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Lots of good ones this week!
Caesarean Births Are at an All Time High in U.S.
By DENISE GRADY, The New York Times, March 23, 2010
The Caesarean section rate in the United States reached 32 percent in 2007, the country’s highest rate ever, health officials are reporting.
The rate has been climbing steadily since 1996, setting new records year after year, and Caesarean section has become the most common operation in American hospitals. About 1.4 million Caesareans were performed in 2007, the latest year for which data is available.
The figures are being published online on Tuesday by the National Center for Health Statistics.
The increases have caused debate and concern for years. When needed, a Caesarean can save the mother and child from injury or death, but most experts doubt that one in three women needs surgery to give birth. Critics say the operation is being performed too often, needlessly exposing mothers and babies to the risks of major surgery. The ideal rate is not known, but the World Health Organization and health agencies in the United States have suggested 15 percent.
The continuing rise “is not going to be good for anybody,” said Dr. George A. Macones, the chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Washington University in St. Louis and a spokesman for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “What we’re worried about is, the Caesarean section rate is going up, but we’re not improving the health of babies being delivered or of moms.”
Risks to the mother increase with each subsequent Caesarean, because the surgery raises the odds that the uterus will rupture in the next pregnancy, an event that can be life-threatening for both the mother and the baby. Caesareans also increase the risk of dangerous abnormalities in the placenta during later pregnancies, which can cause hemorrhaging and lead to a hysterectomy. Repeated Caesareans can make it risky or even impossible to have a large family.
The new report notes that Caesareans also pose a risk of surgical complications and are more likely than normal births to cause problems that put the mother back in the hospital and the infant in an intensive care unit. The report states: “In addition to health and safety risks for mothers and newborns, hospital charges for a Caesarean delivery are almost double those for a vaginal delivery, imposing significant costs.”
Fay Menacker, an author of the report and a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics, said: “There’s been an increase for women of all ages and racial and ethnic groups, and all states.”
The highest rates were in New Jersey (38.3 percent) and Florida (37.2 percent), and the lowest were in Utah (22.2 percent) and Alaska (22.6 percent).
The report notes that the rate in the United States is higher than those in most other industrialized countries. But rates have soared to 40 percent in some developing countries in Latin America, and the rates in Puerto Rico and China are approaching 50 percent. A report by the World Health Organization published earlier this year in The Lancet, a medical journal, said hospitals in China may be doing unnecessary operations to make money.
There is no single reason for the continuing increase in the United States. Rising multiple births due to fertility treatments have a role, because they often require Caesareans. But, the report notes, Caesarean rates for singletons increased substantially more than those for multiples. Another factor is that more older women are giving birth nowadays, and they are more likely to have Caesareans — but women under 25 had the greatest increases in Caesareans from 2000 to 2007.
Nonmedical issues are also involved. Obstetricians, fearful of being sued if there is harm to a baby after a normal labor and delivery, are quicker than they used to be to perform a Caesarean.
“The threshold for doing a Caesarean section is going down, and one of the major factors is professional liability, ending up in court,” Dr. Macones said.
In an article published last month in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, the obstetricians’ college reported that a poll of 5,644 of its members found that 29 percent said they were performing more Caesareans because they feared lawsuits. Eight percent said they had quit delivering babies, and nearly a third of them said it was because of liability issues.
Some of the increase in Caesareans has also come from women requesting the surgery even when it is not medically necessary, Dr. Macones said. Caesareans have become so common that many people do not realize they are major abdominal surgery, with all the attendant risks.
In addition, the increased tendency to induce labor before a woman’s due date, for reasons of convenience, has helped push up the Caesarean rate, because induction is more likely than natural labor to fail and result in a Caesarean.
“We should do inductions for good solid medical reasons, not for convenience or the day of the week,” Dr. Macones said. “Sometimes patients push you.”
Another obstetrician also said that patients requested what she called “social inductions,” for example, because a grandmother was visiting from out of town and hoping to see the baby before she had to leave, or because a husband was about to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Repeat Caesareans are another part of the problem. They account for about 40 percent of the total and have become increasingly common in the past 15 years as more and more hospitals have refused to allow women who have had a Caesarean to try to give birth normally. Fewer than 10 percent of women who had Caesareans now have vaginal births, compared with 28.3 percent in 1996. Many hospitals banned vaginal birth after Caesarean because of stringent guidelines set by the obstetricians’ college, which said surgery and anesthesia teams should be “immediately available” whenever a woman with a prior Caesarean was in labor.
An expert panel convened earlier this month by the National Institutes of Health said there were too many barriers to vaginal birth after Caesarean and suggested ways to reduce them. It urged the obstetricians’ group to reassess its guidelines on “immediate availability,” and it urged hospitals to publicize their rates of vaginal birth after Caesarean, so that women could make informed choices about where to give birth. It also acknowledged the problem of malpractice suits but did not make a specific recommendation about how to solve it.
Dr. Macones said the panel’s advice made sense, but he added: “The first thing we should be trying to do is lower the primary C-section rate. Then we wouldn’t get into this trouble.”
Dr. Menacker said: “It looks as if this is a trend that is continuing. I don’t know what the future will hold.”
Sabotaging Success, but to What End?
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D., The New York Times, March 22, 2010
“You could say I’ve been unlucky in love,” a young man told me during a recent consultation.
He went on to describe a series of failed romantic relationships, all united by a single theme: he had been mistreated by unsympathetic women who cheated on him.
This was not his only area of disappointment, though. At work, he had just been passed over for a promotion; it went to a colleague whom he viewed as inferior.
I asked him about his work as a computer scientist and discovered that he worked long hours and relished challenging problems. But he also did some curious things to undermine himself. Once, for example, he “forgot” about an important presentation and arrived 30 minutes late, apologizing profusely.
What was striking about this intelligent and articulate young man was his view that he was a hapless victim of bad luck, in the guise of unfaithful women and a capricious boss; there was no sense that he might have had a hand in his own misfortune.
I decided to push him. “Do you ever wonder why so many disappointing things happen to you?” I asked. “Is it just chance, or might you have something to do with it?”
His reply was a resentful question: “You think it’s all my fault, don’t you?”
Now I got it. He was about to turn our first meeting into yet another encounter in which he was mistreated. It seemed he rarely missed an opportunity to feel wronged.
Of all human psychology, self-defeating behavior is among the most puzzling and hard to change. After all, everyone assumes that people hanker after happiness and pleasure. Have you ever heard of a self-help book on being miserable?
So what explains those men and women who repeatedly pursue a path that leads to pain and disappointment? Perhaps there is a hidden psychological reward.
I got a glimpse of it once from another patient, a woman in her early 60s who complained about her ungrateful children and neglectful friends. As she spoke, it was clear she felt that all the major figures in her life had done her wrong. In fact, her status as an injured party afforded her a psychological advantage: she felt morally superior to everyone she felt had mistreated her. This was a role she had no intention of giving up.
As she left my office, she smiled and said, “I don’t expect that you’ll be able to help me.” She was already setting up her next failure: her treatment.
Masochism is not solely the province of psychotherapists; even sociobiologists have had a crack at it. Some see its origins in the self-sacrificial behavior of ants and bees, which, at their own expense, go in search of food for others in the colony, instead of competing with them. Is human self-defeating behavior, similarly, a remnant of altruism that might once have benefited one’s kin? Perhaps, but it has long since lost any adaptive value. Believe me, your family is a lot better off if you succeed in life.
Yet telling people they are the architects of their own misery doesn’t go over very well. The usual response is some variation on “Is it my fault that life is unfair?”
The American Psychiatric Association found itself in this position when it included a category for self-defeating patients in an earlier version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Partly in response to social and political pressure, the notion of masochistic character has disappeared from the manual altogether, even though the behavior is a source of considerable suffering and a legitimate target for treatment.
Of course, terrible things happen randomly to people all the time, and no one is suggesting that isolated misfortunes are anything more than that.
Moreover, a history of repeated failures, especially in one sphere of life, doesn’t mean someone is a masochist. Many people fall far short of their potential not because they secretly desire to fail but because they are anxious about what it means to succeed.
But if someone has a pattern of disappointment in many areas of life, a therapist should consider that it could be self-engineered. Treatment can help, including psychodynamic and cognitive therapy, but there is still no effective medication for masochism.
It can be an uphill battle, as patients often try to defeat their therapists’ best efforts. But at least there’s a chance these patients can experience in therapy what they so expertly undermine everywhere else: success.
Dr. Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
When Your Looks Take Over Your Life
By JANE E. BRODY, The New York Times, March 22, 2010
Is there a part of you that you hate to look at and perhaps try to hide from others? Do you glance at your image in distress whenever you pass a reflective surface?
Many of us are embarrassed by or dissatisfied with some body part or other. I recall that from about age 11 through my early teens I sat in class with my hand over what I thought was an ugly bump on my nose. And I know a young woman of normal weight who refuses to sit down in a subway car because she thinks it makes her thighs look huge.
But what if such self-consciousness about a perceived facial or body defect becomes all consuming, an obsession or paranoia that keeps the person from focusing on school or work, pursuing normal social activities, even leaving the house to shop or see a doctor? What if it leads to attempted suicide?
Such are the challenges facing tens of thousands of Americans who suffer from body dysmorphic disorder, or B.D.D., a syndrome known for more than a century but recognized only recently by the official psychiatric diagnostic manual. Even more recently, effective treatments have been developed for the disorder, and its emotional and neurological underpinnings have begun to yield to research.
New Findings
A pioneering researcher, Dr. Jamie D. Feusner, and his colleagues at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently found patterns of brain activity in people with B.D.D. that appeared to differ from those of others. The differences showed up in areas involved in visual processing. The more severe the symptoms, the more the person’s brain activity on imaging scans differed, on average, from normal levels, the researchers reported in the February issue of The Archives of General Psychiatry.
These brain changes may help explain how people can become overly focused on a perceived defect of their face, hair, skin or facial or body shape that others may not notice — indeed, that may not even exist. Some turn to alcohol and drugs to try to cope with the extreme distress. Others seek cosmetic surgery — which fails to relieve anxiety and can even make the problem worse, leaving scars where nothing was apparent before.
Some men have a form of B.D.D. called muscular dysmorphic disorder, thinking they look puny and weak when in fact their muscles are highly developed through compulsive weight training.
Dr. Katharine A. Phillips, a professor of psychiatry at Brown Medical School, is perhaps the best known authority on B.D.D. and the author, most recently, of “Understanding Body Dysmorphic Disorder: An Essential Guide” (Oxford University Press, 2009).
In an interview, Dr. Phillips described how crippling the disorder can become for those who spend hours in front of a mirror trying to “fix” their “ugly hair” or disguise a facial blemish only they can see. Some pick at an unnoticeable mark on their skin until they do indeed have a visible lesion. Some won’t leave the house unless they can totally cover their face and hair. Those who do go out without masking the area of concern sometimes suddenly flee and hide when they think someone has noticed it or is staring at them.
Many trace their problem to a childhood emotional trauma, like being teased about their looks, parental neglect, distress over parents’ divorce, or emotional, sexual or physical abuse. But Dr. Phillips says most people survive such traumas without developing B.D.D., especially if other factors in their lives lift their self-esteem.
Rather, she explained, the disorder seems to have a combination of genetic, emotional and neurobiological underpinnings.
“It’s likely that the genes a person is born with provide an essential foundation for B.D.D. to develop,” Dr. Phillips wrote. She noted that in about 20 percent of cases, a parent, a sibling or a child also had the disorder. Imaging studies done by Dr. Feusner, Dr. Phillips and others suggest that some brain circuits may be overactive in people with the disorder.
One presumed factor — societal emphasis on looks — is far less important than you might think. Dr. Phillips said the incidence of B.D.D. was nearly the same all over the world, regardless of cultural influences. Also, unlike eating disorders, which mainly affect women seeking supermodel thinness, nearly as many men as women have body dysmorphic disorder.
Which Treatments Work?
The good news is that even though research into the causes of the disorder is in its relative infancy, treatments have been found to help a large percentage of those affected, as long as their problem is recognized and they manage to overcome their embarrassment long enough to get to a qualified therapist.
The two most effective approaches are cognitive behavioral therapy and treatment with serotonin-enhancing drugs, either alone or in combination. In cognitive therapy, patients gradually learn to reorder their thinking, expose their “defect” to others and view themselves more realistically as whole individuals rather than seeing only the presumed defect.
In studies using serotonin-enhancing drugs, half to three-quarters of people with B.D.D. have improved, although Dr. Phillips warned that it can take as long as three months to see the benefit of a proper dose. (Moreover, there is still controversy about how many people achieve long-lasting benefits from the serotonin drugs.)
What does not work is plastic surgery and other cosmetic treatments. Even if the treatments modify one presumed defect, the person is likely to come up with another, and another, and another, leading to a vicious cycle of costly and often deforming as well as ineffective remedies.
Most important, Dr. Phillips said, is not to give up. Effective treatment is out there and it can make a tremendous difference — even a lifesaving difference. Her new book lists centers around the country that specialize in treating B.D.D.
Artists Mine Scientific Clues to Paint Intricate Portraits of the Past
By CARL ZIMMER, The New York Times, March 22, 2010
Somewhere in England, about 600 years ago, an artist sat down and tried to paint an elephant. There was just one problem: he had never seen one.
The artist was illustrating a book known today as the “Bestiary of Anne Walshe,” a guide to animals. To paint an elephant, he could not jet to Kenya to scrutinize one in person. He could not visit the London zoo. He could not watch a David Attenborough DVD or click through a Web gallery of nature photographs. The only clues the artist could have found were in the mix of facts and myths preserved in old books.
There he might read how elephants cannot bend at the knees, or that they have no interest in sex. There were illustrations of elephants in those old books, too, but they were painted by artists who had also never seen one. In the end, the illustrator of the “Bestiary of Anne Walshe” produced a charming mishmash of guesses. His elephant looks like a bull terrier with camel hooves for feet and a vacuum cleaner for a nose.
Artists are still painting things they cannot see in real life. Rather than being separated from their subjects by thousands of miles, though, today’s artists are separated by thousands of years — even millions of them. Fortunately, they have a lot more scientific information on which to base their images. But they cannot eliminate the gap between reality and image.
Last month, for example, the portrait of a 4,000-year-old man appeared on the cover of Nature. The picture commemorated the sequencing of the complete genome of an ancient resident of Greenland. In a technical tour de force, a team of scientists extracted DNA from tufts of hairs that had been collected in Greenland in 1986 and stored in a Danish museum since. The scientists discovered that the owner of the Greenland genome — nicknamed Inuk — was not all that closely related to Native Americans. Instead, his DNA links him to the Chukchi people of Siberia. The new research suggests that Greenland was peopled in a separate wave of migration from Asia.
The scientists then looked at markers for individual genes that previous studies had linked to particular traits. For example, they discovered that Inuk’s blood was A positive. Other gene variants in Inuk’s DNA have been associated with physical appearance. Some are linked with a high body mass index. Others are linked to brown eyes and dark, thick hair. Inuk had a gene variant associated with a slightly shovel-like shape to the upper front teeth. He even had a gene associated with baldness.
The artist Nuka Godtfredsen used these clues to paint Inuk’s portrait. He studied photographs of Chukchi people to give Inuk a face. He also took note of the fact that, despite Inuk’s genetic propensity for baldness, the tufts of his hair were up to eight inches long. As a compromise, he gave Inuk a receding hairline and a mullet.
Mr. Godtfredsen’s picture is plausible, rather than photographic. It’s impossible to pick out an individual from a police lineup based on nothing but a genome. Dark hair, brown eyes and a stocky build could describe thousands of people who live in the Arctic today. It’s also important to bear in mind that genes rarely guarantee any particular traits; instead, they tend to be associated with them. So we can’t know for sure that having a so-called baldness gene meant that Inuk actually ended up bald. It’s certainly possible that he died too soon to find out.
The better the portrait, the easier it is to forget all the complexity to the science behind it. Last October, the paleoartist Jay Matternes offered up a lovely portrait of a 4.4-million-year-old relative of humans, called Ardipithecus ramidus. Mr. Matternes was invited to paint the hominid by its discoverers, a team of American and Ethiopian scientists who had been digging up and analyzing Ardipithecus bones since the early 1990s and were finally ready to publish a detailed description. In Mr. Matternes’s portrait, Ardipithecus is not quite like anything alive today. It has long, apelike hands and feet and a round, apelike face. And yet it stands upright like a human.
Mr. Matternes worked for years with the scientists on his reconstruction of Ardipithecus. First he drew its skeleton. Onto the skeleton he added muscles, and finally skin and hair. Mr. Matternes infused the picture with a deep artistic understanding of anatomy. But it is also a scientific hypothesis.
The scientists maintain that Ardipithecus stood upright, based on the shapes of bones in its feet, legs, pelvis and spine. But those bones were not perfectly preserved, and the scientists couldn’t just snap them together like a Lego set. The pelvis was so fragmented that the scientists had to use a CT scanner to create three-dimensional models of its pieces, which they then analyzed in the virtual space of a computer.
As a result, some other experts are not ready to endorse the vision of Ardipithecus that Mr. Matternes painted. That doesn’t mean Mr. Matternes is deceiving anyone. It just means that we, the viewers, have to bear in mind how scientists reconstruct the past.
Mr. Matternes can only guess at the color of Ardipithecus by looking at living apes. It turns out that much older fossils hold clues to their hues. Last month the journal Science published a watercolor of a 150-million-year-old feathered dinosaur called Anchiornis. (Anchiornis was an ancient relative of living birds.) The painting, by the wildlife artist Michael DiGiorgio, shows the dinosaur with a crown of rufous plumage, a mottled face, a dark gray body and bold white stripes on its wings.
Mr. DiGiorgio based his painting on a new analysis of the fossil of Anchiornis. Along with the dinosaur’s bones, the fossil also preserved feathers across its whole body. And in those feathers are microscopic structures called melanosomes. The size, shape and arrangement of the melanosomes help give color to the feathers of living birds. The new study on Anchiornis marks the first time that scientists were able to use melanosomes to map the colors of a dinosaur’s entire body.
Like Mr. Matternes and Mr. Godtfredsen, Mr. DiGiorgio spent a long time planning his painting. First he sketched out the body of Anchiornis by studying its skeleton. Mr. DiGiorgio, who usually paints birds, was reminded of roadrunners, so he watched videos of the birds to get ideas about the dinosaur’s posture. He and paleontologists traded sketches back and forth for weeks before he was ready to add feathers. But the feathers were not quite like those of any living bird; for one thing, they covered the entire body of Anchiornis, even down to its feet.
As detailed as Mr. DiGiorgio’s painting is, however, it may not tell the whole story of Anchiornis. Melanosomes are not the only structures that give feathers their colors, and so Anchiornis might have had other patterns on its plumage that have been lost to time. At best, Mr. DiGiorgio has given Anchiornis a base coat.
Still, that’s better than no coat at all. And it’s vastly better than one taken from a bestiary’s pages.
After Years of War and Abuse, New Hope for Ancient Babylon
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, March 22, 2010
The most immediate threat to preserving the ruins of Babylon, the site of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is water soaking the ground and undermining what is left in present-day Iraq of a great city from the time of King Nebuchadnezzar II.
It is also one of the oldest threats. The king himself faced water problems 2,600 years ago. Neglect, reckless reconstruction and wartime looting have also taken their toll in recent times, but archaeologists and experts in the preservation of cultural relics say nothing substantial should be done to correct that until the water problem is brought under control.
A current study, known as the Future of Babylon project, documents the damage from water mainly associated with the Euphrates River and irrigation systems nearby. The ground is saturated just below the surface at sites of the Ishtar Gate and the long-gone Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders. Bricks are crumbling, temples collapsing. The Tower of Babel, long since reduced to rubble, is surrounded by standing water.
Leaders of the international project, describing their findings in interviews and at a meeting this month in New York, said that any plan for reclaiming Babylon as a tourist attraction and a place for archaeological research must include water control as “the highest priority.”
The study, aimed at developing a master plan for the ancient city, was begun last year by the World Monuments Fund in collaboration with Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. A $700,000 grant from the United States Department of State is financing the initial two-year study and preliminary management plan. An official of the monuments fund said the entire effort could last five or six years.
“This is without doubt the most complex program we’ve ever had to organize,” said Bonnie Burnham, the fund’s president.
A few archaeologists have expressed concern about what they said was the project’s slow start. Project members said that they have had serious problems persuading foreign experts to go to Iraq and then clearing them and their instruments for work there.
Besides the wear of time that all ruins of antiquity are prey to, consider the depredations Babylon has suffered in recent history. German archaeologists who made the first careful study of the site, before World War I, recognized the despoiling inroads of irrigation waters drawn from a tributary of the Euphrates River, 50 miles south of modern Baghdad.
McGuire Gibson, a specialist in Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago, who is not involved in the project, agreed that water is Babylon’s “major problem,” which he said was made worse in recent years when a lake and canal were dug as part of a campaign to lure tourists. Nebuchadnezzar himself, Dr. Gibson noted, dealt with water encroachment by erecting new buildings at ever-higher elevations, on top of mounds of old ruins.
The first German investigators, led by Robert Koldewey, reported finding extensive water damage to mud-brick structures and the intrusion of agricultural fields and villages within boundaries of the original city. People had already carted off bricks and stones, leaving almost nothing of the Ziggurat, known from the historian Herodotus and the Bible as the Tower of Babel. The Germans themselves hauled off the elaborate Ishtar Gate to a museum in Berlin.
Then, in the 1970s and ’80s, President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, casting himself as heir to Nebuchadnezzar’s greatness, had his own imposing palace built at Babylon along the lines of his royal predecessor’s. He even adopted the king’s practice of stamping his own name on the bricks for the reconstruction. Archaeologists were aghast. The new palace and a few other restorations, they say, are hardly authentic, and yet they dominate the site.
What to do with Hussein’s palace is another issue, said the co-director of the project, Jeff Allen. “How to balance integrity of the site with its use as a tourist attraction is the problem,” he explained, noting that Iraq counts on Babylon as a future source of foreign tourist income.
Mr. Allen, an American consultant in cultural preservation who is based in Cairo, said it would cost millions of dollars to demolish the palace or convert it into a visitor center for tourists. “This still has to be studied by other experts,” he said, joking that one suggestion is that the palace would make a perfect casino.
“I’d leave the palace alone,” Dr. Gibson said, pointing out that it was based on sketches left by the German archaeologists.
“So that way, you will walk around in something of what the ancient architecture looked like,” he continued. “Otherwise, you walk around with nothing to see but a bunch of rubble.”
Elizabeth C. Stone, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University in New York who is familiar with Babylon, said she supported efforts to reopen the site to tourists, especially Iraqis themselves. “It’s near Baghdad and is the one site where you used to see Iraqis going to get a sense of their past,” she said.
Further damage was incurred during the Iraq war, started in 2003. Looting was prevalent there and at other archaeological sites. The United States military occupied Babylon for several years, protecting it from plundering but leaving other scars. About one square kilometer of surface soil, some of it with artifacts, “got removed one way or another,” Dr. Stone said.
“The military certainly did not do the place any good,” said Lisa Ackerman, executive vice president of the monuments fund. “They moved a lot of dirt around, but that damage is largely fixable.”
The site was returned to Iraqi control more than a year ago. Ms. Ackerman and Mr. Allen said the project had already surveyed the remains, building by building, and started the restoration of two museums. Although Iraq has a large corps of trained archaeologists, they said, an immediate need is to instruct others in the conservation of ruins and bring in structural engineers and hydrologists to handle the water problem.
For Extinct Monsters of the Deep, a Little Respect
By SEAN B. CARROLL, The New York Times, March 22, 2010
Here is a quick paleontology quiz. Which group of animals included large, air-breathing predators up to 50 feet long that bore live young, dominated their world for more than 100 million years and were ultimately exterminated by an asteroid 65 million years ago?
Easy, right?
Did you say dinosaurs? Sorry, wrong answer. But it was a trickier question than it may have appeared.
The correct answer is marine reptiles, which at the time of the last great extinction included mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and pliosaurs. The key clue in my question was “bore live young.” Unlike the dinosaurs, which were terrestrial and laid eggs, marine reptiles were fully aquatic and bore live young. This latter combination was no coincidence.
Despite their awesome size and abundance in the fossil record — their bones were among the first to be recognized as fossil remains of extinct creatures — marine reptiles have long played second fiddle to their much more famous saurian cousins.
But if we humans were aquatic creatures, we would have a whole lot more respect for these other reptiles. They were the top predators of Cretaceous seas. Thanks to their prevalence, scientists have figured out a lot about them, particularly recently. This includes, most remarkably, insights into their genetics — something that is not even preserved in the fossil record — and what it took to transform ordinary lizards into extraordinary sea monsters.
The first scientific description of a fossil marine reptile was of a beast discovered in 1764 by workmen in an underground limestone quarry near Maastricht, in the Netherlands. It took a long time for the identity and significance of the bones to be realized. At first mistaken for a crocodile, fish or whale, the creature was pilfered by the French Army when it seized Maastricht in 1795. The fossil was eventually recognized as something entirely different and named Mosasaurus (“Mosa,” Latin for the Meuse River, near Maastricht, and “saurus,” meaning lizard).
Mosasaurs and other marine reptiles were center stage in the growth of the fossil record in the early 19th century. Ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs like those discovered by young Mary Anning in the Lyme Regis area of Dorset, in southern England, were displayed in museums across Europe. Marine reptile fossils have been found across the globe, from Africa to Australia, and even Antarctica, a distribution that documents their long success. The first report of the creatures in the American West was from the Lewis and Clark expedition, which encountered a large skeleton in 1804 while voyaging up the Missouri River in Sioux country. It, too, was initially misidentified as a fish, even though at a reported 45 feet long, that would have been one heck of a fish.
Indeed, the name ichthyosaur means “fish lizard” and describes the streamlined body form that resembled large fish and sea mammals like dolphins.
Extinct marine reptiles also exhibited another important similarity to all sea mammals: they bore live young. We know this because among the plethora of fossil skeletons that have been unearthed are specimens of female ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs and other extinct marine reptiles preserved in the act of giving birth, with their young emerging tail-first, just as baby whales, dolphins and manatees do; doing so prevents the air-breathing young from drowning.
The bearing of live young distinguishes the marine reptiles from many other reptiles that lay eggs, like lizards and snakes, as well as dinosaurs. Even reptiles that spend most of their time in water, like crocodiles, sea turtles and marine iguanas, must come to land to lay eggs. This is because gas exchange through the eggshell is too slow underwater to allow the young to develop.
Interestingly, the only living reptiles that spend their entire lives in water, the 60 or so species of sea snakes, all bear live young. So there appears to be a simple requirement for reptiles to be fully aquatic: to bear live young.
But that precludes another common reptilian trick, the control of the determination of the sex of their young by the temperature at which eggs are incubated. In crocodiles, the majority of sea turtles and some lizards, the temperature of the environment surrounding their eggs governs whether the hatchling is male or female, as opposed to the presence of distinct sex chromosomes as in many other species.
Since live-bearing reptiles are not able to regulate sex through incubation temperature, this fact raises the question of whether there is a link between the evolution of giving birth to live babies, and the control of sex by genetic means. Chris Organ and Daniel Janes of Harvard, and Andrew Meade and Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, in England, recently examined 94 living species of reptiles, birds and mammals and found that, indeed, there was a very strong link. The genetic control of sex appears then to be a crucial prerequisite to evolving live birth.
Given that link, the scientists then investigated whether they could infer how sex was controlled in ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs and other lines of extinct marine reptiles, each of which evolved from a different ancestor and at different times. Using sophisticated statistical tests, they concluded that, indeed, genetic control of sex was likely to have operated in each group.
The point of the study was not so much the feat of inferring the genetics of long-extinct creatures, but of understanding the steps involved in evolving a fully aquatic lifestyle. Once the genetic control of sex evolved, so could live birth. And with live birth, these animals were freed of the obligation to return to land to nest. That freedom allowed them to evolve large body size, and the fins and fluked tails that made them efficient swimmers. They dominated the open seas.
Caesarean Births Are at an All Time High in U.S.
By DENISE GRADY, The New York Times, March 23, 2010
The Caesarean section rate in the United States reached 32 percent in 2007, the country’s highest rate ever, health officials are reporting.
The rate has been climbing steadily since 1996, setting new records year after year, and Caesarean section has become the most common operation in American hospitals. About 1.4 million Caesareans were performed in 2007, the latest year for which data is available.
The figures are being published online on Tuesday by the National Center for Health Statistics.
The increases have caused debate and concern for years. When needed, a Caesarean can save the mother and child from injury or death, but most experts doubt that one in three women needs surgery to give birth. Critics say the operation is being performed too often, needlessly exposing mothers and babies to the risks of major surgery. The ideal rate is not known, but the World Health Organization and health agencies in the United States have suggested 15 percent.
The continuing rise “is not going to be good for anybody,” said Dr. George A. Macones, the chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Washington University in St. Louis and a spokesman for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “What we’re worried about is, the Caesarean section rate is going up, but we’re not improving the health of babies being delivered or of moms.”
Risks to the mother increase with each subsequent Caesarean, because the surgery raises the odds that the uterus will rupture in the next pregnancy, an event that can be life-threatening for both the mother and the baby. Caesareans also increase the risk of dangerous abnormalities in the placenta during later pregnancies, which can cause hemorrhaging and lead to a hysterectomy. Repeated Caesareans can make it risky or even impossible to have a large family.
The new report notes that Caesareans also pose a risk of surgical complications and are more likely than normal births to cause problems that put the mother back in the hospital and the infant in an intensive care unit. The report states: “In addition to health and safety risks for mothers and newborns, hospital charges for a Caesarean delivery are almost double those for a vaginal delivery, imposing significant costs.”
Fay Menacker, an author of the report and a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics, said: “There’s been an increase for women of all ages and racial and ethnic groups, and all states.”
The highest rates were in New Jersey (38.3 percent) and Florida (37.2 percent), and the lowest were in Utah (22.2 percent) and Alaska (22.6 percent).
The report notes that the rate in the United States is higher than those in most other industrialized countries. But rates have soared to 40 percent in some developing countries in Latin America, and the rates in Puerto Rico and China are approaching 50 percent. A report by the World Health Organization published earlier this year in The Lancet, a medical journal, said hospitals in China may be doing unnecessary operations to make money.
There is no single reason for the continuing increase in the United States. Rising multiple births due to fertility treatments have a role, because they often require Caesareans. But, the report notes, Caesarean rates for singletons increased substantially more than those for multiples. Another factor is that more older women are giving birth nowadays, and they are more likely to have Caesareans — but women under 25 had the greatest increases in Caesareans from 2000 to 2007.
Nonmedical issues are also involved. Obstetricians, fearful of being sued if there is harm to a baby after a normal labor and delivery, are quicker than they used to be to perform a Caesarean.
“The threshold for doing a Caesarean section is going down, and one of the major factors is professional liability, ending up in court,” Dr. Macones said.
In an article published last month in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, the obstetricians’ college reported that a poll of 5,644 of its members found that 29 percent said they were performing more Caesareans because they feared lawsuits. Eight percent said they had quit delivering babies, and nearly a third of them said it was because of liability issues.
Some of the increase in Caesareans has also come from women requesting the surgery even when it is not medically necessary, Dr. Macones said. Caesareans have become so common that many people do not realize they are major abdominal surgery, with all the attendant risks.
In addition, the increased tendency to induce labor before a woman’s due date, for reasons of convenience, has helped push up the Caesarean rate, because induction is more likely than natural labor to fail and result in a Caesarean.
“We should do inductions for good solid medical reasons, not for convenience or the day of the week,” Dr. Macones said. “Sometimes patients push you.”
Another obstetrician also said that patients requested what she called “social inductions,” for example, because a grandmother was visiting from out of town and hoping to see the baby before she had to leave, or because a husband was about to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Repeat Caesareans are another part of the problem. They account for about 40 percent of the total and have become increasingly common in the past 15 years as more and more hospitals have refused to allow women who have had a Caesarean to try to give birth normally. Fewer than 10 percent of women who had Caesareans now have vaginal births, compared with 28.3 percent in 1996. Many hospitals banned vaginal birth after Caesarean because of stringent guidelines set by the obstetricians’ college, which said surgery and anesthesia teams should be “immediately available” whenever a woman with a prior Caesarean was in labor.
An expert panel convened earlier this month by the National Institutes of Health said there were too many barriers to vaginal birth after Caesarean and suggested ways to reduce them. It urged the obstetricians’ group to reassess its guidelines on “immediate availability,” and it urged hospitals to publicize their rates of vaginal birth after Caesarean, so that women could make informed choices about where to give birth. It also acknowledged the problem of malpractice suits but did not make a specific recommendation about how to solve it.
Dr. Macones said the panel’s advice made sense, but he added: “The first thing we should be trying to do is lower the primary C-section rate. Then we wouldn’t get into this trouble.”
Dr. Menacker said: “It looks as if this is a trend that is continuing. I don’t know what the future will hold.”
Sabotaging Success, but to What End?
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D., The New York Times, March 22, 2010
“You could say I’ve been unlucky in love,” a young man told me during a recent consultation.
He went on to describe a series of failed romantic relationships, all united by a single theme: he had been mistreated by unsympathetic women who cheated on him.
This was not his only area of disappointment, though. At work, he had just been passed over for a promotion; it went to a colleague whom he viewed as inferior.
I asked him about his work as a computer scientist and discovered that he worked long hours and relished challenging problems. But he also did some curious things to undermine himself. Once, for example, he “forgot” about an important presentation and arrived 30 minutes late, apologizing profusely.
What was striking about this intelligent and articulate young man was his view that he was a hapless victim of bad luck, in the guise of unfaithful women and a capricious boss; there was no sense that he might have had a hand in his own misfortune.
I decided to push him. “Do you ever wonder why so many disappointing things happen to you?” I asked. “Is it just chance, or might you have something to do with it?”
His reply was a resentful question: “You think it’s all my fault, don’t you?”
Now I got it. He was about to turn our first meeting into yet another encounter in which he was mistreated. It seemed he rarely missed an opportunity to feel wronged.
Of all human psychology, self-defeating behavior is among the most puzzling and hard to change. After all, everyone assumes that people hanker after happiness and pleasure. Have you ever heard of a self-help book on being miserable?
So what explains those men and women who repeatedly pursue a path that leads to pain and disappointment? Perhaps there is a hidden psychological reward.
I got a glimpse of it once from another patient, a woman in her early 60s who complained about her ungrateful children and neglectful friends. As she spoke, it was clear she felt that all the major figures in her life had done her wrong. In fact, her status as an injured party afforded her a psychological advantage: she felt morally superior to everyone she felt had mistreated her. This was a role she had no intention of giving up.
As she left my office, she smiled and said, “I don’t expect that you’ll be able to help me.” She was already setting up her next failure: her treatment.
Masochism is not solely the province of psychotherapists; even sociobiologists have had a crack at it. Some see its origins in the self-sacrificial behavior of ants and bees, which, at their own expense, go in search of food for others in the colony, instead of competing with them. Is human self-defeating behavior, similarly, a remnant of altruism that might once have benefited one’s kin? Perhaps, but it has long since lost any adaptive value. Believe me, your family is a lot better off if you succeed in life.
Yet telling people they are the architects of their own misery doesn’t go over very well. The usual response is some variation on “Is it my fault that life is unfair?”
The American Psychiatric Association found itself in this position when it included a category for self-defeating patients in an earlier version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Partly in response to social and political pressure, the notion of masochistic character has disappeared from the manual altogether, even though the behavior is a source of considerable suffering and a legitimate target for treatment.
Of course, terrible things happen randomly to people all the time, and no one is suggesting that isolated misfortunes are anything more than that.
Moreover, a history of repeated failures, especially in one sphere of life, doesn’t mean someone is a masochist. Many people fall far short of their potential not because they secretly desire to fail but because they are anxious about what it means to succeed.
But if someone has a pattern of disappointment in many areas of life, a therapist should consider that it could be self-engineered. Treatment can help, including psychodynamic and cognitive therapy, but there is still no effective medication for masochism.
It can be an uphill battle, as patients often try to defeat their therapists’ best efforts. But at least there’s a chance these patients can experience in therapy what they so expertly undermine everywhere else: success.
Dr. Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
When Your Looks Take Over Your Life
By JANE E. BRODY, The New York Times, March 22, 2010
Is there a part of you that you hate to look at and perhaps try to hide from others? Do you glance at your image in distress whenever you pass a reflective surface?
Many of us are embarrassed by or dissatisfied with some body part or other. I recall that from about age 11 through my early teens I sat in class with my hand over what I thought was an ugly bump on my nose. And I know a young woman of normal weight who refuses to sit down in a subway car because she thinks it makes her thighs look huge.
But what if such self-consciousness about a perceived facial or body defect becomes all consuming, an obsession or paranoia that keeps the person from focusing on school or work, pursuing normal social activities, even leaving the house to shop or see a doctor? What if it leads to attempted suicide?
Such are the challenges facing tens of thousands of Americans who suffer from body dysmorphic disorder, or B.D.D., a syndrome known for more than a century but recognized only recently by the official psychiatric diagnostic manual. Even more recently, effective treatments have been developed for the disorder, and its emotional and neurological underpinnings have begun to yield to research.
New Findings
A pioneering researcher, Dr. Jamie D. Feusner, and his colleagues at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently found patterns of brain activity in people with B.D.D. that appeared to differ from those of others. The differences showed up in areas involved in visual processing. The more severe the symptoms, the more the person’s brain activity on imaging scans differed, on average, from normal levels, the researchers reported in the February issue of The Archives of General Psychiatry.
These brain changes may help explain how people can become overly focused on a perceived defect of their face, hair, skin or facial or body shape that others may not notice — indeed, that may not even exist. Some turn to alcohol and drugs to try to cope with the extreme distress. Others seek cosmetic surgery — which fails to relieve anxiety and can even make the problem worse, leaving scars where nothing was apparent before.
Some men have a form of B.D.D. called muscular dysmorphic disorder, thinking they look puny and weak when in fact their muscles are highly developed through compulsive weight training.
Dr. Katharine A. Phillips, a professor of psychiatry at Brown Medical School, is perhaps the best known authority on B.D.D. and the author, most recently, of “Understanding Body Dysmorphic Disorder: An Essential Guide” (Oxford University Press, 2009).
In an interview, Dr. Phillips described how crippling the disorder can become for those who spend hours in front of a mirror trying to “fix” their “ugly hair” or disguise a facial blemish only they can see. Some pick at an unnoticeable mark on their skin until they do indeed have a visible lesion. Some won’t leave the house unless they can totally cover their face and hair. Those who do go out without masking the area of concern sometimes suddenly flee and hide when they think someone has noticed it or is staring at them.
Many trace their problem to a childhood emotional trauma, like being teased about their looks, parental neglect, distress over parents’ divorce, or emotional, sexual or physical abuse. But Dr. Phillips says most people survive such traumas without developing B.D.D., especially if other factors in their lives lift their self-esteem.
Rather, she explained, the disorder seems to have a combination of genetic, emotional and neurobiological underpinnings.
“It’s likely that the genes a person is born with provide an essential foundation for B.D.D. to develop,” Dr. Phillips wrote. She noted that in about 20 percent of cases, a parent, a sibling or a child also had the disorder. Imaging studies done by Dr. Feusner, Dr. Phillips and others suggest that some brain circuits may be overactive in people with the disorder.
One presumed factor — societal emphasis on looks — is far less important than you might think. Dr. Phillips said the incidence of B.D.D. was nearly the same all over the world, regardless of cultural influences. Also, unlike eating disorders, which mainly affect women seeking supermodel thinness, nearly as many men as women have body dysmorphic disorder.
Which Treatments Work?
The good news is that even though research into the causes of the disorder is in its relative infancy, treatments have been found to help a large percentage of those affected, as long as their problem is recognized and they manage to overcome their embarrassment long enough to get to a qualified therapist.
The two most effective approaches are cognitive behavioral therapy and treatment with serotonin-enhancing drugs, either alone or in combination. In cognitive therapy, patients gradually learn to reorder their thinking, expose their “defect” to others and view themselves more realistically as whole individuals rather than seeing only the presumed defect.
In studies using serotonin-enhancing drugs, half to three-quarters of people with B.D.D. have improved, although Dr. Phillips warned that it can take as long as three months to see the benefit of a proper dose. (Moreover, there is still controversy about how many people achieve long-lasting benefits from the serotonin drugs.)
What does not work is plastic surgery and other cosmetic treatments. Even if the treatments modify one presumed defect, the person is likely to come up with another, and another, and another, leading to a vicious cycle of costly and often deforming as well as ineffective remedies.
Most important, Dr. Phillips said, is not to give up. Effective treatment is out there and it can make a tremendous difference — even a lifesaving difference. Her new book lists centers around the country that specialize in treating B.D.D.
Artists Mine Scientific Clues to Paint Intricate Portraits of the Past
By CARL ZIMMER, The New York Times, March 22, 2010
Somewhere in England, about 600 years ago, an artist sat down and tried to paint an elephant. There was just one problem: he had never seen one.
The artist was illustrating a book known today as the “Bestiary of Anne Walshe,” a guide to animals. To paint an elephant, he could not jet to Kenya to scrutinize one in person. He could not visit the London zoo. He could not watch a David Attenborough DVD or click through a Web gallery of nature photographs. The only clues the artist could have found were in the mix of facts and myths preserved in old books.
There he might read how elephants cannot bend at the knees, or that they have no interest in sex. There were illustrations of elephants in those old books, too, but they were painted by artists who had also never seen one. In the end, the illustrator of the “Bestiary of Anne Walshe” produced a charming mishmash of guesses. His elephant looks like a bull terrier with camel hooves for feet and a vacuum cleaner for a nose.
Artists are still painting things they cannot see in real life. Rather than being separated from their subjects by thousands of miles, though, today’s artists are separated by thousands of years — even millions of them. Fortunately, they have a lot more scientific information on which to base their images. But they cannot eliminate the gap between reality and image.
Last month, for example, the portrait of a 4,000-year-old man appeared on the cover of Nature. The picture commemorated the sequencing of the complete genome of an ancient resident of Greenland. In a technical tour de force, a team of scientists extracted DNA from tufts of hairs that had been collected in Greenland in 1986 and stored in a Danish museum since. The scientists discovered that the owner of the Greenland genome — nicknamed Inuk — was not all that closely related to Native Americans. Instead, his DNA links him to the Chukchi people of Siberia. The new research suggests that Greenland was peopled in a separate wave of migration from Asia.
The scientists then looked at markers for individual genes that previous studies had linked to particular traits. For example, they discovered that Inuk’s blood was A positive. Other gene variants in Inuk’s DNA have been associated with physical appearance. Some are linked with a high body mass index. Others are linked to brown eyes and dark, thick hair. Inuk had a gene variant associated with a slightly shovel-like shape to the upper front teeth. He even had a gene associated with baldness.
The artist Nuka Godtfredsen used these clues to paint Inuk’s portrait. He studied photographs of Chukchi people to give Inuk a face. He also took note of the fact that, despite Inuk’s genetic propensity for baldness, the tufts of his hair were up to eight inches long. As a compromise, he gave Inuk a receding hairline and a mullet.
Mr. Godtfredsen’s picture is plausible, rather than photographic. It’s impossible to pick out an individual from a police lineup based on nothing but a genome. Dark hair, brown eyes and a stocky build could describe thousands of people who live in the Arctic today. It’s also important to bear in mind that genes rarely guarantee any particular traits; instead, they tend to be associated with them. So we can’t know for sure that having a so-called baldness gene meant that Inuk actually ended up bald. It’s certainly possible that he died too soon to find out.
The better the portrait, the easier it is to forget all the complexity to the science behind it. Last October, the paleoartist Jay Matternes offered up a lovely portrait of a 4.4-million-year-old relative of humans, called Ardipithecus ramidus. Mr. Matternes was invited to paint the hominid by its discoverers, a team of American and Ethiopian scientists who had been digging up and analyzing Ardipithecus bones since the early 1990s and were finally ready to publish a detailed description. In Mr. Matternes’s portrait, Ardipithecus is not quite like anything alive today. It has long, apelike hands and feet and a round, apelike face. And yet it stands upright like a human.
Mr. Matternes worked for years with the scientists on his reconstruction of Ardipithecus. First he drew its skeleton. Onto the skeleton he added muscles, and finally skin and hair. Mr. Matternes infused the picture with a deep artistic understanding of anatomy. But it is also a scientific hypothesis.
The scientists maintain that Ardipithecus stood upright, based on the shapes of bones in its feet, legs, pelvis and spine. But those bones were not perfectly preserved, and the scientists couldn’t just snap them together like a Lego set. The pelvis was so fragmented that the scientists had to use a CT scanner to create three-dimensional models of its pieces, which they then analyzed in the virtual space of a computer.
As a result, some other experts are not ready to endorse the vision of Ardipithecus that Mr. Matternes painted. That doesn’t mean Mr. Matternes is deceiving anyone. It just means that we, the viewers, have to bear in mind how scientists reconstruct the past.
Mr. Matternes can only guess at the color of Ardipithecus by looking at living apes. It turns out that much older fossils hold clues to their hues. Last month the journal Science published a watercolor of a 150-million-year-old feathered dinosaur called Anchiornis. (Anchiornis was an ancient relative of living birds.) The painting, by the wildlife artist Michael DiGiorgio, shows the dinosaur with a crown of rufous plumage, a mottled face, a dark gray body and bold white stripes on its wings.
Mr. DiGiorgio based his painting on a new analysis of the fossil of Anchiornis. Along with the dinosaur’s bones, the fossil also preserved feathers across its whole body. And in those feathers are microscopic structures called melanosomes. The size, shape and arrangement of the melanosomes help give color to the feathers of living birds. The new study on Anchiornis marks the first time that scientists were able to use melanosomes to map the colors of a dinosaur’s entire body.
Like Mr. Matternes and Mr. Godtfredsen, Mr. DiGiorgio spent a long time planning his painting. First he sketched out the body of Anchiornis by studying its skeleton. Mr. DiGiorgio, who usually paints birds, was reminded of roadrunners, so he watched videos of the birds to get ideas about the dinosaur’s posture. He and paleontologists traded sketches back and forth for weeks before he was ready to add feathers. But the feathers were not quite like those of any living bird; for one thing, they covered the entire body of Anchiornis, even down to its feet.
As detailed as Mr. DiGiorgio’s painting is, however, it may not tell the whole story of Anchiornis. Melanosomes are not the only structures that give feathers their colors, and so Anchiornis might have had other patterns on its plumage that have been lost to time. At best, Mr. DiGiorgio has given Anchiornis a base coat.
Still, that’s better than no coat at all. And it’s vastly better than one taken from a bestiary’s pages.
After Years of War and Abuse, New Hope for Ancient Babylon
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, March 22, 2010
The most immediate threat to preserving the ruins of Babylon, the site of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is water soaking the ground and undermining what is left in present-day Iraq of a great city from the time of King Nebuchadnezzar II.
It is also one of the oldest threats. The king himself faced water problems 2,600 years ago. Neglect, reckless reconstruction and wartime looting have also taken their toll in recent times, but archaeologists and experts in the preservation of cultural relics say nothing substantial should be done to correct that until the water problem is brought under control.
A current study, known as the Future of Babylon project, documents the damage from water mainly associated with the Euphrates River and irrigation systems nearby. The ground is saturated just below the surface at sites of the Ishtar Gate and the long-gone Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders. Bricks are crumbling, temples collapsing. The Tower of Babel, long since reduced to rubble, is surrounded by standing water.
Leaders of the international project, describing their findings in interviews and at a meeting this month in New York, said that any plan for reclaiming Babylon as a tourist attraction and a place for archaeological research must include water control as “the highest priority.”
The study, aimed at developing a master plan for the ancient city, was begun last year by the World Monuments Fund in collaboration with Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. A $700,000 grant from the United States Department of State is financing the initial two-year study and preliminary management plan. An official of the monuments fund said the entire effort could last five or six years.
“This is without doubt the most complex program we’ve ever had to organize,” said Bonnie Burnham, the fund’s president.
A few archaeologists have expressed concern about what they said was the project’s slow start. Project members said that they have had serious problems persuading foreign experts to go to Iraq and then clearing them and their instruments for work there.
Besides the wear of time that all ruins of antiquity are prey to, consider the depredations Babylon has suffered in recent history. German archaeologists who made the first careful study of the site, before World War I, recognized the despoiling inroads of irrigation waters drawn from a tributary of the Euphrates River, 50 miles south of modern Baghdad.
McGuire Gibson, a specialist in Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago, who is not involved in the project, agreed that water is Babylon’s “major problem,” which he said was made worse in recent years when a lake and canal were dug as part of a campaign to lure tourists. Nebuchadnezzar himself, Dr. Gibson noted, dealt with water encroachment by erecting new buildings at ever-higher elevations, on top of mounds of old ruins.
The first German investigators, led by Robert Koldewey, reported finding extensive water damage to mud-brick structures and the intrusion of agricultural fields and villages within boundaries of the original city. People had already carted off bricks and stones, leaving almost nothing of the Ziggurat, known from the historian Herodotus and the Bible as the Tower of Babel. The Germans themselves hauled off the elaborate Ishtar Gate to a museum in Berlin.
Then, in the 1970s and ’80s, President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, casting himself as heir to Nebuchadnezzar’s greatness, had his own imposing palace built at Babylon along the lines of his royal predecessor’s. He even adopted the king’s practice of stamping his own name on the bricks for the reconstruction. Archaeologists were aghast. The new palace and a few other restorations, they say, are hardly authentic, and yet they dominate the site.
What to do with Hussein’s palace is another issue, said the co-director of the project, Jeff Allen. “How to balance integrity of the site with its use as a tourist attraction is the problem,” he explained, noting that Iraq counts on Babylon as a future source of foreign tourist income.
Mr. Allen, an American consultant in cultural preservation who is based in Cairo, said it would cost millions of dollars to demolish the palace or convert it into a visitor center for tourists. “This still has to be studied by other experts,” he said, joking that one suggestion is that the palace would make a perfect casino.
“I’d leave the palace alone,” Dr. Gibson said, pointing out that it was based on sketches left by the German archaeologists.
“So that way, you will walk around in something of what the ancient architecture looked like,” he continued. “Otherwise, you walk around with nothing to see but a bunch of rubble.”
Elizabeth C. Stone, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University in New York who is familiar with Babylon, said she supported efforts to reopen the site to tourists, especially Iraqis themselves. “It’s near Baghdad and is the one site where you used to see Iraqis going to get a sense of their past,” she said.
Further damage was incurred during the Iraq war, started in 2003. Looting was prevalent there and at other archaeological sites. The United States military occupied Babylon for several years, protecting it from plundering but leaving other scars. About one square kilometer of surface soil, some of it with artifacts, “got removed one way or another,” Dr. Stone said.
“The military certainly did not do the place any good,” said Lisa Ackerman, executive vice president of the monuments fund. “They moved a lot of dirt around, but that damage is largely fixable.”
The site was returned to Iraqi control more than a year ago. Ms. Ackerman and Mr. Allen said the project had already surveyed the remains, building by building, and started the restoration of two museums. Although Iraq has a large corps of trained archaeologists, they said, an immediate need is to instruct others in the conservation of ruins and bring in structural engineers and hydrologists to handle the water problem.
For Extinct Monsters of the Deep, a Little Respect
By SEAN B. CARROLL, The New York Times, March 22, 2010
Here is a quick paleontology quiz. Which group of animals included large, air-breathing predators up to 50 feet long that bore live young, dominated their world for more than 100 million years and were ultimately exterminated by an asteroid 65 million years ago?
Easy, right?
Did you say dinosaurs? Sorry, wrong answer. But it was a trickier question than it may have appeared.
The correct answer is marine reptiles, which at the time of the last great extinction included mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and pliosaurs. The key clue in my question was “bore live young.” Unlike the dinosaurs, which were terrestrial and laid eggs, marine reptiles were fully aquatic and bore live young. This latter combination was no coincidence.
Despite their awesome size and abundance in the fossil record — their bones were among the first to be recognized as fossil remains of extinct creatures — marine reptiles have long played second fiddle to their much more famous saurian cousins.
But if we humans were aquatic creatures, we would have a whole lot more respect for these other reptiles. They were the top predators of Cretaceous seas. Thanks to their prevalence, scientists have figured out a lot about them, particularly recently. This includes, most remarkably, insights into their genetics — something that is not even preserved in the fossil record — and what it took to transform ordinary lizards into extraordinary sea monsters.
The first scientific description of a fossil marine reptile was of a beast discovered in 1764 by workmen in an underground limestone quarry near Maastricht, in the Netherlands. It took a long time for the identity and significance of the bones to be realized. At first mistaken for a crocodile, fish or whale, the creature was pilfered by the French Army when it seized Maastricht in 1795. The fossil was eventually recognized as something entirely different and named Mosasaurus (“Mosa,” Latin for the Meuse River, near Maastricht, and “saurus,” meaning lizard).
Mosasaurs and other marine reptiles were center stage in the growth of the fossil record in the early 19th century. Ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs like those discovered by young Mary Anning in the Lyme Regis area of Dorset, in southern England, were displayed in museums across Europe. Marine reptile fossils have been found across the globe, from Africa to Australia, and even Antarctica, a distribution that documents their long success. The first report of the creatures in the American West was from the Lewis and Clark expedition, which encountered a large skeleton in 1804 while voyaging up the Missouri River in Sioux country. It, too, was initially misidentified as a fish, even though at a reported 45 feet long, that would have been one heck of a fish.
Indeed, the name ichthyosaur means “fish lizard” and describes the streamlined body form that resembled large fish and sea mammals like dolphins.
Extinct marine reptiles also exhibited another important similarity to all sea mammals: they bore live young. We know this because among the plethora of fossil skeletons that have been unearthed are specimens of female ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs and other extinct marine reptiles preserved in the act of giving birth, with their young emerging tail-first, just as baby whales, dolphins and manatees do; doing so prevents the air-breathing young from drowning.
The bearing of live young distinguishes the marine reptiles from many other reptiles that lay eggs, like lizards and snakes, as well as dinosaurs. Even reptiles that spend most of their time in water, like crocodiles, sea turtles and marine iguanas, must come to land to lay eggs. This is because gas exchange through the eggshell is too slow underwater to allow the young to develop.
Interestingly, the only living reptiles that spend their entire lives in water, the 60 or so species of sea snakes, all bear live young. So there appears to be a simple requirement for reptiles to be fully aquatic: to bear live young.
But that precludes another common reptilian trick, the control of the determination of the sex of their young by the temperature at which eggs are incubated. In crocodiles, the majority of sea turtles and some lizards, the temperature of the environment surrounding their eggs governs whether the hatchling is male or female, as opposed to the presence of distinct sex chromosomes as in many other species.
Since live-bearing reptiles are not able to regulate sex through incubation temperature, this fact raises the question of whether there is a link between the evolution of giving birth to live babies, and the control of sex by genetic means. Chris Organ and Daniel Janes of Harvard, and Andrew Meade and Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, in England, recently examined 94 living species of reptiles, birds and mammals and found that, indeed, there was a very strong link. The genetic control of sex appears then to be a crucial prerequisite to evolving live birth.
Given that link, the scientists then investigated whether they could infer how sex was controlled in ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs and other lines of extinct marine reptiles, each of which evolved from a different ancestor and at different times. Using sophisticated statistical tests, they concluded that, indeed, genetic control of sex was likely to have operated in each group.
The point of the study was not so much the feat of inferring the genetics of long-extinct creatures, but of understanding the steps involved in evolving a fully aquatic lifestyle. Once the genetic control of sex evolved, so could live birth. And with live birth, these animals were freed of the obligation to return to land to nest. That freedom allowed them to evolve large body size, and the fins and fluked tails that made them efficient swimmers. They dominated the open seas.
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Re: Self-Sabotage
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Date: 2010-03-24 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-24 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-24 04:36 am (UTC)'In fact, her status as an injured party afforded her a psychological advantage: she felt morally superior to everyone she felt had mistreated her. This was a role she had no intention of giving up.'
Ay ay ay, does that ever ring true! My family has more than a few martyrs and victims. I have never really understood why that is so gratifying for them. Even though I was the suicidally depressed one in the family for years, I never understood why they went looking for unhapiness all the time or why they would want attention for it.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-24 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-24 03:02 pm (UTC)Hope I didn't offend anyone by referring to my family members as martyrs and victims! Some of them take it a step further by making "I've been so wronged" the basis for their entire identity. It's just really uncomfortable for me when they want so much negative attention ALL THE TIME.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-24 03:04 pm (UTC)