01/04/2006
Good News and Bad in 2005
I’m back after a two-week hiatus and, with the end of a frightful year and a birthday last week, I’m in a reflective mode. Talking with a friend of my vintage recently, we agreed that we couldn’t have lived in a better time in human history, especially for a scientist. Born in the same year (1927) that Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, I’ve witnessed all manner of major scientific and technological advances. Take sliced bread. When I was born, everyone had to slice his or her own bread. (There have also been social advances; fifty years ago I would have said “…. slice his own bread.”) According to an article by Evan Morris in the January 2006 Reader’s Digest, it was in 1933 that Wonder Bread introduced the pre-sliced loaf to the American consumer.
There have been many advances deserving of being called “the best thing since sliced bread”, the popularity of which gave rise to the phrase. Growing up in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania in the 1930s, I remember the iceman delivering big blocks of ice for our icebox – electric refrigerators were not yet all that common. We got our milk (raw) from the milkman, veggies from the vegetable man and bread from the breadman (my cousin Phyllis, who was living with us at the time, married our breadman!). The supermarket and bar codes were yet to appear.
Although the first demonstration of television took place a few months before my birth in 1927, it was over two decades before TV made its way into our homes. Instead, we listened to the radio for our news from Lowell Thomas and from Edward R. Murrow reporting from London during the bombings of World War II. Those radios contained vacuum tubes, each of which occupied more space than today’s iPod, which has a mind- boggling storage capacity for one who grew up in the days of those fragile 78 rpm records.
But enough reminiscing; let’s reflect on some of the major scientific stories of the past year. Unfortunately, the ongoing story that has been grabbing headlines recently is one showing that science, as with any other occupation, has its bad apples. I’m referring, of course, to the South Korean researcher Woo Suk Hwang, who claimed in a paper published in Science last May that he had created 11 lines of stem cells from cloned human embryos derived from 11 patients with various diseases. The achievement was hailed as a very important achievement in stem cell research. Patient-specific stem cells held out the possibility that stem cell therapies could eventually be tailored to address the medical problems of those patients.
Last week, an AP dispatch from Seoul by Bo-Mi Lim in the December 30 Star-Ledger reported that an investigative panel at Seoul National University has concluded that Hwang fabricated the evidence for all 11 of the stem cell colonies. Earlier reports credit Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh (where I did my graduate work) as being one of the whistle blowers in the case. He was one of 23 other authors of the Science paper. I’ve mentioned in the past the frequent appearance of papers with 10, 20 or more authors, a consequence of the involvement of teams of workers on different aspects of a project, often from groups scattered over the globe. These workers, and reviewers, must rely on the honesty of others in their parts of the project. Sadly, that was not the case.
Another big story this past year involved school boards that insert so-called intelligent design “theory” or “science” into the science curriculum. I’m happy to say that a fellow alumnus of Dickinson College (where I did my undergraduate work) has weighed in on the subject in a very forceful manner. U. S. District Judge John Jones, class of 1977, not only is a Republican and attends church but also was appointed to the federal judgeship by President Bush.
Judge Jones’ ruling came in the case brought by parents in Dover, Pennsylvania against the Dover Area School Board for inserting intelligent design into the biology curriculum. I noted in an earlier column that, in November, Dover voters voted out members of the Board that supported this action. In his decision, handed down on December 20, Jones delivered what AP’s Martha Raffaele in the December 21 Star-Ledger termed a “stinging attack” on the school board. Jones cited the “breathtaking inanity” of the board’s policy, saying the evidence was “overwhelming” that intelligent design is “a mere relabeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory”. He concluded that intelligent design “violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation” and that its attacks on evolution “have been refuted by the scientific community.” Hey, if Alito isn’t confirmed for the Supreme Court, I nominate Judge Jones!
Coincidentally, the journal Science revealed its “Breakthrough of the Year” and what do you know? The choice for 2005 is “Evolution in Action”. As if to underscore Judge Jones’ decision, an article on the breakthrough choice by Elizabeth Culotta and Elizabeth Pennish in the December 23 Science states “Today evolution is the foundation of all biology, so basic and all-pervasive that scientists sometimes take its importance for granted.”
Why the choice of “evolution in action”? The answer is that 2005 saw major progress in the quest to determine how evolution actually takes place. I’ve already discussed in a previous column one of the most important studies, one that promises to reveal what it is that makes us human. The decoding of the chimpanzee genome allows researchers to search for differences in the human and chimp genes and in the noncoding (formerly called “junk”) sequences of DNA that can tell us how we evolved to differ from the chimp.
Biologists are also fascinated by the European corn borer and a bird known as the European blackcap. Why the interest in these two very different critters? Both are showing signs that they may be in the process of evolving into separate species. Take the blackcaps, which share breeding grounds in southern Germany and Austria. Over a period of decades, studies have shown that more and more blackcaps are heading north for the winter instead of going south. One characteristic that typically is indicative of different species is that they don’t mate with each other. Rsearchers are finding that the northerly blackcaps get back to the breeding grounds earlier and hence mate with other northerners before the southerners arrive. Evolution in action?
The European corn borers, on the other hand, aren’t much for traveling and may share the same field. However, while some borer caterpillars maintain their taste for corn, others have grown to prefer hops and mugwort. Apparently, their choices of diet have led to the two groups emitting different pheromones, those compounds that attract members of the opposite sex. As a result, the couples pairing off are those sharing the same dietary preferences. Again, evolution in action. In the future, there may well be corn borers and mugwort borers. (OK, I had no idea what mugwort is and my dictionary wasn’t very informative except to say that it has little clusters of greenish-yellow flowers. I’d personally stick to the corn.)
Evolution in action can be a dangerous thing. In fact, our very lives may depend on evolution not being in action. The avian flu virus that has killed half of infected humans so far has been confined, with a few exceptions, to China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia. These areas all lie within or close to the East Asia-Australia flyway for migratory birds that spread the disease. As long as the avian flu is spread only by birds or fowl, we in the Western Hemisphere are relatively safe. An article by Professor Howard Markel of the University of Michigan in the January 1 Sunday New York Times has a map of the major global flyways. The good news is that, for us in the Western Hemisphere, there is very little overlap of our three flyways with those of Europe, Africa and Asia. The overlaps occur in the northern regions of Alaska and Canada where intermingling of the birds is rare.
However, the ball game changes completely if the avian flu virus evolves into one that can spread through human-to-human contact. A major scientific breakthrough last year was the sequencing of the flu virus that caused the 1918 pandemic, which killed between 20 and 50 million people. The 1918 virus was recovered from the body of a flu victim frozen in Alaskan permafrost all these years. The researchers found that the 1918 virus started out as a pure avian virus and that only a handful of mutations gave it the ability to spread human-to-human. A devastating example of evolution in action!
I apologize for starting 2006 on such a down note and promise to pursue less gloomy themes in upcoming columns. Meanwhile, I can’t help thinking that many who believe Darwin was wrong are, or should be praying that avian flu doesn’t spread further, not realizing that they are in essence acknowledging how right Darwin was. Let’s hope we all have a happy 2006, free from any avian evolution in action.
Footnote: Some people are surprised to hear that, living only some 20 miles from New York City, we still have a milkman. I was surprised when, a couple of years ago, he switched from a New Jersey dairy as his source of milk to Harrisburg Dairies, located just 10 miles from Mechanicsburg.
Footnote to the Footnote: After writing the above, I decided to check on the possibility that Harrisburg Dairies might have bought out Konhaus Dairy, the dairy that delivered our raw milk when I lived in Mechanicsburg. I was astounded when I went to yahoo.com and searched “Konhaus Dairy”. What should come up as the first entry but a story about a 10-year-old boy and Konhaus delivering raw milk – it was my column of 7/14/2004! If you’re in need of lighter fare after the gloomy stuff above, click on the archives below and then click on the 7/14/2004 column. It’s about ice cream.
Allen F. Bortrum
|