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If You Swat, Watch Out: Bees Remember Faces
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, February 2, 2010
A honeybee brain has a million neurons, compared with the 100 billion in a human brain. But, researchers report, bees can recognize faces, and they even do it the same way we do.
Bees and humans both use a technique called configural processing, piecing together the components of a face — eyes, ears, nose and mouth — to form a recognizable pattern, a team of researchers report in the Feb. 15 issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology.
“It’s a kind of gluing,” said Martin Giurfa, a professor of neural biology at the University de Toulouse, France, and one of the study’s authors.
It is the same ability, Dr. Giurfa said, that helps humans realize that a Chinese pagoda and a Swiss chalet are both abodes, based on their components.
“We know two vertical lines, with a hutlike top,” he said. “It’s a house.”
In their research, Dr. Giurfa and his colleagues created a display of hand-drawn images, some faces and some not.
The faces had bowls of sugar water in front of them, while the nonfaces were placed behind bowls containing plain water. After a few failed trips to the bowls without sugar water, the bees kept returning to the sugar-filled bowls in front of the faces, the scientists found.
The images and the bowls were cleaned after every visit, to ensure that the bees were using visual cues to find the sugar and not leaving scent marks.
The researchers found that bees could also distinguish a face that provided sugar water from one that did not.
After several hours’ training, the bees picked the right faces about 75 percent of the time, said Adrian Dyer, another author of the study and a vision scientist at Monash University in Australia.
The researchers said that while they were biologists and not computer scientists, they hoped their work could be more widely used, including by face recognition experts. “If somebody else finds it interesting and it improves airport security, that’s great,” Dr. Dyer said. “The potential mechanisms can be made available to the wider facial recognition community.”
Dr. Giurfa said that the benefit of studying a creature as simple as the bee was in knowing that it did not take a complex neural network to distinguish objects. This could offer hope to technologists, he said.
“We could imagine that through repeat exposure, we may be able to train machines to extract a configuration and know that ‘This a motorbike’ or no, ‘This is rather a dog,’ ” he said.
But while the research on bees is interesting, it does not help with the most difficult problem technologists are having, said David Forsyth, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois, whose research focuses on computer vision.
That challenging problem is to build systems that can recognize the same people over a period of time, Dr. Forsyth said, after their hair has grown, or when they have sunglasses on, or after they have aged. These are all tasks that humans can usually perform but that computers struggle to replicate.
“I highly doubt that bees can tell the difference,” Dr. Forsyth said, adding, “If bees did that, I’d fall off my chair.”
Nonetheless, he said, it is important to add to the body of research on face recognition by studying animals.
While computers have become very capable at detecting faces, dependable face recognition by machines continues to be elusive.
“We know almost nothing about recognition, but it is really useful and really hard, and it helps us make decisions about the world,” Dr. Forsyth said. “Research into anything about identifying and recognizing seems to be a good thing.”
The Miracle of Vitamin D: Sound Science, or Hype?
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, FEBRUARY 1, 2010
Imagine a treatment that could build bones, strengthen the immune system and lower the risks of illnesses like diabetes, heart and kidney disease, high blood pressure and cancer.
Some research suggests that such a wonder treatment already exists. It’s vitamin D, a nutrient that the body makes from sunlight and that is also found in fish and fortified milk.
Yet despite the health potential of vitamin D, as many as half of all adults and children are said to have less than optimum levels and as many as 10 percent of children are highly deficient, according to a 2008 report in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
As a result, doctors are increasingly testing their patients’ vitamin D levels and prescribing daily supplements to raise them. According to the lab company Quest Diagnostics, orders for vitamin D tests surged more than 50 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from the same quarter a year earlier. And in 2008, consumers bought $235 million worth of vitamin D supplements, up from $40 million in 2001, according to Nutrition Business Journal.
But don’t start gobbling down vitamin D supplements just yet. The excitement about their health potential is still far ahead of the science.
Although numerous studies have been promising, there are scant data from randomized clinical trials. Little is known about what the ideal level of vitamin D really is, whether raising it can improve health, and what potential side effects are caused by high doses.
And since most of the data on vitamin D comes from observational research, it may be that high doses of the nutrient don’t really make people healthier, but that healthy people simply do the sorts of things that happen to raise vitamin D.
“Correlation does not necessarily mean a cause-and-effect relationship,” said Dr. JoAnn E. Manson, a Harvard professor who is chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
“People may have high vitamin D levels because they exercise a lot and are getting ultraviolet-light exposure from exercising outdoors,” Dr. Manson said. “Or they may have high vitamin D because they are health-conscious and take supplements. But they also have a healthy diet, don’t smoke and do a lot of the other things that keep you healthy.”
Dr. Manson is leading a major study over the next five years that should provide answers to these questions and more. The nationwide clinical trial is recruiting 20,000 older adults, including men 60 and older and women 65 and older, to study whether high doses of vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids from fish-oil supplements will lower risk for heart disease and cancer. (Learn about taking part in the study at www.vitalstudy.org.)
Dr. Manson said fish-oil supplements were included in the study because they are another promising treatment that suffers from a dearth of clinical trial evidence. In addition, both vitamin D and fish oil are known to have an anti-inflammatory effect, but each works through a different pathway in the body, so there may be an added health benefit in combining them.
Study participants will be divided into four groups. One will take both vitamin D and fish oil pills. Two will take either a vitamin D or a fish-oil supplement and a placebo. The fourth will take two placebo pills.
Vitamin D is found throughout the body and acts as a signaling mechanism to turn cells on and off. Right now, the recommended dose from food and supplements is about 400 international units a day for most people, but most experts agree that is probably too low. The Institute of Medicine is reviewing guidelines for vitamin D and is expected to raise the recommended daily dose.
Study participants will take 2,000 I.U.’s of vitamin D3, believed to be the form most easily used by the body. The study will use one-gram supplements of omega-3 fish oil, about 5 to 10 times the average daily intake.
The vitamin D dose is far higher than what has been used in other studies. The well-known Women’s Health Initiative study, for instance, tracked women taking 400 units of vitamin D and 1,000 milligrams of calcium. The study found no overall benefit from the supplements, although women who consistently took their pills had a lower risk of hip fracture. Even so, many experts think 400 units is far too low for any additional health benefits.
Another study, of 1,200 women, looked at the effects of 1,500 milligrams of calcium and 1,000 units of vitamin D. Women who took both supplements showed a lower risk for breast cancer over the next four years, but the numbers of actual cases — seven breast cancers in the placebo group and four in the supplement group — were too small to draw meaningful conclusions.
Although consumers may be tempted to rush out and start taking 2,000 I.U.’s of vitamin D a day, doctors warn against it. Several recent studies of nutrients, including vitamins E and B, selenium and beta carotene, have proved disappointing — even suggesting that high doses do more harm than good, increasing risk for heart problems, diabetes and cancer, depending on the supplement.
Despite the promise of vitamin D in observational studies, research into other supplements shows it’s difficult to document a benefit in otherwise healthy people, and virtually impossible to predict potential harms, notes Dr. Eric A. Klein, chairman of the Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Klein recently worked as national coordinator for Select, a study of vitamin E and selenium for prostate cancer. The study seemed promising, but in the end it showed no benefit from the supplements and a potentially higher risk for diabetes in selenium users.
“My sentiment is that the lesson we have learned form large trials with other vitamin supplements, including Select, is that there is no proven health or preventative benefit for dietary supplements in nutritionally replete populations, which accounts for most of the people who enter this sort of clinical trial,” Dr. Klein said. “It makes more sense to me to study dietary supplements or vitamins in populations who are deficient.”
People most at risk for vitamin D deficiency are older, have diabetes or kidney disease, stay indoors or have darker skin. African-American teenagers are at particularly high risk, possibly because in addition to their dark skin, they are less likely at that age to drink milk or play outside.
The scientific community continues to debate the optimum level of vitamin D. In general, people are considered to be deficient if they have blood levels below 15 or 20 nanograms per milliliter. But many doctors now believe vitamin D levels should be above 30. The ideal level isn’t known, nor is it known at what point a person is getting too much vitamin D, which can lead to kidney stones, calcification in blood vessels and other problems.
People’s vitamin D levels are influenced by whether they have light or dark skin, where they live, how much time they spend outdoors and by fish and milk consumption. To raise vitamin D without supplements, a person could increase sun exposure for 10 to 15 minutes a day. Eating more fish can help — a 3.5-ounce serving of wild fresh salmon has 600 to 1,000 I.U.’s of vitamin D — but it would take a quart of milk a day to get the recommended dose of vitamin D.
“What we know is that there are a lot of people who are vitamin D deficient based on estimates from national surveys,” said Dr. Michal L. Melamed, assistant professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. “But we don’t know what happens when the curve shifts to the other end. There probably is a risk to having too much vitamin D in the system.”
SECOND OPINION: A Lasting Gift to Medicine That Wasn’t Really a Gift
By DENISE GRADY, The New York Times, February 2, 2010
Fifty years after Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in the “colored” ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital, her daughter finally got a chance to see the legacy she had unknowingly left to science. A researcher in a lab at Hopkins swung open a freezer door and showed the daughter, Deborah Lacks-Pullum, thousands of vials, each holding millions of cells descended from a bit of tissue that doctors had snipped from her mother’s cervix.
Ms. Lacks-Pullum gasped. “Oh God,” she said. “I can’t believe all that’s my mother.”
When the researcher handed her one of the frozen vials, Ms. Lacks-Pullum instinctively said, “She’s cold,” and blew on the tube to warm it. “You’re famous,” she whispered to the cells.
Minutes later, peering through a microscope, she pronounced them beautiful. But when she asked the researcher which were her mother’s normal cells and which the cancer cells, his answer revealed that her precious relic was not quite what it seemed. The cells, he replied, were “all just cancer.”
The vignette comes from a gripping new book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” (Crown Publishers), by the journalist Rebecca Skloot. The story of Mrs. Lacks and her cells, and the author’s own adventures with Mrs. Lacks’s grown children (one fries her a pork chop, and another slams her against a wall) is by turns heartbreaking, funny and unsettling. The book raises troubling questions about the way Mrs. Lacks and her family were treated by researchers and about whether patients should control or have financial claims on tissue removed from their bodies.
The story began in January 1951, when Mrs. Lacks was found to have cervical cancer. She was treated with radium at Johns Hopkins, the standard of care in that day, but there was no stopping the cancer. Her doctor had never seen anything like it. Within months, her body was full of tumors, and she died in excruciating pain that October. She was 31 and left five children, the youngest just a year old. She had been a devoted mother, and the children suffered terribly without her.
Neither Mrs. Lacks nor any of her relatives knew that doctors had given a sample of her tumor to Dr. George Gey, a Hopkins researcher who was trying to find cells that would live indefinitely in culture so researchers could experiment on them. Before she came along, his efforts had failed. Her cells changed everything: they multiplied like crazy and never died.
A cell line called HeLa (for Henrietta Lacks) was born. Those immortal cells soon became the workhorse of laboratories everywhere. HeLa cells were used to develop the first polio vaccine, they were launched into space for experiments in zero gravity and they helped produce drugs for numerous diseases, including Parkinson’s, leukemia and the flu. By now, literally tons of them have been produced.
Dr. Gey did not make money from the cells, but they were commercialized. Now they are bought and sold every day the world over, and they have generated millions in profits.
The Lacks family never got a dime. They were poor, with little education and no health insurance, and some had serious physical or mental ailments. But they didn’t even know that tissue had been taken or that HeLa cells even existed until more than 20 years after Mrs. Lacks’s death. And they found out only by accident, when her daughter-in-law met someone from the National Cancer Institute who recognized her surname and said he was working with cells from “a woman named Henrietta Lacks.”
The daughter-in-law rushed home and told Mrs. Lacks’s son, Lawrence, “Part of your mother, it’s alive!”
When they learned that their mother’s cells had saved lives, the family felt proud. But they also felt confused, a bit frightened, used and abused. It had never occurred to anyone to ask permission to take their mother’s tissue, tell them that her cells had changed scientific history or even to say thank you. And certainly no one had ever suggested that they deserved a share of the profits.
Some of the Lackses later gave blood to Hopkins researchers, thinking they were being tested for cancer, when really the scientists wanted their genetic information to help determine whether HeLa cells were contaminating other cultures. When Ms. Pullum-Lacks asked a renowned geneticist at the hospital, Victor McKusick, about her mother’s illness and the use of her cells, he gave her an autographed copy of an impenetrable textbook he had edited, and, Ms. Skloot writes, “beneath his signature, he wrote a phone number for Deborah to use for making appointments to give more blood.”
The bounds of fairness, respect and simple courtesy all seem to have been breached in the case of the Lacks family. The gulf between them and the scientists — race, class, education — was enormous and made communication difficult.
A less charitable view is that it might have made the Lackses easier to ignore. When the family’s story became known in the black community in Baltimore, Ms. Skloot writes, it was seen as the case of a black woman whose body had been exploited by white scientists.
Ideas about informed consent have changed in the last 60 years, and the forms now given to people having surgery or biopsies usually spell out that tissue removed from them may be used for research. But Ms. Skloot points out that patients today don’t really have any more control over removed body parts than Mrs. Lacks did. Most people just obediently sign the forms.
Which is as it should be, many scientists say, arguing that Mrs. Lacks’s immortal cells were an accident of biology, not something she created or invented, and were used to benefit countless others. Most of what is removed from people is of no value anyway, and researchers say it would be too complicated and would hinder progress if ownership of such things were assigned to patients and royalties had to be paid.
But in an age in which people can buy songs with the click of a mouse, that argument may become harder to defend.
So far, the courts have sided with scientists, even in a case in the 1980s in which a leukemia patient’s spleen and other tissues turned out to be a biomedical gold mine — for his doctor. The patient, John Moore, sued his doctor after discovering that the doctor had filed for a patent on his cells and certain proteins they made, and had created a cell line called Mo with a market value estimated at $3 billion. Mr. Moore ultimately lost before the California Supreme Court.
As Ms. Skloot writes in her last chapter, this issue is not going away. If anything, it may become increasingly important, because the scale of tissue research is growing, and people are becoming savvier about the money to be made and also the potential for abuse if tissue samples are used to ferret out genetic information.
The notion of “tissue rights” has inspired a new category of activists. The question that comes up repeatedly is, if scientists or companies can commercialize a patient’s cells or tissues, doesn’t that patient, as provider of the raw material, deserve a say about it and maybe a share of any profits that result? Fewer people these days may be willing to take no for an answer.
BOOKS ON SCIENCE: Tale of an Unsung Fossil Finder, in Fact and Fiction
By KATHERINE BOUTON, The New York Times, February 2, 2010
THE FOSSIL HUNTER: Dinosaurs, Evolution and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World.
By Shelley Emling. Palgrave Macmillan. 234 pages. $27.
REMARKABLE CREATURES
By Tracy Chevalier. Dutton. 312 pages. $26.95.
Mary Anning was one of the few women to make a success in paleontology and one of the fewer still whose success was not linked to that of a paleontologist spouse (or any spouse: she was single). She made five major fossil discoveries from 1811 to her death in 1847, and many lesser ones.
Why then is she best known as the inspiration for the tongue twister “She sells sea shells by the seashore”?
The answer lies in her gender, her poverty, her lack of formal education, her regional accent — as it might even today. But as Shelley Emling says in “The Fossil Hunter,” her readable biography of Anning, she had one major advantage in the place and time of her birth: Lyme Regis, 1799.
The beach at Lyme Regis, on the southern coast of England, was littered with fossils, and every storm tore away at the limestone cliffs to reveal new treasures. The area is now a Unesco World Heritage Site known as the Jurassic Coast. But when Anning was born it was an isolated village.
Anning’s finds, beginning with her first major discovery, when she was 12, coincided with the emerging debate over extinction. In 1811, she found a complete ichthyosaur, the first extinct animal known to science. The concept of extinction struck at the very heart of the prevailing belief that God’s creatures were immutable and eternal, fueling a debate that preoccupied early 19th-century Christians that continues over intelligent design.
Scientists like William Buckland, Henry de la Beche and William Conybeare walked the beach with Anning and wrote about her discoveries, which came in quick succession and soon included the first complete plesiosaur and the first British pterosaur. Too often she received no credit. (She also often received no money, though fossil hunting was the family’s primary source of income.)
Ms. Emling cites numerous instances throughout Anning’s life of a scientist’s or an institution’s failing to acknowledge her role. As a contemporary wrote, “Men of learning have sucked her brains and made a great deal by publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages.”
A rigorous autodidact, Anning taught herself comparative anatomy by dissecting marine animals. She read as much scientific literature as she could find, at one point asking the British Museum for a complete list of its holdings. She cleaned and prepared her specimens so professionally that when a prominent scientist brought her ichthyosaur to public attention, he praised the preparation — but credited the collector, apparently unable or unwilling to grasp that a girl could have been responsible. She documented her finds with skillful scientific drawings.
Anning was plucky, determined, fearless and undaunted by the odds. Despite her not having formal education, she nevertheless made a lasting contribution to science. It is no wonder that she has been the subject of several children’s books. Now “The Fossil Hunter” and “Remarkable Creatures,” a novel by Tracy Chevalier, the author of “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” are appearing almost simultaneously.
Ms. Chevalier focuses on Anning’s early life and her relationship with another historic figure, Elizabeth Philpot, vividly imagining the former’s inner life. But the merging of fact and fiction can be frustrating because it is hard to know which is which.
Did the eminent French naturalist Georges Cuvier, for instance, send a condescending letter to Anning suggesting her plesiosaur was fraudulent? The historic record shows that he had doubts about its authenticity, but was such a letter written? In the novel, Philpot storms a Geological Society meeting in London in a satisfying rush to Anning’s defense. But did she?
Ms. Emling’s approach is journalistic, but she seems not to trust the inherent interest of her facts and too frequently semifictionalizes her narrative by suggesting what “might have” happened. Too many might haves, probablys and possiblys distract from a story than can stand on its own.
Her amply footnoted book skillfully puts Anning’s work into the scientific and sociological context. But some readers may wish she had also taken a more contemporary perspective. Amateur excavations are sometimes considered looting, and it would be interesting to know how Anning would have fared today. Nor does Ms. Emling tell readers whether the lack of scientific context recorded during Anning’s excavations limited the value of her finds.
Anning died of untreated breast cancer in 1847, a painful death not untypical of the times. Though she once described herself as “well known throughout the whole of Europe,” true scientific recognition was late in coming. Toward the end of Anning’s life, the naturalist Louis Agassiz named two different species of fossil fish after her.
Anning’s death was noted in the annual presidential address at the Geological Society, which did not accept women as fellows until 1919. As the 200th anniversary of her first discovery nears, these two books remind us that she was more than the girl who sold sea shells by the sea shore.
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, February 2, 2010
A honeybee brain has a million neurons, compared with the 100 billion in a human brain. But, researchers report, bees can recognize faces, and they even do it the same way we do.
Bees and humans both use a technique called configural processing, piecing together the components of a face — eyes, ears, nose and mouth — to form a recognizable pattern, a team of researchers report in the Feb. 15 issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology.
“It’s a kind of gluing,” said Martin Giurfa, a professor of neural biology at the University de Toulouse, France, and one of the study’s authors.
It is the same ability, Dr. Giurfa said, that helps humans realize that a Chinese pagoda and a Swiss chalet are both abodes, based on their components.
“We know two vertical lines, with a hutlike top,” he said. “It’s a house.”
In their research, Dr. Giurfa and his colleagues created a display of hand-drawn images, some faces and some not.
The faces had bowls of sugar water in front of them, while the nonfaces were placed behind bowls containing plain water. After a few failed trips to the bowls without sugar water, the bees kept returning to the sugar-filled bowls in front of the faces, the scientists found.
The images and the bowls were cleaned after every visit, to ensure that the bees were using visual cues to find the sugar and not leaving scent marks.
The researchers found that bees could also distinguish a face that provided sugar water from one that did not.
After several hours’ training, the bees picked the right faces about 75 percent of the time, said Adrian Dyer, another author of the study and a vision scientist at Monash University in Australia.
The researchers said that while they were biologists and not computer scientists, they hoped their work could be more widely used, including by face recognition experts. “If somebody else finds it interesting and it improves airport security, that’s great,” Dr. Dyer said. “The potential mechanisms can be made available to the wider facial recognition community.”
Dr. Giurfa said that the benefit of studying a creature as simple as the bee was in knowing that it did not take a complex neural network to distinguish objects. This could offer hope to technologists, he said.
“We could imagine that through repeat exposure, we may be able to train machines to extract a configuration and know that ‘This a motorbike’ or no, ‘This is rather a dog,’ ” he said.
But while the research on bees is interesting, it does not help with the most difficult problem technologists are having, said David Forsyth, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois, whose research focuses on computer vision.
That challenging problem is to build systems that can recognize the same people over a period of time, Dr. Forsyth said, after their hair has grown, or when they have sunglasses on, or after they have aged. These are all tasks that humans can usually perform but that computers struggle to replicate.
“I highly doubt that bees can tell the difference,” Dr. Forsyth said, adding, “If bees did that, I’d fall off my chair.”
Nonetheless, he said, it is important to add to the body of research on face recognition by studying animals.
While computers have become very capable at detecting faces, dependable face recognition by machines continues to be elusive.
“We know almost nothing about recognition, but it is really useful and really hard, and it helps us make decisions about the world,” Dr. Forsyth said. “Research into anything about identifying and recognizing seems to be a good thing.”
The Miracle of Vitamin D: Sound Science, or Hype?
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, FEBRUARY 1, 2010
Imagine a treatment that could build bones, strengthen the immune system and lower the risks of illnesses like diabetes, heart and kidney disease, high blood pressure and cancer.
Some research suggests that such a wonder treatment already exists. It’s vitamin D, a nutrient that the body makes from sunlight and that is also found in fish and fortified milk.
Yet despite the health potential of vitamin D, as many as half of all adults and children are said to have less than optimum levels and as many as 10 percent of children are highly deficient, according to a 2008 report in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
As a result, doctors are increasingly testing their patients’ vitamin D levels and prescribing daily supplements to raise them. According to the lab company Quest Diagnostics, orders for vitamin D tests surged more than 50 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from the same quarter a year earlier. And in 2008, consumers bought $235 million worth of vitamin D supplements, up from $40 million in 2001, according to Nutrition Business Journal.
But don’t start gobbling down vitamin D supplements just yet. The excitement about their health potential is still far ahead of the science.
Although numerous studies have been promising, there are scant data from randomized clinical trials. Little is known about what the ideal level of vitamin D really is, whether raising it can improve health, and what potential side effects are caused by high doses.
And since most of the data on vitamin D comes from observational research, it may be that high doses of the nutrient don’t really make people healthier, but that healthy people simply do the sorts of things that happen to raise vitamin D.
“Correlation does not necessarily mean a cause-and-effect relationship,” said Dr. JoAnn E. Manson, a Harvard professor who is chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
“People may have high vitamin D levels because they exercise a lot and are getting ultraviolet-light exposure from exercising outdoors,” Dr. Manson said. “Or they may have high vitamin D because they are health-conscious and take supplements. But they also have a healthy diet, don’t smoke and do a lot of the other things that keep you healthy.”
Dr. Manson is leading a major study over the next five years that should provide answers to these questions and more. The nationwide clinical trial is recruiting 20,000 older adults, including men 60 and older and women 65 and older, to study whether high doses of vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids from fish-oil supplements will lower risk for heart disease and cancer. (Learn about taking part in the study at www.vitalstudy.org.)
Dr. Manson said fish-oil supplements were included in the study because they are another promising treatment that suffers from a dearth of clinical trial evidence. In addition, both vitamin D and fish oil are known to have an anti-inflammatory effect, but each works through a different pathway in the body, so there may be an added health benefit in combining them.
Study participants will be divided into four groups. One will take both vitamin D and fish oil pills. Two will take either a vitamin D or a fish-oil supplement and a placebo. The fourth will take two placebo pills.
Vitamin D is found throughout the body and acts as a signaling mechanism to turn cells on and off. Right now, the recommended dose from food and supplements is about 400 international units a day for most people, but most experts agree that is probably too low. The Institute of Medicine is reviewing guidelines for vitamin D and is expected to raise the recommended daily dose.
Study participants will take 2,000 I.U.’s of vitamin D3, believed to be the form most easily used by the body. The study will use one-gram supplements of omega-3 fish oil, about 5 to 10 times the average daily intake.
The vitamin D dose is far higher than what has been used in other studies. The well-known Women’s Health Initiative study, for instance, tracked women taking 400 units of vitamin D and 1,000 milligrams of calcium. The study found no overall benefit from the supplements, although women who consistently took their pills had a lower risk of hip fracture. Even so, many experts think 400 units is far too low for any additional health benefits.
Another study, of 1,200 women, looked at the effects of 1,500 milligrams of calcium and 1,000 units of vitamin D. Women who took both supplements showed a lower risk for breast cancer over the next four years, but the numbers of actual cases — seven breast cancers in the placebo group and four in the supplement group — were too small to draw meaningful conclusions.
Although consumers may be tempted to rush out and start taking 2,000 I.U.’s of vitamin D a day, doctors warn against it. Several recent studies of nutrients, including vitamins E and B, selenium and beta carotene, have proved disappointing — even suggesting that high doses do more harm than good, increasing risk for heart problems, diabetes and cancer, depending on the supplement.
Despite the promise of vitamin D in observational studies, research into other supplements shows it’s difficult to document a benefit in otherwise healthy people, and virtually impossible to predict potential harms, notes Dr. Eric A. Klein, chairman of the Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Klein recently worked as national coordinator for Select, a study of vitamin E and selenium for prostate cancer. The study seemed promising, but in the end it showed no benefit from the supplements and a potentially higher risk for diabetes in selenium users.
“My sentiment is that the lesson we have learned form large trials with other vitamin supplements, including Select, is that there is no proven health or preventative benefit for dietary supplements in nutritionally replete populations, which accounts for most of the people who enter this sort of clinical trial,” Dr. Klein said. “It makes more sense to me to study dietary supplements or vitamins in populations who are deficient.”
People most at risk for vitamin D deficiency are older, have diabetes or kidney disease, stay indoors or have darker skin. African-American teenagers are at particularly high risk, possibly because in addition to their dark skin, they are less likely at that age to drink milk or play outside.
The scientific community continues to debate the optimum level of vitamin D. In general, people are considered to be deficient if they have blood levels below 15 or 20 nanograms per milliliter. But many doctors now believe vitamin D levels should be above 30. The ideal level isn’t known, nor is it known at what point a person is getting too much vitamin D, which can lead to kidney stones, calcification in blood vessels and other problems.
People’s vitamin D levels are influenced by whether they have light or dark skin, where they live, how much time they spend outdoors and by fish and milk consumption. To raise vitamin D without supplements, a person could increase sun exposure for 10 to 15 minutes a day. Eating more fish can help — a 3.5-ounce serving of wild fresh salmon has 600 to 1,000 I.U.’s of vitamin D — but it would take a quart of milk a day to get the recommended dose of vitamin D.
“What we know is that there are a lot of people who are vitamin D deficient based on estimates from national surveys,” said Dr. Michal L. Melamed, assistant professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. “But we don’t know what happens when the curve shifts to the other end. There probably is a risk to having too much vitamin D in the system.”
SECOND OPINION: A Lasting Gift to Medicine That Wasn’t Really a Gift
By DENISE GRADY, The New York Times, February 2, 2010
Fifty years after Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in the “colored” ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital, her daughter finally got a chance to see the legacy she had unknowingly left to science. A researcher in a lab at Hopkins swung open a freezer door and showed the daughter, Deborah Lacks-Pullum, thousands of vials, each holding millions of cells descended from a bit of tissue that doctors had snipped from her mother’s cervix.
Ms. Lacks-Pullum gasped. “Oh God,” she said. “I can’t believe all that’s my mother.”
When the researcher handed her one of the frozen vials, Ms. Lacks-Pullum instinctively said, “She’s cold,” and blew on the tube to warm it. “You’re famous,” she whispered to the cells.
Minutes later, peering through a microscope, she pronounced them beautiful. But when she asked the researcher which were her mother’s normal cells and which the cancer cells, his answer revealed that her precious relic was not quite what it seemed. The cells, he replied, were “all just cancer.”
The vignette comes from a gripping new book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” (Crown Publishers), by the journalist Rebecca Skloot. The story of Mrs. Lacks and her cells, and the author’s own adventures with Mrs. Lacks’s grown children (one fries her a pork chop, and another slams her against a wall) is by turns heartbreaking, funny and unsettling. The book raises troubling questions about the way Mrs. Lacks and her family were treated by researchers and about whether patients should control or have financial claims on tissue removed from their bodies.
The story began in January 1951, when Mrs. Lacks was found to have cervical cancer. She was treated with radium at Johns Hopkins, the standard of care in that day, but there was no stopping the cancer. Her doctor had never seen anything like it. Within months, her body was full of tumors, and she died in excruciating pain that October. She was 31 and left five children, the youngest just a year old. She had been a devoted mother, and the children suffered terribly without her.
Neither Mrs. Lacks nor any of her relatives knew that doctors had given a sample of her tumor to Dr. George Gey, a Hopkins researcher who was trying to find cells that would live indefinitely in culture so researchers could experiment on them. Before she came along, his efforts had failed. Her cells changed everything: they multiplied like crazy and never died.
A cell line called HeLa (for Henrietta Lacks) was born. Those immortal cells soon became the workhorse of laboratories everywhere. HeLa cells were used to develop the first polio vaccine, they were launched into space for experiments in zero gravity and they helped produce drugs for numerous diseases, including Parkinson’s, leukemia and the flu. By now, literally tons of them have been produced.
Dr. Gey did not make money from the cells, but they were commercialized. Now they are bought and sold every day the world over, and they have generated millions in profits.
The Lacks family never got a dime. They were poor, with little education and no health insurance, and some had serious physical or mental ailments. But they didn’t even know that tissue had been taken or that HeLa cells even existed until more than 20 years after Mrs. Lacks’s death. And they found out only by accident, when her daughter-in-law met someone from the National Cancer Institute who recognized her surname and said he was working with cells from “a woman named Henrietta Lacks.”
The daughter-in-law rushed home and told Mrs. Lacks’s son, Lawrence, “Part of your mother, it’s alive!”
When they learned that their mother’s cells had saved lives, the family felt proud. But they also felt confused, a bit frightened, used and abused. It had never occurred to anyone to ask permission to take their mother’s tissue, tell them that her cells had changed scientific history or even to say thank you. And certainly no one had ever suggested that they deserved a share of the profits.
Some of the Lackses later gave blood to Hopkins researchers, thinking they were being tested for cancer, when really the scientists wanted their genetic information to help determine whether HeLa cells were contaminating other cultures. When Ms. Pullum-Lacks asked a renowned geneticist at the hospital, Victor McKusick, about her mother’s illness and the use of her cells, he gave her an autographed copy of an impenetrable textbook he had edited, and, Ms. Skloot writes, “beneath his signature, he wrote a phone number for Deborah to use for making appointments to give more blood.”
The bounds of fairness, respect and simple courtesy all seem to have been breached in the case of the Lacks family. The gulf between them and the scientists — race, class, education — was enormous and made communication difficult.
A less charitable view is that it might have made the Lackses easier to ignore. When the family’s story became known in the black community in Baltimore, Ms. Skloot writes, it was seen as the case of a black woman whose body had been exploited by white scientists.
Ideas about informed consent have changed in the last 60 years, and the forms now given to people having surgery or biopsies usually spell out that tissue removed from them may be used for research. But Ms. Skloot points out that patients today don’t really have any more control over removed body parts than Mrs. Lacks did. Most people just obediently sign the forms.
Which is as it should be, many scientists say, arguing that Mrs. Lacks’s immortal cells were an accident of biology, not something she created or invented, and were used to benefit countless others. Most of what is removed from people is of no value anyway, and researchers say it would be too complicated and would hinder progress if ownership of such things were assigned to patients and royalties had to be paid.
But in an age in which people can buy songs with the click of a mouse, that argument may become harder to defend.
So far, the courts have sided with scientists, even in a case in the 1980s in which a leukemia patient’s spleen and other tissues turned out to be a biomedical gold mine — for his doctor. The patient, John Moore, sued his doctor after discovering that the doctor had filed for a patent on his cells and certain proteins they made, and had created a cell line called Mo with a market value estimated at $3 billion. Mr. Moore ultimately lost before the California Supreme Court.
As Ms. Skloot writes in her last chapter, this issue is not going away. If anything, it may become increasingly important, because the scale of tissue research is growing, and people are becoming savvier about the money to be made and also the potential for abuse if tissue samples are used to ferret out genetic information.
The notion of “tissue rights” has inspired a new category of activists. The question that comes up repeatedly is, if scientists or companies can commercialize a patient’s cells or tissues, doesn’t that patient, as provider of the raw material, deserve a say about it and maybe a share of any profits that result? Fewer people these days may be willing to take no for an answer.
BOOKS ON SCIENCE: Tale of an Unsung Fossil Finder, in Fact and Fiction
By KATHERINE BOUTON, The New York Times, February 2, 2010
THE FOSSIL HUNTER: Dinosaurs, Evolution and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World.
By Shelley Emling. Palgrave Macmillan. 234 pages. $27.
REMARKABLE CREATURES
By Tracy Chevalier. Dutton. 312 pages. $26.95.
Mary Anning was one of the few women to make a success in paleontology and one of the fewer still whose success was not linked to that of a paleontologist spouse (or any spouse: she was single). She made five major fossil discoveries from 1811 to her death in 1847, and many lesser ones.
Why then is she best known as the inspiration for the tongue twister “She sells sea shells by the seashore”?
The answer lies in her gender, her poverty, her lack of formal education, her regional accent — as it might even today. But as Shelley Emling says in “The Fossil Hunter,” her readable biography of Anning, she had one major advantage in the place and time of her birth: Lyme Regis, 1799.
The beach at Lyme Regis, on the southern coast of England, was littered with fossils, and every storm tore away at the limestone cliffs to reveal new treasures. The area is now a Unesco World Heritage Site known as the Jurassic Coast. But when Anning was born it was an isolated village.
Anning’s finds, beginning with her first major discovery, when she was 12, coincided with the emerging debate over extinction. In 1811, she found a complete ichthyosaur, the first extinct animal known to science. The concept of extinction struck at the very heart of the prevailing belief that God’s creatures were immutable and eternal, fueling a debate that preoccupied early 19th-century Christians that continues over intelligent design.
Scientists like William Buckland, Henry de la Beche and William Conybeare walked the beach with Anning and wrote about her discoveries, which came in quick succession and soon included the first complete plesiosaur and the first British pterosaur. Too often she received no credit. (She also often received no money, though fossil hunting was the family’s primary source of income.)
Ms. Emling cites numerous instances throughout Anning’s life of a scientist’s or an institution’s failing to acknowledge her role. As a contemporary wrote, “Men of learning have sucked her brains and made a great deal by publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages.”
A rigorous autodidact, Anning taught herself comparative anatomy by dissecting marine animals. She read as much scientific literature as she could find, at one point asking the British Museum for a complete list of its holdings. She cleaned and prepared her specimens so professionally that when a prominent scientist brought her ichthyosaur to public attention, he praised the preparation — but credited the collector, apparently unable or unwilling to grasp that a girl could have been responsible. She documented her finds with skillful scientific drawings.
Anning was plucky, determined, fearless and undaunted by the odds. Despite her not having formal education, she nevertheless made a lasting contribution to science. It is no wonder that she has been the subject of several children’s books. Now “The Fossil Hunter” and “Remarkable Creatures,” a novel by Tracy Chevalier, the author of “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” are appearing almost simultaneously.
Ms. Chevalier focuses on Anning’s early life and her relationship with another historic figure, Elizabeth Philpot, vividly imagining the former’s inner life. But the merging of fact and fiction can be frustrating because it is hard to know which is which.
Did the eminent French naturalist Georges Cuvier, for instance, send a condescending letter to Anning suggesting her plesiosaur was fraudulent? The historic record shows that he had doubts about its authenticity, but was such a letter written? In the novel, Philpot storms a Geological Society meeting in London in a satisfying rush to Anning’s defense. But did she?
Ms. Emling’s approach is journalistic, but she seems not to trust the inherent interest of her facts and too frequently semifictionalizes her narrative by suggesting what “might have” happened. Too many might haves, probablys and possiblys distract from a story than can stand on its own.
Her amply footnoted book skillfully puts Anning’s work into the scientific and sociological context. But some readers may wish she had also taken a more contemporary perspective. Amateur excavations are sometimes considered looting, and it would be interesting to know how Anning would have fared today. Nor does Ms. Emling tell readers whether the lack of scientific context recorded during Anning’s excavations limited the value of her finds.
Anning died of untreated breast cancer in 1847, a painful death not untypical of the times. Though she once described herself as “well known throughout the whole of Europe,” true scientific recognition was late in coming. Toward the end of Anning’s life, the naturalist Louis Agassiz named two different species of fossil fish after her.
Anning’s death was noted in the annual presidential address at the Geological Society, which did not accept women as fellows until 1919. As the 200th anniversary of her first discovery nears, these two books remind us that she was more than the girl who sold sea shells by the sea shore.
