Lab Notes

Global Warming: It's Fat People's Fault

Sharon Begley — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:01:53 GMT

If the mail I get from readers is any indication, the issue of climate change is a dastardly conspiracy to “redistribute global wealth,” as one memorably explained to me. Now greenhouse deniers can imagine another conspiracy: it is all a plot to get rid of fat people.

The link between obesity and climate change has come up before, although subtly. An AP story last year noted that people could combat both of these problems by walking or bicycling rather than driving (so they burn calories, not gasoline). And writing in the Huffington Post, filmmaker Bryan Young (“Killer at Large”) cited a scientist who told him that “for every pound the average American is overweight, we use an additional 938 million gallons of gasoline per year. That's enough to fill 2 million cars with gasoline every year.” It’s straightforward physics: it takes more energy to move a lot of weight than it does to move a little weight (which is also why, everything else being equal, big cars get worse gas mileage than subcompacts).

Now a paper in The Lancet today puts a scientific stamp on this. The logic goes like this: Fat people consume more food than thin people, it takes energy to grow and transport food, ergo fat people are responsible for more global warming than thin people. Or, more precisely, for 18 percent more food energy than normal people, calculate Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

The standard definition of “overweight” is having a body mass index of 25 or greater (you can calculate yours here). A population with BMIs of 24.5 consumes, on average, 1550 calories of food per person per day just for basic metabolism and another 950 calories for daily activities. That’s 2500 calories each. A population with BMIs of 29 needs 1680 calories per person for basic metabolism, plus 1280 calories for daily activities, or 2960. That’s 18 percent more food energy.

In addition, it takes more fuel to move an obese person than a slender one, the authors note, something that “will increase further if, as is likely, the overweight people in response to their increased body mass choose to walk less and drive more.” The authors therefore advocate policies that promote walking and bicycling to reduce obesity and, hence, global warming.

But I can’t help reading in their paper the latest pretense for feeling greener-than-thou: it won’t be enough to drive a Prius, air-dry your laundry, become a vegan and ditch your air conditioning to feel smug about your tiny carbon footprint. Now you’ll have to be waif-thin, too.

The Vatican and Little Green Men

Sharon Begley — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:10:32 GMT

Here's the curious thing about the head of the Vatican’s astronomical observatory saying there’s a strong likelihood that extraterrestrial beings exist and that they are part of God’s plan: not the “what,” but the “when,” as in “why now?”

In the long interview he gave the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano yesterday, Father José Gabriel Funes, a Jesuit priest from Argentina, called the existence of extraterrestrials a real possibility. “Astronomers contend that the universe is made up of a hundred billion galaxies, each of which is composed of hundreds of billions of stars,” he correctly noted. (The interview was headlined The Extra-terrestrial Is My Brother.) “Many of these, or almost all of them, could have planets. [So] how can you exclude that life has developed somewhere else?”

For all the attention they got, however, Funes’ comments do not exactly break new ground, as my colleague Edward Pentin, who covers the Vatican for Newsweek, points out. In 2005 Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno wrote a 50-page booklet, Intelligent Life in the Universe, published by the Catholic Truth Society, in which he makes the standard astronomical points—lots of galaxies, lots of stars, some with planets, some of which may have conditions conducive to life. (Theological question: can God create life only in places with the right conditions? Or could He create life where there is, for instance, no water, or where the temperatures are too hot or too cold? If not, why not?).

But the Vatican has never denied the findings of contemporary astronomy, which is now up to 288 “extrasolar” planets (that is, those that orbit a star beyond our own solar system), including one whose atmosphere contains organic molecules, the ingredients of life, as I blogged in March. As Consolmagno put it, “There is nothing in Holy Scripture that could confirm, or contradict, the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe,” which means that telescopes and not the bible will be the only reliable guide to the question.

In his L’Osservatore interview, Fr. Funes echoed that, declaring that “As there exist many creatures on earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God. This doesn’t contradict our faith because we cannot put limits on the creative freedom of God.”

In asking whether little green men might be guilty of original sin, we are obviously in the realm of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” But the theologian astronomers don’t blink. Fr. Funes said he was sure that, if aliens needed redemption, they “in some way, would have the chance to enjoy God’s mercy.” Consolmagno was more explicit: there’s no problem in getting the Son of God to every planet with ETs because, as Christians accept every Sunday during the Holy Eucharist, “Christ is truly, physically present in a million places, and sacrificed a million times, every day at every sacrifice of the Mass.”

So if the Catholic Church has accepted the possibility of aliens for a while now, why the high-profile interview in the Vatican newspaper? Applying the techniques of Kremlinology to St. Peter’s, Edward Pentin’s sources tell him it might be part of a push to demonstrate the Vatican’s embrace of science (in 1992 it apologized for that whole unfortunate Galileo mess, after all). Toward the end of the interview, Fr. Funes called science and religion “two allies which elevate the human spirit. There can be tensions or conflicts, but we mustn’t be afraid. The Church mustn’t fear science and its discoveries.”

Interestingly, the Vatican has plans to host a conference in Rome next spring to mark the 150^th anniversary of the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin’s seminal work on the theory of evolution. Conference organizers say it will look beyond entrenched ideological positions—including misconstrued creationism. The Vatican says it wants to reconsider the problem of evolution “with a broader perspective” and says an “appropriate consideration is needed more than ever before.”

“We hope this will really be an example of how to hold an open discussion without overtones,” Gennaro Auletta, director of science and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University, told Pentin. “We simply wish to dialogue between people whose mission is to understand a little more.” Those who see science as a dogma and unchangeable are being unscientific, he believes.

That is a striking statement coming from a scholar with close ties to the Vatican, for the latest slander against science is that it is just as dogmatic and closed-minded as religion. (A theme that the execrable and fallacious film, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” pounds away at.)

Contrary to much conventional wisdom, the Church has often been in science’s corner. The telescopes of the Vatican Observatory are perched on the roof of the Pope’s summer home in Caste1 Gandolfo, and Jesuits were for centuries Europe’s leading astronomers. “Seventeenth-century Jesuits invented the reflecting telescope and the wave theory of light,” Consolmagno pointed out. “In the 18th century they ran a quarter of all the astronomical observatories in Europe.” And it was Georges Lemaitre, a priest, who in 1927 deduced from Einstein’s equations of general relativity that the universe is expanding—and that it therefore began in a Big Bang. It will be fascinating to see if the Vatican is now enlisting in the battle to defend science from its growing legions of attackers.

Two Americas: The Death Gap

Sharon Begley — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Are you better off today than you were 10 years ago? Some version of that is a favorite question of politicians looking to oust the party in power. As of today, if the “you” refers to American adults with a high-school education or less, and if the “better off” refers to the most basic measure you can think of—whether you are alive or dead—the answer is a shameful “no.”

Last month I blogged about a study that underlined how we truly are Two Americas (though the idea never gained traction for John Edwards this primary season). That study found that, since the early 1980s, death rates in wealthy counties of the United States have fallen—but those in poorer ones have stagnated or risen, despite the huge strides in disease prevention and treatment. Those are just not reaching the poor. Now another study uses a different proxy for “haves” or “have-nots”—education—and reaches another shameful conclusion: the gap in death rates between Americans with less than a high school education and college graduates has soared since 1993, they will report tomorrow in the May 14 issue of PLoS One.

The scientists analyzed death certificates (which indicate the last year of schooling that the person completed, as well as cause of death) for blacks and whites between the ages of 25 and 64. The age cut-off was chosen because, for older generations, education is not as strong a proxy for socioeconomic status—class—as it is for younger ones.

The numbers are shocking. Among white men who did not graduate from high school, there were 837 deaths per 100,000 of them in 1993; that same year, only 285 white men with college degrees died per 100,000 in this age group. But it gets worse. In 2001, those respective rates were 931 and 213—the death rate for less-educated white men had risen, while that for college grads had fallen. Do the math: white men who did not graduate from high school were dying at a rate 2.9 times that of college grads in 1993—and at a rate 4.4 times higher in 2001. For black men, the comparable mortality rates were 2.1 times higher in 1993 and 3.4 times higher in 2001.

For white women who never graduated from high school, the death rate was 422 per 100,000 in 1993, and for white women with a college degree it was 165. In 2001? It rose to 553 per 100,000 in the first group, and dropped to 146 in the highly-educated group. Breaking that down, the death rate from cancer among white women with only 12 years of education rose 1.1 percent per year during the period studied; for heart disease and stroke, it rose 1.8 percent per year among these women. All three of these diseases have become more preventable and more treatable—but, apparently, only for some.

Conclusion: the widening death gap was due to sharp decreases in mortality from all causes—but especially in heart disease, cancer and stroke, all of which have benefited from new forms of prevention and treatment—among the most educated. The less educated have benefited hardly at all from medical progress.

Why are the death rates from the major causes of death falling among the educated but rising among the less educated? Think of lower educational attainment as a marker of social and economic class—which has become a big issue in the presidential campaign, as Clinton grabs the votes of those lower on the socioeconomic ladder and Obama gets the votes of the higher-ups. The have-nots are not only poorer; they also are less likely to have health insurance or stable employment, which means little to no preventive care, and lower health literacy. The last factor means less likelihood of knowing when some small symptom means big trouble, and greater difficulty navigating the medical system. Those with less education are also more likely to smoke, be obese, get little exercise, and suffer from high blood pressure due to the stress of unemployment.

“Risk factors are higher in less well-educated groups, and they have less access to preventive medicine and treatment,” says Ahmedin Jemal of the American Cancer Society, who led the study.

The death gap isn’t going away. In 2005, the most recent year the researchers analyzed, the all-cause mortality rate for those with less than a high-school education was 3.2 times higher than that for people with even some college.

The poor will always be with us, as the saying goes, and so will inequality in education. But other countries have socioeconomic inequality also—with no comparable death gap, says Jemal, because they do not make access to health care (especially non-emergency and preventive care) contingent on having health insurance. Two Americas, indeed.

In Defense of Ethanol

Sharon Begley — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:29:26 GMT

In the 12 years that I have speaking to him, Robert Zubrin has never disappointed. Whether he was devising a bargain-basement way to mount a manned mission to Mars (rather than taking along the fuel you need for the return trip, produce it from compounds in the Martian atmosphere once you get there, founding Pioneer Astronautics or serving as president of the Mars Society, Zubrin has never let conventional wisdom get in his way.

Amid the avalanche of new books on energy, Zubrin’s—Energy Victor: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil—also goes its own way. Rather than focusing on energy sources that will reduce the world’s emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases, he has one goal, and one goal only: breaking the stranglehold that despots from the Middle East to South America to Africa have on the world’s oil supply.

Zubrin was understandably not happy, therefore, when I disparaged the use of corn ethanol for fuel, pointing out that its greenhouse benefit is somewhere between small and nonexistent. Zubrin is an ethanol booster for one basic reason: it has the potential to wean the U.S. off imported oil. And he doesn’t buy the claim that diverting a large fraction of the corn harvest to ethanol plants is causing world grain prices—and U.S. food prices—to skyrocket. His arguments:

*Diverting corn for ethanol is not cutting in to food production, he says. “Here are the facts,” he told me in an email. “In 2002, the United States grew 9.0 billion bushels of corn, and turned 1.1 billion bushels into . . . 3 billion gallons of ethanol. In 2007, US farmers grew 13.1 billion bushels of corn, turned 3 billion bushels of it . . . into 8 billion gallons of ethanol,” leaving 10.1 billion bushels for food, more than the 7.9 billion bushels in 2002. Do the math: “despite the nearly three-fold growth of the corn ethanol industry,” Zubrin writes, “the net corn food and feed product of the USA increased 34% since 2002. Furthermore, contrary to claims in many articles, this has not been done at the expense of soy or wheat production. In fact, U.S. soy plantings this year are expected to be up 18% to a near record of 75 million acres, wheat plantings are up 6%, and overall, U.S. farm exports are up 23%.”

*The ethanol program pushed the price of a bushel of corn from $2.50 to about $4.50 or $5 in the last five years, or 9 cents per pound at the $5 price. This has induced farmers to plant more corn, from 78.9 million acres in 2002 to 93.6 million acres in 2007, putting “more corn on the market, helping to feed the world.”

*Those price increases? Blame OPEC, for causing fuel prices to rise 60% this year, plus increased demand from China and India. At $5 per bushel, the corn in a $3 box of cornflakes “cost 8 cents when bought from the farmer. So farm commodity prices have almost no effect on the retail consumers. But the effect of oil price hikes can be huge.”

*With oil above $120 per barrel, the U.S. will pay nearly $1 trillion for its oil supply, and the world as a whole will pay almost $4 trillion. “These petroleum costs are both up a factor of ten from what they were in 1999, and represent a huge highly-regressive tax on the world economy,” argues Zubrin, an astronautical engineer by training. “[The dollars going to OPEC are] “equivalent to a 45% increase in income taxes across the board, with 60% of the sum being paid over in tribute to foreign governments. Indeed, it is this massive tax increase – by far the largest in American history – that is now driving the United States into a recession.”

His conclusion: “rather than shut down the biofuel programs, we need to radically augment them, to the point where we can take down the oil cartel." He wants Congress to require that all new cars "be flex-fuel vehicles that can run on any combination of gasoline, ethanol or methanol. The technology is readily available and it only costs about $100 per vehicle. By making America a flex-fuel vehicle market, we will effectively make flex-fuel the international standard, as all significant foreign car makers would be impelled to convert their lines over as well.”

Zubrin doesn't pretend that corn ethanol will do much to avert the greenhouse crisis, but his focus on oil independence and energy prices is likely to resonate with more Americans (and politicians) than climate change does anyway. (As an aside, I have to mention a letter I got today from an angry reader, letting me know that "nobody [in his small town] even knows what a carbon footprint is. . . . Global warming and saving the planet is a bunch of crap. Everyone is concerned [instead] about maing enough money to pay for gasoline to drive to work.") And that will be the challenge for the next Administration, and the next Congress.

Which Orphans Do You Want to Starve?

Sharon Begley — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:19:58 GMT

Here’s a moral dilemma that seems tragically timely, given the chaos surrounding attempts to deliver aid to Burma’s cyclone victims. There are 60 orphans at the Canaan Children’s Home in Buziika, Uganda, and their meal allotment has to be cut. What do you want to do: take six meals away from each of two kids, or 10 meals away from one? You have eight seconds to decide.

In this and similar moral dilemmas, efficiency (the total number of meals lost) is pitted again against equity (how evenly the burden of lost meals is shared among the children). You have to take away a total of 12 meals if two children share the loss, but only 10 (which would seem better) if a single orphan bears the entire burden. You have to decide whether to sacrifice efficiency (losing fewer meals) to equity (spreading the loss over more children).

Here’s another way to think about it. You are driving a truck to the Burmese cyclone victims. It holds 1,000 pounds of rice. The time it will take to deliver the rice to everyone in the Irrawaddy Delta village you are headed for means that 200 pounds will spoil. If you deliver the rice to people you meet en route, you will be distributing it to only half the population of the village, but only 50 pounds will spoil. Do you deliver the rice to only half the number of victims, maximizing the total amount of food provided (efficiency), or do you sacrifice 150 pounds to distribute it to more people (equity), giving rice to more people but also causing more rice to go to waste?

In a study reported online today in the journal Science, researchers posed the orphan dilemma to people while scanning their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Unlike most studies of the brain basis of ethical decision making ("neuroethics"), this one was grounded in reality: the volunteers’ choices would determine how many meals the research team actually donated to the Ugandan orphans. The volunteers knew this, which made the dilemma painful in the extreme. “Quite a few came out saying: ‘This is the worst experiment I’ve ever been in. I never want to do anything like this again!’,” said study co-author Ming Hsu of the University of Illinois’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

So, which is more critical to our sense of justice, equity or efficiency? And how does the brain decide?

In the experiment, the volunteers (26 men and women, ages 28 to 55) first read short bios of the orphans. Then they watched a video on a computer screen, showing a ball rolling toward a lever. By moving the lever, they could steer the ball toward either of two depictions of the moral choices: photographs of the actual orphans who would be affected by that choice, with numbers for the number of meals that would be lost to those children if that option were chosen.

By an overwhelming margin, people chose to preserve equity at the expense of efficiency—lose a few more meals, but spread the burden among as many children as possible, rather than making one hungry child—whose imploring little face stared back at them from the screen--shoulder the entire loss.

According to the fMRI, different brain regions became active at different points in the decision-making. The insula, which is involved in processing emotions and the awareness of bodily states as well as (in some studies) evaluating fairness, was active when the volunteers wrestled with questions of equity. The putamen, which is activated during learning that brings rewards, lit up when people thought about efficiency.

Since equity won, it suggests that decisions about fairness are rooted in emotion more than in cold-eyed cost-benefit analysis. “That the brain has such a robust response to unfairness suggests that sensing unfairness is a basic evolved capacity,” Steven Quartz of Caltech and co-author of the study said in a statement. “The emotional response to unfairness pushes people from extreme inequity and drives them to be fair,” suggesting that “our basic impulse to be fair isn’t a complicated thing that we learn,” but an instinctive one.

And whoever said scientists have no heart? After the experiment, and based on the volunteers’ decisions, the team donated $2,279 to the orphanage.

The Platypus: God's Little Joke

Sharon Begley — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:31:36 GMT

The 1999 comedy Dogma opens with a disclaimer, exhorting the audience to remember that “even God has a sense of humor. Just look at the Platypus. Thank you and enjoy the show. P.S. We sincerely apologize to all Platypus enthusiasts out there who are offended by that thoughtless comment about Platypi. We at View Askew respect the noble Platypus, and it is not our intention to slight these stupid creatures in any way. Thank you again and enjoy the show.”

God expressed his sense of humor, of course, in assembling a creature that is a little bit mammal (the platypus, a native of Australia, produces milk and is furry), a little bit reptile (it lays eggs and has venom, released from spurs in the hind legs) and a little bit bird (eggs again, plus it has a bill like a duck as well as webbed feet). Its cognitive capacity and/or nobility we’ll leave to the guys at Dogma, but one particular platypus—Glennie, from New South Wales, Australia—has made scientists smarter: an international team of researchers from the U.S., Australia, England, Germany, Israel, Japan, New Zealand and Spain collected her DNA and from it sequenced the platypus genome, they’re announcing today in papers in Nature and Genome Research.

The platypus genome consists of roughly 2.2 billion pairs of chemical “letters,” those As, Ts, Cs and Gs that spell out a species’ genetic code. (Humans have about 3 billion.) Within those letters are some 18,500 genes, compared to maybe 24,000 in humans.

Not surprisingly, the platypus genome is an amalgam of mammal, reptile and bird DNA, too.

Like reptiles, the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) has genes for egg laying. Its venom comes from genes that are duplicates of genes that evolved in ancestral reptiles, which is also the source of venom in today’s reptiles. Like mammals, it has genes for lactation (though, lacking nipples, it nurses its young through the abdominal skin). Like birds, it has a weird way of determining sex: of its 52 chromosomes, 10 are sex chromosomes (in humans, the X and Y, of 23 chromosomes, are sex chromosomes), and the platypus X resembles the sex chromosome of birds, called Z. A female platypus has five pairs of X chromosomes, while males have five Xs and five Ys. The platypus genome contains both reptilian and mammalian genes involved in the fertilization of eggs. Unlike most mammals, which have a pretty good sense of smell, the platypus doesn’t—and its genome has about half as many odor receptors as the mouse and other mammals.

Just one request, please. In the PR avalanche preceding this announcement, one talked about the medical benefits that would surely come from this feat. ("What does this discovery mean for the public? The very real potential for advances in human disease prevention and a better understanding of mammalian evolution.") Aren't we beyond that yet? There have been virtually no medical benefits from sequencing the human genome (yet), for goodness sake; can't we, just occasionally, celebrate a feat of pure science without raising hopes that it will, you know, cure cancer or something? Sometimes a platypus genome is just a platypus genome.

How Child Abuse Gets Into the Brain

Sharon Begley — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:11:38 GMT

This has been the enduring mystery: How do events in the outside world get inside your head? That is, how do things that affect whether a child grows up to be contented and well-adjusted or a neurotic mess—things like abuse and neglect—change the gray matter to produce the brain activity and circuitry that corresponds to these psychological states? By turning some genes on and other genes off, according to a study posted this evening in the May 6 edition of the online PLoS ONE.

One of my favorite studies ever done showed how this happens in rats. In the 1990s Michael Meaney of McGill University saw that when a Mother Rat rarely licks and grooms her pups, the pups grow up to be fearful, stressed-out, jumpy and neurotic. If a Mother Rat is attentive and grooms her pups a lot, they grow up to be less neurotic, less fearful, more curious, mellower. The reason isn’t genetic, at least not in the usual sense. That is, it isn’t that mellow moms have mellow pups and neglectful moms have neurotic pups because the pups inherited mom’s mellow or neurotic DNA. (Pups born to attentive moms but reared by neglectful ones grow up to be stressed out, while pups born to neglectful moms but reared by attentive ones grow up to be less fearful, less neurotic. That is, they resemble their adoptive mom, not their biological one.)

Instead, licking and grooming removes the silencer on a gene that makes stress-hormone receptors in the rats’ brains. The more such receptors the brain has in the hippocampus, the fewer stress hormones are released and the mellower the rat is. But in rats reared by neglectful mothers, the silencer stays firmly attached, the brain therefore has a small supply of stress-hormone receptors, and glands pump out a flood of the hormones, producing a rat that is constantly jumpy and on hair-trigger alert. There you have it: Maternal behavior alters whether a gene is on or off.

Now the same core team of scientists has found that something like this happens in people, too. They compared the brains of troubled individuals who committed suicide, and who had been abused or severely neglected when they were children, to a comparison group of people who had no history of childhood abuse and who died suddenly of other causes. What the scientists did not find was any significant differences in the two groups’ gene sequences—that is, the strings of As, Ts, Cs and Gs that make up the double helix were basically the same.

But there were stark differences in the on-off setting of genes that work in the brain’s hippocampus. In the suicides, the genes were turned off like lights during a blackout, the McGill scientists report. In particular, “ribosomal RNA genes,” which humans have about 400 copies of and which make a big chunk of the cellular machinery that produces proteins, were studded with “off” switches. (This was not so in the cerebellum, but only the hippocampus. The former is mostly involved in movement, while the hippocampus encodes memories—and is often shrunk in people who have experienced trauma.)

As you would expect, the suicides—because of the “off” genes—made fewer rRNAs in the hippocampus. That likely means they also made fewer proteins—the workhorses of cells, since they include enzymes.

The next question is what effect the turned-off genes have in the brain, and how that may explain the suicides. But for now, chalk up another advance in understanding how the experiences we have can reach into our very DNA.

Window on the Mind: Will the Antidepressant Work?

Sharon Begley — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:06:13 GMT

Bad enough that antidepressants fail to help an estimated one-third of people suffering from depression. Even worse is that it can take 6 to 8 weeks before that becomes clear: the patient dutifully swallows Zoloft after Zoloft or Paxil after Paxil, only to find after two months that she is no better off—at which point her doctor typically puts her on a different med, and the whole process of trial-and-error starts all over again. There’s got to be a better way—and now there may be.

Last September I wrote about a new use of EEGs—the decades-old technology that measures brain waves—in which psychiatrists compare the EEG of a patient to thousands of EEGs in a huge database that matches it to an effective treatment. (This is different from using EEGs to diagnose a mental illness, something that doesn’t seem to work, perhaps because there are many, many ways for a brain to have an underlying pattern of electrical activity that adds up to “depression” or “bipolar disorder” or other psychiatric disease.) CNS Response, the California company that runs the database, looks for matches between EEG and effective drug. In about 75% of cases, that produces surprising pairings—such as an anticonvulsive drug for a patient with depression—that the physician would never have thought of.

A new study being reported this afternoon at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association finds another use for EEGs: predicting which patients will respond to the antidepressant they have just started. Rather than waiting for months, patients suffering from major depression—as nearly 15 million Americans do—take the drug for a week and then undergo an EEG (which is painless, noninvasive and relatively cheap, on the order of $150).

The study, led by Andrew Leuchter of UCLA and called BRITE (Biomarkers for Rapid Identification of Treatment Effectiveness), had 73 patients take the antidepressant escitalopram, which is sold as Lexapro and belongs to same category—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs—as Prozac and many others. That’s the quandary: all of the drugs supposedly work by targeting the brain’s serotonin system (which is actually a questionable claim, but that’s a story for another day), so which one will help a particular patient? Before starting the drug and again after taking it for 48 hours, for one week, and for two and seven weeks, the patients underwent EEGs. At the one-week visit, doctors assessed how well they were responding to the drug; the researchers also identified genetic markers that have been reported to predict how well patients will respond to SSRIs, and measured how much of the drug was in the patients’ blood, which is thought to be an indication of whether it is likely to work.

The bad news: the docs were terrible at predicting, based on how well the patients were doing after a week on Lexapro, whether the drug would alleviate their depression. The genetic markers fared no better. Neither did the blood levels.

But of the 38 patients who got a little better and the 28 who recovered completely by the end of the seven weeks, the EEG readings—measuring brain-wave changes after one week on the drug—did pretty well, predicting who would get a little better or even recover with 74% accuracy (compared to 51% accuracy for the docs’ evaluation).

“Early changes in frontal EEG signals carry important information about future clinical response,” Leuchter said in a statement, suggesting that EEGs have “the potential to help clinicians improve the care of patients suffering from depression.”

Caveats: the company that sells the EEG system, Aspect Medical Systems, funded the study, and Leuchter has been a paid consultant to Aspect, served on its board and received grant money from Aspect. (I have blogged before on how company-funded studies can be skewed.) And seven weeks is not exactly long-term. Still, anything that moves us beyond the current hit-and-miss approach to treating depression is to be welcomed.

But Her Body Language Said 'Yes!'

Sharon Begley — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:38:38 GMT

Before the month is out, I have to take note of a research article in the April issue of Psychological Science, which concludes that when it comes to reading women’s non-verbal signals—smiles, gaze, body language, tone of voice—men are complete and utter illiterates.

Especially when it comes to figuring out whether she is saying (in the family-friendly version): take me someplace where we can be horizontal and engage in activities that have been known to perpetuate the species. Or as scientists led by Coreen Farris and Richard McFall of Indiana University put it, “Men perceive more sexual intent in women’s behavior than women perceive or report intending to convey.”

I don’t mean to make light of this. Such misreading can lead to date rape, and telling the woman that she led the man on makes the victim feel complicit in her attack. Smiling, making eye contact, moving closer, or touching someone on the shoulder can indeed convey romantic interest—but all of these cues can also indicate “simple warmth, friendliness, or platonic interest,” the scientists note.

As is usual in questions like this, evolutionary psychologists have spun a theory to explain why men read “let’s have sex” into every nonverbal cue. If a man misses a signal to have sex, he loses out in the evolutionary sweepstakes. If he misreads an innocent signal as a sexual one, the worst that can happen (from the male reproductive point of view) is that he mates with a not-so-willing partner. In terms of evolution, erring on the side of “she wants sex” is a better, more adaptive strategy than erring in the other direction, missing such signals. As a result, goes this argument, men are programmed to read sex where no such message is intended.

No wonder “men consistently rate female targets as intending to convey a greater degree of sexual interest than do women who rate the same targets,” write the scientists. In a survey of university women, 67 percent said male acquaintance had misread friendliness as a sexual come-on.

According to the new study, however, it’s not just that men read sex where no sexual invitation is intended. Men can’t read any signals right. The scientists had 280 straight, undergraduate men and women look at a series of full-body photos of women, and categorize them as friendly, sexually interested, sad, or rejecting. The scientists selected the photos that were clearly one or another, then had a new group of 80 men and 80 women categorize the women in the photographs. A “correct” answer was one that agreed with the vast majority of raters in the first group, since only (seemingly) unambiguous photos were shown to this second, test group.

In every category, women categorized more images correctly than men did. Men were more likely than women to miscategorize a friendly-looking woman as indicating sexual interest, but—crucially—they also flunked out when it came to recognizing photos showing sexual interest: men were more likely than women to misidentify sexually interested targets as merely friendly, by 37.8% vs. 31.9%. In short, “men were more likely than women to misperceive friendliness as sexual interest, but they also were quite likely to misperceive sexual interest as friendliness,” the scientists found. “Men were significantly less sensitive to the distinction between friendliness and sexual interest”—in both directions, since they couldn’t tell when women were sad as opposed to rejecting, either. Men “oversexualized some women, but were quite likely to undersexualize other women.”

The take-home message is clear. Women can’t assume that men will understand anything they’re trying to convey.

Absinthe: Another Myth Debunked

Sharon Begley — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:20:35 GMT

All you connoisseurs who lament that new versions of old classics—the Corvette, Astroturf, metal bats—just do not measure up to the original can cross one example off your list: absinthe.

The bitter green liqueur made from wormwood was for decades the toast of Europe, imbibed by the likes of van Gogh, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso to, it was believed, spur their creativity. For absinthe was deemed more drug than drink: thujone, a natural essence found in common wormwood (Artemisia absinthium L.) and Roman wormwood (Artemisia pontica L.) that was widely believed to be its active ingredient, induces convulsions like those suffered by people with epilepsy, and was thought to account for absinthe’s supposedly mind-altering properties. Thujone was thought to explain absinthe’s reputation as a “green fairy” and a “green muse.” (The original absinthe also contained green anise, Pimpinella anisum L.; hyssop, Hyssopus officinalis L.; lemon balm, Melissa officinalis L. and Florence fennel, Foeniculum vulgare Mill.)

I couldn’t avoid all those “supposedly”s and “thought to”s in the paragraph above: it turns out that there had been only a single actual test of how much thujone classic absinthe contained. By “classic,” I mean the version available throughout the 19^th century, before first Switzerland and then most of Europe banned it beginning in 1908. (Spain and some other countries never banned it, however.) Now, though, a team of scientists has managed to get their hands on 13 unopened bottles of the original, pre-ban absinthe, produced in France before 1915. They find that the stuff contains too little thujone to alter anyone’s mind—but more than enough alcohol to do so: the absinthe contained 70 percent alcohol, making it 140-proof, compared to proofs of 80 to 100 characteristic of most gin, vodka and whiskey. They’ll report their findings in the May 14 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Starting in December 2004, the scientists began locating samples of pre-ban absinthe, eventually finding unopened, uncontaminated bottles in France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, and the U.S. Earlier, they had made some theoretical calculations about how much thujone absinthe makers were likely to get out of the wormwood they used, concluding that “for typical French and Swiss 19th century recipes” the thujone content probably ranged from zero (if thujone-free wormwood was used) to 76 milligrams per liter (if oil-rich varieties with high thujone concentrations were used). The average would have been around 17–23 mg/L.

Their findings matched their expectations. Analyses of the 13 pre-ban bottles showed thujone concentrations of 0.5 and 48.3 mg/L, with an average of 25.4 20.3 mg/L. The highest was 48.3 mg/L, in a Pernod Fils absinthe.

What do the numbers mean? If you imbibed one whole liter of the high-thujone Pernod Fils, you would get about 0.8 mg of thujone per kilogram of body weight if you weighed 60 kg (132 pounds)—less if you weighed more, more if you weighed less. But “even this unrealistically high intake of alcohol produces thujone concentrations below the ‘no observed effects level’ of 5 mg/kg bodyweight.” That is, glugging an entire liter—something even Toulouse-Lautrec rarely managed—would still leave you at less than 16 percent of the amount found in tests to produce mind-altering effects.

For what it’s worth, the thujone levels in these pre-ban absinthes were about the same as those in modern absinthe, which has been produced since 1988, when the European Union lifted its ban. “All things considered, nothing besides ethanol was found in the absinthes that was able to explain the syndrome of absinthism,” said one of the scientists. Classic absinthe may have been a psychedelic substance, but only because quaffing anything that’s 70 percent alcohol tends to be.

Climate Change and Ozone: Laws of Unintended Consequences

Sharon Begley — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:33:39 GMT

When it comes to averting dangerous climate change, an awful lot of people seem to hold out hope that we can blast our way out of the mess we’re in. Nothing so boring as energy conservation, or even replacing coal, oil and natural gas with solar, wind and nuclear: Instead, let’s shoot sulfate particles into the atmosphere to reflect away sunlight! Let’s load up the oceans with iron so plankton will grow like dandelions on my lawn and suck up the heat-trapping carbon dioxide produced when we burn fossil fuels!

Hope springs eternal. This week brought a conference on weather modification, with the emphasis on getting clouds to drop their raindrops. My favorite paper was, alas, withdrawn: it proposed a machine—a ship, actually, with “four torpedo-shaped hulls”—that would “stop hurricanes from wrecking large parts of America.”

While the inventor goes back to the drawing board on that one, a new study suggests that geo-engineering proposals may well blow up in our faces. Injecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere would shred Earth’s protective ozone layer, conclude scientists led by Simone Tilmes of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, delaying the recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole by decades and triggering serious ozone loss over the arctic.

The problem, as she and colleagues explain in a paper published online in Science Express, is that although sulfur particles from volcanic eruptions do cool the planet’s surface, they also provide a surface on which chlorine gases—the chief culprits in ozone depletion—can cause chemical reactions that speed the destruction of ozone molecules. Sulfates themselves do not destroy ozone; they simply provide a convenient surface for chlorine to do so.

“Trying to artificially cool off the planet could have perilous side effects,” Tilmes said in a statement. “While climate change is a major threat, more research is required before society attempts global geoengineering solutions.”

Over the next few decades, the quantity of sulfates that geo-engineering schemes envision could destroy one-fourth to three-fourths of the ozone layer above the arctic, she calculates. Because of atmospheric mixing, this low-ozone mass would sometimes swing over inhabited regions of the northern hemisphere, leaving people and other living things without the protection from ultraviolet light that ozone provides. Injected sulfates would also postpone by 30 to 70 years the repair of the ozone hole over Antarctica, or until at least the 2090s.

More UV raises the risk of skin cancers, including deadly melanomas, and decimation of phytoplankton that anchor marine food chains. But hey, what’s a little (or a lot of) melanoma and fisheries crashes if we can avoid the hard steps needed to avert dangerous global warming?

In one of those “you can’t win for losing” things, another study concludes that if the ozone hole over Antarctica does return, as it is expected to now that the world has banned most ozone-destroying chemicals (and assuming we don’t mess it up with geo-engineering), the antarctic will finally start warming the way the rest of the world has.

It’s been a puzzle of climate-change models that the interior of Antarctica has not warmed as much as models project. Average global surface temperatures have been increasing, but the interior of the southern continent has actually been cooling during the austral summer and fall. That’s been traced to ozone depletion which, through a complicated mechanism, produces atmospheric circulation patterns—basically, intense westerly winds—that block warm air masses to the north from reaching Antarctica. In addition, with low levels of ozone the lower stratosphere over Antarctica doesn’t absorb as much ultraviolet radiation.

Once the ozone returns, calculate Judith Perlwitz of the University of Colorado at Boulder and colleagues, the warming trend will kick in as the westerlies fade and UV absorption causes air temperatures 6 to 12 miles up to rise by as much as 16 degrees F.

That might be good news for travelers who are waiting for Antarctica to warm up before they book a trip to the south pole, but it will be bad news to climate-change deniers. They have long pointed to Antarctica's cooling to question the basic predictions of global warming.

Galaxies Gone Wild

Sharon Begley — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:54:10 GMT

This is why millions of space fans erupted in fury when those fools at NASA announced in 2004 that the Hubble Space Telescope would be allowed to die. The images that Hubble has taken since its launch in 1990 (or, really, since its near-sightedness was corrected during a space shuttle mission in 1993) have revealed a universe wilder and more beautiful, mysterious and humbling than anyone suspected. This morning, the 18th anniversary of Hubble’s launch, NASA is unveiling a collection of photographs taken by the telescope—the most ever released at one time—showing that Hubble is far from running out of glorious targets.

Flip through them yourself and you’ll see why NASA calls these “galaxies gone wild.” Far from the static, staid islands of stars depicted in textbooks, galaxies are dynamic, antsy and even promiscuous, having what astronomers call “flirtatious close encounters that sometimes end in grand mergers and overflowing ‘maternity wards’ of new star birth as the colliding galaxies morph into wondrous new shapes.” Although only one in a million galaxies in the nearby universe is colliding, many more in the distant environs are: farther away equals longer ago, and longer ago galaxies were closer together because the expanding universe was smaller.

Among the standouts in the 59 images is Arp 148, the detritus of an encounter between two galaxies that produced a shockwave that first drew matter inward and then pushed it outward, creating a ring-shaped galaxy and a long-tailed hanger-on perpendicular to the ring. (Arp 148 is located in Ursa Major, the Great Bear, about 500 million light-years from Earth.)

Then there is Arp 256, two spiral galaxies in flagrante delicto: the merger has triggered blue knots of star formation that look like a 4th of July display. (Arp 256 is in the constellation of Cetus, the Whale, 350 million light-years away.)

Arp 220 is what happens when two spiral galaxies collide. This one is 250 million light-years away in the constellation of Serpens, the Serpent. The collision, 700 million years ago, ignited a fury of star formation, producing 200 huge star clusters in a packed, dusty region 5,000 light-years across (about 5 percent of the Milky Way’s diameter, it holds as much gas as the entire Milky Way).

ESO 148-2 looks like a flying owl, and is a pair of disk galaxies in the act of colliding. The centers of the two contain myriads of stars, while two enormous “wings” curving out from the center are actually the tidal tails of stars and gas that have been pulled from the disks.

I could go on, but it's much more fun to see the photos yourself.

Censored Science: Part . . . . (we've lost count)

Sharon Begley — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:39:12 GMT

It's a sad commentary on the current politicization of science that the latest example sounds like a dog-bites-man story----as in, what else is new? Still, the fact that 889 of 1,586 staff scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency say they've experienced political interference in their work over the last five years, as a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists being released today finds, is enough to make you despair for the state of policy-relevant science in this country.

In previous UCS investigations, scientists at the Food and Drug Administration, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and climate scientists at seven federal agencies reported that Bush administration officials had manipulated the results of their research, such as by calling global warming a theory, playing down its potential impact and altering scientific reports concluding that particular species are endangered.

At EPA, there have been allegations (which Congress is investigating) that the administration overruled staff scientists on California's request to regulate vehicle emissions of greenhouse gases, and on scientific findings about the ground-level ozone pollution standard. Rep. Henry Waxman's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has been documenting the administration's manipulation of science for political ends since 2003. In a hearing today, he is getting testimony about abstinence-only sex education, an area where the administration has been less than forthright when it comes to measuring how well such programs work.

In the UCS report, 889 scientists said they had personally experienced at least one instance of political interference in their work over the last five years, 394 experienced "statements by EPA officials that misrepresent scientists' findings," and 285 experienced "selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome." That's when the scientists reach a conclusion, and the political appointees not only ignore it but twist it. Also, 224 scientists said they had been "directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information from an EPA scientific document." Why haven't the scientists spoken up more? 492 (31 percent) felt they could not speak candidly within the agency and 382 (24 percent) felt they could not do so outside the agency. Half said they couldn't talk to reporters.

Bill Hirzy, an EPA senior scientist and union official, put it this way: "Too many EPA scientists have had to fight interference from political or private sector interests and fear retaliation for speaking out."

Live Poor, Die Young

Sharon Begley — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:33 GMT

Want to live longer? Move. Or make more money.

During the decades when life expectancy in the U.S. rose from 67 to 74 years for men and from 74 to 80 for women, the rising tide was lifting all boats: although death rates in poorer counties exceeded those in better-off counties, everyone experienced steady improvement. No more. From 1961 to 1983, the death rate in every county fell largely because deaths from cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke) did; the spread in death rates between poorer and wealthier counties also fell. “In the 1960s and 1970s the improvements seemed to reach everybody,” says Majid Ezzati of the Harvard School of Public Health, as people in poor as well as wealthy counties adopted such heart-healthy habits as controlling blood pressure and not smoking.

Since the early 1980s, however, the difference in death rates between counties has increased. Death rates in poorer ones have stagnated and, in some counties, have actually risen, Ezzati and colleagues report this evening in PLoS Medicine.

That means health inequality is rising. The spread between the counties with the greater life expectancy and the worst is now 18.2 years for men and 12.7 years for women. In 1983 it was nine years for men and 6.7 years for women.

The authors call the increased inequalities in mortality “particularly troubling because an oft-stated aim of the U.S. health system is the improvement of the health of all people, and especially those at greater risk of health disparities.” “There has always been a view in U.S. health policy that inequalities are more tolerable as long as everyone’s health is improving,” Ezzati said. “There is now evidence that there are large parts of the population . . . whose health has been getting worse for about two decades.”

Between 1961 and 1983, no county suffered a statistically-significant decline in life expectancy; not so in the years since. From 1983 to 1999 (the last year for which the National Center for Health Statistics would give the scientists the data it collects from counties--a story in and of itself), life expectancy actually fell in 11 counties for men and 180 counties for women, averaging a drop of 1.3 years. So much for "the best health care system in the world."

Most of the counties where mortality is rising—counties populous enough and numerous enough that 4 of men and 19 of women experienced either decline or stagnation in mortality beginning in the 1980s—are poor. They’re in the Deep South, along the Mississippi River and in Appalachia, extending into the southern portion of the Midwest and into Texas. Those are among the counties that experienced the greatest improvements in life expectancy in the 1960s and 1970s, because they had the most room for improvement. But progress there has come to a screeching halt since the 1980s.

You can see life expectancy at birth between 1961 and1999 for men here and for women here, and life expectancy in 1961, 1983 and 1999 here. The absolute change in life expectancy, also by country, in 1961–1983 and 1983–1999 is here.

It’s even sadder than those blue and red maps that show the country’s political divide. This one is literally a matter of life and death.

Hearts and Minds: Voters' Feelings About the Candidates

Sharon Begley — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:14:39 GMT

The thrill is gone.

Maybe voters are simply tired of the seemingly endless campaign for the Democratic nomination. Or maybe their excitement about the new (Barack Obama), the suddenly emoting (Hillary Clinton, in New Hampshire) or the coming-back-from the-politically-dead (John McCain) can’t last forever. But whatever the reason, voters are feeling much less excitement and fewer positive emotions about all three of the remaining presidential candidates than they once did, finds a poll that, uniquely, measures voters’ emotional reactions.

If the trend continues, that’s bad news for the candidates, because research keeps showing that voters base their decisions more on their hearts than their heads and are easily swayed by anxiety, fear and other negative emotions. Latest evidence: anyone who feels—the key word—that Obama doesn’t understand “people like me” because he said that voters embittered about their economic plight “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” If that loses him any votes, it will not be because of a rational analysis of his record and positions, but because of how it made people feel about him.

Anyway, a company called AdSam measures what it calls “Emotional Temperature,” which gauges people’s emotional engagement with a product, website or advertisement. Since, as we all know from Joe McGinniss’s 1969 book, “The Selling of the President, 1968,” candidates are marketed and sold just like detergent, the same technique should work with politicians.

In its latest study, AdSam measured how strongly voters feel about each candidate, and how engaging they find them. Since last September, Clinton’s “emotional temperature has been on a continual steep decline with voters,” says AdSam president Jon Morris, a professor at the University of Florida, dropping from 93 to 70 (where 173 is how emotionally positive voters say they would like to feel about a candidate). “Her emotional cool-off is a sign that she is not relevant and not making connections with voters. This is a significant barrier for her and will be very difficult for her to turn around.”

Clinton trails both McCain and Obama, whose emotional temperatures are very similar (85 and 88, respectively, this month) and have not fallen off a cliff the way Clinton’s has. Obama dropped 8 points from September to January (97 to 89), and has stayed at about that “temperature” since. McCain moved up 9 points from September to January (79 to 88), but is down 3 points since.

Obama generates the most positive emotional response among Democrats (beating Clinton 120 to 97) and beats McCain among Independents (97 to 81), with Clinton at 74 among Independents. McCain has finally excited and united Republicans, however, zooming from 101 last September to 145 now.

Clinton is leaving more voters cold, says Morris. Compared to last September or even January, fewer voters feel “interested/excited” by her, while more feel “reluctant,” “uninterested/unexcited” and even “disgusted.” The biggest reason for the turnaround, Morris finds, is that more voters perceive Clinton as dishonest.

Obama is making more Democrats “interested/excited” now than he did in January, but more are also feeling “ambivalent” about him. In follow-up interviews, voters use words such as “truthful,” “honest,” “trust” and “inspirational,” but more and more cite his scant experience on the national stage. The Illinois senator has further to go with Independents: 21 percent feel strong positive emotions about him, compared to 32 percent last September. Equally worrisome, 28 percent now feel “ambivalent,” the most of any emotion among Independents asked about Obama.

More Democrats (20 percent) were disgusted by Clinton’s dishonesty about coming under fire during a trip to Bosnia than by Obama’s links to his controversial pastor (10 percent). We'll see how this translates into votes in Pennsylvania next Tuesday.