Showing posts with label Resources. Show all posts

Sunday, January 27, 2013

The Middle East conflict at 35,000 feet

By Paul Moss BBC News

It is not just the election results that show that Israelis have different views about who should be running the country: a flight to Tel Aviv can provide a glimpse into some of the simmering tensions in the Middle East.

The conflict was awfully familiar.
The Israelis were arguing with the non-Israelis, and indeed with each other - over who was entitled to what territory.
Some were polite, but others more hostile. It was an ugly scene. At one point, I thought people might well come to blows.
And still they could not sort it out. Who was supposed to be in what seat? The plane had not even taken off yet, but already Flight 2085, from Luton to Tel Aviv, had become a microcosm of the Middle East.
Some argued from a point of legal entitlement. They held up their boarding passes, the seat number clearly visible.
"I have a right to be here," they protested. But others simply pointed out that they had got there first. I felt I had heard this before somewhere.

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Meanwhile, bolder passengers were simply shoving their luggage - and themselves - into the places they wanted. You might call it "establishing facts on the ground".

They ignored the would-be occupants towering above them, now waving boarding cards in their faces, like title-deeds to a house.
"Sit down," yelled the exasperated air stewardess, sounding like a teacher dealing with unruly children on a school bus trip. But no-one was listening to teacher that day.
Eventually, the captain's voice came over the intercom, more imploring than commanding.
"If you do not take your seats soon, we will miss our slot, and take-off could be delayed by a very long time." In other words, if the fighting continued, everyone would lose.
That kind of reasoning has never seemed to work too well in the Middle East, and it certainly did not make an impression on Flight 2085. The stand-off continued.
Tensions rose and so did voices in English, in Hebrew and in Russian. I only speak one of those languages but I am quite sure I was being treated to a crash course in their finest insults and for the first time I found myself awfully glad that metal implements are no longer permitted in carry-on luggage.

“Start Quote

The stewardess had brought unexpected calm to a conflict-ridden flight”

And then she appeared. The heroine of the day. I do not know her name, I guess I never will, but she seemed like Florence Nightingale and Mother Teresa all rolled in to one.

A clever, sensitive stewardess came up with a compromise. "Sit down where you are for now," she said, "and we can sort out who goes where, once we are up in the air."
Brilliant. The passengers looked at her, they looked at each other, and they meekly obeyed. Those wanting a window seat accepted an aisle; couples hoping to travel together agreed to be rent asunder.
It reminded me of the Oslo Agreement, back in the day when that seemed like a solution to the Middle East problem. Let us all calm down for a bit, live in our respective places for now, and sort out the final agreement later on in the day.
I thought of telling the stewardess she had missed her metier, that instead of serving gin and tonics to rude passengers, she should be working for the United Nations - she certainly could not have made a worse job than others who have tried.
I drifted off into a reverie, imagining this diplomatic wonder-woman circling the globe, perhaps still wearing her Easyjet uniform - she would shuttle between North and South Korea, between the US and Iran - everywhere bringing her home-spun approach to international crises.
But I soon snapped out of my fantasy, because a while after take-off, a new problem arose.

Benjamin Netanyahu narrowly won the election this week and now faces building a coalition

A group of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews had been given space at the back of the plane to hold a prayer meeting. They bowed, and recited, but in the process they attracted more worshippers and, who knows, perhaps new worshippers converted to the faith by this stirring display of mid-air religiosity.
Eventually there were so many offering their thanks to God that they were blocking the aisle, and the non-observant passengers found they could not reach the toilet.
One unfortunate lady found herself stuck inside the lavatory, pushing on the door but meeting resistance from the mini-congregation now gathered outside.
Soon the secular bladders were causing real problems to their owners, who began to complain that the religious people were getting things all their own way.
Now that is a complaint you will hear in Israel itself where there have been furious quarrels between zealous followers of God and those of a more sceptical inclination.
But here we were nearly a thousand miles from the Holy Land and quite a few thousand feet up in the sky.
I searched in vain for Easyjet's unappreciated ambassador-of-peace - the stewardess who had brought unexpected calm to a conflict-ridden flight.
But she had gone back to serving gin and tonics - and it looked like this time, she just did not want to get involved.

Source

Sunday, January 20, 2013

'Quadruple helix' DNA seen in human cells

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

A representation of the four-stranded structure (L) and fluorescent markers reveal its presence inside cells (R)

A representation of the four-stranded structure (L) with fluorescent markers revealing its presence inside cells (R)

Cambridge University scientists say they have seen four-stranded DNA at work in human cells for the first time.

The famous "molecule of life", which carries our genetic code, is more familiar to us as a double helix.
But researchers tell the journal Nature Chemistry that the "quadruple helix" is also present in our cells, and often in functions related to cancer.
They suggest that control of the structures could provide novel ways to fight the disease.
"The existence of these structures may be loaded when the cell has a certain genotype or a certain dysfunctional state," said Prof Shankar Balasubramanian from Cambridge's department of chemistry.
"We need to prove that; but if that is the case, targeting them with synthetic molecules could be an interesting way of selectively targeting those cells that have this dysfunction," he told BBC News.
Tag and track It will be exactly 60 years ago in February that James Watson and Francis Crick famously burst into the pub next to their Cambridge laboratory to announce the discovery of the "secret of life".
What they had actually done was describe the way in which two long chemical chains wound up around each other to encode the information cells need to build and maintain our bodies.
Today, the pair's modern counterparts in the university city continue to work on DNA's complexities.
Balasubramanian's group has been pursuing a four-stranded version of the molecule that scientists have produced in the test tube now for a number of years.
It is called the G-quadruplex. The "G" refers to guanine, one of the four chemical groups, or "bases", that hold DNA together and which encode our genetic information (the others being adenine, cytosine, and thymine).
The G-quadruplex seems to form in DNA where guanine exists in substantial quantities.
And although ciliates, relatively simply microscopic organisms, have displayed evidence for the incidence of such DNA, the new research is said to be the first to firmly pinpoint the quadruple helix in human cells.
'Funny target' The team, led by Giulia Biffi, a researcher in Balasubramaninan's lab, produced antibody proteins that were designed specifically to track down and bind to regions of human DNA that were rich in the quadruplex structure. The antibodies were tagged with a fluorescence marker so that the time and place of the structures' emergence in the cell cycle could be noted and imaged.
This revealed the four-stranded DNA arose most frequently during the so-called "s-phase" when a cell copies its DNA just prior to dividing.
Prof Balasubramaninan said that was of key interest in the study of cancers, which were usually driven by genes, or oncogenes, that had mutated to increase DNA replication.
If the G-quadruplex could be implicated firmly in the development of some cancers, it might be possible, he said, to make synthetic molecules that contained the structure and blocked the runaway cell proliferation at the root of tumours.
"We've come a long way in 10 years, from simple ideas to really seeing some substance in the existence and tractability of targeting these funny structures," he told the BBC.
"I'm hoping now that the pharmaceutical companies will bring this on to their radar and we can perhaps take a more serious look at whether quadruplexes are indeed therapeutically viable targets."

Prof Shankar Balasubramanian in front of a painting by artist Annie Newman that represents quadruplex DNA

Source

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Immune system 'booster' may hit cancer

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News

Two T-cells on the surface of a cancerous cell

Two white blood cells attacking a cancer

Vast numbers of cells that can attack cancer and HIV have been grown in the lab, and could potentially be used to fight disease.

The cells naturally occur in small numbers, but it is hoped injecting huge quantities back into a patient could turbo-charge the immune system.
The Japanese research is published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
Experts said the results had exciting potential, but any therapy would need to be shown to be safe.
The researchers concentrated on a type of white blood cell known as a cytotoxic T-cell, which can recognise telltale markings of infection or cancer on the surfaces of cells. If a marking is recognised, it launches an attack.
Teams at the University of Tokyo and the Riken Research Centre for Allergy and Immunology used advances in stem cell technology to make more T-cells.
One group extracted T-cells which targeted a patient's skin cancer. Another group did the same for HIV.

“Start Quote

The next step will be to test whether these T-cells can selectively kill tumour cells, but not other cells in the body”

Dr Hiroshi Kawamoto Researcher

These T-cells were converted into stem cells, which could dramatically increase in number when grown in the laboratory. These were converted back into T-cells which should also have the ability to target the cancer or HIV.

New weapon? The groups have proved only that they can make these cells, not that they can be safely put back into patients or that if would make a difference to their disease if they did.
Dr Hiroshi Kawamoto, who worked on the cancer immune cells at Riken, said: "The next step will be to test whether these T-cells can selectively kill tumour cells, but not other cells in the body.
"If they do, these cells might be directly injected into patients for therapy. This could be realized in the not-so-distant future."
Dr Hiromitsu Nakauchi from the University of Tokyo said it was "unclear" whether this technique would help in treating HIV and that other infections and cancer may be a better place to start.
'Very exciting' Experts in the field said the findings were encouraging.
Prof Alan Clarke, the director of the European Cancer Stem Cell Research Institute at Cardiff University, said: "This is a potentially very exciting development which extends our capacity to develop novel cell therapies."
He said it was important that cells could be tailored for each patient so there would be no risk of rejection.
Other experts said the findings were still at an early stage, but were still very promising and represented a strong foundation for future research. However, Cancer Research UK said it was still too early to know if any therapy would be safe.
Prof Sir John Burn, from the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Newcastle University, said: "This is a very appealing concept and the research team are to be congratulated on demonstrating the feasibility of expanding these killer cells.
However he added: "Even if these T cells are effective, it could prove very challenging to produce large quantities safely and economically.
"Nevertheless, there is real promise of this becoming an alternative when conventional therapies have failed."

Source

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Republicans Fire Back At Boehner For Delaying Sandy Relief Vote

Monday, December 31, 2012

Homelessness Abolished in Scotland!

New rights for the homeless come into force

The deputy first minister called it a "landmark" day in the fight against homelessness

Legislation which aims to effectively end homelessness in Scotland has come into force.

The change entitles anyone finding themselves homeless through no fault of their own to settled accommodation.
Previously, only those classed as being in priority need - often families with children - had that right.
It meets Scotland's historic 2012 homelessness commitment, first set 10 years ago by the Labour/Lib Dem government.
The change, passed unanimously last month under the Homelessness (Abolition of Priority Need Test) (Scotland) Order 2012, will give an estimated 3,000 more people a year the right to settled accommodation.
As the changes came into force, the deputy first minister also announced £300,000 would be spent over the next two years to help councils with their efforts to prevent homelessness.
'Heartache and trauma' Nicola Sturgeon said: "This is a landmark day in the fight against homelessness.
"I know the heartache and trauma of homelessness from working closely with households faced with the prospect of losing the roof over their head.
"Meeting our 2012 commitment guarantees that those who lose their home from no fault of their own will be guaranteed settled accommodation.
"It is absolutely right to offer this guarantee in a time of crisis for people. It sends the signal that we are there to help, there is hope and that the state will do what it can."
Official figures from February 2012 suggested the number of homeless people in Scotland is at its lowest for a decade.
Graeme Brown, director of the housing and homelessness charity Shelter Scotland, said: "Scotland can be very proud that it is making history by meeting the 2012 commitment - which is internationally regarded as the cutting edge of progressive homelessness reform.
"I congratulate all the local authorities who have made widespread changes in order to meet their new responsibilities to homeless people."

Source

Monday, December 3, 2012

Plastic bulb development promises better quality light

By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent, BBC News

US researchers say they have developed a new type of lighting that could replace fluorescent bulbs.

The new source is made from layers of plastic and is said to be more efficient while producing a better quality of flicker-free light.
The scientists behind it say they believe the first units will be produced in 2013.
Details of the new development have been published in the journal Organic Electronics.

“Start Quote

What we've found is a way of creating light rather than heat”

Prof David Carroll Wake Forest University

Brighter white

The new light source is called field-induced polymer electroluminescent (Fipel) technology. It is made from three layers of white-emitting polymer that contain a small volume of nanomaterials that glow when electric current is passed through them.

The inventor of the device is Dr David Carroll, professor of physics at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He says the new plastic lighting source can be made into any shape, and it produces a better quality of light than compact fluorescent bulbs which have become very popular in recent years.

The new light source is said to be twice as efficient as fluorescent bulbs

"They have a bluish, harsh tint to them, " he told BBC News, "it is not really accommodating to the human eye; people complain of headaches and the reason is the spectral content of that light doesn't match the Sun - our device can match the solar spectrum perfectly.
"I'm saying we are brighter than one of these curly cube bulbs and I can give you any tint to that white light that you want."

Lighting up the world

Lighting accounts for around 19% of global electricity use
A worldwide switch to low-energy bulbs could save the output of around 600 power plants

There have been several attempts to develop new light-bulbs in recent years - Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) have come a long way since they were best known for being indicator lights in electronic devices. Over the past decade, they have become much more widely used as a light source as they are both bright and efficient. They are now often used on large buildings.

Light not heat Another step forward has been organic LEDs (OLEDs) which also promise greater efficiency and better light than older, incandescent bulbs. Their big advantage over LEDs is that they can be transformed into many different shapes including the screens for high-definition televisions.
But Prof Carroll believes OLED lights haven't lived up to the hype.
"They don't last very long and they're not very bright," he said. "There's a limit to how much brightness you can get out of them. If you run too much current through them they melt."
The Fipel bulb, he says, overcomes all these problems.
"What we've found is a way of creating light rather than heat. Our devices contain no mercury, they contain no caustic chemicals and they don't break as they are not made of glass."
Prof Carroll says his new bulb is cheap to make and he has a "corporate partner" interested in manufacturing the device. He believes the first production runs will take place in 2013.
He also has great faith in the ability of the new bulbs to last. He says he has one in his lab that has been working for about a decade.

Source

Friday, November 30, 2012

Bread that lasts for 60 days could cut food waste

By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent, BBC News

An American company has developed a technique that it says can make bread stay mould-free for 60 days.

The bread is zapped in a sophisticated microwave array which kills the spores that cause the problem.
The company claims it could significantly reduce the amount of wasted bread - in the UK alone, almost a third of loaves purchased.
The technique can also be used with a wide range of foods including fresh turkey and many fruits and vegetables.
World of waste Food waste is a massive problem in most developed countries. In the US, figures released this year suggest that the average American family throws away 40% of the food they purchase - which adds up to $165bn (£102bn) annually.
Bread is a major culprit, with 32% of loaves purchased in the UK thrown out as waste when they could be eaten, according to figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

The machine uses similar technology to a home microwave

One of the biggest threats to bread is mould. As loaves are usually wrapped in plastic, any water in the bread that evaporates from within is trapped and makes the surface moist. This provides excellent growing conditions for Rhizopus stolonifer, the fungus that leads to mould.
In normal conditions, bread will go mouldy in around 10 days.
But an American company called Microzap says it has developed a technique that will keep the bread mould free for two months.
At its laboratory on the campus of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, chief executive Don Stull showed off the long, metallic microwave device that resembles an industrial production line. Originally designed to kill bacteria such as MRSA and salmonella, the researchers discovered it could kill the mould spores in bread in around 10 seconds.
"We treated a slice of bread in the device, we then checked the mould that was in that bread over time against a control, " he explained.
"And at 60 days it had the same mould content as it had when it came out of the oven."
Question of taste The machine the team has built uses much the same technology as found in commercial microwaves - but with some important differences, according to Mr Stull.
"We introduce the microwave frequencies in different ways, through a slotted radiator. We get a basically homogeneous signal density in our chamber - in other words, we don't get the hot and cold spots you get in your home microwave."

20th-Century history of bread

1928: First bread slicing machine, invented by Otto Rohwedder, exhibited in US
1930: Large UK bakeries take commercial slicers and sliced bread first appears in shops
1933: About 80% of US bread is pre-sliced and wrapped, and the phrase "the best thing since sliced bread" is coined
1941: Calcium added to UK flour to prevent rickets
1942: The national loaf - much like today's brown loaf - introduced to combat shortage of white flour
1954: Conditions in bakeries regulated by the Night Baking Act
1956: National loaf abolished
1961: The Chorleywood Bread Process introduced

Source: The Federation of Bakers

The company's device has attracted plenty of interest from bread manufacturers - but it is worried that it could push up costs in an industry where margins are very tight.

And there is also a concern that consumers might not take to bread that lasts for so long. Mr Stull acknowledges it might be difficult to convince some people of the benefits.
"We'll have to get some consumer acceptance of that," he said. "Most people do it by feel and if you still have that quality feel they probably will accept it. "
Mr Stull believes that the technology could impact bread in other ways. He said that bread manufacturers added lots of preservatives to try and fight mould, but then must add extra chemicals to mask the taste of the preservatives. If bakers were able to use the microwave technology, they would be able to avoid these additives.
While a wholesale change in the bread industry might be difficult to achieve, there may be more potential with other foods, including ground turkey.
In 2011, food giant Cargill had to recall 16 million kg of the product after a salmonella outbreak. Mr Stull believes that using microwaves would be an effective way of treating this and several other products ranging from jalapenos to pet foods.
The only fruit that his device was unable to treat effectively were cantaloupes.
"We've used our tumbler machine to treat them, he says "but you can't tumble cantaloupes because they damage."

Source

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Yang Jisheng: The man who discovered 36 million dead

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In the era whose secret he uncovered, a journalist's office would have looked just like the one where Yang Jisheng works now. The tiled floor, the grimy window panes, the desk piled two feet high with papers, envelopes and books. The Mao-era radiators. The cigarette ash and the dust.

Under Mao Zedong, Yang's good fortune was to find a job as a reporter with China's state-run Xinhua news agency. His misfortune had been to see his father die of hunger in 1961, at the height of the famine that killed an estimated 36 million people:
"When my dad died, I thought it was just my family's problem. I blamed myself because I hadn't gone back home to pick wild plants to feed my dad. Later on, the governor of Hubei province said millions of people had died. I was astonished," Yang says.
In the 1990s Yang, by now a senior editor at Xinhua, used his status to secretly research the truth about the famine in 12 different provincial archives:
"I could not say I was looking for data about the famine, I could only say I was looking for data about the history of China's agriculture policy. In the data, I found a lot of information about the famine, and people who starved from it. Some of the libraries allowed me to take photocopies; some only let me write the information down. These," he gestures casually at a teetering pile of brown envelopes on the floor, "are the photocopies".

Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong visiting farm workers in Zhejiang, China, 9 Feb 1958

Chinese communists launched the Great Leap Forward campaign under Mao Zedong's leadership

The result was Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao's Great Famine, published in the West this year to high acclaim.
Yang, aged 72, is neat, small, swaddled in two jumpers despite the shafts of winter sunlight that stream across his desk. He is rummaging through his shelves on the hunt for a book whose title is important: by a Western author whose name has slipped his mind.
"Something about slavery?" he says. I try the name Hayek and after a bit of transliteration it works. He had stumbled on Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in a library and chuckles with mild scepticism when I tell him it is probably the most influential book in Western economics:
"Before I read Hayek, I had only read works the party wanted me to. Hayek says that to use the state to promote a utopia is very dangerous. In China that's exactly what they did. The utopia promoted by Marx, even though it is beautiful, it is very dangerous."
Even now, 50 years on, Chinese official history insists the famine of 1958-61 was a natural disaster. Yang's work demonstrates the famine's massive scale and its direct, political causes.
Agriculture was brutally collectivised, leaving peasants dependent on centrally distributed grain. Local cadres ordered the forced pooling of family kitchens, confiscating all ladles and punishing those who kept private food supplies.
Then, as Mao ordered rapid industrialisation during the Great Leap Forward, the grain supplies disappeared. Simultaneously local officials, terrified of failure, began to report fictional bumper harvests. Mao, meanwhile, publicly humiliated any party leader who voiced doubts. The result was the greatest famine in modern history.
It is Yang's refusal to duck the parallels with today that make his book unpublishable in mainland China. The famine happened because the party was all-powerful, he argues - just as numerous disasters visited on China by today's leaders - from the HIV-infected blood selling scandal, to the spread of Sars, to the shoddy buildings that collapsed during the Sichuan earthquake - are the result of unfree politics and an unfree press.
Despite its samizdat status, Yang thinks there may be around half a million copies of the Hong Kong edition circulating in China. His own copy, discreetly kept in a cupboard, is a black-market version of the latter: its pages are photocopied, its binding stiff, shiny and amateur.

“Start Quote

We learn a lot about history. However, most of it is fake. It is full of made up stories to meet the needs of ideology. Once you realise you've been cheated, you'll begin to pursue the truth. ”

Yang Jisheng

"It is estimated that there are about 100,000 of these knock off copies in circulation," he says. "People try to bring the real ones from Hong Kong but they get confiscated, so they make these. The response is very strong, I have received lots of letters from readers telling me the stories of relatives who died from the famine."
The English language version has made a massive impact, with some calling Yang the Chinese Solzhenitsyn. To me, however, he seems more like the Chinese equivalent of Vasily Grossman: though he believes Marxism is a dangerous fantasy he remains a party member. His haunting prose - like Grossman's - defends the power of memory:
"China has undergone an enormous transformation. But… the abuses under the exclusive profit orientation of a market economy and the untrammelled power of totalitarianism have created an endless supply of injustice, exacerbating discontent among the lower class majority. In this new century I believe that rulers and ordinary citizens alike know in their hearts that the totalitarian system has reached its end." (Tombstone, p22)
What is it like, I ask, to be an historian in a country where historical memory is so completely suppressed?
"Very painful," he says. "We learn a lot about history. However, most of it is fake. It is full of made-up stories to meet the needs of ideology. Once you realise you've been cheated, you'll begin to pursue the truth. That's what I did: I've been cheated, so I want to write the truth - however risky it is."
Though retired from Xinhua, Yang is still active. The small political magazine he runs out of this tiny office seems, from piles of unsold copies stacked up in the corridors, not massively influential. He thinks it will take 10 years to publish Tombstone in the People's Republic, if the political reform process keeps to its current glacial pace.
But like all dissident writers in China, he has learned not to hurry.
He pinches green tea leaves for me into a paper cup, and pours hot water from a flask. There is a barely-touched and ancient computer in one corner of the room, but Yang's conquest has been made in the world of analogue information: photocopies and scribbled notes.
He pats the English edition contentedly, still stunned by the price the publishers Penguin are charging for each one:
"Tombstone has four layers of meaning. The first is for my father who died in the famine, another is to remember the 36 million people who died during the famine. The third layer is a tombstone for the system that killed them."
And the fourth?
"The fourth is - the book has put me at political risk, so it's a tombstone for myself if anything happens to me because of writing it."
See Paul Mason's report on Yang Jisheng and other writers whose work is banned in China, on Newsnight Wednesday 21 November at 2230 on BBC Two, then afterwards on the BBC iPlayer.

Source

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Will we ever… have safe cigarettes?

(Copyright: Getty Images)

For decades the tobacco industry has tried to come up with alternatives that people would want to smoke, but this is much harder than you would think.

There’s an old saying among people who work in public health: Tobacco is the only legal product that, when used as intended, will kill you. Decades of research have thoroughly documented the health problems that result from inhaling tobacco smoke – more than a dozen different types of cancer, heart disease, stroke, emphysema and other respiratory diseases, among others. Are these risks an inevitable part of smoking? Or is there a way of creating safe cigarettes without any of these hazards?
“I think it’s very unlikely,” says Stephen Hecht from the University of Minnesota Cancer Center, who studies tobacco carcinogens – substances that cause cancer. Tobacco smoke is a complex cocktail of at least 4,000 chemicals including at least 70 known carcinogens. No one has made a “cigarette that is significantly decreased in all of these [chemicals] and is still something people would want to smoke, even though the industry has worked on this for around 50 years,” says Hecht. “There’s no indication that it’s possible.”
As Hecht says, it’s not that the industry hasn’t tried. Journalist Will Storr recently documented a history of bungled attempts to create a safer cigarette, from one that passed the carcinogenic smoke through a filter made of another carcinogen – asbestos – to another that heated tobacco rather than burning it, but tasted of sulphur, charcoal, and burning plastic.
The problem is that no single step in the production or consumption process fills cigarette smoke with its dangerous constituents. Some constituents are in the tobacco leaves themselves at the point of harvesting. The plants can absorb metals and metalloids like arsenic and cadmium from fertilisers and the surrounding soil, while sticky hairs on their leaves can gather particles from the air, including radioactive elements like polonium-210.
When the harvested leaves are cured and dried, compounds within them are converted into tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs), a class of well-known and intensely studied carcinogens. And when the smoker lights up, chemical reactions in the burning leaves fill the smoke with carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide and a cocktail of carcinogens – the infamous polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and vapour-borne “volatiles” like formaldehyde and benzene. As long as you’re burning plant matter and inhaling the smoke, you’ll get a lungful of carcinogens. “There’s no getting around that fact,” says Neal Benowitz, a pharmacologist from the University of California, San Francisco.
Potent drug
As always with toxicology, it’s the dose that makes the poison, and a laundry list of ingredients is a poor way of assessing a product’s true risk. But it’s clear that many of the substances in cigarette smoke, particularly the well-studied TSNAs, PAHs and volatiles, are found at significant levels in both the smoke and the bodies of smokers who inhale it . And, they cause similar patterns of DNA damage to those seen in actual tumours.
The route of exposure also matters. Many of the chemicals in tobacco smoke are also found in other everyday sources, including foods. But there’s a big difference between taking these substances into your guts, where they pass through a soup of enzymes before being actively transported into the bloodstream, and sucking them directly into your lungs where they can passively diffuse into your blood.
There are some measures that could individually reduce the number of carcinogens in smoke: modifying the blend of tobacco; refining the curing process; including charcoal filters to absorb some of the volatiles; and so on. “But there’s no evidence that this does any good,” says Hecht. None of these measures completely deletes the full spectrum of carcinogens, and Hecht adds, “We tend to focus on the compounds that we know are dangerous, but that’s maybe only a few hundred of the 4,000 that are identified. There could be other things going on that we’re not aware of.”

And then there’s nicotine. This highly addictive drug isn’t a carcinogen, but it’s not entirely benign either. It increases heart rate, constricts blood vessels, and contributes to high levels of cholesterol. There’s some evidence that it could stop cancerous cells from self-destructing or promote the growth of blood vessels that bring oxygen and nutrients to tumours. But both of these claims come from studies in lab-grown cells. “It’s not clear if any of this works in a live animal,” says Hecht. “The big thing [about nicotine] is the addiction.” Nicotine is a potent drug – it’s the one chemical that keeps smokers inhaling all the rest.
Nicotine’s addictive properties have led to some spectacular backfires in attempts to create safer cigarettes. From the 60s and 70s, the tobacco industry marketed “low-tar” cigarettes as safer versions of their normal cousins. These so-called “mild”, “smooth” and “light” alternatives contained tiny vents in their filters, which were meant to allow fresh air to dilute the tar – the collective term for the chemical gunge in smoke.
These cigarettes were tested with machines that, sure enough, measured a lower concentration of tar in the ensuing smoke. But, surprise, people aren’t machines. As the smoke from these brands also contained less nicotine, smokers would get their fix by taking longer drags, smoking more frequently, or simply blocking the filters with their fingers. They ended up inhaling more smoke, and despite the industry’s claims, exposed themselves to the same level of carcinogens.
Safer options?
Smokeless tobacco products fare little better. Even though they are sucked, chewed and sniffed, and never set on fire, they still contain many of the same carcinogens as cigarettes, and have been linked to mouth, oesophageal and pancreatic cancers. The one possible exception is snus, a Swedish product that’s not unlike a “tobacco-stuffed teabag” that you stick under your lips. It’s manufactured according to rigorous standards that limit the amount of nitrosamines in the final product, while still retaining that craving-satisfying nicotine. Snus is billed as the reason for Sweden’s low rates of lung and oral cancers, compared to countries where cigarettes are the dominant tobacco product.
“It’s much safer [than smoked products] but not entirely safe, and there’s a possibility that it still poses a cancer risk,” says Benowitz. Indeed, some recent studies have suggested that snus users have a higher risk of pancreatic cancer, and a higher risk of dying from cancer. “If you simplistically said everyone stopped smoking and used snus, there’d be a tremendous health benefit, but the question is whether they would do that,” says Benowitz. His concerns are that snus could make it harder for active smokers to give up their habit by fuelling nicotine addiction, or act as a gateway drug that entices non-smokers to start. “It’s probably better than smoking, but you probably don’t want to put it in your mouth,” says Hecht.
The same arguments apply to e-cigarettes – battery-powered devices that look like cigarettes, and release a nicotine vapour without any of the accompanying carcinogens. At least, that’s the theory – there’s scant data on what they actually release, and how that varies from brand to brand. An analysis from the US Food and Drug Administration showed that some still contained detectable traces of nitrosamines. “In theory, they could be safer than snus,” says Benowitz. “But there’s been hesitation around them because they are unregulated, so who knows what you’re getting.”
The use of both snus and e-cigarettes will probably remain highly controversial, even after more data comes in. This reflects a tension in public health circles: given smoking is so addictive and damaging, is it acceptable or even ethical to reduce that harm by advocating products that are safer, but still not safe? “If we’d never heard of cigarettes, we’d look at a smokeless tobacco product and say, ‘This thing should be banned’,” says Hecht. In a world where tobacco never existed, these arguments would be moot. But that world does not exist; what do we do in this one?

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Sunday, October 28, 2012

A Point Of View: China and multiculturalism

The vast majority of the Chinese population regard themselves as belonging to the same race, a stark contrast to the multiracial composition of other populous countries. What effect does this have on how China views the world, ask Martin Jacques.

I was on a taxi journey in Shanghai with a very intelligent young Chinese student, who was helping me with interviews and interpreting. She was shortly to study for her doctorate at a top American university. She casually mentioned that some Chinese students who went to the US ended up marrying Americans.
I told her that I had recently seen such a mixed couple in Hong Kong, a Chinese woman with a black American. This was clearly not what she had in mind. Her reaction was a look of revulsion. I was shocked. Why did she react that way to someone black, but not someone white? This was over a decade ago, but I doubt much has changed. What does her response tell us - if anything - about Chinese attitudes towards ethnicity?
China's population is huge.

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Martin Jacques is an economist and author of When China Rules the World
A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated Sundays, 08:50 BST

What people aren't generally aware of, though, is that more than nine out of 10 Chinese people think of themselves as belonging to just one race, the Han. This is remarkable. It is quite different from the world's other most populous nations: India, United States, Indonesia and Brazil. All recognise themselves to be, in varying degrees, multiracial and multicultural.

True, a country that is the size of a continent has obviously been home to countless different races down the ages. But that is not how the great majority of Chinese see themselves today.
Why is this?
The answer takes us back to the birth of modern China more than 2,000 years ago. China is extremely old - the longest continuously existing country in the world. The eastern half of China - where the vast majority of Chinese live now and lived then - has been more or less united ever since 211BC.
Over that extraordinarily long period - as a result of war, occupation, absorption, assimilation, ethnic cleansing and government resettlement - the sense of difference between the many races that lived in the eastern half of China was slowly eroded.
Fundamental to this process was the gradual emergence of a shared cultural identity.

Han Chinese

Trace ancestry back to Huaxia people who lived along northern China's Yellow River
Name comes from Han Dynasty that ruled a unified China from 206BC til 220
Han have absorbed many ethnic groups, taking on aspects of their culture and language
Speak a variety of dialects and even distinct languages, but share a common writing system based on Mandarin
Traditional Han beliefs are Confucianism and Daoism

China, along with part of today's Middle East, was home to the first settled agricultural communities in the world. They gradually supplanted nomadic culture and ushered in the beginnings of centralised governance.

Over the last two millennia, China has generally been one of the most advanced, often the most advanced, civilisation in the world. It is hardly surprising that, with a rich history like this, the Chinese have a very powerful sense of their cultural identity.
Every country has its own unique story of ethnicity. Take the US. It starts with arrival of the European settlers and the near extermination of the native American population, to be followed later by large-scale African slavery. Not surprisingly, these experiences have profoundly influenced American attitudes and the country's behaviour as a global power.
How did China evolve? It is essentially the story of the Han and the way in which over a period of two millennia they came to absorb the great majority of other ethnic groups.

Ethnic minorities in China

Of the 55 recognised ethnic minority groups, the 10 largest are:

Zhuang (16.9 million)
Hui (10.59 million)
Manchu (10.39 million)
Uyghur (10.07 million)
Miao (9.43 million)
Yi (8.7 million)
Tujia (8.35 million)
Tibetan (6.28 million)
Mongol (5.98 million)
Buyei (2.87 million)

Source: 2010 China census

Before the victory of the Qin dynasty in 221BC, China was divided into many different states. The process of its subsequent unification was the creation of an empire. But whereas all the other great empires of the world have long since broken up, China remains united. Why? In one word - the Han. The Han identity has served as the glue which has kept a geographically and demographically vast country together. Without that shared identity, China would long ago have fallen apart.

The China I have been talking about is the eastern half of present-day China, where more than 90% of the population lives. What then of the western half? This is a different story. It accounts for over half the territory of China but contains only about 6% of its population.
Whereas the eastern half of China dates back about two millennia, the western part is far more recent, having only been incorporated about 300 years ago.
From the mid-17th Century, large tracts of the western region were conquered by the Qing dynasty in a series of brutal wars. The inhabitants of these lands were not Han. With their different physical appearance, darker skin, distinctive customs and lower level of development, the Han saw them as the Other, as "barbarians".
Not surprisingly, the Chinese government, both imperial and communist, has long had a troubled relationship with parts of the western regions, notably Tibet and Xinjiang.

Tibetans protest against Chinese domination

If the strength of the Han identity is that it has held China together, its weakness, I would argue, has been its relative lack of respect for difference, an underlying assumption that the non-Han should become like the Han - indeed eventually be absorbed into the Han. This attitude is not difficult to understand, it is how the Han became almost, but not quite, synonymous with being Chinese, or, to put it another way, how China was created.
Ethnicity is a powerful determinant of how societies perceive others. So is China, as a global power, likely to view the rest of the world?
Just as with the US, China will naturally tend to see the world in its own image. An unusual feature of China, in this respect, is that its history is so atypical: a huge population who overwhelmingly consider themselves to share the same identity. This helps to explain why the Chinese have tended to think of Africa as one, just like China, rather than a complex mosaic of different ethnicities and cultures.
The fact that China has had little experience of, or exposure to, the rest of the world until very recently - the past 30 years to be exact - has served to reinforce a tendency to see other countries through a Chinese prism.

Bear in mind, too, that the Chinese have a deep pride in their own cultural achievements, many believing that, for understandable reasons, their civilisation, and their history, is greater than all others. Such an outlook also tends to accentuate a China-centric view of the world.
When I first got to know the Chinese, one of the things I most enjoyed about them was their powerful sense of who they were, their confidence in who they were. They did not defer to white people. I liked that and respected them for it. It was as if their remarkable history resided in each and every one of them and made them walk tall.
Despite the fact that for the best part of two centuries China came to suffer hugely at the hands of the West, and to lag badly behind the West, the Chinese never stopped believing in themselves. Such pride and confidence is to be admired. In my view, though, it can also have a downside - a tendency to look down on others. If the Chinese have always considered themselves to be at least the equal of white Westerners, a common, though by no means universal, attitude has been to regard those of darker skin as inferior.
My horrified student friend was a case in point.
But why is this? Its roots are deep. For many centuries, white has had positive connotations in Chinese culture and black negative ones. Perhaps the reason is that those who toiled all day in the fields became dark while the aristocratic elite, protected from the sun, remained pristine white. To this day, interestingly, skin whitening products are enormously popular amongst Chinese women, as they also are in Japan and Korea and elsewhere.

Didier Drogba helped up by Shanghai Shenhua goalkeeper Dong Guangxiang

Didier Drogba now plays in Shanghai

Over the past two centuries, the Chinese have been hugely aware of the fact that white societies around the globe have been dominant while those of colour, especially African, have been poorer and much less developed. Success breeds respect, failure can all too easily attract scorn. Remember, those of African descent, until the past few decades, have been remote and distant from the Chinese, far removed from their knowledge and experience, a situation which can foster ignorance and prejudice.
There are small signs of change.
Didier Drogba, the Ivory Coast footballer who now plays for Shanghai Shenhua, has spoken in glowing terms about how the Chinese have received him.
As China becomes increasingly familiar with the world - as is now happening in such a dramatic way, from Africa to Latin America, and South Asia to Central Asia - parochial if deep-seated prejudices will come under growing pressure.

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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

The maths that made Voyager possible

By Christopher Riley and Dallas Campbell BBC Four

In 1961, mathematics graduate Michael Minovitch decided to take on the hardest problem in celestial mechanics - the "three body problem".

Nasa's Voyager spacecraft have enthralled everyone with their exploits at the edge of the Solar System, but their launch in 1977 was only possible because of some clever maths and the persistence of a PhD student who worked out how to slingshot probes into deep space.

On the 3 October, 1942, the nose cone of an early V2 test rocket soared high above the north German coast before falling back to a crash-landing in the Baltic Sea.
For the first time in history, an object built by humans had crossed the invisible Karman line, which marks the edge of space.
Astonishingly, within 70 years - just one human lifespan - we'd hurled another spacecraft right to the edge of the Solar System.
Today, 35 years after leaving Earth, Voyager 1 is 18.4 billion km (11.4 billion miles) from Earth and about to cross over the boundary marking the extent of the Sun's influence, where the solar wind meets interstellar space.
Sometime in the next five years, it will likely break through this so called "bowshock" and head out into the galaxy beyond. Its twin, Voyager 2, having flown past all the outer giant planets, should pass over into interstellar not long after.

Nasa's Voyager probes

Voyager 2 launched on 20 August 1977; Voyager 1 lifted off on 5 September the same year
Their official missions were to study Jupiter and Saturn, but the probes were able to continue on
The Voyager 1 probe is now the furthest human-built object from Earth
Both probes carry discs with recordings designed to portray the diversity of culture on Earth

To boldly go beyond the Solar System

It's easy to take this monumental achievement for granted, but the gateway to the outer Solar System remained shut for the first 20 years of the space age.

In 1957, as Sputnik 1 became the first engineered object to orbit our home planet, mission planners started to look towards other worlds to propel their probes.
Spacecraft were quickly dispatched to the Moon, Venus and Mars. But there was one major limiting factor to reaching more distant destinations.
For a voyage to the outer planets, you must escape the gravitational pull of the Sun, and that demands a very large rocket indeed. And given what an "uphill" gravitational struggle it would be to reach them, such a journey to the furthest planet - Neptune, more than four billion km (2.5 billion miles) away - could easily take 30 or 40 years.
At the time, Nasa couldn't guarantee a spacecraft for more than a few months of operational life, and so the outer planets were considered out of reach.
That was until a 25-year-old mathematics graduate called Michael Minovitch came along in 1961.
Excited by UCLA's new IBM 7090 computer, the fastest on Earth at the time, Minovitch decided to take on the hardest problem in celestial mechanics: the "three body problem".

The issue was being able to reach the outer planets in practical timeframe

The three bodies it refers to are the Sun, a planet and a third object such as an asteroid or comet all travelling through space with their gravities acting on each other. The problem is predicting exactly how the gravity of the Sun and the planet will influence the third object's trajectory.
Astronomers had been pondering the three-body problem for at least 300 years, ever since they'd started plotting the path that comets took as they fell through the inner Solar System towards the Sun.
Undeterred by the fact that some of the finest minds in history, including Isaac Newton hadn't solved the three-body problem, Minovitch became focused on cracking it. He intended to use the IBM 7090 computer to home in on a solution using a method of iteration.
In his spare time, whilst studying for his PhD during the summer of 1961, he set about coding a series of equations to apply to the problem.
Feeding data on planetary orbits into his model, Minovitch had made progress by the autumn, but was anxious to check his data. So in the summer of the following year, during an internship at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab he persuaded his boss to give him more accurate data on planetary positions to re-test his model.
To his delight, he ran the simulations again and found his solution still worked. What he had achieved made possible an extraordinary breakthrough in spacecraft propulsion.
Minovitch had shown that as a craft flew close to a planet orbiting the Sun, it would steal some of the planet's orbital speed, and be accelerated away from the Sun. Such acceleration, without using a single drop of rocket propellant seemed too good to be true, and Minovitch's critics were quick to try to discredit him.

The domain of the Sun's influence is called the heliosphere: The Voyagers are approaching the edge of this enormous balloon of charged particles thrown out into space by our star

Without funds for further computer time, and in a bid to persuade Nasa to embrace his discovery, he drew up by hand hundreds of theoretical mission trajectories to the outer planets. Among them was one very special flight path that would become the Voyagers' trajectory.
But in 1962 the Jet Propulsion Lab was preoccupied with supporting Project Apollo, and no-one spotted Minovitch's breakthrough.
It would take another summer intern called Gary Flandro to identify the opportunity.
A spacecraft engineer, grounded in the hard realities of spaceflight, Flandro knew that any mission to the outer planets would have to be flown as fast as possible, otherwise the craft might not last long enough to reach its destination.
So in the summer of 1965, he began to look at whether the solution to the three-body problem could be put to practical use in exploring the outer planets. He started by drawing graphs of where these planets were going to be in the coming years.
And to his surprise, the plots revealed that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune would all be on the same side of the Solar System in the late 1970s.
Using a solution to the three-body problem, a single mission, launching from Earth in 1977, could sling a spacecraft past all four planets within 12 years. Such an opportunity would not present itself again for another 176 years.
With further lobbying from Minovitch and high level intervention from Maxwell Hunter, who advised the president on US space policy, Nasa eventually embraced Minovitch's slingshot propulsion and Flandro's idea for a "grand tour" of the planets.

The solution came through using the most powerful computer of the day

Initially named "Mariner-Jupiter-Saturn", or MJS, funding to build two spacecraft was released in the early 1970s. The twin craft would eventually become known as the Voyagers.
To reach Neptune they would have to last for over a decade in space, operating in the darkest reaches of the Solar System billions of km from the Sun.
They would require radiation-hardened electronics to survive their encounters with the magnetosphere of Jupiter, and an artificial intelligence autonomous enough to make independent decisions when too far away from Earth for help.
Although still lacking funding to extend its mission beyond Saturn, Nasa's optimistic engineers loaded enough control propellant on board to keep the probes' dishes orientated towards the Earth for decades after passing Saturn.
They'd also built the Voyager power supply system to last until at least the year 2020. But most visionary of all, they'd included five experiments on board that were capable of analyzing space beyond the Solar System.
In 1977, as the duo launched from Earth, no-one dared imagine that they would survive long enough to make such measurements. But in 2012, they're still going strong - their pitifully weak signals just a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a watt of power by the time they reach the Earth. New discoveries are still being made.
Today, in a darkened lecture theatre at JPL - named after the same Theodore von Karman whose boundary to space our machines first crossed 70 years ago - sits a model of the Voyagers.
These great machines are now carrying our spirit of exploration across a boundary the Hungarian-American engineer could only dream of - into interstellar space.

Voyager: To The Final Frontier will be broadcast on BBC Four on Wednesday 24 October, 2012. It is produced and directed by Christopher Riley and presented by Dallas Campbell.

Chris Riley next to the Voyager model at JPL

The author Christopher Riley stands in front of the Voyager exhibition at JPL

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Saturday, October 20, 2012

A Point Of View: What kind of superpower could China be?

China is on course to becoming a superpower - but not in the way many expect, writes economist Martin Jacques.

Beijing these days is positively throbbing with debate. It may not have the trappings of a western-style democracy, but it is now home to the most important and interesting discussions in the world.
When I addressed an audience of young Chinese diplomats at their foreign ministry a year ago, it was abundantly clear that a fascinating debate is under way about what kind of foreign policy might be appropriate for the global power China is in the process of becoming.
What will China be like as a superpower? You might think it is already - it is not.
Its military power is puny compared with that of the US. While America has 11 aircraft carriers, China only commissioned its first last month - based on, of all things, a Ukrainian hull.

Find out more

Martin Jacques is an economist and author of When China Rules the World
A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated Sundays, 08:50 BST

And its global political influence is still extremely limited.

The only sense in which China is a superpower is economic - that is, its economy is already over half the size of the US economy and projected to overtake it around 2018, notwithstanding its reduced growth rate of 7%. But this is overwhelmingly a function of China's huge population. In terms of technology and living standards it lags far behind the US.
So when we speak of China as a superpower, we are talking about the future.
A common reaction to the idea of China as a superpower is that it will be like the US - except worse. Worse because it is not a democracy, it has a communist government and because its people are not like us. I guess that gives some the jitters.
In fact we should not expect China to behave in the manner of the US. It will be very different. And nor should we assume that it will necessarily be worse.
Why will it be different? Because its history is so different. Articles about China's growing involvement with Africa - in terms of trade and investment - often talk of the "new colonialism".
Beware historical ignorance. China has never colonised any overseas territories. Overseas empires were a European speciality, with Japan getting in on the act for a short while too.
China could have colonised South East Asia, for example, in the early 15th century. It had the resources, it had enormous ships, many times bigger than anything Europe possessed at the time. But it didn't.

China's first aircraft carrier is a former Soviet vessel, the Varyag

That is not to say China ignored its neighbours. On the contrary. For many, many centuries it dominated them - as a result of its sheer size and far more advanced level of development. China's relationship with them was based not on colonialism but what we now know as the tributary system. It neither ruled them nor occupied them. Rather, in return for access to the Chinese market and various forms of protection, the rulers of tribute states were required to give gifts - literally tribute - to the Emperor as a symbolic acknowledgement of China's superiority.
The tributary system comprised what we know today as East Asia, home to one-third of the world's population. It stretched from Japan and Korea to the Malay Peninsula and parts of Indonesia.
It proved remarkably stable, lasting for at least 2,000 years and only coming to an end around 1900.
The West and China share an important characteristic - they both believe they are universal, a model for all others. But the way they have interpreted this in practice has been entirely different. For Europe, and latterly the US, it meant projecting their power around the world, most spectacularly during the heyday of colonialism in the 19th and first half of the 20th Century, when a large part of the world found itself under European rule.
We governed from afar, exported our ways of doing things, imposed our languages, our education, our religion and much else besides.

Zheng He's statue looks across to the city of Nanjing

The Chinese, in contrast, preferred to stay at home. They believed the Middle Kingdom, the old name for China, literally meaning the centre of the world, was the highest form of civilisation. So why step outside into ever darkening shades of barbarianism?
The seven great voyages of Zheng He between 1405 and 1433 around the East and South China Seas and across the Indian Ocean as far as East Africa left no permanent mark - they were about demonstrating the glory of the Middle Kingdom rather than a desire to conquer. Those who left China to settle in South East Asia were seen as leaving civilisation and deserving of no support or protection by the Emperor.
Compare that with the way in which Britain and France celebrated the heroes of their colonial expansion. Our cities are littered with statues and street names in their memory.
There is another reason why the Chinese have tended to stay at home. The country is huge, diverse - and extremely difficult to govern. The overwhelming preoccupation of its rulers down the ages has been how to maintain order and stability and thereby retain power. It remains just as true today.
Rather than look outwards, China's leaders look inwards. The exception was China's own continental land mass. Its expansion, rather than to the four corners of the world, was confined to its own continent.
The most dramatic example was the westward march of the Qing dynasty from the mid-17th Century which, in a series of bloody and brutal wars, doubled the physical size of China.
So what, you might ask, does all this history tell us about how China might behave as a great global power? A great deal.

Europe, I would argue, has historically been an extremely aggressive and expansionist continent. Its own history has been characterised by seemingly endless wars which were then transplanted onto a global stage during the era of colonial expansion and world war. Military might, the projection of power around the world, and the desire if necessary by force to impose our way of life on others, have been fundamental to the European story.
And it is not difficult to see how the US - itself the product of European overseas expansion and settlement - inherited these characteristics from us.
China won't be like this. It is not in its DNA. Its rulers will be far less interested in seeking to dominate the rest of the world and far more concerned with keeping themselves in power. That is what ruling a country containing a fifth of the world's population obliges. When Xi Jinping becomes Chinese leader next month, his in-tray, as with Hu Jintao before him, will be overwhelmingly filled with domestic rather than foreign issues.
In time China will certainly come to enjoy huge global power. It will be exercised, however, in a rather different way.
The iconic form of western power has been military. Extraordinarily, the US today accounts for around half of global defence expenditure. Before, European colonial expansion was only possible because its fighting capacity was massively superior to that of the rest of the world.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Is Human Nature Fundamentally Selfish or Altruistic?

Human inclinations are not primarily selfish: kindness and altruism have been evolutionarily valued in mates, and even the youngest children often try to be helpful

By Maia Szalavitz | @maiasz | October 8, 2012 |

Getty Images

Did selfishness — or sharing — drive human evolution? Evolutionary theorists have traditionally focused on competition and the ruthlessness of natural selection, but often they have failed to consider a critical fact: that humans could not have survived in nature without the charity and social reciprocity of a group.
Last week on Slate, evolutionary anthropologist Eric Michael Johnson explored the question against the backdrop of two cultural events in 1957 — the consequences of the rogue, selfish activities of a pygmy hunter in a Congo forest, who used the group’s collective hunting efforts to benefit only himself, and in New York City, the publication of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, whose protagonist champions the author’s notion that human nature is fundamentally selfish and that each man “exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.”
Atlas Shrugged counts many politicians as admirers, perhaps most notably Republican vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, who cites the book as one of his main inspirations for entering politics and is known to give Rand’s books frequently to his interns.
(MORE: ‘Paradise Built in Hell:’ How Disaster Brings Out the Best in People)
So, does Rand’s theory comport with current evolutionary theory? The data is not exactly kind to her position. For example, Johnson describes an anthropologist’s account of the pygmy tribesman, Cephu, in the Congo who lived by the Randian ideal that selfishness is the highest morality. Cephu was part of the Mbuti tribe for whom “hunts were collective efforts in which each hunter’s success belonged to everybody else,” Johnson writes, detailing how the tribe “employed long nets of twined liana bark to catch their prey, sometimes stretching the nets for 300 feet. Once the nets were hung, women and children began shouting, yelling, and beating the ground to frighten animals toward the trap.”
It was a group effort, for most:

But one man, a rugged individualist named Cephu, had other ideas. When no one was looking, Cephu slipped away to set up his own net in front of the others.

Soon caught in this blatant attempt to steal meat, Cephu was brought in front of the whole tribe:

At an impromptu trial, Cephu defended himself with arguments for individual initiative and personal responsibility. “He felt he deserved a better place in the line of nets,” [the anthropologist Colin] Turnbull wrote. “After all, was he not an important man, a chief, in fact, of his own band?” But if that were the case, replied a respected member of the camp, Cephu should leave and never return. The Mbuti have no chiefs, they are a society of equals in which redistribution governs everyone’s livelihood. The rest of the camp sat in silent agreement.
Faced with banishment, a punishment nearly equivalent to a death sentence, Cephu relented.

He apologized, handed over his meat to the tribe and then, essentially, was sent to bed without dinner. As Johnson explains, selfishness is considered far from a virtue in such tribal groups, which still live in ways similar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Indeed, every such group ever studied has been found to idealize altruism and punish selfishness, in everything from their mythologies to their mating practices.
(MORE: How Economic Inequality Is (Literally) Making Us Sick)
Although Rand accepted that early human life was a collective effort, she failed to realize how this shaped our brains. In most societies, for example, a man like Cephu would be seen as the opposite of a good catch for a woman wanting a partner. A good mate — and one whose genes were likely selected for and passed on in our earliest evolutionary history — would have been a cooperative hunter, one who didn’t put his own goals ahead of those of the tribe. He would have been altruistic in battle too, particularly when warring with other groups. A selfish soldier, after all, is known as a coward, not a hero.
The evidence for altruism as a critical part of human nature isn’t limited to anthropology. Studies of 18-month-old toddlers show that they will almost always try to help an adult who is visibly struggling with a task, without being asked to do so: if the adult is reaching for something, the toddler will try to hand it to them, or if they see an adult drop something accidentally, they will pick it up.
However, if the same adult forcefully throws something to the ground, toddlers won’t try to retrieve it: they understand that the action was deliberate and that the object is unwanted. These very young children will even assist (or refrain from helping) with a book-stacking task depending on what they perceive to be the adult’s intention. If the adult clumsily knocks the last book off the top of the stack, the toddler will try to put it back; if the adult deliberately takes the last book off, however, toddlers won’t intervene. Even before kids are taught to chip in — perhaps especially before they are told it’s an obligation — children are less selfish than often presumed.
Another study found that 3- to 5-year-olds tend to give a greater share of a reward (stickers, in this case) to a partner who has done more work on a task — again, without being asked — even if it means they get to keep less for themselves. And those cries of “That’s not fair!” that plague sibling relationships: they’re not only selfish; they reflect children’s apparently innate desire for equity.
(MORE: The Upside of Gossip: Social and Psychological Benefits)
Fundamental tendencies toward altruism aren’t only seen in children, either. Worldwide, the aftermath of natural disasters are typically characterized by heroism and a sharing of resources — within the affected community and in others farther way — not selfish panics. During the terrorist attacks of 9/11, for example, there were no accounts of people being trampled rushing out of the World Trade Center towers; rather, those who needed assistance descending were cared for, and calm mainly prevailed. The same occurred after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan in 2011. The cases in which people stampede or look out only for themselves tend to be rare and involve very specific circumstances that mitigate against helpfulness.
Moreover, our stress systems themselves seem to be designed to connect us to others. They calm down when we are feeling close to people we care about — whether related to us or not — and spike during isolation and loneliness. Even short periods of solitary confinement can derange the mind and damage the body because of the stress they create. And having no social support can be as destructive to health as cigarette smoking.
Of course, none of this is to say that humans are never selfish or that we don’t have a grasping, greedy part of our nature. But to claim, as Rand does, that “altruistic morality” is a “disease” is to misrepresent reality.
(Share the love and read the rest of Johnson’s fascinating feature here.)
MORE: An Evolutionary Explanation for Altruism: Girls Find It Sexy

Maia Szalavitz is a health writer at TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

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A Point Of View: China and multiculturalism

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Han Chinese

Ethnic minorities in China

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

The maths that made Voyager possible

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Saturday, October 20, 2012

A Point Of View: What kind of superpower could China be?

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Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Is Human Nature Fundamentally Selfish or Altruistic?

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