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Family trees: Tracing the world's ancestor

By Dr Yan Wong Evolutionary biologist

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A question one Radio 4 listener asked about the bloodline between Jesus and King David raised a wider genealogical issue. How many generations does it take before someone alive today is the ancestor of everyone on the planet?

Listeners to the More or Less programme on Radio 4 have been challenging me to answer any fiendish question they can throw at me.
A question about Jesus's genealogy was rather interesting and the answer has astounding ramifications.
The Bible says Jesus was a descendant of King David. But with 1,000 years between them, and since King David's son Solomon was said to have had about 1,000 wives and mistresses, couldn't many of Jesus's peers in Holy Land have claimed the same royal ancestor?
Theory tells us that not only would all of Jesus's contemporaries be descended from King David, but that this would probably be the case even if Solomon had been into monogamy.
We can make this sort of prediction because over the past 15 years or so, these ideas have been studied as part of the research into understanding patterns in our own genome.

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Who is Yan Wong?

Yan Wong is an evolutionary biologist specialising in computer and mathematical modelling of evolutionary genetics.
He is a presenter of the BBC One science programme Bang Goes The Theory and a contributor to More or Less.

• Bang Goes the Theory

The most successful approach has been to go backwards in time, taking a sample of people and imagining the patterns of inheritance in their ancestral family tree.

When applied to the question of who is descended from whom, the results can surprise even the professionals.
That's because geneticists normally study biological information - DNA - that people inherit from just one of their parents.
Just like a surname, or the male lines of descent quoted in the Bible, these generate lineages that shrink or expand rather slowly. That's why we expect the proportion of Smiths in the phone-book to fluctuate only a little from decade to decade.
The surprise comes if we look at inheritance from both parents. Here, the numbers change drastically as the generations go by. For instance, we have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on.
Each generation back, we multiply the number by two. This leads to what is called an exponential increase: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 and so on.
It's not long before we hit huge numbers. Take the specific case of Jesus and King David.
The number of generations between them is at least 35. Luke lists 42 generations down the male line, and Matthew gives an incomplete list of 27.

Jesus Christ would have had more than 34 billion potential ancestors

These numbers agree reasonably well with an average time between generations of 25 or 30 years - an estimate taken from documented historical records from Iceland and Canada.
So back in the time of David, Jesus would have had at least 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 (35 times); in other words 2^35 - or more than 34 billion potential ancestors. That's far more than the total population of the world, of course.
This is a good illustration of what's been called the "genealogical paradox".

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What about isolated communities?

"The one thing that stands a chance of scuppering our calculations is if the population is split into isolated groups," says Yan Wong.
"However, to be considered separate, these groups need to basically never interbreed with each other.
"To quote one of the papers on this subject, 'substantial forms of population subdivision can still be compatible with very recent common ancestors'. (Rohde et al., 2004).
"In fact, even using current DNA studies, you can almost always detect distant shared relatives between distinct human populations (Henn et al., 2012)."

In short, we seem to have too many ancestors. The solution is that we have to take inbreeding into account. Many of these ancestors are duplicates; the same person can found through multiple routes in the family tree.

You are unlikely to be the product of inbreeding between recent ancestors. So initially, your increase in ancestors will indeed be almost exponential.
But as your family tree increases to thousands upon thousands, you will inevitably find many obscure branches that have interbred. That's when the numbers start tailing off.
Even so, by that time, you will have collected a large number of people in your ancestry. So it's not surprising that any two people in any one country probably won't need to go back many generations before finding a common ancestor.
More specifically, imagine the simplest case of a population of a constant size - say a million (the approximate size of the Holy Land at the time of Jesus).
If people in this population meet and breed at random, it turns out that you only need to go back an average of 20 generations before you find an individual who is a common ancestor of everyone in the population.
If you go back on average 1.77 times further again (35 generations) everyone in the population will have exactly the same set of common ancestors (although they will be related, of course, through different routes in all the different family trees).

Advances in DNA allow us to detect shared genetic ancestry

In fact about 80% of the people at that time in the past will be the ancestors of everyone in the present. The remaining 20% are those who have had no children, or whose children have had no children, and so on - in other words, people who were genetic dead-ends.
Apply that to the case of King David. According to this model, he would be a common ancestor of the whole population of the Holy Land somewhere between 20 and 35 generations after his life. That's even without Solomon sowing his seed so widely.
That's why everyone alive in the Holy Land at the time of Jesus would have been able to claim David for an ancestor.
Reductions in population caused by events such as the Assyrian invasions will have produced more inbred family trees, and shortened the number of generations needed to reach a common ancestry.

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More or Less: Behind the stats

Listen to More or Less on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, or download the free podcast

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What about the wider ramifications? A single immigrant who breeds into a population has roughly 80% chance of becoming a common ancestor. A single interbreeding event in the distant past will probably, therefore, graft the immigrant's family tree onto that of the native population. That makes it very likely that King David is the direct ancestor of the populations of many other countries too.

How far do we have to go back to find the most recent common ancestor of all humans alive today? Again, estimates are remarkably short. Even taking account of distant isolation and local inbreeding, the quoted figures are 100 or so generations in the past: a mere 3,000 years ago.
And one can, of course, project this model into the future, too. The maths tells us that in 3,000 years someone alive today will be the common ancestor of all humanity.
A few thousand years after that, 80% of us (those who leave children who in turn leave children, and so on) will be ancestors of all humanity. What an inheritance!

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How Americans view wealth and inequality

Viewpoint by Dan Ariely Professor of behavioural economics, Duke University, USA

 

  Americans do not understand how wealth is distributed in their society

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There have been lots of questions and discussions recently about inequality and economists often argue about what is the right level of inequality to have in society.

But Mike Norton, professor at Harvard Business School, and I decided to take a different path and we decided to ask people what inequality they would want.
Now, there are lots of ways to ask this question and we used the philosopher John Rawls.
Rawls said that "a just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you'd be willing to enter it in a random place". And it's really a beautiful definition.
He called it a veil of ignorance, because if you're very wealthy, you might want the wealthy people to have lots of money and the poor to have very little; and if you are very poor, you might want the poor to have more money and the wealthy to have less.
But in Rawls' definition, you don't know where you'll end up, you have to consider all the different options and therefore you have to think about what is good for society as a whole.
Incomprehension So, we took the American society and we asked people to imagine it divided into five buckets, the wealthiest 20%, the next 20%, the next, the next and the poorest 20%.
First of all, we asked people: how much wealth do you think is concentrated in each of those buckets?
It turns out people get it very wrong.

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Even Americans understand that inequality is not a good idea and principle”

The reality is that the bottom two buckets together, the bottom 40% of Americans, own 0.3% of the wealth; 0.3%, almost nothing, whereas the top 20% own about 84% of the wealth.

And people don't understand it. They don't understand how much wealth the top have and in particular, they don't understand how little the bottom has.
But then we described to people Rawls' definition, the veil of ignorance, and the idea they could end up anywhere. And we said: What society would you like to create? How much wealth? How would you like to distribute the wealth?
And it turns out people created a society that is much more equal than any society on Earth. It was much more equal than Sweden.
Blind tasting In fact, when we did this experiment another way and we showed people two distributions of wealth, one based on the wealth distribution in the US and the other based on the wealth distribution that is more equal than Sweden, 92% of Americans picked the improved Swedish distribution.
So this suggests to me that when people take a step away from their own position and their own current state, and when people look at society in general terms, in abstract terms, Americans want a much more equal society.

 

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There is one more interesting thing to this: 93% of Democrats picked the improved Swedish model, compared with 90.5% of Republicans. Different, but not very different.
And all this makes me wonder, how can it be that in our studies people seem to want such equal society but when you look at the political ideology, people don't seem to want that?
And I think it is a little bit like blind tasting of wine.
When you taste wine and you know the label and you know the price, you are going to be influenced by that. And when you are tasting wine in a blind way, now you don't have anything to base it on and you have to really use your senses.
I think the same thing happens with thoughts about just societies. When we are in the regular world, we are using our current position, our ideology and the labels that politicians give us, and they obscure reality and obscure what we really want.
But Rawls' definition really lets us strip all this away, lets us focus on what is really important and how people actually want something very different from what we have.
The question, of course, is how do we get people to think about this to a higher degree and how do we get them to act on that for a better future?
Dan Ariely is the James B Duke professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University in North Carolina.

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Treating Addiction: A Top Doc Explains Why Kind Love Beats Tough Love

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Drug users at Canada's Insite injection room in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Dr. Gabor Mate is renowned in Canada for his work in treating people with the worst addictions, most notably at Vancouver’s controversial Insite facility, which provides users with clean needles, medical support and a safe space to inject drugs.
Canada’s Conservative government has tried to shut Insite down, but the country’s Supreme Court ruled late last year that doing so would contravene human rights laws because the program has been shown to save lives.
In Mate’s book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, which was a No. 1 bestseller in Canada, he advocates for the compassionate treatment of addiction, a position that is increasingly receiving international attention. Healthland recently spoke with Mate about the causes and consequences of addiction and what to do about the problem.
How do you define addiction?
Any behavior that is associated with craving and temporary relief, and with long-term negative consequences, that a person is not able to give up. Note that I said nothing about substances — it’s any behavior that has temporary relief and negative consequences and loss of control.
When you look at process or behavior — sex, gambling, shopping or work or substances — they engage the same brain circuitry, the same reward system, the same psychological dynamic and the same spiritual emptiness. People go from one to the other. The issue for me is not whether you’re using something or not; it’s, Are you craving, are you needing it for relief and does it have negative consequences?
Do you believe all addiction results from trauma?
I think childhood trauma or emotional loss is the universal template for addiction. It also depends on how you want to define trauma: if you want to define it as something bad happening, then it’s true that not every addict [has experienced trauma], in the sense of a death of a parent or violence in the family or child abuse, or any of the usual markers of trauma.
But there’s another [way to define it]. D.W. Winnicott [the late British child psychiatrist] said that there are two things that can go wrong in childhood: things that happen that shouldn’t happen — that’s trauma — and things that should happen that don’t happen. Children are equally hurt by things that should happen and don’t as they are by things that shouldn’t happen but do. If the parents aren’t emotionally available, [for example], no one will define that as trauma, but it will be for the child. If a mother has postpartum depression, that’s not defined as trauma but it can lead to emotional neglect and that interferes with child brain development.
(MORE: How Childhood Trauma Can Cause Adult Obesity)
It’s impossible for a parent to be emotionally available all of the time, however.
The parent doesn’t have to be perfect. In our society, it’s not [just] a question of whether parents are doing their best or love their kids or not, it’s that parents are often isolated and stressed or too economically worried to be there. What I’m saying is that early emotional loss is the universal template for all addictions. All addictions are about self-soothing. And when do children need to sooth themselves? When they are not being soothed.
You practice a harm-reduction approach to addiction, in which you provide clean needles and safe spaces for addicts to inject drugs. Americans have long tended to see this as “enabling” and typically view it as a bad thing because it doesn’t require addicts to be abstinent to receive care.
The question is, Is it better for people to inject drugs with puddle water or sterile water? Is it better to use clean needles or share so that you pass on HIV and hepatitis C? This is what harm reduction is. It doesn’t treat addiction, it just reduces harm. In medicine, we do this all the time. People smoke but we still give them inhalers to open airways, so what’s different? You’re not enabling anything they’re not already using.
Some critics claim that it prevents addicts from “hitting bottom” and getting off drugs entirely.
I worked for 12 years in the Americas’ most concentrated area of drug use, the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. People live there in the street with HIV and hepatitis and festering wounds: what more of a bottom can they hit? If hitting bottom helped people, there would be no addicts at all in the Downtown Eastside. ‘Bottom’ is very relative, so it’s a meaningless concept. For me as a doctor, rockbottom might be losing my medical license, but what is a bottom for a person who has been abused all her life and lives on the street? It’s meaningless and false. People don’t need more negative things to happen to them to give it up. They need more positive things to happen. In 12 years of work on the Downtown Eastside, I didn’t meet an [addicted] woman who was not sexually abused as a child.
[Addicts] relationship to authority figures is one of fear and suspicion. How will it help if I punish them more? They need the very opposite. We end up punishing them for self-soothing. It makes no sense at all. Harm reduction is not an end in itself. Ideally, what it is is a first step towardsa more thorough-going [recovery], but you have to begin with where people are at.
When I’ve visited harm-reduction programs, it seemed that the clean needles and other tools weren’t the most important thing they provided. Rather, it was the message that ‘I believe you are worth saving, even though you are still using drugs.’ That touches people and opens doors.
That’s the key. Quite apart from clean needles and sterile water, the most important factor is for the first time saying to someone who has been rejected all their life, ‘We’re not going to judge you based on how you present your needs at the present moment.’ Harm reduction is much more than set of practices; it’s a way of relating to people. We’re not requiring you to stop using or do anything, we’re just trying to help you get healthier. At least you’re not going to suffer an infection of the bone marrow because you’re using a clean needle: is that not worth something? We’re here to reduce suffering. They may not get better in the sense of giving up the addiction, but that’s not a limit of harm reduction — that’s a limit of the treatment system.
[There are a lot of things] we can’t do in the context of a war on drugs. When people are attacked and stressed, we can’t hope to rehabilitate them [well]. That’s not a valid criticism of harm reduction; it’s a failure of the medico-legal approach we have right now to addiction.
People describe addicts as behaving compulsively in the face of negative consequences, but the same could be said of our drug policy.
It’s almost an addiction because we keep doing something with negative consequences and don’t give it up, and it gives a kind of emotional relief because people feel a lot of hostility towards addicts. Seeing someone jailed certainly provides some satisfaction and relief, but it’s not an evidence-based [treatment for addiction]. There are also a lot of other consequences we experience as a society by avoiding the connections between trauma and illness. Trauma is the basis for not just mental illnesses and addiction specifically, but also often for cancer and all kinds of other conditions [due to the effects of early childhood stress on the brain and immune system]. Society doesn’t look at it. We look at the effects and blame people for the effects but we don’t look at causes.
Why?
Because we live in a culture that promotes addiction, left, right and center. Addiction essentially is trying to get something from the outside to fill a gap and soothe pain. The entire economy is based on people seeking soothing from outside. The addict symbolizes all of our self-loathing.
The expression “the scapegoat” is very specific. The term in the Bible means a goat on whom the community symbolically imposed all its sins and then chases it into the desert. That’s what we’re doing with addiction. All the desperation to soothe pain and fill in emptiness from the outside that characterizes our culture, the addict represents. We hate to see that so we scapegoat them and think that way we are getting rid of our own sins.
So what can we do?
First of all, I would recommend that prevention has to begin at the first prenatal visit. Stress during pregnancy — contrary to the genetic view — has a large impact. Second, in the U.S., [you need] yearlong paid maternity leave. In other words, I would provide support and emotional nourishment for the child — and that comes from support for parents.
In term of addictions, first of all recognize that these people are traumatized and what they need is not more trauma and punishment but more compassion.
(MORE: 10 Reasons to Revisit Marijuana Policy Now)
What most surprised you in working with some of the most severely addicted people?
What’s most astonishing is just how people survive, no matter what. Even amid drug dealing and mutual ripoffs, there’s still a tremendous amount of caring. The same people who rip each other off would sometimes also go to great lengths to help each other. Despite all the pressure and suffering, to see people reach out to each other like that was the most astonishing thing I saw. When someone was sick, how people gathered around and helped, how they would share food with each other and some would volunteer and go at night and look after the young sex trade workers to make sure they were not getting hurt. There is that acceptance and community, and people need community. Especially for people who have not had emotional support, that community is very powerful.

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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Will Millennials Change How Cars Are Bought and Sold?

By Brad Tuttle | @bradrtuttle | August 9, 2012

blue jean images / Getty Images

Gen Y doesn’t seem to care much for cars. Based on sales and survey data, it’s clear that young Americans are far more interested in iPhones than cars. Only one of those two is considered a necessity nowadays, and it’s not the one that comes with a steering wheel. All of this ambivalence over automobiles may given millennials the upper hand if and when the time comes that they actually bother entering a car dealership.


A recent story in Automotive News focused on what it is that millennials want out of the car-buying experience. Naturally, members of Gen Y, who came of age with online shopping and Twitter, want things to happen fast. They want details about model options, pricing, financing, and more to be instantly available online—or if, in person, to be presented by a dealership staffer in the speed of a click. None of this wandering around the dealership lot to see what’s in stock or time-wasting “let me talk to the manager” games either.

Millennials also want car shopping to be a low-pressure experience, with little or no haggling. They prefer to have all of the information they need upfront, and certainly don’t want any “gotcha” surprises.


While the story is presented as a primer on why Gen Y customers are different, and offers advice on how automakers and dealerships might try to market to them, the characteristics that supposedly set young consumers apart may seem awfully familiar. Consumers of all ages, after all, think car shopping is torture, or at least unnecessarily painful. Lots of shoppers would be happy if the classic car sale transaction—involving stressful negotiations, hours of waiting around, and a general lack of trust all around—was transformed along the lines of Gen Y’s preferences.
Thus far, however, car dealerships have been incredibly reluctant to change the way business is done. Despite the aggravation visited on customers, the system apparently maximizes profits, and therefore it works for automakers, car salesmen, and dealerships.
If dealerships haven’t changed strategies in generations, why might they be willing to tweak how cars are sold now, or in the near future? The biggest reason could be that they’ve had a hell of a hard time selling cars to millennials, and they might try anything, including (God forbid) the jettisoning of manipulative sales tactics, to tempt young consumers into buying cars.



Much has been written about how, when compared to previous generations, Gen Y is remarkably uninterested in car ownership. The percentage of young people with driver’s licenses has plummeted. Given the state of the jobs market and the likelihood of student loan debt burdens, many young consumers don’t have the money to buy new cars. Even if they did, they seem to prefer to spend their money on smartphones and other gadgets, and view car sharing and living in cities with good public transportation as more sensible alternatives to the “American Dream” revolving around owning a car in the suburbs.
Some auto insiders have dubbed Gen Y as “Gen N” (because they’re neutral on buying cars), while an Edmunds post from earlier this summer focused on the “Young and the Restless” as one of the key demographics that is decreasing its car purchases. Last year, Americans ages 18 to 34 accounted for roughly 30% fewer new cars purchased than this age group did in 2007.


Clearly, automakers and car dealerships are struggling to convince Gen Y that car ownership is cool, or even necessary. So perhaps, in their desperation to attract younger Americans and make them happier, or at least more comfortable, with the car buying experience, dealerships and car salespeople may be willing to shift the way they’ve done business—and driven consumers crazy—for decades.


Milllennials have been called “game changers” in the auto industry. “They are the next big segment of car buyers, and they’re defining the buying process,” says industry expert Dale Pollak. By 2025, Gen Y is expected to account for 75% of all vehicles purchased. Whichever automaker comes up with the business plan to woo this group best obviously is in a terrific position in the marketplace going forward.
If there’s one area to focus on in the hopes of reaching out to millennials, it’s probably the way prices are determined in the car transaction. Gen Y, more so than older consumers, absolutely hates haggling. More than half of millennials say they’d prefer to visit the dentist than haggle with a car salesman. After doing ample research online, here’s how they typically go about trying to buy a car, per Automotive News:

Heavily armed with pricing and vehicle information, Gen Y shoppers arrive at a dealership showroom with their minds made up to buy a specific vehicle at a specific price, not negotiate a deal, said Alison Spitzer, Rosa’s boss and vice president of the Spitzer group.
“These buyers aren’t looking for a salesman; they’re looking for a customer advocate,” said Spitzer, who just turned 33.

They don’t want to joust back and forth with prices scrawled on paper. They don’t want to be upsold. They don’t want to be surprised, pushed around, or be subjected to mind games. They just want some quick, efficient help, and then they want to be off behind the wheel of their new car.
The question is: Will the auto industry give them what they want?

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How Not to Sabotage Yourself at Work

By Gary Belsky | August 8, 2012

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Are these two co-workers talking about you? Sometimes office paranoia that people are out to get you can actually lead to you becoming the office pariah

To paraphrase the old saw about suckers at a poker table: If you can’t spot the sneaky gossip at the office, it’s probably you. But you probably shouldn’t be looking for him or her at all. That’s the conclusion of an interesting new study in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, which suggests that people who search for enemies in the workplace will find what they’re looking for — if only because they turned their colleagues against them in the process. Through a series of cleverly designed experiments, the study’s authors — Jennifer Carson Marr, Stefan Thau, Karl Aquino and Laurie J. Barclay — demonstrate a clear relationship between the motivation to prove that co-workers are saying bad things about you and an increase in paranoia, suspicious behavior of your own and peer rejection. That is, people who try to ferret out workplace enemies are likely to create some that didn’t exist before, at least in part because their own eavesdropping, snooping and gossiping sets colleagues to talking about them. Worse, the quartet’s findings suggest that this vicious cycle leads to suspicion-confirming behavior beyond gossip; it’s likely to lead colleagues to actively reject their paranoid peers whenever possible — for example, by avoiding opportunities to collaborate.

For people who aren’t prone to paranoid ideation on the job, the findings will likely confirm their experience at work. Most of us have had colleagues who insist on treating the workplace as a toxic combination of the U.S. Senate cloakroom, Cold War–era East Berlin and the parlor game Mafia. The best strategy for dealing with such types is often to avoid prolonged or in-depth interactions with them whenever possible.
(MORE: Are ‘Safe Accounts’ the Answer to Our Consumer-Banking Problems)
But if your first thought when reading about the study’s finding was more cynical — i.e., But what if someone really is trying to undermine me? — you just might be the sucker at the table. (No, really.) That is, the takeaway from this study is not so much that you’re imagining all those evildoers, gossips and troublemakers at the office. They might, in fact, be gossiping about you, criticizing your work or avoiding you. But they might be doing all or some of that because your initial and unwarranted feelings of threat or exclusion — not to mention the negative behavior that followed — prompted their actions.
To paraphrase another old saw: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone’s not out to get you. It means they may be out to get you because you’re paranoid!

And so the best strategy for dealing with potential workplace “frenemies” is to give them the benefit of the doubt, even if it feels like you’re exposing yourself to harm. For one thing, you might be sensing that others are gossiping about (or otherwise undermining) you simply because you’re prone to such behavior yourself. “There is evidence from other research that people often do project their perceptions of themselves onto others,” says Aquino, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, who is the study’s lead author. “And there is also a stream of research that shows that when people do something bad to others, they are highly motivated to rationalize it. One way to do this is to assign more negative attributes to people whom they harm as a way of making the harm-doer feel like the person deserved it.”
It takes one to know one, indeed.

But there’s another, even-more-humbling reason you may experience yourself as a workplace target: a psychological bias called the spotlight effect, which was demonstrated some years back by Cornell University psychology professor Tom Gilovich and colleagues. (Those few careful readers of my author bio will know that Tom and I wrote a book together about behavioral economics.) In a series of experiments that were both amusing and revealing, the researchers showed that humans consistently overestimate the extent to which others are paying attention to them. In the most recent edition of our book — Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them — Tom and I summed up the relevant takeaway thusly: “The key lesson is not that fewer people are paying attention to you than you think; it’s that you’re paying more attention to what you think people are thinking about you than is warranted.”


In other words: “It may be best to ignore impulses that tell you that you’re the victim of office politics,” says Aquino. That’s good advice. Because there’s a good chance that the harm you may incur by failing to be as “vigilant” (a.k.a. paranoid) as you might otherwise be will pale in comparison with the benefits you’ll garner when your colleagues slowly start to realize you’re not such a sneaky gossip after all.

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Antarctica to Mars: The loneliest job in the world 

 Mars is once again in the spotlight after Nasa successfully landed its biggest ever robot on the Red Planet - an achievement that naturally raises the question of when man will first set foot on the red Planet.

Already, researchers are hard at work trying to understand what it would take to succeed in such a mission. One of those is Dr Alexander Kumar, based at the Concordia research station in the centre of Antarctica,  a place so remote - and so cold - that it is only possible to get in and out for three months of the year.
He is trying to understand the physical and psychological effects of human space travel, particularly the role of extreme isolation. BBC Future spoke to Dr Kumar about life at the station and how his stay may be the fore runner for a manned mission to the red Planet.

Can you describe where you are now?


I am in a place I have come to call ‘White Mars’ - the heart of Antarctica.
It is the coldest, darkest and most extreme environment on our planet. The outside temperature has again fallen below -80C (-112F) or -99.9C (-148F) with wind chill - the extreme limit of its scale. Inside, the window is frozen over, entombed with ice and it remains dark outside, as it has done so 24 hours a day for the past three months.  And we are at an equivalent altitude of 3800m above sea level, making it difficult to breathe.
We are completely alone and isolated here from February to November. The French refer to people who over-winter here as 'Hivernauts', but, unlike astronauts, we have no 'mission control'.
Concordia base is unique in that it is jointly run by the French Polar Institute and Italian Antarctic Programme.  It consists of two cylindrical, three-story towers – a shape that stirs your imagination to think they could have arrived within a Saturn V rocket. It is strange to refer to it at home, but that is how it has come to feel.  The base is our life-support system in a region where there is nothing but ice for more than 1,000km (700 miles) in most directions.

What do you do there?

I am the only British member of a European crew of 13 currently living at Concordia station.  I am responsible for assessing documenting - and treating where necessary - any ailments in the mind or body. I have to expect the unexpected, prepare myself for anything and when it arrives deal with it onsite.
Alongside my role as the station doctor, I am conducting research for the European Space Agency’s Human Spaceflight programme, investigating the physiological and psychological effects of living in isolation at this extreme. My research will help to understand how far we can push humans, particularly in regard to extreme physiology and psychology.  The work may one-day help shape a manned mission to Mars, and more importantly, see it safely return.

What can Antarctica teach us about Mars?

Living here is the closest anyone can come to living on the surface of another planet.  I have also coined the term Planet Concordia to describe this feeling.  Despite significant differences in surface gravity and atmospheric pressure between Antarctica and the Polar Regions on Mars, the average Martian surface temperature is -55C (-67F), similar to our extreme cold temperatures at Concordia.
Our crew has been completely isolated since February. We are more isolated from civilization than the astronauts living onboard the International Space Station.  It is impossible for us to leave the base until mid-November.
Alongside studying and reacting to changes in crew dynamics, we have to deal with any day to day challenges involving life-support-system maintenance and equipment failure and breakdown.  We have to be completely self-sufficient.  All our food is canned, tinned, dried and prepackaged - there is no method of delivery here during winter.  We are alone - the same as any Mars Mission would be.

How does living in such a remote place affect you psychologically?

There are many important psychological factors associated with confinement, isolation and sensory deprivation.

One of my predecessors told me that “monotony” was the largest challenge from living in isolation at Concordia.  I disagree.  Like him, I have access to information – via the internet, telephone and the rest of the crew.  In fact we are surrounded by information, compared to the heroic age of polar exploration.  Life is not monotonous - there is huge potential to stimulate your mind – through hobbies, conversation and news from the outside world.  However, as winter progresses, overwintering crew members regress further into their own rooms and minds, which can be dangerous- living in isolation and isolating yourself from your only access to human contact on the station.
Things are different. Your senses are not bombarded in the way they are at home and in the winter darkness, they become ‘blunted’, meaning any new sensory stimulation remains a luxury.  We have an inventive chef - Giorgio Deidda  - who continually strives to surprise us with new taste combinations.  He is spending his 3rd winter at Concordia and surprises the crew with nationally themed evenings and his own trademarked dishes including digestifs such as his whiskey sorbet.
But ultimately life changes from being in 'technicolor' to black and white over winter.  It’s almost as if our senses become under stimulated and wither in the darkness, ice and silence. So when a new stimuli comes along it can be disproportionately fascinating. It has been some time since I stubbed my toe walking around the station barefooted in the dark.  But I can tell you it hurt each and every-time, even more.  Also our reaction times have slowed down. Recently the wind caught a heavy door, slamming it into my face.  I suffered moderate concussion for three days.  In daylight with my normal senses back home, I know I would have stopped it first.
But perhaps the main factor is dealing with the degree of separation from our lives back home ‘on Earth’.

Could technology help overcome that isolation?

Surprisingly, I often envy the previous polar expeditions’ lack of communications.  Nowadays, with heightened technological capability and wide satellite communications access for those overwintering in Antarctica, messages, problems and bad news are transmitted into our minds – whether it is a loved one passing away or salary difficulties.  Such news is airdropped into the station by email, telephone, Facebook and video call, sometimes exploding like a bomb.  There is no release - you are in a prison of your own mind here.
But being disconnected can bring new unexpected challenges.  A fellow crew-member recently described to me how he “felt dead” and “not real”.  Certainly depersonalization and “derealisation” have been recognized as features of significant psychological stress.  He went on to say that when he went on Facebook it was as if his “previous life was continuing whilst his empty body continued on here in the Antarctic wasteland”.

How do you deal with the isolation?

A sense of camaraderie is crucial as well as regular hobbies.  Reading and listening to music makes a huge impact.  I recently rediscovered Jerry Lee Lewis – which when played after lunch, lifts peoples’ spirits more than any drug can, perhaps providing an element of ‘escapism’ from station life.
But everyone has different tastes. For example, I often have a late night cup of tea and toast with Dr Igor Petenko, our Russian Meteorologist, while listening to his favourite classical music.

Martian crews would also need to deal with physiological challenges – has your experience given you any insight into these?

All ground-based attempts to recreate Mars lack one crucial factor – the lack of zero gravity – responsible for some of the most restrictive and challenging elements faced by humans in space. I was recently in contact with Britain's only current astronaut-in-training - Tim Peake – who reminded me that even over relatively short periods, weightlessness can affect everything from balance and cardiovascular health to muscle mass and bone density.


In addition inter-planetary astronauts are going to have to deal with things like cosmic rays, Mars surface radiation and storms of dust or ‘fines’ - particles that are smaller than dust particles.
Luckily, here at Concordia, we don’t have to deal with those kinds of things. Being But there are some physiological challenges we experience that are similar – such as disturbed sleep patterns, increased cardiovascular stress from long periods of relative inactivity and Vitamin D depletion due to the lack of sunlight.  Whilst here, I track changes in the crews circadian rhythms brought on by the long periods of darkness, alongside mood changes, social interaction and levels of stress.  
Living in the Antarctic winter darkness, it is difficult to perceive the passage of time. In situations like this it is very important to maintain a regular busy routine to avoid the risk of ‘free-run’ – a process where internal body clocks disintegrate cycling and resetting continually.
Even if you avoid extremes like this, waking up in the darkness feels like a groundhog day of sorts.  It takes an extraordinary amount of time for your mind to fire up, like an engine starting up in the cold.  My research testing people’s cognitive performance during this period of complete darkness also demonstrates slowness in the mind, memory difficulties and inability to concentrate – not a good combination when operating life support systems in deep space or in temperatures of -80C (-112F).

What can be done to alleviate the problems for future Martian astronauts?

Romain Charles – one of the crew members of the Mars 500 experiment, who spent 520 days in isolation simulating a mission to Mars told me there is no such thing as a one way mission to Mars.  For a trip to Mars, he said, the astronauts must have a plan to come back to Earth eventually.  Even if it’s a small hope, it must be there, to remain sane.  Living at Concordia, we only talk about and look forward to one date - the arrival of the first plane, our first contact with the outside world, expected in November.
The Apollo lunar missions also give us some clues. Astronauts reported being kept very busy, adhering to a tight schedule to maximize research and to make sure they did not have time to think about the distance and separation from their home planet.  It is similar here - if you let your mind wander during the Antarctic winter to dwell upon such negativity, I have seen it can be very dangerous and spiral out of your control. Interestingly, it appears those with predefined roles and technical responsibilities requiring busy, daily routines display the least problems.
Personally, I have maintained a relatively normal sleep pattern keeping myself busy and through exercise. But overwintering in such isolation is a personal journey and challenge.  I liken overwintering to dredging the ocean’s depths of your mind.  You never know what you will find, but have to feel confident- knowing you can deal with anything.

Has your time in Concordia led you to any conclusions about the ideal crew for a manned Mars mission?

Although it is difficult to say how many crew members would be ideal - balancing skills, ability for self-sufficiency and finite resources available, against increased medical risk, I believe it would need a psychologically and physically screened diverse, multinational crew – ideally with past space experience or having spent time at a place like Concordia. They would need to be mentally resilient and have a full complement of skills to ensure that they can all contribute to the mission, remain active and in a way distracted from dwelling on their isolation.   All those interested must be driven by the innate curiosity and enthusiasm to answer life’s greatest question in the same way those had who replied to a fabled advertisement once offered by Sir Ernest Shackleton, "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness.”

That said, providing an interactive, safe, stimulating and supportive spacecraft environment would prove as important as selecting a crew made of the ‘right stuff’.
You say a mixed-sex crew would be ideal – why?
At Concordia, we have one female crewmember among a crew of 12 men.  There is the potential for it to cause problems - previous Antarctic missions have been plagued by jealousy.
An exclusively male crew was used during the recent Mars 500 mission without major conflicts, much to the surprise of psychologists.  Importantly it showed that such a mission could be possible.
But we have come a long way from the early male dominated polar expeditions.  Women play an equally important role in space.  Charles [from the Mars 500 mission] believes that any crew should made up of both males and females - both sexes bringing balance to a mission.
Finally, you are the only doctor on the base, so what happens if you get sick?
I can't talk about medical issues on the base here, but from my time living and working here, I have learnt to hope and pray that I am never put in the same position as the Russian doctor Leonid Rogozov who in 1961, had to remove his own appendix with local anaesthetic.  In terms of Mars missions, it may be a good idea to send two doctors... just in case.

 Dr Alexander Kumar FRGS is the Concordia Station doctor (French Polar Institute/ Italian Antarctic Programme) and European Space Agency-sponsored Research MD
 To follow his experiences living at Concordia, read his blog www.AlexanderKumar.com.

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