Stephen S. Hall » Articles

The 0.5 Pandemic

admin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:50:54 +0000

Relax. H1N1 is not going to be nearly as bad as you may have been led to believe…Unless …

The virus is out there, and has been all summer, circulating at a low level through the five boroughs, turning up in samples sent to the city’s public-health lab, popping up at sleepaway camps, making a winter tour of the Southern Hemisphere, roaring back on college campuses in the South, and knocking on the door of New York City just as the school year began four weeks ago. And in what is known informally as an “epi shop,” on the second floor of a stolid prewar building on Worth Street, the epidemiologists of the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene have been on the lookout, every day, for the return of H1N1.

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Last of the Neanderthals

admin — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:58:26 +0000

In March of 1994 some spelunkers exploring an extensive cave system in northern Spain poked their lights into a small side gallery and noticed two human mandibles jutting out of the sandy soil. The cave, called El Sidrón, lay in the midst of a remote upland forest of chestnut and oak trees in the province of Asturias, just south of the Bay of Biscay. Suspecting that the jawbones might date back as far as the Spanish Civil War, when Republican partisans used El Sidrón to hide from Franco’s soldiers, the cavers immediately notified the local Guardia Civil.

But when police investigators inspected the gallery, they discovered the remains of a much larger—and, it would turn out, much older—tragedy.

Within days, law enforcement officials had shoveled out some 140 bones, and a local judge ordered the remains sent to the national forensic pathology institute in Madrid. By the time scientists finished their analysis (it took the better part of six years), Spain had its earliest cold case. The bones from El Sidrón were not Republican soldiers, but the fossilized remains of a group of Neanderthals who lived, and perhaps died violently, approximately 43,000 years ago. The locale places them at one of the most important geographical intersections of prehistory, and the date puts them squarely at the center of one of the most enduring mysteries in all of human evolution.

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Small and Thin

admin — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 01:29:40 +0000

In the early nineteen-eighties, a group of British epidemiologists at the University of Southampton compiled a grimly detailed atlas of the common causes of death in various parts of England and Wales. The atlas comtained page after page of maps for everything from cirrhosis of the liver (most common in industrial areas) to automobile accidents (drivers in the countryside are the most at risk). One of the maps, charting heart disease, proved difficult to interpret. Heart disease, the leading killer in the Western world, is considered a rich person’s illness: rates tend to rise as a society becomes more affluent. But, on this map, the poorer areas of England, in the north and west, were predominantly red, indicating higher than average death rates; the prosperous south and east, including London, were overwhelmingly green, indicating below-average death rates.

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Science That the Government Doesn’t Want to Exist

admin — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 18:58:20 +0000

On a Thursday afternoon earlier this year, Willy Lensch sat at his desk in the “nonpresidential” section of a seventh-floor laboratory at Children’s Hospital Boston and watched in dismay as one of the recent congressional debates about embryonic stem cell research streamed into his laptop. Employing the arch rhetoric that has typified stem cell politics since 1998, some members of Congress denounced the research because it requires the destruction of human embryos. Others trumpeted “alternative” techniques that promise the creation of embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos. Stem cell scientists like Lensch have heard it all before, and it never feels comfortable. “You feel the heat working on stem cells,” he said. “I’ve been working in labs for 20 years, and this is a different deal.”

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Vesuvius

admin — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 20:12:07 +0000

When the first thunderous boom echoed across the plain of Campania, quickly followed by a blistering hail of volcanic rock, the man and the woman hastily abandoned their village and made a run for it to the east, up a gently sloping hill toward what must have seemed like possible sanctuary in a nearby forest. She was about 20 years old; he was in his mid-40s. A violent downpour of rubbly pumice mixed with incandescent rocks capable of crushing skulls and scalding skin obscured their escape. To their uncomprehending minds, the calamity descending upon them must have seemed like the end of the world.

Thousands of other people were at that same moment running for their lives, marking the soft ash and wet volcanic mud with footprints of human desperation that would remain undiscovered for millennia. The people whose footprints led to the north or northwest chose a path that probably saved their lives; those who set out to the east, like the young woman and the older man, toward the present-day Italian town of Avellino, unwittingly chose a path that led to certain death. They headed, by ill luck, smack into the middle of a fallout zone that would be swiftly buried under three feet of pumice.

Battered by the fallout as if stoned by the gods, weary with the effort and terrorized by the darkness that descended around them, each breath more labored than the one before, the couple—surely united in their desperation if not by any ancient form of matrimony—began to slow down. After struggling part way up the hill, a hill that rises toward a promontory now called Castel Cicala, they finally collapsed and fell to the ground, in the final throes of asphyxiation.

“They couldn’t have seen more than a few feet in front of themselves,” Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo was saying. A volcanologist at the Osservatorio Vesuviano in Naples, Mastrolorenzo stood in a small, well-lit room in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Naples, leaning over a display case containing the beautifully preserved skeleton of the young woman extended on a bed of pumice, just as it had been found.

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Last Hours of the Iceman

admin — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 20:06:21 +0000

It was late spring or early summer, when a modest tree called the hop hornbeam unfurls bright yellow clusters of flowers in the steep valleys that run north into the mountains now known as the Italian Alps. The man hurried through a forest he knew well, wincing from the pain in his injured right hand and pausing occasionally to listen for sounds that he was being pursued. As he fled up the slope, the yellow pollen of the hornbeam blossoms fell like an invisible rain, salting the water and food he consumed when he stopped to rest. Five thousand years later, the Neolithic hunter we call the Iceman would still bear traces of this ancient dusting inside his body—a microscopic record of the time of year it was when he passed through this forest and into the nearby mountains, where fate would finally catch up with him.

Since hikers discovered his mummified corpse in 1991 in a rocky hollow high in the Ötztal Alps on Italy’s border with Austria, scientists have used ever more sophisticated tools and intellectual cunning to reconstruct the life and times of the Iceman (or “Ötzi”), the oldest intact member of the human family. We know that he was a small, sinewy, and, for his times, rather elderly man in his mid-40s. Judging from the precious, copper-bladed ax found with him, we suspect that he was a person of considerable social significance. He set off on his journey wearing three layers of garments and sturdy shoes with bearskin soles. He was well equipped with a flint-tipped dagger, a little fire-starting kit, and a birchbark container holding embers wrapped in maple leaves. Yet he also headed into a harsh wilderness curiously under-armed: The arrows in his deerskin quiver were only half finished, as if he had recently fired all his munitions and was in the process of hastily replenishing them. And he was traveling with a long, roughly shaped stalk of yew—an unfinished longbow, yet to be notched and strung. Why?

When it comes to the Iceman, there has never been a shortage of questions, or theories to answer them. During the 16 years that scientists have poked, prodded, incised, and x-rayed his body, they have dressed him up in speculations that have not worn nearly as well as his rustic garments. At one time or another, he has been mistakenly described as a lost shepherd, a shaman, a victim of ritual sacrifice, and even a vegan. But all these theories fade in the face of the most startling new fact scientists have learned about the Iceman. Although we still don’t know exactly what happened up there on that alpine ridge, we now know that he was murdered, and died very quickly, in the rocky hollow where his body was found.

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The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis

admin — Sun, 06 May 2007 22:50:29 +0000

In 1950, the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, in a famous treatise on the phases of life development, identified wisdom as a likely, but not inevitable, byproduct of growing older. Wisdom arose, he suggested, during the eighth and final stage of psychosocial development, which he described as “ego integrity versus despair.” If an individual had achieved enough “ego integrity” over the course of a lifetime, then the imminent approach of infirmity and death would be accompanied by the virtue of wisdom. Unfortunately for researchers who followed, Erikson didn’t bother to define wisdom.

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The Short of It

admin — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 21:18:59 +0000

Several years ago, around the time the Food and Drug Administration was considering the use of human growth hormone to treat extremely short but otherwise normal children, researchers were working up the results of a large-scale psychology experiment involving hundreds of middle-school and high-school students in the Buffalo area – including some who were extremely short but otherwise normal. The students didn’t know the study was about height. All they knew was that each of them had been asked to be the director of a class play. They were given thumbnail sketches of various characters in the drama – “a good leader,” “teases others too much,” “gets picked on” and so forth – and were then asked to cast the play by selecting classmates who best fit each role.

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Is Buddhism Good for Your Health?

admin — Sun, 14 Sep 2003 19:47:06 +0000

In the spring of 1992, out of the blue, the fax machine in Richard Davidson’s office at the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison spit out a letter from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Davidson, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, was making a name for himself studying the nature of positive emotion, and word of his accomplishments had made it to northern India. The exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists was writing to offer the minds of his monks — in particular, their meditative prowess — for scientific research.

Most self-respecting American neuroscientists would shrink from, if not flee, an invitation to study Buddhist meditation, viewing the topic as impossibly fuzzy and, as Davidson recently conceded, ”very flaky.” But the Wisconsin professor, a longtime meditator himself — he took leave from graduate school to travel through India and Sri Lanka to learn Eastern meditation practices — leapt at the opportunity. In September 1992, he organized and embarked on an ambitious data-gathering expedition to northern India, lugging portable electrical generators, laptop computers and electroencephalographic (EEG) recording equipment into the foothills of the Himalayas. His goal was to measure a remarkable, if seemingly evanescent, entity: the neural characteristics of the Buddhist mind at work. ”These are the Olympic athletes, the gold medalists, of meditation,” Davidson says.

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The Quest for a Smart Pill

admin — Mon, 01 Sep 2003 19:46:31 +0000

On a wintry afternoon in April, Tim Tully and I stood in a laboratory at Helicon Therapeutics, watching the future of human memory and cognition–or at least a plausible version of that future–take shape. Outside, a freak spring snowstorm lashed at the Long Island landscape. I mention the weather because it reminded both Tully and me of winters from our childhoods in the Midwest many years ago. The enduring power of those memories–and the biological processes that record and preserve them in the brain–lie at the heart of an incipient revolution in neuropharmacology that is unfolding in small, relatively unknown labs like this one in Farmingdale, N.Y.

Tully, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and founder of Helicon, has been one of the leading protagonists in the race to develop a new class of drugs that might improve memory in the memory impaired–drugs that grow out of an increasingly sophisticated molecular and mechanistic understanding of how we can remember everything from snowstorms more than 30 years ago to where we put our car keys 30 minutes ago.

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