February 7, 2008
Newsmakers
BAD FUEL: An Associated Press article about the expense and pollution of energy produced with coal quoted Dan Jaffee, a professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at UW Bothell and adjunct professor of atmospheric sciences at the Seattle campus, along the way.
Pollution from China’s coal-fired power plants shows up in mercury caught as far away as Oregon, increases cloud cover and raises ozone levels, the article said. “Hands down, coal is by far the dirtiest pollutant,” said Jaffee, who has found pollution from Asia at monitoring sites at Mount Bachelor in Oregon and Cheeka Peak in Washington state. “It’s a pretty bad fuel on all scores.”
FOOD SCORES: After generations of confusing health claims about food, certain researchers are now stepping forward with systems to make sense of it all, according to a recent New York Times article. Among these is Adam Drewnowski, UW professor of epidemiology and medicine and director of the Nutitional Science Program, who is developing a scoring system for food products that can be translated to a numerical score or a letter grade.
Drewnowski told the Times that many health logos seen in on products focus on negative attributes like salt and fat but don’t account for positive attributes. “It’s not enough to come up with a score that spinach is healthier than potato chips,” Drewnowski said. “What happens to the vast majority of foods in the middle of the range? How do they compare? Ours does that.”
NO SMOOTH PATH: There needs to be a shift in doctoral education to account for the changing and increasingly uncertain job marketplace, according to “Social Science Ph.D’s—Five + Years Out,” a study by the UW’s Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education and discussed in a recent article in The Chronicle for Higher Education. “”It’s a myth that all those who earn a doctorate in the social sciences become professors,” Maresi Nerad, director of the center and the principal investigator on the study, told the Chronicle. “It’s also a myth that the career path is straight and smooth.”
“STUDIED IGNORANCE”: Bruce Psaty, UW professor of medicine and epidemiology, was quoted in a recent New York Times story about the drug manufacturer Merck, which recently settled its litigation over the painkiller Vioxx for $4.85 billion. Even before the drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the article stated, “there were rumblings in the scientific community that Vioxx might increase the risk of heart attacks or strokes. It’s not quite right to say that Merck completely ignored those potential problems — but the company certainly tried to avert its eyes.”
Psaty said, “Once a drug has been approved, there is a marketing enthusiasm that takes over that doesn’t want to deal with the risks and wants to promote the drug,” adding that at Merck “there was a kind of studied ignorance” about the possibility that Vioxx could increase the chances of heart attacks in patients.
ANTS MARCHING: A recent New York Times article discussed the complicated swarming behavior that ants engage in, noting that ants cooperate so well they even use their own living bodies to build a bridge if needed to get by an obstruction as they march along. Decipering the rules of this behavior is a challenge because, as Iain Couzin of Princeton and the University of Oxford said, you’d never get a sense of their amazing abilities when working together by the million. But Couzin and his colleagues are beginning to unlock simple rules that enable swarms to function so well.
The article quoted Daniel Grunbaum, UW associate professor of oceanography, who has an adjunct appointment in biology. As a mathematical biologist, Grunbaum said, math is merging with observation of nature to bring advances in the field. “In the next 10 years or so there’s going to be a lot of progress,” Grunbaum said, adding that Couzin is “a real leader in bringing a lot of ideas together. He has a larger vision. If it works, that’ll be a big advance.”
FAMILY PAIN: Chronic pain is a family problem; when one member of a family suffers unrelenting pain, other members can suffer, too, from stress, anxiety and depression, according to a recent article in The New York Times. “Family members are rarely considered by doctors who treat pain. Yet a study we did found that family members were up to four times as depressed as the patients,” said Dennis C. Turk, UW professor of anthesthesiology, who researches pain management. He added that “open, two-way communication is crucial to dealing effectively with chronic pain. Family members need to know how they can be helpful and what might be hurtful.”
Newsmakers is a compilation of the words of UW professors who have been quoted in the national media.
