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Wordless Wednesday: Green on Green

Grasshopper on a leafy bush.

Science Online09 – Science Blogging Conference

On January 16 -19, 2009, several dozen scientists, educators, science journalists, science bloggers, and some proud techies for good measure will convene on the Sigma Xi Center, Research Triangle, NC – the Center of the Science Universe.

Science Online09 is the 3rd Annual Conference on about Science Blogging. It’s all about Doing, teaching and communicating science on the Web. It is a free ‘unconference’ for everyone interested in science communication and education, how the Web is changing science, and how science is changing the Web. There will also be Lab tours. This is truly fun nerdy stuff: A field trip to local science labs and museums and demonstrations. It’s like visiting Epcot Center.

Registration is nearing 75%. If you think you’re interested you should sign up now. Or if you simply want to see if your favorite science blogs and magazines will be represented check to see who has already registered.

Conference organizers recommend for participants to start thinking now about what you can bring to the discussion. They even recommend sharing links and questions and resources, and keeping a notebook so we're come to the workshops ready to gab. In fact I registered to attend and was asked to moderate a session: Race in science – online and offline. In fact, the entire Program is shaping up nicely. I am quite excited to attend and participate.

I read some of these blogs daily and can’t wait to meet the authors. I’m looking quite forward to learning and networking.

It was only 6 months ago that I was concern about my blog’s growth and outreach capacity and now I have experienced a number of highs.

1. Becoming a Finalist Nomination for 2008 Weblog Awards in the Science/Tech Category. That really spread the word to people, especially among African-American Bloggers.

2. Being invited to contribute to the Young Black Professional Guide – a forum of multiple perspectives and advice to support the many challenges that Young Black Professionals face. Through YBPGuide I am reaching more people and sharing science and environmental lessons with a traditionally under-served audience.

3. And now this. Participating as a moderator in the ScienceOnline Conference.

Proud to be a Nerd,
DNLee

I can name 6 Latin-American Scientists!

Saludos a todos!

We smack dab in the middle of Latino Heritage Month. Unlike Black History Month or even Women's History Month, this cultural celebration of the talents and contributions of our Latin-American family doesn't get much media attention.

But thanks to the efforts of the Urban Scientist to promote diversity in the sciences, we can all learn a little more.

Over at Science, Education, and Society there is Science Diversity Meme and Challenge. In honor of Latino Heritage Month, can you name 5 Latino or Hispanic Scientists?

Yes, I can! And I can do so because my department has a strong recruitment emphasis in Latin America, so many of my fellow classmates are Latin-American Scientist. But one of the rules is that you can't name anyone from your current institution. Thank goodness some of them have graduated and are now elsewhere, so I get to name them.

1. Letitia Avilés: University of Arizona Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Studies the social behavior of spiders.
Contributor of The Evolution of Social Behaviour in Insects and Arachnids

2. Regina Macedo: She studies Animal Behavior of Birds and is an officer in the Animal Behavior Society - which is one of my main professional affiliations. Many of her publications are in Portuguese, but she is also an accomplished wildlife photographer. Departamento de Zoologia, Universidade de Brasília

3. Manuel S Leal: Assistant Professor of Biology, Duke University.

4. Renata Durães: She is one of my former classmates and is now a Post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Tropical Research in Los Angeles, California. You can access one of her publications here.

5. Guillermo Paz y Miño: He is actually my academic sibling - which means we were mentored by the same advisor - in our case we share 2 advisers. He also studies animal behavior (worked with voles, too.) He is also a big proponent of Behavior and Conservation Studies.

6. Iván Jiménez: He is another of my former classmates and the only person on this list who is NOT an Animal Behaviorist. Assistant Curator with Missouri Botanical Garden and studies plants.

Can you name 5 (or more) Latin-American Scientist? Latin-American Heritage Month ends October 15th.

Rules
1. Be sure to name their discipline or field.
2. You can't choose people from your own institution or company. (I may go soft on this one, this time)
3. You can't Google or use the internet to aid in your search. (But if you know someone is a scientist, but not sure what disciple, you can look that up).
4. You can consult textbooks, journals, and class notes.
5. You can ask others to help you brainstorm, but they can't use the internet just to get 5 names fast (see #2).
6. Living and deceased scientists are acceptable.
7. Links to or references about the named scientists are greatly appreciated. Let's share the knowledge, and list as many as you can, even if it isn't five.

Induced pluripotent stem cells IV

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) may again be judged one of the most significant scientific developments this year, and the news keeps coming. (Of course, it was near the top last year also.)

Some of our previous discussions are here, here, and here.

The ability to turn nearly any type of adult cell into the equivalent of a pluripotent stem cell seems almost too good to be true. And so far, that goal is still elusive, as a practical matter, with respect to treating diseases.

There have been at least three principal difficulties with experimental processes reported so far.

The process depends on a kind of gene therapy that inserts a few desired additional genes into cellular DNA using certain types of viruses, and the process itself significantly raises the chances of affected cells becoming cancerous.
One or more of the genes that are added to cellular DNA to induce pluripotency can also raise the chances of a cell becoming cancerous.
Alternative methods that address the first two problems tend to be substantially less efficient, therefor slower and more expensive, for producing the desired iPS cells.

The research we'll consider here addresses the first of these problems.

Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Generated Without Viral Integration

Pluripotent stem cells have been generated from mouse and human somatic cells by viral expression of the transcription factors Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc. A major limitation of this technology is the use of potentially harmful genome-integrating viruses. Here, we generate mouse induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) from fibroblasts and liver cells by using nonintegrating adenoviruses transiently expressing Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc. These adenoviral iPS (adeno-iPS) cells show DNA demethylation characteristic of reprogrammed cells, express endogenous pluripotency genes, form teratomas, and contribute to multiple tissues, including the germ line, in chimeric mice. Our results provide strong evidence that insertional mutagenesis is not required for in vitro reprogramming. Adenoviral reprogramming may provide an improved method for generating and studying patient-specific stem cells and for comparing embryonic stem cells and iPS cells.

Perhaps a little more explanation would be in order. We've discussed the four transcription factors, Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc, in earlier articles.

The "insertional mutagenesis" mentioned here refers to the use of a type of virus that inserts some of its genes directly into the cellular DNA. Such viruses include lentiviruses and other retroviruses. HIV is an example of a lentivirus. The genetic material of this kind of virus is in the form of RNA, which must first be translated into DNA (by an enzyme called reverse transcriptase) and then integrated into the host cell DNA. The transcription factor genes are artificially added to the virus RNA so that they are copied along with everything else.

That integration step is what enables genes for the transcription factors to be inserted into host DNA. Although genes for those factors are already present, of course, in non-stem cells, they are in a form that is less readily translated into proteins than in pluripotent cells. The newly-integrated genes, however, can be easily translated, and they produce the protein transcription factors that go on to turn the cell into a pluripotent stem cell.

The drawback of this method is that the new genes can be inserted at arbitrary points of the host DNA, and this can harmfully affect other genes, which may make the cell susceptible to becoming cancerous.

What the research in this latest work has done is to add the transcription factor genes to a different kind of virus, called an adenovirus. The significant difference of an adenovirus from a retrovirus is that the genetic material of the former consists of double-stranded DNA, like the DNA of the host cell. When an adenovirus infects a cell, its DNA floats freely within the cell, and it can be translated into proteins by the same process as for the host cell DNA.

So what the new work described in this study does is to add the transcription factor genes to the adenovirus DNA, and then allow the virus to infect normal adult cells. This has the advantage of not damaging the host DNA, because it does not get integrated into it.

Naturally, this is an obvious approach to try, and it has been attempted before, but not successfully. The reason it hasn't worked before, probably, is that the adenovirus DNA is diluted every time an infected cell divides, since there may be, at most, only a couple dozen copies of the virus DNA in each infected cell. It does not get copied reliably into daughter cells, and that's a good thing on the whole. (Otherwise an infection might never go away.)

Fortunately, it turns out that simply having the adenovirus-carried transcription factor genes in a cell for a sufficiently long time can trigger further gene expression that confers pluripotency – which remains even after the virus genes are no longer present. Persistence pays.

The research was carried out using various types of mouse cells – fetal liver cells, adult hepatocytes, and fibroblasts from the mouse tail tip. The last of these can, of course, be obtained quite easily.

There is, however, a downside. The efficiency of inducing pluripotency by this method is still very low. Typically, only 0.0001% to 0.001% (1 in a million to 1 in 100,000) of cells are converted. This compares with 0.01% to 0.1% when DNA-integrating viruses are used.

The research proceeded to compare the adenovirus-induced pluripotent cells with natural pluripotent cells. The similarities were quite close:

Pluripotency genes of the reprogrammed cells lack methylation (a chemical modification that inhibits expression), just like the genes of natural pluripotent cells.
The pluripotency genes (including Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, c-Myc, and Nanog) of normal pluripotent cells are also expressed in the reprogrammed cells, even after all traces of adenovirus DNA are gone.
The iPS cells formed teratomas (cell masses consisting of many different cell types) when injected into adult mice.
When the iPS cells were injected into mouse blastocysts, which then developed into mostly normal, but "chimeric", young mice, evidence of descendants of the iPS cells turned up in many different tissue types.

The next step for research in this direction will be to find out whether the low efficiency of adenoviral reprogramming can be improved by techniques similar to those used to improve the efficiency of retroviral reprogramming.

News reports on this research:

Important new step toward producing stem cells for human treatment (9/25/08) – Harvard University press release
A New, Improved Stem Cell Recipe (9/26/08) – ScienceNOW
Safer iPS cells (9/25/08) – The Scientist
Cell 'rebooting' technique sidesteps risks (9/25/08) – Nature
Safer Creation of Stem Cells (9/25/08) – Science News
New way to make stem cells is safe: research (9/25/08) – Reuters
Stem cells created without cancer-causing viruses (9/25/08) – New Scientist

M. Stadtfeld, M. Nagaya, J. Utikal, G. Weir, K. Hochedlinger (2008). Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Generated Without Viral Integration Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1162494

Tags: stem cells, embryonic stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells

Book Review: Butterfly Eyes and Other Secrets of the Meadow

Butterfly Eyes and Other Secrets of the Meadow
By Joyce Sidman
Illustrated by Beth Krommes
Publisher Houghton Mifflin Company

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The author creatively and accurately describes scenes of life in a meadow throughout a typical day with poetic riddles. The accompanying illustrations are grand and lush and offer clues to the riddle. The art is poster-worthy in and of itself.

Following each pair of poetic riddles the answer is provided on the next page. She explains how the wildlife in the meadow live and interact with the other creatures and the land. Through this whimsical presentation youngsters are introduced to basic ecological concepts like abiotic-biotic interactions, predator-prey relationships, insect-plant interaction, even ecological succession, but she does so with such ease and simplicity. It is perfect read-a-long book for young ones or read-on-my-own book for young readers. The sentences are simple and descriptive and you can take one section at a time if you like.

The I LOVE this book, it actually features voles, meadow voles to be in fact. And you all know about my affinity for voles. Plus, I've studied meadow voles, so this is extra special to me. Voles never get their due in stories or adorable creature media. When will they make a vole Beanie Baby? I’m waiting. In the meantime, I highly recommend this adorable and informative Poem Book to you and your family and students.

Hobgoblins, devils, and politics

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
-- H. L. Mencken

Political Attitudes Are Predicted By Physiological Traits, Research Finds (9/18/08)

Alford and his colleagues studied a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs. Those individuals with "measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism and the Iraq War," the authors wrote. ...

In a later session, they were attached to physiological measuring equipment and shown three threatening images (a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face and an open wound with maggots in it) interspersed among a sequence of 33 images. Similarly, participants also viewed three nonthreatening images (a bunny, a bowl of fruit and a happy child) placed within a series of other images. A second test used auditory stimuli to measure involuntary responses to a startling noise.

The researchers noted a correlation between those who reacted strongly to the stimuli and those who expressed support for "socially protective policies," which tend to be held by people "particularly concerned with protecting the interests of the participants' group, defined as the United States in mid-2007, from threats." These positions include support for military spending, warrantless searches, the death penalty, the Patriot Act, obedience, patriotism, the Iraq War, school prayer and Biblical truth, and opposition to pacifism, immigration, gun control, foreign aid, compromise, premarital sex, gay marriage, abortion rights and pornography.

It's this election season's well-timed release of a poli-psy research study connecting political behavior with behavior in general. And why shouldn't a particular type of individual behavior have something in common with other types?

Perhaps the main resistance to such a connection comes from the optimistic notion that ideological choices are somehow more "rational" and carefully thought out than other types of choices – like preferences for particular fragrances, colors, or ice cream flavors.

Or, at least, that political opinions are based on real-life experience rather than on whatever it is that shapes physiological responses.

We've been over similar ground a few times before. See here, here.

So what to make of this study? Political scientists generally accept that there are personality factors that correlate with political beliefs. Personality factors usually have both genetic and developmental roots. The genetic roots will also usually be expressed in various physiological attributes of an individual.

Just as genetic factors affect personality and behavior and physiology, it isn't unreasonable to suppose that personality and behavioral tendencies affect political beliefs. (Causation may well go in the other way, too, from beliefs to personality and behavior.) So it's not unreasonable that physiological attributes may also correlate with beliefs.

As far as this research is concerned – it's interesting, but quite a bit more data and research will be needed for a persuasive case.

Here's the actual abstract of the study:

Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits

Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals' experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.

Unsurprisingly, given what time of the year it is, this research has received its share of media attention. For example:

Ideology in Your DNA? Not Quite (9/19/08)

The study had its limitations — the sample size was small and all of the subjects were white Nebraskans — but it’s still a small step toward a greater understanding our ever-increasing ideological divide, even if the answer doesn’t lie in our genes.

That political beliefs per se are not in our genes is obvious. What's in our DNA got there over the last 3 or 4 billion years, and the part that's specifically human, over the last 200,000 or so years. Contemporary ideologies were not around for most of that time. But what was around was a world that was usually hazardous to an organism's existence, so consequently a whole panoply of predispositions evolved to efficiently deal with threats. Of course, all individuals of a given species don't have exactly the same predispositions, because different strategies can be effective even in similar situations.

However, there is research that shows, based on twin studies, the probable existence of some genetic factors that correlate with political belief. For example:

Political Views May Be Genetically Influenced, Twin Study Shows (2/6/08)

Research by Rice University professor of political science John Alford indicates that what is on one's mind about politics may be influenced by how people are wired genetically.

Alford, who has researched this topic for a number of years, and his team analyzed data from political opinions of more than 12,000 twins in the United States and supplemented it with findings from twins in Australia. Alford found that identical twins were more likely to agree on political issues than were fraternal twins.

On the issue of property taxes, for example, an astounding four-fifths of identical twins shared the same opinion, while only two-thirds of fraternal twins agreed.

Not coincidentally, Alford is a co-author of the Science paper we're discussing. He also makes a good common-sense case for the role of genetics in understanding political opinion and behavior:

Alford believes that political scientists are too quick to dismiss genetics; rather, he believes genetics should be studied and taught along with social-environment influences.

"It has been proven that genetics plays a role in a myriad of different human interaction and makeup," said Alford. "Why should we exclude political beliefs and attitudes?"

Even more to the point, there are studies that show that the emotion of fear – fear of death, specifically – influences political opinion. In particular, the opinions that people express can be influenced by whether or not thoughts of death are on their minds. For example:

Fear of death may factor into who we vote for (12/21/05)

Authors of a study published in the latest issue of Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy believe that voting behavior should be the result of rational choice based on an informed understanding of the issues. But using research based on the 2004 presidential election, they found that people may vote with their hearts, rather than their heads. Their findings demonstrated that registered voters in a psychologically benign state of mind preferred Senator Kerry to President Bush, but Bush was more popular than Kerry after voters received a subtle reminder of death.

(Another news report on this: here.)

Again, it shouldn't be all that surprising that having a fear of death in their minds could affect people's political opinions. After all, a fear of death certainly affects religious opinions. Death, speculation about an individual's fate after it occurs, and the fear of it, are central features of most religions. Religions generally compete among themselves to tell self-promotional stories about the favorable rewards that will accrue after death to true believers of the religion. And those religions which promise the most attractive rewards generally are the most successful.

Speculations about the evolutionary and social origins of religious belief generally assign an important role in those origins to human concerns and fears of death, and the way religious beliefs are constructed to help cope with those fears.

So if fear, and the ways that an individual typically deals with it, play a big role in religious opinion, why not in political opinion also? Of course, this would also explain well-known correlations between the religious and political beliefs of people. Religion and politics consist of ideologies with a lot of overlap.

As long as we're speculating, we may as well go all in and take note of important similarities between government and religion. In particular, government and religion are both social institutions created to deal with fears inherent in social living. Religion is primarily concerned with the fear of death itself, in any form, and secondarily with behavior of others or oneself that might threaten an individual's welfare. The latter concern is the province of "morality".

[Added 6/16/09: Here's Bertrand Russell's take on this: "Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes." - from Why I Am Not a Christian]

Government has these same two concerns, but generally in reverse order – except for extremes such as homicidal behavior and warfare. Government usually deals with less dire threats, but most political philosophers agree that one of its primary functions is to allay fears of the Hobbesian "war of all against all".

So government and religion are twin institutions that developed from the same seed – fear. Sometimes they are even Siamese twins, in theocracies and states with theocratic elements.

Let's go back now to the psychology of fear, and the question of how much role genetics may play in the experience of fear, physiological signs of fear, and hence a possible connection with political attitudes.

This is quite an interesting question in itself, and there is recent research that's relevant:

Mice Missing 'Fear' Gene Slow To Protect Offspring (9/15/08)

First, he discovered a gene that controls innate fear in animals. Now Rutgers geneticist Gleb Shumyatsky has shown that the same gene promotes "helicopter mom" behavior in mice. The gene, known as stathmin or oncoprotein 18, motivates female animals to protect newborn pups and interact cautiously with unknown peers.

This "fear gene" is highly concentrated in the amygdala, a key region of the brain that deals with fear and anxiety. Shumyatsky's newest finding could enhance our understanding of human anxiety, including partpartum depression and borderline personality disorders.

Here's a blog post on the research and here's the research abstract:

Stathmin reveals dissociable roles of the basolateral amygdala in parental and social behaviors

Innate parental behaviors and adult social interactions are essential for survival of the individual along with the species as a whole. Because these behaviors require threat assessment of the environment, it is plausible that they are regulated by the amygdala-associated neural circuitry of fear. However, the amygdala is not a single anatomic and functional unit, and nuclei of the amygdala have multiple inter- and intra-connections. This poses a question as to the exact role of different amygdala nuclei in these behaviors and the mechanisms involved. The basolateral complex of the amygdala nuclei (BLA) is particularly interesting in this regard: although the BLA role in forming memories for learned fear is established, the BLA role in innate behaviors is not well understood. We recently demonstrated that mice without an inhibitor of microtubules, stathmin, a gene enriched in BLA-associated circuitry, have deficiency in innate and learned fear. Here we show that the deficiency in fear processing in stathmin−/− females leads to improper threat assessment, which in turn affects innate parental care and adult social interactions.

Below are some blog commentaries on the political attitudes paper of Hibbing, Oxley, et al. It's interesting that these bloggers have expertise in biology, psychology, and neuroscience, but none seem to have a professional political science perspective (as some of the paper's co-authors do).

Some of these blog posts correctly point out methodological reasons why the study cannot be construed to "prove" a hypothesis. However, that does not seem to have been the intention of the researchers who did the study. I think they were more interested in finding plausible evidence for the hypothesis, as a first step to pursuing their ideas in more depth.

Additional news reports:

Some Political Views May be Related to Physiology (9/18/08) – NSF press release
Left, Right; Obama, McCain: It may not be what you think (9/18/08) – University of Nebraska press release
The Politics of Fear (9/18/08) – ScienceNOW
Politics in the body? (9/18/08) – The Scientist
Are you a born conservative (or liberal)? (9/19/08) – Los Angeles Times
Conservatives Scare More Easily Than Liberals, Say Scientists (9/18/08) – Wired
Spiders, Maggots, Politics (9/18/08) – Newsweek
Conservatives Have Stronger Startle Reflexes? (9/18/08) – National Geographic
Political conservatives more jumpy: study (9/19/08) – ABC (Australia)
Study: calm people are liberal, skittish are conservative (9/19/08) – Cosmos Magazine
Political views 'all in the mind' (9/18/08) – BBC
Voting Republican may be a survival response (9/18/08) – New Scientist
Are you more likely to be politically left or right if you scare easily? (9//18/08) – Scientific American

D. R. Oxley, K. B. Smith, J. R. Alford, M. V. Hibbing, J. L. Miller, M. Scalora, P. K. Hatemi, J. R. Hibbing (2008). Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits Science, 321 (5896), 1667-1670 DOI: 10.1126/science.1157627

Tags: political science, political psychology