April 20, 2006
Newsmakers: Your peers in the news
ON JAPAN: It was, the Christian Science Monitor stated, “a Godzilla moment” for Japan when the Nikkei lost nearly $400 billion in value over three days of wild selling in January. The event was triggered by a police raid on an Internet company called Livedoor, run by an aggressive entrepreneur named Tokai Horie.
While discussing the event, the newspaper quoted from a new book titled Reprogramming Japan by Marie Anchordoguy, an associate professor of International Studies. The country, she wrote, “needs to allow its citizens and firms more independence so they can become more innovative and entrepreneurial” like Horie, but that business leaders are rejecting pressure to become more like their Western counterparts. They paraphrased Anchordoguy, saying the Japanese “don’t want a US-style, exclusive focus on shareholder interest at the expense of employees and the broader community.”
AFTER THE FIRE: Jerry Franklin, a UW professor of forest ecology, was quoted in two recent Associated Press articles about whether to remove dead trees from forest areas after a fire, a process called “salvage logging.”
The Bush administration, one of the articles noted, supports moving in quickly after a major forest fire, to “cut marketable trees that remain and plant a healthy forest.”
But many scientists, the articles noted, say leaving dead trees in the habitat where they lived helps the forest remain healthy and diverse “that will seed itself with trees uniquely suited genetically to thrive” and support a diversity of fish and wildlife. Franklin advised a field hearing of the House subcommittee on forests and forest health that while salvage logging can succeed in some cases, it should not be prescribed as a cure-all for every forest damaged by fire.
Franklin said, “What we are dealing with, to a certain extent, is a mind-set. That dead forest is a desert and the best thing you can do is get a closed forest back as quickly as possible,” Franklin said. “We can’t argue for salvage logging on the basis that it is going to do good things ecologically.”
UNPLUG FOR SANITY: The New York Times quoted UW Information School Professor David Levy in a recent article under the headline “Parents Feel that Dialing Up Interferes With Growing Up,” about children’s computer use. While it can be argued that the cyber world makes children better multitaskers, Levy says that very trend may be decreasing their ability to focus when they need to. Such multitasking, Levy argues, reduces children’s “ability to focus on a single thing, the ability to be silent and still inside, basically the ability to be unplugged and content.”
Levy added, “That’s true for the whole culture. Most adults have a hard time doing that, too. What we’re losing is the comtemplative dimension of life. For our sanity, we need to cultivate that.”
SQUANDERED TALENTS: UW English Professor and author Charles Johnson used the occasion of the Million Man March to issue a call in the Wall Street Journal for better leadership and attention to what he termed “a national ‘boy problem’ in general, one with devastating consequences for black males in particular.”
Despite the presence of blacks at high levels in business, academics, finance, government and other areas, Johnson wrote, attention to the problem of black male youth is long overdue. “We have already allowed the talent, resources and genius of two generations of young black men who might have enriched this republic to be squandered by gang violence, by poor academic preparation, by the lack of good parenting and by the celebration of an irresponsible ‘thug life’ that is ethically infantile and, predictably, embraced by a notoriously values-challenged entertainment industry.”
Certain star black athletes returning to school, however — such as Shaquille O’Neal working toward his master’s in criminal science — “seem to be bellwethers for a possible black male renaissance,” Johnson wrote. “These individuals, so highly competitive on the court, understand that the responsibility for the breadth of their skills, the depths of their intellects, the daring of their imaginative pursuits, and the quality of their lives rests — just like their academic prowess — only on themselves.”
UNDER THE SEA: A recent New York Times article described how networks of tiny sensors are being used by scientists to “help fill an observational gap between microscopes and telescopes” in studies of forests, rivers, plate tectonics and undersea environments. The article quoted, among others, John R. Delaney, UW professor of oceanography.
Among these is the NEPTUNE project, which involves running 2,000 miles of cables dotted with sensors, cameras and tiny robots deep in the Pacific Ocean from California to Canada to study the “total ocean environment from below the sea bed to the surface.” The $200 million project is expected to be operational in 2012, and function for about 30 years.
“It’s going to set the tone for how the human race interacts with oceans,” Delaney said, then paraphrased an old political truism originally applied to the state of Maine: “As goes the ocean, so goes the planet.”
IS THIS GLOBAL WARMING?: A lengthy midsummer article by the Associated Press discussed increased water temperatures along the Pacific Coast and their apparent negative effects on fish catches, sea bird populations and plankton (a great food source). Northerly winds have not kicked in this year, which prevented an “upwelling” of colder water that sustains the plankton and other life. “Is this just a stranger year,” the article asked, “or is this what global warming looks like?”
The article concluded that stated that it’s too soon to draw conclusions from the single year’s phenomenon, which led to a quote from Nathan Mantua, a UW affiliate assistant professor of atmospheric sciences. “To me, it really points out how uncertain our speculation is about global warming,” Mantura said. “If we did see this next year, the notion that global warming plays a role in this carries more weight.”
OF MICE AND MEN: It’s called the Klotho gene and it was identified in mice in 1997 by researcher Makoto Kuro-o of the University of Texas’ Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. When the gene was damaged, the mice experienced ageing-related symptoms such as hardening of the arteries, thinning of the bones and weak lungs. The gene was named Klotho after the Greek goddess who spins the thread of life.
According to a recent article in The Washington Post, the researcher found a small protein, called a peptide, in the Klotho gene that he then isolated, purified and injected into normal mice. Tests show the substance modulates a biological pathway that has been the focus of researchers on aging for years. The injected mice lived an average of 20 percent to 30 percent longer than normal mice. “Our work shows that the Klotho gene is an aging-supressor gene,” Kuro-o told The Post.
Other researchers agreed the findings were noteworthy, The Post said, because it was the first instance of finding a naturally occurring hormone capable of extending the life of a mammal. The newspaper then quoted George M. Martin, a professor of pathology and scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research. “You have lots of ways to shorten the life of an animal, but it’s hard to get it to live longer,” Martin said. “You can kick a radio to make it not work so well, but it’s hard to make it work better. It’s quite a wonderful discovery.”
HEALTHY CANDY: Philly.com, a Web site covering the Brotherly Love area (and beyond, it seems), reported recently about research efforts at the UW School of Dentistry to replace sugar with the cavity-fighting ingredient xylitol in some candies, such as Gummi Bears. Xylitol is a natural sugar that has been shown, in certain quantities, to help prevent tooth decay. The goal is to make Gummi Bears or other candies loved by kids with the more healthy ingredient, then distribute the revised candies through school meal programs or Head Start.
“We want to find some way to get xylitol to children,” Marilyn Rothen of the UW’s Regional Clinical Dental Research Center. Xylitol is found in raspberries, plums, lettuce, corn cobs and birch tree, and already is used some sugarless gums, toothpaste and mints. Not cheese steaks, however.
REWILDING?: A plan to transplant big-game animals — elephants, cheetahs, lions, camels — from Africa to the American Great Plains states met with criticism as well as praise in a late-summer article by the Associated Press. The idea, also called “rewilding,” was promoted in an article in the journal Nature.
“Scientists point to Australia, which was overrun by rabbits and poisonous cane toads after misguided species relocations,” the article stated, leading to a comment by Donald K. Grayson, professor of anthropology with an adjunct appointment at the Quaternary Research Center, which researches the global environment. “It is not restoration to introduce animals that were never here,” Grayson told the AP. “Why introduce Old World camels and lions when there are North American species that could benefit from the same kind of effort?”
OF MAN AND MURDER: “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to,” is the famous quotation from humorist Mark Twain. The same is true of intra-species murder, right? Not really, writes David Barash, UW professor of psychology, in an article titled “Red in Tooth, Claw and Trigger Finger” in the Chronicle Review section of a recent Chronicle of Higher Education.
“Let’s face it, human beings are a violent, murderous lot, destructive of each other and of their environment,” Barash writes. “But let’s also admit that such misdeeds, greivous as they are, derive less from bloodlust than from the combination of all-too-natural aggressiveness with ever-advancing technology — which is itself natural, too.”
Barash ends his piece with a salutation to Homo sapiens, long noted as the world’s most dangerous creature, “whose dangerousness resides not only in the originality of its sin, but in the reach of its hands.”
DARWIN’S DELIGHT: Newsweek magazine ran a quote recently by Robert Waterston, professor and Gates chair of the Genome Sciences Department, on a study showing humans and chimpanzees have genetic blueprints that are 96 percent identical. “Reading those two genomes side by side, it’s amazing to see the evolutionary changes that are occurring. I couldn’t imagine Darwin looking for stronger confirmation of his theories,” Waterston said.
SEA CHANGE: It’s old news by now, but the first sentences of a recent Associated Press article about changes in marine life pulled no punches: “Marine biologists are seeing mysterious and disturbing things along the Pacific Coast this year: Higher water temperatures, plummetting catches of fish, lots of dead birds on the beaches, and perhaps most worrisome, very little plankton — the tiny organisms that are a vital link in the ocean of the food chain,” wrote AP reporter Terence Chea.
The article later quoted the UW’s own Julia Parrish, an associate professor of aquatic and fishery sciences, reflecting on this dark reality: “The bottom has fallen out of the coastal food chain, and there’s just not enough food out there.”
