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The bended femurs of a 2-year-old member of the wealthy Medici family, indicating that the child may have had rickets.
Rickets Plagued Children of the Medicis
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA, The New York Times, June 17, 2013
The rich are different from you and me, F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. But according to a new study in The International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, children of the Medicis, one of history’s wealthiest families, may have had rickets, a disease typically associated with the inferior diet and cramped living conditions of the poor. What’s more, the family’s wealth may have been to blame.
A team of Italian researchers found evidence of the disease in the skeletons of nine 16th-century Medici children. Several of the skeletons had curved arm and leg bones — a telltale sign of walking or crawling on soft bones. One had a deformed skull.
Rickets is caused by a lack of vitamin D, which renders bones soft or malformed. In poor children, the disease often stems from malnutrition or a lack of sunlight from living in cramped, polluted cities.
But an analysis of the nitrogen isotopes in the bone collagen, which indicates the main source of protein in one’s diet, suggests they were fed breast milk — a poor source of vitamin D — until they were 2. And assuming the Medicis followed the custom of the time, they would have supplemented the breast milk only with soft bread and apples, which do not contain much of the nutrient.
The researchers said the children were probably deprived of sunlight, which spurs the body to make vitamin D. Wealthy children of that time were often tightly swaddled and kept inside, with suntans discouraged as signs of low standing.
Saying Less and Doing More
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, June 17, 2013
When I received a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2009, my friend Caitlin was one of the first people I called. And when she came to see me, she said the perfect thing: nothing. Instead, she burst into tears, gave me a hug — and then took me shopping for wigs.
Caitlin has a genius for friendship. And because she had received her own diagnosis a year before, as a guide through breast cancer she was unparalleled.
She arranged for me to have eyebrows tattooed, so I would not look faceless when all my hair fell out under chemo. After my first treatment, she shaved my head in my kitchen sink. And after my mastectomy surgery, she presented me with a material assertion that there would be a life after reconstruction — a lacy bra.
Unfortunately, most people — even the most warmhearted — lack Caitlin’s intelligence and good sense. Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s new book is for us.
Ms. Pogrebin, a writer who, among other things, contributed to the founding of Ms., the feminist magazine, has produced a guide for people who have friends facing a wide range of troubles, including their own illness (or imminent death), the loss of a loved one, or the mental illness or drug addiction of a child.
She wrote it after her own bout with breast cancer, successfully treated with lumpectomy and radiation. It is full of the gaucheries of her well-meaning friends, but also the stories of friends and family members who have faced serious trouble, as well as accounts of fellow cancer patients she encountered in her journey back to good health.
A lot of her advice is common sense, but some of it is surprising.
As Ms. Pogrebin notes, greeting someone with the seemingly innocent question “How are you?” can prompt all kinds of unwelcome thoughts. Better, she advises, is a simple “It is good to see you.” For sure, you should not ask “How are you really?” If you are close enough to merit that information, it will come to you.
Like Ms. Pogrebin, I found it irritating when people told me they were inspired by my “battle” with cancer. Military analogies are not appropriate. Most of the time, being ill is not a battle. It is just an unpleasant experience.
Ms. Pogrebin has some other useful dos and don’ts.
■ Don’t talk about people you know who had something similar and are now fine.
■ Don’t tell your friend she looks great when it is obvious that she looks anything but.
■ Don’t say “I know what you’re going through” unless you actually do.
■ Do draw up a list of possible chores you could perform — picking up children at school, grocery shopping, mowing the lawn. Look and listen to cues from the sick person, or his caregivers, as to when it is appropriate to show up, and when it is a good time to leave.
■ Do realize that in the end you are powerless in the face of your friend’s illness, particularly if it is terminal. If you think a terminally ill friend wants to say goodbye, Ms. Pogrebin suggests, “gently open the door to a last conversation and leave it up to the patient to either close it or walk through.”
But perhaps the best advice Ms. Pogrebin offers is the simplest: Listen. Take your cues from the sick person.
That’s what Caitlin — and several other good friends — did for me when I was sick. I turned to those people often, and they never let me down, I think because they were paying such close attention to how I was and what I needed.
I wish I could say the same for me, when it came to helping Caitlin.
Because I can find writing therapeutic, I suggested she keep a journal — and even sent her a notebook to write in and a recorder she could dictate into. To cheer her through chemo, I sent her DVDs that I think are hilarious.
In short, I was doing for her what I might like someone to do for me. That was hardly the point.
But we forgive the lapses of our friends and hope they will forgive ours. Meanwhile, this book will help save us from a lapse or two.
Poking Holes in Genetic Privacy
By GINA KOLATA, The New York Times, June 16, 2013
Not so long ago, people who provided DNA in the course of research studies were told that their privacy was assured. Their DNA sequences were on publicly available Web sites, yes, but they did not include names or other obvious identifiers. These were research databases, scientists said, not like the forensic DNA banks being gathered by the F.B.I. and police departments.
But geneticists nationwide have gotten a few rude awakenings, hints that research subjects in fact could sometimes be identified by their DNA alone, or even by the way their cells were using their DNA. The latest shock came in January, when a researcher at the Whitehead Institute, which is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, managed to track down five people selected at random from a database using only their DNA, ages and the states in which they lived. And he did it in just hours. He also found relatives — a total of close to 50 people.
This month an international group of nearly 80 researchers, patient advocates, universities and organizations like the National Institutes of Health announced that it wants to consolidate the world’s databases of DNA and other genetic information, making data easier for researchers to retrieve and share. But the security and privacy of the study subjects are paramount concerns, said Dr. David Altshuler of the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T., a leader of the group.
“The problems are not yet solved in any general way,” Dr. Altshuler said. “We want to work to solve them.”
For years now, a steady stream of research has eroded scientists’ faith that DNA can be held anonymously.
The first shock came in 2008, when David W. Craig, a geneticist at TGen, a research institute in Phoenix, and his colleagues imagined a theoretical problem. Suppose you are trying to learn what percentage of intravenous drug users are infected with hepatitis, and you collect DNA from discarded needles and amass it in a database to look for signs of the virus in the genetic material. Is there any way, they wondered, to find a particular person’s DNA is in this soup of genes?
Most researchers would have said the task was impossible, worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. But Dr. Craig and his colleagues found a way to do it, exploiting the four million or so tiny, and usually inconsequential, differences in DNA letters between one individual and another. With their method, using the combinations of hundreds of thousands of DNA markers, the researchers could find a person even if his or her DNA constituted just 0.1 percent of the total in the mix.
So explosive was the finding that Dr. Craig deliberately chose to write about it only very technically. The N.I.H. understood what he had accomplished, though, and quickly responded, moving all genetic data from the studies it financed behind Internet firewalls to prevent the public or anyone not authorized from using the data and, it was hoped, to protect the identities of research subjects.
But another sort of genetic data — so-called RNA expression profiles that show patterns of gene activity — were still public. Such data could not be used to identify people, or so it was thought.
Then Eric E. Schadt of Mount Sinai School of Medicine discovered that RNA expression data could be used not only to identify someone but also to learn a great deal about that person. “We can create a profile that reflects your weight, whether you are diabetic, how old you are,” Dr. Schadt said. He and a colleague also were able to tell if a person is infected with viruses, like HPV or H.I.V., that change the activity of genes. Moreover, they were able to make what they called a genetic bar code that could be used to identify a person in a number of DNA databases.
Then, this year, in perhaps the most disturbing exercise, Yaniv Erlich, a genetics researcher at the Whitehead Institute, used a new computational tool he had invented to identify by name five people from their DNA, which he had randomly selected from a research database containing the genes of one thousand people.
Experts were startled by what Dr. Erlich had done. “We are in what I call an awareness moment,” said Eric D. Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health.
Research subjects who share their DNA may risk a loss of not just their own privacy but also that of their children and grandchildren, who will inherit many of the same genes, said Mark B. Gerstein, a Yale professor who studies large genetic databases.
Even fragments of genetic information can compromise privacy. James Watson, a discoverer of DNA’s double helix shape, had his genes sequenced and made the information public — except for one, the sequence for ApoE, a gene that has a variant linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers noticed, though, that they could still figure out if Dr. Watson had that variant by examining the DNA on either side of the gene he had removed. They did not reveal whether he had it.
With so many questions about the privacy and security of genetic data, researchers wonder what research subjects should be told. Leaks and identification of study subjects will never be completely avoidable, said George Church, a Harvard geneticist. And as much as investigators might like to find a way to keep genetic data secure and private, he does not think there is an exclusively technical solution.
“If you believe you can just encrypt terabytes of data or anonymize them, there will always be people who hack through that,” Dr. Church said.
He believes that people who provide genetic information should be informed that a loss of privacy is likely, rather than unlikely, and agree to provide DNA with that understanding.
Other researchers say the idea is not far-fetched, and some suggest that scientists be licensed before they are given access to genetic databases, with severe penalties for those who breach privacy.
“My fear is not so much that someone will take everyone’s genomes and put them on the Web,” Dr. Gerstein said. “It is that a graduate student in some lab somewhere will naïvely post bits of genomes on his Facebook page. The idea is that before he could get access to genomes, he would be taught he can’t do that. And if he did he would lose his license.”
The amount of genetic data that has been gathered so far is minuscule compared with what will be coming in the next few years, Dr. Altshuler noted, making it important to address the problems before the data deluge makes them worse.
“We see substantial issues,” he said. “We want to have serious discussions now.”
For Its Latest Beer, a Craft Brewer Chooses an Unlikely Pairing: Archaeology
By STEVEN YACCINO, The New York Times, June 17, 2013
CLEVELAND — The beer was full of bacteria, warm and slightly sour.
By contemporary standards, it would have been a spoiled batch here at Great Lakes Brewing Company, a craft beer maker based in Ohio, where machinery churns out bottle after bottle of dark porters and pale ales.
But lately, Great Lakes has been trying to imitate a bygone era. Enlisting the help of archaeologists at the University of Chicago, the company has been trying for more than year to replicate a 5,000-year-old Sumerian beer using only clay vessels and a wooden spoon.
“How can you be in this business and not want to know from where your forefathers came with their formulas and their technology?” said Pat Conway, a co-owner of the company.
As interest in artisan beer has expanded across the country, so have collaborations between scholars of ancient drink and independent brewers willing to help them resurrect lost recipes for some of the oldest ales ever made.
“It involves a huge amount of detective work and inference and pulling in information from other sources to try and figure it out,” said Gil Stein, the director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, which is ensuring the historical accuracy of the project. “We recognize that to get at really understanding these different aspects of the past, you have to work with people who know things that we don’t.”
There is an unresolved argument in academic circles about whether the invention of beer was the primary reason that people in Mesopotamia, considered the birthplace of Western civilization about 10,000 years ago, first became agriculturalists.
By about 3200 B.C., around the time the Sumerians invented the written word, beer had already held a significant role in the region’s customs and myths. Sipped through a straw by all classes of society, it is also believed to have been a source of drinkable water and essential nutrients, brewed in both palaces and in average homes. During the rule of King Hammurabi, tavern owners were threatened with drowning if they dared to overcharge.
But for all the notes that Sumerians took about the ingredients and the distribution of their libations, no precise recipes have ever been found. Left behind were only cuneiform texts that vaguely hint at the brewing process, perhaps none more poetically than the Hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer.
The song, dated around 1800 B.C., had entranced modern brewers before. A brew based on the hymn was made as part of a partnership in the early 1990s between Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco and the University of Chicago, where a well-known interpretation of the text was translated in 1964.
Reproductions of ancient alcohols have since grown in popularity, largely through a partnership between the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Delaware and Patrick E. McGovern, an archaeological chemist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Together, they have recreated beers from prehistoric China, from ancient Egypt and from evidence found in what is believed to be the tomb of King Midas.
“Of different people who do fermented beverages, microbrewers are the most willing to experiment,” Dr. McGovern said. “They’re ready to try anything.”
Great Lakes has no plan to sell its brew, also based on the Hymn to Ninkasi, to the public. The project, unlike others that recreate old recipes on modern equipment, is an educational exercise more than anything else. It has been shaped by a volley of e-mails with Sumerian experts in Chicago as both sides try to better understand an “off the grid” approach that has proved more difficult than first thought.
In place of stainless steel tanks, the Oriental Institute gave the brewery ceramic vessels modeled after artifacts excavated in Iraq during the 1930s. In keeping with the archaeological evidence, the team successfully malted its own barley on the roof of the brew house. It also asked a Cleveland baker to help make a bricklike “beer bread” for use as a source of active yeast — by far the most difficult step in the process.
The archaeologists, who have committed their careers to studying Sumerian culture, said having professional brewers involved in the effort had helped them ask questions they had not considered.
“We keep going back to the evidence and finding new hints that can help us choose between different interpretations,” said Tate Paulette, a doctoral student and a lead researcher on the project. “We are immersed in studying Mesopotamia, and this is a fundamental thing that we don’t understand well enough.”
While the project continues, Great Lakes’ brewing vessels are already a popular addition to guided tours of the brewery. The company is making plans to showcase its Sumerian beer at events in Cleveland and Chicago by the end of this summer, offering a public tasting of the final brew alongside an identical recipe made with more current brewing techniques.
In the meantime, there is still some tweaking to do.
After months of experiments in the brewery’s laboratory, Nate Gibbon, a brewer at Great Lakes, said he had stood over a ceramic vat on a recent Wednesday, cooking outside on a patch of grass. The fire that heated the vat was fueled by manure.
The batch, spiced with cardamom and coriander, fermented for two days, but it was ultimately too sour for the modern tongue, Mr. Gibbon said. Next time, he will sweeten it with honey or dates.
Without sophisticated cleaning systems to rid the vessels of natural bacteria, Mesopotamian imbibers might have been more familiar with the brew’s unwanted vinegar flavor, archaeologists said. Yet even with the most educated guesswork, they said, the Sumerian palate might never be fully uncovered.“We’re working with questions that are not going to have a final answer,” Mr. Paulette said. “It’s just back and forth, trying to move toward a better understanding. We’re pretty comfortable with that.”
