Skip to main content

Blog Archives

Older posts
Newer posts

Promoting Science, Human Rights in the Middle-East

Two human rights activists are named winners of the Academy’s Human Rights Award for 2005.

Published October 17, 2005

By Fred Moreno

Image courtesy of Manpeppe via stock.adobe.com.

Two activists who have long fought for the rights of scientists-especially in the Middle East-received the 2005 Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award at the Academy’s 187th Business Meeting held on September 29.

The 2005 winners are Zafra Lerman, distinguished professor of Science and Public Policy and head of the Institute for Science Education and Science Communication at Columbia College Chicago, and Herman Winick, assistant director and professor emeritus of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory at Stanford University.

Zafra Lerman

For more than a decade, in her role as chair of the Subcommittee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights of the American Chemical Society’s Committee on International Activities, Zafra Lerman has stimulated human rights awareness in communities of chemists and is the American Chemical Society’s leading voice on behalf of the human rights of scientists throughout the world. She has traveled to the former Soviet Union, Russia, Cuba, China, and the Middle East, bringing encouragement to repressed scientists.

In 2003 she worked with the Israel Academy of Science, particularly in the case of allowing nine Palestinian scientists to attend a conference in Malta where scientists from ten nations in the Middle East met to tackle problems of research and education in the politically and economically troubled region.

Herman Winick

Herman Winick has been an extraordinarily effective and tireless scientist working on behalf of the Human Rights of Scientists for more than 25 years. He was one of the original supporters and founders of the Sakharov-Orlov-Scharansky (SOS) group in the 1980’s.

In the 1990s, he strongly supported the Human Rights activities of the American Physical Society (APS), on behalf of repressed scientists all around the world, first as a member, and then as the Chair of the APS Committee on International Freedom of Scientists. In the mid-1990’s he conceived the brilliant idea of creating a new synchrotron research facility in the Middle East, known as the SESAME project, which would be located in Jordan and actively solicit participants from other regional nations such as Egypt, The Palestinian Authority, Israel, Syria, and others; it is now operating.

For the past three years he has worked on behalf of an Iranian dissident physicist, Professor Hadizadeh, who has been imprisoned for his pro-democracy activities. Due in large part to efforts by Winick, Professor Hadizadeh is now carrying out research in the United States.

Pagels Award

The Academy’s first human rights award was given in 1979 to Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov. Renamed in 1988 in honor of former Academy president Heinz R. Pagels, the award has been bestowed on such imminent scientists as Chinese dissident Fang Li-Zhi, Russian Nuclear Engineer Alexander Nikitin, and Cuban Economist Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello. The 2004 award was presented to Dr. Nguyen Dan Que of Vietnam.

Also read: Promoting Human Rights through Science

Bringing a Scientific Perspective to Wall Street

Emanuel Derman was a pioneer in the now-established field of financial engineering, which was influenced by his background in theoretical physics.

Published October 6, 2005

By Adelle Caravanos

Image courtesy of helivideo via stock.adobe.com.

Emanuel Derman, director of the Columbia University financial engineering program, and Head of Risk at Prisma Capital Partners, will speak at the Academy on October 19. The self-described “quant” will discuss his unusual career path, from theoretical physics to Wall Street, where he became known for co-developing the Black-Derman-Toy interest-rate model at Goldman Sachs. His book, My Life As a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, became one of Business Week’s Top Ten Books of 2004.

The Academy spoke with Derman in advance of his lecture.

*some quotes were lightly edited for length and clarity*

First, please tell our readers what a quant is!

Well, “quant” is short for quantitative strategist or quantitative analyst. It’s somebody who uses mathematics, physics, statistics, computer science, or any combination of these things at a technical level to try to understand the behavior of stock prices, auction prices, bonds, commodities, and various kinds of derivatives from a mathematical point of view — from a predictive view to some extent.

Is it safe to assume that most of the major banks employ quants?

Yes. When interest rates went up astronomically around [the time of], and even after, the oil crisis of ’73, [the hiring of quants] started in the fixed income business. Fixed income has always been a much more quantitative business historically than the rest of the securities business and people have always thought that bonds and fixed income investments were fairly non-volatile, stable, and safe. Once interest rates went up to around 15 percent and gold prices went up like crazy, investment banks and companies had a whole different range of problems to deal with than before.

They’d always known stocks were volatile, but not that bonds were. So, they started hiring people out of non-financial parts of universities, non-business schools — computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, Bell Labs — to tackle these problems, partly because they involved more mathematics than people were used to and partly because they involved more computer science than people were used to.

If you had a whole portfolio of things, you couldn’t do them efficiently on paper anymore. You couldn’t take account of the changes or take account of what they were worth, so people started building computer programs to do these things. And so, there was an in-road there for a lot of quantitative people.

I think it was good to get in [to quantitative strategy] early because you could make a contribution with much less skill and talent. After 20 years everything gets so complicated mathematically that it’s much harder to do anything. It’s not impossible; people do it. But it was very exciting in the early ’80s because there were virtually no textbooks. You couldn’t get a degree in the field. Everybody was self-taught. It was exciting.

When you started at Goldman, were you one of the first of their quants?

They had maybe 10 or 20 people there. I was early, but I wasn’t the first.

You talk in your book about the difference between the way traders and quants approach problems.

I think the differences are less extreme now because quantitative methods have become much more ubiquitous all over Wall Street, particularly in hedge funds. But, yes, traders were impulsive, sharp, and gregarious. They liked meeting with people, and if you worked on the trading floor everybody was yelling and screaming. It’s exciting, but for people coming from an academic background, it is hard to concentrate! It’s chaotic. You have to multi-task a lot, which is very disturbing if you grew up wanting to do just one thing, like getting a PhD and working for six years solidly on it.

You also make the distinction between working on the mathematical models and the actual science or technology of working on the interfaces for the people. Which did you enjoy more?

I liked both. When I was in physics, we were always trying to do research and it was hard, lonely work. You shut yourself in an office and tried to make progress and when you couldn’t get anything done, or when things weren’t working, you had nothing else to do — it was really depressing.

What was nice about working at Goldman was that there were useful things you could do, like software, that didn’t take the same mental effort. They took talent and they took skill, but you didn’t have to discover something new to do them. So it was very nice to spend a quarter of your time doing research and half doing software and another quarter dealing with people. It was a much more balanced life.

Do you think that things are changing as far as academicians looking down at people going into the business world, and business people looking down at academicians?

I do think it goes both ways. I certainly looked down on people dropping out of PhDs and going into business. It felt like you were leaving the monastery before you’d become a monk. Academics brought you up to look down on anybody who copped out. And then business people always used “academic” as sort of a dirty word — “academic” in the sense of “not applied.”

About the Author

Professor Emanuel Derman is director of Columbia University’s program in financial engineering and Head of Risk at Prisma Capital Partners, a fund of funds. My Life as A Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance was one of Business Week’s top ten books of the year for 2004. Derman obtained a PhD in theoretical physics from Columbia University in 1973. Between 1973 and 1980 he did research in theoretical particle physics, and from 1980 to 1985 he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories.

In 1985 Derman joined Goldman Sachs’ fixed income division where he was one of the co-developers of the Black-Derman-Toy interest-rate model. From 1990 to 2000 he led the Quantitative Strategies group in the Equities division, where they pioneered the study of local volatility models and the volatility smile. He was appointed a Managing Director of Goldman Sachs in 1997. In 2000 he became head of the firms Quantitative Risk Strategies group. He retired from Goldman, Sachs in 2002.

Derman was named the IAFE/Sungard Financial Engineer of the Year 2000, and was elected to the Risk Hall of Fame in 2002.

Also read:What Happens When Innovative Scientists Embrace Entrepreneurship?

Exploring Nature and Nurture of Women in Science

Three young girls conduct a science experiment.

Are gender disparities in the STEM fields a matter of nature or nurture? A panel of experts explored the ways in which these two seemingly opposing viewpoints interact.

Published September 2, 2005

By David Berreby

In 1993, the makers of the Talking Barbie doll included, among its 270 recorded phrases, the sentence “Math class is tough!” Did they do this because girls don’t like math as much as boys? Or do girls not like math because of influences that include Barbie dolls?

That’s the issue for policymakers contemplating the absence of women from the rosters of some scientific fields. Do we perceive gender differences, and act upon them, because men and women are biologically different? (If so, then women may never be represented in some fields in the same numbers as men.) Or is it that we have trained ourselves to see those differences? (In which case, our beliefs are holding talented people back.)

Are gender disparities, in other words, a matter of nature or nurture?

To those dilemmas, most scientists agree, there is only one good response: those are the wrong questions. Gender differences are obviously a matter of both nature and nurture. This was one rare point of agreement among panelists at an April 14, 2005, discussion on women in science held at the Cooper Union, sponsored by the Women Investigators Network and the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Sloan Project’s First Light Festival, and moderated by former New York Times science editor Cornelia Dean. It’s absurd, the speakers agreed, to choose one side or the other. The real problem is to figure out how nature and nurture interact.

The State of Current Knowledge

In that quest, the essential controversy is over the state of current knowledge. Some argue that today’s science is good enough to speak of certain gender differences as facts, and to tell which are innate and which are not. Others believe we don’t yet know enough to tease nature and nurture apart and note that one era’s “facts” about men and women have a way of looking like prejudice to later generations.

The Cooper Union session had its roots in remarks made on January 14, 2005, by a former Harvard University president to a meeting of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Saying he wanted to “provoke” his listeners, he took a side on the basic underlying question: is today’s science good enough to speak with confidence about the biological differences between men and women?

He thinks it might be, arguing that it is reasonable to ask if one reason for the paucity of women in top-level academic science jobs might be innate differences in the ways male and female minds work. He also mentioned two other factors he thought merited consideration: the demands of family life and the hindrances posed by convention and prejudice. However, his remarks about innateness got the most attention, in part because a number of attendees were so offended they walked out.

One was Nancy Hopkins, who led MIT’s Study of Women Faculty in Science, an inquiry launched in 1995 to determine why women were underrepresented among MIT professors. At the Cooper Union Hopkins argued that if we don’t yet know how nature and nurture combine to shape people’s lives, the very act of claiming certainty can breed prejudices and stereotypes.

Increase in Representation at MIT

Pointing out that women went from comprising 2% of MIT’s student body to more than 40% in the 20th century, she noted that such an upsurge was unlikely to be due to a fundamental change in the biology of women’s brains. Overconfident belief that women weren’t suited to her field, biology, once kept talented people out, she said. Now women are well represented in biology, but the same beliefs obstruct their progress in mathematics.

Linda Gottfredson, professor in the School of Education and affiliated faculty in the University Honors Program at the University of Delaware, however, argued that innate gender differences are very clear—so clear, in fact, that a goal of gender parity in all professions seems unrealistic. Specifically, she said, male minds show a bias toward interest in things, while female minds are interested in people, creating what she called a genetic “tilt” that affects the types of careers they choose. In this light, supporting an idea of infinite human malleability “ignores both women’s own preferences and the huge challenges they face when committed to having both children and careers.”

Richard Haier, who studies the neurobiology of intelligence, consciousness, and personality at the University of California, Irvine, also argued for the innateness of intelligence. He explained that while bell curves of male and female scores of general intelligence “essentially completely overlap,” more men tend to be found at the extreme high end of the scale for a few specific cognitive abilities like mathematical reasoning. Using imaging technology, he found that different parts of men’s and women’s brains are related to general intelligence in one study and to mathematical reasoning in another.

Gender Differences in Cognitive Traits

Diane Halpern, past-president of the American Psychological Association and professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College, agrees that there is significant evidence to suggest that gender differences in cognitive traits exist. However, the observation that some differences may be due to innate traits does not mean those differences are immutable. This is because even innate aspects of a person interact with an environment, and environments can change.

Or as Halpern said, “The word innate does not mean forever.” In assessing male and female performance on tests and career tracks, she argued, it is important to remember that the academic world “has been devised as a very male, very heterosexual world,” and the fact that “the biological clock and tenure clocks run in the same time zone” has been bad for women in academia.

New York University’s Joshua Aronson acknowledged the importance and relevance of studies on biological gender differences, but also warned against too much stress on innateness as an explanation. He looks at how people, cultural animals that they are, respond to cultural notions. Cognition, he argued, is affected by a phenomenon called stereotype threat, “an apprehension arising from the awareness of a negative stereotype or personal reputation in a situation where you can confirm that stereotype with your behavior or the way you look.” Citing various studies that he and his colleagues have conducted, he said that changes in the environment in which high-achieving women navigate cognitive tests can affect their performance.

Are Sex Differences in Intelligence Innate?

None of this was abstract theory for the panelists or their audience at The Cooper Union. As scientists were both the investigators and the subjects of research about such issues, the talks and subsequent questions produced an unusual mix of passion, autobiography, and political debate. The panel was sharply split on the question of whether we have sufficient knowledge to say that sex differences in intelligence are innate. As is usually the case when scientific controversies mix with political disputes, some on each side accused the other of seeking to cut off debate and suppress inconvenient facts. And some speakers of both schools of thought stated that the other approach was actively harmful to young women.

Women should not be pushed to do things against their nature, said one of the innatists. Women should not be told that their ambitions aren’t natural, said one of the environmentalists. Though no speaker bolted (and the tone of the talks, questions, and reception stayed civil), there was no disguising the profound philosophical, political, and scientific disagreement at the heart of this question.

Also read: Strategies from Successful Women Scientists

About the Author

David Berreby has written for the New York Times Science Section, The New York Times Magazine, The Sciences, Discover, Smithsonian, Slate, The New Republic, and many other publications

Wilson Bentley: The Man Who Studied Snowflakes

A shot of an intricate snowflake with a black background.

This Vermont-based farmer spent his career in the late 19th and early 20th centuries transforming the study of snowflakes into an art as well as a science.

Published June 1, 2005

By Fred Moreno

Image courtesy of vadim_fl via stock.adobe.com.

For centuries, humans have been fascinated by the endless variety of snowflakes and their six-fold symmetry. Scientists have sought to better understand how they are formed from single crystals of ice and why complex patterns arise spontaneously in such simple physical systems. According to Kenneth Libbrecht, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, “snowflakes are the product of a rich synthesis of physics, mathematics, and chemistry.”

The oldest observation of snow crystals* on record appears in China around 135 BC, but the 17th century seemed to witness the dawn of their serious scientific consideration. A treatise by Johannes Kepler raised questions about the genesis of their hexagonal symmetry, while the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes wrote detailed accounts of the geometrical perfection of snow-crystal structure.

Later in that century, English scientist Robert Hooke was the first to draw snowflakes through a microscope. Many others – including the 19th century Arctic explorer William Scoresby and the great Japanese scientist Ukichiro Nakaya in the mid-20th century – have made important contributions to understanding the science of snow and ice.

But if there is one person who transformed snowflake study into an art as well as a science, it was Wilson A. Bentley, a farmer from Jericho, Vermont, who spent a lifetime (1865-1931) studying snow crystals. He became interested in the structure of snow crystals as a teenager in the 1880s and tried sketching them through an old microscope his mother had given him. But he found this a frustrating task since he had to work very rapidly in order to capture a complex phenomenon.

Much Trial and Error

Eventually Bentley devised a means of attaching a bellows camera to a compound microscope, and after much trial and error, he finally succeeded in photographing his first snow crystal on January 15, 1885. Over the next 46 years, he took more than 5,000 snow-crystal images on glass photographic plates – as well as pictures of frost, pond ice, dew, and clouds. A little known fact about Bentley is that he also studied rainfall and was the first American to make measurements of raindrop size. His work in this area is one reason he is considered a pioneer in the science known today as cloud physics.

Keeping fragile things like crystals frozen and unspoiled meant Bentley had to work in temperatures below freezing. He caught the crystals on a blackboard and would transfer them to a microscope slide, taking care not to breathe on them.

“The utmost haste must be used, for a snow crystal is often exceedingly tiny, and frequently not thicker than heavy paper,” Bentley wrote. “Furthermore…evaporation (not melting) soon wears them away, so that, even in zero weather, they last but a very few minutes.”

The Treasures of the Snow

In the late 1890s, the world outside Jericho began to notice Bentley’s work. Some of his photomicrographs were acquired by the Harvard Mineralogical Museum and he published an article with George Henry Perkins, a natural history professor at the University of Vermont. It was in this article that he first outlined the notion that no two snowflakes are alike. In the coming years, many other academic institutions throughout the world – as well as the American Museum of Natural History and the British Museum – acquired samples of Bentley’s work, and he published articles in such magazines as Scientific American, National Geographic, Nature, and Popular Science.

Finally, in 1931, he collaborated with William J. Humphreys, chief physicist for the U.S. Weather Bureau, on a book, Snow Crystals, that would be the culmination of Bentley’s life’s work. It was illustrated with 2,500 snowflake photographs. Just a few weeks later, on a cold December day, Bentley died of pneumonia at his Jericho farm at the age of 66.

In the Old Testament, God asks of Job, “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?” Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley surely would have answered, “Yes!”

*To most people, there is no difference between snowflakes and snow crystals. But there is a meteorological difference. A snow crystal refers to a single crystal of ice while a snowflake can mean an individual crystal or a cluster of them formed together. In short, a snowflake is always a snow crystal, but a snow crystal is not always a snowflake.

Also read: The Culture Crosser: The Sciences and Humanities

The Science Behind a Tsunami’s Destructiveness

A blue and white sign warning: Tsunami Hazard Zone - in case of earthquake go to high ground or inland.

In the aftermath of the 2004 tsunamis, and with tectonic plates continuing to shift beneath the Indian Ocean, scientists are seeking answers to handle the next natural disaster.

Published June 1, 2005

By Sheri Fink, MD, PhD

Image courtesy of jdoms via stock.adobe.com.

Stunning images of devastation and soaring body counts dominated news coverage of last December’s tsunami, leaving one of the most important questions about the disaster barely addressed: Why did so many people die? With tectonic plates still shifting beneath the Indian Ocean, setting off new earthquakes almost daily, finding answers to this question is urgent.

Lareef Zubair is an associate research scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and founder of the Sri Lanka Meteorology, Oceanography and Hydrology Network. He studies why disasters in some parts of the world tend to carry a much higher human, as opposed to financial, toll than disasters in other places – compare the thousands who die in a typical cyclone in Bangladesh with the 123 deaths caused by last year’s four hurricanes in Florida.

Zubair recently spoke at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) on a panel organized by Science Writers in New York (SWINY), an affiliate of the National Association of Science Writers, to discuss untold stories of the tsunami.

Disasters: Unequal Opportunity Killers

Destructive acts of nature impact human populations to varying degrees. “People who study disasters sort of separate out three aspects of disasters,” said Zubair. “One is the hazards, which is something like a flood, or lightening strike, or a tsunami, which is the physical or biophysical event itself. And then there is the exposure, the degree to which people are exposed to the hazard. The third thing is how vulnerable you are to that event.”

In Zubair’s home country of Sri Lanka, the tsunami restricted its wrath to the first several hundred meters adjacent to the water’s edge. The destruction coincided with areas of high population density. Not only those who eked out a living on the sea lived in close proximity to it, but also traders and farmers, despite regulations stipulating that construction within 300 meters of the shoreline be reviewed by the government. One reason people are drawn to the coast is that infrastructure such as roads, telephones, hospitals and schools have been developed there.

“The seashore has to be protected,” said Zubair. “Cyclones and flooding and storm surges happen at the seashore…every 10, 20, 30 years, and everybody knows this. But somehow that did not translate into the desired action of having people live in safer areas.”

Not only were people living along the seashore exposed to natural disasters, Zubair said, but because of the area’s depressed economy and 20-year history of civil war, they also were highly vulnerable to them. “Vulnerability…is grossly related [to] the distribution of wealth,” Zubair said. “How good are your houses, how good is the infrastructure, how good are the hospitals that are around so that you can get treatment? How good is the road system?” The answers in the tsunami-hit areas of Sri Lanka were, in most cases, “poor.”

A Failure of Prevention

On December 26, 2004, Sri Lanka’s National Disaster Management Center did not jump into action to mitigate the tsunami’s destructive effects. The country’s “Sunday Times” newspaper summed up the problem in a headline: “Only three phones, staff of 10, and never on a Sunday.” The tsunami had the bad manners to hit on the Sunday after Christmas. “How on earth [can you] have a national disaster management center that does not work on public holidays?” Zubair asked.

An hour elapsed between the tsunami’s first deadly landfall on the island’s eastern coast and its last lashing in the country’s northwest. In that time, an estimated 20,000 additional people died. Zubair believes that had a warning been broadcast to the rest of the country soon after the tsunami began hitting the coast – roughly one and a half hours after the earthquake – lives would have been saved.

“That should have happened,” said Zubair. “Any middle school student could see [that] if you have an earthquake hazard in the middle of the ocean, there is going to be a tsunami risk. You don’t need sophisticated scientists to come and tell you this. Why did people fail? And, why did people fail in Sri Lanka? Why did people fail in India? Lastly, why did people fail here? I don’t think we should push these questions under the carpet, as scientists.”

An Early Warning System

Zubair said he made his way to the “plush” part of Colombo to visit the disaster management center several times in the year prior to the tsunami, seeking to discuss early warning systems. He was offered tea, but never an audience with anyone willing to talk about technical issues. An early warning system had indeed been proposed after Sri Lanka’s 1978 cyclone. Plans were made, reports were written, money was disbursed, but the ideas were never implemented by the center. “They exist, with a name-board and a plaque, for donors,” he said, concluding that a “perverse incentive system” exists for those involved in disaster management and related fields.

“Every time there’s a disaster, they get rewarded with larger and larger amount of funds,” he said. “In countries such as Sri Lanka, fields like disaster management and energy conservation are seen as fields in which you can get foreign funds, opportunities for scholarships and maybe some sort of benefit. There’s no integration of the disaster management system itself into the internal networks of science, into the internal networks of education, into the internal networks of governments itself and disaster management.”

High Price of Neglecting Science

Sri Lanka’s Geological Survey and Mines Bureau possessed both a functioning seismograph and a 100-year scientific pedigree, but on December 26th it had no one working on site to analyze the seismic measurements. Data were sent instead to the Scripps Institute in San Diego. “The question is, why is it that you’re sitting on probably the most important piece of scientific data Sri Lanka ever recorded or needed and you just ship it off?”

The answer is controversial. Zubair traced it to the pressures of mounting foreign debt, which forced the bureau to shift its focus away from science to supporting commercial mining interests. “Because of the fact that the country is dependent…services that look after the safety of the population got converted into a service that helps repay debt,” he said. Hewing to World Bank and Sri Lanka’s central bank guidelines, the bureau did not have the authority to spend the roughly $2,000 needed to hire someone to monitor the seismograph.

In fact, $2,000 is the government’s entire yearly grant to Sri Lanka’s Academy of Sciences. “The investment of the Sri Lankan government in science is about .18% of GDP. It’s just miniscule. You should at least have 1% or 2%, because what you’re doing is investing in people, you’re investing in safety, in the future.”

Empowering Humanity

Zubair concluded that the death toll from the tsunami was in great part a function of unmitigated exposure and vulnerability of the population – factors he laid at the doorstep of a government that neglects science and technology, and international donor organizations that offer a shower of funds for emergency relief, but turn off the spigot for prevention efforts.

“The basic message here is we really should be talking about disaster preparedness and risk management,” he said. The goal is to integrate modern scientific and technological advancements with emergency preparedness and public education. “You can have policy, but there must be implementation and there must be good governance…governance that looks after the welfare of the people.”

Despite the failures, Zubair recalled that when he visited Sri Lanka a week after the disaster he came away with hope as well as frustration. At a time when the government and international agencies had not yet swung into action, he saw the local inhabitants themselves saving lives. “Church groups, community groups, temples, mosques, workplaces. It was like 9/11 here – extraordinary mobilization. It’s not a poor country in that sense.” The key, he says, is to support the “huge capacity of people.” Chief among them? The scientists.

Also read: Tsunami Relief Efforts: A Personal Account

Tsunami Relief Efforts: A Personal Account

Water splashes and people scramble during a tsunami.

Collaboration is key when dealing with disasters. A medical doctor offers guidance from her experience in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

Published June 1, 2005

By Sheri Fink, MD, PhD

A photograph of the 2004 tsunami in Ao Nang, Krabi Province, Thailand. Image courtesy of David Rydevik via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

During two months working in Thailand and Indonesia after the tsunami, I was struck by the many ways that science and technology was employed during the disaster recovery process, although not without controversy and complications. Geospatial imaging information guided aid workers to highly populated disaster zones, but not all countries immediately released the sensitive information. Instant cell-phone messaging allowed disease surveillance specialists to track emerging infectious outbreaks across widespread areas, but not all health workers reported their cases.

One of the most interesting applications of science was in the field of forensics. In Thailand, the tsunami stole the lives of an estimated 3,442 Thai nationals and 1,953 foreigners, many of them European tourists. While tsunami victims’ bodies were buried or cremated in countries with fewer tourists, identification teams from more than two dozen countries showed up in Thailand to identify the victims, using techniques ranging from forensic anthropology to genetics. Most of the experts worked on the verdant grounds of a massive Buddhist temple known as Wat Yan Yao.

Quickly, however, a problem emerged: Each team had its own standards for evidence collection. Brendan Harris, a young volunteer from Vancouver, Canada, provided assistance to the teams, heaving waterlogged bodies onto mortuary tables in the first weeks after the tsunami. “There are a lot of arguments going on about how to deal with the bodies,” he said.

Collaboration is Imperative during Crises

Clad in hospital gowns, masked and gloved, the foreign teams at first focused their efforts on Caucasian-appearing bodies. That left Thai forensic scientists and dentists to photograph, examine and take fingerprints and DNA samples from Asian-appearing bodies, or bodies where decomposition had wiped away all traces of race. The result was two separate identification efforts, one foreign and one Thai, proceeding within earshot of each other. A month after the tsunami, the Thai and foreign teams had established completely different computer databases and were not sharing information crucial to identifying the missing. With only roughly 1,000 bodies identified, family members of the missing were distraught.

Ultimately the scientists realized that they had to work together. The foreign teams and the Thai interior ministry formed the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification Center, adopting protocols based on Interpol standards. The Center’s members committed to identifying all recovered bodies, regardless of nationality.

Scientists cautioned that the identification process could take many months, but expressed hope for what had become one of the largest international disaster identification efforts in history. “I have no doubt this will be a very highly successful system,” said DNA expert Ed Huffine, of Bode Technology Group in Springfield, Virginia. “This is developing a world response system to disaster. And it’s beginning a standardization process that uses all forms of forensic evidence, where DNA will play the leading role.”

The Need for a Crisis Response Network

A laboratory in Beijing, China, offered to test all victims’ DNA samples for free. Weeks later, scientists were surprised when the Chinese lab, and eventually several labs in other countries, had difficulty deriving usable DNA profiles from the degraded DNA in tooth samples. By the end of March, more than three months after the tsunami, the Victim Identification Center had put names to only an additional 1,112 bodies, the vast majority of them matched exclusively through dental records. Only three IDs came exclusively from DNA.

Continued disagreements and frequent personnel turnover have plagued the identification center, which insiders refer to as “a mess.” The disappointing experience has pointed out the need for better preparation and coordination among multi-national forensics experts responding to disasters.

Just as the World Health Organization plays a coordinating role for diverse groups of health professionals working in disaster and conflict zones, so, too, an international organization is needed to coordinate disaster victim identification teams. Such a group would be wise to standardize not only technical procedures, but also ethical principles – including the impartial treatment of bodies of all nationalities and races.

Perhaps most importantly, family members of the missing, who have the largest stake in the outcome of identification efforts, should be offered both full access to information and decision-making representation in any future crisis. It is crucial that their preferences and belief systems count.

Also read: The Science Behind a Tsunami’s Destructiveness

Check out the Academy’s International Science Reserve and consider joining this inclusive, impactful network.

Artists Consider Manipulation of Human Form

Analyzing how cosmetic surgery, science, and art interact in a new exhibit on display at the Academy.

Published March 31, 2005

By Fred Moreno

Image courtesy of Acronym via stock.adobe.com.

Although the Hindu surgeon Sushruta noted how to reconstruct a nose from a patient’s cheek as far back as 600 B.C., plastic surgery is said to have begun during the Renaissance with the Italian Gasparo Tagliacozzi. He originated a method of nasal reconstruction in which a flap from the upper arm is gradually transferred to the nose.

Plastic surgery (a term which covers both reconstructive and cosmetic surgery) has come a long way since then and it is now one of the largest medical specialties in the United States. It is a good example of how market demand can drive medical developments, as technology races to keep up with consumer desire. But the decision to alter one’s face or body, surgically or otherwise, continues to raise questions about the social impact of medicine and technology, the manipulation of the human form, as well as issues of identity, self-esteem, and health, both physical and psychological.

Face Value: Plastic Surgery and Transformation Art

An exhibition opening April 8 in the Gallery of Art & Science of The New York Academy of Sciences, Face Value: Plastic Surgery and Transformation Art, takes a look at these questions through the eyes of more than a dozen contemporary artists who are imagining new parameters for body identity in a wide range of media, from painting to photography— and even through personal body manipulation. Curated by artist Suzanne Anker, chair of the Art History Department at New York’s School of Visual Arts, the exhibition will include works by Erica Baum, Aaron Cobbett, Margi Geerlinks, Leigh Kane, Daniel Lee, Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault, Orlan, Julia Reodica, Aura Rosenberg, Chrysanne Stathacos, and Linn Underhill.

“In many ways, plastic surgery lies at the nexus of medicine and consumerism,” Anker says. “How visual artists interpret that interaction can say a lot about the nature of beauty and our society’s medical and cultural values.”

Also read: The Art and Science of Human Facial Perception

Academy Aids Effort to Release Political Prisoner

A recipient of The New York Academy of Sciences’ Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award was recently released from a Vietnamese prison.

Published February 3, 2005

By Fred Moreno

Image courtesy of Cavan for Adobe via stock.adobe.com.

Dr. Nguyen Dan Que, a Vietnamese doctor who won The New York Academy of Sciences’ 2004 Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award for his efforts to improve the lives of his fellow citizens, has been released from prison by the Vietnamese government following a campaign by a coalition of individuals and organizations, including the Academy.

In a letter to the Academy from Dr. Que’s brother, Dr. Quan Nguyen wrote about his brother’s release: “It is wonderful news and you’ve made it happen. On behalf of Dr. Que and my family, I thank you for all that you’ve done for Dr. Que and other dissidents around the world.”

Dr. Nguyen accepted the Pagels prize on behalf of his brother in ceremonies at the Academy in September, 2004. Awarded annually in recognition of services on behalf of the human rights of scientists, the Pagels award was given to Dr. Que “in recognition of his courage and singular moral responsibility as a medical doctor committed to the welfare and health care of the Vietnamese people and for peacefully promoting human rights in Vietnam.”

The Academy’s first human rights award was given in 1979 to Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov. Renamed in 1988 in honor of former Academy president Heinz R. Pagels, the award has been bestowed on such imminent scientists as Chinese dissident Fang Li-Zhi, Russian Nuclear Engineer Alexander Nikitin, and Cuban Economist Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello.

Also read: Promoting Human Rights through Science

From Imagination to Reality: Art and Science Fiction

A new art exhibit on display at the Academy explores more than 100 years of science fiction history.

Published October 27, 2004

By Fred Moreno and Jennifer Tang

An illustration from the 1906 French language edition of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, a classic in the field of science fiction. Image courtesy of Henrique Alvim Corrêa via Wikimedia Commons

The blending of fantasy and prediction with science gave birth more than 100 years ago to a unique literary genre known as science fiction. It takes the latest ruminations from the realms of science and extrapolates them to present conflicts that drive some of the most thought-provoking-and entertaining—fiction of our time.

The New York Academy of Sciences Gallery of Art & Science will take a close look at the eye-catching and exotic images that often illuminate science fiction and how the concepts depicted are grounded in real science in an exhibition opening November 5. From Imagination to Reality: The Art of Science Fiction will feature works illustrating such themes as robotics and extraterrestrials, space development and habitats, genetic engineering, computers, and time travel.

Artists represented will include Wayne Barlowe, John Berkey, Vincent Di Fate, Dean Ellis, Donato Giancola, Paul Lehr, Richard Powers, John Schoenherr, Gene Szafran, Murray Tinkelman, and Michael Whelan. A special feature of the show will be a selection of sci-fi movie props, including the severed hand for the 1951 film, The Thing from Another World, and a fiberglass casting from the final headpiece worn in the classic 1954 movie, Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Ubiquitous in Popular Culture

Guest curator for the exhibition is Vincent Di Fate, one of the world’s leading painters of futuristic themes whose book, Infinite Worlds: The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art, is considered the definitive volume on the subject.

“At its very best science fiction can provide compelling insights into the future and a better understanding of the human condition,” said Di Fate. “That it can sometimes predict the future with a stunning accuracy is only an incidental consequence of its purpose to entertain.”

Di Fate noted that the art of science fiction has become so ubiquitous in culture that virtually anyone can identify a robot, a ray gun and a few dozen other iconic objects of the genre on sight, whether they’ve actually ever read a science fiction story.

“For example, most of what we think about anthropomorphic mechanical beings-robots-comes from science fiction, with some important preliminary thinking on the subject presented in Isaac Asimov’s robot stories,” he said. “Computer technology also has long been a subject of science fiction literature, with the widely-used term ‘cyberspace’ coming from the pages of William’s Gibson’s landmark novel Necromancer.”

Other staples of the genre, such as rocket ships, aliens of all types, and space exploration have inspired some wonderful and exciting art, Di Fate explained. Even sociological issues such as overpopulation and racism are reflected in science fiction and the images it inspires.

“In a sense, science fiction is about the shape of things to come,” he said. “The Academy exhibition demonstrates that SF art, in reflecting things yet to be, illustrates how imagination can become reality.”

From Imagination to Reality: The Art of Science Fiction will be on view from November 5, 2004 to January 28, 2005.

Also read: The Art and Science of Human Facial Perception

The Beauty of Geometry and Art of Minimalism

New Academy art exhibit explores the beauty of the minimalist art movement, which saw a renaissance 1960s and 70s.

Published September 8, 2004

By Jennifer Tang

Image courtesy of YesPhotographers via stock.adobe.com.

In the 19th century, mathematicians such as David Hilbert turned to the work of Euclid, the ancient Greek mathematician, for new ways in which to study geometry. Hilbert uncovered new foundations of geometry by reducing mathematics to its most basic elements: lines, squares, circles, and triangles. Reflecting this line of thought, European and Russian artists in the early 1900’s began producing art based on the simplicity of ancient geometric shapes. Known as Minimalism, this movement later took the art world by storm during the 1960’s and ’70s.

To celebrate the ways in which geometry has inspired art, the New York Academy of Sciences is presenting a new exhibit, “Plane Geometry: Minimalist Work on Paper”, which will run from September 8 to October 29, 2004. The exhibit brings together about a dozen artists whose work reveals how planes of geometry can inspire artworks of startling beauty.

Included are works such as Constellations II (1967) by Jacob Drachler, which features a grid structure filled with a vocabulary of shapes (circles and squares) that are repeated in various arrangements (“constellations”). Another work, Trepass, offers a dense grid filled with gradations of color, reflecting Julian Stanszak’s study of visual perceptions.

Randomness Within Rules

Geometric shapes are also prominent in Left Turn (1979), by Alan D’Arcangelo. Here, the artist uses geometric shapes derived from road signs to give the illusion that the shapes recede into space, as if they are part of a road. Another bold design, “Untitled”, by Jimmy Ernst, son of Max Ernst, the famous Surrealist painter, presents a stick figure and the “X”-shape of a traffic sign.

Other artists include Alexander Calder, Patrick Hughes and Kenneth Martin. This fascinating collection of works from Minimalism’s heyday in the 1960’s and ’70s is from the collection of the Binghamton University Art Museum. The show will go on to Binghamton from November 5 to December 10. Lynn Gamwell, artist and chair of the Department of Art History at the School of Visual Arts, is the curator.

“Artists seeking ideal proportions have always come under the spell of numbers and mathematics,” Ms. Gamwell observed. “The current age has been driven by the possibilities of generating seemingly random phenomena from a set of precise rules.”

Also read: From Imagination to Reality: Art and Science Fiction

Older posts
Newer posts