October 2, 2009

Fossil Skeleton From Africa Predates Lucy

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Lucy, meet Ardi.

Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus, is the newest fossil skeleton out of Africa to take its place in the gallery of human origins. At an age of 4.4 million years, it lived well before and was much more primitive than the famous 3.2-million-year-old Lucy, of the species Australopithecus afarensis.

Since finding fragments of the older hominid in 1992, an international team of scientists has been searching for more specimens and on Thursday presented a fairly complete skeleton and their first full analysis. By replacing Lucy as the earliest known skeleton from the human branch of the primate family tree, the scientists said, Ardi opened a window to “the early evolutionary steps that our ancestors took after we diverged from our common ancestor with chimpanzees.”

The older hominid was already so different from chimps that it suggested “no modern ape is a realistic proxy for characterizing early hominid evolution,” they wrote.

The Ardipithecus specimen, an adult female, probably stood four feet tall and weighed about 120 pounds, almost a foot taller and twice the weight of Lucy. Its brain was no larger than a modern chimp’s. It retained an agility for tree-climbing but already walked upright on two legs, a transforming innovation in hominids, though not as efficiently as Lucy’s kin.

Ardi’s feet had yet to develop the arch-like structure that came later with Lucy and on to humans. The hands were more like those of extinct apes. And its very long arms and short legs resembled the proportions of extinct apes, or even monkeys.

Tim D. White of the University of California, Berkeley, a leader of the team, said in an interview this week that the genus Ardipithecus appeared to resolve many uncertainties about “the initial stage of evolutionary adaptation” after the hominid lineage split from that of the chimpanzees. No fossil trace of the last common ancestor, which lived some time before six million years ago, according to genetic studies, has yet come to light.

The other two significant stages occurred with the rise of Australopithecus, which lived from about four million to one million years ago, and then the emergence of Homo, our own genus, before two million years ago. The ancestral relationship of Ardipithecus to Australopithecus has not been determined, but Lucy’s australopithecine kin are generally recognized as the ancestral group from which Homo evolved.

Scientists not involved in the new research hailed its importance, placing the Ardi skeleton on a pedestal alongside notable figures of hominid evolution like Lucy and the 1.6-million-year-old Turkana Boy from Kenya, an almost complete specimen of Homo erectus with anatomy remarkably similar to modern Homo sapiens.

David Pilbeam, a professor of human evolution at Harvard University who had no role in the discovery, said in an e-mail message that the Ardi skeleton represented “a genus plausibly ancestral to Australopithecus” and began “to fill in the temporal and structural ‘space’ between the apelike common ancestor and Australopithecus.”

Andrew Hill, a paleoanthropologist at Yale University who was also not involved in the research, noted that Dr. White had kept “this skeleton in his closet for the last 15 years or so, but I think it has been worth the wait.” In some ways the specimen’s features are surprising, Dr. Hill added, “but it makes a very satisfactory animal for understanding the changes that have taken place along the human lineage.”

The first comprehensive reports describing the skeleton and related findings, the result of 17 years of study, are being published Friday in the journal Science. Eleven papers by 47 authors from 10 countries describe the analysis of more than 110 Ardipithecus specimens from a minimum of 36 different individuals, including Ardi.

The paleoanthropologists wrote in one of the articles that Ardipithecus was “so rife with anatomical surprises that no one could have imagined it without direct fossil evidence.”

A bounty of animal and plant material — “every seed, every piece of fossil wood, every scrap of bone,” Dr. White said — was gathered to set the scene of the cooler, more humid woodland habitat in which these hominids had lived.

This was one of the first surprises, said Giday WoldeGabriel, a geologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, because it upset the hypothesis that upright walking had evolved as an adaptation to life on grassy savanna.

The discovery site, on what is now an arid floodplain along the middle stretch of the Awash River in Ethiopia, is 140 miles northeast of Addis Ababa and 45 miles south of Hadar, where Lucy was found in 1974 by Donald Johanson, with whom Dr. White collaborated in analyzing those fossils.

Gen Suwa, a paleoanthropologist now at the University of Tokyo, made the first discovery in 1992: a single upper molar. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, an Ethiopian curator of anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, uncovered the first skeletal bones. A preliminary report on the new species was published in 1994.

But the fossils, which are housed at the anthropology museum in Addis Ababa, were so plentiful, fragmentary and potentially significant that Dr. White held back from further public discussion of the research, even while discoveries of older fossils were being made.

One discovery was of an earlier species of Ardipithecus from elsewhere in Ethiopia. Other finds, perhaps from more than six million years ago and given other species names, were excavated in Chad and Kenya. Their bones indicate that they also walked upright, scientists say, but the fossils are too few to draw any definitive conclusions.

Ardi’s skull, Dr. Pilbeam said, appears to be more similar to the older Chad hominid than to younger australopithecines. This indicates that the fossils from Chad and Ethiopia possibly represent species of the Ardipithecus genus, or closely related genera.

From the new research, scientists inferred that Ardi was female, based on its small and lightly built skull and its canine teeth, which are small compared with other individuals at the site.

Dr. Suwa, a specialist in fossil teeth, said the more than 145 teeth collected at the site were of the size and shape and had wear patterns showing that the individuals were omnivorous eaters of plants and nuts, as well as small mammals, but were not as big consumers of fruits as are living chimps and gorillas. Ardi probably fed in trees and on the ground.

Dr. Suwa also noted that males had stubby canine teeth, more like those of modern humans, in contrast to the projecting tusklike upper canines of chimps and gorillas, suggesting that Ardipithecus teeth no longer functioned as weapons or displays in male-male or male-female conflicts. In fact, the male and female upper canines are similar.

This was seen as further evidence that the species had already evolved a distinctive trait of early prehumans. C. Owen Lovejoy, an anatomist at Kent State University and lead author of two of the journal reports, speculated that these hominids had a social system that involved less competition among males and that this suggested the beginning of pair bonding between males and females.

Dr. Pilbeam disputed this conjecture, saying, “This is a restatement of Owen Lovejoy’s ideas going back almost three decades, which I found unpersuasive then and still do.”

In his articles and an interview, Dr. Lovejoy described the five years he spent analyzing the Ardipithecus pelvis, which appeared to be in transition between a structure originally suited for life in trees and one modified for early upright walking. By contrast, the pelvis of the Lucy species had already evolved nearly all of the adaptations for bipedality.

Asked at a news conference in Washington what Lucy might have said to her new-found “sister,” Dr. Lovejoy replied, “She would have challenged her to a race, and Lucy would have won handily.”Although the lower pelvis is still primitive, Dr. Lovejoy found, changes in the upper pelvis enabled the species to walk on two legs with a straightened hip, “but probably with less speed and efficiency than humans.” A few scientists think this walking evidence to be only circumstantial. The lower part of the pelvis, “still almost entirely apelike,” indicates retention of powerful hamstring muscles for climbing.

Dr. White, Berhane Asfaw of the Rift Valley Research Service in Ethiopia and other team members concluded that “despite the genetic similarities of living humans and chimpanzees, the ancestor we last shared probably differed substantially from any extant African ape.”

As Dr. Hill of Yale said, “It is always new specimens, particularly those from little known time periods or geographic areas, that provoke the greatest changes in our ideas.”

Looking ahead, Dr. White lamented that there were so few sites in Africa known to have fossil deposits six million to seven million years old. “We are getting so close to that common ancestor of hominids and chimps, and we’d love to find an earlier skeleton,” he said.

Big Food vs. Big Insurance

Berkeley, Calif.

TO listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.

No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.

That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.

We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.

The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care. The president has made a few notable allusions to it, and, by planting her vegetable garden on the South Lawn, Michelle Obama has tried to focus our attention on it. Just last month, Mr. Obama talked about putting a farmers’ market in front of the White House, and building new distribution networks to connect local farmers to public schools so that student lunches might offer more fresh produce and fewer Tater Tots. He’s even floated the idea of taxing soda.

But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform. And so the government is poised to go on encouraging America’s fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet. To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

Why the disconnect? Probably because reforming the food system is politically even more difficult than reforming the health care system. At least in the health care battle, the administration can count some powerful corporate interests on its side — like the large segment of the Fortune 500 that has concluded the current system is unsustainable.

That is hardly the case when it comes to challenging agribusiness. Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

The market for prescription drugs and medical devices to manage Type 2 diabetes, which the Centers for Disease Control estimates will afflict one in three Americans born after 2000, is one of the brighter spots in the American economy. As things stand, the health care industry finds it more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There’s more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.

As for the insurers, you would think preventing chronic diseases would be good business, but, at least under the current rules, it’s much better business simply to keep patients at risk for chronic disease out of your pool of customers, whether through lifetime caps on coverage or rules against pre-existing conditions or by figuring out ways to toss patients overboard when they become ill.

But these rules may well be about to change — and, when it comes to reforming the American diet and food system, that step alone could be a game changer. Even under the weaker versions of health care reform now on offer, health insurers would be required to take everyone at the same rates, provide a standard level of coverage and keep people on their rolls regardless of their health. Terms like “pre-existing conditions” and “underwriting” would vanish from the health insurance rulebook — and, when they do, the relationship between the health insurance industry and the food industry will undergo a sea change.

The moment these new rules take effect, health insurance companies will promptly discover they have a powerful interest in reducing rates of obesity and chronic diseases linked to diet. A patient with Type 2 diabetes incurs additional health care costs of more than $6,600 a year; over a lifetime, that can come to more than $400,000. Insurers will quickly figure out that every case of Type 2 diabetes they can prevent adds $400,000 to their bottom line. Suddenly, every can of soda or Happy Meal or chicken nugget on a school lunch menu will look like a threat to future profits.

When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system — everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches — will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn’t really ever had before.

AGRIBUSINESS dominates the agriculture committees of Congress, and has swatted away most efforts at reform. But what happens when the health insurance industry realizes that our system of farm subsidies makes junk food cheap, and fresh produce dear, and thus contributes to obesity and Type 2 diabetes? It will promptly get involved in the fight over the farm bill — which is to say, the industry will begin buying seats on those agriculture committees and demanding that the next bill be written with the interests of the public health more firmly in mind.

In the same way much of the health insurance industry threw its weight behind the campaign against smoking, we can expect it to support, and perhaps even help pay for, public education efforts like New York City’s bold new ad campaign against drinking soda. At the moment, a federal campaign to discourage the consumption of sweetened soft drinks is a political nonstarter, but few things could do more to slow the rise of Type 2 diabetes among adolescents than to reduce their soda consumption, which represents 15 percent of their caloric intake.

That’s why it’s easy to imagine the industry throwing its weight behind a soda tax. School lunch reform would become its cause, too, and in time the industry would come to see that the development of regional food systems, which make fresh produce more available and reduce dependence on heavily processed food from far away, could help prevent chronic disease and reduce their costs.

Recently a team of designers from M.I.T. and Columbia was asked by the foundation of the insurer UnitedHealthcare to develop an innovative systems approach to tackling childhood obesity in America. Their conclusion surprised the designers as much as their sponsor: they determined that promoting the concept of a “foodshed” — a diversified, regional food economy — could be the key to improving the American diet.

All of which suggests that passing a health care reform bill, no matter how ambitious, is only the first step in solving our health care crisis. To keep from bankrupting ourselves, we will then have to get to work on improving our health — which means going to work on the American way of eating.

But even if we get a health care bill that does little more than require insurers to cover everyone on the same basis, it could put us on that course.

For it will force the industry, and the government, to take a good hard look at the elephant in the room and galvanize a movement to slim it down.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine and a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

The article on the front of today’s NY Times scares the hell out of me.  The thought that billions of dollars invested by some of the worlds largest corporations could be funneled into something that gives a profit motive for the early death of masses of individuals is a scary road to begin travelling.  The behind the curtain abuses that are potential with this type of investment tool are far too large to ignore from both a citizen’s and government’s perspective.  What happens when Goldman owns the company that discovers the drug that cures cancer (or does not own them yet but immediately buys when drug trials start becoming fruitful) and they stand more to lose on these securities than they do from selling the drug?  Do you think that the thought of losing millions or billions of dollars PERSONALLY would keep the handful of people at the head of this investment bank from releasing a drug for say breast cancer? Or do you think that a moral obligation would override their desire to feed their family?  Do we even want that question to become a reality for one of these individuals?

Heady Theories on the Contours of Einstein’s Genius

Stored Near a Beer Cooler and Sent Through the Mail, Physicist’s Unusual Brain Comes Under Renewed Study

Seeking signs of genius, a researcher recently reconstructed the shape of Albert Einstein’s brain with techniques normally used to analyze fossils. This mold of thought, she believes, reveals the imprint of a rare intelligence that transformed our understanding of space, time and energy.

By studying photographs of Einstein’s brain taken at his death in 1955, paleoanthropologist Dean Falk at Florida State University identified a dozen subtle variations in its surface that may have heightened his ability to see physics in a new way. Her research suggests how the brain shaped the inner life of the 20th century’s most famous mind.

“Einstein’s brain is really unusual,” says Dr. Falk. “On the surface at least, it looks different than others. It’s suggestive.”

Like every human brain, Einstein’s was an island universe of thought.

The insights that revolutionized physics were the product of 25 billion neurons linked by billions of connections — an essence of intellect so densely compacted that a thimble full of brain matter normally holds 50 million neurons and a trillion synapses. His ideas and impressions raced through a maze of 93,000 miles of insulated nerve fibers at 200 miles per hour.

No one knows exactly how intelligence and originality arises from the action of so many special cells. Researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia and Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., recently discovered that patterns of electrical brain activity, as measured by electroencephalograms, usually are different among creative thinkers than among more methodical problem solvers.

LancetThe arrow above points to the Sylvian fissure in Einstein’s brain.

An expert on ancient neural evolution, Dr. Falk is accustomed to studying brains that no longer exist. She reviewed 25 autopsy photographs. She could see that Einstein’s brain had an unusual pattern of grooves and ridges along its parietal lobes, suggesting a rearrangement of areas associated with mathematical, visual and spatial cognition.

Although he published 300 scientific papers, Einstein couldn’t easily describe the way his mind worked. “A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,” he once said. His thoughts moved “in a wildly speculative way.” As a theorist, he sometimes solved physics problems by imagining himself riding alongside a light beam or falling in an elevator. “I rarely think in words at all. A thought comes and I may try to express it in words afterwards …I have no doubt that our thinking goes on for the most part without the use of signs and, furthermore, largely unconsciously.”

Told that many people only think in words, he laughed.

By studying Einstein’s neural remains, researchers like Dr. Falk pursue an inquiry at the confluence of science, folklore and medical history. For a century, scientists have compared famous brains in hopes of finding the link between neural structure and talent. It’s heady work. “The brain is as close as we can get to the physical essence of what makes us human,” she says.

To this end, Soviet scientists once conducted top-secret studies of Lenin’s brain, seeking in its dead cells the intellectual seeds of social revolution, says University of Houston political economist Paul Gregory, who discovered the 1936 medical report hidden in Communist Party archives. More recently, researchers at the Institute of Medicine in Juelich, Germany, took apart the brain of a translator fluent in 60 languages, in hopes of finding the secret of his exceptional language ability. In both cases, the findings were inconclusive.

By itself, brain size is no true measure of intellect, comparative studies confirm. Einstein’s brain weighed 2.7 pounds, less than most men. The brain of 1921 Nobel laureate Anatole France weighed just 2.1 pounds. At three pounds, Lenin’s brain was exactly average. The brain of Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev outweighed them all at 4.4 pounds.

To understand the anatomical reasons our mental capacities often differ, researchers must look instead for subtle distinctions among neurons and synapses in structures associated with specific abilities. Nonetheless, the effort to study Einstein’s brain was controversial from the start.

When Einstein died in New Jersey at the age of 76, an eccentric hospital pathologist named Thomas Harvey conducted a routine autopsy. But he removed the physicist’s brain for later study — apparently acting on his own authority. He soaked it in preservative and cut it into 240 pieces, each containing about two teaspoons of cerebral tissue. He mounted 1,000 slivers on microscope slides for study.

It was decades, though, before Dr. Harvey could persuade anyone to seriously examine them. Einstein’s brain samples languished in a cider box next to the beer cooler under his desk.

Not until 1985 did the first scientific analysis appear. Pioneering neuroscientist Marion Diamond at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered that, in some tissue samples, Einstein’s brain had more cells nurturing each neuron than normal. These well-tended cells, located in a region associated with mathematical and language skills, might help explain the physicist’s “unusual conceptual powers,” she speculates.

Then Dr. Harvey contacted neuropsychologist Sandra Witelson at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. An authority on cognition and comparative neuroanatomy, Dr. Witelson had assembled the world’s largest collection of normal brains, all cross-matched and cataloged by intelligence tests and behavioral surveys conducted while the donors were still alive.

“Unannounced, he sent me packages — packets of slides — just addressed to me without a return address,” Dr. Witelson recalls. “These slides of Einstein’s brain kept coming through the mail, unannounced and uninsured.”

She compared Einstein’s brain samples with dozens of normal men and women in her brain bank. Most of his brain was unremarkable, but she found that one area associated with visual and spatial reasoning — the inferior parietal region — was 15% larger than normal. Even more unusual, his brain lacked a special fissure there, effectively fusing two key brain regions into one.

“I can’t prove that those were the regions that Einstein was using when he was thinking about relativity,” says Dr. Witelson. “We suggested that anatomy could have given him an advantage in three-dimensional thinking.”

No one knows whether the quirks of Einstein’s brain structure were the cause or effect of his genius. Some of his gift, no doubt, was hereditary. But his research required intense study, and such concentrated effort can alter the brain physically. Regular meditation, for example, can increase the size of brain areas that regulate emotion, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, Laboratory of Neuroimaging reported last week in the journal Neuroimage.

Indeed, a curious knob-like feature that Dr. Falk saw in pictures of Einstein’s motor cortex might be due to his early musical training. It resembled a structure detected in neural studies of experienced pianists and violinists, caused by hand exercises.

“I wish Einstein were alive,” says Dr. Falk, “and we could ask a little more about how he thinks.”

• Robert Lee Hotz also shares recommended reading on this topic and responds to reader comments at WSJ.com/Currents. Email him at sciencejournal@wsj.com.

Study shows vast differences in area graduation rates over time

San Marcos showed good improvement over 10 year period while Manor posted declines.

By Laura Heinauer
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, June 23, 2009

School districts across Central Texas have improved their graduation rates, according to a recent national study. But a few posted significant declines.

From 1996 to 2006, the Liberty Hill school district’s graduation rate increased 30.1 percentage points, and San Marcos’ increased 25.3 percentage points, according to the Diplomas Count study, produced by Education Week’s Editorial Projects in Education Research Center. There is no uniform reporting of graduation rates nationwide; the report allows districts to compare their graduation rates.

The report said the Austin school district’s graduation rate was slightly lower than what would be expected relative to other school systems with similar student populations but that Austin’s graduation rates were higher than other large urban districts in Texas. Overall, Texas’ average graduation rate of 65.3 percent, compared with 69.2 percent nationwide, put it in the bottom quarter of states, but the 10-year percentage point increase was higher than in most states.

Central Texas education and business leaders say improving graduation rates is crucial for attracting jobs to the region. The Austin Chamber of Commerce will discuss recent troubling graduation and college trends at a round table today.

David Reiter, a Luminex Corp. employee who sits on the chamber’s education committee said, “We need to do better, especially if we want to compete against other states and other countries in terms of having a skilled workforce.”

In the 10 years considered in the Education Week study, the Manor school district saw a 27.5 percentage point decline — going from a graduation rate of 73.6 percent in 1996 to 46.1 percent in 2006, the most recent comparable figures available to researchers.

Superintendent Andrew Kim said he wasn’t surprised by the results, adding that the district had been struggling in the 10 years considered in the study. But, he said, the district has made a lot of gains recently.

“You’ve got to change the culture and support systems and that takes time,” said Kim, who was hired as superintendent about a year ago. The district also has a high mobility rate, which researchers say makes students hard to track and could effect the accuracy of reported graduation rates.

The study compared the number of students who start ninth grade and graduate from 12th grade in four years, a method that some education experts criticize as being especially inaccurate for districts with large numbers of students who transfer to charter or private schools or for home schooling.

“I think in Manor, just like in East Austin, we have a lot of kids moving between schools and between districts,” Kim said. “You couple that with the increase in enrollment in the past five years, and it has really been a shock to our system.”

In their report to the Texas Education Agency, which they say better tracks students who move out of the district and graduate elsewhere, Manor officials say 68.5 percent of students in the class of 2007 graduated on time.

The San Marcos district, meanwhile, was recognized in the national study, not just for its 25.3 percentage point increase but also because the overall graduation rate of 73.8 percent far exceeded what the data suggests would have been expected, based on the district’s size and at-risk population, researchers said.

“It validates that our children are working hard and are focused on acquiring a quality education and their high school diploma,” San Marcos Superintendent Patty Shafer said. “And it validates the outstanding support that parents, families, and the community give to their local children and teachers.”

Austin’s 59.8 percent graduation rate increased 14.5 percentage points in 10 years; other school systems with similar demographics had higher graduation rates, the report said. Still, Austin was ranked the 36th largest district in the country but had the 25th highest graduation rate — ahead of Dallas, Houston and Fort Worth.

A previous study by the same group showed that 59 percent of Austin’s class of 2005 graduated, a 12 percentage point increase from the class of 1995.

Austin officials have criticized the method used in the study and said the on-time graduation rate they report to the state, which was 75.3 for the class of 2007, is more accurate because it tracks individual students.

“In a city like Austin, while we’re fortunate in that we do have more resources to keep track of students and get them the resources they need, we’re also going to have more kids leaving to go do things like charter schools because there are more options available,” said Linelle Clark-Brown, Austin’s dropout prevention coordinator.

The study also found that 51 percent of Austin dropouts left school in ninth grade, more than other area districts but on par with other urban districts in the state, including Houston and Fort Worth.

Clark-Brown said students typically have difficulty with certain “gateway courses,” such as algebra, a trend similar to those seen in schools across the country.

With the promise of federal stimulus funding, she said the Austin district plans to create a program for overage middle and high school students that would allow them to catch up on classes they need to graduate or get back on grade-level.

“It would be more intensive, more hands on and more focused on identifying and helping kids earlier” Clark-Brown said. “That identification, prevention part is key.”

Kim said Manor is also redoubling its efforts, including revamping its high school counselling department by hiring three new counsellors and a college coordinator. He said Manor is also making partnerships with Austin Community College and other organizations to improve its rates.

“What we need to do, and have been doing especially in the past year, is make sure that the infrastructure and support systems are in place so we can do a better job making sure our students graduate,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/business/24collins.html?em=&pagewanted=all

All Things Considered, May 21, 2009 · Ninety percent of Americans say they pray — for their health, or their love life or their final exams. But does prayer do any good?

For decades, scientists have tried to test the power of prayer and positive thinking, with mixed results. Now some scientists are fording new — and controversial — territory.

Mind Over Body

When I first meet Sheri Kaplan, she is perched on a plastic chair at a Miami clinic, holding out her arm as a researcher draws several vials of blood.

“I’m quite excited about my blood work this time,” she says. “I’ve got no stress and I’m proud of it.”

Kaplan is tanned and freckled, with wavy red hair and a cocky laugh. She is defiantly healthy for a person who has lived with HIV for the past 15 years.

“God didn’t want me to die or even get sick,” she asserts. “I’ve never had any opportunistic infections, because I had no time to be down.”

Kaplan’s faith is unorthodox, but it’s central to her life. She was raised Jewish, and although she claims no formal religion now, she prays and meditates every day. She believes God is keeping the virus at bay and that her faith is the reason she’s alive today.

“Everything starts from a thought, and then the thought creates a reaction,” she says. “And I have the power to control my mind, before it gets to a physical level or an emotional level.”

For the past decade, Kaplan has been coming every few months to see Gail Ironson, a professor at the University of Miami. Ironson, an AIDS researcher, runs down a battery of questions.

“During this time have you had any HIV- or AIDS-related symptoms?” Ironson asks.

“Nope,” Kaplan says. “Nothing.”

“What percent of your well-being do you think is due to your own attitudes and behaviors versus medical care?” Ironson continues.

Kaplan laughs: “110 percent.”

Kaplan has never taken medicine, yet the disease has not progressed to AIDS (and she is not part of the population that has a mutation in the CCR5 gene that prevents progression of HIV to AIDS). In the mid-1990s, when having HIV was akin to a death sentence, Ironson noticed that a number of patients like Kaplan never got sick. Ironson wanted to know why. And she found something surprising.

“If you ask people what’s kept you going so long, what keeps you healthy, often people would say spirituality,” she says. “It was something that just kept coming up in the interviews, and that’s why I decided to look at it.”

Spirituality And Health

Ironson began to zero in on a patient’s relationship with God in an attempt to predict how fast the disease would progress.

She focused on two key indicators. She measured viral load, which tells how much of the virus is present in a person’s body, and immune cells called CD-4 cells, which help fight off the AIDS virus.

Ironson says over time, those who turned to God after their diagnosis had a much lower viral load and maintained those powerful immune cells at a much higher rate than those who turned away from God.

“In fact, people who felt abandoned by God and who decreased in spirituality lost their CD4 cells 4.5 times faster than people who increased in spirituality,” Ironson says. “That was actually our most powerful psychological predictor to date.”

“Just so I understand it,” I confirm, “if someone weren’t taking their meds and were depressed, they would still fare better if they increased in spirituality?”

“Yes,” she says. “Now, I’m not in any way suggesting that people don’t take their meds,” she adds quickly, laughing. “This is really an important point. However, the effects of spirituality are over and above.”

Can My Prayers Affect Your Body?

Ironson calls the finding extraordinary. She was one of the first researchers to connect a patient’s approach to God to specific chemical changes in the body.

Of course, mind-body medicine — the idea that my thoughts and emotions can affect my own health — has been standard teaching at many medical schools for years. But does that mean my thoughts can affect another person’s body?

“The answer is pretty unequivocally no,” says Richard Sloan, professor of Behavioral Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center.

Sloan notes that studies in the 1980s and ’90s seemed to show that praying for a patient in a hospital sped up his recovery. But he says those studies were flawed. More recent, more rigorous studies, he argues, showed prayer either had no effect, or the patients actually grew worse.

Sloan says science understands how a person’s thoughts can influence his own body — for example, through chemical changes in the brain that affect the immune system.

“There are no plausible mechanisms that account for how somebody’s thoughts or prayers can influence the health of another person,” Sloan says. “None. We know of nothing.”

A few renegade scientists aren’t satisfied with that. For years, they say, no one knew how morphine or aspirin worked. They just knew it worked. These researchers say typical prayer studies, in which a stranger prays for a stranger from a script, miss the critical element: a personal connection. So they’re asking a different sort of question. Can a husband’s love for his wife affect her body?

Or, as Marilyn Schlitz puts it: “Does our consciousness have the capacity to reach out and connect to someone else in a way that’s health-promoting?”

The Love Study

On a bright spring day, Schlitz is leading Teena and J.D. Miller down a path to the laboratory at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, north of San Francisco. Schlitz is the president of the institute, which conducts research on consciousness and spirituality. The Millers have been married a decade and their affection is palpable — making them perfect for the so-called Love Study.

Schlitz takes Teena into an isolated room, where no sound can come in or go out. Teena settles into a deep armchair as Schlitz attaches electrodes to her right hand.

“This is measuring blood flow in your thumb, and this is your skin conductance activity,” the researcher explains. “So basically both of these are measures of your unconscious nervous system.”

Schlitz locks Teena into the electromagnetically shielded chamber, then ushers J.D. into another isolated room with a closed-circuit television. She explains that the screen will go on and off. And at random intervals, Teena’s image will appear on the screen for 10 seconds.

“And so during the times when you see her,” she instructs, “it’s your opportunity to think about sending loving, compassionate intention.”

As the session begins, Dean Radin, a senior scientist here, watches as a computer shows changes in J.D.’s blood pressure and perspiration. When J.D. sees the image of his wife, the steady lines suddenly jump and become ragged. The question is: Will Teena’s nervous system follow suit?

“Notice how here … see, there’s a change in the blood volume,” says Radin, pointing to a screen charting Teena’s measurements. “A sudden change like that is sometimes associated with an orienting response. If you suddenly hear somebody whispering in your ear, and there’s nobody around, you have this sense of what? What was that? That’s more or less what we’re seeing in the physiology.”

An hour later, Radin displays Teena’s graph, which shows a flat line during the times her husband was not staring at her image, but when her husband began to stare at her, she stopped relaxing and became “aroused” within about two seconds.

After running 36 couples through this test, the researchers found that when one person focused his thoughts on his partner, the partner’s blood flow and perspiration dramatically changed within two seconds. The odds of this happening by chance were 1 in 11,000. Three dozen double blind, randomized studies by such institutions as the University of Washington and the University of Edinburgh have reported similar results.

The ‘Quantum Entanglement’ Of Love

So how do you explain this? No one really knows. But Radin and a few others think that a theory known as “quantum entanglement” may offer some clues.

Here’s how it works. Once two particles have interacted, if you separate them, even by miles, they behave as if they’re still connected. So far, this has only been demonstrated on the subatomic level.

But Radin wonders: Could people in close relationships — couples, siblings, parent and child — also be “entangled”? Not just emotionally, and psychologically — but also physically?

“If it is true that entanglement actually persists, by means of which we don’t understand,” he says, “if they are physically entangled, you should be able to separate them, poke one, and see the other one flinch.”

This idea — that we may be connected at some molecular level — echoes the words of mystics down the ages. And it appeals to some scientists.

But it infuriates others — like Columbia University’s Sloan. The underlying idea is wrong, he says. Entanglement just doesn’t work this way.

“Physicists are very clear that the relationship is purely correlational and not causal,” Sloan says. “There is nothing causal about quantum entanglement. It’s good to be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brains fall out.”

Radin and others agree that that’s what science says right now. But they say these findings eventually have to be explained somehow.