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SIDE EFFECTS: Found in Arkansas: Hope on Wings
By JAMES GORMAN, The New York Times, May 3, 2005
Emily Dickinson was right: hope is the thing with feathers. What she didn't know was that it lives in an Arkansas swamp and has a big ivory bill.
On Thursday, the day that scientists announced the first confirmed sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in 60 years, I went for a short paddle in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, where the bird was seen. I was with four other people, two from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which had made a major effort to confirm the sighting, and two from the Nature Conservancy, which has been buying land in the area. And I was trying to adjust to the good news.
In fact, I had always preferred Woody Allen's take on Dickinson's poem: "How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not the 'thing with feathers.' The thing with feathers has turned out be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich."
Furthermore, as a journalist, I'm not used to good news. There's just not that much of it. So the report that the ivory bill lived took me off guard. I got a bit overexcited and flew down to Little Rock from New York, drove out to Bayou de View in the refuge and got in a canoe.
On a slow bayou, the two canoes slipped through water tupelo and cypress, on slate-colored water, and I talked with Elliott Swarthout and Peter Wrege of the Cornell Lab about the off kilter beauty of swamps and the thing with feathers.
The common wisdom had been that the ivory bill was gone for good, not a bird anymore but a symbol, a reminder of loss. It once lived in southern swamps and bottom land and depended on large areas of old forest, since it needed dead trees for nesting and for feeding on grubs and beetles beneath the bark. Logging squeezed out the ivory bill, turning it into an accusatory ghost.
This was no subspecies of salamander threatened by a housing development. It was the biggest of its kind, something Americans always love. It had a 30-inch wingspan and a jackhammer beak. Audubon called it the "great chieftain of the woodpecker tribe" and others called it the Lord God bird because when people saw it, they said, "Lord God!" But it was gone, one of the natural treasures that a growing country stepped on and broke.
When I talked to experts during a hunt for the ivory bill in Louisiana three years ago, even some of the most dedicated searchers held out little chance of success. Outside the small circle of ivory bill seekers, the bird seemed a lost cause, a particularly sad lost cause for me because I have a soft spot for swampy places. Give me a dark slough over a sunlit meadow any day. Walking through the Louisiana bottom land was both exhilarating, because this part had been saved, and painful, because so much had been lost.
Tim Gallagher, who wrote "The Grail Bird" about the search and the sighting of the ivory bill, said that Bobby Harrison, his partner on the search, wept when he saw the bird fly in front of his canoe. I know of at least one person with no connection to the search who wept on reading the news, and I'm sure he was not alone.
Why was the discovery so powerful?
I think it is the reason for the bird's survival. It wasn't a miracle. It wasn't luck. And it wasn't simply the resilience of nature, although that helped. The reason for the astonishing re-emergence of a mysterious bird is as mundane as can be. It is habitat preservation, achieved by hard, tedious work, like lobbying, legislating and fund-raising.
There was luck involved, of course. But my favorite comment about luck was made by Branch Rickey, who said, "Luck is the residue of design." Chance favors the protected wetland.
Think about where the bird was found, in a national wildlife refuge, and in an area, the Big Woods of Arkansas, that conservation organizations and government agencies had targeted as crucial for preservation. Just south of the Cache River refuge is the White River National Wildlife Refuge. State refuges are nearby. And the Nature Conservancy has been buying up land in that area.
The same is true about other likely spots. The hunt in Louisiana was in the state's Pearl River Wildlife Management Area. When I talked to Scott Simon, the state director of the Nature Conservancy in Arkansas, he said that Arkansas, a poor state, had voted for an eighth-of-a-cent sales tax for conservation, not a large amount, but a tax nonetheless.
I think the reason the discovery is so moving is that so many people worked so hard to save and protect land, telling themselves there may be an ivory bill out there, and that protecting the bottomland had to be important. I'm not sure they all believed it, but they acted as if they did.
As did the searchers. Mr. Swarthout showed me one spot on the bayou where observers on his team would sit in a canoe and wait and watch, for perhaps 10 or 12 hours. The refuge is a beautiful place, the bird is great, but sitting in a canoe for 12 hours has to be tedious and uncomfortable.
It is possible that this is the last ivory bill, that it won't appear again. And we have to trust the judgment and expertise of the scientists involved on the sighting because there is no crystal-clear photograph. Instead, there are detailed observations and an analysis of a blurry bit of videotape.
In most cases, I might hesitate to allow myself to join in the celebration. But I'm going with the experts in this case.
I am giving in to hope. Perhaps there are more ivory bills. I really hope so. The thing with feathers has got me in its grip.
VIDEO of Ivory Billed Woodpecker.
New Light on M.I.T. Issues, With a (Gasp!) Biologist at the Helm
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, May 3, 2005
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 26 - When Dr. Susan Hockfield was named president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year, there was talk that M.I.T. was breaking new ground. What would it mean, many wondered, if one of the world's leading citadels of physics, electrical engineering and other hard sciences were led for the first time by - a biologist?
That discussion did not last long because Dr. Hockfield was also the first woman to head M.I.T. And soon after she took office in December, she found herself in the middle of a still-simmering debate over whether women have the will and the capacity to achieve at the highest levels of science.
One of her first major public acts as president was to respond to a suggestion, by Harvard's president, Dr. Lawrence H. Summers, that one reason for the relative dearth of women at the upper ranks of science might be an innate lesser ability.
"Marie Curie exploded that myth," Dr. Hockfield and two other university presidents, Dr. Shirley M. Tilghman of Princeton and Dr. John L. Hennessy of Stanford, wrote in an essay that appeared on the op-ed page of The Boston Globe. But women need "teachers who believe in them," they went on, and low expectations of women "can be as destructive as overt discrimination."
Today, as she prepares for her presidential inauguration on Friday, Dr. Hockfield says she regrets having been "thrown" into the debate.
She herself has never encountered discrimination because of her sex, she said in an interview - or if she has, she has never noticed it. And other issues, like financing for science and reconciling the sometimes conflicting demands of commercial and academic research are also pressing, she said.
Still, she said, the reaction of M.I.T. students to Dr. Summers's remarks "made me aware that we needed to say something."
"There was a real sense of just being puzzled and being unsure and feeling abandoned and of really being deeply unsettled," she continued.
Besides, she added, squandered talent "is one of the key issues of women in science and engineering."
The place of women in science and engineering is not a new issue for M.I.T., which under its previous president, Dr. Charles M. Vest, acknowledged that it had been unintentionally discriminating and took a number of steps like temporarily stopping the tenure clock for women who have children.
So having a woman in the president's office is of little practical importance now, Dr. Vest said in an interview. But its symbolism "is very powerful," he said.
Dr. Hockfield's training gives her an unusual vantage point on the debate. Her field is neuroscience, in particular how experiences in life shape the structure and, therefore, the function of the brain.
"I always kind of smile when people say, 'Is it nature or nurture?' " she said. "It clearly is nature and nurture."
Dr. Hockfield, who is 54, was born in Chicago and her family moved often as her father, a patent lawyer, worked his way up the corporate hierarchy of General Electric. Eventually, he was posted to the company's headquarters in New York. She attended high school in Chappaqua, and graduated from the University of Rochester in 1973.
Even when she was a small child, she recalled, the "received wisdom" in her family was that she would become a doctor. Though she studied biology in college with an eye to medical school, something about that goal did not feel right.
It was not until a sympathetic adviser steered her into a summer job in a laboratory that she realized that what interested her was not treating the ills of the body but figuring out how it functioned. "It was the thing I had been looking for, searching for, all my life," she said.
After earning a doctorate in anatomy at the Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1979, she was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco.
In those days, she said, neuroscience was just emerging as a field in its own right. Scientists were only beginning to probe the detailed workings of the nervous system, using monoclonal antibodies and other new tools to identify the proteins active in the brain.
At Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, she saw some of this work. "I had a visceral feeling of just profound curiosity and interest," she recalled.
At the invitation of Dr. James D. Watson, the laboratory's director, she went to the lab in 1980. Working there, she said, was like "having a black bag full of jewels and putting your hand in and pulling them out one by one."
In 1985, she joined the faculty of Yale, where she met her husband, Dr. Thomas Byrne, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a teacher at M.I.T. They have a daughter, Elizabeth, 13. It was also at Yale that Dr. Hockfield moved into university administration, first, from 1998 to 2002, as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and then as provost.
Some researchers who make that switch maintain their research efforts, or try to. Dr. Hockfield is not among them. And even though her eyes light up when she recalls her days at the laboratory bench, she said she did not regret leaving it behind - even on the recent day when Elizabeth said she was having trouble using a microscope at school.
Dr. Hockfield said she was about to suggest they go to her lab and practice when she realized, "Oh, well, we can't just go to my lab and look at my microscope."
But administration has its own rewards, she said, adding, "There is just a huge amount of intellectual collaboration that goes into helping to lead the university."
She said she expected to continue the practice, which dates from World War II, of M.I.T. presidents' serving "as a kind of adviser to the government and spokesperson for sound policies for science."
For example, she expects to advocate for greater research spending on the physical sciences. People in the physical sciences have not done as well as biologists in making the case for their work, she said, and as a result, "the level of funding for research in America is very distressing."
But how easy is it to advocate for science at a time when many Americans, including the president, do not accept evolution, the idea that human activity is altering the earth's climate or other ideas science regards as more or less established?
Dr. Hockfield did not answer that question directly. But she said she was profoundly worried about what she called a "disrespect" for the wonders of math, science, engineering and technology.
"As a nation we have ceased to be inspired by these things," she said.
That is one of the issues she said she eventually hoped to address. Right now, though, she is spending a lot of time getting to know her new environment.
Recently, she and her husband and daughter went on a campus radio show, where faculty members and others play and discuss their favorite music.
Elizabeth did not agree with one of her parents' choices, Bob Dylan, making for some lively off-the-air moments. "It was pretty fun," said Eric Chemi, a senior electrical engineering and computer science major who is host of the show. "The three of them were arguing about music."
For him, the notable thing about Dr. Hockfield's appointment was not that she was a biologist or a woman, but rather that she was the mother of a young child, and that "she and her husband and her daughter are partners in this thing."
Dr. Hockfield, he said, has "a sort of charisma" that makes her easy for an undergraduate to talk with.
"She makes you feel like she wants you to succeed," he said.
REALLY? The Claim: Eating Carrots Improves Your Eyesight
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR, The New York Times, May 3, 2005
THE FACTS Your mother probably told you that carrots are good for your eyes - and you probably dismissed it as just an old wives' tale. But the claim is not baseless.
Carrots are high in beta carotene, a component of vitamin A, which is critical to normal vision. It's no coincidence that in countries where rice is a dietary staple but carrots and other sources of the vitamin are scarce, poor vision is rampant.
So should you forget about glasses and just eat carrots? Probably not. Studies show that while taking vitamin A can reverse poor vision caused by a deficiency, it will not strengthen eyesight or slow decline in people who are healthy.
A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins in 1998, for example, looked at 30,000 women in South Asia at high risk of vitamin deficiencies. It found that a group that received vitamin A tablets had 67 percent fewer cases of night blindness than a group that received a placebo.
But in 2003, researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston found that a group of thousands of healthy men who took beta carotene pills for 12 years had the same rate of age-related cataracts as those given a placebo.
THE BOTTOM LINE Eating carrots helps maintain normal vision.
The Inexplicable Survivors of a Widespread Epidemic
By CAROL POGASH, The New York Times, May 3, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO, April 28 - Before powerful antiviral medicines became available, Kai Brothers lost his partner and many friends to AIDS. Thinking he was next, he quit his job, emptied his 401(k) and waited to die.
Nothing happened.
It has been 16 years since Mr. Brothers learned he was H.I.V. positive. Since then, he has never taken AIDS drugs or had any illnesses associated with the disease. Despite his good fortune, Mr. Brothers says he feels isolated.
"I don't identify with people who are H.I.V. negative because I'm not," he said. "I could infect someone. I don't identify with the positive people, because I don't have to deal with my health and medications and the things they have to worry about."
Once a month Mr. Brothers visits the laboratory of Dr. Jay Levy, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who is director of the university's laboratory for tumor and AIDS virus research. Since the epidemic began in 1981, Dr. Levy has been trying to understand why Mr. Brothers and others who are H.I.V. positive can remain medicine-free yet fit for decades, while the average person with H.I.V. progresses to AIDS within 10 years, if untreated.
An answer to that question could help in the development of a vaccine.
As a long-term survivor, also known as a long-term nonprogressor, Mr. Brothers, 42, is a much sought after anomaly. Dr. Levy believes that about 5 percent of people with H.I.V. are medicine-free and still healthy after 10 years.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases defines nonprogressors as treatment-free people with H.I.V. who have so little virus in their blood that it cannot be routinely detected. He suggests their numbers are far smaller, more like 0.2 to 0.4 percent.
Whatever the percentage, locating these research subjects is challenging. In the early years, one of Dr. Levy's volunteers trolled gay bars looking for survivors. A number of Dr. Levy's volunteers take part in other studies, here and at the infectious diseases institute in Bethesda, Md.
Long-term survivors have been around for a long time, said Dr. Mike McCune, senior investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology.
"We just don't know why they do what they do," Dr. McCune said.
Martin Delaney, founder of Project Inform, an H.I.V. information and advocacy organization based in San Francisco, said: "The disappointing thing is that there's no consensus about what the long-term nonprogressors do. Different things explain it in different people."
For many years, Mr. Brothers said, he carried a sense of guilt. Before his infection was discovered, his church encouraged him to donate blood four times a year. The blood bank discovered that one of its donors was H.I.V. positive and asked that Mr. Brothers, too, be tested. Reluctant to learn the truth, he refused and quit donating blood.
In retrospect, Mr. Brothers, who had a flu-like illness in 1981, an early symptom of infection with the virus, believes he was H.I.V. positive before he began donating blood.
"This is something I contributed to and could possibly have meant dozens of people contracting the virus and dying," he said in an interview.
For years, he wanted to be part of a study. Five years ago, friends told him about Dr. Levy's research. Even when AIDS was a death sentence, Dr. Levy, a virologist, knew that every virus had its survivors.
He believed he could learn from those whose bodies had kept the virus in check.
Some of Dr. Levy's subjects have been H.I.V. positive for 27 years, longer than there has been an epidemic.
The dates of infection were confirmed by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, which in 1978 began a hepatitis B study of 6,704 gay men, whose blood was preserved. Over time, some of these nonprogressors have turned into slow-progressors, dying of AIDS. But there remain a dozen who are infected but have stayed healthy for more than 20 years without treatment.
In 1986, Dr. Levy discovered that in survivors, the white blood cells, known as CD8 cells secreted minuscule amounts of an antiviral factor that blocked replication of viruses in cells but did not kill them. The better the antiviral activity of those cells, the healthier the individual.
Dr. Levy has devoted his career to trying to determine what that factor is. "It is the hardest thing I've ever had to do," he said.
When Dr. David Ho, the founder of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, reported that he had found the substance, Dr. Levy told him he was mistaken.
Repeatedly, Dr. Levy has told peers that they are wrong. He is also his own worst critic: "After a while they say 'Levy is spending all this time telling us what it isn't. What is it?' " he said.
Over the years, Dr. Fauci said, many people have grown skeptical. "I have tried to find the factor, and I can't find what it is," Dr. Fauci said. "I can demonstrate the phenomenon, but I can't isolate the factor."
Ten years ago, Dr. Robert C. Gallo, a co-discoverer of the AIDS virus and the director of the Institute of Human Virology and Division of Basic Science at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, said he was "fed up" waiting for Dr. Levy to reveal the elusive substance.
While searching for it, Dr. Gallo, along with Dr. Paolo Lusso, discovered three chemicals, called chemokines, in the blood of long-term nonprogressors that inhibit a certain subset of the virus, "like bouncers at a disco," Dr. Gallo said.
He did not find Dr. Levy's mysterious factor. But Dr. Gallo's research has opened a new field of therapy.
By 1996, when better treatment became available and people with H.I.V. were living longer, interest in survivors had diminished. But when it became apparent that a vaccine was still sorely needed, Dr. McCune said, the interest re-emerged.
Many researchers have focused on the late stages of AIDS, but Dr. McCune compares that method to piecing together the fabric of an ancient civilization by examining its ruins. He and others are now focusing on H.I.V.'s early stages. By studying long-term nonprogressors, they are raising questions about what types of immune responses are useful against H.I.V. and about when, in the course of the disease, they can have an effect.
"The main thing long-term nonprogressors teach us, and it keeps coming back again and again and again, is that it's not just the virus; it's the host," he said.
Dr. Eric Rosenberg, an infectious disease doctor and assistant professor at Harvard who focuses on the earliest stages of infection, compares CD4 cells to generals in a bunker. In most people with H.I.V., he said, the generals quit ordering the CD8 "soldiers" cells to kill H.I.V.-infected cells. But in the nonprogressors, the CD4's continue to give their marching orders.
Although many survivors attribute their good health to daily exercise, positive thinking, visualization or eating egg whites, Dr. Levy said it was all about genetics. When his subjects ask him why they're surviving so long, Dr. Levy said, he tells them, "You chose the right parents."
Dr. Mark Connors of the infectious disease institute's Laboratory of Immunoregulation has enlisted 19 subjects from around the country.
"Many of these folks are true altruists," he said. "These are very healthy people," yet they drop their careers to have blood examined at his laboratory.
Robert, a computer programmer who stopped by Dr. Levy's laboratory to have his blood drawn, said, "I feel strongly about making a contribution as I pass through this life." Robert, who did not want his last name used out of privacy concerns, has been healthy and medicine-free for the 19 years he has been infected.
Being in good health, after so many of his friends have died, seems somehow wrong. He harbors "this horrible secret," horrible, he said, because "I look healthy but I'm a carrier; you're carrying something that's fatal, but it's not fatal to you."
Long-term nonprogressors "are telling us we're missing something big with regard to how immune system works," Dr. Connors said.
Ninety-five percent of the long-term nonprogressors he studies share a gene that encodes molecules, allowing the immune system to recognize infected cells. Only 10 percent of progressors have that gene.
While researchers ferret out more information, Mr. Brothers has changed his ways. He has developed a long-term relationship, bought a house and is adding to his 401(k).
"I want to indulge in the future," he said. "I plan on being here for the long run."
Benefits of the Dinner Table Ritual
By LAURIE TARKAN, The New York Times, May 3, 2005
The family dinner has long been an example of family togetherness. But recently, scientists have been coming up with compelling reasons - including a lowered risk of smoking, drinking and doing illicit drugs among teenagers - for families to pull up a chair around the table.
The interest in the ritual may have been spurred by concerns that the number of families who do not dine together is increasing. According to several surveys, 30 to 40 percent of families do not eat dinner together five to seven nights a week, though most families eat dinner together some days a week.
Families with older teenagers eat fewer dinners together than those with younger children.
The two most common obstacles, parents say, are late working hours and activities that overlap with mealtime, like soccer games and Girl Scout meetings.
Many families that do dine together make a concerted effort to carve out the time. Some spend Sundays cooking meals for the week, some do prep work the evening before, some use takeout a couple of nights a week, and many parents of young children guiltily admit that they could not prepare a dinner if it were not for the TV, which gets turned on for 30 to 60 minutes while they cook.
Parents generally agree that family dinners are vital. According to one survey, 87 percent of parents say that it is "very important" or "extremely important" to eat together as a family.
The effort to do just that in a harried world has spawned hundreds of cookbooks, thousands of recipes on the Internet and the re-emergence of slow cookers, aimed at busy mothers.
Childhood memories often influence people's opinion about the importance of family dinners.
Isabel Wurgaft, a member of a group for working mothers in Millburn, N.J. said: "Growing up, my father got home late, at 8 p.m., but my mother always made us wait to eat as a family no matter how much we complained. Now that my father has passed away over 10 years ago, dinner conversations are the strongest and best memories for me and my sisters."
For others, though, the struggle is apparent. "I feel guilty because it's supposed to be very important for families to eat together, but it just doesn't work with our schedule," said Janette Pazer, another member of the working mothers' group. "I'd have to leave work an hour early, and try to cook while they're hanging on me for attention and asking for homework help, rather than getting my full attention when I get home."
In past eras, the family meal was more of a practicality - people had to eat, and they turned up at the table, where food was being served.
"In the contemporary world, we've made an icon of the dinner hour as a way to hold on to something, otherwise people would go off in different directions and never get together," said Barbara Haber, the author of "From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals."
Recent studies have begun to shore up the idea that family dinners can have an effect.
For example, a 2004 study of 4,746 children 11 to 18 years old, published in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, found that frequent family meals were associated with a lower risk of smoking, drinking and using marijuana; with a lower incidence of depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts; and with better grades.
Another study last year, a survey of 12- to 17-year-olds by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, found that teenagers who reported eating two or fewer dinners a week with family members were more than one and a half times as likely to smoke, drink or use illegal substances than were teenagers who had five to seven family dinners.
"We also noticed that the more often teens had dinner with their parents, the less likely they were to have sexually active friends, less likely girls were to have boyfriends two years older, and the less time teens spent with boyfriends or girlfriends," said Joseph A. Califano Jr., the center's chairman and president.
A study from the University of Minnesota published last year found that adolescent girls who reported having more frequent family meals and a positive atmosphere during those meals were less likely to have eating disorders.
"The family dinner is an important time for families to be together and talk, it's important for family bonds, having time together that's not stressful, enjoying each other's company and being around food," said Dr. Karen Weber Cullen, a behavioral nutritionist at the Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Family meals, experts say, also offer a predictable routine and an opportunity for parents to monitor their children's behavior. "That monitoring has been related to a host of positive physical and mental health outcomes in children and adolescents," said Dr. Barbara Fiese, who studies family routines and rituals at Syracuse University.
She added that regular family meals also provide an opportunity to establish a sense of belonging to a family unit.
According to one study, family dinners may help improve the vocabulary of younger children.
Researchers at Harvard in 1996 looked at the types of activities that promoted language development. Family dinners were more important than play, story time and other family events. And those families that engaged in extended discourse at the dinner table, like story telling and explanations, rather than one-phrase comments, like "eat your vegetables," had children with better language skills, said Dr. Catherine Snow, professor of education at Harvard and the researcher of the study.
"When there is more than one adult at the table, it tends to make talk richer, topics are established by adult interest and can be extremely valuable opportunities for children to learn," Dr. Snow said.
A handful of studies have also suggested that eating as a family improves children's consumption of fruits and vegetables, grains, fiber and vitamins and minerals. Children who have family meals also eat less fried food, saturated fat and soda, studies suggest.
But Dr. Leann Birch, who has studied eating habits of children for more than two decades, said that while the research indicates that parents act as models for eating, the "data on the family dinner is pretty weak."
What's available in the household may have a greater impact on healthier food intake, she said.
With toddlers and preschoolers, it may be more stressful having them sit at the table for a long meal, she said. "Sitting down at the family table at the end of a long day with a 1-year-old and 3-year-old may not be a particularly pleasant experience. In and of itself, having a family meal without positive interaction, may not be that important," she said.
By JAMES GORMAN, The New York Times, May 3, 2005
Emily Dickinson was right: hope is the thing with feathers. What she didn't know was that it lives in an Arkansas swamp and has a big ivory bill.
On Thursday, the day that scientists announced the first confirmed sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in 60 years, I went for a short paddle in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, where the bird was seen. I was with four other people, two from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which had made a major effort to confirm the sighting, and two from the Nature Conservancy, which has been buying land in the area. And I was trying to adjust to the good news.
In fact, I had always preferred Woody Allen's take on Dickinson's poem: "How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not the 'thing with feathers.' The thing with feathers has turned out be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich."
Furthermore, as a journalist, I'm not used to good news. There's just not that much of it. So the report that the ivory bill lived took me off guard. I got a bit overexcited and flew down to Little Rock from New York, drove out to Bayou de View in the refuge and got in a canoe.
On a slow bayou, the two canoes slipped through water tupelo and cypress, on slate-colored water, and I talked with Elliott Swarthout and Peter Wrege of the Cornell Lab about the off kilter beauty of swamps and the thing with feathers.
The common wisdom had been that the ivory bill was gone for good, not a bird anymore but a symbol, a reminder of loss. It once lived in southern swamps and bottom land and depended on large areas of old forest, since it needed dead trees for nesting and for feeding on grubs and beetles beneath the bark. Logging squeezed out the ivory bill, turning it into an accusatory ghost.
This was no subspecies of salamander threatened by a housing development. It was the biggest of its kind, something Americans always love. It had a 30-inch wingspan and a jackhammer beak. Audubon called it the "great chieftain of the woodpecker tribe" and others called it the Lord God bird because when people saw it, they said, "Lord God!" But it was gone, one of the natural treasures that a growing country stepped on and broke.
When I talked to experts during a hunt for the ivory bill in Louisiana three years ago, even some of the most dedicated searchers held out little chance of success. Outside the small circle of ivory bill seekers, the bird seemed a lost cause, a particularly sad lost cause for me because I have a soft spot for swampy places. Give me a dark slough over a sunlit meadow any day. Walking through the Louisiana bottom land was both exhilarating, because this part had been saved, and painful, because so much had been lost.
Tim Gallagher, who wrote "The Grail Bird" about the search and the sighting of the ivory bill, said that Bobby Harrison, his partner on the search, wept when he saw the bird fly in front of his canoe. I know of at least one person with no connection to the search who wept on reading the news, and I'm sure he was not alone.
Why was the discovery so powerful?
I think it is the reason for the bird's survival. It wasn't a miracle. It wasn't luck. And it wasn't simply the resilience of nature, although that helped. The reason for the astonishing re-emergence of a mysterious bird is as mundane as can be. It is habitat preservation, achieved by hard, tedious work, like lobbying, legislating and fund-raising.
There was luck involved, of course. But my favorite comment about luck was made by Branch Rickey, who said, "Luck is the residue of design." Chance favors the protected wetland.
Think about where the bird was found, in a national wildlife refuge, and in an area, the Big Woods of Arkansas, that conservation organizations and government agencies had targeted as crucial for preservation. Just south of the Cache River refuge is the White River National Wildlife Refuge. State refuges are nearby. And the Nature Conservancy has been buying up land in that area.
The same is true about other likely spots. The hunt in Louisiana was in the state's Pearl River Wildlife Management Area. When I talked to Scott Simon, the state director of the Nature Conservancy in Arkansas, he said that Arkansas, a poor state, had voted for an eighth-of-a-cent sales tax for conservation, not a large amount, but a tax nonetheless.
I think the reason the discovery is so moving is that so many people worked so hard to save and protect land, telling themselves there may be an ivory bill out there, and that protecting the bottomland had to be important. I'm not sure they all believed it, but they acted as if they did.
As did the searchers. Mr. Swarthout showed me one spot on the bayou where observers on his team would sit in a canoe and wait and watch, for perhaps 10 or 12 hours. The refuge is a beautiful place, the bird is great, but sitting in a canoe for 12 hours has to be tedious and uncomfortable.
It is possible that this is the last ivory bill, that it won't appear again. And we have to trust the judgment and expertise of the scientists involved on the sighting because there is no crystal-clear photograph. Instead, there are detailed observations and an analysis of a blurry bit of videotape.
In most cases, I might hesitate to allow myself to join in the celebration. But I'm going with the experts in this case.
I am giving in to hope. Perhaps there are more ivory bills. I really hope so. The thing with feathers has got me in its grip.
VIDEO of Ivory Billed Woodpecker.
New Light on M.I.T. Issues, With a (Gasp!) Biologist at the Helm
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, May 3, 2005
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 26 - When Dr. Susan Hockfield was named president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year, there was talk that M.I.T. was breaking new ground. What would it mean, many wondered, if one of the world's leading citadels of physics, electrical engineering and other hard sciences were led for the first time by - a biologist?
That discussion did not last long because Dr. Hockfield was also the first woman to head M.I.T. And soon after she took office in December, she found herself in the middle of a still-simmering debate over whether women have the will and the capacity to achieve at the highest levels of science.
One of her first major public acts as president was to respond to a suggestion, by Harvard's president, Dr. Lawrence H. Summers, that one reason for the relative dearth of women at the upper ranks of science might be an innate lesser ability.
"Marie Curie exploded that myth," Dr. Hockfield and two other university presidents, Dr. Shirley M. Tilghman of Princeton and Dr. John L. Hennessy of Stanford, wrote in an essay that appeared on the op-ed page of The Boston Globe. But women need "teachers who believe in them," they went on, and low expectations of women "can be as destructive as overt discrimination."
Today, as she prepares for her presidential inauguration on Friday, Dr. Hockfield says she regrets having been "thrown" into the debate.
She herself has never encountered discrimination because of her sex, she said in an interview - or if she has, she has never noticed it. And other issues, like financing for science and reconciling the sometimes conflicting demands of commercial and academic research are also pressing, she said.
Still, she said, the reaction of M.I.T. students to Dr. Summers's remarks "made me aware that we needed to say something."
"There was a real sense of just being puzzled and being unsure and feeling abandoned and of really being deeply unsettled," she continued.
Besides, she added, squandered talent "is one of the key issues of women in science and engineering."
The place of women in science and engineering is not a new issue for M.I.T., which under its previous president, Dr. Charles M. Vest, acknowledged that it had been unintentionally discriminating and took a number of steps like temporarily stopping the tenure clock for women who have children.
So having a woman in the president's office is of little practical importance now, Dr. Vest said in an interview. But its symbolism "is very powerful," he said.
Dr. Hockfield's training gives her an unusual vantage point on the debate. Her field is neuroscience, in particular how experiences in life shape the structure and, therefore, the function of the brain.
"I always kind of smile when people say, 'Is it nature or nurture?' " she said. "It clearly is nature and nurture."
Dr. Hockfield, who is 54, was born in Chicago and her family moved often as her father, a patent lawyer, worked his way up the corporate hierarchy of General Electric. Eventually, he was posted to the company's headquarters in New York. She attended high school in Chappaqua, and graduated from the University of Rochester in 1973.
Even when she was a small child, she recalled, the "received wisdom" in her family was that she would become a doctor. Though she studied biology in college with an eye to medical school, something about that goal did not feel right.
It was not until a sympathetic adviser steered her into a summer job in a laboratory that she realized that what interested her was not treating the ills of the body but figuring out how it functioned. "It was the thing I had been looking for, searching for, all my life," she said.
After earning a doctorate in anatomy at the Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1979, she was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco.
In those days, she said, neuroscience was just emerging as a field in its own right. Scientists were only beginning to probe the detailed workings of the nervous system, using monoclonal antibodies and other new tools to identify the proteins active in the brain.
At Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, she saw some of this work. "I had a visceral feeling of just profound curiosity and interest," she recalled.
At the invitation of Dr. James D. Watson, the laboratory's director, she went to the lab in 1980. Working there, she said, was like "having a black bag full of jewels and putting your hand in and pulling them out one by one."
In 1985, she joined the faculty of Yale, where she met her husband, Dr. Thomas Byrne, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a teacher at M.I.T. They have a daughter, Elizabeth, 13. It was also at Yale that Dr. Hockfield moved into university administration, first, from 1998 to 2002, as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and then as provost.
Some researchers who make that switch maintain their research efforts, or try to. Dr. Hockfield is not among them. And even though her eyes light up when she recalls her days at the laboratory bench, she said she did not regret leaving it behind - even on the recent day when Elizabeth said she was having trouble using a microscope at school.
Dr. Hockfield said she was about to suggest they go to her lab and practice when she realized, "Oh, well, we can't just go to my lab and look at my microscope."
But administration has its own rewards, she said, adding, "There is just a huge amount of intellectual collaboration that goes into helping to lead the university."
She said she expected to continue the practice, which dates from World War II, of M.I.T. presidents' serving "as a kind of adviser to the government and spokesperson for sound policies for science."
For example, she expects to advocate for greater research spending on the physical sciences. People in the physical sciences have not done as well as biologists in making the case for their work, she said, and as a result, "the level of funding for research in America is very distressing."
But how easy is it to advocate for science at a time when many Americans, including the president, do not accept evolution, the idea that human activity is altering the earth's climate or other ideas science regards as more or less established?
Dr. Hockfield did not answer that question directly. But she said she was profoundly worried about what she called a "disrespect" for the wonders of math, science, engineering and technology.
"As a nation we have ceased to be inspired by these things," she said.
That is one of the issues she said she eventually hoped to address. Right now, though, she is spending a lot of time getting to know her new environment.
Recently, she and her husband and daughter went on a campus radio show, where faculty members and others play and discuss their favorite music.
Elizabeth did not agree with one of her parents' choices, Bob Dylan, making for some lively off-the-air moments. "It was pretty fun," said Eric Chemi, a senior electrical engineering and computer science major who is host of the show. "The three of them were arguing about music."
For him, the notable thing about Dr. Hockfield's appointment was not that she was a biologist or a woman, but rather that she was the mother of a young child, and that "she and her husband and her daughter are partners in this thing."
Dr. Hockfield, he said, has "a sort of charisma" that makes her easy for an undergraduate to talk with.
"She makes you feel like she wants you to succeed," he said.
REALLY? The Claim: Eating Carrots Improves Your Eyesight
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR, The New York Times, May 3, 2005
THE FACTS Your mother probably told you that carrots are good for your eyes - and you probably dismissed it as just an old wives' tale. But the claim is not baseless.
Carrots are high in beta carotene, a component of vitamin A, which is critical to normal vision. It's no coincidence that in countries where rice is a dietary staple but carrots and other sources of the vitamin are scarce, poor vision is rampant.
So should you forget about glasses and just eat carrots? Probably not. Studies show that while taking vitamin A can reverse poor vision caused by a deficiency, it will not strengthen eyesight or slow decline in people who are healthy.
A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins in 1998, for example, looked at 30,000 women in South Asia at high risk of vitamin deficiencies. It found that a group that received vitamin A tablets had 67 percent fewer cases of night blindness than a group that received a placebo.
But in 2003, researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston found that a group of thousands of healthy men who took beta carotene pills for 12 years had the same rate of age-related cataracts as those given a placebo.
THE BOTTOM LINE Eating carrots helps maintain normal vision.
The Inexplicable Survivors of a Widespread Epidemic
By CAROL POGASH, The New York Times, May 3, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO, April 28 - Before powerful antiviral medicines became available, Kai Brothers lost his partner and many friends to AIDS. Thinking he was next, he quit his job, emptied his 401(k) and waited to die.
Nothing happened.
It has been 16 years since Mr. Brothers learned he was H.I.V. positive. Since then, he has never taken AIDS drugs or had any illnesses associated with the disease. Despite his good fortune, Mr. Brothers says he feels isolated.
"I don't identify with people who are H.I.V. negative because I'm not," he said. "I could infect someone. I don't identify with the positive people, because I don't have to deal with my health and medications and the things they have to worry about."
Once a month Mr. Brothers visits the laboratory of Dr. Jay Levy, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who is director of the university's laboratory for tumor and AIDS virus research. Since the epidemic began in 1981, Dr. Levy has been trying to understand why Mr. Brothers and others who are H.I.V. positive can remain medicine-free yet fit for decades, while the average person with H.I.V. progresses to AIDS within 10 years, if untreated.
An answer to that question could help in the development of a vaccine.
As a long-term survivor, also known as a long-term nonprogressor, Mr. Brothers, 42, is a much sought after anomaly. Dr. Levy believes that about 5 percent of people with H.I.V. are medicine-free and still healthy after 10 years.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases defines nonprogressors as treatment-free people with H.I.V. who have so little virus in their blood that it cannot be routinely detected. He suggests their numbers are far smaller, more like 0.2 to 0.4 percent.
Whatever the percentage, locating these research subjects is challenging. In the early years, one of Dr. Levy's volunteers trolled gay bars looking for survivors. A number of Dr. Levy's volunteers take part in other studies, here and at the infectious diseases institute in Bethesda, Md.
Long-term survivors have been around for a long time, said Dr. Mike McCune, senior investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology.
"We just don't know why they do what they do," Dr. McCune said.
Martin Delaney, founder of Project Inform, an H.I.V. information and advocacy organization based in San Francisco, said: "The disappointing thing is that there's no consensus about what the long-term nonprogressors do. Different things explain it in different people."
For many years, Mr. Brothers said, he carried a sense of guilt. Before his infection was discovered, his church encouraged him to donate blood four times a year. The blood bank discovered that one of its donors was H.I.V. positive and asked that Mr. Brothers, too, be tested. Reluctant to learn the truth, he refused and quit donating blood.
In retrospect, Mr. Brothers, who had a flu-like illness in 1981, an early symptom of infection with the virus, believes he was H.I.V. positive before he began donating blood.
"This is something I contributed to and could possibly have meant dozens of people contracting the virus and dying," he said in an interview.
For years, he wanted to be part of a study. Five years ago, friends told him about Dr. Levy's research. Even when AIDS was a death sentence, Dr. Levy, a virologist, knew that every virus had its survivors.
He believed he could learn from those whose bodies had kept the virus in check.
Some of Dr. Levy's subjects have been H.I.V. positive for 27 years, longer than there has been an epidemic.
The dates of infection were confirmed by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, which in 1978 began a hepatitis B study of 6,704 gay men, whose blood was preserved. Over time, some of these nonprogressors have turned into slow-progressors, dying of AIDS. But there remain a dozen who are infected but have stayed healthy for more than 20 years without treatment.
In 1986, Dr. Levy discovered that in survivors, the white blood cells, known as CD8 cells secreted minuscule amounts of an antiviral factor that blocked replication of viruses in cells but did not kill them. The better the antiviral activity of those cells, the healthier the individual.
Dr. Levy has devoted his career to trying to determine what that factor is. "It is the hardest thing I've ever had to do," he said.
When Dr. David Ho, the founder of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, reported that he had found the substance, Dr. Levy told him he was mistaken.
Repeatedly, Dr. Levy has told peers that they are wrong. He is also his own worst critic: "After a while they say 'Levy is spending all this time telling us what it isn't. What is it?' " he said.
Over the years, Dr. Fauci said, many people have grown skeptical. "I have tried to find the factor, and I can't find what it is," Dr. Fauci said. "I can demonstrate the phenomenon, but I can't isolate the factor."
Ten years ago, Dr. Robert C. Gallo, a co-discoverer of the AIDS virus and the director of the Institute of Human Virology and Division of Basic Science at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, said he was "fed up" waiting for Dr. Levy to reveal the elusive substance.
While searching for it, Dr. Gallo, along with Dr. Paolo Lusso, discovered three chemicals, called chemokines, in the blood of long-term nonprogressors that inhibit a certain subset of the virus, "like bouncers at a disco," Dr. Gallo said.
He did not find Dr. Levy's mysterious factor. But Dr. Gallo's research has opened a new field of therapy.
By 1996, when better treatment became available and people with H.I.V. were living longer, interest in survivors had diminished. But when it became apparent that a vaccine was still sorely needed, Dr. McCune said, the interest re-emerged.
Many researchers have focused on the late stages of AIDS, but Dr. McCune compares that method to piecing together the fabric of an ancient civilization by examining its ruins. He and others are now focusing on H.I.V.'s early stages. By studying long-term nonprogressors, they are raising questions about what types of immune responses are useful against H.I.V. and about when, in the course of the disease, they can have an effect.
"The main thing long-term nonprogressors teach us, and it keeps coming back again and again and again, is that it's not just the virus; it's the host," he said.
Dr. Eric Rosenberg, an infectious disease doctor and assistant professor at Harvard who focuses on the earliest stages of infection, compares CD4 cells to generals in a bunker. In most people with H.I.V., he said, the generals quit ordering the CD8 "soldiers" cells to kill H.I.V.-infected cells. But in the nonprogressors, the CD4's continue to give their marching orders.
Although many survivors attribute their good health to daily exercise, positive thinking, visualization or eating egg whites, Dr. Levy said it was all about genetics. When his subjects ask him why they're surviving so long, Dr. Levy said, he tells them, "You chose the right parents."
Dr. Mark Connors of the infectious disease institute's Laboratory of Immunoregulation has enlisted 19 subjects from around the country.
"Many of these folks are true altruists," he said. "These are very healthy people," yet they drop their careers to have blood examined at his laboratory.
Robert, a computer programmer who stopped by Dr. Levy's laboratory to have his blood drawn, said, "I feel strongly about making a contribution as I pass through this life." Robert, who did not want his last name used out of privacy concerns, has been healthy and medicine-free for the 19 years he has been infected.
Being in good health, after so many of his friends have died, seems somehow wrong. He harbors "this horrible secret," horrible, he said, because "I look healthy but I'm a carrier; you're carrying something that's fatal, but it's not fatal to you."
Long-term nonprogressors "are telling us we're missing something big with regard to how immune system works," Dr. Connors said.
Ninety-five percent of the long-term nonprogressors he studies share a gene that encodes molecules, allowing the immune system to recognize infected cells. Only 10 percent of progressors have that gene.
While researchers ferret out more information, Mr. Brothers has changed his ways. He has developed a long-term relationship, bought a house and is adding to his 401(k).
"I want to indulge in the future," he said. "I plan on being here for the long run."
Benefits of the Dinner Table Ritual
By LAURIE TARKAN, The New York Times, May 3, 2005
The family dinner has long been an example of family togetherness. But recently, scientists have been coming up with compelling reasons - including a lowered risk of smoking, drinking and doing illicit drugs among teenagers - for families to pull up a chair around the table.
The interest in the ritual may have been spurred by concerns that the number of families who do not dine together is increasing. According to several surveys, 30 to 40 percent of families do not eat dinner together five to seven nights a week, though most families eat dinner together some days a week.
Families with older teenagers eat fewer dinners together than those with younger children.
The two most common obstacles, parents say, are late working hours and activities that overlap with mealtime, like soccer games and Girl Scout meetings.
Many families that do dine together make a concerted effort to carve out the time. Some spend Sundays cooking meals for the week, some do prep work the evening before, some use takeout a couple of nights a week, and many parents of young children guiltily admit that they could not prepare a dinner if it were not for the TV, which gets turned on for 30 to 60 minutes while they cook.
Parents generally agree that family dinners are vital. According to one survey, 87 percent of parents say that it is "very important" or "extremely important" to eat together as a family.
The effort to do just that in a harried world has spawned hundreds of cookbooks, thousands of recipes on the Internet and the re-emergence of slow cookers, aimed at busy mothers.
Childhood memories often influence people's opinion about the importance of family dinners.
Isabel Wurgaft, a member of a group for working mothers in Millburn, N.J. said: "Growing up, my father got home late, at 8 p.m., but my mother always made us wait to eat as a family no matter how much we complained. Now that my father has passed away over 10 years ago, dinner conversations are the strongest and best memories for me and my sisters."
For others, though, the struggle is apparent. "I feel guilty because it's supposed to be very important for families to eat together, but it just doesn't work with our schedule," said Janette Pazer, another member of the working mothers' group. "I'd have to leave work an hour early, and try to cook while they're hanging on me for attention and asking for homework help, rather than getting my full attention when I get home."
In past eras, the family meal was more of a practicality - people had to eat, and they turned up at the table, where food was being served.
"In the contemporary world, we've made an icon of the dinner hour as a way to hold on to something, otherwise people would go off in different directions and never get together," said Barbara Haber, the author of "From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals."
Recent studies have begun to shore up the idea that family dinners can have an effect.
For example, a 2004 study of 4,746 children 11 to 18 years old, published in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, found that frequent family meals were associated with a lower risk of smoking, drinking and using marijuana; with a lower incidence of depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts; and with better grades.
Another study last year, a survey of 12- to 17-year-olds by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, found that teenagers who reported eating two or fewer dinners a week with family members were more than one and a half times as likely to smoke, drink or use illegal substances than were teenagers who had five to seven family dinners.
"We also noticed that the more often teens had dinner with their parents, the less likely they were to have sexually active friends, less likely girls were to have boyfriends two years older, and the less time teens spent with boyfriends or girlfriends," said Joseph A. Califano Jr., the center's chairman and president.
A study from the University of Minnesota published last year found that adolescent girls who reported having more frequent family meals and a positive atmosphere during those meals were less likely to have eating disorders.
"The family dinner is an important time for families to be together and talk, it's important for family bonds, having time together that's not stressful, enjoying each other's company and being around food," said Dr. Karen Weber Cullen, a behavioral nutritionist at the Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Family meals, experts say, also offer a predictable routine and an opportunity for parents to monitor their children's behavior. "That monitoring has been related to a host of positive physical and mental health outcomes in children and adolescents," said Dr. Barbara Fiese, who studies family routines and rituals at Syracuse University.
She added that regular family meals also provide an opportunity to establish a sense of belonging to a family unit.
According to one study, family dinners may help improve the vocabulary of younger children.
Researchers at Harvard in 1996 looked at the types of activities that promoted language development. Family dinners were more important than play, story time and other family events. And those families that engaged in extended discourse at the dinner table, like story telling and explanations, rather than one-phrase comments, like "eat your vegetables," had children with better language skills, said Dr. Catherine Snow, professor of education at Harvard and the researcher of the study.
"When there is more than one adult at the table, it tends to make talk richer, topics are established by adult interest and can be extremely valuable opportunities for children to learn," Dr. Snow said.
A handful of studies have also suggested that eating as a family improves children's consumption of fruits and vegetables, grains, fiber and vitamins and minerals. Children who have family meals also eat less fried food, saturated fat and soda, studies suggest.
But Dr. Leann Birch, who has studied eating habits of children for more than two decades, said that while the research indicates that parents act as models for eating, the "data on the family dinner is pretty weak."
What's available in the household may have a greater impact on healthier food intake, she said.
With toddlers and preschoolers, it may be more stressful having them sit at the table for a long meal, she said. "Sitting down at the family table at the end of a long day with a 1-year-old and 3-year-old may not be a particularly pleasant experience. In and of itself, having a family meal without positive interaction, may not be that important," she said.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2005-05-03 03:50 pm (UTC)What kind of infectious disease work do you do? I'm also fascinated by the topic and have Laurie Garrett's book "The Coming Plague." One of my friends worked for the CDC.
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Date: 2005-05-03 03:54 pm (UTC)I'm actually a graduate student in the history of science and medicine at the university of wisconsin :) I focus on the history of infectious disease (Judith Leavitt is in the department, she wrote "The Healthiest City" and "Typhoid Mary.").
Yourself?
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Date: 2005-05-03 04:13 pm (UTC)I was an engineer for 6 years (chemical and software engineering).
Now I'm starting nursing school this August and plan to enter critical care and anesthesiology.
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Date: 2005-05-03 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-03 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-03 03:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-03 03:59 pm (UTC)Especially if you have no kids, is this "ritual" important. It's nice to remind each other, for a few minutes, that this was one of the reasons you're together.