise, people started showing up and expressing interest, at all levels. A lot of people who love Emory wanted to help create a better future."

Barlett began serving as the sustainability point person for faculty, staff, administrators, students and alumni, planting the seeds for Emory to become a nationally recognized green campus. The Piedmont Project, for example, infuses sustainability into the curriculum across disciplines, and has become a model for the country, inspiring hundreds of others.

Meanwhile, she published prolifically. "Sustainability on Campus: Stories and Strategies for Change," co-edited by Barlett, offers firsthand accounts, both inspiring and practical.

Barlett also helped develop the Sustainability Vision for Emory, adopted by the President's Cabinet in 2005 as a core principle of the University's strategic plan. The vision called for an Office of Sustainability Initiatives, and laid out clear and ambitious goals to achieve by 2015. Among them: Reduce average campus energy use by 25 percent, reduce the total waste stream by 65 percent, and procure 75 percent of the food for campus dining facilities from local or sustainably grown sources.

"Ultimately, the goal is to help prepare students to be leaders in a different world," says Barlett, who doesn't take a pessimistic view of the sustainability challenges they face. "This is an exciting time to be part of change, so much is happening. Businesses, governments and nonprofits are moving dynamically. Whole new professions are emerging around sustainability."

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Primatologist says humans may be nice by nature

Hugs, and our capacity for empathy, go way back in our evolutionary history, says primatologist Frans de Waal.

In the decades following the devastation of World War II, the idea that humans are naturally “killer apes,” with a stronger tendency toward aggression than pacifism, gained credence and became a dominant theme in behavioral research.

“Although it is far from my intention to depict us as angels of peace, this literature is now recognized as one-sided,” writes Emory primatologist Frans de Waal in the journal Science. His article, “The Antiquity of Empathy,” is part of a special issue on human conflict.

Humans are biologically geared to find pleasure in eating, sex, nursing and socializing. “If warfare were truly in our DNA, we should happily engage in it,” de Waal writes. “Yet soldiers report a deep revulsion to killing, and only shoot at the enemy under pressure. Many end up with haunting memories and disturbed social lives. Far from being a recent phenomenon, combat trauma was already known to the ancient Greeks, such as Sophocles, who described Ajax’s “divine madness,” now known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).”

Read the whole article here.

Image: istockphoto.com

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A glimpse of world's most elusive gorillas

Using camera traps, the Wildlife Conservation Society recently captured the above video of rare Cross River gorillas, in their habitat of Cameroon’s Kagwene Gorilla Sanctuary. They are the world’s rarest and least observed gorilla species: Fewer than 250 of them are left.

While poaching and habitat loss are taking the biggest toll on the gorillas, they are also threatened by viruses and bacteria carried by people. They share 95 to 99 percent of our DNA, raising the potential for pathogen exchange, says Tom Gillespie, associate professor of global health and biodiversity conversation at Emory University.

Gillespie, a leading primate disease ecologist, researches ways to understand, and minimize, the exchange of pathogens between humans and apes. HIV, for example, originated from apes.

Gillespie’s lab, together with partners at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, is analyzing fecal samples from the Cross River gorillas, to monitor for evidence of disease or parasites. Ebola, polio, gastrointestinal parasites and respiratory diseases are examples of human diseases that have also impacted gorillas.

Midway through the video a male silverback thumps his chest and charges toward the camera. “It’s a very humbling experience” to get charged by a gorilla, says Gillespie, who often encounters them face-to-face in the wild. Although gorillas are generally peaceful animals, and do not resort to violence unless provoked, Gillespie says they put on an impressive display. Click here to read more.

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What is your dog thinking? Brain scans unleash canine secrets

By Carol Clark

When your dog gazes up at you adoringly, what does it see? A best friend? A pack leader? A can opener?

Many dog lovers make all kinds of inferences about how their pets feel about them, but no one has captured images of actual canine thought processes – until now.

Emory University researchers have developed a new methodology to scan the brains of alert dogs and explore the minds of the oldest domesticated species. The technique uses harmless functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), the same tool that is unlocking secrets of the human brain.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) published the results of their first experiment, showing how the brains of dogs reacted to hand signals given by their owners.

“It was amazing to see the first brain images of a fully awake, unrestrained dog,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Emory Center for Neuropolicy and lead researcher of the dog project. “As far as we know, no one has been able to do this previously. We hope this opens up a whole new door for understanding canine cognition and inter-species communication. We want to understand the dog-human relationship, from the dog’s perspective.”

Callie wears ear protection as she prepares to enter the scanner. The research team includes, from left, Andrew Brooks, Gregory Berns and Mark Spivak. Photo by Bryan Meltz.

Key members of the research team include Andrew Brooks, a graduate student at the Center for Neuropolicy, and Mark Spivak, a professional dog trainer and owner of Comprehensive Pet Therapy in Atlanta.

Two dogs are involved in the first phase of the project. Callie is a two-year-old Feist, or southern squirrel-hunting dog. Berns adopted her at nine months from a shelter. McKenzie is a three-year-old Border Collie, who was already well-trained in agility competition by her owner, Melissa Cate. Both dogs were trained over several months to walk into an fMRI scanner and hold completely still while researchers measured their neural activity.

The researchers aim to decode the mental processes of dogs by recording which areas of their brains are activated by various stimuli. Ultimately, they hope to get at questions like: Do dogs have empathy? Do they know when their owners are happy or sad? How much language do they really understand?

Callie, a two-year old Feist, is one of two dogs involved in the initial phase of the project. Photo by Carol Clark.

In the first experiment, the dogs were trained to respond to hand signals. One signal meant the dog would receive a hot dog treat, and another signal meant it would not receive one. The caudate region of the brain, associated with rewards in humans, showed activation in both dogs when they saw the signal for the treat, but not for the no-treat signal.

“These results indicate that dogs pay very close attention to human signals,” Berns says. “And these signals may have a direct line to the dog’s reward system.”

Berns is a neuroeconomist, who normally uses fMRI technology to study how the human mind works. His human brain-imaging studies have looked at everything from why teens engage in risky behavior to how adults decide to follow, or break, established rules of society.

Callie training in a scanner mock-up. 

Dog lovers may not need convincing on the merits of researching the minds of our canine companions. “To the skeptics out there, and the cat people, I would say that dogs are the first domesticated species, going back at least 10,000 years, and by some estimates 30,000 years,” Berns says. “The dog’s brain represents something special about how humans and animals came together. It’s possible that dogs have even affected human evolution. People who took dogs into their homes and villages may have had certain advantages. As much as we made dogs, I think dogs probably made some part of us, too.”

The idea for the dog project came to Berns about a year ago, when he learned that a U.S. Navy dog had been a member of the SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden. “I was amazed when I saw the pictures of what military dogs can do,” Berns says. “I realized that if dogs can be trained to jump out of helicopters and airplanes, we could certainly train them to go into an fMRI to see what they’re thinking.”

All procedures for the dog project were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of Emory. “From the outset, we wanted to ensure the safety and comfort of the dogs,” Berns says. “We wanted them to be unrestrained and go into the scanner willingly.”

The dogs were trained to wear earmuffs, to protect them from the noise of the scanner. They were also taught to hold their heads perfectly still on a chin rest during the scanning process, to prevent blurring of the images.

“We know the dogs are happy by their body language,” says Mark Spivak, the professional trainer involved in the project. Callie, in particular, seems to revel in the attention of breaking new ground in science.

“She enters the scanner on her own, without a command, sometimes when it’s not her turn,” Spivak says. “She’s eager to participate.”

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