Science Tuesday - Neurosurgery, Neuroscience, Chronic Fatigue, and Antarctica

Inside Neurosurgery’s Rise
By RANDI HUTTER EPSTEIN, M.D., The New York Times, August 23, 2010

NEW HAVEN — Two floors below the main level of Yale’s medical school library is a room full of brains. No, not the students. These brains, more than 500 of them, are in glass jars. They are part of an extraordinary collection that might never have come to light if not for a curious medical student and an encouraging and persistent doctor.

The cancerous brains were collected by Dr. Harvey Cushing, who was one of America’s first neurosurgeons. They were donated to Yale on his death in 1939 — along with meticulous medical records, before-and-after photographs of patients, and anatomical illustrations. (Dr. Cushing was also an accomplished artist.) His belongings, a treasure trove of medical history, became a jumble of cracked jars and dusty records shoved in various crannies at the hospital and medical school.

Until now. In June 2010, after a colossal effort to clean and organize the material — 500 of 650 jars have been restored — the brains found their final resting place behind glass cases around the perimeter of the Cushing Center, a room designed solely for them.

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Peeling Away Theories on Gender and the Brain
By KATHERINE BOUTON, The New York Times, August 23, 2010

“Delusions of Gender” takes on that tricky question, Why exactly are men from Mars and women from Venus?, and eviscerates both the neuroscientists who claim to have found the answers and the popularizers who take their findings and run with them.

The author, Cordelia Fine, who has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from University College London, is an acerbic critic, mincing no words when it comes to those she disagrees with. But her sharp tongue is tempered with humor and linguistic playfulness, as the title itself suggests. Academics like Simon Baron-Cohen and Dr. Louann Brizendine will want to come to this volume well armed. So would Norman Geschwind if he were still alive. Popular authors like John Gray (“Men are from Mars”), Michael Gurian (“What Could He Be Thinking?”) and Dr. Leonard Sax (“Why Gender Matters”) may want to read something else.

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Study Links Chronic Fatigue to Virus Class
By DAVID TULLER, The New York Times, August 23, 2010

When the journal Science published an attention-grabbing study last fall linking chronic fatigue syndrome to a recently discovered retrovirus, many experts remained skeptical — especially after four other studies found no such association.

Now a second research team has reported a link between the fatigue syndrome and the same class of virus, a category known as MRV-related viruses. In a paper published Monday by The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists found gene sequences from several MRV-related viruses in blood cells from 32 out of 37 chronic-fatigue patients but only 3 of 44 healthy ones.

The researchers did not find XMRV, the specific retrovirus identified in patients last fall. But by confirming the presence of a cluster of genetically similar viruses, the new study represents a significant advance, experts and advocates say.

“I think it settles the issue of whether the initial report was real or not,” said K. Kimberly McCleary, president of the CFIDS Association of America, the leading organization for people with chronic fatigue syndrome.

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Scientist at Work - Notes From the Field: 50 Years Ago: Photographs of an Antarctic Odyssey
By THOMAS LIN, The New York Times, August 23, 2010

In 1959, when Robert A. McCabe ventured to Antarctica as a freelance photojournalist, there were no rules against handling penguins and seals. So when an emperor penguin wandered onto McMurdo Base, Mr. McCabe and his cohorts put the almost three-foot-tall bird on a bar for snapshots. At Cape Royds, he photographed a man holding a diminutive Adélie penguin under its wings as if it were a toddler. Another photograph shows a man about to pet a seal pup.

The military personnel running the base even killed seals to feed the sled dogs, Mr. McCabe said, adding, “Today that’s absolutely prohibited.”

For the 100th anniversary of Roald Amundsen’s and Robert Falcon Scott’s race to the South Pole, Mr. McCabe has published a book of photographs and journal entries called “DeepFreeze! A Photographer’s Antarctic Odyssey in the Year 1959.”

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