Top Ten Stories of 2006 From National Geographic News

From The National Geographic:

Top_1 A biblical figure gets a controversial image makeover. A famous TV personality is killed by a stingray. A far-flung planet gets a demotion. These are just a few of the big stories covered this year by National Geographic News. Reload the year in nature, science, and exploration with the most popular news stories of 2006.

1. Lost Gospel Revealed; Says Jesus Asked Judas to Betray Him (April 6)
Hidden for 1,700 years, the Gospel of Judas now offers a surprising take on Christianity’s most reviled man.

More here.



Laughter: it’s catching

From Nature:

Laugh Laughter is indeed infectious, according to a new study. Researchers have shown that the mere sound of giggles tickles the same area of the listener’s brain that is activated when smiling. The brain’s response helps to prepare the facial muscles for a good hearty laugh. “It really seems to be true: ‘Laugh and the whole world laughs with you’,” says study co-author Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London in the United Kingdom.

The team of played pleasant sounds, such as laughter or cheering, and unpleasant sounds, such as screaming or retching, to volunteers. They then monitored their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). All the sounds triggered neural responses in the premotor cortex of the brain — an area known to prepare groups of facial muscles to respond accordingly. When a person in the study actually smiled or laughed, the neural activity moved to a primary motor cortical region.

More here.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Hitchens Recalls the Crimes of Pinochet

In Slate, Hitchens on the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006):

Pinochet ended up like Spain’s Gen. Francisco Franco, with a series of deathbed farewells that were obscenely protracted and attended by numerous priests and offerings of extreme unction. By the end, Chileans had become wearily used to the way in which he fell dramatically ill whenever the workings of justice took a step nearer to his archives or his bank accounts. Like Franco, too, he long outlived his own regime and survived to see his country outgrow the tutelage to which he had subjected it. And, also like Franco, he earned a place in history as a treasonous and ambitious officer who was false to his oath to defend and uphold the constitution. His overthrow of civilian democracy, in the South American country in which it was most historically implanted, will always be remembered as one of the more shocking crimes of the 20th century.

His coup—mounted on Sept. 11, 1973, for those who like to study numinous dates—was a crime in itself but involved countless other crimes as well. Over the past decade, and especially since his arrest in England in 1998, these crimes began to catch up with him. Pinochet had arranged a lifetime immunity for himself via a lifelong Senate seat, as part of his phased withdrawal from power. But this deal was not binding on Spain, where a magistrate successfully sought a warrant for his arrest in connection with the “disappearance” of some Spanish citizens. That warrant from Judge Baltasar Garzón, served in London, was the beginning of the unraveling. By the time he returned to Chile, the general was faced with a newly aroused citizenry. I once went to testify in front of Judge Juan Gúzman, the magistrate who finally ordered him indicted and fingerprinted. He told me that he himself had been a supporter of the original coup and that he came from a conservative military family that had thought of Pinochet as a savior. It was only when he read through the massive and irrefutable judicial files, on murder and torture and kidnapping, that he realized that there was only one course open to him.

Gaze and Acknowledgement

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I will start with a personal story that I have told several times before. In 1993, I taught in Germany as a lecturer in Bulgarian language and literature at the university of Göttingen. One day, I was invited to a German student party together with a friend of mine, a Yugoslavian PhD student, who during the siege of Sarajevo realized that she is Bosnian and Moslem and became an anti-war activist. We decided to have a bite to eat before the party. Faced with the difficult choice between Italian, German, Chinese, and French restaurants, we chose – with a slight hint of shame – to go to a Greek tavern and enjoy the native culinary pleasures. Eating moussaka and souvlaki (not at all different from the Bulgarian-Serbian-Macedonian-Turkish shish kebab), we watched the weather forecast for Europe on the restaurant’s TV. The borders of the separate countries were delineated with white contours. For no apparent reason, Romania and Bulgaria appeared as one country with Bucharest as the capital. At the end of our dinner, we asked the Greek waiter for Turkish coffee – he said, however, that in this restaurant they only offered Greek coffee. We ordered it – it was the same “Ottoman” type: sweet and thick, unsuited to the German taste for filtered coffee, nevertheless known in Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Bosnia, and Turkey as Turkish coffee.

more from Eurozine here.

singular, or an exemplar?

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In 1927 Paul Valéry wrote that Europe dreams of being ruled by an American Commission, and for many Europeans America is still seen as having an enviable freedom from the burdens of the past. There may be few who would now want to be subject to American rule but there are still many who see America as standing for a kind of freedom and equality to which Europeans can still only aspire. It is a view as common on the left of politics as on the right. There seem to be plenty of ex-communists and former Trotskyites who regard the United States with a loyalty and reverence of a sort they once reserved for the Soviet Union, and who round on critics of US policies as enemies of progress. Right across the spectrum of opinion America is seen as the supreme modern society, which more than any other embodies the future.

If any one writer can be said to be responsible for this view, it must be Alexis de Tocqueville. This acutely observant, high-strung French nobleman has been hugely influential in disseminating the idea that America is the country in whose path all others are bound – sooner or later, one way or another – to follow.

more from Literary Review here.

la beijing

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I’LL BEGIN WITH THE BULLET HOLES. They were small, but by no means discreet, and surely everyone who visited the UCLA Hammer Museum in early 2006 saw them, pocking the lower flanks of Jean Prouvé’s prefabricated steel-and-aluminum Tropical House, 1951/2005–2006, which had been retrieved from its original site in the former French Congo and reassembled in the museum’s courtyard. At first glance, the structure had a quaint dioramic quality, like a life-size colonial dollhouse for a make-believe attaché, an impression that was only enhanced by the leafy bamboo plants that surrounded it. But then I noticed the holes, ominous punctures in the logic and presentation of an otherwise perfectly self-contained architectural relic. Given the meticulous restoration, it was clear the perforations had been left intentionally unrepaired, as if to preserve the contradictions inherent in memorializing such a prototype, whose innovations and “functionality” pertain pointedly to France’s colonial past: Prouvé’s “machine for living” was easily shipped, quick to put up or take down, and equipped with a ventilation system that promised comfort to the European unused to equatorial climates.

more from artforum here.

Gandhi’s nonviolent principles show way toward peaceful world

From The Harvard Gazette:

Gandhi2225 The nonviolent principles of Mohandas Gandhi may be the only way to bring peace to the world, Gandhi’s granddaughter said. Human rights activist and former South African member of parliament Ela Gandhi told about 160 people gathered in Harvard Law School’s Pound Hall that violent victory sows the seeds of its own destruction. It is only through nonviolent resistance and dispute resolution, the focus of Mohandas Gandhi’s Satyagraha philosophy, that the world can become a peaceful place, she said.

Susan Hackley, the Program on Negotiation’s managing director, said Mohandas Gandhi’s principles provided the foundation for later movements by celebrated leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Lech Walesa. “The history of the last 100 years includes some breathtaking success stories … [by leaders who] brought about profound change without violence,” Hackley said. “All of these leaders would no doubt declare they owe a great debt to one person who 100 years ago developed a method and a philosophy for dealing with oppression that showed them how to stand up to overwhelming force.”

More here.

Younger siblings up the odds of brain cancer

From Nature:

Brain_25 Younger brothers and sisters are usually considered pests for their whining and fighting. Now it seems they could also be a factor in whether older siblings grow a brain tumour. The cause of brain tumours is a long-standing and impenetrable mystery, because they are very rare and it is difficult to collect together enough cases to find a common cause. But one idea is that viral infections are involved, as they are in causing cervical and other cancers.

To explore this, a team led by Andrea Altieri of the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg, studied the number of brothers and sisters a person has as a surrogate measure for the number of infections they suffered. The idea, used by epidemiologists before, is that a greater number of snotty siblings generally exposes a child to more viruses. The team found that people with four or more siblings (either younger or older) were twice as likely to have developed certain types of brain and nervous-system tumours than those with no siblings.

Sibling count is “one of the highest risk factors we know for nervous-system cancers,” Altieri says.

More here.

Monday, December 11, 2006

monday musing: hurricane

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Hurricanes are such powerful forces that we often anthropomorphize them, we think of them as being conscious beings. One sign of this is that we name them. We talk about where they ‘want’ to go and what their ‘intentions’ are. And perhaps nothing is more mysterious, tantalizing and intriguing than the ‘eye’ of the hurricane. If the hurricane were a conscious being, the seat of its consciousness would surely be within the calm center of the eye. Indeed, there is a long history of equating the ‘eye’ with the ‘I’. The eye is the thing through which you perceive in the act of looking, though you never see the eye itself as you do so. The ‘I’ is the unifying force through which experiences are held together as ‘my’ experiences, though you never get to experience the ‘I’ itself as you do so.

But, in fact, hurricanes are the very opposite of intentional beings. A hurricane is simply the outcome of various inputs. The wind is blowing at such and such velocity. The temperature of the ocean water is at such and such degrees. The atmospheric conditions are having this or that effect. Ultimately, like any other force of nature, hurricanes are absolutely indifferent to how they develop, where they go, and what effects they have. They play themselves out like an algorithm. Any given hurricane has more in common with a storm blowing across the heat blasted, empty and forlorn wastelands of Mercury than it does to any creature picking its way across a landscape fraught with opportunities for the making of decisions and the exercise of intentional actions. Hurricanes do not care, they simply are.

When a hurricane comes into close contact with a city full of human beings there occurs a confrontation between a world of meaning and intentionality on one side and the mute indifference of the laws of nature on the other. The hurricane makes its impact felt physically, in swaths of devastation that reduce the city back to its material elements, back to mere things devoid of context and framework. The hurricane treats the city like an aggregate of stuff, and in doing so, reveals the fact that, on one level, that is all a city ever really is, no matter how much that stuff may actually mean to the individuals who live with it.

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The photographs of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by Robert Polidori in the special exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are studies in the results of this impact between the indifference of nature and the intentional space of the city. They are incredibly powerful photographs. They show a city reduced to mere things. Perhaps most profoundly, they show the interior spaces of people’s homes as those homes have been instantly transformed into ruins. Bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens that less than two years ago were rich with the contents of human lives look like they are the remnants of a long dead civilization. They look a thousand years old. The effect is not unlike the work of the artist Gordon Matta-Clarke, who would, literally, cut through the urban landscape exposing the interiors of houses and other structures and creating what felt like open wounds within the space of the city. Smyth644_1

The amazing thing about Matta-Clarke’s work was the way that it instantly transformed the most intimate spaces into places that feel like ruins, archeological. In its swath of destruction, Hurricane Katrina achieved something similar within the urban landscape of New Orleans.

In my favorite photograph, a white automobile sits in front of a white house. At first glance, it isn’t immediately clear that anything is wrong. But further study shows that the entire area has been under water. Lines of sediment have formed on the exterior of the house showing the different levels of flooding over previous weeks. Those same lines are mirrored on the car, revealing, from the perspective of the photograph, layers of geographical strata that mark the progress of the flooding. The overall effect is to erase the significance of the particular objects in the photograph. 1_new_orleans_polidori_000_orleans2732r The house and the car aren’t really what they are anymore. They have become elements in a more primal geographical story that is about water and wind and dirt and mud.

In aggregate, these photographs tell a general story about the transience of human things in the face of cosmic indifference. And oddly, in doing so, they are profoundly beautiful. They are so beautiful that it is disconcerting. In viewing the photos, I began to find myself almost pleased that the hurricane had graced us with these images of human ruin. In one photo, several cars have been upended in the flooding and now lean at angles against a few houses on a block. It is as if they were placed there by Richard Serra. And they are beautiful that way. It is inherently pleasing to look at and to contemplate.

Perhaps this is the revenge of the mind against the meaninglessness of the hurricane’s work. The hurricane won. In the course of a few hours it reduced generations of human activity to so much detritus floating in the filthy waters that breached the levees. But in doing so it also revealed a truth, which is that the richness of intentional spaces always contain the seeds of collapse and decay. It is melancholy to reflect that every facet of the urban landscape is also a ruin in potential. But it is no less true for being so. Hurricane Katrina neither knew nor cared that it was beautiful. But Polidori’s photographs have revealed the truth content that, despite itself, the hurricane carried along in its wake. What can be glimpsed in those striking images is the beauty of eking out transient spaces of meaning within the background of the swirl, the decay, within the waiting arms of death and oblivion.

Dispatches: America the Inconceivable

About a month ago, a close friend who I don’t see often asked me at dinner, in an outraged tone, “How does it make you feel that at any moment you could be secretly whisked away to another country and held and tortured without trial by our government?”  Pretty shocking question, and certainly one that made me pause over my lamb ragu.  My first reaction was, yes, that sounds awful!  And then, “Strange, I’ve never worried particularly about such a thing happening to me, not at all.”  This was the truth.  Such eventualities, so hard to make real until, I suppose, the dread moment when they precipitate in your own life, occur to us mostly as dangers to others.  And it is with familiar liberal empathy that we grieve the possibility that such things might happen to another, especially in the name of our own polity.  That is the habitual structure through which I, as well as my friend, who I went to school with in Buffalo and who I have known for about twenty years, conceptualized the issue.   The issue being, of course, the current “state of emergency” under which the U.S. government authorizes itself to suspend fundamental jurisprudential rights: the right to counsel, the right to a trial, habeas corpus.

But here, instead of us both considering this situation in parallel, I could see that he was projecting that sympathy we reserve for the victim of flagrantly abused state power onto me, whereas I was proceeding as normal, seeing the potential victim abstractly.  My friend had personalized the issue (using his friend: me), and hence his sense of outrage up till that point exceeded mine.  Of course, I had to concede, I might be more susceptible to the whims of the state.  It’s not as if that never occurred to me when in an airport.  Certain external characteristics of mine fit into the realm of suspicion better than his: my ethnicity, my name, my passport stamps.  How many people have, as I had in 2005, traveled from New York City to Karachi, a twenty hour flight, and returned after twenty-four hours (an incident that followed two immediately successive family emergencies)?  On a purely statistical basis, surely I could be said to be a better candidate for interrogation and maybe even detention than he.  I had worried about other members of my family for this very reason.  Yet until the question was posed by my friend in this startling, menacing way, it had yet to occur to me to be scared of this possibility myself.

The question I became interested in on the way home from this conversation, then, was: why had I never personalized this issue, instead behaving the same way that my friend had towards me, concerned for the other and not myself.  I wouldn’t say I displaced my concern onto others so much as I had never placed it onto myself to begin with.  The first reason is clear enough: such detentions are happening to other people.  Some of those incarcerated at Guantanamo’s Camp Delta, for instance, are being detained indefinitely without trial.  These people are really subjects not of “the state,” conceived as a legal framework subtended by the Constitution and other fundamental documents of the nation, but of an absolutist power.  It decides arbitrarily (in the sense of never providing justification) who is and who is not allowed the protections of a legal framework – and this decision is not taken by an elected official, nor a judge, nor even a named individual at all, but by anonymous administrative and military “officials.”  In sum, a part of our government has allocated to itself the power to operate utterly outside of national law (and also of international law).  As Judith Butler wrote in a powerful essay called “Infinite Detention,” this is “a ‘rogue’ power par excellence.”

The arbitrariness of the division of who is and who is not allowed to have rights, who is and who is not allowed even to be construed as human in the juridical realm, leads, I realized, to my second reason for not understanding this state of affairs as dangerous to myself.  To accept that I was in more danger than my friend was in some way, psychically, to accept some difference between us that was more than arbitrary, more than fictive.  Thinking about it, it would mean to distinguish levels of Americanness, levels in how securely one was ensconced in the nation.  I, by contrast, had constructed my understanding in the opposite way: the government’s current activities were that which failed to belong properly to the national framework, rather my own status with respect to that framework.  But perhaps, I thought, I should take seriously the implication of my friend’s question to me: was I naive to reject the possibility of differentiable levels of belonging?

A more direct way of posing this question would be: Are some Americans less American than others?  I wondered at this question.  Obviously, there are levels of discrimination amongst people within the spatial confines of the U.S.: native citizens, naturalized citizens, legal aliens, illegal aliens.  To engage with those categories is a hugely complex topic in political philosophy.  But even, for simplicity, sticking to those of one category, the question can be posed.  Am I as American as Dick Cheney?  Is my friend as American as Judith Butler?  Is Emeril Lagasse as American as Joan Didion?  In every such case I could imagine, the answer was: yes, how can there be a distinction?  Though it was equally clear to me that for many others, the answer to some of these would be no.  Nativism operates in the realm of culture: eating marshmallows in a salad, or admiring the novels of Cormac McCarthy, or liking football better than soccer, might be held in someone’s sympathies to be more American, whatever that might mean. 

That this kind of cultural fealty is so ill-defined and ephemeral does not stop it from mattering.  It contributes to the ability of our government to act in certain ways.  In that sense, it is important.  (I was reminded of this last week, when I saw Casino Royale, which starts out with the new, Nordic James Bond drowning a Middle Eastern man in a bathroom sink.  This scene of the lethal brutality of UK/US espionage agents apparently affected no one’s ability to identify with Mr. Bond.  Is it any wonder there is no sustained outrage over Abu Ghraib?)  For this reason, it is important to point out nativism’s incoherence (in the British context, it’s always nice to read Daniel Defoe’s The True-Born Englishman).  As Alon Levy pointed out on this site last week, yesterday’s dangerous outsider is today’s celebrated embodiment of ethnic authenticity.  I have my own genealogy of Americanness.  It is one whose members recognize one signal feature of America: its inconceivability.  Recall here the nature of the Great American Novel: as everyone knows, it’s a mythical beast.  The country holds too much.  Unless you want to argue that certain figures (who?  Jonathan Franzen? or Oprah Winfrey?  Maybe Bill Bennett?) “tap into” the inner sense of the nation.  That’s arrant journalistic nonsense.  Lobstermen.  Mobsters.  Cajuns.  Ladies who lunch.  Whatever. 

If I have a relation to Americanness, I think it consists in my belligerent confidence that I embody it as well as anyone else, despite (or maybe because of) my many departures from what is generally considered to be normative.  In fact, I believe the danger I face is that of succumbing to the sense that I am much more representative than others – just the thing I am rejecting.  But there it is: a strangely implacable sense that I am more properly representative of this contradictory mass of people and places than anyone who attempts to define it, that in some sense such people are the true aliens.  My Americanness is almost private, like a spiritual belief.  It features landmarks and people and ideas that are part of my experience.  It dissents from the idea of looking to past customs and habits for definition.  Perhaps prophets of American excess and incomprehensibility like Herman Melville or Walt Whitman would understand; perhaps not.  I ain’t waiting for an invitation, Jack.  This is a paradox: only by claiming not to understand and define what belongs, in my sense of things, can one belong to something worth belonging to.  (I know, that’s a claim as to what belongs. It’s a paradox, remember?)  For me, only in such openness can something as illusory as nationalism be understood.  I may be deluded.  Sometimes delusions are grander. 

See the rest of my Dispatches.

Teaser Appetizer: Not so Nobel

Nobel_prizeYou have been selected to the jury to award the Nobel Prize (NP) in medicine. One of the contenders for the prize is the multiple antiviral drug therapy for HIV-AIDS. Surely, you say, this therapy has prolonged the lives of millions of HIV patients who were otherwise doomed, which makes it a favorite in your mind. But then you consider that it does not guarantee cure; while it is a great innovation it is not a fundamental discovery. How do you decide? Let us look at the history of Nobel Prizes in physiology or medicine.

The Nobel Prize (NP) has propelled brilliant scholars into the stratosphere of fame; many scientists have flown high and long on the wings of a seminal discovery but a few have glided back to ground in a short time. Only rarely has there been an unceremonious crash.

Slide0028_image028One hundred and five years ago, on 10 Dec 1901, Emil Behring [photo on right] won the first Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on the serum therapy of diphtheria. Nobel has since then honored one hundred eighty five more scientists in physiology or medicine. The annual continuity of the Nobel Prize (NP) suffered interruption during the world wars, so the prize has been awarded only ninety eight times.

Not all Nobel are equal. That arbitrary quintessential American measure of everything – small, medium and large – could well describe the durability and the impact of the Nobel discoveries. Durability signifies longevity of the validity of the discovery before its improved replacement arrives and impact shows the breadth of humanity that it benefits.

Ninety-one such discoveries out of a total of ninety-eight “Large impact” discoveries have opened gates to new vistas and have changed our lives forever, without us being so aware. The list is impressive and includes normal biological functions, pathogenesis of disease, tools of investigation and therapeutics.

The honor of the “Triple-extra-large impact” and arguably the largest impact discovery belongs to deciphering the very code of life that lay curled up — smug and self-assured — for over 3.5 billion years. For unraveling the twists of DNA, Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins received the NP 1962.

Some “large” discoveries have helped us:

  • Quantify molecules, hitherto immeasurable (radio-immune assay: Yallow, 1977)
  • Pierce the crevices of body but without a knife (CAT: Cormack and Hounsfield 1979; MRI: Lauterbur and Mansfield 2003)
  • Indict the culprits (Tuberculosis: Koch 1905; Prions: Prusiner 1997)
  • Understand mundane functions (Olfactory system: Axel and Buck 2004; dioptrics of the eye: Gullstrand 1911)

The large Nobel has a long life. The very second NP was awarded to Ross in 1902 for the discovery of the pathogenesis of malaria and the lifecycle of the malarial parasite. His work is still valid more than a century later.

But there also have been discoveries with a shorter life span. Five such “Medium impact” discoveries have provided extraordinary windows of opportunity. They may not have been durable but they have ushered subsequent important discoveries:

  • 1903: Niels Finsen treated tuberculosis of the skin with concentrated sunlight and founded the Finsen Institute of Photo-therapy in Copenhagen in 1896. Antibiotics have replaced sunlight but this notion perhaps continues remotely with radiation treatment of cancer.
  • 1926: Johanes Fibiger induced first experimental cancer in rat stomachs (Spiroptera carcinoma) by feeding them cockroaches infected with a worm called Gongylonema neoplasticum. Subsequently coal tar application produced skin cancer in other animal experiments. His mentors Koch and Behring also won Nobel for other discoveries.
  • 1934:George Whipple, George Minot and William Murphy got the NP for their discoveries in treating pernicious anemia with liver extracts. Currently we treat pernicious anemia with vitamin B12.
  • 1939:Gerhard Domagk proved the antibacterial effects of prontosil rubrum (red dye – a derivative of sulfanilamide), which paved the way for the development of sulfonamide dugs. He proved the efficacy of prontosil in mice and rabbits infected with staphylococci and streptococci. It so happened that his daughter fell deathly sick with streptococcal infection and he administered one dose of prontosil with skepticism — and in desperation. She recovered completely. Later he conducted wider successful human trials.
  • 1948: Paul Muller discovered the efficacy of DDT as a poison against arthropods. DDT was the main weapon in many countries for the control of mosquitoes causing malaria three decades ago but it went into disrepute when suspicions mounted for its toxic effect on humans and wild life. But recently on 15 Sept 06, the WHO has unambiguously rehabilitated this insecticide by recommending indoor spraying of the walls and roofs of the houses to kill malaria laden mosquitoes. Data has confirmed its safety in both humans and animals.

The ‘Oscar’ for the story, however, goes to two “Small impact” NP discoveries that have been peepshows of transient excitement and probably did more harm than good. These two Nobel discoveries stand out as not so noble. A fortuitous meeting of three scientists in a neurology conference in London set the stage for the first tragic discovery. The scientists were Fulton, Moniz and Freeman.

Fulton, like other scientists before him, had demonstrated that frontal lobotomy calmed the Chimpanzees. He shared this observation with Moniz, a Portuguese doctor, who mulled over this experimental idea and argued that cutting the nerve fibers between the frontal cortex and the thalamus (frontal leucotomy) could benefit psychotic patients with incurable hallucinations and obsessive-compulsive ideas. He would insert an ice pick like instrument on each side of the brain and with a few sweeps damage part of the frontal cortex. Some patients became docile but many deteriorated.

In 1936 Freeman and his coworker refined the lobotomy procedure and named it “Freeman-Watts Standard Procedure.” The pair demonstrated the procedure in the USA and made it extremely popular. Thus started the lobotomy craze. But further serious observation revealed that lobotomy harmed two thirds of patients and barely benefited the rest. What Fulton had investigated in Monizanimals, Freeman popularized in humans. But it was Antonio Egas Moniz [photo on right] who received the honor of the NP in 1949.

Unfortunately, he also received a bullet in his back from one of his not-so-happy patients a few years later, which left him paraplegic for life. His physical immobility ironically mirrored the emotional paralysis of some frontal lobotomy patients.

If this “small impact” NP was a consequence of a chance meeting of scientists the second “small impact” NP discovery resulted from serendipity.

When Wagner-Jauregg, like other investigators before him, observed that some patients with neuro-syphilitic paresis, improved after a febrile illness like typhoid or erysipelas, he set out to induce experimental febrile illness in his patients with a series of toxins. In 1888 he infected several patients with injections of streptococci. Stung by criticism, in 1890 he switched to non-infectious tuberculin; then in 1902 he used sodium nulleinate, boiled milk and milk protein – all in an attempt to induce fever. A few years later he observed a soldier suffering from neurosyphilis had improved with concomitant malaria. So in 1917 he started infecting syphilitic paretic patients with malaria.

War had probably blunted his sensitivity and he juxtaposed his treatment against the insane cruelty of war. He observed, “ We were already in the third year of the war, and its emotional implications became more manifest from day to day. Against such a background, a therapeutic experiment could stir me little, in particular since its success could not be foreseen. What meant a few paralytics, would possibly be saved, in comparison to the thousands of able-bodies and capable men who often died on a single day as the result of the prolongation of the war.”

The success of the treatment silenced its critics except one member of the prize committee: Dr Gadelius, a Swedish psychiatrist objected to giving the Nobel Prize because he thought a physician who injected malaria into a patient with advanced syphilis was a ‘criminal.’ Notwithstanding this Screenhunter_3_19 dissent, Julius Wagner-Jauregg [photo on right] received the NP in 1927 for demonstrating therapeutic benefits of malaria in syphilitic dementia and paralysis. Many hailed this as a “therapeutic noble deed” for a hopeless condition.

The story of small impact NP exemplifies the pitfall of any discovery. While all Nobel Laureates shine brightly in the limelight, yet on some the lights dim before the fifteen minutes of fame expire. Some migrate into cache of history and others disappear into the recycle bin but none gets deleted.

Does this brief background help you in deciding if the antiviral cocktail therapy for HIV-AIDS deserves the prize? Well, you should also know that some NP winning therapeutic interventions belong to “medium or small impact” categories. You say, in that case an HIV vaccine – when available – will be more deserving.

But no vaccine has ever won the prize.

So you go ahead and vote. The Nobel jury does not have to be perfect; science, unlike religion, is fallible.

Sandlines: Exile and patriotism – Who will rebuild DR Congo?

Throughout the Congolese conflict (1996 – present), civilian populations have served as the primary target for diverse combatant groups: ethnic militias, so-called ‘popular defense forces’, rebel factions and the government army. As attacks on civilians continue, persistent insecurity and suffering have triggered a different kind of explosion—a mass exodus of Congolese citizens seeking safety and opportunity in Africa, Europe and North America. An extensive Congolese diaspora was born.

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Under fire, often from their own national army, the poorest of the poor seek safety and refuge in neighboring countries on foot, without clothing or food. Their survival needs are met by the many humanitarian agencies working in the region. Those who can afford the voyage to Nairobi, Johannesburg, Brussels or Montreal are of the skilled and educated middle class, once central to Congo’s administrative and professional sectors. A reality for many African countries today, conflict-driven brain drain is often wrongly attributed to the ‘globalization dynamic’, and whose consequences are measured by their impact on host countries. On the contrary, the most devastating result is felt at home. The mass exodus of middle class, educated Africans fleeing violence at home into the foreign diaspora creates a crippling cultural and professional void, one with far-reaching consequences for the home country.

In the case of DR Congo, filling this void depends largely on the country’s success at rebuilding a functional state, one to which Congolese expatriates can confidently return. Now that the presidential election results have been announced and the defeated party, led by a former warlord, has promised to accept peacefully, the new government can begin the path of national reconstruction. First priority is to establish a secure environment in which reconstruction can begin, thereby attracting expatriate Congolese to return home.

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The costs of a thriving Congolese diaspora go deeper than the void left by an absent educated middle class, whose departure also sees the voice of civil society fall completely silent. Few are left to challenge the predations of a militarized and self-interested political class, atrocities to which all are witness but none dare condemn openly. Congolese human rights activists are few and far between, and independent journalism is sold to the highest bidder. Reporting on the conflict itself is left to foreign news agencies whose media outlets are inaccessible to local residents, the real victims of the war. As Congo’s wartime history has gravely illustrated, the greater the number of educated people leaving, the deeper the darkness and isolation enveloping the country. While no numerical figure exists, a near-total absence of skilled, literate labor force in the country suggests the enormity of the present vacuum.

Another component of Congolese society that has disappeared in the mass exodus is its patriotism, understood as commitment to one’s country and a willingness to sacrifice for its cohesion and progress. National pride is now articulated in divisive and xenophobic terms. Looking inward, this means a tense cleavage between the Lingala and Swahili-speaking demographic who supported the two presidential finalists, Jean-Pierre Bemba and Joseph Kabila. Looking outward, patriotism takes the form of suspicion of western powers, who are conveniently blamed for all Congo’s woes. There is no collective condemnation of the failures of Congo’s political elites, no popular mobilization to dismiss ineffective politicians and replace them with sincere leaders. With the educated class lost to the diaspora, this dynamic of oppression and submission is perpetuated in two ways: corrupt politicians go unchallenged and the illiterate masses comprising the voting electorate are more easily manipulated by the same leaders.

I have worked regularly in the Congo for the last 18 years, and am often asked what I think the country needs to return to normalcy. To Congolese ears, my response is contrarian but not incomprehensible: “Where are Congo’s patriots? Those who abandoned the country in search of a better life should come home, sacrifice, and rebuild. Stop waiting for others to do this in your place.” Embarrassed, a Congolese friend living in the US responded: “But it is so hard to feel patriotic today. What is there to invest in or be proud of? I live abroad because it offers the one thing, the most important thing that I can’t get at home: a decent place to raise and educate my children.”

You can’t argue with that. Or can you?

In the popular psyche, the perception that the political class is an untouchable elite group, inaccessible to ordinary Congolese and above the law, is wholly entrenched after forty years under President Mobutu Sese Seko and, in his wake, eight years of violent conflict. Such blind acceptance is extremely disempowering to the masses, who in so doing sacrifice all vestige of political agency. Blind faith in one’s leaders opens the door to impunity for the political class itself, who are thereby removed from all accountability to their political subjects. In Congo and elsewhere, the post-colonial era of African dictatorships has unfailingly applied this simple formula for success. And while many see the cult of personality as a sham—the ‘Big Man’ myth, Africa’s panem et circum—no alternative political models are within reach.

An extended period of oppression by a long cast of characters, not limited to the war but dating from the Mobutu era, each of whom claims to be ‘of the people and for the people’, has eroded much of the popular will to mobilize for a better present and future. The cynical patriotism manifested by political elites—cronyism and corruption instead of serving the collective interest and cultivating a culture of accountability—has left many Congolese with no other model to follow. At the local level, authorities regurgitate the same false rhetoric of serving the nation as they bribe local citizens and divert vital resources away from intended beneficiaries and into their own pockets.

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But as the saying goes, hope dies last. For many Congolese, a solution to their problems will come not from their leaders or even themselves, sadly, but from the western countries where so many have fled in search of a better life. Paradoxically, western countries are seen both as responsible for Congo’s crisis and as its only legitimate savior. During the war’s most bitter years, many felt that only a ‘Marshall Plan’—one implemented and managed directly by the international community—could deliver Congo from its chaos and misery.

Although many pockets of conflict and insecurity remain, the presidential elections transpired without a return to all-out war, as many feared. The next six months will determine whether the elected government will sufficiently right its course to begin attracting the diaspora to return home. Should this fail, replacing the educated and professional Congolese diaspora will take an entire generation of imprinting today’s youth in the image of the departed. But Congo cannot afford to wait another generation for its renewal. The heart and mind of its collective professional and economic capacity—the diaspora itself—must return from their places of refuge abroad and begin rebuilding the country.

Edward Rackley posts frequently at his personal blog, Across the Divide: Analysis and Anecdote from Africa.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Can Burma escape from its history?

John Lanchester in The New Yorker:

BurmaBurma stood out in my childhood as the place about which there were no stories. My parents moved there in March, 1963, when I was just over a year old. We spent six months in Rangoon, and for that entire period we were under house arrest. The military junta led by General Ne Win, which had seized power the year before, was shutting down all foreign activity in the country. My father was allowed to travel to the bank where he worked in order to help wind up its business, because the bank—like everything else in the country, including the Boy Scouts and the Automobile Association—was being nationalized. My mother and I stayed at home. Our camera was confiscated—it’s the only place we lived of which I don’t have any photographs. The house had a permanent staff of nine, so there was nothing to do. My parents had stories about everywhere we’d ever lived and everyone they’d ever met, but their experience of Burma was so weirdly isolated and isolating that they had next to nothing to say about it.

More here.

Is “Apocalypto” Pornography?

A scholar challenges Mel Gibson’s use of the ancient Maya culture as a metaphor for his vision of today’s world.

Tracy Ardren in Archaeology:

ApocalyptoWith great trepidation I went to an advance screening of “Apocalypto” last night in Miami. No one really expects historical dramas to be accurate, so I was not so much concerned with whether or not the film would accurately represent what we know of Classic period Maya history as I was concerned about the message Mel Gibson wanted to convey through the film. After Jared Diamond’s best-selling book Collapse, it has become fashionable to use the so-called Maya collapse as a metaphor for Western society’s environmental and political excesses. Setting aside the fact that the Maya lived for more than a thousand years in a fragile tropical environment before their cities were abandoned, while here in the U.S, we have polluted our urban environments in less than 200, I anticipated a heavy-handed cautionary tale wrapped up in Native American costume.

What I saw was much worse than this.

More here.

Marvin Minsky’s and Daniel Dennett’s latest thoughts about the brain

David Pescovitz in Wired:

Pl_83_dennett_t_1For half a century, Marvin Minsky has tried to mechanize the mind. In his new book, The Emotion Machine, the AI pioneer posits that anger, love, and other emotions are types of thought, not feeling. The idea will surely stir up controversy. But Minsky – who cofounded MIT’s AI Lab and advised director Stanley Kubrick during the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey – wants to make us think. His groundbreaking tome The Society of Mind, published in 1986, argued there’s no central conductor of operations in your head, just agents working together to create awareness. In the spirit of collective consciousness, Wired challenged Minsky to a meeting of the minds with philosopher Daniel Dennett, codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and the author of several seminal brain books with heady titles like Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

WIRED: What’s wrong with the traditional approach to how the brain works?
Minsky:
Physics gives us about five laws that explain almost everything. So we keep looking for those kinds of simple laws to apply to the brain. The idea in my new book is that you shouldn’t be looking for a single explanation of how thinking works. Evolution has found hundreds of ways to do things, and when one of them fails, your mind switches to another. That’s resourcefulness…

More here.

Speaking frankly about Israel and Palestine

“Jimmy Carter says his recent book is drawing knee-jerk accusations of anti-Israel bias.”

From the Los Angeles Times:

26800161The many controversial issues concerning Palestine and the path to peace for Israel are intensely debated among Israelis and throughout other nations — but not in the United States. For the last 30 years, I have witnessed and experienced the severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts. This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices.

It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians. Very few would ever deign to visit the Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza City or even Bethlehem and talk to the beleaguered residents. What is even more difficult to comprehend is why the editorial pages of the major newspapers and magazines in the United States exercise similar self-restraint, quite contrary to private assessments expressed quite forcefully by their correspondents in the Holy Land.

With some degree of reluctance and some uncertainty about the reception my book would receive, I used maps, text and documents to describe the situation accurately and to analyze the only possible path to peace: Israelis and Palestinians living side by side within their own internationally recognized boundaries.

More here.

Sexual Psychopaths

Beth Hawkins in Twin Cities Reader (of Minneapolis/St. Paul):

27_1356a14924_m …Janus makes a persuasive case that by throwing vast resources at a few offenders while hiding the true scope of sexual violence, sexual predator laws do more harm than good. Not only is the public not much safer than it was before civil commitment became widespread, he writes, but we’ve unleashed a political monster.

“No one is opposed to punishing people who engage in terrorism or commit rape, or to arresting people who are conspiring to commit terrorist acts or attempting to lure children over the Internet,” Janus writes. “Our sense of justice, our fear for our own rights, are soothed by the mental disorder label, the assurance that these folks are somehow different from us. But the only real difference is risk; and as the science of risk assessment improves and expands, the temptation to intervene earlier and earlier, with a broader and broader segment of the population, may be proving too hard for our political process to resist. We should stop the process now, before we create a legal monster we truly regret.”

More here.  [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

POEMS that were considered and rejected before ’twas the night before christmas was established as “THE OFFICIAL AMERICAN CHRISTMAS POEM.”

Reindeer Girl
BY SYLVIA PLATH

On this month they call December,
On this street of filth,
A girl with her latest suitor
Is walking through the filthy snow
Piled on the sidewalks by the still-eyed men
Who call her “slut”
From their wretched street-sweeper machines.
And she hears the sound
Of Jack Frost nipping at her nose
And the man next to her
Drunkenly stumbles along
Thinking of a television set
That he saw in a window surrounded by fake snow
And the falsehood she has walked through
Her whole reindeer life, daddy.
Oh, Curse this idiot and his television.
Oh, father!
Curse your life with your driveway!
And your brick barbeque pit
And your American wet saliva
That sticks to your disgusting American face
With Perry Como in it
With a green face
Because they cannot get
The “tone” control right.

more from McSweeney’s here.

blitcons

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The British literary landscape is dominated by three writers: Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan. All three have considered the central dilemma of our time: terror. Indeed, Amis has issued something of a manifesto on the subject he terms “horrorism”. In their different styles, their approach and opinions define a coherent position. They are the vanguard of British literary neoconservatives, or, if you like, the “Blitcons”.

Blitcons come with a ready-made nostrum for the human condition. They use their celebrity status to advance a clear global political agenda. For all their concern with the plight of the post-9/11 century, they do not offer a radical new outlook on the world. Their writing stands within a tradition, upholding ideas with deep roots in European consciousness and literature. They are by no means the first to realise that fiction can have political clout; but they are the first to appreciate the true global power of contemporary fiction, its ability to persuade us to focus our attention in a specific direction. How conscious Blitcons are of their traditionalism may be in question. But it is a question that must be put to them. Where are you coming from? And where do you want to take us?

more from The New Statesman here.