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Science Tuesday - Evolution, Dragons, and Vermont
Sorry, yesterday I was busy enjoying the weather, a bikini, and disc golf...

German Fossil Found to Be Early Primate
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, May 16, 2009
Fossil remains of a 47-million-year-old animal, found years ago in Germany, have been analyzed more thoroughly and determined to be an extremely early primate close to the emergence of the evolutionary branch leading to monkeys, apes and humans, scientists said in interviews this week.
Described as the “most complete fossil primate ever discovered,” the specimen is a juvenile female the size of a small monkey. Only the left lower limb is missing, and the preservation is so remarkable that impressions of fur and the soft body outline are still clear. The animal’s last meal, of fruit and leaves, remained in the stomach cavity.
In an article to be published on Tuesday in PLoS One, an online scientific journal, an international team of scientists will report that this extraordinary fossil could be a “stem group” from which higher primates evolved, “but we are not advocating this.”
The researchers said the specimen, designated Darwinius masillae, “is important in being exceptionally well preserved and providing a much more complete understanding of the paleobiology” of a primate from the Eocene period, a time when primitive primates were starting to branch into two lineages, the prosimians and the anthropoids.
As part of a heavily promoted publicity campaign, the skeleton will be displayed at a news conference on Tuesday at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; the History Channel plans a documentary on the primate at 9 p.m. on May 25; and Little Brown is bringing out a book. The Wall Street Journal published an article on Friday giving some scientific details of the discovery.
The specimen was excavated by private collectors in 1983 from the Messel Shale Pit, a shale quarry near Darmstadt, Germany, that has yielded many fossils of Eocene life, including other primitive primates.
Jörn H. Hurum, a paleontologist at the University of Oslo and a leader of the research, said the site was “one of the real treasure troves of paleontology, like the Gobi Desert for dinosaurs.”
The skeleton was divided and sold in two parts, one of which had dropped out of sight. When Dr. Hurum learned that the missing part was for sale, he arranged for its purchase by the Natural History Museum in Oslo and two years ago rounded up a team of German and American scientists to study the bones with CT imaging and other advanced technologies.
Speaking by telephone from Norway, Dr. Hurum recalled: “I realized at first it’s a primate. It just screams primate: opposable big toes and thumbs, no evidence of claws. This is like the Archaeopteryx of primate evolution.”
The scientists estimated that the primate was about 9 months old, the equivalent of a 6-year-old human. At maturity they suggest that it would have weighed two pounds and been two feet long, most of it tail. It had a broken left wrist, healing at the time of death, and may have drowned in the volcanic lake at Messel. It was, the researchers said, something like a combination “lemur monkey.”
Philip D. Gingerich, a member of the team who is a paleontologist of Eocene life at the University of Michigan, said in an e-mail message that in the context of other fossil finds and DNA studies the primate should be considered for a place in the ancestral line leading to living higher primates, including apes and humans.

Chemicals in Dragon’s Glands Stir Venom Debate
By CARL ZIMMER, The New York Times, May 19, 2009
The Komodo dragon is already a terrifying beast. Measuring up to 10 feet long, it is the world’s largest lizard. It delivers a devastating bite with its long, serrated teeth, attacking prey as big as water buffaloes.
But in a provocative paper to be published this week, an international team of scientists argues that the Komodo dragon is even more impressive. They claim that the lizards use a potent venom to bring down their victims.
Other biologists have greeted the notion of giant venomous lizards with mixed reactions. Some think the scientists have made a compelling case, while others say the evidence is thin.
Biologists have long been intrigued by the success Komodo dragons have at killing big prey. They use an unusual strategy to hunt, lying in ambush and then suddenly delivering a single deep bite, often to the leg or the belly. Sometimes the victim immediately falls, and the lizards can finish it off.
But sometimes a bitten animal escapes. Biologists have noted that the lizard’s victims may collapse later, becoming still and quiet, and even die. For decades, many scientists have speculated that the dragons infected their victims with deadly bacteria that lived in the bits of carrion stuck in their teeth.
Yet others have always been skeptical of the bacteria hypothesis. “Your average lion has a much dirtier bite,” said Bryan Fry, a biologist at the University of Melbourne. “It’s complete voodoo.”
Dr. Fry suspected that Komodo dragons were using venom instead. In 2006, Dr. Fry and his colleagues published evidence suggesting that some lizards share the same venom genes as snakes. They concluded that venom evolved about 200 million years ago in the common ancestors of the lizards and snakes. Studying an Australian lizard called the lace monitor, Dr. Fry found proteins in its mouth that were produced by those shared venom genes. When he tested the proteins, he found that some could cause a rapid drop in blood pressure, and that others stop blood from clotting.
Komodo dragons, like the lace monitor, are closely related to snakes, which suggested to Dr. Fry that the largest of all lizards might be venomous too. To test his hypothesis, Dr. Fry climbed into a Komodo dragon’s cage at the Singapore Zoo. “I dangled a rat above it and got it really excited,” he said. As mucus drooled out of the lizard’s mouth, he used a test tube on a pole to collect it.
Dr. Fry did not find any venomlike proteins in the mucus, but later he realized mucus was the wrong place to look. Studying other lizards, he discovered that the proteins were coming from a separate set of glands in their mouths.
A medical disaster offered Dr. Fry a chance to take another look at the Komodo dragons. During a mysterious outbreak at the Singapore Zoo, most of the Komodo dragons died. Dr. Fry and his colleagues were given permission to dissect jaw tissue from a terminally ill lizard and preserve the heads of two dead lizards for later study.
The researchers found the second set of glands in the Komodo dragon heads, and inside they found venomlike proteins. Tests showed that one protein keeps blood from clotting. Another one relaxes blood vessel walls. “It drops the blood pressure like a stone,” Dr. Fry said.
He argues that Komodo dragons depend on these venoms for their success. A Komodo skull is light, so it cannot generate a powerful bite or hold down a struggling victim, the way alligators do. “You’d expect them to be strong, but they’re not,” he said.
Instead, Dr. Fry argues, Komodo dragons slice open their victims, adding venom to the open wound. “If you keep it bleeding and lower its blood pressure, it’s going to lose consciousness, and then you can tear its guts out at your leisure,” he said.
Some experts praised the new study, which is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. “This paper clearly demonstrates that the Komodo dragon is a venomous predator,” wrote Nicolas Vidal, an evolutionary biologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, in an e-mail message.
But Kurt Schwenk, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut, is not so impressed.
Dr. Schwenk finds the new mouth glands intriguing, but he considers most of the evidence for venom in the study to be “meaningless, irrelevant, incorrect or falsely misleading.” Even if the lizards have venomlike proteins in their mouths, Dr. Schwenk argues, they may be using them for a different function.
Dr. Schwenk also doubts that venom is necessary to explain the effect of a Komodo dragon bite. “I guarantee that if you had a 10-foot lizard jump out of the bushes and rip your guts out, you’d be somewhat still and quiet for a bit,” he said, “at least until you keeled over from shock and blood loss owing to the fact that your intestines were spread out on the ground in front of you.”
Vermont Acts to Make Drug Makers’ Gifts Public
By NATASHA SINGER, The New York Times, May 20, 2009
Cracking down on medical industry payments to doctors, the Vermont legislature has passed a law requiring drug and device makers to publicly disclose all money given to physicians and other health care providers, naming names and listing dollar amounts.
The law, scheduled to take effect on July 1, is believed to be the most stringent state effort to regulate the marketing of medical products to doctors. It would also ban nearly all industry gifts, including meals, to doctors, nurses, medical staff, pharmacists, health plan administrators and health care facilities.
In practice, the new law would let Vermonters learn each year which doctors have been paid, and how much, by the makers of the brand-name drugs for which they wrote prescriptions — or how much money certain surgeons have received from the makers of the stents, pacemakers, artificial knees and such that the doctors implanted.
The action by Vermont has been watched around the country, as national legislators and medical groups look for links between industry marketing and health care costs.
Minnesota already requires drug companies to report payments to doctors. New Massachusetts regulations limit gifts to health care practitioners and call for disclosure of any payment or benefit worth $50 or more.
In Congress, Senators Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin, have sponsored a bill requiring disclosure of pharmaceutical industry payments to doctors.
But Vermont has gone further with its new law, which Gov. Jim Douglas, a Republican, is expected to sign by early next month. It will require public disclosure of all payments by companies to any health care provider with authority to write prescriptions for drugs, medical devices and biologics, drugs that are typically administered by injection or infusion.
The law is also the first to ban all free meals, long a favorite gift in marketing to doctors. The law also closes a loophole in previous regulations that had allowed companies to keep specific expenses private by claiming them as trade secrets.
The required disclosures, though, do not include payments for clinical research on products under review by the Food and Drug Administration.
“This is a much more comprehensive law because it makes clear — whether devices, biologics or drugs are involved — the issue is inappropriate gift-giving,” said Sharon Treat, the executive director of a nonprofit group, the National Legislative Association for Prescription Drug Pricing, and a Democrat in the Maine House of Representatives.
The Vermont law promises to provide a window into the considerable efforts and spending by device and drug makers to woo doctors even in a small state.
Makers of medical products spent about $2.9 million in fiscal year 2008 on marketing to health care professionals in Vermont, according to a report last month from the state’s attorney general. Of Vermont’s 4,573 licensed health practitioners, almost half received remuneration, including payments for lectures, meals or lodging from pharmaceutical companies in the 2008 fiscal year, the report said.
“If the drug industry gives $3 million on average for three years now to physicians in a small state like Vermont, what is happening in California and New York?” said Ken Libertoff, director of the Vermont Association for Mental Health, an advocacy group that supported the law.
The Vermont attorney general’s report, compiled before passage of the law, provides only aggregate data because companies declared 83 percent of the payments to be trade secrets. Even so, without naming names, the disclosed expenses highlighted a widely used industry strategy of focusing much of the marketing money on a group of influential doctors.
Of the $2.9 million spent in Vermont, for example, about $1.8 million went to only 100 health care providers. That meant only about 4 percent of doctors received 60 percent of the payments, the report said.
A psychiatrist received about $112,000, the highest amount spent on one person. But specialists in internal medicine, neurology, endocrinology and diabetes also received more than $100,000 each during the year.
To reduce the perception of undue industry influence, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America or PhRMA, a trade association, instituted a voluntary code in January that prohibits noneducational gifts to doctors and restricts meals. About 50 manufacturers the code.
With such a code, Vermont’s new reporting requirements seem redundant, said Marjorie E. Powell, a senior lawyer for PhRMA.
“We think this is unnecessary, and it is not going to improve patient care,” Ms. Powell said. “It makes it onerous not only for the company but also for the physician in Vermont, because this is going to be on a Web site.”
But the Vermont Medical Society, which represents 65 percent of the physicians in the state, supported the bill.
Peter Shumlin, president pro tempore of the Vermont state senate, said he hoped his state would provide a model on marketing disclosures for the rest of the country.
“Our goal is not to prohibit this practice,” Mr. Shumlin said, “but to have the first system in this country where providers’ acceptance of this money is on full public record.”

German Fossil Found to Be Early Primate
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, May 16, 2009
Fossil remains of a 47-million-year-old animal, found years ago in Germany, have been analyzed more thoroughly and determined to be an extremely early primate close to the emergence of the evolutionary branch leading to monkeys, apes and humans, scientists said in interviews this week.
Described as the “most complete fossil primate ever discovered,” the specimen is a juvenile female the size of a small monkey. Only the left lower limb is missing, and the preservation is so remarkable that impressions of fur and the soft body outline are still clear. The animal’s last meal, of fruit and leaves, remained in the stomach cavity.
In an article to be published on Tuesday in PLoS One, an online scientific journal, an international team of scientists will report that this extraordinary fossil could be a “stem group” from which higher primates evolved, “but we are not advocating this.”
The researchers said the specimen, designated Darwinius masillae, “is important in being exceptionally well preserved and providing a much more complete understanding of the paleobiology” of a primate from the Eocene period, a time when primitive primates were starting to branch into two lineages, the prosimians and the anthropoids.
As part of a heavily promoted publicity campaign, the skeleton will be displayed at a news conference on Tuesday at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; the History Channel plans a documentary on the primate at 9 p.m. on May 25; and Little Brown is bringing out a book. The Wall Street Journal published an article on Friday giving some scientific details of the discovery.
The specimen was excavated by private collectors in 1983 from the Messel Shale Pit, a shale quarry near Darmstadt, Germany, that has yielded many fossils of Eocene life, including other primitive primates.
Jörn H. Hurum, a paleontologist at the University of Oslo and a leader of the research, said the site was “one of the real treasure troves of paleontology, like the Gobi Desert for dinosaurs.”
The skeleton was divided and sold in two parts, one of which had dropped out of sight. When Dr. Hurum learned that the missing part was for sale, he arranged for its purchase by the Natural History Museum in Oslo and two years ago rounded up a team of German and American scientists to study the bones with CT imaging and other advanced technologies.
Speaking by telephone from Norway, Dr. Hurum recalled: “I realized at first it’s a primate. It just screams primate: opposable big toes and thumbs, no evidence of claws. This is like the Archaeopteryx of primate evolution.”
The scientists estimated that the primate was about 9 months old, the equivalent of a 6-year-old human. At maturity they suggest that it would have weighed two pounds and been two feet long, most of it tail. It had a broken left wrist, healing at the time of death, and may have drowned in the volcanic lake at Messel. It was, the researchers said, something like a combination “lemur monkey.”
Philip D. Gingerich, a member of the team who is a paleontologist of Eocene life at the University of Michigan, said in an e-mail message that in the context of other fossil finds and DNA studies the primate should be considered for a place in the ancestral line leading to living higher primates, including apes and humans.

Chemicals in Dragon’s Glands Stir Venom Debate
By CARL ZIMMER, The New York Times, May 19, 2009
The Komodo dragon is already a terrifying beast. Measuring up to 10 feet long, it is the world’s largest lizard. It delivers a devastating bite with its long, serrated teeth, attacking prey as big as water buffaloes.
But in a provocative paper to be published this week, an international team of scientists argues that the Komodo dragon is even more impressive. They claim that the lizards use a potent venom to bring down their victims.
Other biologists have greeted the notion of giant venomous lizards with mixed reactions. Some think the scientists have made a compelling case, while others say the evidence is thin.
Biologists have long been intrigued by the success Komodo dragons have at killing big prey. They use an unusual strategy to hunt, lying in ambush and then suddenly delivering a single deep bite, often to the leg or the belly. Sometimes the victim immediately falls, and the lizards can finish it off.
But sometimes a bitten animal escapes. Biologists have noted that the lizard’s victims may collapse later, becoming still and quiet, and even die. For decades, many scientists have speculated that the dragons infected their victims with deadly bacteria that lived in the bits of carrion stuck in their teeth.
Yet others have always been skeptical of the bacteria hypothesis. “Your average lion has a much dirtier bite,” said Bryan Fry, a biologist at the University of Melbourne. “It’s complete voodoo.”
Dr. Fry suspected that Komodo dragons were using venom instead. In 2006, Dr. Fry and his colleagues published evidence suggesting that some lizards share the same venom genes as snakes. They concluded that venom evolved about 200 million years ago in the common ancestors of the lizards and snakes. Studying an Australian lizard called the lace monitor, Dr. Fry found proteins in its mouth that were produced by those shared venom genes. When he tested the proteins, he found that some could cause a rapid drop in blood pressure, and that others stop blood from clotting.
Komodo dragons, like the lace monitor, are closely related to snakes, which suggested to Dr. Fry that the largest of all lizards might be venomous too. To test his hypothesis, Dr. Fry climbed into a Komodo dragon’s cage at the Singapore Zoo. “I dangled a rat above it and got it really excited,” he said. As mucus drooled out of the lizard’s mouth, he used a test tube on a pole to collect it.
Dr. Fry did not find any venomlike proteins in the mucus, but later he realized mucus was the wrong place to look. Studying other lizards, he discovered that the proteins were coming from a separate set of glands in their mouths.
A medical disaster offered Dr. Fry a chance to take another look at the Komodo dragons. During a mysterious outbreak at the Singapore Zoo, most of the Komodo dragons died. Dr. Fry and his colleagues were given permission to dissect jaw tissue from a terminally ill lizard and preserve the heads of two dead lizards for later study.
The researchers found the second set of glands in the Komodo dragon heads, and inside they found venomlike proteins. Tests showed that one protein keeps blood from clotting. Another one relaxes blood vessel walls. “It drops the blood pressure like a stone,” Dr. Fry said.
He argues that Komodo dragons depend on these venoms for their success. A Komodo skull is light, so it cannot generate a powerful bite or hold down a struggling victim, the way alligators do. “You’d expect them to be strong, but they’re not,” he said.
Instead, Dr. Fry argues, Komodo dragons slice open their victims, adding venom to the open wound. “If you keep it bleeding and lower its blood pressure, it’s going to lose consciousness, and then you can tear its guts out at your leisure,” he said.
Some experts praised the new study, which is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. “This paper clearly demonstrates that the Komodo dragon is a venomous predator,” wrote Nicolas Vidal, an evolutionary biologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, in an e-mail message.
But Kurt Schwenk, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut, is not so impressed.
Dr. Schwenk finds the new mouth glands intriguing, but he considers most of the evidence for venom in the study to be “meaningless, irrelevant, incorrect or falsely misleading.” Even if the lizards have venomlike proteins in their mouths, Dr. Schwenk argues, they may be using them for a different function.
Dr. Schwenk also doubts that venom is necessary to explain the effect of a Komodo dragon bite. “I guarantee that if you had a 10-foot lizard jump out of the bushes and rip your guts out, you’d be somewhat still and quiet for a bit,” he said, “at least until you keeled over from shock and blood loss owing to the fact that your intestines were spread out on the ground in front of you.”
Vermont Acts to Make Drug Makers’ Gifts Public
By NATASHA SINGER, The New York Times, May 20, 2009
Cracking down on medical industry payments to doctors, the Vermont legislature has passed a law requiring drug and device makers to publicly disclose all money given to physicians and other health care providers, naming names and listing dollar amounts.
The law, scheduled to take effect on July 1, is believed to be the most stringent state effort to regulate the marketing of medical products to doctors. It would also ban nearly all industry gifts, including meals, to doctors, nurses, medical staff, pharmacists, health plan administrators and health care facilities.
In practice, the new law would let Vermonters learn each year which doctors have been paid, and how much, by the makers of the brand-name drugs for which they wrote prescriptions — or how much money certain surgeons have received from the makers of the stents, pacemakers, artificial knees and such that the doctors implanted.
The action by Vermont has been watched around the country, as national legislators and medical groups look for links between industry marketing and health care costs.
Minnesota already requires drug companies to report payments to doctors. New Massachusetts regulations limit gifts to health care practitioners and call for disclosure of any payment or benefit worth $50 or more.
In Congress, Senators Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin, have sponsored a bill requiring disclosure of pharmaceutical industry payments to doctors.
But Vermont has gone further with its new law, which Gov. Jim Douglas, a Republican, is expected to sign by early next month. It will require public disclosure of all payments by companies to any health care provider with authority to write prescriptions for drugs, medical devices and biologics, drugs that are typically administered by injection or infusion.
The law is also the first to ban all free meals, long a favorite gift in marketing to doctors. The law also closes a loophole in previous regulations that had allowed companies to keep specific expenses private by claiming them as trade secrets.
The required disclosures, though, do not include payments for clinical research on products under review by the Food and Drug Administration.
“This is a much more comprehensive law because it makes clear — whether devices, biologics or drugs are involved — the issue is inappropriate gift-giving,” said Sharon Treat, the executive director of a nonprofit group, the National Legislative Association for Prescription Drug Pricing, and a Democrat in the Maine House of Representatives.
The Vermont law promises to provide a window into the considerable efforts and spending by device and drug makers to woo doctors even in a small state.
Makers of medical products spent about $2.9 million in fiscal year 2008 on marketing to health care professionals in Vermont, according to a report last month from the state’s attorney general. Of Vermont’s 4,573 licensed health practitioners, almost half received remuneration, including payments for lectures, meals or lodging from pharmaceutical companies in the 2008 fiscal year, the report said.
“If the drug industry gives $3 million on average for three years now to physicians in a small state like Vermont, what is happening in California and New York?” said Ken Libertoff, director of the Vermont Association for Mental Health, an advocacy group that supported the law.
The Vermont attorney general’s report, compiled before passage of the law, provides only aggregate data because companies declared 83 percent of the payments to be trade secrets. Even so, without naming names, the disclosed expenses highlighted a widely used industry strategy of focusing much of the marketing money on a group of influential doctors.
Of the $2.9 million spent in Vermont, for example, about $1.8 million went to only 100 health care providers. That meant only about 4 percent of doctors received 60 percent of the payments, the report said.
A psychiatrist received about $112,000, the highest amount spent on one person. But specialists in internal medicine, neurology, endocrinology and diabetes also received more than $100,000 each during the year.
To reduce the perception of undue industry influence, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America or PhRMA, a trade association, instituted a voluntary code in January that prohibits noneducational gifts to doctors and restricts meals. About 50 manufacturers the code.
With such a code, Vermont’s new reporting requirements seem redundant, said Marjorie E. Powell, a senior lawyer for PhRMA.
“We think this is unnecessary, and it is not going to improve patient care,” Ms. Powell said. “It makes it onerous not only for the company but also for the physician in Vermont, because this is going to be on a Web site.”
But the Vermont Medical Society, which represents 65 percent of the physicians in the state, supported the bill.
Peter Shumlin, president pro tempore of the Vermont state senate, said he hoped his state would provide a model on marketing disclosures for the rest of the country.
“Our goal is not to prohibit this practice,” Mr. Shumlin said, “but to have the first system in this country where providers’ acceptance of this money is on full public record.”