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News Analysis: Rethink Stem Cells? Science Already Has
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, March 10, 2009
With soaring oratory, President Obama on Monday removed a substantial practical nuisance that has long made life difficult for stem cell researchers. He freed biomedical researchers using federal money (a vast majority) to work on more than the small number of human embryonic stem cell lines that were established before Aug. 9, 2001.
In practical terms, federally financed researchers will now find it easier to do a particular category of stem cell experiments that, though still important, has been somewhat eclipsed by new advances.
Until now, to study unapproved stem cell lines, researchers had to set up separate, privately financed labs and follow laborious accounting procedures to make sure not a cent of federal grant money was used on that research. No longer. The lifting of such requirements “is just a major boon for the research here and elsewhere,” said Dr. Arnold Kriegstein, a stem cell researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. George Q. Daley, who studies blood diseases at Children’s Hospital in Boston, said that he had derived 15 human embryonic stem cell lines using private money, and that for the first time he could now apply for grants from the National Institutes of Health to study these cells. In the last eight years, his lab has moved from 90 percent N.I.H. support to half N.I.H., half private financing. But private money is now drying up, he said, and new N.I.H. support will be particularly welcome.
However, the president’s support of embryonic stem cell research comes at a time when many advances have been made with other sorts of stem cells. The Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka found in 2007 that adult cells could be reprogrammed to an embryonic state with surprising ease. This technology “may eventually eclipse the embryonic stem cell lines for therapeutic as well as diagnostics applications,” Dr. Kriegstein said. For researchers, reprogramming an adult cell can be much more convenient, and there have never been any restrictions on working with adult stem cells.
For therapy, far off as that is, treating patients with their own cells would avoid the problem of immune rejection.
Members of Congress and advocates for fighting diseases have long spoken of human embryonic stem cell research as if it were a sure avenue to quick cures for intractable afflictions. Scientists have not publicly objected to such high-flown hopes, which have helped fuel new sources of grant money like the $3 billion initiative in California for stem cell research.
In private, however, many researchers have projected much more modest goals for embryonic stem cells. Their chief interest is to derive embryonic stem cell lines from patients with specific diseases, and by tracking the cells in the test tube to develop basic knowledge about how the disease develops.
Despite an F.D.A.-approved safety test of embryonic stem cells in spinal cord injury that the Geron Corporation began in January, many scientists believe that putting stem-cell-derived tissues into patients lies a long way off. Embryonic stem cells have their drawbacks. They cause tumors, and the adult cells derived from them may be rejected by the patient’s immune system. Furthermore, whatever disease process caused the patients’ tissue cells to die is likely to kill introduced cells as well. All these problems may be solvable, but so far none have been solved.
Restrictions on embryonic stem cell research originated with Congress, which, each year since in 1996, has forbidden the use of federal financing for any experiment in which a human embryo is destroyed. This includes the derivation of human stem cell lines from surplus fertility clinic embryos, first achieved by Dr. James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin in 1998.
President Clinton contemplated but never implemented a policy that would have allowed N.I.H.-financed researchers to study human embryonic stem cells derived by others. Research was able to begin only in August 2001, when President Bush, seeking a different way around the Congressional restriction, said researchers could use any lines established before that date.
Critics said the distinction between the Clinton and Bush policies lacked moral significance, given that each was intended to get around the Congressional ban, based on a religious and moral argument. The proposed Clinton policy amounted to: “Stealing is wrong, but it’s O.K. to use stolen property if someone else stole it.” The Bush policy was: “Stealing is wrong, but it’s O.K. to use stolen property if it was stolen before Aug. 9, 2001.”
Mr. Obama has put the proposed Clinton policy into effect, but Congressional restrictions remain. Researchers are still forbidden to use federal financing to derive new human embryonic stem cell lines. They will, however, be allowed to do research on new stem cell lines grown in a privately financed lab.
Stem cell research is the best known of several avenues of investigation into what is known as regenerative medicine. To regenerate the aging body with its own subtle repair systems, of which stem cells are one component, would be far more effective than the brute methods of drugs and surgery used today.
But scientists are still merely at the threshold of understanding how the body’s 200 different types of cell interact with one another. It seems likely to be years before biologists know all the settings that must be adjusted in a human cell’s chromosomes to make it become a well-behaved cone cell in the retina or a dopamine-making neuron of the type destroyed in Parkinson’s.
Despite the new interest in reprogrammed stem cells, human embryonic stem cells are still worth studying, both to track the earliest moments in disease and to help assess the behavior of the reprogrammed cells.
Really? The Claim: Daylight Saving Time Can Affect Your Health
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, The New York Times, March 10, 2009
THE FACTS
Daylight saving time, which began this week in most of the United States, has long been promoted as a way to save energy. Whether it does is still a matter of debate. But it does seem clear from studies that a one-hour time adjustment can have unintended health consequences.
It seems that when the clock is moved forward or back one hour, the body’s internal clock — its circadian rhythm, which uses daylight to stay in tune with its environment — does not adjust. In a study of 55,000 people, for example, scientists found that on days off from work, subjects tended to sleep on standard time, not daylight time: their waking hour followed the seasonal progression of dawn.
In other studies, scientists tracked large groups of people for eight weeks at a time as they made the transitions to daylight time in spring and to standard time in autumn. They found that in spring, people’s peak activity levels were more in tune with their body clock than with the actual clock. Studies suggest that this disconnect between body time and clock time can result in restlessness, sleep disruption and shorter sleep duration. Other studies have suggested links between time change and increases in heart attacks, suicides and accidents, though scientists say more study is needed.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Daylight saving time is associated with sleep disruptions and possibly more serious consequences.
Global Update: Viruses: Malaria Drug Is Found to Curb Deadly Infections Spread From Animals
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, March 10, 2009
Scientists have discovered that an old antimalaria drug is effective against two fatal viruses that recently jumped from animals to humans.
The closely related viruses, Nipah and Hendra, live in the fruit bats sometimes called flying foxes and are believed to infect animals that eat fruit contaminated with the bats’ urine or saliva.
Nipah was discovered in 1999, when it was blamed for the deaths of 106 people in Malaysia and Singapore, mostly farm or slaughterhouse workers who got it from pigs.
Since 2001, Nipah has killed more than 100 in Bangladesh and India. The early deaths were from brain infections, but in 2004 it also took on a respiratory form transmitted from person to person. Each small outbreak had a different death rate, but most were well over 50 percent.
Hendra was discovered in 1994 in Australia, where it has killed dozens of horses and two of four humans known to have been infected by horses.
Until recently, there was no known treatment. But in the last month, two teams of scientists — one at Cornell’s medical school in New York and one in France — separately discovered that chloroquine, a malaria drug invented 50 years ago, prevents both viruses from reproducing.
Chloroquine has a long safety record and, in laboratory tests, appears to work at doses even lower than those used to prevent malaria.
It has not yet been tested against Nipah or Hendra in humans but presumably will be during the next outbreak, scientists said.
Findings: What Do Dreams Mean? Whatever Your Bias Says
By JOHN TIERNEY, The New York Times, March 10, 2009
Suppose last night you had two dreams. In one, God appears and commands you to take a year off and travel the world. In the other, God commands you to take a year off to go work in a leper colony.
Which of those dreams, if either, would you consider meaningful?
Or suppose you had one dream in which your friend defends you against enemies, and another dream in which that same friend goes behind your back and tries to seduce your significant other? Which dream would you take seriously?
Tough questions, but social scientists now have answers — and really, it’s about time. For thousands of years, dreamers have had little more to go on than the two-gate hypothesis proposed in “The Odyssey.” After Penelope dreams of the return of her lost-long husband, she’s skeptical and says that only some dreams matter.
“There are two gates,” she explains, “through which these unsubstantial fancies proceed; the one is of horn, and the other ivory. Those that come through the gate of ivory are fatuous, but those from the gate of horn mean something to those that see them.”
Her two-gate hypothesis, later endorsed by Virgil and Ovid, was elegant in theory but not terribly useful in practice. How could you tell which gate your dream came from? One woman’s ivory could be another’s horn.
Today, though, we can start making distinctions, thanks to a series of studies of more than 1,000 people by two psychologists, Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University and Michael Norton of Harvard. (You can report your dreams to these researchers at TierneyLab, nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
The psychologists began by asking college students in three countries — India, South Korea and the United States — how much significance they attached to dreams. Relatively few students believed in modern theories that dreaming is simply the brain’s response to random impulses, or that it’s a mechanism for sorting and discarding information. Instead, the majority in all three countries believed, along with Freud, that dreams reveal important unconscious emotions.
These instinctive Freudians also considered dreams to be valuable omens, as demonstrated in a study asking them to imagine they were about to take a plane trip. If, on the eve of the flight, they dreamed of the plane’s crashing, they were more likely to cancel the trip than if they saw news of an actual plane crash on their route.
But when the researchers asked people to interpret dreams, some suspiciously convenient correlations turned up. When asked to recall their own dreams, they attached more significance to a negative dream if it was about someone they disliked, and they gave correspondingly more weight to a positive dream if it was about a friend.
A similar bias showed up when people were asked to imagine that they had had various dreams starring a friend or a deity. People rated a dream about a friend protecting them against attackers as being more “meaningful” than a dream about their own romantic partner faithlessly kissing that same friend. People who believed in God were more likely than agnostics to be swayed by divine apparitions.
But even the nonbelievers showed a weakness for certain heavenly dreams, like one in which God commanded them to take a year off to travel the world. Agnostics rated that dream as significantly more meaningful than the dream of God commanding them to spend a year working in a leper colony. (Incidentally, although the preferred term for leprosy is now Hansen’s disease, the deity in the experiment used the old-fashioned term from the Bible.)
Dreamers’ self-serving bias is tactfully defined as a “motivated approach to dream interpretation” by Dr. Morewedge and Dr. Norton in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. When asked if this “motivated approach” might also affect dream researchers, Dr. Morewedge pointed to Freud’s tendency to find what he was looking for — sex — in his “Interpretation of Dreams.”
“Freud himself suggested that dreams of flying revealed thoughts of sexual desire,” Dr. Morewedge noted. “Interestingly, in the same text, Freud also suggested that dreams about the absence of the ability to fly — i.e., falling — also indicate succumbing to sexual desire. One might interpret this as evidence that scientists are just as self-serving as laypeople when interpreting their dreams.”
Once you see how flexible dream interpretation can be, you can appreciate why it has always been such a popular tool for decision-making. Relying on your dreams for guidance is like the political ritual of appointing an “independent blue-ribbon panel” to resolve an issue. You can duck any personal responsibility for action while pretending to rely on an impartial process, even though you’ve stacked the panel with your own friends and will ignore any advice that conflicts with your desires. Charity work, no; margaritas, sí.
Even if you don’t believe in your own dreams, the new research suggests that you can learn something from those of others. In the Book of Genesis, when the Pharaoh becomes concerned over his dreams of emaciated cattle and withered ears of corn, it would not be unreasonable for Joseph to conclude that the ruler is worried about the possibility of famine. Joseph would therefore have every motivation to interpret the dream so that the Pharaoh creates a new grain-storage program — and, not incidentally, a new job for Joseph supervising it.
While they doubt that dreams contain hidden insights or prophecies, Dr. Morewedge and Dr. Norton note that dreams can be indicators of people’s emotional state, as evidenced by other researchers’ findings of a correlation between stress and nightmares.
Dreams can also become self-fulfilling prophecies simply because people take them so seriously, Dr. Morewedge and Dr. Norton say. Dreams of spousal infidelity may lead to accusations and acrimony that ultimately lead to real infidelity.
“When friends and loved ones have disturbing dreams,” Dr. Morewedge suggested, “one may need to do more than say, ‘It was just a dream.’ It may also be a good idea not to tell people about their undesirable behavior in your dreams, as they may infer that your dreams reveal your true feelings about them.”
This last caveat applies even when non-Freudians are discussing dreams. Even if you don’t ascribe any deep meaning to dreams, even if you think they’re just random hallucinations that don’t come from gates of ivory or horn or anything else, you should still probably pay attention when, say, your romantic partner tells you about a dream in which you were caught in bed with your partner’s friend.
And you should definitely be concerned if your partner goes on to mention a second dream involving a commandment from God to take a year off and travel the world. If your partner is a highly motivated interpreter of dreams, you may find yourself home alone.
Tools That Leave Wildlife Unbothered Widen Research Horizons
By JIM ROBBINS, The New York Times, March 10, 2009
You may remember Senator John McCain’s criticism of a study of grizzly bear DNA as wasteful spending. And you may have wondered how the scientists got the DNA from the grizzlies.
The answer is hair. The study, which Mr. McCain referred to during his run for president, was a large one, and it provided an estimate of the population of threatened grizzly bears in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, in and around Glacier National Park.
The researchers did not trap the bears or shoot them with tranquilizers. Instead, they prepared 100 55-gallon drums with a mixture of whole fish and cattle blood that was allowed to ferment until it had the aroma of grizzly bear candy.
They built 2,400 hair corrals — 100 feet of barbed wire around five or six trees — and placed the fish and blood mix in the center. When bears went under the wire to check it out they left hair behind.
The team collected 34,000 hair samples in 14 weeks this way. And the population estimate from the study, announced late last year, was 765, a figure 2.5 times the estimate based on sightings of females and cubs, the previously used method.
“Hair snaring has given us a much more precise number,” said Katherine C. Kendall, a research ecologist with the United States Geological Survey who designed and implemented the study. The results were just published in The Journal of Wildlife Management.
It also gives a glimpse of a growing trend in wildlife biology toward research methods that are gentler — and cheaper — than the classic “capture, mark, recapture.” In that process researchers trap an animal, sometimes drug it and fasten on a radio collar or implant or attach a transmitter. Then they follow the radio signal or catch the animal again to see where it goes.
Such tools are powerful. Some high-tech collars beam an animal’s whereabouts to a satellite every 20 or 30 minutes, giving researchers unparalleled data on movement and habitat. But the techniques can create animals that are either “trap happy” or “trap shy.”
There is concern that contacts with humans can reduce an animal’s wildness or lead to its death. Some research shows that bears may suffer long-term impacts from being drugged. And in national parks, visitors often complain when they see a wild wolf or bear with a large radio collar around its neck.
As a result, new noninvasive techniques are evolving, some that use hair and others that use animal scat. Such methods can be useful in countries that lack access to expensive technology.
“You don’t need a vet, you don’t need an airplane, you don’t need training,” said Megan Parker, assistant director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s North America Program, based in Bozeman, Mont.
In Bhutan, for example, biologists are gathering scat to study snow leopards, which are extraordinarily difficult to see, let alone trap. The problem is that there are a lot of different types of scat on the ground that cannot be differentiated visually. Out of 100 fecal samples gathered, often only 2 belong to a snow leopard. Lab testing to find those two samples is expensive.
The scat is shipped to Bozeman, where Dr. Parker is training a dog, a Belgian Malinois named Pepin, to tell snow leopard scat from other types. Once Pepin’s sniff test weeds out the false samples, the right scat can be sent to a lab. Because of technological advances, a fragment of DNA found in scat can identify the species and sex of the animal that produced it. By collecting numerous samples across a territory, critical migration corridors can be identified as well as the abundance of a species. Stress hormones in the sample may be an indicator of the animal’s health. Diet and parasites can be assessed.
“The genetic code is a mystery novel, a history book and a time log in a single hair,” said Michael K. Schwartz, a research ecologist at the United States Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Mont.
L. Scott Mills, a professor of wildlife population ecology who teaches the techniques at the University of Montana in Missoula, said noninvasive methods “opened the door for abundance and density estimates that are very hard to do with live trapping.”
“We can sample so many more animals,” Dr. Mills said. “With live trapping you might trap three animals in two years. With scats we can find 15 or 30.”
Another noninvasive technique involves the use of still and video cameras triggered by heat and motion. Kerry R. Foresman teaches in the wildlife biology program at the University of Montana in Missoula, which emphasizes noninvasive techniques. He studies the fisher, wolverine, lynx and pine marten, all secretive carnivores, leaving a remote camera trained on the hanging hindquarter of a deer.
Tracking plates are another tool. Animals are lured by bait across soot-covered metal plates and onto contact paper. “They leave behind exquisite images of their tracks,” Dr. Foresman said. The setup costs $12.
For a study on river otters, Dr. Foresman used Google Earth to find log jams on the Bitterroot River. “Otters love log jams,” he said. The next day he went to a jam and set up a remote camera. “I had a hundred pictures of river otters in one night,” he said.
Such techniques are easier on researchers as well as their subjects. Tracking animals with a radio collar often means flying low in treacherous mountain weather.
“People get hurt all of the time,” Dr. Foresman said. “I know a lot of wildlife researchers who have died in plane crashes while tracking animals.”
The trend has unleashed a burst of creativity. In Portugal, biologists studying the Eurasian lynx outfit a lynx den with cork in which an Amazonian kissing bug is contained in a hole the width of a quarter, covered by thin plastic. The kissing bug drills through the plastic, bites the animal and goes back into its hole. When the lynx leaves, researchers fetch the bug and take the blood sample.
In Yellowstone National Park, fish in Yellowstone Lake carry naturally occurring mercury from underwater thermal vents up through the food chain. After feeding bears in captivity with trout harvested from the lake, researchers know precisely the ratio of fish eaten to mercury in hair and blood. So they have an accurate continuing window into how much fish the bears are eating simply by gathering hairs.
Museum specimens of wildlife, relegated to dusty and forgotten corners, are also playing a new role in modern research, because of the usefulness of a bit of DNA from a skull or a hair. A sample from a fisher, mounted in 1896 and found in a museum at Harvard, helped biologists determine that there is a population of genetically distinct fisher still living in Montana.
Although noninvasive approaches have opened windows into the lives of wildlife, there are drawbacks. “I got into the field to watch wild behavior and to hold an animal,” said Chuck Schwartz, head of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team in Bozeman. “That’s special. But with noninvasive that doesn’t happen.”
In addition, the data quality from feces is often poor. “To avoid error you have to repeat the study sometimes multiple times,” said Gordon Luikart, a wildlife geneticist at the University of Montana.
So the traditional method of “capture, mark, recapture” is still a vital tool that is complemented by the noninvasive techniques.
“We still mark animals,” Dr. Schwartz said. “It’s remarkably informative.”
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, March 10, 2009
With soaring oratory, President Obama on Monday removed a substantial practical nuisance that has long made life difficult for stem cell researchers. He freed biomedical researchers using federal money (a vast majority) to work on more than the small number of human embryonic stem cell lines that were established before Aug. 9, 2001.
In practical terms, federally financed researchers will now find it easier to do a particular category of stem cell experiments that, though still important, has been somewhat eclipsed by new advances.
Until now, to study unapproved stem cell lines, researchers had to set up separate, privately financed labs and follow laborious accounting procedures to make sure not a cent of federal grant money was used on that research. No longer. The lifting of such requirements “is just a major boon for the research here and elsewhere,” said Dr. Arnold Kriegstein, a stem cell researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. George Q. Daley, who studies blood diseases at Children’s Hospital in Boston, said that he had derived 15 human embryonic stem cell lines using private money, and that for the first time he could now apply for grants from the National Institutes of Health to study these cells. In the last eight years, his lab has moved from 90 percent N.I.H. support to half N.I.H., half private financing. But private money is now drying up, he said, and new N.I.H. support will be particularly welcome.
However, the president’s support of embryonic stem cell research comes at a time when many advances have been made with other sorts of stem cells. The Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka found in 2007 that adult cells could be reprogrammed to an embryonic state with surprising ease. This technology “may eventually eclipse the embryonic stem cell lines for therapeutic as well as diagnostics applications,” Dr. Kriegstein said. For researchers, reprogramming an adult cell can be much more convenient, and there have never been any restrictions on working with adult stem cells.
For therapy, far off as that is, treating patients with their own cells would avoid the problem of immune rejection.
Members of Congress and advocates for fighting diseases have long spoken of human embryonic stem cell research as if it were a sure avenue to quick cures for intractable afflictions. Scientists have not publicly objected to such high-flown hopes, which have helped fuel new sources of grant money like the $3 billion initiative in California for stem cell research.
In private, however, many researchers have projected much more modest goals for embryonic stem cells. Their chief interest is to derive embryonic stem cell lines from patients with specific diseases, and by tracking the cells in the test tube to develop basic knowledge about how the disease develops.
Despite an F.D.A.-approved safety test of embryonic stem cells in spinal cord injury that the Geron Corporation began in January, many scientists believe that putting stem-cell-derived tissues into patients lies a long way off. Embryonic stem cells have their drawbacks. They cause tumors, and the adult cells derived from them may be rejected by the patient’s immune system. Furthermore, whatever disease process caused the patients’ tissue cells to die is likely to kill introduced cells as well. All these problems may be solvable, but so far none have been solved.
Restrictions on embryonic stem cell research originated with Congress, which, each year since in 1996, has forbidden the use of federal financing for any experiment in which a human embryo is destroyed. This includes the derivation of human stem cell lines from surplus fertility clinic embryos, first achieved by Dr. James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin in 1998.
President Clinton contemplated but never implemented a policy that would have allowed N.I.H.-financed researchers to study human embryonic stem cells derived by others. Research was able to begin only in August 2001, when President Bush, seeking a different way around the Congressional restriction, said researchers could use any lines established before that date.
Critics said the distinction between the Clinton and Bush policies lacked moral significance, given that each was intended to get around the Congressional ban, based on a religious and moral argument. The proposed Clinton policy amounted to: “Stealing is wrong, but it’s O.K. to use stolen property if someone else stole it.” The Bush policy was: “Stealing is wrong, but it’s O.K. to use stolen property if it was stolen before Aug. 9, 2001.”
Mr. Obama has put the proposed Clinton policy into effect, but Congressional restrictions remain. Researchers are still forbidden to use federal financing to derive new human embryonic stem cell lines. They will, however, be allowed to do research on new stem cell lines grown in a privately financed lab.
Stem cell research is the best known of several avenues of investigation into what is known as regenerative medicine. To regenerate the aging body with its own subtle repair systems, of which stem cells are one component, would be far more effective than the brute methods of drugs and surgery used today.
But scientists are still merely at the threshold of understanding how the body’s 200 different types of cell interact with one another. It seems likely to be years before biologists know all the settings that must be adjusted in a human cell’s chromosomes to make it become a well-behaved cone cell in the retina or a dopamine-making neuron of the type destroyed in Parkinson’s.
Despite the new interest in reprogrammed stem cells, human embryonic stem cells are still worth studying, both to track the earliest moments in disease and to help assess the behavior of the reprogrammed cells.
Really? The Claim: Daylight Saving Time Can Affect Your Health
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, The New York Times, March 10, 2009
THE FACTS
Daylight saving time, which began this week in most of the United States, has long been promoted as a way to save energy. Whether it does is still a matter of debate. But it does seem clear from studies that a one-hour time adjustment can have unintended health consequences.
It seems that when the clock is moved forward or back one hour, the body’s internal clock — its circadian rhythm, which uses daylight to stay in tune with its environment — does not adjust. In a study of 55,000 people, for example, scientists found that on days off from work, subjects tended to sleep on standard time, not daylight time: their waking hour followed the seasonal progression of dawn.
In other studies, scientists tracked large groups of people for eight weeks at a time as they made the transitions to daylight time in spring and to standard time in autumn. They found that in spring, people’s peak activity levels were more in tune with their body clock than with the actual clock. Studies suggest that this disconnect between body time and clock time can result in restlessness, sleep disruption and shorter sleep duration. Other studies have suggested links between time change and increases in heart attacks, suicides and accidents, though scientists say more study is needed.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Daylight saving time is associated with sleep disruptions and possibly more serious consequences.
Global Update: Viruses: Malaria Drug Is Found to Curb Deadly Infections Spread From Animals
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, March 10, 2009
Scientists have discovered that an old antimalaria drug is effective against two fatal viruses that recently jumped from animals to humans.
The closely related viruses, Nipah and Hendra, live in the fruit bats sometimes called flying foxes and are believed to infect animals that eat fruit contaminated with the bats’ urine or saliva.
Nipah was discovered in 1999, when it was blamed for the deaths of 106 people in Malaysia and Singapore, mostly farm or slaughterhouse workers who got it from pigs.
Since 2001, Nipah has killed more than 100 in Bangladesh and India. The early deaths were from brain infections, but in 2004 it also took on a respiratory form transmitted from person to person. Each small outbreak had a different death rate, but most were well over 50 percent.
Hendra was discovered in 1994 in Australia, where it has killed dozens of horses and two of four humans known to have been infected by horses.
Until recently, there was no known treatment. But in the last month, two teams of scientists — one at Cornell’s medical school in New York and one in France — separately discovered that chloroquine, a malaria drug invented 50 years ago, prevents both viruses from reproducing.
Chloroquine has a long safety record and, in laboratory tests, appears to work at doses even lower than those used to prevent malaria.
It has not yet been tested against Nipah or Hendra in humans but presumably will be during the next outbreak, scientists said.
Findings: What Do Dreams Mean? Whatever Your Bias Says
By JOHN TIERNEY, The New York Times, March 10, 2009
Suppose last night you had two dreams. In one, God appears and commands you to take a year off and travel the world. In the other, God commands you to take a year off to go work in a leper colony.
Which of those dreams, if either, would you consider meaningful?
Or suppose you had one dream in which your friend defends you against enemies, and another dream in which that same friend goes behind your back and tries to seduce your significant other? Which dream would you take seriously?
Tough questions, but social scientists now have answers — and really, it’s about time. For thousands of years, dreamers have had little more to go on than the two-gate hypothesis proposed in “The Odyssey.” After Penelope dreams of the return of her lost-long husband, she’s skeptical and says that only some dreams matter.
“There are two gates,” she explains, “through which these unsubstantial fancies proceed; the one is of horn, and the other ivory. Those that come through the gate of ivory are fatuous, but those from the gate of horn mean something to those that see them.”
Her two-gate hypothesis, later endorsed by Virgil and Ovid, was elegant in theory but not terribly useful in practice. How could you tell which gate your dream came from? One woman’s ivory could be another’s horn.
Today, though, we can start making distinctions, thanks to a series of studies of more than 1,000 people by two psychologists, Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University and Michael Norton of Harvard. (You can report your dreams to these researchers at TierneyLab, nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
The psychologists began by asking college students in three countries — India, South Korea and the United States — how much significance they attached to dreams. Relatively few students believed in modern theories that dreaming is simply the brain’s response to random impulses, or that it’s a mechanism for sorting and discarding information. Instead, the majority in all three countries believed, along with Freud, that dreams reveal important unconscious emotions.
These instinctive Freudians also considered dreams to be valuable omens, as demonstrated in a study asking them to imagine they were about to take a plane trip. If, on the eve of the flight, they dreamed of the plane’s crashing, they were more likely to cancel the trip than if they saw news of an actual plane crash on their route.
But when the researchers asked people to interpret dreams, some suspiciously convenient correlations turned up. When asked to recall their own dreams, they attached more significance to a negative dream if it was about someone they disliked, and they gave correspondingly more weight to a positive dream if it was about a friend.
A similar bias showed up when people were asked to imagine that they had had various dreams starring a friend or a deity. People rated a dream about a friend protecting them against attackers as being more “meaningful” than a dream about their own romantic partner faithlessly kissing that same friend. People who believed in God were more likely than agnostics to be swayed by divine apparitions.
But even the nonbelievers showed a weakness for certain heavenly dreams, like one in which God commanded them to take a year off to travel the world. Agnostics rated that dream as significantly more meaningful than the dream of God commanding them to spend a year working in a leper colony. (Incidentally, although the preferred term for leprosy is now Hansen’s disease, the deity in the experiment used the old-fashioned term from the Bible.)
Dreamers’ self-serving bias is tactfully defined as a “motivated approach to dream interpretation” by Dr. Morewedge and Dr. Norton in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. When asked if this “motivated approach” might also affect dream researchers, Dr. Morewedge pointed to Freud’s tendency to find what he was looking for — sex — in his “Interpretation of Dreams.”
“Freud himself suggested that dreams of flying revealed thoughts of sexual desire,” Dr. Morewedge noted. “Interestingly, in the same text, Freud also suggested that dreams about the absence of the ability to fly — i.e., falling — also indicate succumbing to sexual desire. One might interpret this as evidence that scientists are just as self-serving as laypeople when interpreting their dreams.”
Once you see how flexible dream interpretation can be, you can appreciate why it has always been such a popular tool for decision-making. Relying on your dreams for guidance is like the political ritual of appointing an “independent blue-ribbon panel” to resolve an issue. You can duck any personal responsibility for action while pretending to rely on an impartial process, even though you’ve stacked the panel with your own friends and will ignore any advice that conflicts with your desires. Charity work, no; margaritas, sí.
Even if you don’t believe in your own dreams, the new research suggests that you can learn something from those of others. In the Book of Genesis, when the Pharaoh becomes concerned over his dreams of emaciated cattle and withered ears of corn, it would not be unreasonable for Joseph to conclude that the ruler is worried about the possibility of famine. Joseph would therefore have every motivation to interpret the dream so that the Pharaoh creates a new grain-storage program — and, not incidentally, a new job for Joseph supervising it.
While they doubt that dreams contain hidden insights or prophecies, Dr. Morewedge and Dr. Norton note that dreams can be indicators of people’s emotional state, as evidenced by other researchers’ findings of a correlation between stress and nightmares.
Dreams can also become self-fulfilling prophecies simply because people take them so seriously, Dr. Morewedge and Dr. Norton say. Dreams of spousal infidelity may lead to accusations and acrimony that ultimately lead to real infidelity.
“When friends and loved ones have disturbing dreams,” Dr. Morewedge suggested, “one may need to do more than say, ‘It was just a dream.’ It may also be a good idea not to tell people about their undesirable behavior in your dreams, as they may infer that your dreams reveal your true feelings about them.”
This last caveat applies even when non-Freudians are discussing dreams. Even if you don’t ascribe any deep meaning to dreams, even if you think they’re just random hallucinations that don’t come from gates of ivory or horn or anything else, you should still probably pay attention when, say, your romantic partner tells you about a dream in which you were caught in bed with your partner’s friend.
And you should definitely be concerned if your partner goes on to mention a second dream involving a commandment from God to take a year off and travel the world. If your partner is a highly motivated interpreter of dreams, you may find yourself home alone.
Tools That Leave Wildlife Unbothered Widen Research Horizons
By JIM ROBBINS, The New York Times, March 10, 2009
You may remember Senator John McCain’s criticism of a study of grizzly bear DNA as wasteful spending. And you may have wondered how the scientists got the DNA from the grizzlies.
The answer is hair. The study, which Mr. McCain referred to during his run for president, was a large one, and it provided an estimate of the population of threatened grizzly bears in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, in and around Glacier National Park.
The researchers did not trap the bears or shoot them with tranquilizers. Instead, they prepared 100 55-gallon drums with a mixture of whole fish and cattle blood that was allowed to ferment until it had the aroma of grizzly bear candy.
They built 2,400 hair corrals — 100 feet of barbed wire around five or six trees — and placed the fish and blood mix in the center. When bears went under the wire to check it out they left hair behind.
The team collected 34,000 hair samples in 14 weeks this way. And the population estimate from the study, announced late last year, was 765, a figure 2.5 times the estimate based on sightings of females and cubs, the previously used method.
“Hair snaring has given us a much more precise number,” said Katherine C. Kendall, a research ecologist with the United States Geological Survey who designed and implemented the study. The results were just published in The Journal of Wildlife Management.
It also gives a glimpse of a growing trend in wildlife biology toward research methods that are gentler — and cheaper — than the classic “capture, mark, recapture.” In that process researchers trap an animal, sometimes drug it and fasten on a radio collar or implant or attach a transmitter. Then they follow the radio signal or catch the animal again to see where it goes.
Such tools are powerful. Some high-tech collars beam an animal’s whereabouts to a satellite every 20 or 30 minutes, giving researchers unparalleled data on movement and habitat. But the techniques can create animals that are either “trap happy” or “trap shy.”
There is concern that contacts with humans can reduce an animal’s wildness or lead to its death. Some research shows that bears may suffer long-term impacts from being drugged. And in national parks, visitors often complain when they see a wild wolf or bear with a large radio collar around its neck.
As a result, new noninvasive techniques are evolving, some that use hair and others that use animal scat. Such methods can be useful in countries that lack access to expensive technology.
“You don’t need a vet, you don’t need an airplane, you don’t need training,” said Megan Parker, assistant director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s North America Program, based in Bozeman, Mont.
In Bhutan, for example, biologists are gathering scat to study snow leopards, which are extraordinarily difficult to see, let alone trap. The problem is that there are a lot of different types of scat on the ground that cannot be differentiated visually. Out of 100 fecal samples gathered, often only 2 belong to a snow leopard. Lab testing to find those two samples is expensive.
The scat is shipped to Bozeman, where Dr. Parker is training a dog, a Belgian Malinois named Pepin, to tell snow leopard scat from other types. Once Pepin’s sniff test weeds out the false samples, the right scat can be sent to a lab. Because of technological advances, a fragment of DNA found in scat can identify the species and sex of the animal that produced it. By collecting numerous samples across a territory, critical migration corridors can be identified as well as the abundance of a species. Stress hormones in the sample may be an indicator of the animal’s health. Diet and parasites can be assessed.
“The genetic code is a mystery novel, a history book and a time log in a single hair,” said Michael K. Schwartz, a research ecologist at the United States Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Mont.
L. Scott Mills, a professor of wildlife population ecology who teaches the techniques at the University of Montana in Missoula, said noninvasive methods “opened the door for abundance and density estimates that are very hard to do with live trapping.”
“We can sample so many more animals,” Dr. Mills said. “With live trapping you might trap three animals in two years. With scats we can find 15 or 30.”
Another noninvasive technique involves the use of still and video cameras triggered by heat and motion. Kerry R. Foresman teaches in the wildlife biology program at the University of Montana in Missoula, which emphasizes noninvasive techniques. He studies the fisher, wolverine, lynx and pine marten, all secretive carnivores, leaving a remote camera trained on the hanging hindquarter of a deer.
Tracking plates are another tool. Animals are lured by bait across soot-covered metal plates and onto contact paper. “They leave behind exquisite images of their tracks,” Dr. Foresman said. The setup costs $12.
For a study on river otters, Dr. Foresman used Google Earth to find log jams on the Bitterroot River. “Otters love log jams,” he said. The next day he went to a jam and set up a remote camera. “I had a hundred pictures of river otters in one night,” he said.
Such techniques are easier on researchers as well as their subjects. Tracking animals with a radio collar often means flying low in treacherous mountain weather.
“People get hurt all of the time,” Dr. Foresman said. “I know a lot of wildlife researchers who have died in plane crashes while tracking animals.”
The trend has unleashed a burst of creativity. In Portugal, biologists studying the Eurasian lynx outfit a lynx den with cork in which an Amazonian kissing bug is contained in a hole the width of a quarter, covered by thin plastic. The kissing bug drills through the plastic, bites the animal and goes back into its hole. When the lynx leaves, researchers fetch the bug and take the blood sample.
In Yellowstone National Park, fish in Yellowstone Lake carry naturally occurring mercury from underwater thermal vents up through the food chain. After feeding bears in captivity with trout harvested from the lake, researchers know precisely the ratio of fish eaten to mercury in hair and blood. So they have an accurate continuing window into how much fish the bears are eating simply by gathering hairs.
Museum specimens of wildlife, relegated to dusty and forgotten corners, are also playing a new role in modern research, because of the usefulness of a bit of DNA from a skull or a hair. A sample from a fisher, mounted in 1896 and found in a museum at Harvard, helped biologists determine that there is a population of genetically distinct fisher still living in Montana.
Although noninvasive approaches have opened windows into the lives of wildlife, there are drawbacks. “I got into the field to watch wild behavior and to hold an animal,” said Chuck Schwartz, head of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team in Bozeman. “That’s special. But with noninvasive that doesn’t happen.”
In addition, the data quality from feces is often poor. “To avoid error you have to repeat the study sometimes multiple times,” said Gordon Luikart, a wildlife geneticist at the University of Montana.
So the traditional method of “capture, mark, recapture” is still a vital tool that is complemented by the noninvasive techniques.
“We still mark animals,” Dr. Schwartz said. “It’s remarkably informative.”
