Aladdin to Lincoln: How stories shape a life

The tales that we read, and the tales that we spin about ourselves, play a role in helping us realize our full potential, says Jordan Greenwald, who gave a TEDxEmory talk last spring (see above video) as an Emory senior, majoring in psychology.

Greenwald counts stories of both the fictional Aladdin, and the real-life Abraham Lincoln as strong influences in shaping his own life.

“Stories give us an emotional education, “ Greenwald says. “If we don’t address this inner world of dreams, desires, anxieties, we risk meandering, which really means forfeiting who we could become.” 

Related:
Prometheus: Seeding wonder and science
Stories your parents should have told you

Uganda closing in on river blindness

In 2007, Uganda announced a bold plan to eliminate river blindness by 2020. The Carter Center’s Moses Katabarwa, a graduate of Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health, has been in the battle from the beginning— and he believes they’re going to win. Photos by Kay Hinton.

By Paige Parvin, Emory Magazine

The River Nile is the longest in the world, moving mightily over more than four thousand miles and through ten African countries before emptying itself into the Mediterranean Sea. For millions it is the source of life and legend, death and mystery, symbol and song—not to mention water, food, transportation, and money. It is at once mythic and utterly real, visible from space and from bridges, banks, and boats.

As the matriarch of Uganda’s many rivers and streams, the Nile holds innumerable secrets, including a tiny black fly that breeds only in swift-moving waters and carries inside it the makings of a particular sort of human misery: onchocerciasis, or river blindness.

Black fly larvae cling to underwater vegetation, developing until they eventually take wing and break the surface as adult flies. 

It’s this fly that Moses Katabarwa, a Uganda native and senior epidemiologist for The Carter Center’s River Blindness Program, has been chasing for more than 20 years. The black fly Simulium—about the size of a Georgia gnat—is unusual in its preference for moving water, since so many of its brethren pests like to breed in warm, stagnant puddles and ponds. Two different types of the fly carry the river blindness parasite, Onchocerca volvulus—one, S. damnosum, dives into flowing waters to lay its eggs, shooting them from its tiny body bundled in a superglue-like substance that sticks them firmly to underwater rocks or vegetation. The other, S. neavei, can lay eggs only in small river crabs and has a shorter flight range than its wily cousin.

When people are bitten by female flies (the males don’t bite), they can become infected with onchocerciasis microfilaria, pre-larval-stage parasitic worms that wriggle their way around under the skin. Like the Guinea worm parasite—another of The Carter Center’s targeted diseases—these worms can breed inside the body; they multiply and sometimes form writhing nodules that can be felt and even seen.

Ojok Charles lost his sight completely after he became severely infected at age 12 with the river blindness parasite. He says he could feel the worms moving in his eyes as the disease progressed.

And they love to migrate up to the eye, where they cause irritation and nerve damage, and eventually, as they die, leave debris that can build up to the point of diminished vision and permanent blindness. Affecting some eighteen million people in Africa and the Americas, the disease is the second-leading cause of preventable blindness in the world.

River blindness infection triggers an immune response similar to that of an allergic reaction, which is why it causes intense itching, swelling, rashes, lesions, and skin discoloration—a pattern commonly referred to as “leopard skin.” Ironically, a strong immune system can produce a more severe reaction.

“If you have an efficient immune system, you will suffer much more,” says Katabarwa. “The more you scratch, the more you want to.”

It takes many fly bites to produce a bad infection—what health workers offhandedly call a high “worm load”—but in rural villages that are situated near swift-moving rivers and streams, it’s not hard to become bait.

Read more in Emory Magazine.

Related:
On the trail of black flies

Psychedelics, the brain and shamanism

“Call upon me, for I am the black jaguar. It is me you must evoke if you wish to scare the illness away.” These words of a Brazilian shaman describe the ancient practice of creating a charismatic intermediary with the divine.

In the above video, Emory art historian Rebecca Stone gives a brief overview of an ongoing exhibit at the Carlos Museum, “For I Am the Black Jaguar,” that explores shamanism through art, zoology, botany, religion and anthropology.

The trances that transformed shamans into totems like jaguars and whale sharks were brought about in part by the ingestion of etheogenic substances. Psychiatrists Katherine MacLean and Charles Raison will discuss what happens in the brain during these trances in a special lecture at the museum, on Thursday, November 29 at 7:30 pm.

Related:
Tapping traditional remedies to fight modern super bugs

Chemists fine-tune ideas on how life evolved

By Carol Clark

An iPod can store a music library in a wafer-thin device that fits in your palm, providing a vast amount of data at your fingertips. But a human cell, only a few microns across, contains all of the information that made you. And even more remarkable, the first complex cells are thought to have somehow self-assembled from the fundamental building blocks of life.

The Accounts of Chemical Research (ACR) devoted its entire December issue to ideas about this self-assembly process, and how it could have enabled life to emerge from the chemical soup of early Earth and grow increasingly complex. By understanding this process, chemists hope to boost our ability to bioengineer living systems in ways that benefit us, just as computer engineers do with digital devices like iPods.

“Chemists have spent a long time breaking down cells and looking at their individual components,” says Emory chemist Anil Mehta. “Now we have a fantastic understanding of these parts. So how do we put them together? How can we, as chemists, get new complex networks to emerge from these components that communicate with each other? We are right on the verge of achieving this.”

The special ACS issue was edited by three Emory chemists – Mehta, Jay Goodwin and David Lynn, who are all also part of the NSF/NASA Center for Chemical Evolution – and a University of Utah chemist, Cynthia Burrows.

“We’re trying to figure out how to get from inanimate matter to living matter,” Goodwin says. “It’s one of science’s greatest challenges, and a problem the scientific community has been working on for centuries.”

The quest has heated up during the last decade, largely driven by genetic sequencing technology and our growing understanding of the minimum amount of information needed for evolution.

Fossils from Western Australia indicate that the earliest life may have been primitive bacteria going back about 3.4 billion years. “But it wasn’t until the ribosome appeared, around 3 billion years ago, that life exploded,” Mehta says. “Everything seems to have radiated from the ribosome.”

Ribosomes are essentially little machines that churn out proteins from nucleic acids. And proteins and nucleic acids are two biological macromolecules that learned to collaborate in encoding, transmitting and expressing genetic information.

In a paper included in the ACR issue, the Emory chemists use a digital-to-analog converter model to explain how the polymer cooperation of ribosomes may have helped the first dynamic functional networks reach the critical threshold for the emergence of cellular life.

Presumably, the polymers of proteins and nucleic acids evolved separately, and then found a way to join forces. “They both have strengths and weaknesses,” Goodwin says. “And together they make a system that takes advantage of the strengths of both, generating greater diversity and evolutionary potential.”

The nucleic acids are the digital part of the system, providing the ability to store vast amounts of information, like songs on an iPod, with crucial and exacting accuracy. Proteins are analog, delivering responsiveness and a continually variable range of functionality, such as the ability to communicate with internal and external networks, or play the songs. The ribosome functions like a digital-analog convertor that joins these two components into a single, dynamic system.

“We recognize that the march of molecular history likely had many pathways,” Lynn says. The aim of the special ACR issue is to bring together different areas of research on the problem, he adds. “Just as it takes a diversity in chemical composition for the evolution of life, it takes a diversity of ideas to fully comprehend the origins of that evolution.”

Related:
Chemists go in search of little green molecules
Peptides may hold 'missing link' to life

Top image: iStockphoto.com.

Paleontologist goes wild for Thanksgiving

Emory paleontologist Anthony Martin has prepared a special Thanksgiving treat -- a post about wild turkeys on his blog, "Life Traces of the Georgia Coast." Here's an excerpt:

"Unfortunately, because I live in the metropolitan Atlanta area, I never see turkeys other than the dead packaged ones in grocery stores. Nonetheless, one of the ways I experience turkeys as wild, living animals is to visit the Georgia barrier islands, and the best way for me to learn about wild turkey behavior is to track them. This is also great fun for me as a paleontologist, as their tracks remind me of those made by small theropod dinosaurs from the Mesozoic Era. And of course, as most schoolchildren can tell you, birds are dinosaurs, which they will state much more confidently than anything they might know about Benjamin Franklin."

Click here to read more.

Related:
Polar dinosaur tracks open new trail to past

Image: Wikipedia Commons.