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Oozing Through Texas Soil, a Team of Amoebas Billions Strong
By CAROL KAESUK YOON, The New York Times, March 24, 2009
After producing superlatives like the world’s biggest statue of a jackrabbit and the nation’s most unpopular modern-day president, Texas can now boast what may be its most bizarre and undoubtedly its slimiest topper yet: the world’s largest known colony of clonal amoebas.
Scientists found the vast and sticky empire stretching 40 feet across, consisting of billions of genetically identical single-celled individuals, oozing along in the muck of a cow pasture outside Houston.
“It was very unexpected,” said Owen M. Gilbert, a graduate student at Rice University and lead author of the report in the March issue of Molecular Ecology. “It was like nothing we’d ever seen before.”
Scientists say the discovery is much more than a mere curiosity, because the colony consists of what are known as social amoebas. Only an apparent oxymoron, social amoebas are able to gather in organized groups and behave cooperatively, some even committing suicide to help fellow amoebas reproduce. The discovery of such a huge colony of genetically identical amoebas provides insight into how such cooperation and sociality might have evolved and may help to explain why microbes are being found to show social behaviors more often than was expected.
“It is of significant scientific interest,” said Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who was not involved with the study. Though amoebas would seem unlikely to coordinate interactions with one another over much more than microscopic distances, the discovery of such a massive clonal colony, he said, “raises the possibility that cells might evolve to organize on much larger spatial scales.”
Thoughts of a giant organized amoeba colony can conjure up visions of the 1958 horror classic “The Blob,” but these social amoebas, a species known as Dictyostelium discoideum, a kind of slime mold, are infinitely more subtle. Microscopic and tucked away in the dirt, the billions of amoebas would have gone unnoticed by anyone driving past the pasture. Joan Strassmann, an author on the paper along with another evolutionary biologist at Rice University, David Queller, said she and a team of undergraduates searched for the species by sticking drinking straws into dirt and cow dung to retrieve materials where the amoebas might be living. In the laboratory, they spread the samples on Petri dishes and waited to see what would grow. DNA analyses later showed that the huge numbers of amoebas collected from the pasture were genetically identical.
Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, said the study was the first to clearly demonstrate “the extreme of relatedness” in social microbes, a population of genetically identical individuals. Such a colony provides the ideal conditions to foster the evolution of behaviors like cooperation, because the more genetically similar two organisms are, the more natural selection will favor their assisting each other.
Dictyostelium, for example, can carry out stunning feats of cooperation, engaging in what’s known as suicidal altruism, a behavior in which individual amoebas come together to form a single body, with some amoebas sacrificing themselves to allow for more effective reproduction of amoebas in other parts of the body.
Scientists said that if other species were also found to have such clonal colonies, that could help explain the surprisingly widespread finding of social behaviors among microbes. But just what conditions prompt the flourishing of clones remains unclear. Scientists said it was odd to find the slime molds thriving in an open field, as they prefer enclosed forest soils. It is possible that the lumbering cows fostered the growth of the giant clone colony by spreading the amoebas through the muck, said John Bonner, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University.
Meanwhile, as impressive (or even threatening) as a colony of a couple billion amoebas might sound, it has turned out to be surprisingly fragile.
“Just one week later, it had rained a lot and then it basically was gone,” Mr. Gilbert said.
Apparently, such is the fleeting nature of grand amoebic phenomena, for the Texas clone is not the first to dwindle inexplicably into nothingness. Scientists say that the last traces of what at one point may have been the world’s largest individual amoeba — and the star of a highly productive research program — shriveled in their laboratory last summer until it disappeared.
Manfred Schliwa, a cell biologist at the University of Munich, first came across the organism, known as Reticulomyxa, quite by accident as it spread as a white slime across the fish tank in his office at the University of California at Berkeley where he was then a professor.
The amoeba, a blob with no defined shape, bits of which could break off to take up a life of their own, fed so heartily off stray morsels of fish food that it eventually attained the status of giant among microbes, its body reaching more than an inch across.
A single enormous cell, the amoeba was studied by Dr. Schliwa and colleagues to understand movement from one part of a cell to another, a process that was both easily visualized and carried out extremely rapidly in the big Reticulomyxa, which at its largest could house a billion or more nuclei as it constantly shuttled cell parts and whatnot across its titanic form.
Dr. Schliwa, still mystified by the demise of the big-amoeba-that-couldn’t, said he hoped at some point to obtain a new wild Reticulomyxa, though under natural conditions the organism is much smaller and lives in the soil, making it difficult to spot. In fact, like the colony of social amoebas, the giant amoebas could be everywhere underfoot without anyone’s noticing.
“I used to joke,” Dr. Schliwa said, “that there might be a giant organism in the soil spanning the entire continent and whenever you dig up a shovelful you get a piece of it.”
So where will the next giant amoeba be found hiding? Dr. Schliwa points out that the original discovery of the amoeba-to-end-all-amoebas was made in the 1940s by a researcher named Ruth N. Nauss. She discovered the species in a New York City park.
The Doctor's World: A Quandary in Sweden: Criminals in Med School
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D., The New York Times, March 24, 2009
A year ago, Sweden’s most prestigious medical school found itself in an international uproar after it unknowingly admitted a student who was a Nazi sympathizer and a convicted murderer, then scrambled to find a way to expel him.
It is hard to imagine how the case could get any more bizarre. But it has.
The 33-year-old student, Karl Helge Hampus Svensson, having been banished from the medical school of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on the ground that he falsified his high school records, has now been admitted to a second well-known medical school — Uppsala, Sweden’s oldest university.
New twists in his and another case highlight the difficulties that three of the country’s six medical schools have had in admitting and dismissing students with serious criminal offenses in just the past two years. The cases resonate far beyond Sweden, raising fundamental questions about who is fit to become a doctor.
The circumstances of Mr. Svensson’s admission to Uppsala’s first-year class — reported in January by Swedish news organizations — are unknown, because none of the officials involved will publicly discuss his case. He apparently uses an assumed name — a customary practice for Swedes seeking to remain anonymous because of a personal threat. Last week, Uppsala officials, responding to concerns about Mr. Svensson’s admission, said he had not participated in class work, but did not say why.
In another embarrassing twist, a Swedish newspaper reported last month that much of the verdict and court files regarding Bjorn Soderberg, Mr. Svensson’s murder victim, had been cut out or replaced with blank pages. The police said they had been unable to find a culprit.
And in still another case, a 24-year-old medical student at Lund University was convicted last April of raping a 14-year-old boy while he slept. A district court sentenced the student to two years in prison, but a higher court reduced the sentence to two years’ probation and medical therapy.
When the dean at Lund sought to expel the student, a national board that reviews expulsions blocked the action, saying that although the man had committed a serious crime, he was not considered a threat to people or property. The decision was then reversed by an administrative court, which upheld the expulsion; the student did not appeal.
In contrast with the United States, Swedish laws and customs are sympathetic to released offenders, saying that once they have served their time they should be treated like ordinary citizens. But the cases raise questions about protecting the rights of patients and fellow medical students and health care workers.
Entry to Swedish medical schools is highly competitive. At Uppsala, for example, a spokeswoman said there were 2,603 applicants for the spring semester and just 100 admissions. They include Mr. Svensson, who is taking up a taxpayer-financed slot that could have gone to another student.
Indeed, the Uppsala County Council, which runs all government health facilities in the area, says it will not allow Mr. Svensson to do any clinical work, which is a critical and mandatory part of medical school training. That raises questions about how he will complete a degree even if he does attend classes.
Mr. Svensson, who has not responded to numerous attempts to reach him over the last year, was convicted in the 1999 hate murder of a trade union worker and was paroled after serving 6 ½ years of an 11-year sentence — a typical penalty for murder in Sweden. He entered Karolinska in fall 2007 while still on probation; he had earned credits for medical school while in prison.
The disclosures about his past proved deeply embarrassing to the institute. Among other things, two senior faculty members on the admissions committee that interviewed him failed to ask for an explanation of the six-and-a-half-year gap in his résumé, the period he was in prison.
Swedish universities are legally prohibited from conducting background checks on applicants. To complicate matters, Mr. Svensson legally changed his surname from Hellekant after his conviction.
In the United States, the chances of a convicted criminal’s being admitted to medical school were reduced in 2002, when the Association of American Medical Colleges’ standard application form began requiring answers to questions about felony convictions. In 2008, questions were also added about military discharge history and misdemeanor convictions.
Since Mr. Svensson had done nothing wrong in medical school, Karolinska officials said they were powerless to expel him until they discovered his falsified records, blaming the Swedish agency responsible for checking the validity of educational records.
The Swedish medical licensing agency said that it would not allow Mr. Svensson to practice even if he earned his medical degree. But because the agency’s jurisdiction excludes universities, questions arose about whether and how medical school officials should inform patients examined by Mr. Svensson about his criminal past, and what the patients’ responses would be.
Now Uppsala has declined to say whether its admission committee interviewed him or knew of his criminal past. Nor is there a public explanation of how he earned any high school credits he may have been lacking in the relatively short period since his expulsion from the Karolinska.
Last year, Karolinska officials, acting in part on a committee’s recommendation, exhorted the Swedish parliament to enact legislation to allow medical schools a freer hand in admitting and dismissing students in cases where they would have patient contact.
But little has happened.
Sweden’s medical student association is divided about whether a convicted murderer should ever be allowed to become a doctor.
The president of the student group, Yosef Tyson, said his colleagues have been annoyed about the very limited journalistic coverage of the cases and the complexities of the issues in training doctors.
“The problem is not that he’s been accepted again; the problem is that nothing was done about this a year ago,” Mr. Tyson said in an interview. “Everyone is in limbo.”
Mr. Svensson’s case has raised the question of whether Swedish universities should now be allowed to require criminal records as part of a background check of applicants. While such requirements are rare in Sweden, they do exist for prospective teachers of young children and for applicants to private companies where personal security is important, like taxi services.
Another concern is the threat he might pose to patients who are immigrants, or their families — long a target of neo-Nazi vilification. Even as a student, he will have access to electronic medical records, which could potentially be misused.
In a group interview, five upper-level Uppsala medical students criticized the university for not holding an open dialogue about Mr. Svensson’s case, and they worried that the affair was harming their school’s reputation — and, by extension, theirs.
“Not talking to us, telling us, creates a lot of talk and rumors, when we should be focusing on school,” said one of the students, Jessica Svefors, 25.
Pontus Andren, 23, said the issue was one of trust. “If a rapist or a murderer with neo-Nazi motives can study to become a doctor, that causes a crisis that affects the entire medical profession,” he said. “When you arrive at a hospital or an emergency room, you might not be alert or even conscious as a patient, and that puts you in a really vulnerable position.”
But another Uppsala student, Karl-Wilhelm Olsson, 23, said that “the important factor is whether a person is a risk to another human being, and it’s hard to draw a line.”
He added that while there is no law requiring a university to bar prospective students because of a criminal past, “a student should be expelled if he or she is viewed as unfit.”
But Gustav Stalhammar, 25, said Mr. Svensson should be allowed to become a doctor. “Who is to say that he might not become a great doctor, even if it in some ways would feel wrong or awkward to have a murderer for a colleague?” he asked. “It is not fair to have preconceptions about his character.”
Still, the five students said they were upset because they had not had a chance to meet Mr. Svensson and judge his motivations. And they are concerned that he has not publicly expressed regret for his crime.
“A convicted murderer is a risky candidate for the job, especially if you haven’t been able to ask him why he wants to become a doctor,” Mr. Andren said.
Ms. Svefors said the issue went well beyond the Svensson case. “I am upset that nobody’s done anything with this issue, that no one has shown civil courage to expel him, that those who have power to do something are just trying to hand off the problem to someone else,” she said. “This is hurting our reputation as future doctors.”
Majsan Boström contributed reporting from Uppsala, Sweden.
Findings: Oversaving, a Burden for Our Times
By JOHN TIERNEY, The New York Times, March 24, 2009
We interrupt this recession to bring you news of another crisis that is much more pleasant to deal with. Now that shoppers have sworn off credit cards, we’re risking an epidemic of a hitherto neglected affliction: saver’s remorse.
The victims won’t evoke much sympathy — don’t expect any telethons — but their condition is real enough to merit a new label. Consumer psychologists call it hyperopia, the medical term for farsightedness and the opposite of myopia, nearsightedness, because it’s the result of people looking too far ahead. They’re so obsessed with preparing for the future that they can’t enjoy the present, and they end up looking back sadly on all their lost opportunities for fun.
It’s hard to imagine this excessive foresight being much of a burden for, say, Bernard L. Madoff. Nor for the optimists who took out balloon mortgages (and the A.I.G. executives who insured them). But hyperopia does seem to affect a wide range of people in some circumstances, to judge from clever experiments with people shopping for bargains and redeeming prizes.
Splurging on a vacation or a pair of shoes or a plasma television can produce an immediate case of buyer’s remorse, but that feeling isn’t permanent, according to Ran Kivetz of Columbia University and Anat Keinan of Harvard. In one study, these consumer psychologists asked college students how they felt about the balance of work and play on their winter breaks.
Immediately after the break, the students’ chief regrets were over not doing enough studying, working and saving money. But when they contemplated their winter break a year afterward, they were more likely to regret not having enough fun, not traveling and not spending money. And when alumni returned for their 40th reunion, they had even stronger regrets about too much work and not enough play on their collegiate breaks.
“People feel guilty about hedonism right afterwards, but as time passes the guilt dissipates,” said Dr. Kivetz, a professor of marketing at the Columbia Business School. “At some point there’s a reversal, and what builds up is this wistful feeling of missing out on life’s pleasures.”
He and Dr. Keinan managed to change consumers’ behavior simply by asking a few questions to bus riders going to outlet stores and to other shoppers shortly before Black Friday.
The people who were asked to imagine how they would feel the following week about their purchases proceeded to shop thriftily for basic necessities, like underwear and socks. But people who were asked to imagine how they’d feel about their purchases in the distant future responded by spending more money and concentrating on indulgences like jewelry and designer jeans
“When I look back at my life,” one of these high rollers explained, “I like remembering myself happy. So if it makes me happy, it’s worth it.”
Aesop told a fable of two types of people: the virtuous Ant who saves for the winter and the improvident Grasshopper who’s punished with starvation. But even the most conscientious Ants sometimes recognize the need to lighten up — and, with typical Ant discipline, will find ways to “precommit to indulgence,” as Dr. Kivetz discovered in a lottery experiment he conducted with Itamar Simonson of Stanford University.
The experimental participants, who were all women, were given a ticket for a lottery drawing to be held three months later, and asked to choose in advance which prize they’d prefer if they won: $85 in cash, or a voucher for an $80 massage or facial at a spa. They were reminded that they could simply use the $85 in cash to buy the spa treatment (and have $5 left over), but even so, more than a third of the women chose the voucher for the spa.
Similar results turned up when the researchers asked men and women to pick other kind of prizes or to redeem points earned in frequent-buyer programs. When choosing between cash and “hedonic luxuries” like bottles of wine, dinners or vacations, a substantial minority chose the luxuries even though the cash was a better deal.
“If I took the cash,” one person explained, “it would end up going into the rent.” Another wrote of her decision: “That way I’d have to pamper myself and not spend the $ on something like groceries.”
Other experiments showed that people will work harder for luxuries than for more practical prizes — and the more effort that’s required, the more they feel entitled to a self-indulgent reward. That’s a motivation strategy for managers and marketers to keep in mind, Dr. Kivetz said.
During the current recession, hyperopic Ants are presumably having a harder time than ever parting with their own cash, no matter how often President Obama and his economists urge them to do some stimulative shopping. But would these Ants — and the economy — be better off if they relaxed a little? (You can provide an answer at TierneyLab, nytimes.com/tierneylab. ) I asked Dr. Kivetz for his advice to shoppers.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” he said. “Obviously you need to be responsible and conserve your savings. But it’s been a depressing winter, and there’s nothing wrong with indulging yourself a little. This is a chance to reassess the quality and the balance of your life and to think how you’ll feel in the future. As long as you can afford it, it’s not a bad thing to be enjoying yourself.”
That advice sounds sensible to me, but then I, like a lot of baby boomers, have always had a strong Grasshopper streak anyway. The bigger challenge will be persuading serious Ants like my parents, who remember the Depression and have looked with horror on the money spent by my generation (particularly those of us living in New York).
In the past, I’ve tried pointing out to my parents that all money not spent by the Greatest Generation will only be spent by their heirs — and in not-so-great ways. Sometimes, after I’ve threatened to blow the inheritance on a box at the Metropolitan Opera or nightly meals at Le Bernardin, my parents will consent to a little extravagance for themselves, and my mother will remind my father of an old proverb: “There are no pockets in shrouds.”
But maybe now, thanks to Dr. Kivetz’s research, there are better arguments to use on Ants of any age. They can be presented with a scientific rationale for going on a shopping binge: It’s essential therapy for your hyperopia! If that doesn’t convince them, if they seem puzzled by the term, then try this question on them:
When you’re on your deathbed, how much time will you spend wistfully thinking, “If only I’d bought the smaller plasma TV. . . .”?
By CAROL KAESUK YOON, The New York Times, March 24, 2009
After producing superlatives like the world’s biggest statue of a jackrabbit and the nation’s most unpopular modern-day president, Texas can now boast what may be its most bizarre and undoubtedly its slimiest topper yet: the world’s largest known colony of clonal amoebas.
Scientists found the vast and sticky empire stretching 40 feet across, consisting of billions of genetically identical single-celled individuals, oozing along in the muck of a cow pasture outside Houston.
“It was very unexpected,” said Owen M. Gilbert, a graduate student at Rice University and lead author of the report in the March issue of Molecular Ecology. “It was like nothing we’d ever seen before.”
Scientists say the discovery is much more than a mere curiosity, because the colony consists of what are known as social amoebas. Only an apparent oxymoron, social amoebas are able to gather in organized groups and behave cooperatively, some even committing suicide to help fellow amoebas reproduce. The discovery of such a huge colony of genetically identical amoebas provides insight into how such cooperation and sociality might have evolved and may help to explain why microbes are being found to show social behaviors more often than was expected.
“It is of significant scientific interest,” said Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who was not involved with the study. Though amoebas would seem unlikely to coordinate interactions with one another over much more than microscopic distances, the discovery of such a massive clonal colony, he said, “raises the possibility that cells might evolve to organize on much larger spatial scales.”
Thoughts of a giant organized amoeba colony can conjure up visions of the 1958 horror classic “The Blob,” but these social amoebas, a species known as Dictyostelium discoideum, a kind of slime mold, are infinitely more subtle. Microscopic and tucked away in the dirt, the billions of amoebas would have gone unnoticed by anyone driving past the pasture. Joan Strassmann, an author on the paper along with another evolutionary biologist at Rice University, David Queller, said she and a team of undergraduates searched for the species by sticking drinking straws into dirt and cow dung to retrieve materials where the amoebas might be living. In the laboratory, they spread the samples on Petri dishes and waited to see what would grow. DNA analyses later showed that the huge numbers of amoebas collected from the pasture were genetically identical.
Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, said the study was the first to clearly demonstrate “the extreme of relatedness” in social microbes, a population of genetically identical individuals. Such a colony provides the ideal conditions to foster the evolution of behaviors like cooperation, because the more genetically similar two organisms are, the more natural selection will favor their assisting each other.
Dictyostelium, for example, can carry out stunning feats of cooperation, engaging in what’s known as suicidal altruism, a behavior in which individual amoebas come together to form a single body, with some amoebas sacrificing themselves to allow for more effective reproduction of amoebas in other parts of the body.
Scientists said that if other species were also found to have such clonal colonies, that could help explain the surprisingly widespread finding of social behaviors among microbes. But just what conditions prompt the flourishing of clones remains unclear. Scientists said it was odd to find the slime molds thriving in an open field, as they prefer enclosed forest soils. It is possible that the lumbering cows fostered the growth of the giant clone colony by spreading the amoebas through the muck, said John Bonner, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University.
Meanwhile, as impressive (or even threatening) as a colony of a couple billion amoebas might sound, it has turned out to be surprisingly fragile.
“Just one week later, it had rained a lot and then it basically was gone,” Mr. Gilbert said.
Apparently, such is the fleeting nature of grand amoebic phenomena, for the Texas clone is not the first to dwindle inexplicably into nothingness. Scientists say that the last traces of what at one point may have been the world’s largest individual amoeba — and the star of a highly productive research program — shriveled in their laboratory last summer until it disappeared.
Manfred Schliwa, a cell biologist at the University of Munich, first came across the organism, known as Reticulomyxa, quite by accident as it spread as a white slime across the fish tank in his office at the University of California at Berkeley where he was then a professor.
The amoeba, a blob with no defined shape, bits of which could break off to take up a life of their own, fed so heartily off stray morsels of fish food that it eventually attained the status of giant among microbes, its body reaching more than an inch across.
A single enormous cell, the amoeba was studied by Dr. Schliwa and colleagues to understand movement from one part of a cell to another, a process that was both easily visualized and carried out extremely rapidly in the big Reticulomyxa, which at its largest could house a billion or more nuclei as it constantly shuttled cell parts and whatnot across its titanic form.
Dr. Schliwa, still mystified by the demise of the big-amoeba-that-couldn’t, said he hoped at some point to obtain a new wild Reticulomyxa, though under natural conditions the organism is much smaller and lives in the soil, making it difficult to spot. In fact, like the colony of social amoebas, the giant amoebas could be everywhere underfoot without anyone’s noticing.
“I used to joke,” Dr. Schliwa said, “that there might be a giant organism in the soil spanning the entire continent and whenever you dig up a shovelful you get a piece of it.”
So where will the next giant amoeba be found hiding? Dr. Schliwa points out that the original discovery of the amoeba-to-end-all-amoebas was made in the 1940s by a researcher named Ruth N. Nauss. She discovered the species in a New York City park.
The Doctor's World: A Quandary in Sweden: Criminals in Med School
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D., The New York Times, March 24, 2009
A year ago, Sweden’s most prestigious medical school found itself in an international uproar after it unknowingly admitted a student who was a Nazi sympathizer and a convicted murderer, then scrambled to find a way to expel him.
It is hard to imagine how the case could get any more bizarre. But it has.
The 33-year-old student, Karl Helge Hampus Svensson, having been banished from the medical school of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on the ground that he falsified his high school records, has now been admitted to a second well-known medical school — Uppsala, Sweden’s oldest university.
New twists in his and another case highlight the difficulties that three of the country’s six medical schools have had in admitting and dismissing students with serious criminal offenses in just the past two years. The cases resonate far beyond Sweden, raising fundamental questions about who is fit to become a doctor.
The circumstances of Mr. Svensson’s admission to Uppsala’s first-year class — reported in January by Swedish news organizations — are unknown, because none of the officials involved will publicly discuss his case. He apparently uses an assumed name — a customary practice for Swedes seeking to remain anonymous because of a personal threat. Last week, Uppsala officials, responding to concerns about Mr. Svensson’s admission, said he had not participated in class work, but did not say why.
In another embarrassing twist, a Swedish newspaper reported last month that much of the verdict and court files regarding Bjorn Soderberg, Mr. Svensson’s murder victim, had been cut out or replaced with blank pages. The police said they had been unable to find a culprit.
And in still another case, a 24-year-old medical student at Lund University was convicted last April of raping a 14-year-old boy while he slept. A district court sentenced the student to two years in prison, but a higher court reduced the sentence to two years’ probation and medical therapy.
When the dean at Lund sought to expel the student, a national board that reviews expulsions blocked the action, saying that although the man had committed a serious crime, he was not considered a threat to people or property. The decision was then reversed by an administrative court, which upheld the expulsion; the student did not appeal.
In contrast with the United States, Swedish laws and customs are sympathetic to released offenders, saying that once they have served their time they should be treated like ordinary citizens. But the cases raise questions about protecting the rights of patients and fellow medical students and health care workers.
Entry to Swedish medical schools is highly competitive. At Uppsala, for example, a spokeswoman said there were 2,603 applicants for the spring semester and just 100 admissions. They include Mr. Svensson, who is taking up a taxpayer-financed slot that could have gone to another student.
Indeed, the Uppsala County Council, which runs all government health facilities in the area, says it will not allow Mr. Svensson to do any clinical work, which is a critical and mandatory part of medical school training. That raises questions about how he will complete a degree even if he does attend classes.
Mr. Svensson, who has not responded to numerous attempts to reach him over the last year, was convicted in the 1999 hate murder of a trade union worker and was paroled after serving 6 ½ years of an 11-year sentence — a typical penalty for murder in Sweden. He entered Karolinska in fall 2007 while still on probation; he had earned credits for medical school while in prison.
The disclosures about his past proved deeply embarrassing to the institute. Among other things, two senior faculty members on the admissions committee that interviewed him failed to ask for an explanation of the six-and-a-half-year gap in his résumé, the period he was in prison.
Swedish universities are legally prohibited from conducting background checks on applicants. To complicate matters, Mr. Svensson legally changed his surname from Hellekant after his conviction.
In the United States, the chances of a convicted criminal’s being admitted to medical school were reduced in 2002, when the Association of American Medical Colleges’ standard application form began requiring answers to questions about felony convictions. In 2008, questions were also added about military discharge history and misdemeanor convictions.
Since Mr. Svensson had done nothing wrong in medical school, Karolinska officials said they were powerless to expel him until they discovered his falsified records, blaming the Swedish agency responsible for checking the validity of educational records.
The Swedish medical licensing agency said that it would not allow Mr. Svensson to practice even if he earned his medical degree. But because the agency’s jurisdiction excludes universities, questions arose about whether and how medical school officials should inform patients examined by Mr. Svensson about his criminal past, and what the patients’ responses would be.
Now Uppsala has declined to say whether its admission committee interviewed him or knew of his criminal past. Nor is there a public explanation of how he earned any high school credits he may have been lacking in the relatively short period since his expulsion from the Karolinska.
Last year, Karolinska officials, acting in part on a committee’s recommendation, exhorted the Swedish parliament to enact legislation to allow medical schools a freer hand in admitting and dismissing students in cases where they would have patient contact.
But little has happened.
Sweden’s medical student association is divided about whether a convicted murderer should ever be allowed to become a doctor.
The president of the student group, Yosef Tyson, said his colleagues have been annoyed about the very limited journalistic coverage of the cases and the complexities of the issues in training doctors.
“The problem is not that he’s been accepted again; the problem is that nothing was done about this a year ago,” Mr. Tyson said in an interview. “Everyone is in limbo.”
Mr. Svensson’s case has raised the question of whether Swedish universities should now be allowed to require criminal records as part of a background check of applicants. While such requirements are rare in Sweden, they do exist for prospective teachers of young children and for applicants to private companies where personal security is important, like taxi services.
Another concern is the threat he might pose to patients who are immigrants, or their families — long a target of neo-Nazi vilification. Even as a student, he will have access to electronic medical records, which could potentially be misused.
In a group interview, five upper-level Uppsala medical students criticized the university for not holding an open dialogue about Mr. Svensson’s case, and they worried that the affair was harming their school’s reputation — and, by extension, theirs.
“Not talking to us, telling us, creates a lot of talk and rumors, when we should be focusing on school,” said one of the students, Jessica Svefors, 25.
Pontus Andren, 23, said the issue was one of trust. “If a rapist or a murderer with neo-Nazi motives can study to become a doctor, that causes a crisis that affects the entire medical profession,” he said. “When you arrive at a hospital or an emergency room, you might not be alert or even conscious as a patient, and that puts you in a really vulnerable position.”
But another Uppsala student, Karl-Wilhelm Olsson, 23, said that “the important factor is whether a person is a risk to another human being, and it’s hard to draw a line.”
He added that while there is no law requiring a university to bar prospective students because of a criminal past, “a student should be expelled if he or she is viewed as unfit.”
But Gustav Stalhammar, 25, said Mr. Svensson should be allowed to become a doctor. “Who is to say that he might not become a great doctor, even if it in some ways would feel wrong or awkward to have a murderer for a colleague?” he asked. “It is not fair to have preconceptions about his character.”
Still, the five students said they were upset because they had not had a chance to meet Mr. Svensson and judge his motivations. And they are concerned that he has not publicly expressed regret for his crime.
“A convicted murderer is a risky candidate for the job, especially if you haven’t been able to ask him why he wants to become a doctor,” Mr. Andren said.
Ms. Svefors said the issue went well beyond the Svensson case. “I am upset that nobody’s done anything with this issue, that no one has shown civil courage to expel him, that those who have power to do something are just trying to hand off the problem to someone else,” she said. “This is hurting our reputation as future doctors.”
Majsan Boström contributed reporting from Uppsala, Sweden.
Findings: Oversaving, a Burden for Our Times
By JOHN TIERNEY, The New York Times, March 24, 2009
We interrupt this recession to bring you news of another crisis that is much more pleasant to deal with. Now that shoppers have sworn off credit cards, we’re risking an epidemic of a hitherto neglected affliction: saver’s remorse.
The victims won’t evoke much sympathy — don’t expect any telethons — but their condition is real enough to merit a new label. Consumer psychologists call it hyperopia, the medical term for farsightedness and the opposite of myopia, nearsightedness, because it’s the result of people looking too far ahead. They’re so obsessed with preparing for the future that they can’t enjoy the present, and they end up looking back sadly on all their lost opportunities for fun.
It’s hard to imagine this excessive foresight being much of a burden for, say, Bernard L. Madoff. Nor for the optimists who took out balloon mortgages (and the A.I.G. executives who insured them). But hyperopia does seem to affect a wide range of people in some circumstances, to judge from clever experiments with people shopping for bargains and redeeming prizes.
Splurging on a vacation or a pair of shoes or a plasma television can produce an immediate case of buyer’s remorse, but that feeling isn’t permanent, according to Ran Kivetz of Columbia University and Anat Keinan of Harvard. In one study, these consumer psychologists asked college students how they felt about the balance of work and play on their winter breaks.
Immediately after the break, the students’ chief regrets were over not doing enough studying, working and saving money. But when they contemplated their winter break a year afterward, they were more likely to regret not having enough fun, not traveling and not spending money. And when alumni returned for their 40th reunion, they had even stronger regrets about too much work and not enough play on their collegiate breaks.
“People feel guilty about hedonism right afterwards, but as time passes the guilt dissipates,” said Dr. Kivetz, a professor of marketing at the Columbia Business School. “At some point there’s a reversal, and what builds up is this wistful feeling of missing out on life’s pleasures.”
He and Dr. Keinan managed to change consumers’ behavior simply by asking a few questions to bus riders going to outlet stores and to other shoppers shortly before Black Friday.
The people who were asked to imagine how they would feel the following week about their purchases proceeded to shop thriftily for basic necessities, like underwear and socks. But people who were asked to imagine how they’d feel about their purchases in the distant future responded by spending more money and concentrating on indulgences like jewelry and designer jeans
“When I look back at my life,” one of these high rollers explained, “I like remembering myself happy. So if it makes me happy, it’s worth it.”
Aesop told a fable of two types of people: the virtuous Ant who saves for the winter and the improvident Grasshopper who’s punished with starvation. But even the most conscientious Ants sometimes recognize the need to lighten up — and, with typical Ant discipline, will find ways to “precommit to indulgence,” as Dr. Kivetz discovered in a lottery experiment he conducted with Itamar Simonson of Stanford University.
The experimental participants, who were all women, were given a ticket for a lottery drawing to be held three months later, and asked to choose in advance which prize they’d prefer if they won: $85 in cash, or a voucher for an $80 massage or facial at a spa. They were reminded that they could simply use the $85 in cash to buy the spa treatment (and have $5 left over), but even so, more than a third of the women chose the voucher for the spa.
Similar results turned up when the researchers asked men and women to pick other kind of prizes or to redeem points earned in frequent-buyer programs. When choosing between cash and “hedonic luxuries” like bottles of wine, dinners or vacations, a substantial minority chose the luxuries even though the cash was a better deal.
“If I took the cash,” one person explained, “it would end up going into the rent.” Another wrote of her decision: “That way I’d have to pamper myself and not spend the $ on something like groceries.”
Other experiments showed that people will work harder for luxuries than for more practical prizes — and the more effort that’s required, the more they feel entitled to a self-indulgent reward. That’s a motivation strategy for managers and marketers to keep in mind, Dr. Kivetz said.
During the current recession, hyperopic Ants are presumably having a harder time than ever parting with their own cash, no matter how often President Obama and his economists urge them to do some stimulative shopping. But would these Ants — and the economy — be better off if they relaxed a little? (You can provide an answer at TierneyLab, nytimes.com/tierneylab. ) I asked Dr. Kivetz for his advice to shoppers.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” he said. “Obviously you need to be responsible and conserve your savings. But it’s been a depressing winter, and there’s nothing wrong with indulging yourself a little. This is a chance to reassess the quality and the balance of your life and to think how you’ll feel in the future. As long as you can afford it, it’s not a bad thing to be enjoying yourself.”
That advice sounds sensible to me, but then I, like a lot of baby boomers, have always had a strong Grasshopper streak anyway. The bigger challenge will be persuading serious Ants like my parents, who remember the Depression and have looked with horror on the money spent by my generation (particularly those of us living in New York).
In the past, I’ve tried pointing out to my parents that all money not spent by the Greatest Generation will only be spent by their heirs — and in not-so-great ways. Sometimes, after I’ve threatened to blow the inheritance on a box at the Metropolitan Opera or nightly meals at Le Bernardin, my parents will consent to a little extravagance for themselves, and my mother will remind my father of an old proverb: “There are no pockets in shrouds.”
But maybe now, thanks to Dr. Kivetz’s research, there are better arguments to use on Ants of any age. They can be presented with a scientific rationale for going on a shopping binge: It’s essential therapy for your hyperopia! If that doesn’t convince them, if they seem puzzled by the term, then try this question on them:
When you’re on your deathbed, how much time will you spend wistfully thinking, “If only I’d bought the smaller plasma TV. . . .”?
