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Neanderthals’ Big Loss in Battle of the Elements
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 4, 2010
Homo sapiens may not have pushed Neanderthals to extinction, as some scientists have hypothesized; it may have been the weather that did them in.
Volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago devastated Neanderthals in Western Asia and in Europe, anthropologists report in Current Anthropology.
Naomi Cleghorn, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Arlington, and colleagues studied a Neanderthal site in the Caucasus Mountains of southwestern Russia. They were able to identify volcanic ash from two separate eruptions that occurred in the area between 45,000 and 40,000 years ago.
Recently, a separate study found that there was another large volcanic eruption in Italy 40,000 years ago, in an area also occupied at the time by Neanderthals. At the time, our own species was primarily in Africa and southern Europe, areas less affected by the eruptions. Neanderthals were concentrated in Asia and Europe.
“Early modern humans, if any of them were on the affected landscape, had a replenishment population elsewhere,” she said.
About 2,000 years after the volcanic events (though the exact dates are unclear), humans appear to have moved into parts of Europe previously occupied by Neanderthals, the anthropologists say. “We would like people to look more carefully at other Neanderthal sites and to look more carefully for events like this,” Dr. Cleghorn said.
Based on what scientists currently know, a weather-related demise is more likely than a loss in a battle of the wits between Neanderthals and humans, she said.
“It’s really difficult to argue that they weren’t as good as acquiring resources as early modern humans,” she said.
Blue Whales With Pearly Whites, Once Upon a Time
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 4, 2010
Blue whales are enormous, magnificent creatures. The largest mammals known to have existed, they can grow to be more than 100 feet in length and weigh more than 100 tons, and they don’t even have teeth.
They capture prey using a giant sieve in their mouth of baleen or whalebone.
Made of keratin, like fingernails, baleen allows whales to swallow large amounts of food while filtering out seawater.
At one time, however, baleen whales did have teeth. Now, scientists have found the first genetic evidence for the loss of teeth in the common ancestor of all baleen whales.
The research appears in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
The scientists found that a single gene, called the enamelysin gene, which is critical to the formation of enamel in all mammals, and in some other creatures, was inactivated in the common ancestor of baleen whales.
“This gene is missing in every baleen whale today,” said Mark Springer, a biologist at the University of California, Riverside, and one of the study’s authors.
Prior research indicates that the ancestor of baleen whales did not have teeth 25 million years ago. Therefore the loss of this gene must have occurred before then, Dr. Springer said.
In conducting their research, the scientists analyzed the DNA of whales from each of four baleen whale families, which include a total of 15 baleen species.
U.S. Military Orders Less Dependence on Fossil Fuels
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, The New York Times, October 4, 2010
With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels.
Last week, a Marine company from California arrived in the rugged outback of Helmand Province bearing novel equipment: portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment.
The 150 Marines of Company I, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, will be the first to take renewable technology into a battle zone, where the new equipment will replace diesel and kerosene-based fuels that would ordinarily generate power to run their encampment.
Even as Congress has struggled unsuccessfully to pass an energy bill and many states have put renewable energy on hold because of the recession, the military this year has pushed rapidly forward. After a decade of waging wars in remote corners of the globe where fuel is not readily available, senior commanders have come to see overdependence on fossil fuel as a big liability, and renewable technologies — which have become more reliable and less expensive over the past few years — as providing a potential answer. These new types of renewable energy now account for only a small percentage of the power used by the armed forces, but military leaders plan to rapidly expand their use over the next decade.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the huge truck convoys that haul fuel to bases have been sitting ducks for enemy fighters — in the latest attack, oil tankers carrying fuel for NATO troops in Afghanistan were set on fire in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, early Monday. In Iraq and Afghanistan, one Army study found, for every 24 fuel convoys that set out, one soldier or civilian engaged in fuel transport was killed. In the past three months, six Marines have been wounded guarding fuel runs in Afghanistan.
“There are a lot of profound reasons for doing this, but for us at the core it’s practical,” said Ray Mabus, the Navy secretary and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who has said he wants 50 percent of the power for the Navy and Marines to come from renewable energy sources by 2020. That figure includes energy for bases as well as fuel for cars and ships.
“Fossil fuel is the No. 1 thing we import to Afghanistan,” Mr. Mabus said, “and guarding that fuel is keeping the troops from doing what they were sent there to do, to fight or engage local people.”
He and other experts also said that greater reliance on renewable energy improved national security, because fossil fuels often came from unstable regions and scarce supplies were a potential source of international conflict.
Fossil fuel accounts for 30 to 80 percent of the load in convoys into Afghanistan, bringing costs as well as risk. While the military buys gas for just over $1 a gallon, getting that gallon to some forward operating bases costs $400.
“We had a couple of tenuous supply lines across Pakistan that are costing us a heck of a lot, and they’re very dangerous,” said Gen. James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps.
Col. Robert Charette Jr., director of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Energy Office, said he was “cautiously optimistic” that Company I’s equipment would prove reliable and durable enough for military use, and that other Marine companies would be adopting renewable technology in the coming months, although there would probably always be a need to import fuel for some purposes.
While setting national energy policy requires Congressional debates, military leaders can simply order the adoption of renewable energy. And the military has the buying power to create products and markets. That, in turn, may make renewable energy more practical and affordable for everyday uses, experts say.
Last year, the Navy introduced its first hybrid vessel, a Wasp class amphibious assault ship called the U.S.S. Makin Island, which at speeds under 10 knots runs on electricity rather than on fossil fuel, a shift resulting in greater efficiency that saved 900,000 gallons of fuel on its maiden voyage from Mississippi to San Diego, compared with a conventional ship its size, the Navy said.
The Air Force will have its entire fleet certified to fly on biofuels by 2011 and has already flown test flights using a 50-50 mix of plant-based biofuel and jet fuel; the Navy took its first delivery of fuel made from algae this summer. Biofuels can in theory be produced wherever the raw materials, like plants, are available, and could ultimately be made near battlefields.
Concerns about the military’s dependence on fossil fuels in far-flung battlefields began in 2006 in Iraq, where Richard Zilmer, then a major general and the top American commander in western Iraq, sent an urgent cable to Washington suggesting that renewable technology could prevent loss of life. That request catalyzed new research, but the pressure for immediate results magnified as the military shifted its focus to Afghanistan, a country with little available native fossil fuel and scarce electricity outside cities.
Fuel destined for American troops in landlocked Afghanistan is shipped to Karachi, Pakistan, where it is loaded on convoys of 50 to 70 vehicles for transport to central bases. Smaller convoys branch out to the forward lines. The Marines’ new goal is to make the more peripheral sites sustain themselves with the kind of renewable technology carried by Company I, since solar electricity can be generated right on the battlefield.
There are similar tactical advantages to using renewable fuel for planes and building hybrid ships. “Every time you cut a ship away from the need to visit an oiler — a fuel supply ship — you create an advantage,” said Mr. Mabus, noting that the Navy had pioneered previous energy transformations in the United States, from sail power to coal power in the 19th century, as well as from coal to oil and oil to nuclear power in the 20th century.
The cost calculation is also favorable. The renewable technology that will power Company I costs about $50,000 to $70,000; a single diesel generator costs several thousand dollars. But when it costs hundreds of dollars to get each gallon of traditional fuel to base camps in Afghanistan, the investment is quickly defrayed.
Because the military has moved into renewable energy so rapidly, much of the technology currently being used is commercially available or has been adapted for the battlefield from readily available civilian models.
This spring, the military invited commercial manufacturers to demonstrate products that might be useful on the battlefield. A small number were selected for further testing. The goal was to see, for example, if cooling systems could handle the 120 degree temperatures often seen in current war zones or if embedded solar panels would make tents more visible to enemy radar.
This summer, renewable technologies proved capable of powering computers, residences and most equipment for more than a week at a test base in the Mojave Desert — though not enough to operate the most sophisticated surveillance systems.
Much more is in the testing stages: one experimental cooling system uses a pipe burrowed into the cool earth eight feet underground that vents into tents; a solar fan on the tent roof evacuates the hot air and draws cool air from underground. The Marines are exploring solar-powered water purification systems and looking into the possibility of building a small-scale, truck-based biofuel plant that could transform local crops — like illegal poppies — into fuel.
“If the Navy comes knocking, they will build it,” Mr. Mabus said. “The price will come down and the infrastructure will be created.”
Rediscovering the First Miracle Drug
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D., The New York Times, October 4, 2010
Every few months some miracle drug or other is rolled out with bells and confetti, but only once or twice in a generation does the real thing come along.
These are the blockbuster medications that can virtually raise the dead, and while the debuts of some, like the AIDS drugs, are still fresh in memory, the birth of the first one is almost forgotten. It was injectable insulin, long sought by researchers all over the world and finally isolated in 1921 by a team of squabbling Canadians. With insulin, dying children laughed and played again, as parents wept and doctors spoke of biblical resurrections.
Visitors to a new exhibition opening Tuesday at the New-York Historical Society will find a story made particularly vivid by dramatic visuals, for insulin’s miracle was more than a matter of better blood tests. As in Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, it actually put flesh on living skeletons.
But the miracle went only so far: insulin was not a cure. In 1921, New York City’s death rate from diabetes was estimated to be the highest in the country, and today the health department lists diabetes among the city’s top five killers. Now though, it is adults who die, not children. What insulin did was turn a brief, deadly illness into a long, chronic struggle, and both the exhibit and the book, “Breakthrough,” by Thea Cooper and Arthur Ainsberg, on which it is based highlight the complicated questions that inevitably follow medical miracles: Who will get the drug first? Who will pay for it? Who will make enough for everyone? And, of course, who will reward its developers as they feel they deserve?
In the first decades of the 20th century, half a dozen different research groups were hot on the trail of insulin, a hormone manufactured in the pancreas but difficult to separate out from the digestive enzymes also made there.
Without insulin the body is unable to use glucose, its primary fuel. Most diabetic children lack insulin completely, while adults with so-called Type 2 diabetes often associated with obesity are resistant to the hormone’s action. Either way, sugar and starch in the diabetic’s diet turn into poison, clogging the bloodstream with unusable glucose: the glucose is eliminated in sweet-tasting urine as the body’s cells literally starve in the midst of plenty. Insulin-deficient patients are both thirsty and ravenous, but the more they eat, the faster they waste away.
Before insulin was available, doctors understood enough of this sequence to cobble together a stopgap treatment: diabetics were put on salad- and egg-based diets devoid of sugar and starch, with only the minimum number of calories needed to survive. Already thin, these patients became skeletal, but the excess glucose disappeared from their blood and urine, and they survived far longer than untreated contemporaries.
Dr. Elliott Joslin, whose Boston clinic was and remains a renowned diabetes center, recalled that before insulin one of his dieting patients was “just about the weight of her bones and a human soul.”
The other great authority on diet therapy was New York’s Dr. Frederick Allen, now long forgotten, who founded a residential hospital for diabetics, first on East 51st Street in Manhattan, and then in rural New Jersey.
It was to Dr. Allen that the eminent American jurist and Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes turned when his daughter Elizabeth was diagnosed with diabetes in 1919, at age 11.
Elizabeth Hughes was a cheerful, pretty little girl, five feet tall, with straight brown hair and a consuming interest in birds. On Dr. Allen’s diet her weight fell to 65 pounds, then 52 pounds, and then, after an episode of diarrhea that almost killed her in the spring of 1922, 45 pounds. By then she had survived three years, far longer than expected. And then her mother heard the news: insulin had finally been isolated in Canada.
The unlikely hero was Frederick Banting, an awkward Ontario farmboy who graduated from medical school without distinction, was wounded in World War I, then more or less forced himself into a laboratory at the University of Toronto with an idea of how to get at the elusive substance. Over the miserably hot summer of 1921 Dr. Banting and his assistant Charles Best experimented on diabetic dogs, with only limited success until finally dog No. 92, a yellow collie, jumped off the table after an injection and began to wag her tail.
Meanwhile, Dr. Banting’s mentor and lab director, Dr. John J. R. Macleod, was summering in Scotland.
Dr. Banting never forgave Dr. Macleod for arriving back in the autumn, rested and refreshed, and taking over. His bitter hostility lasted years, long after the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1923 which Dr. Banting refused to attend, for although he shared the physiology prize with Dr. Macleod, he would not share a podium.
Meanwhile, mothers all over the globe were writing him heart-wrenching letters: “My dear Dr. Banting: I am very anxious to know more of your discovery,” wrote one, going on to describe her daughter’s case: “She is pitifully depleted and reduced.”
That was from Elizabeth Hughes’s mother, Antoinette. Charles Evans Hughes had by that time temporarily left the Supreme Court, and was serving as secretary of state in President Warren G. Harding’s administration. Dr. Banting, unimpressed, replied no, sorry, no insulin available — for, in fact, the team was having difficulty making enough for more than a handful of patients.
And then a few weeks later, Dr. Banting changed his mind.
Presumably higher powers had intervened, or perhaps Justice Hughes himself — a rigid, unsmiling man whom Theodore Roosevelt had nicknamed “the bearded iceberg” — had pulled strings. Either way, Elizabeth traveled posthaste to Toronto and the lifesaving injections.
It was the end of her journey, but only the beginning for many children without her connections, who had to wait while the Canadians fought bitterly with each other over how to fairly distribute their tiny amounts of the lifesaving substance.
Dr. Banting wound up giving one of his colleagues a black eye before it was all over, and Eli J. Lilly and Company, the Indianapolis pharmaceutical firm, won the right to mass-produce insulin. It was the first partnership negotiated among academia, individual physicians and the pharmaceutical industry.
When the first combinations of AIDS drugs proved to save lives in just the same seemingly miraculous way, Dr. Kent Sepkowitz, an infectious disease expert at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, was moved to look up the old literature on the discovery of insulin and found many parallels between the two eras.
“In some sense, the breakthrough is the easy part,” he said. “Then the real work begins.”
For both insulin and the AIDS drugs the big challenge was “getting it from here to there,” Dr. Sepkowitz said. The expense and logistics of large-scale insulin manufacture were initially daunting. But soon trainloads of frozen cattle and pig pancreas from the giant Chicago slaughterhouses began to arrive at Lilly’s plant. By 1932 the drug’s price had fallen by 90 percent.
Meanwhile, the notion of allowing patients to test their own urine for glucose and calculate their own insulin doses was outlandish to most doctors. Diabetes was the first illness which forced them to cede some medical authority to the patient, said Jean Ashton, one of the exhibit’s curators. With insulin, diabetics suddenly acquired both the right and the responsibility to maintain their own health.
Some of the children who were early recipients of insulin became diabetes advocates, speaking out for patients’ rights well into their old age.
But not Elizabeth Hughes: she ran in the other direction, far from the headlines that briefly made her the most famous diabetic child in the United States. Although she received an estimated 42,000 insulin shots before she died in 1981 at the age of 74, she systematically destroyed most of the material documenting her illness, expunged all references to diabetes from her father’s papers, and occasionally even denied she had been ill as a child.
Ms. Cooper, a writer, and Mr. Ainsberg, a Wall Street executive and amateur historian, show no compunction in making her the focus of their story anyway, creating dialogue for her, and even imagining a few pivotal scenes of which there is no historical record.
But Elizabeth forms only a small part of the exhibit, and a viewer suspects this is exactly what she would have preferred. The few dozen of her letters that survive from her six-month stay in Toronto, as she exuberantly regained health and strength, emphasize how desperately she wanted to stop being a patient forever.
It was a great day when she injected herself with insulin for the first time: “I can do it perfectly beautifully,” she wrote to her mother. “Now I feel so absolutely independent.”
The exhibition “Breakthrough: The Dramatic Story of the Discovery of Insulin” opens on Tuesday at the New-York Historical Society, 2 West 77th Street, New York, and continues through Jan. 31, 2011.
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 4, 2010
Homo sapiens may not have pushed Neanderthals to extinction, as some scientists have hypothesized; it may have been the weather that did them in.
Volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago devastated Neanderthals in Western Asia and in Europe, anthropologists report in Current Anthropology.
Naomi Cleghorn, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Arlington, and colleagues studied a Neanderthal site in the Caucasus Mountains of southwestern Russia. They were able to identify volcanic ash from two separate eruptions that occurred in the area between 45,000 and 40,000 years ago.
Recently, a separate study found that there was another large volcanic eruption in Italy 40,000 years ago, in an area also occupied at the time by Neanderthals. At the time, our own species was primarily in Africa and southern Europe, areas less affected by the eruptions. Neanderthals were concentrated in Asia and Europe.
“Early modern humans, if any of them were on the affected landscape, had a replenishment population elsewhere,” she said.
About 2,000 years after the volcanic events (though the exact dates are unclear), humans appear to have moved into parts of Europe previously occupied by Neanderthals, the anthropologists say. “We would like people to look more carefully at other Neanderthal sites and to look more carefully for events like this,” Dr. Cleghorn said.
Based on what scientists currently know, a weather-related demise is more likely than a loss in a battle of the wits between Neanderthals and humans, she said.
“It’s really difficult to argue that they weren’t as good as acquiring resources as early modern humans,” she said.
Blue Whales With Pearly Whites, Once Upon a Time
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 4, 2010
Blue whales are enormous, magnificent creatures. The largest mammals known to have existed, they can grow to be more than 100 feet in length and weigh more than 100 tons, and they don’t even have teeth.
They capture prey using a giant sieve in their mouth of baleen or whalebone.
Made of keratin, like fingernails, baleen allows whales to swallow large amounts of food while filtering out seawater.
At one time, however, baleen whales did have teeth. Now, scientists have found the first genetic evidence for the loss of teeth in the common ancestor of all baleen whales.
The research appears in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
The scientists found that a single gene, called the enamelysin gene, which is critical to the formation of enamel in all mammals, and in some other creatures, was inactivated in the common ancestor of baleen whales.
“This gene is missing in every baleen whale today,” said Mark Springer, a biologist at the University of California, Riverside, and one of the study’s authors.
Prior research indicates that the ancestor of baleen whales did not have teeth 25 million years ago. Therefore the loss of this gene must have occurred before then, Dr. Springer said.
In conducting their research, the scientists analyzed the DNA of whales from each of four baleen whale families, which include a total of 15 baleen species.
U.S. Military Orders Less Dependence on Fossil Fuels
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, The New York Times, October 4, 2010
With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels.
Last week, a Marine company from California arrived in the rugged outback of Helmand Province bearing novel equipment: portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment.
The 150 Marines of Company I, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, will be the first to take renewable technology into a battle zone, where the new equipment will replace diesel and kerosene-based fuels that would ordinarily generate power to run their encampment.
Even as Congress has struggled unsuccessfully to pass an energy bill and many states have put renewable energy on hold because of the recession, the military this year has pushed rapidly forward. After a decade of waging wars in remote corners of the globe where fuel is not readily available, senior commanders have come to see overdependence on fossil fuel as a big liability, and renewable technologies — which have become more reliable and less expensive over the past few years — as providing a potential answer. These new types of renewable energy now account for only a small percentage of the power used by the armed forces, but military leaders plan to rapidly expand their use over the next decade.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the huge truck convoys that haul fuel to bases have been sitting ducks for enemy fighters — in the latest attack, oil tankers carrying fuel for NATO troops in Afghanistan were set on fire in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, early Monday. In Iraq and Afghanistan, one Army study found, for every 24 fuel convoys that set out, one soldier or civilian engaged in fuel transport was killed. In the past three months, six Marines have been wounded guarding fuel runs in Afghanistan.
“There are a lot of profound reasons for doing this, but for us at the core it’s practical,” said Ray Mabus, the Navy secretary and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who has said he wants 50 percent of the power for the Navy and Marines to come from renewable energy sources by 2020. That figure includes energy for bases as well as fuel for cars and ships.
“Fossil fuel is the No. 1 thing we import to Afghanistan,” Mr. Mabus said, “and guarding that fuel is keeping the troops from doing what they were sent there to do, to fight or engage local people.”
He and other experts also said that greater reliance on renewable energy improved national security, because fossil fuels often came from unstable regions and scarce supplies were a potential source of international conflict.
Fossil fuel accounts for 30 to 80 percent of the load in convoys into Afghanistan, bringing costs as well as risk. While the military buys gas for just over $1 a gallon, getting that gallon to some forward operating bases costs $400.
“We had a couple of tenuous supply lines across Pakistan that are costing us a heck of a lot, and they’re very dangerous,” said Gen. James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps.
Col. Robert Charette Jr., director of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Energy Office, said he was “cautiously optimistic” that Company I’s equipment would prove reliable and durable enough for military use, and that other Marine companies would be adopting renewable technology in the coming months, although there would probably always be a need to import fuel for some purposes.
While setting national energy policy requires Congressional debates, military leaders can simply order the adoption of renewable energy. And the military has the buying power to create products and markets. That, in turn, may make renewable energy more practical and affordable for everyday uses, experts say.
Last year, the Navy introduced its first hybrid vessel, a Wasp class amphibious assault ship called the U.S.S. Makin Island, which at speeds under 10 knots runs on electricity rather than on fossil fuel, a shift resulting in greater efficiency that saved 900,000 gallons of fuel on its maiden voyage from Mississippi to San Diego, compared with a conventional ship its size, the Navy said.
The Air Force will have its entire fleet certified to fly on biofuels by 2011 and has already flown test flights using a 50-50 mix of plant-based biofuel and jet fuel; the Navy took its first delivery of fuel made from algae this summer. Biofuels can in theory be produced wherever the raw materials, like plants, are available, and could ultimately be made near battlefields.
Concerns about the military’s dependence on fossil fuels in far-flung battlefields began in 2006 in Iraq, where Richard Zilmer, then a major general and the top American commander in western Iraq, sent an urgent cable to Washington suggesting that renewable technology could prevent loss of life. That request catalyzed new research, but the pressure for immediate results magnified as the military shifted its focus to Afghanistan, a country with little available native fossil fuel and scarce electricity outside cities.
Fuel destined for American troops in landlocked Afghanistan is shipped to Karachi, Pakistan, where it is loaded on convoys of 50 to 70 vehicles for transport to central bases. Smaller convoys branch out to the forward lines. The Marines’ new goal is to make the more peripheral sites sustain themselves with the kind of renewable technology carried by Company I, since solar electricity can be generated right on the battlefield.
There are similar tactical advantages to using renewable fuel for planes and building hybrid ships. “Every time you cut a ship away from the need to visit an oiler — a fuel supply ship — you create an advantage,” said Mr. Mabus, noting that the Navy had pioneered previous energy transformations in the United States, from sail power to coal power in the 19th century, as well as from coal to oil and oil to nuclear power in the 20th century.
The cost calculation is also favorable. The renewable technology that will power Company I costs about $50,000 to $70,000; a single diesel generator costs several thousand dollars. But when it costs hundreds of dollars to get each gallon of traditional fuel to base camps in Afghanistan, the investment is quickly defrayed.
Because the military has moved into renewable energy so rapidly, much of the technology currently being used is commercially available or has been adapted for the battlefield from readily available civilian models.
This spring, the military invited commercial manufacturers to demonstrate products that might be useful on the battlefield. A small number were selected for further testing. The goal was to see, for example, if cooling systems could handle the 120 degree temperatures often seen in current war zones or if embedded solar panels would make tents more visible to enemy radar.
This summer, renewable technologies proved capable of powering computers, residences and most equipment for more than a week at a test base in the Mojave Desert — though not enough to operate the most sophisticated surveillance systems.
Much more is in the testing stages: one experimental cooling system uses a pipe burrowed into the cool earth eight feet underground that vents into tents; a solar fan on the tent roof evacuates the hot air and draws cool air from underground. The Marines are exploring solar-powered water purification systems and looking into the possibility of building a small-scale, truck-based biofuel plant that could transform local crops — like illegal poppies — into fuel.
“If the Navy comes knocking, they will build it,” Mr. Mabus said. “The price will come down and the infrastructure will be created.”
Rediscovering the First Miracle Drug
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D., The New York Times, October 4, 2010
Every few months some miracle drug or other is rolled out with bells and confetti, but only once or twice in a generation does the real thing come along.
These are the blockbuster medications that can virtually raise the dead, and while the debuts of some, like the AIDS drugs, are still fresh in memory, the birth of the first one is almost forgotten. It was injectable insulin, long sought by researchers all over the world and finally isolated in 1921 by a team of squabbling Canadians. With insulin, dying children laughed and played again, as parents wept and doctors spoke of biblical resurrections.
Visitors to a new exhibition opening Tuesday at the New-York Historical Society will find a story made particularly vivid by dramatic visuals, for insulin’s miracle was more than a matter of better blood tests. As in Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, it actually put flesh on living skeletons.
But the miracle went only so far: insulin was not a cure. In 1921, New York City’s death rate from diabetes was estimated to be the highest in the country, and today the health department lists diabetes among the city’s top five killers. Now though, it is adults who die, not children. What insulin did was turn a brief, deadly illness into a long, chronic struggle, and both the exhibit and the book, “Breakthrough,” by Thea Cooper and Arthur Ainsberg, on which it is based highlight the complicated questions that inevitably follow medical miracles: Who will get the drug first? Who will pay for it? Who will make enough for everyone? And, of course, who will reward its developers as they feel they deserve?
In the first decades of the 20th century, half a dozen different research groups were hot on the trail of insulin, a hormone manufactured in the pancreas but difficult to separate out from the digestive enzymes also made there.
Without insulin the body is unable to use glucose, its primary fuel. Most diabetic children lack insulin completely, while adults with so-called Type 2 diabetes often associated with obesity are resistant to the hormone’s action. Either way, sugar and starch in the diabetic’s diet turn into poison, clogging the bloodstream with unusable glucose: the glucose is eliminated in sweet-tasting urine as the body’s cells literally starve in the midst of plenty. Insulin-deficient patients are both thirsty and ravenous, but the more they eat, the faster they waste away.
Before insulin was available, doctors understood enough of this sequence to cobble together a stopgap treatment: diabetics were put on salad- and egg-based diets devoid of sugar and starch, with only the minimum number of calories needed to survive. Already thin, these patients became skeletal, but the excess glucose disappeared from their blood and urine, and they survived far longer than untreated contemporaries.
Dr. Elliott Joslin, whose Boston clinic was and remains a renowned diabetes center, recalled that before insulin one of his dieting patients was “just about the weight of her bones and a human soul.”
The other great authority on diet therapy was New York’s Dr. Frederick Allen, now long forgotten, who founded a residential hospital for diabetics, first on East 51st Street in Manhattan, and then in rural New Jersey.
It was to Dr. Allen that the eminent American jurist and Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes turned when his daughter Elizabeth was diagnosed with diabetes in 1919, at age 11.
Elizabeth Hughes was a cheerful, pretty little girl, five feet tall, with straight brown hair and a consuming interest in birds. On Dr. Allen’s diet her weight fell to 65 pounds, then 52 pounds, and then, after an episode of diarrhea that almost killed her in the spring of 1922, 45 pounds. By then she had survived three years, far longer than expected. And then her mother heard the news: insulin had finally been isolated in Canada.
The unlikely hero was Frederick Banting, an awkward Ontario farmboy who graduated from medical school without distinction, was wounded in World War I, then more or less forced himself into a laboratory at the University of Toronto with an idea of how to get at the elusive substance. Over the miserably hot summer of 1921 Dr. Banting and his assistant Charles Best experimented on diabetic dogs, with only limited success until finally dog No. 92, a yellow collie, jumped off the table after an injection and began to wag her tail.
Meanwhile, Dr. Banting’s mentor and lab director, Dr. John J. R. Macleod, was summering in Scotland.
Dr. Banting never forgave Dr. Macleod for arriving back in the autumn, rested and refreshed, and taking over. His bitter hostility lasted years, long after the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1923 which Dr. Banting refused to attend, for although he shared the physiology prize with Dr. Macleod, he would not share a podium.
Meanwhile, mothers all over the globe were writing him heart-wrenching letters: “My dear Dr. Banting: I am very anxious to know more of your discovery,” wrote one, going on to describe her daughter’s case: “She is pitifully depleted and reduced.”
That was from Elizabeth Hughes’s mother, Antoinette. Charles Evans Hughes had by that time temporarily left the Supreme Court, and was serving as secretary of state in President Warren G. Harding’s administration. Dr. Banting, unimpressed, replied no, sorry, no insulin available — for, in fact, the team was having difficulty making enough for more than a handful of patients.
And then a few weeks later, Dr. Banting changed his mind.
Presumably higher powers had intervened, or perhaps Justice Hughes himself — a rigid, unsmiling man whom Theodore Roosevelt had nicknamed “the bearded iceberg” — had pulled strings. Either way, Elizabeth traveled posthaste to Toronto and the lifesaving injections.
It was the end of her journey, but only the beginning for many children without her connections, who had to wait while the Canadians fought bitterly with each other over how to fairly distribute their tiny amounts of the lifesaving substance.
Dr. Banting wound up giving one of his colleagues a black eye before it was all over, and Eli J. Lilly and Company, the Indianapolis pharmaceutical firm, won the right to mass-produce insulin. It was the first partnership negotiated among academia, individual physicians and the pharmaceutical industry.
When the first combinations of AIDS drugs proved to save lives in just the same seemingly miraculous way, Dr. Kent Sepkowitz, an infectious disease expert at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, was moved to look up the old literature on the discovery of insulin and found many parallels between the two eras.
“In some sense, the breakthrough is the easy part,” he said. “Then the real work begins.”
For both insulin and the AIDS drugs the big challenge was “getting it from here to there,” Dr. Sepkowitz said. The expense and logistics of large-scale insulin manufacture were initially daunting. But soon trainloads of frozen cattle and pig pancreas from the giant Chicago slaughterhouses began to arrive at Lilly’s plant. By 1932 the drug’s price had fallen by 90 percent.
Meanwhile, the notion of allowing patients to test their own urine for glucose and calculate their own insulin doses was outlandish to most doctors. Diabetes was the first illness which forced them to cede some medical authority to the patient, said Jean Ashton, one of the exhibit’s curators. With insulin, diabetics suddenly acquired both the right and the responsibility to maintain their own health.
Some of the children who were early recipients of insulin became diabetes advocates, speaking out for patients’ rights well into their old age.
But not Elizabeth Hughes: she ran in the other direction, far from the headlines that briefly made her the most famous diabetic child in the United States. Although she received an estimated 42,000 insulin shots before she died in 1981 at the age of 74, she systematically destroyed most of the material documenting her illness, expunged all references to diabetes from her father’s papers, and occasionally even denied she had been ill as a child.
Ms. Cooper, a writer, and Mr. Ainsberg, a Wall Street executive and amateur historian, show no compunction in making her the focus of their story anyway, creating dialogue for her, and even imagining a few pivotal scenes of which there is no historical record.
But Elizabeth forms only a small part of the exhibit, and a viewer suspects this is exactly what she would have preferred. The few dozen of her letters that survive from her six-month stay in Toronto, as she exuberantly regained health and strength, emphasize how desperately she wanted to stop being a patient forever.
It was a great day when she injected herself with insulin for the first time: “I can do it perfectly beautifully,” she wrote to her mother. “Now I feel so absolutely independent.”
The exhibition “Breakthrough: The Dramatic Story of the Discovery of Insulin” opens on Tuesday at the New-York Historical Society, 2 West 77th Street, New York, and continues through Jan. 31, 2011.
