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Science Tuesday - Staph, Therapy, Neanderthals, and the Adirondacks
Well: Germ Fighters May Lead to Hardier Germs
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, October 30, 2007
Reports of schoolchildren dying from infections with drug-resistant bacteria are enough to send parents on an antimicrobial cleaning frenzy.
But before you start waging your own personal war on single-celled organisms, be warned. Many household and personal cleaners contain ingredients that could make the resistance problem worse.
Today, hundreds of soaps, hand lotions, kitchen cleansers and even toothpastes and mouthwashes include antibacterial agents. One of the most popular is triclosan, which has been used not only in cleaners but also to coat toys, cutting boards, mouse pads, wallpaper and even dog bowls.
The temptation to blanket our families with antibacterial protection has been fueled by scary news reports about a deadly bacteria called CA-MRSA, which stands for community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Two otherwise healthy children — a seventh grader in Brooklyn and a high school football player in Virginia — died in recent weeks from MRSA infections.
The general advice for avoiding infection is basic hygiene — washing hands or using alcohol-based sanitizers, keeping scrapes covered until healed and refraining from sharing personal items like towels and cosmetics.
But some recent laboratory studies suggest that antibacterial products containing triclosan may not be the best way to stay clean. Instead of wiping out bacteria randomly, the way regular soap or alcohol-based products do, triclosan may inhibit the growth of bacteria in a way that leaves a larger proportion of resistant bacteria behind, according to lab studies at Tufts and Colorado State Universities, among others.
In fairness, none of the research has shown this effect in the real world. In fact, two randomized studies comparing people who used triclosan hand soaps with people who used plain soaps found no evidence that triclosan contributed to bacteria resistance. The soap industry says these results are far more compelling than the controlled lab studies.
But Allison E. Aiello, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, says the laboratory evidence against triclosan is compelling enough to raise questions about the products. More meaningful, she says, is that several studies show that antibacterial soaps sold to consumers are no better than plain soaps in terms of reducing illness or the count of bacteria left on hands.
“Given that there doesn’t seem to be a benefit, I think it warrants further evaluation,” said Dr. Aiello, whose review article on antibacterial soaps was published last month in the medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. “We should be questioning use of these products.”
Soap companies say the worry about triclosan takes the focus away from the real culprit: the abuse of antibiotics and the need for better hygiene in general. “The last thing we want to see is people discouraged form using beneficial hygiene products,” said Brian Sansoni, a spokesman for the Soap and Detergent Association.
In any given colony of bacteria, some portion will often have a natural resistance to antibiotics. The resistant germs might contain genetic variants that give them stronger cell walls, or pumps that allow them to spit the antibiotic back out. They survive the antibiotic onslaught, and with the susceptible bacteria out of the way, naturally resistant strains can thrive. Not only do they multiply, but some can also share their resistance with other bacteria and collect new resistance traits over time.
Natural resistance happens on such a small scale that it is generally not a health worry. But when antibiotics are overused — either by individuals or when farmers add them to animal feed — the effect is amplified. “You’re going to have this exaggerated, snowballing effect of resistant bacteria multiplying all around you,” said Marlene Zuk, a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, whose book “Riddled With Life” discusses the proliferation of antibacterial cleaners and personal products.
The question about cleaners containing triclosan is whether the agent kills germs randomly or whether it promotes the same selection pressures that can lead to antibiotic resistance. The worry is not that bacteria might become resistant to triclosan. The fear is that the same bacteria that resist triclosan can also resist certain antibiotics. And a handful of lab studies have suggested that triclosan may select for resistant bacteria.
“Here you have a substance that has been widely used in hospital settings and household settings,” said Herbert P. Schweizer, associate director for research at the department of microbiology, immunology and pathology at Colorado State University, who conducted some of the lab studies showing triclosan resistance. “The exposure to this widely used antimicrobial caused emergence of multidrug resistance in laboratory strains.”
That studies of triclosan use haven’t shown a resistance problem in the community doesn’t mean it won’t happen, said Dr. Stuart B. Levy, a microbiology professor at Tufts who is president of the Alliance for Prudent Use of Antibiotics.
“I’m the first to say we haven’t seen a difference yet in the home,” Dr. Levy said. “We know from antibiotic data that if it happens in a lab it will eventually happen outside the lab.”
Recent entries from Tara Parker-Pope’s daily blog, at nytimes.com/health.
Behavior: How to Figure Out When Therapy Is Over
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D., The New York Times, October 30, 2007
If you think it’s hard to end a relationship with a lover or spouse, try breaking up with your psychotherapist.
A writer friend of mine recently tried and found it surprisingly difficult. Several months after landing a book contract, she realized she was in trouble.
“I was completely paralyzed and couldn’t write,” she said, as I recall. “I had to do something right away, so I decided to get myself into psychotherapy.”
What began with a simple case of writer’s block turned into seven years of intensive therapy.
Over all, she found the therapy very helpful. She finished a second novel and felt that her relationship with her husband was stronger. When she broached the topic of ending treatment, her therapist strongly resisted, which upset the patient. “Why do I need therapy,” she wanted to know, “if I’m feeling good?”
Millions of Americans are in psychotherapy, and my friend’s experience brings up two related, perplexing questions. How do you know when you are healthy enough to say goodbye to your therapist? And how should a therapist handle it?
With rare exceptions, the ultimate aim of all good psychotherapists is, well, to make themselves obsolete. After all, whatever drove you to therapy in the first place — depression, anxiety, relationship problems, you name it — the common goal of treatment is to feel and function better independent of your therapist.
To put it bluntly, good therapy is supposed to come to an end.
But when? And how is the patient to know? Is the criterion for termination “cure” or is it just feeling well enough to be able to call it a day and live with the inevitable limitations and problems we all have?
The term “cure,” I think, is illusory — even undesirable — because there will always be problems to repair. Having no problems is an unrealistic goal. It’s more important for patients to be able to deal with their problems and to handle adversity when it inevitably arises.
Still, even when patients feel that they have accomplished something important in therapy and feel “good enough,” it is not always easy to say goodbye to a therapist.
Not long ago, I evaluated a successful lawyer who had been in psychotherapy for nine years. He had entered therapy, he told me, because he lacked a sense of direction and had no intimate relationships. But for six or seven years, he had felt that he and his therapist were just wasting their time. Therapy had become a routine, like going to the gym.
“It’s not that anything bad has happened,” he said. “It’s that nothing is happening.”
This was no longer psychotherapy, but an expensive form of chatting. So why did he stay with it? In part, I think, because therapy is essentially an unequal relationship. Patients tend to be dependent on their therapists. Even if the therapy is problematic or unsatisfying, that might be preferable to giving it up altogether or starting all over again with an unknown therapist.
Beyond that, patients often become stuck in therapy for the very reason that they started it. For example, a dependent patient cannot leave his therapist; a masochistic patient suffers silently in treatment with a withholding therapist; a narcissistic patient eager to be liked fears challenging his therapist, and so on.
Of course, you may ask why therapists in such cases do not call a timeout and question whether the treatment is stalled or isn’t working. I can think of several reasons.
To start with, therapists are generally an enthusiastic bunch who can always identify new issues for you to work on. Then, of course, there is an unspoken motive: therapists have an inherent financial interest in keeping their patients in treatment.
And therapists have unmet emotional needs just like everyone else, which certain patients satisfy. Therapists may find some patients so interesting, exciting or fun that they have a hard time letting go of them.
So the best way to answer the question, “Am I done with therapy?” is to confront it head on. Periodically take stock of your progress and ask your therapist for direct feedback.
How close are you to reaching your goals? How much better do you feel? Are your relationships and work more satisfying? You can even ask close friends or your partner whether they see any change.
If you think you are better and are contemplating ending treatment but the therapist disagrees, it is time for an independent consultation. Indeed, after a consultation, my writer friend terminated her therapy and has no regrets about it.
The lawyer finally mustered the courage to tell his therapist that although he enjoyed talking with her, he really felt that the time had come to stop. To his surprise, she agreed.
If, unlike those two, you still cannot decide to stay or leave, consider an experiment. Take a break from therapy for a few months and see what life is like without it.
That way, you’ll have a chance to gauge the effects of therapy without actually being in it (and paying for it). Remember, you can always go back.
Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
Observatory: Neanderthal Bones Make a Case for Redheads
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, October 30, 2007
An artist painting a Neanderthal portrait would be pretty well stumped. Just bones exist of this hominid species, which lived in Europe and Asia and became extinct 30,000 years ago. So other than some general anatomical features — a large nose and heavy brow among them — not much is known about how they looked.
But by analyzing DNA from some of those old bones, European researchers have helped fill in the picture. Some Neanderthals, they suggest in a study published online by Science, were fair-skinned and redheaded.
Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona and Holger Römpler of the University of Leipzig in Germany and colleagues report the finding. They found a variation in a fragment of a Neanderthal gene that regulates pigmentation of skin and hair through melanin production and discovered that it had effects similar to those from variations in the same gene in humans.
“The inference is that the Neanderthals had red hair just like modern Europeans,” Dr. Lalueza-Fox said.
The researchers used fossils from two sites, including a 43,000-year-old one in northern Spain that because of extremely stable temperatures, has well-preserved DNA. The researchers found the genetic variation in two samples.
Finding the variant “doesn’t tell you the functional significance,” Dr. Lalueza-Fox said. By inserting copies of the DNA fragment into pigment-producing cells in a laboratory dish, they found that the mutation had the same effect, cutting melanin production, as human mutations did. “Most likely, it would produce in Neanderthals the same range of hair color that we see in northern Europeans today,” he said.
The finding also suggests that redheadedness would have evolved separately in Neanderthals and humans, at different times and through different genetic variations. The conditions that drove the evolution were likely the same. Fair skin would have been advantageous in northerly latitudes because it would have let more sunlight into the skin to manufacture vitamin D. In the north, large amounts of melanins to were not needed to protect skin from ultraviolet light.
Logging Is Part of a Plan to Preserve Adirondacks
By ANTHONY DePALMA, The New York Times, October 29, 2007
ADIRONDACK FOREST PRESERVE — Late in the year, when the campers are gone but the hunters have not yet arrived, timber trucks rule Boreas Road in the heart of the Adirondacks, barging through the morning mists with 70,000 pounds of fresh-cut fir and spruce strapped to their backs.
“That’s one of ours,” said Michael T. Carr, a 44-year-old bear of a man driving a green S.U.V. headed west on Boreas Road as one of the timber trucks barreled eastward.
That is a jarring statement coming from Mr. Carr, who is not a lumber man, or paper company executive, but executive director of the Adirondack chapter of the Nature Conservancy, one of the world’s biggest environmental groups and, since June, the owner of 161,000 acres of highly prized Adirondack wild lands.
The conservancy entered the timber business when it purchased the land from Finch, Pruyn & Company, which had held it since the Civil War. As part of that $110 million deal, the conservancy agreed to continue logging to supply wood to the Finch Paper mill in Glens Falls, N.Y., for the next 20 years.
The Finch, Pruyn (pronounced Prine) lands, considered the last remaining large privately owned parcels in Adirondack Park, are an ecological marvel, containing 144 miles of river, 70 lakes and ponds, more than 80 mountains and a vast unbroken wilderness that only loggers and a few hunters have ever seen. The property also contains unmatched natural features like the blue ledges of the Hudson River Gorge, OK Slip Falls and Boreas Pond, with its stunning views of the Adirondack high peaks, which naturalists have dreamed of protecting for decades.
The Adirondack Explorer, a local newspaper, called the transaction “the deal of the young century.” Peter Bauer, executive director of the Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks, said the conservancy’s handling of the land “will have a huge impact on what kind of park we have in the future.”
Environmentalists cheered when the conservancy swooped in to buy the Finch holdings, but a stark reality is now setting in. Not all 161,000 acres will be preserved as public wilderness. The terms of the pulp supply agreement are confidential, but foresters with knowledge of the deal said the conservancy could cut at least 65,000 tons of pulpwood trees a year for the mill — which is about 15 percent less than Finch cut in the Adirondacks last year. In addition, maples and other hardwoods could be cut under strict certified forest management guidelines.
The conservancy expects eventually to sell much of the land to the state. But to pay the enormous debt it incurred and the $1 million in annual property taxes, the group will, in the near term, have to sell some portion of the property to private owners. While those buyers will not be allowed to build on the land, they will be able to keep out the public. Some small parcels near existing hamlets might even be sold for housing or commercial development, Mr. Carr said.
Mr. Carr expects his decisions about which parcels to sell and to whom will anger as many people as they excite.
“This is not a throw-the-gates-open-to-the-public kind of acquisition,” Mr. Carr said. A team of scientists is now conducting a rapid ecological assessment of the land. Final decisions will not be announced until next fall, Mr. Carr said, and they will be driven not by concerns about recreational opportunities, or economic development, but “by science.”
“We have no intention of making everyone happy,” he said.
He also said that he realizes that people might be confused by a conservation organization being in the timber business.
“Right now, people are not sure if we’re going to cut trees or hug them,” Mr. Carr said. He pointed out that in recent years wood supply deals have become accepted aspects of land preservation efforts, and the economics of this deal make logging — according to high standards of forest sustainability — absolutely essential.
Overcoming the perception that the conservancy has no business cutting trees is just one challenge Mr. Carr faces in managing one of the most complicated land deals ever attempted in the Northeast. Dealing with close public scrutiny is another. The conservancy came under criticism after The Washington Post published a series of articles in 2003 that focused on the group’s transactions, particularly a deal in Texas, where it drilled for natural gas on sensitive lands it had purchased.
But the most intense pressure is coming from local communities, environmental organizations and special interest groups, all clamoring to stake their interest in the property. Mr. Carr’s list of petitioners is long: raft guides, float plane pilots, hunting clubs, loggers, hikers, school superintendents, buffalo ranchers and municipal golf course operators looking to expand. “Mike Carr has created a five-year nightmare for himself in trying to decide how to unload this property,” said John Sheehan, spokesman for the Adirondack Council, a nonprofit environmental organization. The impact of those decisions on the Adirondacks and the people who live, work and play there, he said, will be immeasurable.
But overlapping regulations and competing interests abound within the Adirondack Park, the six million-acre Vermont-size slab of New York State that is a century-old experiment in conservation.
Created by the State Legislature in the late 19th century, the park is an unusual mix of public and private lands designed to preserve exquisite mountain wilderness and a rugged way of life. As state purchases added up, the conflict between conservation and economic development intensified, with some local officials arguing that enough property had already been protected.
Over the last decade, many American paper companies in the Northeast changed the way they operated. They sold off their forestlands, creating historic opportunities for governments or conservation groups to acquire vast tracts of woodlands. During the administration of Gov. George E. Pataki, more than 660,000 acres in the Adirondacks were protected.
The Finch, Pruyn lands, while not the largest parcels to change hands, are in some ways among the most important, said Michelle L. Brown, conservation scientist for the conservancy, because they filled in many missing pieces of one of the largest northern forests left in the world.
“What’s most impressive to me is the connectivity,” Ms. Brown said. “Everything’s intact — the rivers, bogs, wetlands and forest all come together.”
Seen from Tom Helms’s 30-year-old Cessna 206 seaplane, the Finch, Pruyn lands are a mountain-size screen saver, with lines of softwood green surrounding rainbow pixels of autumn-colored hardwoods. Although Finch has cut trees here for 150 years, almost no signs of commercial timber operations are visible from 1,500 feet in the air.
“It’s the nicest piece of land in the Adirondacks that the state doesn’t own,” Mr. Helms said.
Leonard J. Cronin, Adirondack forest manager for Finch, said the company cut 3,533 acres of woodlands in the Adirondacks last year. Of that, 66 acres were clear-cut.
In other Adirondack land deals, the state has purchased easements restricting new construction on timberland. State officials said they are studying the Finch lands now for possible purchases. The holdings are spread across 31 towns, and money from the state’s Environmental Protection Fund can be used for land acquisitions if local communities do not object.
Existing leases with private hunting clubs that cover 130,000 acres of the 161,000 in the tract are another big issue. One recent morning, Mr. Carr was out surveying the lands when he ran into David Hubert of Queensbury, a member of the Gooley Club, one of the oldest sportsmen’s groups in the Adirondacks. Mr. Hubert, 67, said he was worried about the future of the 16,000 acres the club has leased for the last 50 years.
“Obviously, we’d like to see it put to use in the same fashion as it is now,” Mr. Hubert said. He had just come back from hunting woodcock with his Brittany spaniel. “I’d hate to see it become non-game-producing state land.”
Mr. Carr has spent months listening to leaseholders and community leaders. Both the Adirondack Council and the Adirondack Mountain Club have already made their desires known: They want the state to buy about half of the 161,000 acres for forest preserve, with most of the rest sold with conservation easements to private buyers.
And those groups agree that woodland crews should continue cutting trees for the conservancy. Mr. Carr said he hopes that shows there no longer needs to be a choice between cutting and conservation.
“At this scale, and with this much land,” he said, “there’s room for both.”
Correction: October 30, 2007
An article yesterday about the future of the 161,000 acres of woodlands in the Adirondack Park of New York that were recently bought by the Nature Conservancy misstated the property tax status of parkland that the state buys from private parties for preservation. It remains subject to local property taxes; it is not removed from the rolls.
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, October 30, 2007
Reports of schoolchildren dying from infections with drug-resistant bacteria are enough to send parents on an antimicrobial cleaning frenzy.
But before you start waging your own personal war on single-celled organisms, be warned. Many household and personal cleaners contain ingredients that could make the resistance problem worse.
Today, hundreds of soaps, hand lotions, kitchen cleansers and even toothpastes and mouthwashes include antibacterial agents. One of the most popular is triclosan, which has been used not only in cleaners but also to coat toys, cutting boards, mouse pads, wallpaper and even dog bowls.
The temptation to blanket our families with antibacterial protection has been fueled by scary news reports about a deadly bacteria called CA-MRSA, which stands for community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Two otherwise healthy children — a seventh grader in Brooklyn and a high school football player in Virginia — died in recent weeks from MRSA infections.
The general advice for avoiding infection is basic hygiene — washing hands or using alcohol-based sanitizers, keeping scrapes covered until healed and refraining from sharing personal items like towels and cosmetics.
But some recent laboratory studies suggest that antibacterial products containing triclosan may not be the best way to stay clean. Instead of wiping out bacteria randomly, the way regular soap or alcohol-based products do, triclosan may inhibit the growth of bacteria in a way that leaves a larger proportion of resistant bacteria behind, according to lab studies at Tufts and Colorado State Universities, among others.
In fairness, none of the research has shown this effect in the real world. In fact, two randomized studies comparing people who used triclosan hand soaps with people who used plain soaps found no evidence that triclosan contributed to bacteria resistance. The soap industry says these results are far more compelling than the controlled lab studies.
But Allison E. Aiello, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, says the laboratory evidence against triclosan is compelling enough to raise questions about the products. More meaningful, she says, is that several studies show that antibacterial soaps sold to consumers are no better than plain soaps in terms of reducing illness or the count of bacteria left on hands.
“Given that there doesn’t seem to be a benefit, I think it warrants further evaluation,” said Dr. Aiello, whose review article on antibacterial soaps was published last month in the medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. “We should be questioning use of these products.”
Soap companies say the worry about triclosan takes the focus away from the real culprit: the abuse of antibiotics and the need for better hygiene in general. “The last thing we want to see is people discouraged form using beneficial hygiene products,” said Brian Sansoni, a spokesman for the Soap and Detergent Association.
In any given colony of bacteria, some portion will often have a natural resistance to antibiotics. The resistant germs might contain genetic variants that give them stronger cell walls, or pumps that allow them to spit the antibiotic back out. They survive the antibiotic onslaught, and with the susceptible bacteria out of the way, naturally resistant strains can thrive. Not only do they multiply, but some can also share their resistance with other bacteria and collect new resistance traits over time.
Natural resistance happens on such a small scale that it is generally not a health worry. But when antibiotics are overused — either by individuals or when farmers add them to animal feed — the effect is amplified. “You’re going to have this exaggerated, snowballing effect of resistant bacteria multiplying all around you,” said Marlene Zuk, a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, whose book “Riddled With Life” discusses the proliferation of antibacterial cleaners and personal products.
The question about cleaners containing triclosan is whether the agent kills germs randomly or whether it promotes the same selection pressures that can lead to antibiotic resistance. The worry is not that bacteria might become resistant to triclosan. The fear is that the same bacteria that resist triclosan can also resist certain antibiotics. And a handful of lab studies have suggested that triclosan may select for resistant bacteria.
“Here you have a substance that has been widely used in hospital settings and household settings,” said Herbert P. Schweizer, associate director for research at the department of microbiology, immunology and pathology at Colorado State University, who conducted some of the lab studies showing triclosan resistance. “The exposure to this widely used antimicrobial caused emergence of multidrug resistance in laboratory strains.”
That studies of triclosan use haven’t shown a resistance problem in the community doesn’t mean it won’t happen, said Dr. Stuart B. Levy, a microbiology professor at Tufts who is president of the Alliance for Prudent Use of Antibiotics.
“I’m the first to say we haven’t seen a difference yet in the home,” Dr. Levy said. “We know from antibiotic data that if it happens in a lab it will eventually happen outside the lab.”
Recent entries from Tara Parker-Pope’s daily blog, at nytimes.com/health.
Behavior: How to Figure Out When Therapy Is Over
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D., The New York Times, October 30, 2007
If you think it’s hard to end a relationship with a lover or spouse, try breaking up with your psychotherapist.
A writer friend of mine recently tried and found it surprisingly difficult. Several months after landing a book contract, she realized she was in trouble.
“I was completely paralyzed and couldn’t write,” she said, as I recall. “I had to do something right away, so I decided to get myself into psychotherapy.”
What began with a simple case of writer’s block turned into seven years of intensive therapy.
Over all, she found the therapy very helpful. She finished a second novel and felt that her relationship with her husband was stronger. When she broached the topic of ending treatment, her therapist strongly resisted, which upset the patient. “Why do I need therapy,” she wanted to know, “if I’m feeling good?”
Millions of Americans are in psychotherapy, and my friend’s experience brings up two related, perplexing questions. How do you know when you are healthy enough to say goodbye to your therapist? And how should a therapist handle it?
With rare exceptions, the ultimate aim of all good psychotherapists is, well, to make themselves obsolete. After all, whatever drove you to therapy in the first place — depression, anxiety, relationship problems, you name it — the common goal of treatment is to feel and function better independent of your therapist.
To put it bluntly, good therapy is supposed to come to an end.
But when? And how is the patient to know? Is the criterion for termination “cure” or is it just feeling well enough to be able to call it a day and live with the inevitable limitations and problems we all have?
The term “cure,” I think, is illusory — even undesirable — because there will always be problems to repair. Having no problems is an unrealistic goal. It’s more important for patients to be able to deal with their problems and to handle adversity when it inevitably arises.
Still, even when patients feel that they have accomplished something important in therapy and feel “good enough,” it is not always easy to say goodbye to a therapist.
Not long ago, I evaluated a successful lawyer who had been in psychotherapy for nine years. He had entered therapy, he told me, because he lacked a sense of direction and had no intimate relationships. But for six or seven years, he had felt that he and his therapist were just wasting their time. Therapy had become a routine, like going to the gym.
“It’s not that anything bad has happened,” he said. “It’s that nothing is happening.”
This was no longer psychotherapy, but an expensive form of chatting. So why did he stay with it? In part, I think, because therapy is essentially an unequal relationship. Patients tend to be dependent on their therapists. Even if the therapy is problematic or unsatisfying, that might be preferable to giving it up altogether or starting all over again with an unknown therapist.
Beyond that, patients often become stuck in therapy for the very reason that they started it. For example, a dependent patient cannot leave his therapist; a masochistic patient suffers silently in treatment with a withholding therapist; a narcissistic patient eager to be liked fears challenging his therapist, and so on.
Of course, you may ask why therapists in such cases do not call a timeout and question whether the treatment is stalled or isn’t working. I can think of several reasons.
To start with, therapists are generally an enthusiastic bunch who can always identify new issues for you to work on. Then, of course, there is an unspoken motive: therapists have an inherent financial interest in keeping their patients in treatment.
And therapists have unmet emotional needs just like everyone else, which certain patients satisfy. Therapists may find some patients so interesting, exciting or fun that they have a hard time letting go of them.
So the best way to answer the question, “Am I done with therapy?” is to confront it head on. Periodically take stock of your progress and ask your therapist for direct feedback.
How close are you to reaching your goals? How much better do you feel? Are your relationships and work more satisfying? You can even ask close friends or your partner whether they see any change.
If you think you are better and are contemplating ending treatment but the therapist disagrees, it is time for an independent consultation. Indeed, after a consultation, my writer friend terminated her therapy and has no regrets about it.
The lawyer finally mustered the courage to tell his therapist that although he enjoyed talking with her, he really felt that the time had come to stop. To his surprise, she agreed.
If, unlike those two, you still cannot decide to stay or leave, consider an experiment. Take a break from therapy for a few months and see what life is like without it.
That way, you’ll have a chance to gauge the effects of therapy without actually being in it (and paying for it). Remember, you can always go back.
Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
Observatory: Neanderthal Bones Make a Case for Redheads
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, October 30, 2007
An artist painting a Neanderthal portrait would be pretty well stumped. Just bones exist of this hominid species, which lived in Europe and Asia and became extinct 30,000 years ago. So other than some general anatomical features — a large nose and heavy brow among them — not much is known about how they looked.
But by analyzing DNA from some of those old bones, European researchers have helped fill in the picture. Some Neanderthals, they suggest in a study published online by Science, were fair-skinned and redheaded.
Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona and Holger Römpler of the University of Leipzig in Germany and colleagues report the finding. They found a variation in a fragment of a Neanderthal gene that regulates pigmentation of skin and hair through melanin production and discovered that it had effects similar to those from variations in the same gene in humans.
“The inference is that the Neanderthals had red hair just like modern Europeans,” Dr. Lalueza-Fox said.
The researchers used fossils from two sites, including a 43,000-year-old one in northern Spain that because of extremely stable temperatures, has well-preserved DNA. The researchers found the genetic variation in two samples.
Finding the variant “doesn’t tell you the functional significance,” Dr. Lalueza-Fox said. By inserting copies of the DNA fragment into pigment-producing cells in a laboratory dish, they found that the mutation had the same effect, cutting melanin production, as human mutations did. “Most likely, it would produce in Neanderthals the same range of hair color that we see in northern Europeans today,” he said.
The finding also suggests that redheadedness would have evolved separately in Neanderthals and humans, at different times and through different genetic variations. The conditions that drove the evolution were likely the same. Fair skin would have been advantageous in northerly latitudes because it would have let more sunlight into the skin to manufacture vitamin D. In the north, large amounts of melanins to were not needed to protect skin from ultraviolet light.
Logging Is Part of a Plan to Preserve Adirondacks
By ANTHONY DePALMA, The New York Times, October 29, 2007
ADIRONDACK FOREST PRESERVE — Late in the year, when the campers are gone but the hunters have not yet arrived, timber trucks rule Boreas Road in the heart of the Adirondacks, barging through the morning mists with 70,000 pounds of fresh-cut fir and spruce strapped to their backs.
“That’s one of ours,” said Michael T. Carr, a 44-year-old bear of a man driving a green S.U.V. headed west on Boreas Road as one of the timber trucks barreled eastward.
That is a jarring statement coming from Mr. Carr, who is not a lumber man, or paper company executive, but executive director of the Adirondack chapter of the Nature Conservancy, one of the world’s biggest environmental groups and, since June, the owner of 161,000 acres of highly prized Adirondack wild lands.
The conservancy entered the timber business when it purchased the land from Finch, Pruyn & Company, which had held it since the Civil War. As part of that $110 million deal, the conservancy agreed to continue logging to supply wood to the Finch Paper mill in Glens Falls, N.Y., for the next 20 years.
The Finch, Pruyn (pronounced Prine) lands, considered the last remaining large privately owned parcels in Adirondack Park, are an ecological marvel, containing 144 miles of river, 70 lakes and ponds, more than 80 mountains and a vast unbroken wilderness that only loggers and a few hunters have ever seen. The property also contains unmatched natural features like the blue ledges of the Hudson River Gorge, OK Slip Falls and Boreas Pond, with its stunning views of the Adirondack high peaks, which naturalists have dreamed of protecting for decades.
The Adirondack Explorer, a local newspaper, called the transaction “the deal of the young century.” Peter Bauer, executive director of the Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks, said the conservancy’s handling of the land “will have a huge impact on what kind of park we have in the future.”
Environmentalists cheered when the conservancy swooped in to buy the Finch holdings, but a stark reality is now setting in. Not all 161,000 acres will be preserved as public wilderness. The terms of the pulp supply agreement are confidential, but foresters with knowledge of the deal said the conservancy could cut at least 65,000 tons of pulpwood trees a year for the mill — which is about 15 percent less than Finch cut in the Adirondacks last year. In addition, maples and other hardwoods could be cut under strict certified forest management guidelines.
The conservancy expects eventually to sell much of the land to the state. But to pay the enormous debt it incurred and the $1 million in annual property taxes, the group will, in the near term, have to sell some portion of the property to private owners. While those buyers will not be allowed to build on the land, they will be able to keep out the public. Some small parcels near existing hamlets might even be sold for housing or commercial development, Mr. Carr said.
Mr. Carr expects his decisions about which parcels to sell and to whom will anger as many people as they excite.
“This is not a throw-the-gates-open-to-the-public kind of acquisition,” Mr. Carr said. A team of scientists is now conducting a rapid ecological assessment of the land. Final decisions will not be announced until next fall, Mr. Carr said, and they will be driven not by concerns about recreational opportunities, or economic development, but “by science.”
“We have no intention of making everyone happy,” he said.
He also said that he realizes that people might be confused by a conservation organization being in the timber business.
“Right now, people are not sure if we’re going to cut trees or hug them,” Mr. Carr said. He pointed out that in recent years wood supply deals have become accepted aspects of land preservation efforts, and the economics of this deal make logging — according to high standards of forest sustainability — absolutely essential.
Overcoming the perception that the conservancy has no business cutting trees is just one challenge Mr. Carr faces in managing one of the most complicated land deals ever attempted in the Northeast. Dealing with close public scrutiny is another. The conservancy came under criticism after The Washington Post published a series of articles in 2003 that focused on the group’s transactions, particularly a deal in Texas, where it drilled for natural gas on sensitive lands it had purchased.
But the most intense pressure is coming from local communities, environmental organizations and special interest groups, all clamoring to stake their interest in the property. Mr. Carr’s list of petitioners is long: raft guides, float plane pilots, hunting clubs, loggers, hikers, school superintendents, buffalo ranchers and municipal golf course operators looking to expand. “Mike Carr has created a five-year nightmare for himself in trying to decide how to unload this property,” said John Sheehan, spokesman for the Adirondack Council, a nonprofit environmental organization. The impact of those decisions on the Adirondacks and the people who live, work and play there, he said, will be immeasurable.
But overlapping regulations and competing interests abound within the Adirondack Park, the six million-acre Vermont-size slab of New York State that is a century-old experiment in conservation.
Created by the State Legislature in the late 19th century, the park is an unusual mix of public and private lands designed to preserve exquisite mountain wilderness and a rugged way of life. As state purchases added up, the conflict between conservation and economic development intensified, with some local officials arguing that enough property had already been protected.
Over the last decade, many American paper companies in the Northeast changed the way they operated. They sold off their forestlands, creating historic opportunities for governments or conservation groups to acquire vast tracts of woodlands. During the administration of Gov. George E. Pataki, more than 660,000 acres in the Adirondacks were protected.
The Finch, Pruyn lands, while not the largest parcels to change hands, are in some ways among the most important, said Michelle L. Brown, conservation scientist for the conservancy, because they filled in many missing pieces of one of the largest northern forests left in the world.
“What’s most impressive to me is the connectivity,” Ms. Brown said. “Everything’s intact — the rivers, bogs, wetlands and forest all come together.”
Seen from Tom Helms’s 30-year-old Cessna 206 seaplane, the Finch, Pruyn lands are a mountain-size screen saver, with lines of softwood green surrounding rainbow pixels of autumn-colored hardwoods. Although Finch has cut trees here for 150 years, almost no signs of commercial timber operations are visible from 1,500 feet in the air.
“It’s the nicest piece of land in the Adirondacks that the state doesn’t own,” Mr. Helms said.
Leonard J. Cronin, Adirondack forest manager for Finch, said the company cut 3,533 acres of woodlands in the Adirondacks last year. Of that, 66 acres were clear-cut.
In other Adirondack land deals, the state has purchased easements restricting new construction on timberland. State officials said they are studying the Finch lands now for possible purchases. The holdings are spread across 31 towns, and money from the state’s Environmental Protection Fund can be used for land acquisitions if local communities do not object.
Existing leases with private hunting clubs that cover 130,000 acres of the 161,000 in the tract are another big issue. One recent morning, Mr. Carr was out surveying the lands when he ran into David Hubert of Queensbury, a member of the Gooley Club, one of the oldest sportsmen’s groups in the Adirondacks. Mr. Hubert, 67, said he was worried about the future of the 16,000 acres the club has leased for the last 50 years.
“Obviously, we’d like to see it put to use in the same fashion as it is now,” Mr. Hubert said. He had just come back from hunting woodcock with his Brittany spaniel. “I’d hate to see it become non-game-producing state land.”
Mr. Carr has spent months listening to leaseholders and community leaders. Both the Adirondack Council and the Adirondack Mountain Club have already made their desires known: They want the state to buy about half of the 161,000 acres for forest preserve, with most of the rest sold with conservation easements to private buyers.
And those groups agree that woodland crews should continue cutting trees for the conservancy. Mr. Carr said he hopes that shows there no longer needs to be a choice between cutting and conservation.
“At this scale, and with this much land,” he said, “there’s room for both.”
Correction: October 30, 2007
An article yesterday about the future of the 161,000 acres of woodlands in the Adirondack Park of New York that were recently bought by the Nature Conservancy misstated the property tax status of parkland that the state buys from private parties for preservation. It remains subject to local property taxes; it is not removed from the rolls.