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Wanted: Volunteers, All Pregnant
By PAM BELLUCK, The New York Times, February 16, 2010
The woman sent by government scientists visited the Queens apartment repeatedly before finding anyone home. And the person who finally answered the door — a 30-year-old Colombian-born waitress named Alejandra — was wary.
Although Alejandra was exactly what the scientists were looking for — a pregnant woman — she was “a bit scared,” she said, about giving herself and her unborn child to science for 21 years.
Researchers would collect and analyze her vaginal fluid, toenail clippings, breast milk and other things, and ask about everything from possible drug use to depression. At the birth, specimen collectors would scoop up her placenta and even her baby’s first feces for scientific posterity.
“Nowadays there are so many scams,” Alejandra said in Spanish, and her husband, José, “initially didn’t want me to do the study.” (Scientists said research confidentiality rules required that her last name be withheld.) But she ultimately decided that participating would “help the next generation.”
Chalk one up for the scientists, who for months have been dispatching door-to-door emissaries across the country to recruit women like Alejandra for an unprecedented undertaking: the largest, most comprehensive long-term study of the health of children, beginning even before they are born.
Authorized by Congress in 2000, the National Children’s Study began last January, its projected cost swelling to about $6.7 billion. With several hundred participants so far, it aims to enroll 100,000 pregnant women in 105 counties, then monitor their babies until they turn 21.
It will examine how environment, genes and other factors affect children’s health, tackling questions subject to heated debate and misinformation. Does pesticide exposure, for example, cause asthma? Do particular diets or genetic mutations lead to autism?
“This is a very important study for understanding the health of our nation’s children and for identifying factors that may play a role downstream in adult health,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, which is overseeing the study.
But while the idea is praised by many experts, the study has also stirred controversy over its cost and content.
In August, the Senate committee overseeing financing for the study accused it of “a serious breach of trust” for not disclosing that the initial price tag of $3.1 billion would more than double, and said the study needed to release more information if it wanted to get “any” financing in the next budget year.
And an independent panel of experts and some members of the study’s own advisory committee say it misses important opportunities to help people and communities — emphasizing narrower medical questions over concerns like racial and ethnic health differences, leaving unresolved crucial ethical questions concerning what to tell participants and communities about test results.
“This study is of the magnitude of the accelerator in CERN, or a trip to the moon — a really big science issue,” said Milton Kotelchuck, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health and a member of the independent panel. “But if you have a flawed beginning, then you’ve got 20 years of working on a flawed study.”
Officials are making changes, putting all but the pilot phase, to involve 37 locations, on hold while conducting an inquiry into the cost and scientific underpinnings, Dr. Collins said. Some data may no longer be collected if “we can’t afford” it, he said, and every aspect will receive “the closest possible scrutiny.”
The study is far from its plan of recruiting 250 babies a year for four or five years in each community. By December, 510 women were enrolled and 83 babies were born in the first seven locations, including Orange County, Calif., and Salt Lake County, Utah.
That was after knocking on nearly 64,000 doors, screening 27,000 women and finding 1,000 who were pregnant and in their first trimester (and therefore eligible).
Dr. Collins said there were “unexpected difficulties in the number of houses that have to be visited to get enough babies” — 40 houses per enrolled woman, instead of the expected 14.
The time and information required from families could also make the study “too burdensome to be conducted the way it is,” said Dr. Susan Shurin, former acting director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health and the study’s supervising agency. The fear is women will “go ‘Oh no, you again,’ and slam the door in your face.”
Specimens include blood, urine, hair and saliva from pregnant women, babies and fathers; dust from women’s bedsheets; tap water; and particles on carpets and baseboards. They are sent to laboratories (placentas to Rochester, N.Y., for example), prepared for long-term storage, and analyzed for chemicals, metals, genes and infections.
Participants provide the names and phone numbers of relatives and friends, so researchers can find them if they move. As children grow, scientists, including outside experts, can cross-reference information about their medical conditions, behavioral development and school performance.
Clues could emerge if, for example, developmentally disabled children in both rural Alabama and suburban California show similar genetic patterns or chemical exposure.
“The task in selling this study is going to be to say we realize that this is audacious” and “seriously hard to do, but this is hugely important,” said Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University and part of the independent panel and the study’s advisory committee. “I’m hopeful some of the deficiencies can be addressed.”
Selling the study presents different challenges everywhere.
In affluent, highly educated Waukesha County, Wis., the study is advertised on movie screens, yard signs and parade banners.
But in the hog-farm-and-Butterball-turkey-plant territory of Duplin County, N.C., where scientists have to enroll nearly a third of the 800 babies born each year, some women are “concerned about questions they may be answering and how they may sound answering those questions,” said Dr. Roland Draughn, a local obstetrician.
Nancy Dole, a co-principal investigator in Duplin, said “we had to reassure” residents that “the purpose is not to make the county look bad.”
Organizers have visited child car-seat installation events, church groups, even Latino men’s soccer teams. Some women have volunteered, even ones who are not pregnant, bringing their children to the study’s Duplin headquarters, a former video store.
But others would hesitate if approached.
“Twenty-one years, that’s a long time,” said Wanda Johnson, 37, a nursing-home aide with four children. “I may say yes, and then tomorrow, I don’t want to be bothered.”
In Queens, with over 2 million people and 30,000 births a year, recruiting 250 might seem easy. And some pregnant women, like Amy Saez, 28, said that if asked to participate, “I would totally be down with that because I’d become a part of science and history.” But recruiters confront a jumble of languages and cultures, calling telephone translation lines to communicate in Urdu, Nepalese and Russian, for example.
And they have to “knock on each and every door in a building until they learn who lives there,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, chairman of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai medical school and the principal investigator in Queens. They buzz random apartments to get into buildings, “buttonhole people coming out, talk to doormen, supers,” he said. For recruiters’ safety, door-knocking stops at 8 p.m.
Soon, said Dr. Steven Hirschfeld, appointed the study’s director when the original leader left under criticism, new recruiting methods will be tried, including having doctors encourage patients to enroll. That was previously rejected because investigators felt doctor-referred patients would exclude some women, like those not getting prenatal care.
Besides looking at widespread conditions, like diabetes, the study will consider regional differences. Maureen Durkin, principal investigator in Waukesha County, Wis., wonders if radium in the county’s water, and houses built on “farm fields that may be contaminated with nitrates and atrazine,” have different health consequences than pollution or industrial chemicals in Queens.
Health authorities in Duplin County, N.C., are concerned about “so many hog lagoons and poop everywhere,” said Shannon Brewer, a health department nurse, who also worries that many women there fail to breastfeed because “at the turkey factory, they just can’t step out of line to pump.”
In Flushing, Queens, Alejandra, who gave birth to Isabella in August, is breastfeeding. But she said she was “afraid of the baby getting too many vaccines.” She quit smoking after getting pregnant, but her husband, 34, a golf instructor, smokes in their bathroom.
Joseph Gilbert, a study employee who has been interviewing and collecting samples from Alejandra, said study protocol limited his ability to urge participants to change health habits.
But study officials are trying to determine what information to give participants and when. Some experts say people should get results of their chemical or genetic tests only if medical treatments exist because otherwise it only causes anxiety. Others agree with Patricia O’Campo, a member of the study’s advisory committee and the independent panel, who says the study should be “less ivory towerish” and disclose more information to families and communities.
In this and other aspects of the study, “changes have to be made, and maybe some very big changes,” Dr. O’Campo said. “I think it could be so much more.”
Dabrali Jimenez contributed reporting.
On Crete, New Evidence of Very Ancient Mariners
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, February 16, 2010
Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.
That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.
Crete has been an island for more than five million years, meaning that the toolmakers must have arrived by boat. So this seems to push the history of Mediterranean voyaging back more than 100,000 years, specialists in Stone Age archaeology say. Previous artifact discoveries had shown people reaching Cyprus, a few other Greek islands and possibly Sardinia no earlier than 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
The oldest established early marine travel anywhere was the sea-crossing migration of anatomically modern Homo sapiens to Australia, beginning about 60,000 years ago. There is also a suggestive trickle of evidence, notably the skeletons and artifacts on the Indonesian island of Flores, of more ancient hominids making their way by water to new habitats.
Even more intriguing, the archaeologists who found the tools on Crete noted that the style of the hand axes suggested that they could be up to 700,000 years old. That may be a stretch, they conceded, but the tools resemble artifacts from the stone technology known as Acheulean, which originated with prehuman populations in Africa.
More than 2,000 stone artifacts, including the hand axes, were collected on the southwestern shore of Crete, near the town of Plakias, by a team led by Thomas F. Strasser and Eleni Panagopoulou. She is with the Greek Ministry of Culture and he is an associate professor of art history at Providence College in Rhode Island. They were assisted by Greek and American geologists and archaeologists, including Curtis Runnels of Boston University.
Dr. Strasser described the discovery last month at a meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. A formal report has been accepted for publication in Hesparia, the journal of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, a supporter of the fieldwork.
The Plakias survey team went in looking for material remains of more recent artisans, nothing older than 11,000 years. Such artifacts would have been blades, spear points and arrowheads typical of Mesolithic and Neolithic periods.
“We found those, then we found the hand axes,” Dr. Strasser said last week in an interview, and that sent the team into deeper time.
“We were flummoxed,” Dr. Runnels said in an interview. “These things were just not supposed to be there.”
Word of the find is circulating among the ranks of Stone Age scholars. The few who have seen the data and some pictures — most of the tools reside in Athens — said they were excited and cautiously impressed. The research, if confirmed by further study, scrambles timetables of technological development and textbook accounts of human and prehuman mobility.
Ofer Bar-Yosef, an authority on Stone Age archaeology at Harvard, said the significance of the find would depend on the dating of the site. “Once the investigators provide the dates,” he said in an e-mail message, “we will have a better understanding of the importance of the discovery.”
Dr. Bar-Yosef said he had seen only a few photographs of the Cretan tools. The forms can only indicate a possible age, he said, but “handling the artifacts may provide a different impression.” And dating, he said, would tell the tale.
Dr. Runnels, who has 30 years’ experience in Stone Age research, said that an analysis by him and three geologists “left not much doubt of the age of the site, and the tools must be even older.”
The cliffs and caves above the shore, the researchers said, have been uplifted by tectonic forces where the African plate goes under and pushes up the European plate. The exposed uplifted layers represent the sequence of geologic periods that have been well studied and dated, in some cases correlated to established dates of glacial and interglacial periods of the most recent ice age. In addition, the team analyzed the layer bearing the tools and determined that the soil had been on the surface 130,000 to 190,000 years ago.
Dr. Runnels said he considered this a minimum age for the tools themselves. They include not only quartz hand axes, but also cleavers and scrapers, all of which are in the Acheulean style. The tools could have been made millenniums before they became, as it were, frozen in time in the Cretan cliffs, the archaeologists said.
Dr. Runnels suggested that the tools could be at least twice as old as the geologic layers. Dr. Strasser said they could be as much as 700,000 years old. Further explorations are planned this summer.
The 130,000-year date would put the discovery in a time when Homo sapiens had already evolved in Africa, sometime after 200,000 years ago. Their presence in Europe did not become apparent until about 50,000 years ago.
Archaeologists can only speculate about who the toolmakers were. One hundred and thirty thousand years ago, modern humans shared the world with other hominids, like Neanderthals and Homo heidelbergensis. The Acheulean culture is thought to have started with Homo erectus.
The standard hypothesis had been that Acheulean toolmakers reached Europe and Asia via the Middle East, passing mainly through what is now Turkey into the Balkans. The new finds suggest that their dispersals were not confined to land routes. They may lend credibility to proposals of migrations from Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain. Crete’s southern shore where the tools were found is 200 miles from North Africa.
“We can’t say the toolmakers came 200 miles from Libya,” Dr. Strasser said. “If you’re on a raft, that’s a long voyage, but they might have come from the European mainland by way of shorter crossings through Greek islands.”
But archaeologists and experts on early nautical history said the discovery appeared to show that these surprisingly ancient mariners had craft sturdier and more reliable than rafts. They also must have had the cognitive ability to conceive and carry out repeated water crossing over great distances in order to establish sustainable populations producing an abundance of stone artifacts.
In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature
By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times, February 16, 2010
Physicists said Monday that they had whacked a tiny region of space with enough energy to briefly distort the laws of physics, providing the first laboratory demonstration of the kind of process that scientists suspect has shaped cosmic history.
The blow was delivered in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, where, since 2000, physicists have been accelerating gold nuclei around a 2.4-mile underground ring to 99.995 percent of the speed of light and then colliding them in an effort to melt protons and neutrons and free their constituents — quarks and gluons. The goal has been a state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma, which theorists believe existed when the universe was only a microsecond old.
The departure from normal physics manifested itself in the apparent ability of the briefly freed quarks to tell right from left. That breaks one of the fundamental laws of nature, known as parity, which requires that the laws of physics remain unchanged if we view nature in a mirror.
This happened in bubbles smaller than the nucleus of an atom, which lasted only a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. But in these bubbles were “hints of profound physics,” in the words of Steven Vigdor, associate director for nuclear and particle physics at Brookhaven. Very similar symmetry-breaking bubbles, at an earlier period in the universe, are believed to have been responsible for breaking the balance between matter and its opposite antimatter and leaving the universe with a preponderance of matter.
“We now have a hook” into how these processes occur, Dr. Vigdor said, adding in an e-mail message, “IF the interpretation of the RHIC results turns out to be correct.” Other physicists said the results were an important window into the complicated dynamics of quarks, which goes by the somewhat whimsical name of Quantum Chromo Dynamics.
Frank Wilczek, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who won the Nobel Prize for work on the theory of quarks, called the new results “interesting and surprising,” and said understanding them would help understand the behavior of quarks in unusual circumstances.
“It is comparable, I suppose, to understanding better how galaxies form, or astrophysical black holes,” he said.
The Brookhaven scientists and their colleagues discussed their latest results from RHIC in talks and a news conference at a meeting of the American Physical Society Monday in Washington, and in a pair of papers submitted to Physical Review Letters. “This is a view of what the world was like at 2 microseconds,” said Jack Sandweiss of Yale, a member of the Brookhaven team, calling it, “a seething cauldron.”
Among other things, the group announced it had succeeded in measuring the temperature of the quark-gluon plasma as 4 trillion degrees Celsius, “by far the hottest matter ever made,” Dr. Vigdor said. That is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun and well above the temperature at which theorists calculate that protons and neutrons should melt, but the quark-gluon plasma does not act the way theorists had predicted.
Instead of behaving like a perfect gas, in which every quark goes its own way independent of the others, the plasma seemed to act like a liquid. “It was a very big surprise,” Dr. Vigdor said, when it was discovered in 2005. Since then, however, theorists have revisited their calculations and found that the quark soup can be either a liquid or a gas, depending on the temperature, he explained. “This is not your father’s quark-gluon plasma,” said Barbara V. Jacak, of the State University at Stony Brook, speaking for the team that made the new measurements.
It is now thought that the plasma would have to be a million times more energetic to become a perfect gas. That is beyond the reach of any conceivable laboratory experiment, but the experiments colliding lead nuclei in the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva next winter should reach energies high enough to see some evolution from a liquid to a gas.
Parity, the idea that the laws of physics are the same when left and right are switched, as in a mirror reflection, is one of the most fundamental symmetries of space-time as we know it. Physicists were surprised to discover in 1956, however, that parity is not obeyed by all the laws of nature after all. The universe is slightly lopsided in this regard. The so-called weak force, which governs some radioactive decays, seems to be left-handed, causing neutrinos, the ghostlike elementary particles that are governed by that force, to spin clockwise, when viewed oncoming, but never counterclockwise.
Under normal conditions, the laws of quark behavior observe the principle of mirror symmetry, but Dmitri Kharzeev of Brookhaven, a longtime student of symmetry changes in the universe, had suggested in 1998 that those laws might change under the very abnormal conditions in the RHIC fireball. Conditions in that fireball are such that a cube with sides about one quarter the thickness of a human hair could contain the total amount of energy consumed in the United States in a year.
All this energy, he said, could put a twist in the gluon force fields, which give quarks their marching orders. There can be left-hand twists and right-hand twists, he explained, resulting in space within each little bubble getting a local direction.
What makes the violation of mirror symmetry observable in the collider is the combination of this corkscrewed space with a magnetic field, produced by the charged gold ions blasting at one another. The quarks were then drawn one way or the other along the magnetic field, depending on their electrical charges.
The magnetic fields produced by the collisions are the most intense ever observed, roughly 100 million billion gauss, Dr. Sandweiss said.
The directions of the magnetic field and of the corkscrew effect can be different in every bubble, the presumed parity violations can only be studied statistically, averaged over 14 million bubble events. In each of them, the mirror symmetry could be broken in a different direction, Dr. Sandweiss explained, but the effect would always be the same, with positive quarks going one way and negative ones the other. That is what was recorded in RHIC’s STAR detector (STAR being short for Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC) by Dr. Sandweiss and his colleagues. Dr. Sandweiss cautioned that it was still possible that some other effect could be mimicking the parity violation, and he d held off publication of the results for a year, trying unsuccessfully to find one. So they decided, he said, that it was worthy of discussion.
One test of the result, he said, would be to run RHIC at a lower energy and see if the effect went away when there was not enough oomph in the beam to distort space-time. The idea of parity might seem like a very abstract and mathematical concept, but it affects our chemistry and biology. It is not only neutrinos that are skewed. So are many of the molecules of life, including proteins, which are left-handed, and sugars, which are right-handed.
The chirality, or handedness, of molecules prevents certain reactions from taking place in chemistry and biophysics, Dr. Sandweiss noted, and affects what we can digest.
Physicists suspect that the left-handedness of neutrinos might have contributed to the most lopsided feature of the universe of all, the fact that it is composed of matter and not antimatter, even though the present-day laws do not discriminate. The amount of parity violation that physicists have measured in experiments, however, is not enough to explain how the universe got so unbalanced today. We like symmetry, Dr. Kharzeev, of Brookhaven, noted, but if the symmetry between matter and antimatter had not been broken long ago, “the universe would be a very desolate place.”
The new measurement from the quark plasma does not explain the antimatter problem either, Dr. Sandweiss said, but it helps show how departures from symmetry can appear in bubbles like the ones in RHIC in the course of cosmic evolution. Scientists think that the laws of physics went through a series of changes, or “phase transitions,” like water freezing to ice, as the universe cooled during the stupendously hot early moments of the Big Bang. Symmetry-violating bubbles like those of RHIC are more likely to form during these cosmic changeovers. “If you learn more about it from this experiment, we could then illuminate the process that gives rise to these bubbles,” Dr. Sandweiss said.
Dr. Vigdor said: “A lot of physics sounds like science fiction. There is a lot of speculation on what happened in the early universe. The amazing thing is that we have this chance to test any of this.”
This King-Size Frog Hopped With Dinosaurs
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, February 16, 2010
STONY BROOK, N.Y. — Now appearing in the lobby of Stony Brook University Medical Center: a frog that lived in the era of the dinosaurs and is as big as a beach ball. Scientists believe it to be the largest frog ever.
The immense frog is part of a permanent exhibition that also features reconstructions of a vegetarian pug-nosed crocodile and a small meat-eating dinosaur.
“This was undoubtedly the heaviest frog ever, we estimate about 10 pounds,” said David Krause, the Stony Brook University paleontologist who unearthed the fossils of the frog and the other creatures in Madagascar. “It probably ate any available prey — lizards and snakes and mammals. It was large enough to maybe even eat hatchling dinosaurs.”
The frog’s scientific name is Beelzebufo ampinga, which means “armored devil toad.”
About 150 schoolchildren from public schools here on Long Island attended the unveiling of the exhibition last week — none of them as small as hatchlings, but small enough to find the frog impressive.
“Looks like he ate a human,” said one, pointing at the frog’s stomach.
The reconstruction of the creature, described as the “frog from hell” by the scientists who dug it up in Madagascar, portrays Beelzebufo as a grim-looking amphibian, with a large pink tongue and sand-colored skin to match its desert environment. It took 15 years and 75 fossils to put together an accurate reconstruction.
The frog lived about 65 million years ago, in a semi-arid environment that experienced sporadic heavy rains, said Dr. Krause, who analyzed sediments to deconstruct the frog’s living conditions. Dr. Krause and his colleagues believe that the frog is related to the Pac-Man frog, a modern-day species in South America that is named for the video game character.
Like the Pac-Man, Beelzebufo was probably an ambush predator, meaning it wriggled its rear end into the ground, sticking its head out, in anticipation of the oblivious lizard or snake.
The reconstruction on display is the only one of the devil frog that the researchers know of, and was made by Joe Groenke, a fossil technician, and Luci Betti-Nash, a scientific artist. Mr. Groenke created a cast of the frog’s head — essentially an enlarged version of the Pac-Man frog — and Ms. Betti-Nash sculpted the body with clay and painted it with water-based acrylics. The colors are a guess, based on where Beelzebufo lived and the coloration of modern desert amphibians.
The exhibit, financed by the Stony Brook University Medical Center Development Council, is intended not only to raise public awareness of science but also to draw attention to Dr. Krause’s side project — the Madagascar Ankizy Fund. The fund, which is a nonprofit, finances health clinics and schools in rural Madagascar.
“We get so much from these digs,” Dr. Krause said. “We get these phenomenal fossils; we have had many graduate students get their Ph.D.’s through this work. We were looking for ways to give back, and they really wanted their children to have an education.”
By PAM BELLUCK, The New York Times, February 16, 2010
The woman sent by government scientists visited the Queens apartment repeatedly before finding anyone home. And the person who finally answered the door — a 30-year-old Colombian-born waitress named Alejandra — was wary.
Although Alejandra was exactly what the scientists were looking for — a pregnant woman — she was “a bit scared,” she said, about giving herself and her unborn child to science for 21 years.
Researchers would collect and analyze her vaginal fluid, toenail clippings, breast milk and other things, and ask about everything from possible drug use to depression. At the birth, specimen collectors would scoop up her placenta and even her baby’s first feces for scientific posterity.
“Nowadays there are so many scams,” Alejandra said in Spanish, and her husband, José, “initially didn’t want me to do the study.” (Scientists said research confidentiality rules required that her last name be withheld.) But she ultimately decided that participating would “help the next generation.”
Chalk one up for the scientists, who for months have been dispatching door-to-door emissaries across the country to recruit women like Alejandra for an unprecedented undertaking: the largest, most comprehensive long-term study of the health of children, beginning even before they are born.
Authorized by Congress in 2000, the National Children’s Study began last January, its projected cost swelling to about $6.7 billion. With several hundred participants so far, it aims to enroll 100,000 pregnant women in 105 counties, then monitor their babies until they turn 21.
It will examine how environment, genes and other factors affect children’s health, tackling questions subject to heated debate and misinformation. Does pesticide exposure, for example, cause asthma? Do particular diets or genetic mutations lead to autism?
“This is a very important study for understanding the health of our nation’s children and for identifying factors that may play a role downstream in adult health,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, which is overseeing the study.
But while the idea is praised by many experts, the study has also stirred controversy over its cost and content.
In August, the Senate committee overseeing financing for the study accused it of “a serious breach of trust” for not disclosing that the initial price tag of $3.1 billion would more than double, and said the study needed to release more information if it wanted to get “any” financing in the next budget year.
And an independent panel of experts and some members of the study’s own advisory committee say it misses important opportunities to help people and communities — emphasizing narrower medical questions over concerns like racial and ethnic health differences, leaving unresolved crucial ethical questions concerning what to tell participants and communities about test results.
“This study is of the magnitude of the accelerator in CERN, or a trip to the moon — a really big science issue,” said Milton Kotelchuck, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health and a member of the independent panel. “But if you have a flawed beginning, then you’ve got 20 years of working on a flawed study.”
Officials are making changes, putting all but the pilot phase, to involve 37 locations, on hold while conducting an inquiry into the cost and scientific underpinnings, Dr. Collins said. Some data may no longer be collected if “we can’t afford” it, he said, and every aspect will receive “the closest possible scrutiny.”
The study is far from its plan of recruiting 250 babies a year for four or five years in each community. By December, 510 women were enrolled and 83 babies were born in the first seven locations, including Orange County, Calif., and Salt Lake County, Utah.
That was after knocking on nearly 64,000 doors, screening 27,000 women and finding 1,000 who were pregnant and in their first trimester (and therefore eligible).
Dr. Collins said there were “unexpected difficulties in the number of houses that have to be visited to get enough babies” — 40 houses per enrolled woman, instead of the expected 14.
The time and information required from families could also make the study “too burdensome to be conducted the way it is,” said Dr. Susan Shurin, former acting director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health and the study’s supervising agency. The fear is women will “go ‘Oh no, you again,’ and slam the door in your face.”
Specimens include blood, urine, hair and saliva from pregnant women, babies and fathers; dust from women’s bedsheets; tap water; and particles on carpets and baseboards. They are sent to laboratories (placentas to Rochester, N.Y., for example), prepared for long-term storage, and analyzed for chemicals, metals, genes and infections.
Participants provide the names and phone numbers of relatives and friends, so researchers can find them if they move. As children grow, scientists, including outside experts, can cross-reference information about their medical conditions, behavioral development and school performance.
Clues could emerge if, for example, developmentally disabled children in both rural Alabama and suburban California show similar genetic patterns or chemical exposure.
“The task in selling this study is going to be to say we realize that this is audacious” and “seriously hard to do, but this is hugely important,” said Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University and part of the independent panel and the study’s advisory committee. “I’m hopeful some of the deficiencies can be addressed.”
Selling the study presents different challenges everywhere.
In affluent, highly educated Waukesha County, Wis., the study is advertised on movie screens, yard signs and parade banners.
But in the hog-farm-and-Butterball-turkey-plant territory of Duplin County, N.C., where scientists have to enroll nearly a third of the 800 babies born each year, some women are “concerned about questions they may be answering and how they may sound answering those questions,” said Dr. Roland Draughn, a local obstetrician.
Nancy Dole, a co-principal investigator in Duplin, said “we had to reassure” residents that “the purpose is not to make the county look bad.”
Organizers have visited child car-seat installation events, church groups, even Latino men’s soccer teams. Some women have volunteered, even ones who are not pregnant, bringing their children to the study’s Duplin headquarters, a former video store.
But others would hesitate if approached.
“Twenty-one years, that’s a long time,” said Wanda Johnson, 37, a nursing-home aide with four children. “I may say yes, and then tomorrow, I don’t want to be bothered.”
In Queens, with over 2 million people and 30,000 births a year, recruiting 250 might seem easy. And some pregnant women, like Amy Saez, 28, said that if asked to participate, “I would totally be down with that because I’d become a part of science and history.” But recruiters confront a jumble of languages and cultures, calling telephone translation lines to communicate in Urdu, Nepalese and Russian, for example.
And they have to “knock on each and every door in a building until they learn who lives there,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, chairman of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai medical school and the principal investigator in Queens. They buzz random apartments to get into buildings, “buttonhole people coming out, talk to doormen, supers,” he said. For recruiters’ safety, door-knocking stops at 8 p.m.
Soon, said Dr. Steven Hirschfeld, appointed the study’s director when the original leader left under criticism, new recruiting methods will be tried, including having doctors encourage patients to enroll. That was previously rejected because investigators felt doctor-referred patients would exclude some women, like those not getting prenatal care.
Besides looking at widespread conditions, like diabetes, the study will consider regional differences. Maureen Durkin, principal investigator in Waukesha County, Wis., wonders if radium in the county’s water, and houses built on “farm fields that may be contaminated with nitrates and atrazine,” have different health consequences than pollution or industrial chemicals in Queens.
Health authorities in Duplin County, N.C., are concerned about “so many hog lagoons and poop everywhere,” said Shannon Brewer, a health department nurse, who also worries that many women there fail to breastfeed because “at the turkey factory, they just can’t step out of line to pump.”
In Flushing, Queens, Alejandra, who gave birth to Isabella in August, is breastfeeding. But she said she was “afraid of the baby getting too many vaccines.” She quit smoking after getting pregnant, but her husband, 34, a golf instructor, smokes in their bathroom.
Joseph Gilbert, a study employee who has been interviewing and collecting samples from Alejandra, said study protocol limited his ability to urge participants to change health habits.
But study officials are trying to determine what information to give participants and when. Some experts say people should get results of their chemical or genetic tests only if medical treatments exist because otherwise it only causes anxiety. Others agree with Patricia O’Campo, a member of the study’s advisory committee and the independent panel, who says the study should be “less ivory towerish” and disclose more information to families and communities.
In this and other aspects of the study, “changes have to be made, and maybe some very big changes,” Dr. O’Campo said. “I think it could be so much more.”
Dabrali Jimenez contributed reporting.
On Crete, New Evidence of Very Ancient Mariners
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, February 16, 2010
Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.
That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.
Crete has been an island for more than five million years, meaning that the toolmakers must have arrived by boat. So this seems to push the history of Mediterranean voyaging back more than 100,000 years, specialists in Stone Age archaeology say. Previous artifact discoveries had shown people reaching Cyprus, a few other Greek islands and possibly Sardinia no earlier than 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
The oldest established early marine travel anywhere was the sea-crossing migration of anatomically modern Homo sapiens to Australia, beginning about 60,000 years ago. There is also a suggestive trickle of evidence, notably the skeletons and artifacts on the Indonesian island of Flores, of more ancient hominids making their way by water to new habitats.
Even more intriguing, the archaeologists who found the tools on Crete noted that the style of the hand axes suggested that they could be up to 700,000 years old. That may be a stretch, they conceded, but the tools resemble artifacts from the stone technology known as Acheulean, which originated with prehuman populations in Africa.
More than 2,000 stone artifacts, including the hand axes, were collected on the southwestern shore of Crete, near the town of Plakias, by a team led by Thomas F. Strasser and Eleni Panagopoulou. She is with the Greek Ministry of Culture and he is an associate professor of art history at Providence College in Rhode Island. They were assisted by Greek and American geologists and archaeologists, including Curtis Runnels of Boston University.
Dr. Strasser described the discovery last month at a meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. A formal report has been accepted for publication in Hesparia, the journal of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, a supporter of the fieldwork.
The Plakias survey team went in looking for material remains of more recent artisans, nothing older than 11,000 years. Such artifacts would have been blades, spear points and arrowheads typical of Mesolithic and Neolithic periods.
“We found those, then we found the hand axes,” Dr. Strasser said last week in an interview, and that sent the team into deeper time.
“We were flummoxed,” Dr. Runnels said in an interview. “These things were just not supposed to be there.”
Word of the find is circulating among the ranks of Stone Age scholars. The few who have seen the data and some pictures — most of the tools reside in Athens — said they were excited and cautiously impressed. The research, if confirmed by further study, scrambles timetables of technological development and textbook accounts of human and prehuman mobility.
Ofer Bar-Yosef, an authority on Stone Age archaeology at Harvard, said the significance of the find would depend on the dating of the site. “Once the investigators provide the dates,” he said in an e-mail message, “we will have a better understanding of the importance of the discovery.”
Dr. Bar-Yosef said he had seen only a few photographs of the Cretan tools. The forms can only indicate a possible age, he said, but “handling the artifacts may provide a different impression.” And dating, he said, would tell the tale.
Dr. Runnels, who has 30 years’ experience in Stone Age research, said that an analysis by him and three geologists “left not much doubt of the age of the site, and the tools must be even older.”
The cliffs and caves above the shore, the researchers said, have been uplifted by tectonic forces where the African plate goes under and pushes up the European plate. The exposed uplifted layers represent the sequence of geologic periods that have been well studied and dated, in some cases correlated to established dates of glacial and interglacial periods of the most recent ice age. In addition, the team analyzed the layer bearing the tools and determined that the soil had been on the surface 130,000 to 190,000 years ago.
Dr. Runnels said he considered this a minimum age for the tools themselves. They include not only quartz hand axes, but also cleavers and scrapers, all of which are in the Acheulean style. The tools could have been made millenniums before they became, as it were, frozen in time in the Cretan cliffs, the archaeologists said.
Dr. Runnels suggested that the tools could be at least twice as old as the geologic layers. Dr. Strasser said they could be as much as 700,000 years old. Further explorations are planned this summer.
The 130,000-year date would put the discovery in a time when Homo sapiens had already evolved in Africa, sometime after 200,000 years ago. Their presence in Europe did not become apparent until about 50,000 years ago.
Archaeologists can only speculate about who the toolmakers were. One hundred and thirty thousand years ago, modern humans shared the world with other hominids, like Neanderthals and Homo heidelbergensis. The Acheulean culture is thought to have started with Homo erectus.
The standard hypothesis had been that Acheulean toolmakers reached Europe and Asia via the Middle East, passing mainly through what is now Turkey into the Balkans. The new finds suggest that their dispersals were not confined to land routes. They may lend credibility to proposals of migrations from Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain. Crete’s southern shore where the tools were found is 200 miles from North Africa.
“We can’t say the toolmakers came 200 miles from Libya,” Dr. Strasser said. “If you’re on a raft, that’s a long voyage, but they might have come from the European mainland by way of shorter crossings through Greek islands.”
But archaeologists and experts on early nautical history said the discovery appeared to show that these surprisingly ancient mariners had craft sturdier and more reliable than rafts. They also must have had the cognitive ability to conceive and carry out repeated water crossing over great distances in order to establish sustainable populations producing an abundance of stone artifacts.
In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature
By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times, February 16, 2010
Physicists said Monday that they had whacked a tiny region of space with enough energy to briefly distort the laws of physics, providing the first laboratory demonstration of the kind of process that scientists suspect has shaped cosmic history.
The blow was delivered in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, where, since 2000, physicists have been accelerating gold nuclei around a 2.4-mile underground ring to 99.995 percent of the speed of light and then colliding them in an effort to melt protons and neutrons and free their constituents — quarks and gluons. The goal has been a state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma, which theorists believe existed when the universe was only a microsecond old.
The departure from normal physics manifested itself in the apparent ability of the briefly freed quarks to tell right from left. That breaks one of the fundamental laws of nature, known as parity, which requires that the laws of physics remain unchanged if we view nature in a mirror.
This happened in bubbles smaller than the nucleus of an atom, which lasted only a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. But in these bubbles were “hints of profound physics,” in the words of Steven Vigdor, associate director for nuclear and particle physics at Brookhaven. Very similar symmetry-breaking bubbles, at an earlier period in the universe, are believed to have been responsible for breaking the balance between matter and its opposite antimatter and leaving the universe with a preponderance of matter.
“We now have a hook” into how these processes occur, Dr. Vigdor said, adding in an e-mail message, “IF the interpretation of the RHIC results turns out to be correct.” Other physicists said the results were an important window into the complicated dynamics of quarks, which goes by the somewhat whimsical name of Quantum Chromo Dynamics.
Frank Wilczek, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who won the Nobel Prize for work on the theory of quarks, called the new results “interesting and surprising,” and said understanding them would help understand the behavior of quarks in unusual circumstances.
“It is comparable, I suppose, to understanding better how galaxies form, or astrophysical black holes,” he said.
The Brookhaven scientists and their colleagues discussed their latest results from RHIC in talks and a news conference at a meeting of the American Physical Society Monday in Washington, and in a pair of papers submitted to Physical Review Letters. “This is a view of what the world was like at 2 microseconds,” said Jack Sandweiss of Yale, a member of the Brookhaven team, calling it, “a seething cauldron.”
Among other things, the group announced it had succeeded in measuring the temperature of the quark-gluon plasma as 4 trillion degrees Celsius, “by far the hottest matter ever made,” Dr. Vigdor said. That is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun and well above the temperature at which theorists calculate that protons and neutrons should melt, but the quark-gluon plasma does not act the way theorists had predicted.
Instead of behaving like a perfect gas, in which every quark goes its own way independent of the others, the plasma seemed to act like a liquid. “It was a very big surprise,” Dr. Vigdor said, when it was discovered in 2005. Since then, however, theorists have revisited their calculations and found that the quark soup can be either a liquid or a gas, depending on the temperature, he explained. “This is not your father’s quark-gluon plasma,” said Barbara V. Jacak, of the State University at Stony Brook, speaking for the team that made the new measurements.
It is now thought that the plasma would have to be a million times more energetic to become a perfect gas. That is beyond the reach of any conceivable laboratory experiment, but the experiments colliding lead nuclei in the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva next winter should reach energies high enough to see some evolution from a liquid to a gas.
Parity, the idea that the laws of physics are the same when left and right are switched, as in a mirror reflection, is one of the most fundamental symmetries of space-time as we know it. Physicists were surprised to discover in 1956, however, that parity is not obeyed by all the laws of nature after all. The universe is slightly lopsided in this regard. The so-called weak force, which governs some radioactive decays, seems to be left-handed, causing neutrinos, the ghostlike elementary particles that are governed by that force, to spin clockwise, when viewed oncoming, but never counterclockwise.
Under normal conditions, the laws of quark behavior observe the principle of mirror symmetry, but Dmitri Kharzeev of Brookhaven, a longtime student of symmetry changes in the universe, had suggested in 1998 that those laws might change under the very abnormal conditions in the RHIC fireball. Conditions in that fireball are such that a cube with sides about one quarter the thickness of a human hair could contain the total amount of energy consumed in the United States in a year.
All this energy, he said, could put a twist in the gluon force fields, which give quarks their marching orders. There can be left-hand twists and right-hand twists, he explained, resulting in space within each little bubble getting a local direction.
What makes the violation of mirror symmetry observable in the collider is the combination of this corkscrewed space with a magnetic field, produced by the charged gold ions blasting at one another. The quarks were then drawn one way or the other along the magnetic field, depending on their electrical charges.
The magnetic fields produced by the collisions are the most intense ever observed, roughly 100 million billion gauss, Dr. Sandweiss said.
The directions of the magnetic field and of the corkscrew effect can be different in every bubble, the presumed parity violations can only be studied statistically, averaged over 14 million bubble events. In each of them, the mirror symmetry could be broken in a different direction, Dr. Sandweiss explained, but the effect would always be the same, with positive quarks going one way and negative ones the other. That is what was recorded in RHIC’s STAR detector (STAR being short for Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC) by Dr. Sandweiss and his colleagues. Dr. Sandweiss cautioned that it was still possible that some other effect could be mimicking the parity violation, and he d held off publication of the results for a year, trying unsuccessfully to find one. So they decided, he said, that it was worthy of discussion.
One test of the result, he said, would be to run RHIC at a lower energy and see if the effect went away when there was not enough oomph in the beam to distort space-time. The idea of parity might seem like a very abstract and mathematical concept, but it affects our chemistry and biology. It is not only neutrinos that are skewed. So are many of the molecules of life, including proteins, which are left-handed, and sugars, which are right-handed.
The chirality, or handedness, of molecules prevents certain reactions from taking place in chemistry and biophysics, Dr. Sandweiss noted, and affects what we can digest.
Physicists suspect that the left-handedness of neutrinos might have contributed to the most lopsided feature of the universe of all, the fact that it is composed of matter and not antimatter, even though the present-day laws do not discriminate. The amount of parity violation that physicists have measured in experiments, however, is not enough to explain how the universe got so unbalanced today. We like symmetry, Dr. Kharzeev, of Brookhaven, noted, but if the symmetry between matter and antimatter had not been broken long ago, “the universe would be a very desolate place.”
The new measurement from the quark plasma does not explain the antimatter problem either, Dr. Sandweiss said, but it helps show how departures from symmetry can appear in bubbles like the ones in RHIC in the course of cosmic evolution. Scientists think that the laws of physics went through a series of changes, or “phase transitions,” like water freezing to ice, as the universe cooled during the stupendously hot early moments of the Big Bang. Symmetry-violating bubbles like those of RHIC are more likely to form during these cosmic changeovers. “If you learn more about it from this experiment, we could then illuminate the process that gives rise to these bubbles,” Dr. Sandweiss said.
Dr. Vigdor said: “A lot of physics sounds like science fiction. There is a lot of speculation on what happened in the early universe. The amazing thing is that we have this chance to test any of this.”
This King-Size Frog Hopped With Dinosaurs
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, February 16, 2010
STONY BROOK, N.Y. — Now appearing in the lobby of Stony Brook University Medical Center: a frog that lived in the era of the dinosaurs and is as big as a beach ball. Scientists believe it to be the largest frog ever.
The immense frog is part of a permanent exhibition that also features reconstructions of a vegetarian pug-nosed crocodile and a small meat-eating dinosaur.
“This was undoubtedly the heaviest frog ever, we estimate about 10 pounds,” said David Krause, the Stony Brook University paleontologist who unearthed the fossils of the frog and the other creatures in Madagascar. “It probably ate any available prey — lizards and snakes and mammals. It was large enough to maybe even eat hatchling dinosaurs.”
The frog’s scientific name is Beelzebufo ampinga, which means “armored devil toad.”
About 150 schoolchildren from public schools here on Long Island attended the unveiling of the exhibition last week — none of them as small as hatchlings, but small enough to find the frog impressive.
“Looks like he ate a human,” said one, pointing at the frog’s stomach.
The reconstruction of the creature, described as the “frog from hell” by the scientists who dug it up in Madagascar, portrays Beelzebufo as a grim-looking amphibian, with a large pink tongue and sand-colored skin to match its desert environment. It took 15 years and 75 fossils to put together an accurate reconstruction.
The frog lived about 65 million years ago, in a semi-arid environment that experienced sporadic heavy rains, said Dr. Krause, who analyzed sediments to deconstruct the frog’s living conditions. Dr. Krause and his colleagues believe that the frog is related to the Pac-Man frog, a modern-day species in South America that is named for the video game character.
Like the Pac-Man, Beelzebufo was probably an ambush predator, meaning it wriggled its rear end into the ground, sticking its head out, in anticipation of the oblivious lizard or snake.
The reconstruction on display is the only one of the devil frog that the researchers know of, and was made by Joe Groenke, a fossil technician, and Luci Betti-Nash, a scientific artist. Mr. Groenke created a cast of the frog’s head — essentially an enlarged version of the Pac-Man frog — and Ms. Betti-Nash sculpted the body with clay and painted it with water-based acrylics. The colors are a guess, based on where Beelzebufo lived and the coloration of modern desert amphibians.
The exhibit, financed by the Stony Brook University Medical Center Development Council, is intended not only to raise public awareness of science but also to draw attention to Dr. Krause’s side project — the Madagascar Ankizy Fund. The fund, which is a nonprofit, finances health clinics and schools in rural Madagascar.
“We get so much from these digs,” Dr. Krause said. “We get these phenomenal fossils; we have had many graduate students get their Ph.D.’s through this work. We were looking for ways to give back, and they really wanted their children to have an education.”
