Story of Impact - NYAS

Runners take off from the starting line.

Researchers continue to advance the science behind doping in sports and are developing detection measures to catch the cheaters. But will it be enough to maintain the integrity of the Olympic Games?

Published August 1, 2004

By Diane Kightlinger

Image courtesy of zhengzaishanchu via stock.adobe.com.

Crossing the finish line in Athens this August should mark the climax of the athletes’ quest to put native ability, training, perseverance, and courage to work in pursuit of their Olympic moment. And provided that’s all the athletes bring into play, they won’t mind the team waiting on the sidelines to signal the start of the next challenge – the contest between the dopers and the testers.

The result can topple victors, strip medals, and bar athletes from competing, possibly for life. For now, the competitors know only that sometime between the victory lap and awards ceremony and press conference, the doping control team will take aside the top four finishers and two other randomly selected athletes to find out if they played true.

Drug testing in the Olympic Games began in 1968, a response to illness and death caused by widespread amphetamine use in prior decades. Since then, the estimate of how many athletes use performance-enhancing drugs in sport has ranged from almost none to almost all. Look at test results and the dopers amount to less than 3% of athletes; ask coaches and trainers and the number can rise as high as 90%, according to “Winning at Any Cost: Doping in Olympic Sports,” a September 2000 report released by the National Center of Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University.

Banned Substances

Today the pharmacopoeia of substances banned at the Olympic Games includes not only stimulants, but narcotics, anabolic steroids, beta-2 agonists, peptide hormones such as EPO (erythropoietin) and hGH (human growth hormone), and a shelf-full of masking agents. Add designer drugs like the steroid THG (tetrahydrogestrinone), around which the Balco scandal churns, plus the specter of gene doping, anticipated by the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and the testers face increasing odds of losing the detection game.

But don’t count them out just yet. The researchers and administrators focused on catching dopers have won important battles in recent years by developing tests for THG and EPO and by using them to catch abusers. Testers are increasingly taking a proactive stance, anticipating their opponents’ next moves and the techniques needed to identify illegal substances and methods. And the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in November 1999 should soon result in near-universal standards for doping control across sports federations and countries.

Whether in- or out-of-competition, sample collection today is a painstaking ritual overseen by the athlete, his representative, doping control agents, and independent observers who act as the public’s eyes and ears. The athlete selects a sealed collection vessel and provides a 75-ml urine sample in view of a doping control officer (DCO) of the same gender. After dividing the urine into A and B bottles, the competitor seals them securely and makes sure the DCO records the correct code on the control form. Blood tests employ a phlebotomist and similar procedures to obtain 2 tubes of at least 2-ml each.

Gaming the Tests

On site, the DCO checks the urine’s pH and specific gravity to ensure it will prove suitable for analysis, and may also screen the blood sample for reticulocytes, hemoglobin, and hematocrit. Athletes must document all prescription and nonprescription drugs, vitamins, minerals, and supplements they take; then all parties sign the doping control form and the samples are sent by courier for analysis at one of 31 laboratories accredited by WADA.

But testing during the Olympic Games accomplishes only so much: It won’t catch athletes who use steroids to bulk up during training but stop months before the Games, or those who use EPO much more than a few days before competition. “Ninety to 95% of the solution is effective, year-round, no-notice testing,” according to Casey Wade, WADA education director. “Give athletes more than 24 hours’ notice and they can provide a sample all right, but it’s going to be free from detection.”

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) requires most Olympic athletes to make themselves available for doping tests anytime and anywhere for one year prior to the opening of the Games. WADA plans some 2,400 tests this year, with a selection process based on the requirements of each sport, the substances an athlete might use, when the abuse might occur, and how long the body will take to clear the drug from the athlete’s system before the Athens Games start.

Once the Olympic village opens for the Games, the IOC will take charge of testing at sporting venues. WADA will continue to conduct out-of-competition tests inside and outside Greece, however, and at non-Olympic venues in Athens to determine which athletes will be allowed to take part in the Games.

The Key to Meaningful Doping Tests

The key to meaningful doping tests lies in the lab’s ability to detect substances and also to document the chain of custody meticulously enough to meet the burden of proof in court cases. Once the samples arrive in the lab, scientists store the B bottle for use in confirmation tests, and open the A bottle, withdraw multiple aliquots, and test for substances on the WADA Prohibited List. The U.S. Olympic Lab at the University of California at Los Angeles, a preeminent testing facility, employs an array of mass spectrometry techniques to work through the samples.

“Mass spectrometry breaks up the molecules and sorts the resulting fragments by mass,” said Don Catlin, the lab’s director. “We can identify steroids by chemical moieties with characteristic masses but, for example, THG was modified in such a way that it lacked those characteristic fragments, making it difficult to spot on conventional tests.”

THG posed only one of many challenges the lab has faced and overcome. Catlin said that the detection of EPO and hGH abuse is particularly vexing. EPO increases oxygen delivery to the muscles, and hGH enhances muscle growth. As potent substances, both appear only in minute quantities in body fluids.

“With methyltestosterone, you might have 500 nanograms per ml of urine; with EPO, you might have less than a nanogram,” explained Catlin. “You have to extract the EPO from the urine, and the less there is, the more difficult it is to extract with good recovery. Then you’re faced with the final jolt: EPO has a molecular weight of 30,000 to 35,000, whereas most of the drugs we’re working with have molecular weights of 300. EPO molecules are too large for our mass spectrometers, which means we have to use different approaches based on molecular biology. It’s really tough work.”

Blood and Gene Doping

A long-acting form of EPO, darbepoetin, became available shortly before the Winter Games in 2002. The existing test for EPO could detect darbepoetin, but Catlin chose not to announce it – catching two gold medalists. Both were stripped of medals for events in which they tested positive in Salt Lake City and, later, of all medals they won at the Games.

For hGH, scientists, lab directors, physicians, and administrators have not yet agreed on a test, but that doesn’t mean athletes can freely abuse the substance. WADA has placed hGH on the Prohibited List, and DCOs will draw, freeze and store blood samples during the Athens Games for later analysis.

In addition to banning dozens of substances, the Prohibited List also bans methods such as blood and gene doping. The proliferation of gene therapy trials, which now number in the hundreds, and the promise of gene transfer methods to build skeletal muscle and increase red blood cell production, make genetic approaches to enhancing performance an encroaching reality.

“All the technology is in the medical literature,” said Theodore Friedmann, director of the Program in Human Gene Therapy at the University of California at San Diego. “The genes are all available or you can make them. The vectors, the viral tools, are all published and available. All it takes is three or four reasonably well-trained post-docs and a million or two dollars.”

On and Off: Inducible Genes

With that in mind, researchers are already focusing on several approaches for gene doping tests. Geoffrey Goldspink, professor, University College Medical School, London, England, described some of the possibilities being pursued. If an adenovirus or lentovirus is used as the vector to transmit a gene such as hGH, Goldspink said, the virus might also move into cells in the blood or mucus. A scrape of the inside of the cheek, followed by real-time RT-PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction), could produce sufficient sample for scientists to distinguish the wild-type virus from the engineered version.

In addition, some gene transfer techniques may involve inducible genes, which can be switched on and off. Without a mechanism to stop production, EPO could swamp the body with red blood cells, for instance. But introducing a gene that can handle the switching function might give testers a detectable bit of DNA on the vector. Friedmann cautioned that although these approaches represent reasonable first steps, new technology will be required to characterize the system and enable researchers to predict when vectors or genes or gene products will appear and then detect them.

Whatever techniques ultimately prove viable, they are likely to drive one change already taking place: the shift from urine to blood tests for detection. “Some of the new tests that we are developing are based on the blood matrix,” said Olivier Rabin, WADA science director. “This is clearly going to be used to detect new substances, to better detect blood transfusions, and also in the future to detect gene doping.”

The Magnitude of the Doping Problem

For decades, the magnitude of the doping problem among Olympic sports and the rewards made possible by ignoring the issue tarnished every medal awarded, even if the athlete tested clean. Tom Murray, bioethicist and president of the Hastings Center in Garrison, New York, and a longtime member of the committee entrusted with drug control for the U.S. Olympic team, said “I think for most of the time, drug control was just seen as a nuisance that they’d rather have go away. Their concerns were marketing and bringing home medals. Drug control was just a pain.”

Since the inception of quasi-independent organizations such as WADA and the national anti-doping agencies, which are funded only partly by their respective Olympic committees, many of the problems cited in the CASA report of 2000 have been alleviated. WADA employs a standard protocol for establishing the Prohibited List; accredits testing labs around the world; sends independent observers to oversee major events; and provides timely notice of banned substances and methods for athletes, coaches, and administrators. In addition, a detailed approach to reporting and managing results insures legal recourse and standard sanctions for athletes who test positive.

Making Strides

On the other hand, the $3 million in research grants doled out by WADA each year, combined with $2 million from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, still runs far shy of the $50 million to $100 million collaborative effort over five years that the CASA report called for. But scientists are making strides by developing effective tests, streamlining existing procedures, and lowering costs.

And they seem almost eager to face sophisticated new substances and delivery systems, no matter how difficult detection may be. Catlin summed up his view by saying, “We’re still here, we’re still able to hold our heads up. When I toss in the towel, because there’s so much doping by so many means that we can’t detect it, then it’s an issue. But I don’t think we’re there yet.”

Also read: The Science Behind Doping in Sports

Carbon Sequestration on the Great Plains

A bison grazes on a grassy hill with white clouds and blue sky in the background.

While the concept of carbon sequestration might seem like a magic trick, researchers continue to advance its environmental and financial feasibility.

Published June 1, 2004

By Christine Van Lenten

Image courtesy of Tom via stock.adobe.com.

Carbon dioxide emission dwarf in quantity all other greenhouse gases (GHGs) and exacerbate the impacts of climate change. But CO2 emissions are difficult to reduce. Chemically scrubbing them from smokestacks isn’t generally practicable, and many sources are mobile, small, and/or dispersed. Rather, achieving reductions requires adopting energy-efficient measures, converting to renewable energy sources or other sources that contain less or no carbon, or attempting to sequester the CO2 after it’s been emitted – that is, removing it from the atmosphere and storing it.

Various carbon sequestration schemes are being pursued. Exploiting soil’s capacity to store carbon is the one advocated by Dr. Patrick Zimmerman, who directs the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. And Zimmerman has a specific carbon storehouse in mind.

While the world struggles to devise policies, practices, and technologies that can slow global warming, the Great Plains region of the United States, says Zimmerman, continues to serve as a vast “carbon sink,” silently sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere. At a March 23, 2004, event co-sponsored by The New York Academy of Sciences’ (the Academy’s) Environmental Sciences Section and the Third Annual Green Trading Summit, Zimmerman, the featured speaker, contended that croplands and rangelands can store much more carbon. And, he stated, the science needed to quantify sequestered carbon and a system for bringing credits for it to market are available right now.

Markets are Emerging

Setting the stage for Zimmerman’s talk was Peter C. Fusaro, an organizer of the Trading Summit and chairman of Global Change Associates. Fusaro said the Kyoto Protocol, the international community’s attempt to reduce GHG emissions by specifying national targets and a timetable for meeting them – yet to be endorsed by the United States – is flawed and won’t work.

But markets for trading GHG credits are emerging, he reported. They’re modeled on existing pollution-trading markets, like the successful market for sulfur dioxide run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Acid Rain Program. SO2 emissions are capped by federal regulation; parties reducing their emissions below regulatory limits can claim credits for reductions and sell them to parties that haven’t met their targets. The overall goal of reducing emissions is served.

In the United States, CO2 emissions aren’t capped by the federal government, but various state and regional initiatives are under way, and leadership for forming GHG markets is coming from state policy makers, Fusaro observed, through bipartisan efforts that are creating the conditions necessary for markets to succeed: “simplicity, replication, and common standards.”

Why Buy Credits?

Why buy credits for reducing CO2 emissions? Anticipation of regulatory schemes is one reason; good corporate PR is another; simple good practice, yet another. And demand generates supply.

California’s Climate Action Registry for voluntary reporting of GHG emissions is the nation’s first. At the invitation of New York’s Governor Pataki, nine northeastern and mid-Atlantic states are collaborating to create a registry and formulate a model rule that states can adapt for capping and trading carbon emissions; two other states and several Canadian provinces are participating as observers. The Chicago Climate Exchange is a new, voluntary pilot market focused on North America. Some major corporations are already trading carbon credits.

Large, existing exchanges will enter the market soon, Fusaro predicted. New York City is the “environmental finance center,” and New York State will be “the template for world trade in carbon. We will have cap-and-trade markets in New York next year.”

CERCs, Cycles, and Soils

In the world of carbon trading, the unit of exchange is the carbon emission reduction credit (CERC), equivalent to one metric ton of CO2. Trading CERCs for CO2 that’s been snatched from the air and stored in the soil may sound like a magic trick. And indeed, scientists are only beginning to understand the intricate and complex feedback loops among climate, atmospheric composition, and terrestrial ecosystems that govern this form of sequestration.

Zimmerman framed the science by explaining that Earth’s carbon inventory cycles among reservoirs – the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. The reservoirs vary dramatically in size; so do carbon fluxes between them. Because fluxes between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere are large, over time small changes in them can produce large changes in how much carbon accumulates in the atmosphere.

Zooming in on the molecular level helps illuminate the huge potential of the carbon sequestration scheme that Zimmerman is advocating. During the growing season, green plants absorb solar energy and remove CO2 from the atmosphere, producing carbohydrates. Because these compounds contain less oxygen for each carbon atom than CO2 does, “surplus” oxygen is released; carbon is stored.

Plants also respire, taking in oxygen to metabolize carbon compounds and release energy needed for cellular processes, and producing water and CO2. When the growing season ends, photosynthesis and plant respiration cease, and organic matter, rich in carbon, decomposes, primarily because organisms in the soil feast on the carbon, metabolize it, and return CO2 to the atmosphere. When soil containing organic matter is broken up – for example, by tillage – more organic matter is exposed to this oxidizing process, accelerating release of CO2 and depletion of soil’s carbon bank.

The “Missing Sink”

If you want to prolong sequestration of carbon in soil, the crucial question becomes this: What conditions hinder decomposition of organic matter in soil, slowing down the release of CO2 back into the atmosphere?

Vegetation growing at high latitudes, Zimmerman said, fits the bill. At high latitudes, plants grow quickly in the summer, and about half the growth is underground. In winter, freezing slows the metabolic processes that oxidize carbon, trapping it within the soil in the form of organic material that’s not completely decomposed. By contrast, Zimmerman noted, “it’s really tough to store organic matter in tropical soils.”

High-latitude efficiencies in storing carbon also offer one answer to the mystery of the “missing sink.” Scientists calculate that quantities of CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels and resulting from deforestation and other land-use practices are greater than quantities taken up by the atmosphere and oceans. Where’s the balance? Seasonal variations in rising concentrations of atmospheric CO2 point to a slight net carbon sink that’s land-based, in the northern hemisphere, in North America, said Zimmerman. And the Great Plains, a high-latitude region, appears to be that “missing sink.” Analysis of carbon and oxygen in atmospheric CO2 samples collected from air masses as they traverse North America appears to confirm this.

Adapting Land-Use Practices

The Great Plains, he added, can store still more carbon, through alteration of land-use practices – for example, converting high-tillage cropland to low-till or no-till, or to pasture or grassland. Zimmerman, who grew up on a wheat farm, pointed out that organic matter also increases ecosystem productivity and resilience to stress.

Sequestering carbon in the Great Plains can significantly offset emissions elsewhere, he contended. For the purpose of slowing global warming, what matters is that CO2 is sequestered; not where. Thus, cropland and rangeland in the Great Plains can serve as generators of tradable CERCs and a brake on global warming.

But how can you tell how many metric tons of CO2 an acre of land is sequestering? As described by Zimmerman, the science is fiercely complex. His team of meteorologists, ecologists, plant physiologists, GIS experts, analytical chemists, computer scientists, and remote-sensing specialists virtually swarm all over the landscape – working from the molecular level, to individual leaf, to grass canopy, to atmosphere – gathering data on a host of processes and factors.

Equipment ranges from plastic bags placed over plants, to towers, tether balloons, an airplane equipped with a digital imaging system, and satellites. Measurements include variations in temperature, humidity, rainfall, snowfall, and solar radiation; quantities of water vapor, volatile organics, and CO2 emitted from vegetation, and the fluxes to vegetation; and leaf area indexes. Data on land use history, vegetation and crop dynamics, and feedback between carbon, phosphorous, nitrogen, and sulfur cycles are gathered, too.

Models Built on Data

Data are used to build numerical models of physical, chemical, and biological processes; these models are then linked, to model ecosystem carbon cycling and atmospheric chemistry, and extrapolated to landscape and regional scales. Regional modeling is essential, Zimmerman emphasized, “because that’s where the impacts are felt – where you live.” He termed the Black Hills (in South Dakota and Wyoming) “a great outdoor laboratory” that lends itself to the measurements needed to constrain regional models. His team is now establishing a network of field monitoring stations.

Determining how to link models constituted of algorithms based on physics and chemistry, across orders of magnitude that span spatial and temporal scales, is, Zimmerman observed, like trying to assemble an elephant from a box of molecules without the benefit of knowing what an elephant looks like. The work is iterative and time-consuming. And modeling rangeland to quantify incremental carbon storage poses special difficulties.

But while this science is still far from precise, it’s plenty good enough to get CERC markets going and “to make a difference,” he contends. Farmers can adapt their land use to sequester CO2 now, while we develop better technologies – and the socio-political will – to cut emissions.

And how can what Zimmerman termed “enhanced ecological carbon storage” be capitalized? For a market to be viable, he’s concluded, six conditions must be met:

(1) The business-as-usual baseline must be established.

(2) The additional CO2 each landowner sequesters must be quantified.

(3) How long CO2 will remain sequestered must be forecast.

(4) No unintended, offsetting releases can be generated; for example, converting cropland to pasture and introducing cows, which emit methane, every ton of which is equivalent to 20 tons of CO2 in its effects on global warming.

(5) Ownership of CERCs must be documented.

(6) CO2 sequestration must be verified.

Satisfying All Six Conditions

Zimmerman and his colleagues have designed a system, C-Lock (patent pending), that he said satisfies all six conditions. Internet- and GIS-based, it creates, certifies, standardizes, and verifies CERCs for specific land parcels, by integrating data on slope, climate, soil, historical land-use variables, and other factors. Farmers can access it directly online; no middlemen are required.

To create economies of scale, so benefits exceed transaction costs, C-Lock aggregates CERCs for many small landowners. Monte Carlo analysis is used to quantify uncertainty and normalize CERCs so they have universal currency. A reserve pool of CERCs with higher uncertainty values and correspondingly lower market values can be tapped to offset fluctuations in actual soil performance. The system’s transparency facilitates four levels of verification and “audits” that employ a variety of databases and scientific tools.

And because the carbon-storage capacity of tilled soil isn’t saturated, C-Lock quantifies only changes in amounts of soil carbon. Trying to quantify absolute amounts would pose daunting soil-sampling problems. Data on land-use history are key here. Quantification needn’t be precise for each individual land parcel; just reproducible and transparent. But it must be reasonably accurate in aggregate, and the uncertainty (financial risk) should be quantified to achieve maximum value.

Launching the System

C-Lock is now equipped with GIS for South Dakota, and a trade is in the works; trades in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota will follow, Zimmerman predicted, adding that C-Lock can accommodate other GHG emissions and forms of sequestration, anywhere in the world.

What’s needed for it to succeed? A pilot phase, cap-and-trade policies, and policies that define soil sequestration’s role in the GHG reduction strategy, he said. But his biggest concern is that huge environmental advantages will be lost if USDA incorporates carbon sequestration into conventional farm subsidy programs. We have an obligation to make a difference, he insisted, and we can: markets can work, benefiting farmers, ranchers, and the environment.

As measures to slow global warming develop, what role is the Academy playing? Its Environmental Sciences Section is stepping up to the plate: Chair Michael Bobker says it’s creating “a dialogue around greenhouse gases and emission trading issues, as well as carbon reduction and sequestration projects” – an initiative squarely in keeping with the Academy’s historical role as a forum for exploring and debating the scientific issues that matter most, and advancing science for the public good.

Also read: The Promise and Limitations of Carbon Capture

Tapping into Ancient Urges for Food and Love?

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
-Aldous Huxley, Music at Night

Published March 1, 2004

By Linda Hotchkiss Mehta

Image courtesy of offsuperphoto via stock.adobe.com.

Can music be reduced to mere brain anatomy and electrochemical interactions within the neural templates through which we experience it? Or will what we learn from science simply reinforce a reality the poets have intuited all along?

A group of scientists came together in Venice in October 2002 to take a look at what is known about music through the neurosciences. This area of study is providing insights into higher cognitive function through the mechanisms of musical perception and processing in the human brain. These scientists, many of whom are musicians themselves, approach their work well aware of the incredibly complex process that results in artistic expression and perception.

One broad question that has been explored is a perennial one about intelligence and musical ability – is musical aptitude an integral part of a person’s general cognitive potential or does it exist on its own, a separable and different type of intelligence?

Obviously, general intelligence alone is insufficient – plenty of demonstrably intelligent people never develop into excellent musicians, even when provided with an early music education. But must one be intelligent to be an accomplished musician? Evidence suggests that high general mental aptitude is necessary if special aptitudes (dare we say talent?) are to be fully developed.

In other words, the answer is yes: General intelligence and musical aptitude probably are linked. Furthermore, children who participate in musical activities show a higher degree of “mental speed” (a measure of mental aptitude) than their peers. So these findings have wide implications: Questions about how musical training can enhance general mental aptitude and what neuroscience can tell us about the effectiveness of various pedagogical techniques for musical training are of vital interest.

A Developmental Approach

Only a developmental approach could illuminate these questions, and The Neurosciences and Music, a volume in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences resulting from the meeting in Venice, focuses on neural development in both musicians and non-musicians, seeking to clarify questions about the development of higher cognitive function, in general, through the lens of the development of musical abilities, specifically.

Contributing scientists explore the mechanisms of human perception of the components of music (pitch, timbre, rhythm and harmony), the development of musical abilities, and the fate of musical abilities within the contexts of cognitive disorders in children and of dementia in the aged.

Scientists studying visual imagery have developed techniques for identifying and quantifying the perception of a visual experience, including mental image-making during the act of reading. Because the image a subject observes while reading is black marks on a page, bearing no resemblance to the image conjured up in the brain by the written words, the scientist/observer cannot “see” the mental image of the subject, and this process can only be observed through the traces of brain-imaging techniques.

Using the same brain-imaging tools, scientists can watch what happens neurologically while a person processes music. In one experiment, subjects listened to music while electroencephalography was used to trace brain responses. Musical phrases with syntactically inappropriate endings elicit early right anterior negativity. Shakespeare understood this intuitively: “How sour sweet music is,/When time is broke, and no proportion kept!/So is it in the music of men’s lives.”

Musicians vs Nonmusicians

A group of skilled musicians showed no significant differences from nonmusicians when presented with tasks designed to assess perception of melody, structuring of harmony, and more complex musical presentations. The subjects were asked to judge the similarity of musical selections and the degree of completeness of a piece of music and to identify the musical emotion expressed. Non-musicians demonstrated an ability to use the same principles as musical experts as they listened to music, which suggests that the capacity to enjoy music is universal and not dependent on training.

Even young children with no musical training demonstrate innate musical knowledge when tested with “inappropriate” chord progressions (not dominant-tonic, which is experienced as a normal, or authentic, cadence) through electric brain potential responses. The brain structure in which this response occurs is also involved in processing the syntax of language, which suggests that this aspect of musical ability is something that the human brain is already structured to do.

Cultural Differences

We are also led to wonder about cultural differences in music perception. Interestingly, when the rhythmic differences between French and English were compared to French and English classical musical themes, rhythmic patterns similar to those of the spoken language were found in the music of each culture. When language perception is tested independently, listening to one’s native language elicits a different neurological response than does listening to an unfamiliar language.

But music perception is dramatically different. In spite of the apparent link between a culture’s language and its musical rhythms, studies that compared the responses of subjects to music of their native culture with their responses to unfamiliar music found that differences depended more on the subjects’ musical expertise than on their familiarity with the music. This is good news for Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, because it suggests that appreciation of another culture’s music should not be out of reach for most people.

More Grey Matter

The neuroanatomical differences that do exist between musicians and non-musicians may instead reflect the complex motor and auditory skills required for performance on an instrument and learning musical repertoire, as well as the processing feedback necessary to monitor a performance. Musicians have more grey-matter volume in several brain areas compared with non-musicians and even compared with amateur musicians, probably because intensity of practice affects these differences.

Another means of elucidating the neural events underlying imagery and perception is to study the function of persons with brain injuries in precise locations. It turns out that both perception (of music as it is played) and the capacity to form a mental image (in the absence of audible music) are damaged when the associated brain structure is damaged, which demonstrates that both processes depend on the same neural territory.

Wordsworth alludes to this human capacity in his poetry: “The music in my heart I bore,/Long after it was heard no more.” Without this capacity to imagine musical tone and timbre accurately and vividly enough to use them in new arrangements, after all, Beethoven would have lost the ability to compose when he lost his ability to hear.

As scientifically defined by Ian Cross of Cambridge, “music embodies, entrains, and transposably intentionalizes time in sound and action.” Most of us, however, think first of the emotional response music engenders. Poets have described music as the language of angels and the food of love, a medium with “charms to soothe a savage breast.” Many people experience “chills” or “shivers” when certain musical phrases are played and describe this experience as euphoric. These responses can be elicited fairly reliably even in a laboratory, where the associated psychophysiological responses can be measured.

The Pleasure of Music

It appears as though the pleasure we derive from music occurs because our neocortex can reach ancient neural systems involved with basic biological stimuli linked to survival. Perhaps the capacity to make and enjoy music is the happy accident of skills acquired and refined for more basic needs: nourishment and reproduction. The poets anticipated the scientists by centuries, in linking music with the ancient urges of love and food.

The poets also speak of music’s power to help us reduce stress: “Music alone with sudden charms can bind/The wand’ring senses, and calm the troubled mind,” wrote William Congreve. As scientists discover more about the links between the immune system and stress, the stress-reducing mechanisms of music might be a fruitful area for research.

The contemporary composer Karlheinz Stockhausen observed that “sonic vibrations do not only penetrate ears and skin. They penetrate the entire body, reaching the soul, the psychic center of perception.”

Stockhausen believed that the ratio between the unknown and the known has remained pretty much the same over time: The discoveries of science may explain much, but new questions are perpetually raised. Thus wonder will never die, and the poets may have the last word. What better words than these from Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “Let knowledge grow from more to more,/ But more of reverence in us dwell;/That mind and soul, according well,/May make one music as before.”

Also read: Music on the Mind: A Neurologist’s Take

Sprawling Cities Can Coexist with Thriving Ecosystems

A rooftop garden with tall city buildings in the background.

Many major urban areas are constrained with the amount of green space they can provide to residents. Encouragingly, building rooftops have emerged as a solution to fill this shortfall of urban green space.

Published January 1, 2004

By Peter Coles

Jacob K. Javits Center – New York City. Image courtesy of demerzel21 via stock.adobe.com.

The common image of cities as hot spots of crime and grime may need updating. They also can be havens of natural and cultural diversity – and could hold the keys to sustainable development in the 21^st century.

While some 3.2 billion people – half the world’s population – are now estimated to live in towns and cities, with a growing number of poor, “urban” is by no means incompatible with “nature,” even in a major city like New York. Once rare, peregrine falcons now nest on Manhattan bridges, while a survey carried out by the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens found over 3,000 species of plants in a 30-mile radius of the city – far more than in the vast cornfields of the Midwest.

The Need for Preservation

And, while the presence of man has driven some species of plant and animal close to extinction, cities may now be the only places they are still found. Paradoxically, they will no longer survive without human intervention to preserve them.

These topsy-turvy ideas emerged during a meeting at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) in October 2003, entitled “Urban Biosphere and Society: Partnership of Cities,” co-organized with CUBES (Columbia University-UNESCO Joint Program on Biosphere and Society) and UN Habitat.

For many people, the built-up environment is the antithesis of nature, as Rutherford Platt, of the Ecological Cities Project at the University of Amherst, pointed out. “Nature” is somewhere else, outside the city, in a national park or some remote wilderness. But, recalling Lewis Mumford, champion of the green belt, he emphasized that not only can nature be part of a city, but cities themselves can be as much a part of nature as an anthill or a beaver colony.

Creating New Types of Habitat

Ecologists are now appreciating that cities, as well as preserving rare patches of ancient flora and fauna in parks and settler cemeteries, also present challenging new habitats, with their own adapted plants. “We are creating types of habitat that have never been seen before,” said Charles Peters, Kate E. Tode Curator of Economic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden, “like a vacant lot with 35 minutes of sunlight a day. It’s an interesting niche.”

Peters, who has been studying a 40-acre swathe of ancient oak and hickory forest in the Botanical Garden for several years, also defended the invasive species that are settling there, filling niches left by native species that have failed to adapt to an urbanized habitat. “The most important thing is that these plants continue to function, whether they’re from China or Siberia. We can’t put the forest back the way it was 200 years ago. To do that, we’d have to put the Bronx back the way it was 200 years ago. Forests are continually changing. What’s important is that the new species are controlling erosion, providing nutrients for the soil, recycling the air.”

Others argue that intact, native ecosystems, like the remnants of oak woodlands and prairies in Chicago, have a far richer biodiversity than those colonized by invasive species, and are more sustainable. Since 1996, Chicago Wilderness, a loosely-structured coalition that today comprises over 165 associations, institutions and organizations, has been working to restore biodiversity in the Windy City, which is visited by some 6 million neo-tropical birds every year on their way to and from Canada.

Retaining Residents

Chicago’s city fathers, explained John Rogner, Chicago Field Supervisor of the Fish and Wildlife Service of the Department of the Interior, bought patches of oak woodland and prairie to prevent them being developed. Their argument was that a beautiful environment, with access to nature, would stop residents – the city’s life force – from moving away.

After three years of research, including “bio blitzes” in which local residents and children help scientists count species, Chicago Wilderness established a “biodiversity recovery plan.” With a wide range of projects, such as ridding the oak woodlands of tenacious, but non-native buckthorn, the consortium is also helping to restore brown-field sites, like Calumet, south of the city, which ironically contains several endangered and critical species of bird, surviving amid the derelict steel plants and toxic waste dumps.

Mark Wigley, interim dean of the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University, suggested that for most people “old cities are the heroes, and new cities are the villains.” But this idealized image leaves out the crime, open sewerage, disease and overcrowding characteristic of city life in the Middle Ages.

For Robert Pirani, director of environmental programs for the New York Regional Plan Association, the “villain” today is not so much the post-industrial downtown as it is suburban sprawl. In the past 10 years, he said, land use in the New York area has expanded by 100%, while population has increased by less than 10%.

Sprawling Cities

This means “thousands of homes surrounded by lawns, and shopping malls surrounded by parking lots,” he said. According to Rutherford Platt, this trend can be seen across the U.S., where suburban population has increased fourfold since 1950, compared to an 85% increase in population. And, he added, car ownership in the U.S. has risen by 100% since 1970, while population increased by 40%. In Atlanta, which has been dubbed “sprawl city,” drivers spend an average of 72 hours a year in gridlock, he said.

If sprawl is a middle-class phenomenon in developed countries, however, it is associated with poverty in much of the south. While 82% of Brazil’s population live in cities, said Rodrigo Victor, of the São Paulo Biosphere Reserve, some 23% of the population of São Paulo live in shanty towns, mostly on the edge of the Green Belt Biosphere Reserve that surrounds the city, a part of the Atlantic Forest Biosphere Reserve.

With a global trend towards urban living – two-thirds of world population in 2030 will live in cities – the challenge is to find sustainable solutions to urban growth. One approach, according to freelance journalist Helen Epstein, is through architecture itself.

A new generation of high performance buildings attempt to behave more like natural systems, with water management on site, passive solar energy production, natural lighting and ventilation reducing their “footprint,” or impact on limited natural resources. An example is the Solaire housing development in Battery Park City, Manhattan. But, as architect Ernie Davis, mayor of Mount Vernon, New York, pointed out, these buildings are not usually for the poor, whereas project housing, which is designed to look as though it’s for the disadvantaged, does not have advanced design features.

Green Rooftops in South Korea

Green rooftops also offer a solution, as Kwi-Gon Kim, professor of landscape architecture at Seoul National University, South Korea, demonstrated. With 42% of Seoul covered by buildings, landscaping rooftops could add an estimated 200 square kilometers of green space to the city, about 30% of the Seoul area. In an experimental green roof project on top of UNESCO’s downtown Seoul office, just five months after its construction the 75 species of plant introduced at the outset had been joined by an additional 39 species, presumably from surrounding green belt areas, while 37 species of insect had colonized the site.

Seoul was one of 11 cities invited by CUBES to prepare case studies to see whether, and how, the UNESCO “biosphere” model could be applied to urban areas. This model, designed 30 years ago, has since been applied in 440 UNESCO Man and the Biosphere (MAB) sites in 97 countries. These are areas of terrestrial and coastal ecosystems that promote the conservation of biodiversity with its sustainable use.

They are internationally recognized, nominated by governments, and remain under the sovereign jurisdiction of the states in which they are located. Usually, they consist of a “core” area that has minimum human impact, surrounded by a “buffer zone” and a “transition” area, with increasing levels of social and economic activity, respectively. But, while some of the sites adjoin cities (like São Paulo), to date there is no urban biosphere site as such.

A Future Urban Biosphere Site

Cape Town, South Africa, which is already surrounded by three natural biosphere reserves, gives some clues as to what a future urban biosphere site might look like, although it is just a theoretical case study at this stage. As Ruida Stanvliet, of the Western Cape Nature Conservation Board illustrated, the nine provinces in the region house 3.5 million people, some of them affluent and white, living in suburbs, while much of the black population lives in extreme poverty, in temporary housing and with a high incidence of HIV/AIDS. Nonetheless, the area boasts a rich biodiversity, with some 9,000 plant species.

“Environment conservation is crucial for poverty alleviation,” said Stanvliet. “It connects people to their sustainable resource base.” And in Cape Flats, one area in the Cape Town urban biosphere case study, over 20% of the people live in sprawling, informal settlements. In some communities, 70% live with less than $1 a day, and only 36% of adults are in paid employment.

The windswept mosaic of dunes and wetlands of Cape Flats is where victims of apartheid were relocated. Now, in a pilot initiative, the City of Cape Town has joined with the Botanical Society of South Africa, the National Botanical Institute and the Table Mountain Fund, to form Cape Flats Nature. This project focuses on conservation and restoration of biodiversity in several sites, enlisting the participation of local people through educational programs.

The Cape Flats Nature project has a certain resonance with the Chicago Wilderness brown-field development in Calumet, half way across the globe from Cape Town. This linking of cities, at least informally, was one of the ambitions of the Academy/CUBES meeting.

As Many Questions as Answers

The meeting raised as many questions as it answered, but that was another of its ambitions. In a city like New York, where would the “core” of a biosphere site be? For William Solecki, of the Department of Geography at Hunter College, City University of New York, it could be the harbor and estuary area, which is historically the focus of human activity in the city, while pockets of intact wetland survive in adjacent Jamaica Bay.

And the “buffer zone” might be the watershed in the Catskills that feeds the “core.” Indeed, as Christopher Ward, commissioner of the New York City Department of the Environment explained, New York was able to avoid spending millions of dollars on a new water treatment plant by investing in protection of the watershed.

This inclusion of more distant areas in the biosphere of a city like New York is a way to acknowledge that its “footprint,” unlike that of an equivalent natural area, can even extend thousands of miles. The coffee consumed in New York has a direct impact on plantations as far away as Bolivia, which, incidentally, is where some of the migrant warblers come from that feed in Central Park every May and October. Food for thought.

Also read: The Impact of Climate Change on Urban Environments

About the Author

Dr. Peter Coles is a freelance science writer and photographer living in Paris, France.

A New Blueprint for Effective Green Architecture

Engineers crunch numbers on a calculator as they go over blueprints on a project.

From local sourcing of materials to utilizing renewable energy, the sustainable building design revolution has transformed the way that architects and engineers approach construction.

Published November 1, 2003

By Jeffrey Penn

Image courtesy of ArLawKa via stock.adobe.com.

As environmental awareness spreads around the globe, the so-called “greening” of architecture has ignited a revolution in the design and construction of buildings, according to one of the nation’s leading experts in the field.

“The concept of sustainable building design has led to a new architectural vocabulary – known as ‘green buildings’ – that is transforming the way we act and think about the environment and the buildings we construct,” said Hillary Brown. Titled “Visioning Green: Advances in High-Performance Sustainable Building Design,” Brown spoke at a August 26 2003, meeting, cosponsored by The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) and the Bard Center for Environmental Policy.

Former director of Sustainable Design for the New York City Department of Design and Construction, Brown now heads her own firm, New Civic Works, which specializes in helping local government, universities and the nonprofit sector incorporate sustainable design practices into their policies, programs, and operations.

“These new practices are beginning to catalyze not only the construction industry, but also the wider society” as people learn about the issues at stake, Brown said. “All sectors are mobilizing around sustainable building design.”

Paying Attention to Nature

“The increased recognition that buildings can contribute directly toward a healthy environment in which to live and work,” Brown said, provides the context for the architectural revolution.

Brown presented a blueprint for “green principles” in new buildings, including climate-responsive designs and an understanding of the relationship between the building and its location. “In this view, water, vegetation and climate are taken into account in the design of the building, with special attention paid to how the building’s infrastructure affects its surroundings,” she said.

“Nature and natural processes should be made visible in green buildings,” Brown added, noting that the form and shape of the building should take into account the interactions between the occupants and the building itself.

“Technology often displaces our connection to the natural world,” Brown contended. Green buildings, she pointed out, “help to improve a sense of health and well being as occupants are put in touch with their natural surroundings.”

According to Brown, studies show that “people are more comfortable in green buildings than conventional buildings.” She asserted that four factors have a substantive impact on performance and mood inside buildings: air quality, thermal comfort, amount of natural light, and appropriate acoustics.

Minimizing Waste of Resources

In addition to aesthetics and comfort, green buildings respond to ecological concerns by “minimizing the impact of human activity in lowering the levels of pollution during both the construction and maintenance of the building,” Brown said.

“Conventional methods of building design and construction leads to depletion of natural resources,” she added, “especially because carbon-based fuels are used extensively during construction and in the operation of the buildings’ infrastructure after completion. Green buildings attempt to minimize the waste of water, energy, and building materials,” Brown said. Within the construction industry, architects and builders have set goals to substantially reduce emission of carbon dioxide during construction and operation of buildings.

Brown noted that green buildings employ the use of daylight in combination with high-efficiency lighting. Use of horizontal “light shelves” and other well-designed building apertures, for example, can reflect daylight deeper into buildings, displacing the need for artificial lighting. Other passive comfort-control techniques include the use of natural ventilation and an improved building envelope to reduce dependence on mechanical systems. Still other green buildings are cooled/heated by utilizing the constant ground temperatures of the earth as a heat source or heat sink.

Designers of green buildings also seek to reduce or eliminate construction materials that contain unstable chemical compounds that, as they cure over time, are released into the environment – such as adhesives, sealants and artificial surfaces. “We need to think about eliminating these noxious chemicals from the building palette,” Brown said.

In addition, Brown said that architects are paying more attention to recycled and local materials in construction. “The selection of local and regional materials means a lower consumption of transportation energy during construction,” she noted. Brown also encouraged the increased use of renewable materials, woods – such as bamboo – or other wood products that are “certified” grown in renewable forests.

Improving Public Spaces

Although architects and builders have been slow to integrate “green principles” into most residential blueprints, Brown cited their incorporation into public buildings such as courthouses, libraries, and performance spaces and schools.

She cited a study from California that revealed elementary students in classrooms with the most daylight showed a 21% improvement in learning rates when compared to students with the least amount of daylight in their classrooms.

For businesses, Brown said improved air quality would likely result in reduced absenteeism from asthma and other respiratory diseases, may lower other health-related costs, and generally help to improve productivity in the workplace. Although she acknowledged that the average well-designed green building might have a slightly higher initial construction cost, up to 3%, she stressed that the long-term savings in operating expenditures can be as much as 33% or higher.

Brown also said urban streetscapes should employ sustainable design practices, including efforts to reduce the “heat-island affect” with increased planting of trees and use of light- or heat-reflective materials in sidewalks, streets, and roofing membranes. In addition, she cited opportunities for improved water resource management by recycling once-used tap water from sinks for irrigation and cleaning, and by installing green roofs or other systems that harvest usable storm water from the roofs of buildings.

‘Civic Environmentalism’

Brown said that although there are still some barriers to incorporating green principles in construction – such as increased costs, the difficulties of apportioning savings to both tenant and developer, and various regulatory disincentives – she noted that the federal government, several states, and many municipalities are beginning to demand or incentivize green buildings. She predicted that building and zoning codes would eventually more adequately reflect the interest in green buildings as society embraces what she called, “civic environmentalism.”

Also read: Green Buildings and Water Infrastructure

Science Education: The Why Behind the What

A hand writes math equations on a chalkboard.

What is inquiry-based learning and why are some college instructors turning to it for teaching complicated scientific topics?

Published September 1, 2003

By Margaret Crane

Image courtesy of stokkete via stock.adobe.com.

The United States may be the world’s only superpower, but on the science and mathematics literacy front the U.S. remains very much a nation at risk, according to recent reports issued by the Office of Science Education of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Commission on Excellence in Education, and the National Research Council. Each of these organizations cites an alarming gap between the state of science education in the U.S. and the stunning challenges the nation faces – hurdles that cannot be overcome by scholars and experts alone, but that require an educated citizenry.

In addition, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that grade-school students in the U.S. have fallen behind their counterparts in a number of other economically advanced countries. Meanwhile, the percentage of science majors at U.S. colleges and universities continues to dwindle. Asked why they shy away from science and math, many students reply that these subjects are simply “too hard.”

It is true that the sciences are more “content-heavy” than some other disciplines, but every student should be able to experience and understand science, at least up to a point, said Francine J. Wald, a speaker at the first of three meetings this spring entitled “Why Inquiry? New Models of College Teaching Science,” administered by The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy). Wald, a physicist on the faculty of New York University’s School of Education, believes the onus for widespread science illiteracy is not on students but on science educators, who tend to privilege memorization over experiential learning.

No Misconceptions, Only Explanations

Dewey I. Dykstra, Jr., professor of physics at Boise State University and a fellow panelist at the March 21 meeting, seconded Wald’s argument: “It’s not about imparting knowledge and supplying the right answers, but inducing students to examine and reconstruct new, more effective understandings of their world.” In his view, there are no misconceptions, only explanations that don’t fit experience.

Barbara Williams, an astrophysicist on the faculty of the University of Delaware, and Fernand Brunschwig, a physics “mentor” at New York City’s Empire State College, further explained that although the inquiry approach isn’t a panacea, it represents an advance over orthodox methods in its ability to stimulate critical thinking.

The essence of inquiry can be summed up as a process that aims at understanding the “why” behind the “what.”

An audience of physics teachers received a crash course in the method when asked to observe a demonstration, discuss their ideas with others at their table, and come up with possible answers to several pointed questions.

First, an old gooseneck lamp was placed on a surface. The lamp’s 40-watt bulb housed a five-sided filament with one side open. Then, Dykstra placed a lens between the lamp and the wall and turned on the light. The resulting projected image was clearly inverted.

Fifty percent of those present believed some property of the lens had caused the image to invert. In just 15 minutes, however, some of the meeting’s participants homed in on a working explanation for the inversion, which occurs as a natural consequence of many light rays going out in all directions from each point on the filament.

Simple, Hands-On Exercises

If they had been Dykstra’s students, they would have had more time to explore the limits of the ray theory and find their way to the wave, versus particle, theory of light and to the laws of refraction, diffraction, interference and reflection that were first postulated in the 17^th century. In this way, a simple, hands-on exercise can become a window into a host of contending theories, including those of Huygens, Newton, and Einstein.

Moreover, inquiry is driven by student understanding. The teacher’s role is to engage students in a process of examining the world around them in ways that challenge their existing ideas.

Small groups of proactive students are another distinguishing feature in inquiry-based classrooms. So is the use of technology – especially for math teachers in their efforts to help students make the connection between mathematics and real-world experiences. The inquiry-based math classroom resembles a workshop, where students learn by doing, then reflect on what they’ve done.

At the Academy’s second inquiry meeting, held on April 2, Nancy Baxter Hastings, professor of mathematics at Dickinson College, projected a graph onto a large screen and used a motion detector to demonstrate the nature of functions. The x-axis was labeled “time,” and the y-axis represented “distance.”

After hitting the requisite button on the instructor’s laptop, an audience member was asked to move forward and backward several times, making the blue line on the graph depicting the relationship between time and distance rise and fall with each movement. Technology can make the study of mathematics engaging, relevant, and fun, said Baxter Hastings, especially for students who believe they lack mathematical ability.

Quantitative Reasoning

To broaden and deepen the learning experience, said Stockton College’s Frank Cerreto, it’s important to show students how quantitative reasoning infuses virtually every discipline. “Students take a calculus class, then a business class where they study compound interest, and then a biology class where they study bacterial population growth, but they don’t realize that the latter two are about the same thing as calculus,” he said.

Judith McVarish, assistant professor at the Steinhardt School of Education at NYU, agreed with Cerreto’s emphasis on interdisciplinary learning as a way of encouraging students to think creatively. “School is usually about getting the right answers, not asking questions,” she said. The inquiry-oriented math teacher’s task, therefore, is to design activities that will help students think like mathematicians – that is, to explore, guess, learn from their errors, and share their ideas with peers. The aim is to nurture a community of learners, as opposed to an atomized group of students who are alternately bored, anxious, or simply going through the motions: a familiar state of affairs captured by the phrase, “Do we have to know that?”

If the word “science” provokes fear, boredom and dread in the hearts of young people, there’s something wrong with their perception – and with the origins of that perception in how science teachers teach. This was the core message of the Academy’s third session, held on May 12.

Merle S. Bruno, professor of biology at Hampshire College, embraces the inquiry approach as pivotal in changing student attitudes and educational outcomes: “We want students to be wowed and energized by science,” she said.

Innovations in Teaching Human Biology

At Hampshire, Bruno was instrumental in introducing an innovative human biology course using actual medical cases to guide students through human anatomy and physiology. “We give the students a little information about a case and let them go from there,” she said. Working in small groups of four or five, students develop three categories of questions:

– First, what do we know about the person?

– Second, what do we suspect?

– Third, what do we need to know?

Each student in the group takes responsibility for one piece of research, and after several rounds of what doctors call “differential diagnosis” – ruling out what is not happening – a diagnosis is reached. And it usually turns out to be the right one.

The Academy’s audience of science teachers had a chance to think together about a medical case, develop the three types of questions specified above, and take a shot at diagnosing the problem. It turned out to be celiac disease, a digestive condition triggered by an allergy to gluten.

Practical Problem-Solving

Along with her like-thinking colleagues in physics and mathematics, Bruno believes practical problem-solving helps students learn by upping their motivation and building self-confidence. Jeannie Drew, who heads the Science Department at Riverdale Country School in Riverdale, New York, is pioneering similar strategies in a grade-school setting. This year, her 7th-graders created a mock crime-scene lab and tested “urine” samples for excess sugar – a sure-fire way of identifying a criminal known to have diabetes.

It all sounds like great fun, skeptics may say, but is it science? Proponents of the inquiry approach respond to this query with an enthusiastic, if qualified, “yes.” They admit that the workshop-based classroom has its disadvantages. “Content always gets sacrificed,” said Drew. “Because thought and discovery come first, we spend a longer time on projects, which means we often can’t cover enough material to compete well on national tests.” But when it comes to long-term understanding and critical thinking, this approach can’t be beat.

It’s science when students learn to read studies, evaluate data, design experiments and think like scientists and mathematicians. That’s precisely what students do in an inquiry-based classroom, where a new foundation for an educated citizenry is being laid, one inquiring student at a time.

Also read: Embracing Globalization in Science Education

Diabetes: Controlling the Uncontrolled with Science

A medical professional pricks a patient's finger to take a blood sample for a diabetes test.

Medical advances in recent years have enabled doctors and other health professionals to better understand the scientific mechanisms behind diabetes, which in turn is enabling them to better treat patients.

Published September 1, 2003

By Rosemarie Foster

Image courtesy of thodonal via stock.adobe.com.

A typical supper in Sunflower County Mississippi, might start with a basket of hot fried cornmeal hush puppies, followed by a heaping plate of spicy barbecued ribs or crispy fried catfish, topped off with a hefty slice of sticky pecan pie, and washed down with a frosty glass of generously sweetened iced tea. To many, this mouthwatering meal may sound like heaven, but for the tens of thousands of residents of this Mississippi Delta community, it could also be a recipe for diabetes.

Although the Delta is famed for its blues and gospel music, lush fields of cotton, and delectable culinary contributions, it also has the unfortunate distinction of having the highest per capita incidence of diabetes in the United States. Due to an ill-fated combination of genetics, ethnic factors, poverty, cultural obstacles, and a downright unhealthy diet, 10.3% of Mississippi’s population has diabetes, with 7.7% having the type 2 variety. In Sunflower County alone – home to some 40,000 people – one in five residents has diabetes.

But big changes are afoot in Sunflower County, noted Scott Nelson, MD, a family physician and Mississippi native. Nelson was one of five presenters who spoke at a meeting in June called Addressing the NEW Diabetes Epidemic: Uncontrolled Diabetes. The gathering – a conference for science writers – was supported by an educational grant from Aventis Pharmaceuticals Inc. and was hosted by The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy).

Overcoming Cultural and Financial Obstacles

Public health programs have been started in an effort to overcome the cultural and financial obstacles that prevent many Sunflower residents from adequately controlling their diabetes. Moreover, these programs may serve as models for nationwide efforts to control the rapidly escalating epidemic of type 2 diabetes. The conference presenters addressed the physiological basis of type 2 diabetes, its potential complications, the importance of self-monitoring, the growing role of insulin in its treatment, and new approaches with a greater chance of helping people manage their disease.

Stephen N. Davis, MD, chief of the Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, described the differences between type 1 and 2 diabetes. Type 1, the type most commonly seen in children, is characterized by destruction of the insulin-secreting beta cells of the pancreas, and results in a lack of insulin. Type 2 – which is commonly called “adult-onset” diabetes, but is now also being detected in children – may feature resistance to insulin and result in insulin deficiency, with beta cells becoming progressively dysfunctional.

Of the 17 million Americans who are estimated to have diabetes, 90-95% have the type 2 variety, but some 5 to 6 million of them don’t know it. Millions more have impaired glucose tolerance, a form of “prediabetes” that can sometimes lead to diabetes if left unchecked. And the problem is only getting worse, with a five-fold increase in the incidence of type 2 diabetes noted during the latter half of the 20th century in the U.S. “You can appreciate what a large public health problem that is,” asserted Davis.

A Genetic Component

Doctors agree that treating diabetes requires a team approach. At a panel discussion, from left: Stephen N. Davis, Richard S. Beaser, Scott Nelson, Alan M. Jacobson, and Stephen Brunton. Photo by Michael Gaffney.

So what can we do about it? The disease has a strong genetic component, a risk factor that can be compounded by an unhealthy lifestyle. Exercise helps by moving glucose from the bloodstream into the muscles. Since fatty acids decrease glucose uptake by the muscles and increase glucose production by the liver, following a diet low in fat can reduce diabetes risk. And different medications work by helping the body to regulate blood glucose levels.

“Despite great advances over the last 10 years, and despite knowledge that if we can control blood glucose to normal levels we can reduce the complications and burden of diabetes, most people [with type 2 diabetes] do not have good glucose control,” said Davis. “We still have great challenges. We’ve got to understand what’s going on in the body so we can intervene appropriately.”

Although monitoring daily blood glucose is an integral part of diabetes management, it’s not the whole story. A more important number today is glycated hemoglobin, or hemoglobin A1C, which is commonly abbreviated as “A1C.” Blood A1C levels represent average glucose levels during the past two to three months. Combined with vigilant daily glucose monitoring, periodic A1C testing offers “a window into the metabolism,” said Richard S. Beaser, MD, a senior physician at the renowned Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.

The American Diabetes Association recommends that people with diabetes aim for an A1C of less than 7%, while the American College of Endocrinology suggests an even tighter goal of 6.5%. (People without diabetes usually have an A1C level between 4% and 6%.) But getting people to that point isn’t easy, as demonstrated by the statistic that some 57% of people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes still have an A1C level of more than 7%.

A Host of Complications

That could be exposing them to a host of complications. People with type 2 diabetes may have increased blood clotting, high cholesterol and hypertension. If not adequately controlled, diabetes can cause retinopathy (degeneration of the blood vessels in the eye, leading to blindness), abnormal electrocardiogram readings, kidney disease (leading to the need for dialysis and sometimes kidney transplantation), nerve damage, coronary artery disease (which can result in a heart attack), peripheral vascular disease (resulting in leg and foot ulcers and even amputation in some patients), and stroke.

Even modest improvements in A1C can dramatically reduce the risk of diabetes complications. The United Kingdom Prospective Diabetes Study reported that every 1% decrease in A1C lowered the incidence of microvascular complications by 35%, diabetes-related mortality by 25%, myocardial infarction incidence and mortality by 18%, and total mortality by 7%.

Patients can achieve optimal A1C levels by monitoring blood glucose levels several times a day, as directed by their doctors. This can be done using traditional finger-prick techniques, or newer digital blood glucose testers that enable the patient to draw blood from a less sensitive area, such as the arm, and store the information in the testing unit. Patients should share the results with their healthcare providers as well.

The payoff of such self-monitoring has been clinically proven: Beaser noted a study showing that 70% of people who tracked their blood glucose regularly achieved an A1C level below 8%, compared to only 18% of those who tested irregularly. “So clearly there’s a relationship between frequency of monitoring and results,” he contended.

A significant problem, noted Beaser, is that diagnosis happens too late. He explained that 18% of people with type 2 diabetes already have retinopathy at the time of diagnosis, a disorder that may have begun up to five years before.

“Missing the Boat”

“We’re really missing the boat in terms of diagnosis,” he emphasized. “We need to diagnose diabetes earlier, before it does its damage, and perhaps even diagnose insulin resistance before it causes diabetes.”

He encouraged doctors to screen all adults over age 45 for diabetes every 3 years, and to screen those at increased risk earlier or more frequently. Risk is greater among people with a family history of diabetes, the obese (those who are more than 20% above ideal body weight), those from certain ethnic groups (including Native Americans, Hispanics, and African-Americans), those with high blood pressure or cholesterol, and women who have had gestational diabetes or delivered a baby greater than 9 pounds.

Once type 2 diabetes is diagnosed, Beaser encouraged combination therapy, when necessary, to lower A1C levels. Different oral diabetes medications work through different mechanisms: Some increase insulin secretion by beta cells, others increase the body’s sensitivity to insulin, and a third group slows the breakdown and absorption of starches and sugars. As a result, many patients may need more than one drug to control their blood glucose. “These medications, used alone or in combination, can lead to important improvements in glucose control,” he asserted. Medication in combination with lifestyle changes would be optimal, but Beaser noted that it can take years for many patients to adopt healthier practices – years that may lead to potentially lethal complications.

“Our challenge is to allow people to have a lifestyle that is as normal as possible,” he concluded. “With the tools we have today, we can do that better than ever before.”

“This is Not Your Grandmother’s Insulin”

Despite oral diabetes drugs and lifestyle changes, blood glucose remains uncontrolled in many patients with type 2 diabetes. For these patients, insulin injections may be the answer. But insulin isn’t what it used to be: Today some patients can get by with a single dose of long-acting insulin each night, using a fine-gauge needle that causes little discomfort. “This is not your grandmother’s insulin,” emphasized Scott Nelson.

Some 25% of the patients in Nelson’s Mississippi practice have diabetes, and many of them have been helped by insulin therapy. Until recently, insulin for type 2 diabetes has had a bad rap among doctors, many of whom saw it as a last resort and an indication of treatment failure. But today’s long-acting insulins not only control blood glucose and match normal insulin secretion patterns, but also are easier for patients to take regularly.

Typically, patients with type 2 diabetes begin receiving insulin therapy some 10 to 15 years after their diagnosis, when diabetes complications may have already started. Nelson recommended insulin therapy earlier in the course of the disease, “before the proverbial train has run down the mountain and crashed into the village.” Recent studies have shown that early intervention with insulin therapy may not only control blood glucose in type 2 diabetes, but also may prevent or delay the progressive loss of beta cell function caused by the disease.

A Team Approach

Nelson also supported a team approach to controlling diabetes. The patient must monitor his or her blood glucose several times a day, take any medications as prescribed, and see a healthcare provider regularly. But doctors also need to step up to the plate, ensuring that their patients get the education they need and that those without diabetes are screened periodically to find the disease in its earliest stages. “If we put the team structure in place, there’s a lot that can be done,” stressed Nelson. In Mississippi, such an approach has resulted in programs that help impoverished patients obtain access to care they may not have otherwise been able to receive.

Alan M. Jacobson, MD, senior vice president of the Joslin Diabetes Center, underscored the importance of positive messages to encourage people to take charge of their health. “Changes in care over the last 25 years have changed the course of diabetes in some important ways,” he stated. “The challenge is to get this message out to the broadest audience.”

Patients need to know that better blood glucose control can pay off for them, and that such control needs to start early in the course of the disease. Many patients are fearful of starting the journey to such goals because they fear failure. Jacobson encouraged doctors to help patients separate their goals into “achievable bits,” rather than emphasizing the end result all at once. It’s easier to think of reducing A1C by 1% at a time, for example, rather than immediately going for a 3-4% decrease.

Overcoming Patient Fears

Stephen Brunton, MD, of Stamford Hospital/Columbia University Family Practice Residency Program in Stamford, Connecticut, agreed that there’s a need to overcome patients’ fears. “This disease is so fraught with misconceptions,” he said. “People may not only not want to discuss it, but they may not see their physicians when they need to.” He encouraged the development of programs that teach patients both how to control their glucose and how to maintain their quality of life.

Vital to those programs are resources that healthcare providers need to educate their patients effectively. Continuing medical education courses for doctors and simple tools for patients (such as flip charts, booklets, and videos) could facilitate the process. “Our goal as clinicians is to access patients who have less access to care, and to provide tools they may not have,” Brunton concluded. “This disease, like no other, needs to be managed by a team. As a team, we can get a handle on this epidemic.”

Also read: Challenges in Food and Nutrition Science

An Entertaining Approach to Science Education

A shot of a microphone in the foreground with stage lights in the background.

Who said that science can’t be fun? These scientists let lose for the night to both entertain and educate their audience.

Published June 1, 2003

By Dennis Gaffney

Image courtesy of Chalabala via stock.adobe.com.

It’s about an hour before Helen Davies is scheduled to sing in the basement grotto at the Cornelia Street Café in New York’s Greenwich Village. The crowd hasn’t yet filtered into the long and narrow bohemian space, with its low ceilings, candle lighting, and tables the size of pizza pies.

By day, Davies is a professor of microbiology. Performing, though, as her stomach reminds her, is not the same as teaching. “I guess you’d say I have butterflies,” admits the professor, who is 77 years old. “That’s a gastro-entomological term.”

Davies is part of the February edition of the monthly “Entertaining Science” series, which aspires to mix a little science, the spoken word and some music in a café setting. Tonight, Davies does all three when she steps onto a stage not much larger than a hospital gurney and sings “Leprosy,” written to the tune of the Beatles hit “Yesterday:”

Leprosy…
Bits and pieces falling off of me.
But it isn’t the toxicity
It’s just neglect of injury.
Suddenly,
I’m not half the man I used to be
Can’t feel anything peripherally…

Davies, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, usually uses such songs – “I have about 40, but I’m happiest with 12,” she says – to provide mnemonic devices to medical students who must memorize mountains of minutiae about infectious diseases.

Song as a Mnemonic Device for Medical Students

From left: Nobelist Roald Hoffman, Professor Helen Davies, and filmmaker Daniel Conrad.

A good example is “Gonococci,” a homage to bacteria that cause gonorrhea. Davies wrote the lyrics to the tune “She’ll be Comin Round the Mountain When She Comes.” This evening, Davies asks just the men in the audience to sing the second stanza from the song sheets she has distributed:

Let’s not clap for gonococcus named for Neisser
Which infects when to your life you add some spice sir.
Prostatitis, urethritis,
And Epididymitis
You can get it many times, not once or twice sir.

The audience breaks into laughter as often as it breaks into song. It’s just the kind of performance that Roald Hoffmann, the playful master of ceremonies for “Entertaining Science,” loves to schedule. “We’re not trying to teach science as much as we’re trying to have fun with science,” explains Hoffmann, who is a poet and a popularizer of science – as well as a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. “For me, the arts are a complementary way to understand this beautiful and terrible world around us.” Robin Hirsch, one of the café’s owners, has compared the combinations of art and science that Hoffmann has scheduled to “atomic particles colliding together.”

Benoit Mandelbrot, largely responsible for fractal geometry, told stories about fractals at the evening titled “The Smooth and the Wildly Rough,” held last September. “I discussed the eternal fight between the rough and the smooth,” says Mandelbrot, who is in attendance this evening. “There’s no good story without conflict.”

Poetry, Music, Film, and More

Sharing the stage with him that September night was poet Emily Grosholz, who read poems sparked by high-level mathematics. Experimental musician Elliott Sharp played fractal-inspired music on his electric guitar. A program last December included a Columbia University chemist who described his research on the biochemistry of vision. A colleague then joined him on stage and the two each dazzled the crowd with magic tricks – hence the evening’s title, “Now You See It, Now You Don’t.”

“The evening must have two elements,” Hoffmann says. “It has to have a theme and then two or three performers who are loosely connected.” The connection this February evening is familial. The warm-up act to Davies is Daniel Conrad, a one-time molecular immunologist who has become an experimental filmmaker. He also happens to be Davies’ son.

The filmmaker began the evening by discussing how films are structured like organisms – pretty academic stuff. Then he showed two of his films, which featured the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, a classical music soundtrack, the buildings of Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi, views of Canada’s Queen Charlotte Islands, and super-imposed dancers who moved more like organisms than humans.

A Free Meal

Clearly, the films are more art than science. All the performers, regardless of their fame, are paid with only a free meal, which they eat upstairs in Cornelia Street Cafe’s restaurant after the show. While waiting for dinner, Mandelbrot explains why he regularly attends the series. “All my work is between fields, so the people I feel most at ease with don’t have a devotion to just one field,” he says. He’s referring to the dozen people at the dinner table, who, lubricated by a few complimentary bottles of wine, converse about the pianist Glenn Gould, Lyme disease, grandmothering, Tourette’s syndrome, and choreographer George Balanchine.

“People have told me we could fill Carnegie Hall with this series,” says Hirsch. “But there wouldn’t be the same sense of play. There would be too much at stake. Besides, Helen would have to worry about singing perfectly in tune.”

Also read: Neural Harmony: When Arts Meets Neuroscience

The Promise and Limitations of Carbon Capture

A shot of tall industrial smokestacks emitting smoke or steam.

Advances in a new technique known as carbon capture will be critical as carbon-based energy supplies continue to be used around the world.

Published June 1, 2003

By Chris Michaud

Image courtesy of Leonid via stock.adobe.com.

How long can earth’s carbon-based energy supplies be sustained in the face of rising global demand? Can the environmental challenges that such energy sources pose be effectively mitigated?

To address these questions, Columbia University Professor Klaus S. Lackner told an April 17, 2003, Environmental Sciences Section gathering at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) it is necessary “to destroy some preconceived notions.”

“Our problem is not that we are running out of energy,” Lackner told the audience. Rather, he posited that the problem lies in finding environmentally acceptable means of utilizing existing carbon resources to meet the world’s rising energy requirements. “Whether we like it or not,” he said, “we will have to look at carbon as a resource, see whether we have enough of it, and use that for the foreseeable future – in an environmentally acceptable manner.”

Now the Ewing-Worzel Professor of Geophysics at Columbia’s Earth Institute, Lackner’s opinion is based on 18 years of research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, where he worked on finding environmentally acceptable technologies for the use of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels provide 85 percent of all energy used in the world today. Contrary to common popular belief, Lackner said carbon-based resources continue to be both plentiful and relatively inexpensive.

Noting that the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen from about 315 parts per million in 1958 to about 370 parts per million today, Lackner said the dilemma lies in the fact that “fossil carbon has caused environmental problems that need to be fixed,” adding that “we really cannot go on like that indefinitely.”

Demand for New Energy Innovations

Nevertheless, he noted that the continuing global desire for economic growth and development demands new energy innovations. Displaying a series of detailed charts and graphs showing historical energy consumption and GDP (gross domestic product) projections for the coming decades, Lackner said, “we are clearly creating an enormous shortage” by removing fossil carbon energy sources from the energy picture.

Due to increasing evidence of global climate change, Lackner said many people now believe the world must reduce its reliance on carbon energy sources. Adding credence to this argument is the “common wisdom,” which holds that “these are finite resources and we are bound to run out – it’s just a question of time.” Although “strong arguments have been made that we might run out of oil,” Lackner said, “that is not the same as running out of carbon,” and noted that coal reserves are plentiful.

The ultimate answer, Lackner said, lies in capturing carbon dioxide and utilizing the carbon resource without allowing excess carbon to escape into the atmosphere where it stays for about 100 years, possibly driving climate change.

The current challenge, he added, is “the technology issue of capturing carbon dioxide and putting it away, if for no other reason than there’s a huge resource sitting out there, and even if we try to be good about it and not use it, the temptation will be there until the day when we find another energy option that is even cheaper.”

Solutions

Using the world’s oceans for carbon deposits is not feasible, Lackner added, because carbon dioxide, an acid, changes the oceans’ pH level. And energy conservation, while laudable and helpful, is not going to solve the energy problem alone. In addition, it is difficult and expensive to collect carbon dioxide emitted by mobile sources, such as cars and airplanes, which generate a significant proportion of it. “We have a gap,” Lackner said, and new ideas and technologies are needed soon – within the next two decades.

Lackner proposed a couple of solutions: one is an artificial tree, a giant carbon-capturing device that he amusingly described as looking like a goal post covered with Venetian blinds; the other one is designed as a huge cooling tower. While the designs are still in an “early exploratory stage,” with various versions looking vastly different from each other, he said they all essentially aim to collect carbon dioxide directly from the air using wind as the transport agent.

Capture from air is rarely considered a viable option because carbon dioxide in the air is very dilute, a seemingly huge obstacle, but Lackner believes the technologies capable of capturing more dilute substances can be developed. He hopes for a pilot demonstration of one of the devices, which could lead to its commercial manufacture and implementation.

A Radical Alternative

Carbon dioxide capture from the air would provide a radical alternative to currently debated options for mitigating climate change, Lackner said. He estimated that about 250,000 of the artificial trees would be needed to take care of all of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. But time, he added, is of the essence. International accords such as the Kyoto Protocol are also key to the effort.

“We need to do it soon,” so that the carbon capturing devices could be put into use by about 2020. “The building blocks are all working now,” he said. “But we are under severe time pressure. There is enormous demand for growth in developing countries. And we are kidding ourselves if we think we can get carbon dioxide emissions to go down over the next 20 years…Sometime around 2050 we will hit a brick wall, effectively having doubled the CO2 in the atmosphere…People will be aware of that by 2020,” he predicted.

Also read: How One Mozambican Researcher Hopes to Mitigate the Climate Crisis through Coffee

Women Rising: The Science of Leadership

A bird's eye view of the Ohio State University campus, with the infamous horseshoe football stadium visible in the background.

Women with science backgrounds are beginning to take more leadership positions in academia than ever before. These pioneers offer their tips for success.

Published April 1, 2003

By Rosemarie Foster

A view from Columbus, Ohio, home to The Ohio State University. Image courtesy of espiegle via stock.adobe.com.

Princeton. Rensselaer. Ohio State. What do they have in common? In addition to being among the nation’s most respected universities, they are all led by women with a common background: science.

As college presidents, women from science are in the minority. Of the 2,594 college and university presidents profiled by the American Council on Education (ACE) in their 2002 report The American College President, just 21 percent of them are women. But that’s also good news: that number has more than doubled since 1986, when 9.5 percent of presidents were women.

Moreover, very few college presidents have their highest awarded degree in the sciences. Just 3.2 percent have an advanced degree in the physical/natural sciences, while 2.1 percent have their highest degree in biological sciences. Those numbers pale in comparison to the 44 percent of college presidents whose highest degree is in education.

So what makes these women different, and what drives them? We asked three of them: Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, who assumed her post in July 1999; Shirley M. Tilghman, who became president of Princeton University in June 2001; and Karen A. Holbrook, who took the helm of The Ohio State University in July 2002.

To be sure, all three women have strong backgrounds in education, having spent many years teaching students both in the laboratory as well as the classroom and assuming major university faculty positions. But all began their careers in one place: the laboratory. And that’s where they believe they acquired some of the most important traits that now make them excellent university presidents.

Shirley Ann Jackson

For Shirley Ann Jackson, a theoretical physicist from Washington, D.C., her career path began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1968. In 1973 she became one of the first two African-American women in the U.S. to earn a doctorate in physics, and the first African-American to receive a doctorate from M.I.T. in any subject. Over the course of the next two decades, she conducted research in theoretical, solid state, quantum, and optical physics at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.

She became a professor of physics at Rutgers University, where she taught from 1991 to 1995 while continuing to conduct her research. In 1995, President Clinton appointed her chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission – a post she held until 1999. Even in her early days in the lab, did she have her eye on such significant leadership?

“I’ve always been interested in science, technology, and public policy,” she explains. “I think there’s a natural evolution as one goes from doing research oneself, particularly as a theoretical physicist, to building a research group, having others work with one on one’s ideas and their ideas, and to teaching. Being a university president is a natural evolutionary point, because part of what a president does is enable others to learn and do research.”

Shirley Tilghman

Shirley Tilghman had no plans to lead an Ivy League university when she began her career as a developmental biologist. A native of Canada, she received an Honors BSc in chemistry from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 1968, and a PhD in biochemistry from Temple University. During post-doctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health, she participated in cloning the first mammalian gene.

She later led a lab as an independent investigator at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, and taught human genetics, biochemistry, and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1986 she joined the Princeton faculty as a professor in the life sciences, continuing her laboratory research and also directing Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute of Integrative Genomics.

“Until I was about 45, I thought I wouldn’t do anything except science,” she recalls. “I thought it was the most interesting thing a person could possibly do. But as you become more senior in a field, you begin to assume more responsibilities, and you’re gradually weaned from the bench. As I started taking on these new roles, I found I enjoyed them. Rather than being annoying distractions from science, they were something I looked forward to. That was the beginning of my recognition that I might someday do something other than be a working scientist.”

Karen Holbrook

Karen Holbrook recalls splitting her time between research and administration from the beginning of her days as a cell biologist. After receiving BS and MS degrees in zoology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she later earned a PhD in biological structure at the University of Washington School of Medicine in 1972. She stayed at Washington through 1993, running her laboratory in the morning, where she studied fetal skin development and genetic skin disease. Her afternoons were devoted to administrative responsibilities as the associate dean for Scientific Affairs.

“In both places, my job was to facilitate the goals of other people in science,” she says. “In my lab, I tried to do it through mentoring, working side-by-side with post docs and students. And my role in the Dean’s Office was to do the same thing – to facilitate programs and to bring people together to meet their goals and move forward in their scientific areas.” She continued in academic administration, moving to the University of Florida in 1993 to become vice president for Research and dean of the Graduate School. From 1998 to 2002, she served as provost at the University of Georgia, and then went to Ohio State to assume her current post.

The Scientific Method

To no one’s surprise, the ACE survey reported that university presidents face significant challenges. Relations with faculty, legislators, governing boards and alumni top the list. Planning, fundraising, budget issues and personnel issues occupy the most significant amount of a presidents’ time.

Jackson, Holbrook and Tilghman unanimously agreed that experience using the scientific method has made their jobs easier. “As a scientist, one is educated to attack complex problems, to think about the right questions that lead to solutions,” says Jackson. “In many ways, as a university president, one is always confronting complex issues that one needs to approach in a certain way.”

“In planning and in problem-solving – both in trying to understand what has happened in the past and what should happen going forward – it is helpful to have a science background, to be able to figure out what kind of data you want to gather, to know how to analyze it, and to know how to use it effectively,” adds Tilghman. “That’s been very helpful for me as a university president.”

Collaboration is Key

Collaboration is also an essential part of the scientific process. Likewise, a college president needs to know how to work with diverse personality types. Indeed, the ACE report noted that “the imperative of rapidly changing economic, demographic, and political conditions suggest the need for adaptability and diversity in education institutions and their leaders.” “In science, you build and value networks of people. Nobody does anything alone,” contends Holbrook. “Scientists also learn to work with diverse groups of people. When I left my own lab, I had people there from Turkey, Australia, Korea and China, all united by the love of the same thing: the science we were doing.”

Holbrook also likens the grant-writing process to the fundraising duties of university presidents. “You need to build a case and a story for what it is you want to accomplish,” she says, “and sell it to somebody whom you want to believe it and support it.”

Roadblocks to Success?

Is there a glass ceiling in science? In education? If there is, these three women broke through it. Jackson notes a few obstacles early in her career that she says were “rooted in the obstacles to women becoming senior scientists and having senior positions in academia and other places.” The wheels of her career were really set in motion once she became a tenured professor at Rutgers, she recalls.

While Holbrook says she didn’t see a lot of roadblocks in her way, she did feel she had to prove herself repeatedly. “As a woman we don’t always have the kinds of doors that are open just by the normal ways through which men typically interact,” she believes. “I do think you always have to sell yourself a little bit more as a woman. But I must say, I didn’t have huge obstacles.”

When it comes to obstacles, Shirley Tilghman claims she had blinders on. “I was never in a position where I felt that either my superiors or my colleagues were treating me differently than they treated their male colleagues,” she says. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to believe that some of that was tunnel vision on my part. And I actually think that is one of the most important ingredients to succeeding in science – to be able to ignore or be unconscious of what could be perceived, and what may be intended to be slights and ways of putting you down because you’re a woman. If they happened, I didn’t see them.”

Do What You Love, Love What You Do

Today’s female college presidents stand as role models for all women in science. They advise young women to challenge themselves, find something they love, and pursue it fervently. “If you have a real passion for your science and what you do, do the very best you can. Get in, enjoy it, and don’t worry about the next step,” advises Holbrook. “The next steps come naturally if you’re doing something you enjoy and are absolutely committed to. There will be lots of doors that are opened.”

“My major advice these days is, ‘Don’t let anybody make you into a victim,’” says Tilghman. “Just don’t let it happen. If you don’t think of yourself as a victim, you won’t be a victim.”

“Scientific careers are full, rich, and challenging. They allow a person to use her intellect at the highest level,” adds Jackson. “I think there still are some obstacles, but the very fact that you now have women scientists in leadership positions at the highest levels in academia and in senior positions at other places should itself let young women know what is possible.”

The Future of Leadership

Will we see more women and more scientists ascend to university presidencies? There are certainly plenty of programs in place to make that happen. The American Council on Education has an Office of Women in Higher Education that provides national direction for women’s leadership development and career advancement through a variety of programs. For example, they sponsor national leadership forums to identify and promote women for senior-level positions, especially presidencies. Some 200 of the 1,000 women who have attended these forums have become college or university presidents.

Bryn Mawr College hosts a Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education, offering intensive training in education administration pertinent to the management and governance of colleges and universities. And the national Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine program offers executive training to expand the number of qualified women for leadership positions in academic medicine and dentistry. “These programs are preparing women just marvelously for leadership roles, and giving them the confidence and tools they may not have,” notes Holbrook. “The fact that they’re booked tells you that there are women who are interested in this as a career route.”

Taking the Lead

Tilghman hopes to see not only more women, but more scientists taking the lead at universities and colleges. She credits Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences and a scientist himself, with a sea change in which biologists are increasingly engaging in public affairs. “He set a tone that said a scientific career for people who want to do this can include public service,” she explains. “I’m hoping that the next generation will see these kinds of jobs not just as service – as in ‘Oh, it’s my turn to pay back’ – but as really enjoyable jobs.”

“The very fact that women have ascended to the presidencies of some of the major institutions in this country, and among those are women who happen to be scientists, I think hopefully portents some open doors that haven’t been,” concludes Jackson. “It certainly shows what women are capable of doing. And I think that’s the real message.”

Also read: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome to Empower Women in STEM

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Advances in a new technique known as carbon capture will be critical as carbon-based energy supplies continue to be used around the world.

Demand for New Energy Innovations

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A Radical Alternative

Women with science backgrounds are beginning to take more leadership positions in academia than ever before. These pioneers offer their tips for success.

Shirley Ann Jackson

Shirley Tilghman

Karen Holbrook

The Scientific Method

Collaboration is Key

Roadblocks to Success?

Do What You Love, Love What You Do

The Future of Leadership

Taking the Lead

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
-Aldous Huxley, Music at Night