Racist tests towards blacks in mid-20th century America

 

 

I am currently reading Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book about the life of a black woman whose cancerous tissue created the first infinitely reproducing cells used for scientific research.  A lot of the book centers around the ethical issues in the case—neither Henrietta nor her family ever gave the doctors permission to harvest her cells in the first place, and despite going for $25 dollars a vial in the 1940’s, the Lacks family has never seen a dime for their mothers’ cells.

This kind of scientific racism—or perhaps more accurately in this case, socio-economic discrimination—was common during this time.  Henrietta, and other poor, usually black, people could not afford to pay for health care.  Instead, they would go to free wards.  At the wards, doctors commonly took their cells or other biological material without their knowledge because they felt that this type of material was payment for their services in lieu of actual money. 

Skloot mentions several other examples of scientific racism perpetrated against blacks around this same period.  The first was perpetrated for nearly 40 years, from 1932-1972, against black men with syphilis. Crafted by the U.S. Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Alabama, the study was originally intended to find a cure for the disease, but part of researchers also wanted to track the disease from its beginning to ending stages. So, the men were diagnosed with syphilis, but were not told about their illness.  Even when researchers found the cure for syphilis, these men were allowed to die, and their families were never told that there was cure to their relatives’ disease.  Nearly 400 black sharecroppers died in this study.

Skloot also mentions the case of Mississippi Appendectomies, which were actually hysterectomies performed on black women so they would stop having children and so that young doctors could gain experience performing the procedure. 

This was not an isolated occurrence.  Throughout the 1930’s to the 1970’s, the government tried to limit blacks’ reproductive freedom in under the heading of family planning.  In 1939, the Birth Control Association of America created the “Negro Project,” which aimed to limit the number of black children a family could have.  The Association said that blacks bred without consideration and beyond their monetary means. They also said that African Americans were the least mentally fit of all the races to be rearing children. 

These are famous cases, but are not the only instances of poor African-Americans being targeted for scientific testing. In 1963, three physicians injected live cancer cells into chronically ill African-American test subjects.  In 1972, twenty primarily black, poor women were transported from Chicago to Philadelphia to receive abortions with a new abortion technique called the Super Coil. A complication of the new procedure was bleeding that would force a complete hysterectomy.  In the 1970’s, samples of black children’s blood was taken by the government, saying that they were testing it for anemia.  In fact, they were testing it for a predisposition to criminal activity.   

I have yet to finish the book and see what terrible things were perpetrated on Henrietta’s family in the years following her death.  Based on this history of scientific racism, however, I’m not predicting it will anything that I can look back on with pride.

 Sources and further reading:

    http://academic.udayton.edu/health/05bioethics/slavery02.htm

http://www.naturalnews.com/019189.html

Help Provide Tornado Relief

Two nights before Easter, my family and I were trapped at a store with several other dozen people while a tornado blazed down one of our main roads. As grateful as we were that we weren’t harmed, it was still devastating to see some of the areas we love—especially in St. Louis, where even our airport took a giant hit and closed due to the damage—impacted so severely by the deadly storm.

Luckily, no one in our area died, though many were injured. Less than a week later, storms raged against the Southern states below us, and hundreds have been killed—with more being counted every few hours. Billions of dollars of damage have also occurred. A state of emergency has even been declared, with President Obama promising to come to the affected areas’ aid immediately.

I hope that the president follows through with his promises, but I also know that recovery from a tornado takes a very long time. In fact, St. Louis was still recovering from tornadoes just this past February when this happened; when we drove to South County just days before these recent storms, we could still see much of that damage.

If you’d like to help out in the affected areas and you can, please do so. I know days after the tornados, we were told that there were too many cooks in the kitchen, with too many volunteers coming right away—but now that jobs have been organized and are being delegated out, many are still needed. You can find out how to volunteer this weekend in St. Louis by clicking here; if you want to volunteer in another area, call that city’s local police or government and find out how you can help.

If you can’t offer physical aid but could afford to give a few dollars, the Red Cross is usually the best place to give. Call your local Red Cross and let them know you can to help; you can also help Alabama, which was most severely affected by the tornadoes, by clicking here. Giving blood is always appreciated during these times—as well as throughout the rest of the year, of course—and people in these areas can also use bottled water, snacks, and emergency supplies. Volunteer centers and relief agencies, however, say that the best way to help these people is to provide monetary donations so that everything that’s immediately needed gets purchased and distributed first.

Mothballs: A Danger to Babies

Mothballs have always been disgusting to me. My dear grandmother used to keep them in her home and I always associate the smell of them with visiting her trailer, the scent merging with the bean bag toss and other few games she kept on hand for us girls.

It turns out that my olfactory dissatisfaction was right on the nose. Some ingredients in mothballs have been proven to be deadly. Recently a baby’s death was attributed to mothballs, as were two instances of brain damage. The ingredient, naphthalene, causes damage to red blood cells. The other active ingredient often found in moth balls, paradichlorobenzene, is also considered toxic.

Though I’m left wondering why we’re only just now discovering this, I’m joining in with the rest of the moms of the world and asking for an immediate ban of this chemical when mothballs are produced. Not only are these chemicals dangerous to our kids—they also seep into our clothing and can cause problems for us, including eye irritation, nausea, bladder problems, dizziness, and other symptoms. Some even say that moth balls are among the most toxic things in our homes; you have to wonder how they’re even allowed on the market in the first place.

Of course, in the meantime, can’t we all sacrifice a few moth holes in our clothing and stop using them to ensure the safety of our kids? I think one vastly outweighs the other in its level of importance for sure. There are plenty of alternatives we can use, as well, such as:

  • Cedar chips or blocks, which will also make your closet smell woodsy and amazing
  • ·         Lavender, which some people love and claim has a calming effect (though it makes me sick, since I associate it with being very ill once back in high school)
  • ·         Making your own homemade moth balls with lavender or cedar oil and fabric
  • ·         Use dried rosemary for a decidedly herby scent
  • ·         Use mint, cloves, and ginseng—which may sound like a power drink but apparently is a great moth repellent

Using proper clothing care can also help diminish moth damage. Be sure to thoroughly clean and air out clothing before storing it, and use airtight storage containers if you can. If you end up seeing moths, put the clothing in a freezer for 48 hours to get rid of them. (We do the same thing with our daughter’s stuffed animals every few months.)

New Viruses Increase Solar Cell Efficiency

MIT scientists engineer virus to assemble nanotubes

Looks like those geniuses at MIT finally put those good-for-nothing viruses to work for us. Researchers at the Cambridge university have discovered a way to engineer viruses to assemble nanotubes in solar cells. 

The virus in question is called M13 and usually infects bacteria. Dr. Angela Belcher, her graduate students, and other researchers are using a modified version of the virus to control the arrangement of hollow carbon cylinders on the surfaces of titanium dioxide solar cells. These dye-sensitized cells are lighter and less expensive than conventional silicon solar cells. Finding ways to increase their efficiency may help to make solar power a more viable alternative to current sources. 

These carbon nanotubes work within the cells by funneling electrons released by the sun's light. However, they tend to bunch up and stick to each other when left to their own devices. This clumping reduces the number of electrons they can route toward a collector. The M13 viruses hold the cylinders in place, sort of like a wire sorter that keeps your power strips tidy. The viruses are also designed to produce titanium dioxide to power the cells. Having titanium dioxide particles in close proximity to the cylinders helps to direct the electrons down their intended path. As an added bonus, the viruses make the tubes water-soluble so that scientists can add them to the solar cells more easily. 

In testing, the new virus-assembled solar cells were almost 30% more efficient than virus-free dye-sensitized cells. Carbon nanotubes have been tested in solar cells before, but never have scientists seen them work with such efficiency. Belcher's research team states that their method would be easy to integrate into existing dye-sensitized solar cell production, which is already commercialized in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.

The next generation of energy technology will probably depend on cheaper solar cells. The work being done now at MIT could potentially lead to solar cells becoming a more common power source. If manufacturers find that these virus-enhanced cells make better, cheaper products, we could be seeing more green energy in the future. 

Never thought I'd say this, but way to go, viruses. Keep at it, little dudes, and I might even forgive you for the common cold. 

(via ScienceBlog)

The ancient and modern dispersals of Galápagos Finches

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Scientists in the last one-hundred-fifty years surely have more fully explained the dispersal and speciation habits of Darwin’s finches than Darwin did after his cursory data collection on the Beagle. In his notes on the archipelago, Darwin said, “The Galápagos seems a perennial source of new things." This statement proves to be true in the case of the Galápagos finches. The ancestor of modern-day Galápagos finches probably arrived on the island in a dispersal necessary because of a catastrophic event in its original home. This ancestor adapted and eventually speciated into 13 distinct varieties spread throughout the islands. Although Darwin was incomplete or incorrect in some of his theories, modern scientists have postulated that Galápagos finches probably came to adapt into 13 unique varieties because of chance dispersal of an ancestor to and throughout the island and ecological niche competition between related varieties, as well as allopatric speciation and the founder effect.

Neither the ancient ancestor of the Galápagos finches nor its ancestral home has been found. Galápagos finches are most closely related to seed-eating tanagers found in the Caribbean, South America, and Central America. Based on geographical proximity and genetic similarity, however, the genera Tiaris, and most specifically the species Tiaris obscura, seems to be the finches’ closest living relative. Tiaris obscura is found on the South American mainland both north and south of the equator. Therefore, the most likely place of dispersal of the finches’ ancestor is the South American mainland. Other possibilities for the dispersal starting point include the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America based on similarities between the finches and birds of those regions.

Many factors contribute to the idea that the finch, from wherever it came, probably was forced from its homeland due to a catastrophic event. No event besides a catastrophic one seems to account for the movement of the ancestor to the remote location of the archipelago. The archipelago is far from other land masses—900 kilometers from Ecuador—so it is rare that birds reach it at all.  Darwin wrote that the original colonizer probably blew or drifted from the coast of South America. Other scientists, however, postulate that the ancestor may have been forced from its home due to “unusual volcanic activity in the Andes and the burning of forests…one can easily imagine large numbers of finches and other birds in coastal regions flying out to sea to escape the heat.” Again, nothing but catastrophe seems to account for the large number of members of the ancestral species which originally colonized the island. Darwin calculated that in order for the population to survive and speciate the way it had that a large number of the bird—at least 30—had to reach the island.

After the arrival of this ancestor, drastic changes began to occur on the archipelago which affected the dispersal of the original colonizers. Islands to disappeared, the difference in the distance between islands changed, and the connectedness between islands shifted due to sea level changes.  Today, dispersal of finches between islands in the Galápagos is influenced by catastrophic events such as El Niño and forest fires due to volcanic eruptions, so similar events can be assumed in the dispersal history of the finches as well.

Other factors contributed to the dispersal of the finches throughout the islands. Darwin’s idea of survival competition between closely related varieties of finches seems to come into play. Darwin said the two varieties of an organism which filled the same ecological niche were in the greatest competition with each other. One of the two varieties must get rid of the other in order to survive. An exceptional individual is one who finds a new niche, or, especially in this case, island, to which it is suited. The individual can now leave the competition behind, and, if its offspring have the same favorable trait, start a new species with a new way of living or new place to live.

After breaking from its original species, the new colonizer becoming its own unique species can potentially be explained by the theories of allopatric speciation and the founder effect. Allopatric speciation occurred in the new populations as they went to their separate habitats. Allopatric speciation happens when there is geographical isolation (allopatry) of a population, followed by adaptation by that population to the new ecological conditions of a place, followed by a second phase of geographical contact (sympatry) with the sister species with no interbreeding between the old and new species. Mayr (1952) explained how the founder effect also seems to come into play in this situation. The founder effect explains why populations on large continents are more uniform than the differentiated populations on small islands. The founder effect asserts that colonization of new places is random based on genotype, but there is enough gene variation within the new population to survive it, alleles are lost to genetic drift, and alleles in new combinations are subject to natural selection. Both of these theories explain how each of the thirteen species seems to be adapted for its unique way of life as well as why finches of different species rarely interbreed, even though they do interact.

Darwin believed that once a dispersed species moved to its own island it was mostly isolated, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. There are up to seven to eight distinct species of finches on each island in the Galápagos. Biologists believe the finches may have diverged in isolation. After this isolation and divergent evolution, natural selection makes the exceptional individual adapt to a new ecological niche, and once it is no longer isolated, is removed as a threat to its closely related species. In some cases, finches simply visit other islands, dubbed by the Grants’ researchers Prince and Millington as “immatures,” visitors to an island that leave or die before the next breeding season. So, modern finch species can and do move from their isolated niches to potentially fill a similar ecological niche on another or island or simply to visit.

Some examples of interspecies relationships seem to illustrate an incomplete or transitional separation between two species, however. David Lack, a prominent biologist and researcher of Galápagos finches, collected information about the different types of finches based on differing island habitats. One study shows two differently ecologically adapted birds and an intermediary species between the two. The generus Geospiza, ground finches, breeds mostly in arid places and feeds primarily on the ground. Camarhynchus, tree finches, breed primarily in humid zones and feeds primarily in trees. However, both genera occasionally breed, within their own species, in transitional areas on the islands. After breeding season, however, the ground finches feed in the open uplands and the humid forest and the tree-finches go to arid lowlands. The most commonly found generus, Certhidea, warbler-finches, breeds throughout arid, transitional, humid forest zones and uplands, and it can be found on nearly all of the islands.

Sources and further reading:

Grant, P. and B. Grant. 2008. How and Why Species Multiply. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.

                                 

Lack, D. Darwin’s Finches. 1947. Cambridge University Press: New York.

 

Weiner, J. 1994. The Beak of the Finch. Random House: London.

Trash Recycling Robot

A new Finnish startup company named ZenRobotics Ltd specializes in robotic recycling technology. Here is a video about their mission and products. There are three types of jobs that are particularly suitable for robots; dirty, dangerous or boring. This technology can help with the dirty and boring parts of sorting trash for recycling. 

Gigapan Time Machine

 With support from Google, a project involving Carnegie Mellon University and NASA has created a process to capture huge (gigapixel) images of locations and make them available on the Internet. With a sequence of images shot at different times, users can pan, zoom and move in time.

MSG probably won't kill you

   

    Anyone who has ever watched the popular Internet short, Teen Girl Squad, the rather sadistic cartoon about various ways that the teens die (pecked to death by a bird, etc…really, it’s not as morbid as it seems) knows that one of the ways to die is to be MSG’d! I’m moving to Thailand next year and have been warned that one of the most common staples of cuisine is the dreaded MSG.  Since I don’t want to die like a cartoon stick figure or fall asleep after like I do when I eat MSG-flavored cheap Chinese food, I thought I would learn about the health risks of this well-known, but little understood, food enhancer.

            MSG, or Monosodium glutamate, is a naturally occurring amino acid, more specifically a sodium salt and a glutamic acid.  Traditionally made from wheat gluten, MSG is now made by bacterial fermentation. In its pure form, the substance appears as a powder of white crystals and is used in the same way as table salt is used on foods.

            Today, MSG is produced by fermenting starch, sugar beets, sugar cane or molasses and is marketed as a flavor enhancer. In the United States, MSG is most commonly associated with Chinese food restaurants, but is also used in commercially processed foods including the foods hocked in most fast food restaurants. Flavored beef jerky, potato chips and condiments like salad dressing also include MSG. 

          Other fermented products like soy sauce, steak sauce and Worcestershire sauce have levels of glutamate similar to those of foods with added MSG.

            MSG wasn’t used in any types of cooking when the amino acid was isolated by scientist Kikunae Ikeda in 1907 and then patented by the Japanese company, Ajinomoto Corporation, in 1909. In East Asian cooking, MSG became an instant and natural substitution because this type of cooking had long used seaweed extract that contained concentrations of glutamic acid similar to those of MSG. MSG was introduced in the United States in 1947.

          Originally dubbed the “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome,” the “MSG symptom complex” was introduced to popular vernacular when scientist Robert Ho Man Kwok recorded the symptoms of people who consumed American Chinese food. Symptoms in Kwok’s study, including migraine headaches, food allergies and hyperactivity in children and obesity, have been attributed to MSG in popular culture ever since.  Although Kwok suggested other possibilities for the eaters’ symptoms, such as alcohol or sodium used in the food, MSG was pegged as the culprit. 

            Despite being the blame of many of these problems, most studies have found MSG to be safe for consumption.  In 1995, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) concluded that MSG is safe for most people when eaten in reasonable doses.  However, based on anecdotal evidence, the Federation also postulated that some people have an MSG intolerance that causes the “MSG symptom complex,” or the symptoms that Kwok described, as well as a worsening of asthmatic symptoms. In addition, author and food writer Harold McGee says that toxicologists say that MSG is harmless for most people even when eaten in large doses.

           Based on this evidence, it seems that MSG has a bad rap for no reason and certainly won’t be killing teenagers, Asian food enthusiasts or me anytime soon.

 

Sources and further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate

Mandelbrot Set

 The Mandelbrot Set is a set of complex numbers generated by a simple equation. It is named after Benoit Mandelbrot who specialized in the study of fractals. While the Set is just a bunch of numbers, the visualization of it can be incredibly beautiful. Here is a video of a voyage into the Mandelbrot Set.

 

20,000 New Species of Ocean Life Discovered

After an entire decade of collecting data, the world finally issued its first ocean census last year, and the results are nothing short of amazing. Estimates of known species went up from 230,000 to 250,000, indicating that at least 20,000 species we didn’t know about before have been discovered. (Of course, researchers still maintain that there are hundreds of thousands of species—even millions—that we still have yet to catalog at all.)

According to the scientists who participated, new species were found all over the planet—even in spots we thought we had explored fully and already known well. Some of the most notable findings include a six and a half pound lobster (located in Madagascar) and various deep sea animals, including fish, squid, and octopus.

While these findings were incredible, perhaps the most important findings that scientists made in this ten year period were many new observations about species behavior—as well as how humans are impacting these species and their habitat right now. For example, where overfishing was thought to be the biggest human impact in the ocean, now scientists believe that both ocean warming and acidification, both attributed to human actions, will post bigger threats in the scheme of things—if not now, then soon.

In fact, damages are already taking their toll. Some researchers say that many species were either too depleted or gone entirely before they were even able to be studied. So who knows how many species may have existed that we simply wiped out, without even knowing it?

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