Oxford University Press's Blog, page 541

Pandas and people: understanding their complex relationships for successful conservation

Amid failures in saving numerous wildlife species worldwide, there is an encouraging success—decades of panda habitat degradation have been transformed into a remarkable recovery.

The success is taking place in Wolong Nature Reserve of China—home to endangered giant pandas and more than 5,000 residents who share a 200,000-ha mountainous area. It is also occurring in many of the other 66 nature reserves and non-reserve areas across southwestern China.

Giant pandas are a global conservation icon and have attracted fascination from humans for centuries. Protecting pandas also provides habitat to many other species that share the same home. Some areas of panda habitat are within global Biodiversity Hotspots. For example, Qionglai Mountains (9,000 km2) alone support 350 breeding bird species (more than Canada) and over 100 species of mammals (twice the number in the UK).

The panda range also offers humans many critical ecosystem services, including fresh air, clean water, carbon sequestration, soil erosion prevention, timber, and non-timber products. Panda habitat has important cultural value for ethnic minority groups, who believe wildlife and mountains are sacred. Numerous visitors from around the world benefit from recreational tourism in panda habitat; pandas in zoos around the world are popular draws.

In the wild, bamboo makes up more than 99% of the panda’s diet. Due to human impacts from activities such as timber harvesting and fuelwood collection, however, the geographic range of the panda has shrunk drastically. As a result, pandas are now only in bamboo forests in southwestern China.

Image credit: Panda zoo animal wildlife by PublicDomianPictures. Public domain via Pixabay.

The Chinese government began to protect pandas in the early 1960s. However, panda habitat, even in the ‘flagship’ Wolong Nature Reserve, continued to degrade until the early 2000s when the government began to implement conservation policies that provide substantial subsidies to local residents. The conservation effort has experienced many surprises. One surprise is policies with good intentions sometimes backfire. For example, giving households subsidies to monitor forests for excessive fuelwood collection inspired many households to split into smaller ones, resulting in a higher demand for fuelwood. Because small households were given the same subsidies as large households, a household of four people could double its subsidy after splitting into two households.

Behind the successes and surprises, there are complex human-nature interactions. Untangling the complexity needs a system approach that views humans and nature as an integrated entity, or a coupled human and natural system. It integrates many natural and social science disciplines from traditional ecological approaches (e.g. fieldwork) to socioeconomic studies (e.g. surveying the people and understanding how they make their decisions).

Many findings and methods developed in studies on pandas and people hold universal truths. In the past, human population size was often used as a proxy for human impacts on planet Earth. In Wolong, researchers found an even bigger threat: household proliferation—household numbers grew much faster than population size. This prompted a global study, which revealed household proliferation is common worldwide. It happens because of increased divorces, dissolution of multigeneration families, unintended policies such as the subsidy policy mentioned above, and so on.

Even a remote corner of the world like Wolong is now globally connected, both socioeconomically and environmentally. This phenomenon led to the development of a new concept to understand the interconnected world: telecoupling—socioeconomic and environmental interactions over distances. The telecoupling framework is more comprehensive than traditional approaches that usually address environmental or socioeconomic connections separately, or focus on what’s happening within an area. It is being applied to issues all over the world, from trading of goods and products such as food, energy, and ecosystem services to tourism, information dissemination, water transfer, and species invasion.

Despite habitat recovery and enormous successes in captive breeding, pandas still face many threats such as climate change and habitat fragmentation. More comprehensive analyses of pandas-people interactions can help better address these threats.

Research on pandas and people not only reflects on many lessons learned, but also points to future directions. The emerging successes in recovering panda habitat hopefully hold more promise for the panda and other wildlife around the world.

Headline image credit: Panda Bear wildlife zoo cute by skeeze. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Towards a global approach to combat antibiotic resistance

The eradication of infectious diseases in the 20th century is arguably one of the most important achievements in modern medicine. The treatment of such illnesses as tuberculosis, leprosy, syphilis, cholera, pertussis, or diphtheria with antibiotics – substances specifically targeting the bacteria causing them – have reduced suffering, increased hygiene, enormously improved lifestyle, and skyrocketed life expectancy around the globe – particularly in developed countries.

Less than a century onwards, these advancements are seriously at risk. Paradoxically, this is caused by the use of antibiotics itself.

From a biological point of view, this phenomenon is easy to explain and already envisaged by Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, the first antimicrobial ever. Antibiotics are naturally produced by microorganisms living in niches with high microbial diversity, like soil, to kill competitors. By inhibiting neighbouring cells, antibiotic producers gain a competitive advantage and enjoy more resources for themselves – food, space, or both.

In general terms there are three ways by which bacteria acquire resistance toward an antibiotic: They can block its entry into the cells (or enhance its exit), they can inactivate or degrade it, or they can alter its target so that the antibiotic can no longer exert its action.

When resistance toward antibiotics is not innate, as it is the case for our own body cells, antibiotic production and antibiotic resistance is an evolutionary arm-wrestle, and its playground is DNA. By accumulating mutations in their DNA, bacteria can for example modify the structure of a cell component targeted by an antibiotic. Upon selective pressure – i.e. presence of the drug – only the cells with the mutations in their DNA are positively selected and can further multiply. Moreover, bacteria can easily exchange DNA, meaning that a resistance can spread within a population or even between different species.

Since the last 20 years, no new antimicrobial has been discovered and, in parallel, resistance toward all major classes of antibiotics has been reported. This has been fostered by the massive, and occasionally wrong, use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture. Multidrug-resistant strains, against which no antibiotic exerts its function any longer, have emerged.

A study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases addresses resistance of enterobacteria like Escherichia coli toward colistin (polymyxin E), a so-called “last-resort” drug. The drug disrupts the membrane of Gram-negative bacteria and is therapeutically important to treat enterobacteria resistant to most antibiotics. Resistance toward colistin has been previously reported, but the responsible DNA mutations conferred a fitness disadvantage for the cell and were localized in the chromosome (the main carrier of the genetic information). Thus, the resistance did not spread easily within a population of bacteria.

Continuous efforts in basic research are equally crucial … The quest for new natural substances with novel modes of action is also ongoing.

The authors of the study monitored resistance toward colistin in enterobacteria from intensive pig farms in China over the last years. Intensive husbandries often rely on the extensive use of antibiotic to foster animal growth and health. The authors observed an increase in the number of bacteria resistant to the drug, and argued that this is due to exchange of genetic material other than chromosomal DNA. Subsequent molecular analyses verified that the resistance determinant is located on a plasmid – a small, circular fragment of DNA that can be easily transferred from cell to cell.

The researchers found that the gene responsible for colistin resistance, called mcr-1, encodes for a protein (MCR-1) which alters the membrane of the bacteria and makes them insensitive to the drug. The plasmid carrying the gene can be exchanged between bacteria of the same species (conjugation) and also be transferred to other species (transformation), eventually resulting in its broad dissemination. Indeed, the authors were able to identify the mcr-1 gene not only in about 21% of E. coli obtained from livestock but also in a high number of bacteria isolated from retail pork and chicken meat (about 15%) as well as in 1% of hospital patients infected with E. coli and another enterobacterium, Klebsiella pneumoniae, indicating an animal-to-man transmission.

These findings are worrisome insofar the effectiveness of the last-resort drug colistin is put at risk. Currently, Asian countries including China are the major producers and consumers of the antibiotic, mainly for agricultural purpose. In this sense, the study by Liu et al. is both a cautionary note and an exhortation for a global action to fight antibiotic resistance. Beside the effective communication to the public to raise awareness and the proper prescription and use of antibiotics as therapeutics, an integrative approach to unite human and veterinary medicine as well as agricultural practices is sought after. This approach is proposed by the One Health Initiative and supported among others by the FEMS (Federation of European Microbiological Societies).

Continuous efforts in basic research are equally crucial. New strategies targeting the social life of bacteria instead of single cells are currently investigated to tackle the issue of antibiotic resistance. The quest for new natural substances with novel modes of action is also ongoing. Recently, an innovative approach has been used to identify a previously unknown antibiotic substance without detectable resistance. From a microbiological perspective, it is baffling that the overwhelming majority of microbes is unknown or doesn’t grow in the laboratory. On top of this, “cultivable” microbes have a metabolism which is mostly silent under laboratory conditions. It is this so-called “secondary metabolism” that microorganisms activate in nature to produce antibiotics – indicating that a wealth of new natural drugs is still untapped.

If and when such new approaches or novel drugs will effectively halt the spread of antibiotic resistance still remains to be seen. In the meanwhile, a concerted action as proposed by the One Health Initiative is even more crucial.

Featured image credit: “Fall Coloured Pills” by Martin Cathrae. CC BY SA 2.0 via Flickr.  

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Secularism and sausages

In France today, pork has become political. A series of conservative mayors have in recent months deliberately withdrawn the pork-free option from school lunch menus. Advocates of the policy claim to be the true defenders of laïcité, the French secular principle that demands neutrality towards religion in public space. Opponents see the new menus as an act of deliberate provocation against France’s Muslim minority. A glance at the politics of pork in nineteenth-century France shows us just how much arguments over laïcité have changed in the last century and a half.

This is not the first time that pork has served as a weapon in the culture wars surrounding religion in modern France. On 10 April 1868 a group of leading Parisian writers, including the novelist Gustave Flaubert and the historian Ernest Renan – whose Life of Jesus had just scandalised the French public – gathered with the literary critic Sainte-Beuve to eat a lavish banquet resplendent with pork dishes.

The meal deliberately subverted the Catholic tradition according to which Christians should refrain from eating meat on Good Friday and consume only fish. Fatty pork sausages occupied a special place on the menu. They symbolised the free-thinkers’ disdain for the restrictive observances of religious life and offered opportunities for innuendo, such as ‘Vicar’s Sausage.’ In response, some Catholic activists started calling free-thinkers ‘sausagers’ (saucissonniers).

The banquet was widely imitated and vendredi dit saint – ‘Supposedly-Holy Friday’ – soon became a popular tradition among ‘free-thinking’ groups in France. The diners at these banquets aimed to enrage their enemies on the Catholic right. They became especially popular during times of political conflict between Republican governments and the Catholic Church, such as the 1880s and 1900s. In fact the tradition lives on in France’s free-thinking associations and a meat-filled Easter banquet can still raise a crowd even in small villages.

Image credit: An allegorical photograph depicting of the 1905 French Law of Separation of Church and State by achat chez un bouquiniste de Bourges. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

At the end of the nineteenth century, anticlericalism and secularism were values associated with the political left. Socialists still claim ownership of laïcité today but in recent years the languages of the ‘Republic’ and ‘laïcité’ have migrated far beyond their traditional home. The former President Nicolas Sarkozy has renamed the mainstream conservative party ‘The Republicans’, while the Front National claims to promote both ‘the spirit and the letter of the 1905 law’ separating church and state. Laïcité is everywhere: even campaigners for a vegetarian option at schools proclaim their project (somewhat playfully) as the ‘ultimate secular menu’ (menu laïque).

The political migration of laïcité provides the context for the recent assault on pork-free meals in towns like Châlon-sur-Saône. The 1905 law had nothing to say about school lunches. Current national legislation mandates only that schools should provide balanced meals, bread, and water, and allows allergy sufferers, vegetarians or religious minorities to bring a packed lunch where necessary. In practice, many school canteens directly accommodate student diversity.

Those first sausage-eating liberals at the 1868 banquet were in fact quite sympathetic to Christianity in principle but they lived in a society where a profoundly conservative Catholic Church wielded great power and influence. They had first-hand experience of repression and restriction that was often justified in religious terms. Flaubert had been tried for obscenity over the adultery scenes in his novel Madame Bovary, while Renan had lost his professorship when he denied the divinity of Jesus. For these men, eating pork on Good Friday symbolised the freedom both to think for oneself and to defy or even offend repressive institutions.

By contrast, actions such as the removal of pork-free meals do not boldly confront any real threat to liberty or society or powerful institutions. Those who want to use school menus as a vehicle for combat argue that they are simply extending the application of a principle: laïcité. But the 1905 law was itself the product of compromise between church and state. The state made provision for Catholic holidays and even continued to fund religious schools. Moreover, a powerful argument for laïcité has always been that it liberates people through the medium of religious neutrality, rather than constraining them through the enforcement of cultural conformity.

Determining the boundaries of religious freedom in a liberal and pluralistic society is a challenge for all modern polities. At its best, the history of laïcité in France has been a story of constructive negotiation rather than ideological combat. Commentators and historians will, of course, continue to argue how successful these negotiations have been. But, despite France’s long history of political pork and secularist sausages, it seems best to keep that more confrontational and petty brand of laïcité ‘off the menu.’

Headline image credit: Sausage pork delicatessen by jackmac34. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Ten things you didn’t know about strippers

One way or another, strippers and other adult entertainers often turn up in the news cycle. Ted Cruz’s campaign pulls an ad because one of the actors turned out to have performed in porn films; corporate accounts are revealed to have funded lap dances for executives; cities and towns seek to clean up their images by banishing strip clubs outside the city limits. You’ve seen strippers in movies and television shows—usually degraded, down on their luck, in an abusive relationship, and possibly possessing a heart of gold. The stereotypes about sex workers and strippers are entrenched, and can make it hard to see the reality behind images of thigh-high boots and fishnet stockings. So here are some fun facts about strippers you won’t find at the Bada-Bing.

1. You probably know one.

More women are employed in the exotic dance industry than in all other dance forms combined. Lots of women from lots of different backgrounds strip at some point in their lives. Every time I speak about striptease at academic conferences, at least one professor comes up to me to confess that she was once a stripper too.

2. Stripping isn’t empowering or degrading to women—it’s both.

Are you a woman? Do you work in a workplace or in your home? Then chances are, you’ve felt degraded or discriminated against. I experienced much more abuse and sexism as a graduate student than I did when I was stripping. That’s not to say that stripping is all about getting your groove on and asserting your sexual power either. Like any other job that involves emotional labor and physical expression, stripping can be incredibly depressing and oppressive, and fulfilling and exhilarating.

3. Strippers aren’t prostitutes or porn stars.

There are a lot of different aspects of the sex industry, and I believe there shouldn’t be a hierarchy among sex workers. But the vast majority of strippers don’t work as prostitutes, so don’t assume that the stripper giving you a lap dance will offer additional services.

4. Strippers pay to work.

The exotic dance industry considers strippers independent contractors, which means that instead of clubs paying dancers, dancers actually pay the club to work there. Each time she comes to work, a dancer has to pay a $80-$150 “house fee” to the club, as well as “tips” for DJs, house-moms, and other support staff.

5. Strippers are labor activists.

Dancers have brought class action suits against a number of chain clubs, asserting their rights as employees. Clubs micromanage every aspect of their labor, from what they wear to when they work to how they speak to customers, so under federal labor law strippers should be treated as employees, rather than independent contractors, and thus entitled to minimum wage, unemployment insurance, etc. Many dancers are against this idea, however, fearing that clubs would exploit them further and that they would lose earning capacity.

6. Strip clubs are about fantasy, not about sex.

I know, a lot of fantasies are about sex. But most of the time, men who go to strip clubs have other kinds of fantasies too, usually involving emotional rather than physical intimacy. Lots of guys go to strip clubs to feel heard and seen; some go to show off for their friends; some go to see women other than their girlfriends or wives get naked. I had one regular who paid me $100 to listen to him talk about his marital problems for a few minutes, week after week. Strippers often end up being more like therapists than anything else—just with less clothing on.

 7. Your boyfriend isn’t going to get with a stripper if he goes to a strip club.

There are two big reasons for this. One is that strip clubs aren’t about reality–see above. Your boyfriend doesn’t want to be with a stripper, he wants to engage in some make-believe and then take that excitement home to you. Going to a strip club means he has an active imagination, so you should enjoy it! The other reason? As awesome as your boyfriend is, the stripper doesn’t want to be with him either. Her job is to make him feel good about himself, but once her shift is over she wants to go home to her own boyfriend or girlfriend, not yours.

8. Strip clubs are multinational chains.

Usually you think of a strip club as a seedy joint in dark alley, full of the dregs of society. But these days most strip clubs are owned by large corporations, and are managed more like a casino than a biker bar. Many clubs feature plush décor and luxurious menu offerings, including one club that offers a $1,000 dessert (it does come with a teeny tiny diamond, but still!).

9. Stripper chic is a thing.

Pop stars dress like strippers. Celebrities take pole dancing classes. Kids can buy a Peek-a-boo pole dancing kit made for girls “11 and up” to “unleash the sex kitten inside.” Actually, that toy was pulled from shelves after parents protested, but it’s real, and you can still sometimes find one on Ebay.

10. Strippers can tell you a lot about the world we live in.

The corporate takeover of striptease is a warning bell about the power of corporate influence in every aspect of your cultural, political, and personal life, even if you never set foot in a strip club. If the personal, intimate experience of erotic dance can be controlled by marketing agendas, we should be worried about other parts of our lives we want to keep outside of the corporate sphere.

Featured image: “exxxotica Miami 2010” by brh_images. CC 2.0 via Flickr.

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To boast, perchance to boost; aye, there’s the rub

Not too long ago I discussed the origin of the verb brag, and already then knew that the turn of boast would soon come round. The etymology of boast is not transparent, but, in my opinion, it is not beyond recovery. Rather than following the immortal royal advice (“begin at the beginning, go on to the end and then stop”), I’ll reverse my route and begin at the end. It remains to be seen whether I’ll be able to reach the beginning. Word historians often have to choose between the fire and the frying pan: either nothing at all is known about the word (then everything degrades into unprofitable guesswork) or a number of equally reasonable etymons may present themselves, and it is hard to give preference to any one of them. Some scholars even think that a word can have several etymologies. This formulation does not make sense, but the idea that sometimes more than one source contributes to the production of a word is not indefensible. After all, if the Scandinavian god Heimdallr could be born of nine mothers, why can’t a word have at least two? A search for the early history of brag and boast illustrates the second alternative mentioned above: more than one probable hypothesis compete for recognition.

And there’s the rub. For example, we find an Old French look-alike endowed with a compatible meaning. The same word is represented in several Celtic languages. However, if, in dealing with brag, many researchers (with Skeat, at the start of his etymological career being among them) declared brag a borrowing from Irish or Welsh, boast has been unanimously declared a borrowing in those languages from English. Here I should repeat the question I asked in connection with brag: “Why should such relatively unimportant words as brag and boast have been borrowed?” In English, boast surfaced in texts only at the beginning of the fourteenth century. This date suggests the Scandinavian or the French provenance. While studying the vocabulary of the late Middle Ages, I constantly run into expressive and so-called popular words that were current in several European languages belonging to different groups. My working hypothesis is that such words owe their existence to the international slang of soldiers, adventurers, prostitutes, beggars, conmen, and all those who moved from country to country with mercenaries and traders. Their language was forceful rather than correct, but they made themselves understood wherever they happened to find their temporary refuge. This does not mean that the word we happen to be investigating did not have a homeland. Unfortunately, that land is hard to detect.

Where shall I begin your Majesty?

Boasting, like bragging, presupposes company and active interaction: one does not boast to oneself. Let us throw a quick look at the words that may be of interest in the present situation. The Old English verb gielpan “to boast,” which has degenerated into yelp, is irrelevant. German prahlen appeared very late; it resembles Dutch brallen “to boast” and brullen “to roar” and belongs with brawl and perhaps with brag. None of them resembles boast. Neither does Gothic hwopjan (regularized spelling), recorded in the fourth century; its origin has not been discovered, but at first blush it has nothing to do with boast.

More promising is Old Engl. boian “to boast” because it begins with bo-, as does boast. Long ago, the suggestion was made that boast is bo(ian) with the addition of –st, but it remains unclear under the influence of what words –st was “added” to the original root. The syllable bo- is extremely productive. It crops up in interjections like boo, whether we are booing a speaker or cannot make ourselves say boo to a goose, and suggests swelling, attempts to frighten an enemy, and so forth. Dutch bui “gust, squall” and even Engl. bogey seem to be part of this group.

If we add s to bo- and allow vowels to alternate in the root, we will end up with Engl. busy and boisterous, German böse “angry; wicked,” Norwegian baus “proud, arrogant,” and some words for “belly” (for instance, German Bausch). I have a strong suspicion that Engl. bosom ~ German Busen belong here too. The original sense of adjectives like busy was negative, approximately “worthless, bad.” Even today calling someone a busybody is not a compliment. Close by are Dutch bijster” crazy” and German verbiestert “grumpy.” Among the objects apt to swell we find Gothic beist “leaven” and possibly German Biest and Engl. beestings (Old Engl. beost and bysting; all of them mean “first milk from a cow after calving”). The group lacks unity as regards its sound shape and sense. Dictionaries tend to list some of such words together but dismiss most as etymologically obscure.

Regardless of details, boast looks like a member of the b-st club. The first recorded meaning of boast (a noun!) was “a threatening sound”; here we are reminded of Engl. boo. Murray (the OED) proposed, though with great caution, the Old French origin of boast but could not find the sought-for etymon. In 1906 Skeat wrote a triumphant note that began so: “At last we found it!” He discovered Anglo-French bost, which may indeed be translated as “boast.” However, I am unable to share his enthusiasm. Granted, Anglo-French bost existed. What guarantees its Romance origin? Why cannot we suppose that bost was a Middle English word in a French guise? It looks as though half of Europe had words like bost. The ultimate origin of boast can hardly be discovered, but, most likely, its root, to the extent to which such words have ascertainable roots, was bos-, occasionally reinforced by t. They denoted swelling, anger, and other feelings compatible with self-assertion. Next to them existed other more or less synonymous b-s words with other vowels. Judging by Gothic biest “leaven,” “swelling” was among the most ancient meanings of the b-st nouns.

Medieval mercenaries carried not only arrows and diseases but also words from land to land. Boast could have been one of them.

Strange as it may be, boost, which immediately springs to mind in this context, is an Americanism that turned up only in the nineteenth century. Occasionally those who wrote about boast mentioned boost but never discussed it. Dictionaries are unanimous: “Origin unknown.” Yet it beggars belief that boost does not belong with the words referring to swelling and rising. It must have lain dormant in dialectal use for a very long time and been brought to the New World by the colonists (we cannot even begin to guess when). Why it slept so long will forever remain a mystery unless another Skeat makes a revolutionary discovery and cries out: “At last we found it!” Regardless of boost with its short recorded history, boast seems to be a Germanic word that became part of international (military?) slang around 1200 or 1300 and spread to the Celtic and Romance-speaking countries in connection with war, braggadocio, and intimidation. If so, brag and boast had a similar history.

Another boast in English means “to smooth stone to the extent required.” There may even be a third one: “a stroke by which a tennis ball is driven on to the wall of a court at an acute angle.” The boasted stroke answers to the coup de bricole in French; only the boasted force into the dedans is the same as the coup de bosse. Whether boast in tennis and boast in masonry and sculpture are related to each other and boast “brag, vaunt” is unknown. The French derivation of the first of them (“to smooth stone”) left Murray unimpressed. Perhaps Heiner Gillmeister, a great specialist in the history of tennis, will enlighten us on this point and give this blog a badly needed boost.

Image credits: (1) Heimdal and his Nine Mothers. Illustrated by W.G. Collingwood. The Elder or Poetic Edda (1908). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Alice in Wonderland. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (3) Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the Renaissance (1870). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The true meaning of cell life and death

Two hundred years ago, William Lawrence blew the roof off the Hunter Lecture Series at the Royal College of Surgeons by adding the word “biology” to the English language to discuss living physiology, behavior, and diversity as a matter of gunky chemistry and physics, sans super-added forces. Moving on from there, one might think that life can arise from non-living stuff any time, or whenever the parameters are right, and who’s to say whether that’s a rare or common thing. Therefore it was difficult on the basis of logic alone to conclude the reverse, that the living things we see are a matter of living things’ reproduction and nothing but.

The following decades produced a new level of microscope technology, knowledge of sperm and ova as cells, the germ theory of disease, and ultimately, cell theory. The names are well-known, like Schleiden, Virchow, Schwann, Weisman, and Pasteur, as well as Thomas Huxley’s “On the Physical Basis of Life.” Crucially, cell theory is composed of three independent statements:

The cell is the smallest living unit: this means no component of a cell is itself alive. (Cells can be of different sizes, so don’t crack wise about mitochondria.)
Life is cellular: This is simply an observation, that we see no other kind of life around here.
Cells are produced (“arise from”) by living cells: This is an inference based on observed homology, that despite other differences, the fundamentals of all cells are the same.

The necessary conclusion is that your life, and that of any multi-celled organism, isn’t life at all. “You” as a being, your identity and experience, is something that a bunch of physically clumped-up living cells do. Regarding its end, your death (nothing personal), isn’t a whole lot of actual death at all–not of the living things. It’s the cessation of that thing they’re doing. You knew this already, what with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and related writings, right?

Life yes, person no.

We don’t even have to wait for that grim moment to see that every day tons of your cells die while you continue onward, such that your cellular composition is best understood as a wave-front, undergoing constant replacement at a rate specific to each tissue. Conversely, and consistently, when you die, most of your cells don’t. I mean, they will eventually, but the point is that they don’t have to.

What is that end, anyway? It’s tempting to consider apoptosis, programmed cell death, as the model. A cell expels some of its contents, dismantles others, and ultimately simply comes apart. It’s a sweet, quiet, reassuring, purposeful-seeming death. It happens all the time, especially in producing various gaps or separated spaces of your own body during embryonic development. It is nice to think of organismal, you-death, as a great big cooperative and purposeful and “programmed” macro-version of apoptosis. The trouble is that it’s wrong. Not one death of a human being or anything else you’re familiar with is caused by mass apoptosis. Mechanically speaking, we die because some piece is too damaged to connect with the others, due either to injury or senescence. It’s all killing. There is no “it was just his time to go.”

Just in case that’s not gothic enough for you … no one waits until every one of the cells which used to comprise you is dead, before announcing you dead. The decision isn’t physiological at all; it’s social–the point at which everyone is pretty much agreed that remaining living cells aren’t going to do the “you” activity any more. Obviously when this is shifts with technological methods to prompt them to do just that; the insight is that this point is based on everyone else’s needs and views, and nothing to do with your “spark of life” (or whatever you want to call it) in any cells.

Image credit: Photograph of a burial vault built circa 1890 to protect against premature burial, originally published in Popular Mechanics Magazine, 1921. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Old-school horror: In older cemeteries it’s not unknown to find the occasional remains of a person in a posture suggesting that he or she had been so adjudged sooner than we’d like to acknowledge.

The people who built the above were very considerate. But you might consider how much of what they had to observe before someone said, “Hey, maybe we better include escape hatches.”

New-school horror: There is no more thoroughly dead person than the guy who paid umpty-ump thousands of bucks to be cryogenically preserved, meaning, killed deader than a door nail via rupturing every last cell simultaneously.

It makes bottled tap water look positively honest.

Your life isn’t really being alive, and your death isn’t really being dead. The absence of useful terminology to express this in ordinary speech is one of professional biology’s greatest intellectual failings, and the absence of this point from biology texts is one of its pedagogical failings. It might have seemed 200 years ago that nailing down what “life” is would also tell us who we are. But it doesn’t.

The content of this post was originally published as a 3-part series on the author’s personal blog.


Part One: Death: When and Who


Part Two: Death: How and Why


Part Three: Death: What Remains

Feature Image: Anitschkow Myocytes in an Aschoff Body, Rheumatic Myocarditis by Ed Uthman, MD. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Understanding producers’ motives for adopting sustainable practices

Why would agricultural producers engage in practices such as conservation, animal welfare, waste management, or organic farming? The literature hints that economic, social, and personal motivations are drivers of adoption. Sustainable practices are welcomed by farmers if there is a potential increase in profitability through more efficient processes, or as a source of differentiation (i.e. labelling). From a social perspective, sustainability has become a license to operate in food supply chains, where long-term viability depends on the fit between firm and society values. In addition, personal motivations are becoming more relevant, since we are undergoing increasing awareness on the importance of sustainability.

This raises the question: how can policy-makers help to increase the likelihood of adoption of sustainable practices by agricultural producers? Should the focus be placed on economic incentives, or on programs that promote awareness and education on the benefits of sustainability? Is it better to emphasize standards, regulations, and enforcement? The design of effective programs that stimulate adoption requires an understanding of producers’ motivations and decision-making processes, besides the analysis of underlying market conditions.

An example of the use of economic incentives can be found in the Netherlands, where the Dutch government offers tax benefits to farmers that obtain a certificate on sustainable livestock practices as part of Maatlat Duurzame Veehouderij (MDV) program. Under MDV, farmers can write off up to 75% of their investment on certified stables. In order to obtain the certificate farmers must comply with strict standards on emissions, energy use, and animal health, among other items. More than 3,500 MDV stables have been built since 2007, making it an important contribution to the Dutch livestock sector.

We have developed a model explaining the relationships between economic, social, and personal expected rewards, and the adoption of sustainable practices. We tested the model by interviewing 164 hog farmersin the Netherlands asking whether they built (or were in the process of building) an MDV stable, their motivations to do so, and their financial risk attitudes. We also evaluated the effect of perceived tax benefits, the size of the farm, and the education level of the farmer.

Image by Andres Trujillo-Barrera. Used with permission.

We found that expected economic rewards and perceived tax benefits were the main drivers for the decision to build a certified stable, while expected social and personal rewards and the level of education of the farmer did not influence the adoption. So why did personal and societal rewards not matter much for Dutch hog farmers? Is that something to be expected for similar industries?

Market conditions for hog farmers in the Netherlands do not differ much from those of many other (agricultural) sectors. In recent years, margins have been low, and the number of farms decreased to almost a half of those seen in the early 2000’s, with most of the small farms exiting the market. On top of a strong competitive environment, an increase in guidelines and policies expected to become legislation soon are driving the decision to adopt sustainable practices. As a result, it is not surprising that farmers focus on tax benefits and other expected economic rewards.

Although tax benefits and tighter legislation seem more persuasive than education under the current market conditions, it is important to highlight that there is room to raise the awareness about benefits and costs of sustainable practices, as well as building clear standards for the stakeholders in the industry, such that an agreement on the value of sustainability can be reached. In that regard, we also find a role for risk attitudes on the decision to adopt. When farmers perceived higher financial risk, their willingness to adopt decreased, while on the other hand more risk-tolerant farmers were more willing to adopt. As such, it is important to educate farmers on the potential financial risk of the investment, and is worth considering a market segmentation approach to policies, such that each policy scheme can be targeted to the risk profile (tolerance) of each group.

Headline image credit: Pigs at Polyface Farm by Jessica Reeder. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Early Greek incantations from Selinous

The so-called “Getty Hexameters” represent an unusual set of early Greek ‘magical’ incantations (epoidai) found engraved on a small, fragmentary tablet of folded lead. Discovered from clandestine operations at ancient Selinous, Sicily, around 1981, and acquired at that time by the J. Paul Getty Museum (Malibu, CA), the hexametric verses have only recently been published in preliminary form in 2011, followed by a scholarly collection of conference papers published by Oxford University Press, in 2013. The new Oxford Classical Dictionary online will soon offer a summary of the text, a review of the present state of research, and a new translation and analysis based on forthcoming work of the author.

The rare verses provide an exciting new window into the early practice and use of written magic and incantatory spells in the Greek polis of the 5th century BCE. Ancient Selinous (modern Selinunte), a colony of Megara Hyblaia, was known for its remarkable temples and almost Sybarite wealth and luxury (see Franco de Angelis, Megara Hyblaia and Selinous: The Development of Two Greek City-States in Archaic Greece, Oxford, 2003); it all came to a tragic and unexpected end when the city-state was stormed in 409 BCE by the devastating forces of Hannibal (the grandson of Hamilcar, and not the more famous Hannibal, whose floruit came some 200 years later). The Getty text must date from some time shortly before this horrific attack, for thereafter the remnants of the inhabitants, of which some 16,000 were slain, were all taken captive. Although the prisoners were eventually allowed to return to till the land, the Greek polis as such ceased to exist: coinage ended, epigraphy ceased, Hellenic culture all but desisted.

Although modest portions of the text of the Getty Hexameters have been found on other tablets roughly contemporary with it, and even on some later magical spells on papyrus, lead, and silver (the latter, partially in Latin) dating some 800 years later, the Getty text is the fullest and best exemplar found to date. It also includes much new, unique material not known from elsewhere. One such portion of the text (col. ii) has a unique set of instructions, also in hexameters, that even seem to presage the aforementioned Carthaginians’ imminent threat against the city:

“Hear carefully the utterance [of this word]! Intone [this] sweet [song] / [over all] the people, in time of need, whenever [doom] / might [come] near [among the people] good at war and the ships, / bringing death [to mortal] men!”

Did the Selinuntines suspect, get wind of, or know of the Carthaginian attack? The specific mention of a threat to the Selinuntine army and navy seems to point to a military attack, to be sure. Or, was some other kind of “doom” in mind, attested elsewhere in the cultural record of the city?

Selinous was known for its periodic plagues, caused by the stagnant waters of its nearby rivers. As Diogenes Laertius (8.70), on the authority of the shadowy figure of a certain Diodorus of Ephesus, tells us, the sage and wonder-worker Empedocles cured the city of the plague by diverting the flow of the neighboring rivers, at his own expense, to produce a less putrefying admixture. The plague, it seems, had been the cause of civilian deaths and dystocia in the womenfolk. Although this reference has in mind a period some 50 years earlier than the writing of the Hexameters themselves (whose style is not decidedly Empedoclean, by the way), the very next verses of the inscription could have in mind repeat episodes of just such a noisome plague when it enjoins the reader to:

“intone [the words] over the cattle and the handiworks of mortals, / by the goodly time of night and by [day], / having [your heart] pure, [and] pure, too, the [little] door of [your] mouth!”

Although cattle can surely be subject to a malignant plague (called Rinderpest, a measles-like or canine-like distemper, transmitted by contaminated water), the mention of protection for the “handiworks (technai) of mortals” seems to point rather to specific commercial benefits that the intoned verses aim to proffer: namely, productivity in the cattle—including breeding, provision of basic alimentary needs, clothing, etc.—as well as success in the business enterprises of the Selinuntines.

These “positive effects” of the verses seem more in keeping with the meaning of the text, rather than, say, protection from cattle-plague or imminent rusting and breakage of human handicrafts.  Indeed, the very concluding verses of this second column even state that the ‘magic’ words of the Hexameters are “[beneficial] for the Polis, for they are best (or, ‘most useful’) for governing.”

But what exactly are the word and song that the Getty Hexameters promise for such protection from doom and, conversely, for the accruing of seemingly societal, commercial, and political benefits? In part, they are a set of ancient ‘magic’ syllables known as the Ephesia Grammata. Believed to have been once engraved on the statue of Artemis of Ephesus, these formerly meaningless syllables now begin to take on linguistic shape in the context of the Getty verses. Whereas some of them still seem to be only quasi-meaningful—those quoted in the second half of the Hexameters—the syllables of the first half actually form part of an (almost) perfectly meaningful  verse: “[Having come] down the shady mountains (in a darkly-glittering land …)”, and so on.

The now clear hexameter actually inaugurates the opening of a remarkable mythological narrative, a narrative whose introduction to the reader as an “immortal” and “sacred” incantation to be written—not merely spoken—intends to bring immediate deliverance from harm, so long as the inscribed verses are enclosed in one’s house. The narrative thus forms a kind of hoary, older set of verses that constitute the very heart of the Getty Hexameters. It tells of a mysterious goat of Demeter’s that is being led from Persephone’s garden for a momentous milking. The goddess Hecate, and perhaps Helios as well, seems to be in attendance, and there are blazing torches, a nighttime setting, a ceaseless flow of milk, as well as foreign shouts carried out along a carriage way. What the mystic narrative intends to convey may be lost forever in the lacunose remains of the Getty’s fragmentary text, but its secrets, if preserving some hieros logos of once unspoken legomena of the ancient Mysteries, may offer intriguing insights into the appropriation of early Greek hexameters as epaiodai for the protection and safety of both individual and polis, whether that individual sought deliverance from harm in the mundane world or salvation in the super-mundane afterlife.

Featured image credit: Garden of the Getty Villa in Malibu, by malosoca. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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W.E.B. Du Bois and the literature of upheaval

There is a moment in the George Miller film Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) that has stuck with me over the two decades since I first saw it. A bedraggled Max (Mel Gibson) is escorted through the crumbling desert outpost of Bartertown. There, he visits Aunty, the nominal leader of the city, played by Tina Turner. She asks a question that presumably comes up a lot in this post-apocalyptic setting: “What did you do before all this?” He admits that he was a police officer. “How the world turns,” she says. “One day, cock of the walk. Next, a feather duster.” And then, Aunty reveals what makes this sub-genre of storytelling so seductive and so frightening. “Do you know who I was?” she asks. “Nobody. Except on the day after. I was still alive. This nobody had a chance to be somebody.”

The prospect of societal upheaval has fueled post-apocalyptic stories for years, derived from fears of economic collapse, revolution, invasion, pandemic, or environmental catastrophe. It is perversely fun, perhaps more so for the most privileged among us, to be afraid of these things, at least for the duration of a film or a novel. But, as Aunty demonstrates, these stories also offer a way to critique the status quo, and to propose a new way of doing things that would be possible only through a sudden, calamitous change. I’ve always wondered: just who was Aunty “before all this”? Was she a working stiff? Was she homeless? Was she in prison? Is she claiming to have been a nobody simply to provide a narrative that demands respect?

I was pleasantly surprised some years ago when I heard that W.E.B. Du Bois explored these themes in his science fiction short story “The Comet” (1920). One of the preeminent intellectuals of his time, Du Bois is of course best known for his extensive scholarship on the African American experience, which covered topics such as the slave trade, the global Pan-African community, and race relations. But as demonstrated in “The Comet,” as well as an earlier story recently rediscovered, Du Bois saw in science fiction a genre that was ready-made for exploring the consequences, and the possibilities, of a massive and irrevocable upheaval. But his story goes beyond mere wish fulfillment, and suggests that even an apocalypse may not be powerful enough to wipe the slate clean and start over.

In “The Comet,” an African American office worker named Jim appears to be the lone survivor of a catastrophe that has wiped out the population of New York, and possibly the world. Roaming through the Financial District, Jim is confronted with a grisly spectacle, with corpses littering the streets and an eerie silence enveloping the city. But almost immediately, he recognizes how things have changed:

He knew that he must steady himself and keep calm, or he would go insane. First he must go to a restaurant. He walked up Fifth Avenue to a famous hostelry and entered its gorgeous, ghost-haunted halls. He beat back the nausea, and, seizing a tray from dead hands, hurried into the street and ate ravenously, hiding to keep out the sights. “Yesterday, they would not have served me,” he whispered, as he forced the food down.

Many post-apocalyptic books and movies, from The Stand to 28 Days Later, include a scene which shows the survivors reveling in the wealth that is left behind in the aftermath. For Du Bois, this act takes on a political significance; Jim’s first moments in this new world are spent subverting the segregationist policies with which he has lived his entire life.

Things get more complicated when he comes to the aid of a white woman named Julia, who contrasts her life of idleness and comfort to his hardscrabble existence as an office drone. Similar to Aunty, Jim admits that he, too, was a nobody, even going so far as to say that he was “not human” until the catastrophe leveled everything around him. Before long, the two form a bond that takes on religious overtones, with allusions to both Genesis and Revelation. In the surreal light of a signal flare, Julia sees Jim as “her Brother Humanity incarnate, Son of God and great All-Father of the race to be.” For a brief passage, it appears that the two survivors have become a new Adam and Eve.

But this moment of transcendence is cut short when Julia’s father arrives with a search party. Immediately, the men take Julia away, telling Jim that he “had no business” helping her and even threatening to lynch him for interfering. To drive the point home, it is at this point in the story that the narrator stops referring to the protagonist as Jim or “the man,” and refers to him instead as “the Negro.” Jim’s brief vision of a post-racial world vanishes in a matter of seconds. In the closing lines, he is reunited with his wife, only to discover that their child has died.

Over a decade before publishing “The Comet,” Du Bois witnessed a real-life apocalyptic scenario of sorts while living in Atlanta, where racial tension threatened to boil over in the early twentieth century. Du Bois spent years researching the city’s problem with violence, and was particularly horrified by the case of Sam Hose, a black man who was lynched in 1899. In his autobiography, Du Bois describes seeing Hose’s knuckles on display in the window of an Atlanta butcher shop, a ghastly sight that left him shaken. “Something died in me that day,” he wrote.

In 1906, local newspapers reported a string of incidents involving black men attacking white women, none of which were ever proven. In response, mobs of white men roamed the streets, destroying property and murdering at least 16 black men. Amidst the chaos, Du Bois stood guard at his home in the city, patrolling the street with a newly purchased shotgun.

The riot marked a turning point in how Du Bois viewed race relations, putting him on a path toward more radical activism. At the same time, one gets the sense from “The Comet” that Du Bois recognized how deep the roots of social injustice had sunk into American culture. The story’s brutal, unsentimental ending, with Jim’s wife carrying their dead child in her arms, leaves the reader’s mouth hanging open in shock. Much like Octavia Butler’s Kindred—in which the protagonist loses an arm as a result of her time-traveling to the antebellum South—“The Comet” does not allow its hero to escape unscathed. And no matter how tempting it is to believe that a single revolutionary event could permanently change everything, Du Bois shows that the problem lies deeper than laws or institutions, taking firm hold in the human heart.

Learn more about African American Science Fiction and Fantasy writers.

Image Credit: “End of the World” by Alan Eng. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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E-cigarettes may lead to youth tobacco use

This past summer, the Atlanta suburb of Roswell, Georgia, banned use of e-cigarettes and vapor pens in public parks. Officials enacted the restriction not because of rampant use of the devices in the city but, as mayor Jere Wood said, to “get ahead of the curve. Smokeless device use is soaring. To fulfill demand, vapor shops are popping up all over. People are noticing, including children. Introduced in the United States in 2007, these battery-powered devices convert liquid nicotine, known as e-liquids, into a vapor that the user inhales (known as “vaping”). The tactile sensation is similar to that of smoking a conventional cigarette—minus the smoke, tars, carbon monoxide, and other harmful ingredients—while delivering nicotine vapor to the lungs. When exhaled, the vapor resembles a puff of quickly dispersing, odorless smoke. E-cigarettes are not subject to many of the regulations that limit cigarette smoking.

The products have a twofold allure: They’re viewed as a harmless way to enjoy nicotine without the stigma and health risks of smoking—while serving as a way to stop cigarette smoking. However, evidence is mounting that the devices are not as benign as advocates claim and may not be an effective means for quitting tobacco.

“Evidence of their effectiveness as an aid for quitting smoking is scant,” said former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researcher Shanta Dube, PhD, MPH, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Georgia State University’s School of Public Health in Atlanta.

One major warning sign is the allure of the devices for youngsters. Marketers offer many kid-friendly e-liquids, vape juices, and e-juice cartridges, sold in flavors that mimic chocolate mint, piña colada, strawberry, and lemon pound cake. The flavors have names such as Apple Berry Cream Puff, by California Vaping, and Devil’s Punchbowl, by Khali Vapors.

Dube said that she sees e-cigarettes as a modern-day Trojan horse that courts children while forging a new route to nicotine addiction—reversing decades of progress persuading youngsters not to smoke. “My biggest concern is the pediatrics population because I think the use and lack of regulation around the products is going to potentially move us back in normalization of cigarette smoking.”

Dube said that conventional cigarettes and e-cigarettes are almost indistinguishable to children. “So, my concern is centered on uptake in the pediatric population of e-cigarettes, which we have seen has increased significantly since 2011.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, e-cigarette use has surpassed traditional cigarette use among middle and high school students.

A longitudinal cohort study published in the 8 September 2015 issue of JAMA Pediatrics, suggests that e-cigarettes often lead to young people trying cigarettes and possibly act as a gateway to nicotine addiction. Among 694 youth not susceptible to cigarette use, 38.8% of e-cigarette users advanced to combustible cigarettes after one year, whereas only 18.9% of those who had not smoked e-cigarettes tried a cigarette. Lead author Brian A. Primack, MD, PhD, is associate professor of medicine, pediatrics, and clinical and translational science at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He also directs the Center for Research on Media, Technology, and Health and is assistant vice chancellor for Research on Health and Society. According to Primack, the most salient finding is that, even among people who initially have no intention of traditional cigarette smoking, experimenting with e-cigarettes is strongly associated with progression to traditional cigarette smoking.

“I think 38% is a really high transition rate,” Primack said, “especially among people who were ‘certain’ at baseline that they were not interested in cigarette smoking.”

Primack said another important finding is that the results were so consistent even when they controlled for multiple predictors of smoking, such as demographics, sensation seeking, and smoking on the part of parents and friends.

Primack said he hoped people will learn that although vaping and smoking may seem so different that one should not lead to the other, initial e-cigarette use may predispose people to take up conventional smoking for several reasons. “Most e-cigarettes deliver nicotine more slowly than traditional cigarettes. So it’s sort of a perfect ‘starter cigarette’: New users can start with e-cigarettes and then progress to regular cigarettes when they need more nicotine.”

Another reason is that e-cigarettes are designed to mimic the behaviors and sensations of cigarette smoking—unlike other forms of tobacco/nicotine use such as smokeless tobacco.

“This might make the person more accustomed to the physical act of smoking, making it an easier transition.”

Home is one place adults could steer children away from e-cigarettes. A study in the 25 August 2015 issue of Academic Pediatrics found that is simply not happening and instead might be leading to their acceptance. According to lead author Jane Garbutt, MB, ChB, research associate professor of medicine and pediatrics at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, many parents who vape aren’t aware of the dangers to children. Their use may send mixed signals to impressionable children and might tempt them to try the e-cigarettes themselves.

In the study, 658 parents and guardians completed a self-administered paper survey during an office visit to 15 pediatric practices in the St. Louis area. Data were collected between 24 June and 6 November 2014. Attitudes toward use of e-cigarettes are reported for those aware of e-cigarettes before the survey. Almost all respondents knew about e-cigarettes; 20% had tried them, and 12.5% said a family member regularly used e-cigarettes. In two-thirds of homes where children were exposed to e-cigarettes, they also were exposed to regular cigarettes. Only 15% of e-cigarette users reported having told their pediatricians they were using the devices, and only 6% said doctors had discussed the use and safe storage of e-cigarettes—which leads to another hazard. Garbutt said cavalier attitudes toward securing the devices and e-liquids could lead to youthful experimentation of a substance that can be toxic when ingested.

Garbutt said many adults, including pediatricians, simply aren’t aware of the dangers. With evidence mounting about the link between e-cigarettes leading to smoking, she said parents and doctors must wfarn patients about the potential dangers.

“We strongly encourage pediatricians to ask parents about nicotine use, including e-cigarettes, and to discuss the risks of exposure,” Garbutt said. “Ingestion is bad, of course, but even skin exposure to e-liquid can harm children.”

A version of this article originally appeared in the Journal of the Nation Cancer Institute.

Featured image credit: Smoke Screen by micadew from US. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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