Wild turkey in Massachusetts; John Collins
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THANKSGIVING MEDITATION
Forget the shining city on the hill, or the new
Jerusalem, Eden, Promised Land—you’re reading from
the wrong text, wrong translation, the non-canonical
source, the exquisite forgery stuffed in the turkey-
shaped urn. This is what the disembarking Pilgrims found:
a place of Briars and Thorns, of Troubles and Sorrows,
Valley of the Shadow of Death, where God is no more
a cause of our sin than the sun of a Dunghill’s stench.
Life is indeed strenuous, but the more desperate
the situation, then the more actions it evokes.
We are like soldiers landed in a hostile country
whose commander has burned their ships behind them and told
them to eat up their enemies or drink up the sea.
~ Leonard Kress
Here is a darker view of the Pilgrims. I grew up without the pious legend, so I always perceived them as religious nuts — extremists so insufferable that they were expelled from England. Later I learned they did indeed think of themselves as the new Chosen People and America as the New Canaan, their own real estate also known as the Promised Land.
So yes, they expected Eden, or close to it. As Leonard points out, instead they found
a place of Briars and Thorns, of Troubles and Sorrows,
Valley of the Shadow of Death
And there was no going back. The poem ends with a simile from Chinese history, the ruthless commander who burned the ships so the soldiers would know there is no returning home; they would have to survive in a hostile territory. This is described in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Alexander the Great likewise burned the ships upon landing on the shore of Persia. Cortés also “scuttled” the eleven ships that had carried 100 sailors and 530 soldiers to “la Conquista.” Without the possibility of retreat, victory is a matter of life or death. But that victory can be very bitter indeed.
Back to the poem. Leonard explained that he used phrases found in the sermons. The highly attractive promises are offset by the negatives. This dilemma has been faced by all immigrants. But if you’ve burned your ships, you move forward and make the best of it. Those who went insane with homesickness, committed suicide, or died a premature death — that’s “collateral cost.” Those who survived were remarkably hardy, their resilience a legend.
A wild turkey in a cemetery in Providence, R.I.
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THE TRUE STORY OF THANKSGIVING
~ The Thanksgiving story you know probably goes like this:
English Pilgrims, seeking religious freedom, landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they found a rich land full of animals and were greeted by a friendly Indian named Squanto, who taught them how to plant corn.
The true story is more complicated — and more interesting. According to historians, here’s what really happened:
In 1614, six years before the Pilgrims landed in modern-day Massachusetts, an Englishman named Thomas Hunt kidnapped Tisquantum (a.k.a. Squanto) from his village, Patuxet, which was part of a group of villages known as the Wampanoag confederation.
Hunt took Tisquantum and around two dozen other kidnapped Wampanoag to Spain, where he tried to sell them into slavery. But Tisquantum escaped with the help of Catholic friars, then somehow found his way to England.
He finally made it back to what is now Massachusetts in 1619. As far as historians can tell, Tisquantum was the only one of the kidnapped Wampanoags ever to return to North America. But while Tisquantum was in Europe, an epidemic had swept across New England.
There had been a shipwreck of French sailors that year on Cape Cod who had introduced an infectious disease, perhaps viral hepatitis, to the native peoples. The infection spread quickly, wiping out whole villages. When Tisquantum returned to Patuxet, he found that he was the village’s only survivor.
Into this disaster bumbled the Pilgrims. They showed up in New England a few weeks before winter and promptly began starving. Up until the Pilgrims, the pattern had been pretty clear. Europeans would visit the Wampanoags who would be interested in their trade goods, but were really uninterested in letting Europeans permanently occupy the land. Often, armed native people would force Europeans to leave if they attempted to stay too long. This time, the Europeans wanted to stay, and the disease that had decimated Patuxet ensured that they had a place to settle.
When the Pilgrims arrived in Patuxet, they found cleared land and the bones of what they assumed were savages. They called it Divine Providence, believing that God had killed these pagans so that Christians could live on their land. The graveyard of Tisquantum’s people became Plymouth Colony.
Meanwhile, Massasoit, a local Wampanoag leader, looked at Tisquantum and smelled trouble. Massasoit kept Tisquantum under what was essentially house arrest until the Pilgrims showed up hungry and clueless.
Patuxet wasn’t the only native village decimated by the plague. The entire Wampanoag confederation had been badly hit — as much as 75 percent of the Wampanoag population was wiped out. But the Narragansett, a rival neighboring group, basically weren’t affected by the disease at all. That put the Wampanoag in a precarious strategic position. But Massasoit had an idea to save his people. He would forge an alliance with the new settlers.
On March 22, 1621, Massasoit went to meet with the Pilgrims. He brought Tisquantum along to translate, but he didn’t trust him.
Let’s pause in our story long enough to note that Tisquantum was probably not the name he was given at birth, but sort of a nickname for a guy who had a talent for squeezing safely through disasters in which everyone else died. In that part of the Northeast, tisquantum referred to rage, especially the rage of manitou, the world-suffusing spiritual power at the heart of coastal Indians’ religious beliefs. So when Tisquantum approached first the Wampanoag and then the Pilgrims and identified himself by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his hand and said, “Hello, I’m the Wrath of God.”
Shortly into the conversation, Tisquantum, true to his name and reputation, tried to pit the Pilgrims against Massasoit, perhaps in an ill-advised coup attempt. But the plan didn’t work: Massasoit caught onto the plot and demanded that the Pilgrims hand Tisquantum over to be executed for treason.
However, the Pilgrims had their own plans for Tisquantum which involved him teaching them how to grow crops so they could survive the next winter. For Tisquantum, the choice between working as an agricultural consultant for the Pilgrims or being executed as a traitor by Massasoit was an easy one to make.
By their second autumn in the New World, the settlers’ situation was secure enough that they held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with about ninety men, most of them with weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and firing their guns in the air in a manner intended to convey menace. Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of food, and complained about their neighbors, the Narragansett.
And today, of course, the descendants of both the English and the Wampanoag are still around. ~
https://voxpopulisphere.com/2015/11/26/the-true-thanksgiving-story/?fbclid=IwAR32iLHiavBVoE_W_FwPcSQdWRxvdnMtGI36nMHwm8Za-V-IJHUIm1CiZYQ
Thanksgiving story: illustration in a 19th century textbook
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WHAT MAKES THE FIRST SENTENCE OF ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE SO MAGICAL?
~ Over the next twenty or so years, the sentence kept returning to me, and, every time, I listened to the sequence of words, trying to put my finger on what was so intriguing about them. It was something to do with time, I felt—something that connected the “many years later” to the “distant afternoon,” and something about the surprising way in which the main verb had been rendered. The full sentence, in one English translation, is this:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
And, of course, we must have it in the original Spanish:
Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.
I will come back to this sentence, but, before I do, I would like to mention another little experience, something that happened more recently—only a couple of years ago. I was, as I am now, living in London, married, with children, and trying to write. I had been trying to write for some time, with mixed results. I went to a writing course and the teacher talked about time. “Time,” this teacher said, “goes in one direction. Forward, not back.”
She was a very good teacher; what she was saying was unarguably true, and I wondered how I had neglected to notice such an important and obvious fact; a greater awareness of this fact, I realized, would improve my writing considerably. “Indeed,” she continued, “we only have to look at the seasons, at the leaves falling in autumn, to be reminded of the passing of time.”
It was in this moment that a number of things occurred to me. First: that sentence and its unusual presentation of time. Second, that García Márquez was from the tropics, like me. Third, that in the tropics we do not have four seasons—in fact, it might be said that we simply do not have seasons at all. “What you are saying does not apply to us in the tropics,” is what I thought. “Time is different for us.”
You see it everywhere in fiction: the passing of time denoted by the change of the seasons—authors show us summer turning to autumn and winter turning to spring as a means of indicating the passing of time, each season with its accompanying symbolism. Now that I have lived in a temperate climate for such a long time, I understand the pervasiveness of it. As I write this, for example, it is winter: it is nearly four o’clock, already dark; I have been busy all day, and haven’t been out for a walk, and now the day is nearly gone! And yet the months of winter seem to drag by; we eagerly anticipate the return of spring.
Summer comes with a sense of permanence, as though it might go on for ever, but all too soon the leaves are turning, and then falling from the trees, and again as you walk down the street, you think, “Just like that! Another year gone!” In a temperate climate, the world is constantly shifting before your eyes: the environment presents a constant reminder of the passing of time.
But it is not so all around the world. In the tropics, there is no autumn. There is no widespread falling of leaves. There is no winter or spring. Consider the pattern in the country I come from, Trinidad & Tobago, which is a small, twin-island nation eleven degrees north of the equator, off the coast of Venezuela. It is, more or less, the same temperature all year round—80-90°F in the daytime. Every day of the year, the sun rises at around six in the morning; it is directly overhead at midday; and it sets at about half past six in the evening.
The fluctuation throughout the whole year is by about twenty minutes, little enough to feel as if there is no difference at all, as if every day is pretty much the same as the one that went before. There’s is no lengthening and shortening: either it is day, or it is night, simple as that. The trees have their own rhythms, but they do not coordinate with each other. There’s no widespread shedding of leaves, no sense of death or rebirth. Aside from the question of whether there is rain or no rain, every day is exactly the same as the one before.
In fact, the only real variation is the rain. For half of the year, it is very dry: we call this the dry season. For the other half of the year, it is very rainy: we call this the rainy season. Dry season, rainy season, dry season, rainy season: that is how it goes. Thus our rhythm is a simple one-two: dry-wet, or day-night. Dry-wet, day-night, dry-wet, day-night, a never-ending one-two one-two, like the endless ticking of a metronome. And then, of course, everywhere, at our perimeter, is the sea. Think of it. The wave comes in, then goes out. In, out. In, out. Does it ever end? Do you see any death and rebirth? Dry, wet, day, night, in, out. No, our landscape does not suggest the passing of time, as your landscape does to you in your temperate climate. Our landscape suggests something entirely different: the eternity of time, the never-endingness of time.
Let’s look at that sentence again.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
There are many wonderful things about this sentence, but the treatment of time is what I would like to talk about. Many years later connects two points in time. There’s a time, let us call it X, in the past, and the time many years later, call it Y. Many years later connects those two points, and hints at the path taken between them. Something that happened on day X is related to something that happened on day Y, and if you imagine making two dots on a piece of paper, one to represent day X and another to represent day Y, you can draw a line between them, and the line you draw is its own entity, an entity which is some function of X and Y. It’s as if it transcends the one-dimensionality of each of those coordinates, and it becomes a higher order piece of information. And we can visualize this line, the line between X and Y, as any kind of line at all: it could be a straight line, or a wiggly line, or a spiral. Whatever it might be, it is described by “many years later.”
Now, of course, many writers may use such a phrase. When I was in my twenties, in a bookshop in Amsterdam, I read the first line of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many years later, in my forties, living in London, I read it again. X is when I was in my twenties, in Amsterdam; Y is when I was in my forties, in London. Many years later represents the twenty or so years that have elapsed between the two events. But does the sentence give us any suggestion that there’s anything special about the period of twenty-or-so years? Could we substitute “the next day” or “some months later” or “one year later”? I think we could. I guess there’s a possibility that the author of these sentences (in this case, me) will come back and attach meaning to the “many years later,” but so far, there’s nothing to suggest that there’s anything special about that particular period of time. So all we have is:
Something happened.
Time passed.
Something else happened.
There’s nothing wrong with that; I write stuff like that all the time, and so do many other writers. The point I’m making is that to use the phrase “many years later” is not in itself a stroke of genius.
So what has García Márquez done differently? Consider the next phrase: when he was to face the firing squad—here’s where it all begins to get a little crazy. First of all, here we are, in the opening line of a novel (a long novel at that), and we’re side by side with a character who’s facing a firing squad. One moment: cosy armchair in your living room, maybe with a cup of tea next to you, say a crackling fire, the cat at your feet; the next moment: firing squad. Secondly, we are presented with knowledge of something which is usually unknowable, the moment of one’s own death. Immediately, we move into the slightly surreal territory of omniscience: that is to say, we keep one foot in reality, because, sure, a skeptic might reasonably point out that this character’s death is imminent enough for him to see it coming; but the other foot is not so firmly rooted to reality, because to foresee the moment of one’s own death is not part of our normal existence at all.
Next, we come to the was to remember, sometimes translated as would remember (había de recordar). Where are we in time? Are we at X or Y? The moment when the character does the remembering happens at time Y, but was to remember seems to place us somewhere outside time Y, even to suspend us outside time altogether.
At the end of the sentence, we find the X, which fulfills the many years later we encountered at the beginning: that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Later in the chapter, we find out that the ice is actually ice carried around in a cool-box by a gypsy, but in this opening sentence, it could be any ice—it could be a huge and ancient glacier. The fact that it is the father taking the son to “discover” something hints at something ancient, something further past even than the “distant afternoon,” and gives the impression of knowledge of previous generations rippling through time.
(The Spanish is “conocer”, which is sometimes translated as “take to see for the first time”, but it also means “to meet” as in to meet a person, or “to become acquainted with” or “to be acquainted with.” “Discover” is certainly a very beautiful choice in English.)
So, by the end of the sentence, those first three words, many years later, quietly reverberate with added meaning, because they contain almost the sum total of this man’s life, having almost reached its end. There’s a pathos in those words, depicting a character in his final moments, simultaneously reaching back across this great expanse of time—and that, in itself, is a transcendence of time—and, on the other hand, having a complete knowledge of his future. All this is captured in this single elegant sentence, this brief moment when he is able to see the whole stretch of his life, from end to end.
I’ve since gone on to read a little more of García Márquez, and it’s only through close reading of some of his other works that I’ve gained a better understanding of why this particular sentence made such an impression on me. My hypothesis is that García Márquez presents an alternate conception of time, of time not simply as something linear, but also as something never-ending.
In one sense, my teacher was, of course, quite right to say that time moves in one direction, forward and not back; none of us can ever go back to a past moment to do or undo, to say or unsay. It is a law that governs all our lives, and if fiction in some way is a reflection of what it is to be human, then fiction too must obey this law. Indeed, now that my eyes have been opened to this fact, I notice again and again that good fiction observes this law, and bad fiction ignores this law. García Márquez obeys. He does more than obey: he stands to attention, and salutes—and then he gives a little wink.
Because, simultaneously, he also manages to present an alternative notion of time, the one which I think is suggested by the tropical climate: time as infinite. Everywhere in his stories, we see notions of circularity, of endlessly repeating cycles. I have been through some of his works with a fine-tooth comb, and marked sentences according to whether they refer to future or past, and I have been not entirely surprised by the pattern that emerged, of future-past, future-past, future-past . . . the forward-back, forward-back of a ticking metronome. Just as he does in that first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude, often García Márquez writes as if there were a kind of parity to past and future, almost as if there were no forward arrow of time at all.
As a developing writer, I find García Márquez’s treatment of time fascinating and exciting. There are, perhaps, “rules” to good writing—and yet here is someone who did not confine himself to the space defined by these rules. These rules may have—unintentionally, invisibly—been defined by a certain portion of the world—and here they have been challenged by someone from a different part of the world, a part of the world that I myself come from. It gives me a certain confidence. It makes me feel as if anything is possible. ~
https://lithub.com/on-the-iconic-first-line-of-one-hundred-years-of-solitude/?fbclid=IwAR12SwrV9tMVwLFlb8R2OeF-C-03jkbZIJcNVz1PVF_KNYd799Wvr3fyLf4
Oriana:
A wonderful article. I never thought of the seasons as markers of the passage of time, but that's exactly it. I can imagine that time feels different to those who live in the tropics.
As for that famous first sentence, what overwhelmed me the first time and every time, is the firing squad. The omniscient narrator is inside the head of a man facing execution, and reports to us something entirely unexpected — not, say, the whole life passing in front of his eyes, but his childhood memory of seeing ice for the first time ("the greatest invention of our times," his father tells him).
from another source:
~ I realized at some point that the novel’s major themes, motifs, and literary technique are all perfectly summed up in the famous opening sentence: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
Immediately we are introduced to a key member of the family at a turning point in his life; but by the time the sentence is finished we’ve gone back to his early childhood and the focus shifts to his father. Temporal dislocation is a key tool in García Márquez’ literary toolkit. Throughout the book he surprises you with a casual mention of someone’s future death, then takes perhaps another fifty pages before it comes into the story’s present.
And then a man standing in front of a firing squad is fundamentally a man standing alone. The great tragedy that dogs the generations of the Buendía family is summed up in the word solitude. It takes many different forms, and happens for different reasons, but the Buendías are ultimately solitary people. They live in a kind of confinement, and even find ways to make their desires for love with another into an isolation from the world. They withdraw into their obsession and many do not find the happiness they once sought, and end their lives in solitude. But then again, it is connecting to the outside world that eventually leads to Macondo’s corruption and downfall. So which is better: solitude or connection? Perhaps it’s a question the novel seeks only to ask rather than answer.
A little more than halfway through the book, Úrsula, the family matriarch, begins to go blind. She’s able to disguise the fact from the rest of the family by being intimately familiar with their habits and her other senses. But it also opens her perceptions about the natural world (discovering that the sun’s path shifts imperceptibly throughout the year) and, surprisingly, it also means that she understands things about her family she didn’t before:
“Even though the trembling of her hands was more and more noticeable and the weight of her feet was too much for her, her small figure was never seen in so many places at the same time. She was almost as diligent as when she had the whole weight of the house on her shoulders. Nevertheless, in the impenetrable solitude of decrepitude she had such clairvoyance as she examined the most insignificant happenings in the family that for the first time she saw clearly the truths that her busy life in former times had prevented her from seeing.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude [shows us] the ways we are both communal and solitary, perhaps even at the same time. ~ C. Steven Gomez, https://csgstories.wordpress.com/2019/04/26/the-discovery-of-ice-gabriel-garcia-marquez-one-hundred-years-of-solitude/
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HOW FATHERHOOD AFFECTS MEN’S BRAINS
~ We have known for decades that mothers’ bodies and brains are transformed by the dramatic hormonal changes of pregnancy and childbirth. Now, new research is showing that men are also biologically transformed by the experience of becoming an involved father.
When women become mothers, levels of the hormones estrogen, progesterone and prolactin increase throughout pregnancy. Hormones have their biological effects by binding to receptors – molecules that sense the hormonal signal – throughout the body, and they can influence behavior through binding to receptors in the brain. Estrogen increases the brain’s capacity to detect another major hormone, oxytocin, and the massive release of oxytocin at birth, coupled with repeated pulses of oxytocin during breastfeeding, helps mothers bond with and want to care for their infants.
Our first study involved recruiting a large group of fathers with children one to three years of age. Our task was to compare their hormone levels and brain function with those of a group of men who were not fathers. We found that compared with non-fathers, fathers had 20 per cent less testosterone, the primary male sex hormone, often abbreviated as ‘T’.
The finding was fascinating in light of seminal research in birds, which had established that testosterone facilitated aggressive competition for mates and territory, while interfering with parenting. For example, when researchers gave monogamous, parental male birds extra testosterone, they became polygynous and non-parental.
Such findings led to the idea that testosterone might redirect energy from parenting to mating in humans too. Important proof came in 2011, when the biological anthropologist Lee Gettler, then at Northwestern University, and colleagues measured testosterone levels twice in the same young Filipino men over a span of 4.5 years. Those who became fathers during that interval experienced a significantly larger decline in testosterone than men who didn’t become fathers, conclusively establishing that the transition to fatherhood decreases testosterone.
The team also showed that Filipino fathers who were more involved in caregiving had a larger decrease in testosterone across the transition to fatherhood. And higher testosterone was associated with increased mating effort, as expected from the animal studies. For example, young men with higher testosterone levels at the initial measurement were more likely to find a mate and become fathers, a form of mating success, over the subsequent five years. What’s more, those fathers whose testosterone decreased the least across the transition to fatherhood reported the highest frequency of sexual intercourse and vice-versa.
Our own research into human fathers adds to the story, as well. We asked mothers to tell us how involved fathers were in caring for their toddler children, and found that men with higher testosterone tended to be less involved, whereas men with lower testosterone were more involved.
We made another important find. Despite having lower testosterone compared with non-fathers, fathers in our study actually had higher levels of another hormone that is classically identified with motherhood: oxytocin. In contrast with testosterone, oxytocin appears to promote paternal caregiving. In 2010, a Dutch research group led by the behavioral scientist Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg gave fathers oxytocin through a nasal spray and then watched them play with their child.
When fathers were given oxytocin, they stimulated their child to explore more and showed less hostility toward the child compared with fathers who received a placebo treatment. Then in 2012, an Israeli group found that intranasal oxytocin made fathers touch their infants more and make more positive vocalizations towards them. In turn, infants, though not treated with oxytocin themselves, spent more time gazing at the father in this condition. Finally, and most remarkably, infants whose fathers were treated with oxytocin experienced an increase in oxytocin themselves. Thus, oxytocin seemed to initiate a positive feedback cycle that promoted father-infant bonding.
In 2016, another important study further implicated oxytocin in key aspects of paternal caregiving. Here, researchers measured the facial muscles of men watching infants express emotion. When the men were given oxytocin, their patterns better mimicked those of the infants, strongly suggesting that the hormone enhances paternal empathy.
In women, oxytocin is released by uterine contractions during labor and by nipple stimulation when breastfeeding. This begs the question, what triggers hormonal changes in men?
Researchers have found some answers here, too. There is evidence for a decline in fathers’ testosterone even during the partner’s pregnancy, so cues from the mother could be important. There is also evidence that postnatal contact with the infant can both lower T and increase oxytocin. Perhaps something about the appearance, the odor or actual tactile contact with the infant is responsible. A notable 2015 study showed that skin-to-skin contact with premature infants increases both parental and infant oxytocin levels. These findings predict that human fathers should become more strongly bonded to their children if they spend more time in close proximity to them as infants, and this has indeed been demonstrated.
To influence behavior, hormones such as oxytocin must act in the brain. What is the brain’s actual neural circuitry that promotes paternal caregiving? Evidence points to a global parental caregiving system that generalizes not only across mothers and fathers, but also across mammals. In the 1970s, the psychologist Michael Numan, then at the University of Chicago, discovered that damaging a particular small region at the base of the brain, known as the medial preoptic area or MPOA, severely disrupted maternal behavior in laboratory rats. The MPOA is part of the limbic system, considered the ‘emotional’ brain, and resides within a structure known as the hypothalamus, a center of sex and aggression, among other things.
Recently, a series of elegant experiments by the biologist Catherine Dulac and colleagues at Harvard University have investigated the role of the MPOA in the parental behavior of male mice in great detail. Virgin male mice will attack and even kill pups, whereas mouse fathers are nurturing parents who lick and groom pups, build nests and retrieve pups to the nest.
Dulac and colleagues showed that both maternal and paternal behavior activates a specific sub-population of neurons within the MPOA. Using sophisticated molecular techniques, they then selectively destroyed only this sub-population of MPOA neurons and found that it abolished both maternal and paternal behavior and also elicited infanticide. On the other hand, when they activated these neurons in infanticidal males, it suppressed infanticide and elicited parental behavior. Thus, the MPOA is a critical node in both the maternal and paternal brain.
Researchers have also shown that the MPOA activates a system of dopamine neurons projecting from the midbrain to a region known as the striatum, which is involved in reward and motivation. This motivational network is essential for parenting; damaging it inhibits caregiving, and rat mothers who lick and groom their pups more have more dopamine in the system.
In many species, this parental caregiving system is not active all the time. For example, female rats find pups unpleasant before giving birth, and require pregnancy hormones to activate the motivational system and stimulate maternal care. A prime player is oxytocin, released in the mother at birth and when nursing; it acts in both the MPOA and the midbrain to stimulate dopamine in the reward system, and this is presumably what makes pups rewarding and provides the motivation to deliver care. Rat mothers with more oxytocin receptors in the MPOA lick and groom their pups more; critically, their level of oxytocin receptors is influenced by the care that they received as a pup. Pups with more affectionate mothers have more oxytocin receptors. This might in fact be the mechanism for the transmission of parental caregiving styles from one generation to the next.
Just as pregnancy hormones act on maternal brain circuits to stimulate caregiving, fatherhood can also alter the male brain so that parental caregiving circuits become more responsive to pups. The California mouse is another of the minority of mammalian species in which males are consistently involved in caring for the offspring. In 2003, the psychologist Brian Trainor then at the University of Wisconsin showed that an enzyme capable of converting testosterone into estrogen increases in the MPOA when males become fathers.
Critically, when they blocked the activity of that enzyme, they disrupted paternal behavior, suggesting that MPOA estrogen was essential for paternal behavior. Other work has established that California mouse fathers also experience significant changes in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in learning and memory, and related structures. These include increased production of new neurons, changes in the shape of neurons that increase their ability to receive input from other neurons, increases in estrogen receptors, and an increased number of oxytocin-containing neurons. Mandarin vole males also care for their offspring. When they become fathers, oxytocin receptors increase within the brain reward system, presumably rendering the system more sensitive to oxytocin so that pups become more rewarding.
My lab has been asking whether these animal models apply to human fathers as well. To find out, we adopted an ethological approach. Animal ethologists posit that offspring activate specific brain patterns and associated behaviors in parents. We sought to identify these patterns in human fathers by imaging their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they responded to their children.
The early ethologists showed that young animals of all vertebrate species have a particular set of physical characteristics, called the baby schema, that tend to ‘release’ adult caregiving. These include large heads, protruding foreheads, large eyes, high brows, small lower faces and short, stubby limbs. We therefore reasoned that photographs of fathers’ children would function as releasers. Indeed, one important study showed that if you morph an infant’s picture to give it more baby schema (ie, you make the baby cuter), adults report stronger motivation to care for it and show stronger neural activation in the striatum. Another critical releaser of parental care that we used in our research is infant crying, which shapes parental behavior through negative reinforcement. As my mentor Melvin Konner put it in his classic book, The Tangled Wing (2002): ‘It has to be a sound that sears its unpleasant way into the core of the mammal mother, causes a deep uneasiness and yet makes her deliver care instead of a lethal bite.’
As with other vertebrate parents, when human fathers come into contact with their offspring (in our experiment, through a photo) it activates the dopamine hub and the motivational system in the midbrain. The more the midbrain was activated, we found, the more involved the father was in caring for the child. This could mean that fathers who were more rewarded by their child became more involved in caregiving, or it could mean that, as fathers became more involved and formed stronger bonds with their child, they came to find the child more rewarding. Viewing pictures of their child also activated a number of other brain regions not included in animal models of parental brain function. These areas, including the anterior cingulate, the thalamus and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, all play a role in empathy. In humans, and likely many other species, parenting involves not only the motivation to deliver care but also the ability to perceive and understand the needs, feelings and mental states of the offspring.
We also found that supplemental oxytocin altered the way men’s brains responded to pictures of their children, boosting the response of the striatum, the target of midbrain dopamine neurons. It also increased activation in the anterior cingulate. Thus, oxytocin could render the child a more rewarding stimulus and might also increase paternal empathy.
In more recent research, we studied the effect of infant crying, that aversive stimulus that effectively forces the caregiver to share in an offspring’s pain or figure out a way to alleviate it. Unsurprisingly, infant crying strongly activates brain regions involved in empathy, such as the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex, especially in more empathic fathers.
Paradoxically, we found that fathers who activate the anterior cingulate the most when listening to infant crying report the most negative emotional responses to those cries, in particular being more likely to label the cry as spoiled or manipulative. How can greater engagement of a brain region associated with empathy be linked with such negative subjective reactions to the cry? We suspect it relates to a phenomenon known as ‘empathic overarousal’, in which an observer takes on the distress of another individual to such an extent that they become mired in personal distress, which in turn interferes with the motivation and ability to deliver compassionate care. There might be an optimal state of arousal and degree of empathy, neither too high nor too low, that facilitates sensitive and responsive fathering.
Our group also evaluated the hypothesis that the trade-off between male mating and parenting occurs at the level of the brain. To do so, we compared the neural response of fathers and non-fathers for both child and visual sexual stimuli. We found that fathers had a stronger neural response to pictures of children than did non-fathers in brain regions involved in reward processing, suggesting that they might attach greater value to those stimuli. On the other hand, and consistent with the hypothesis, fathers had a weaker response to visual sexual stimuli than did non-fathers in brain reward regions.
Finally, there is one crucial paternal brain region that we have so far neglected. Evolutionary theory predicts that males will invest more energy in mating versus parenting if that is how they can maximize their reproductive success, and it is natural for us to ask if the theory applies to our own species. Some men behave much as theory would predict. Consider a man who leaves his menopausal wife and family to start a new family with a younger, fertile woman. Or think of certain high-status, married fathers who spend considerable time and money on girlfriends, mistresses and even prostitutes.
Yet, many other men choose to forego these pursuits. They override impulses that evolution has programmed into their brains, impulses that evolved because they enhanced the reproductive success of their ancestors. They do so out of love and respect for their partners and their children, and out of respect for social and cultural norms. But how do they do what males of other species seem incapable of?
The answer, I believe, is that they rely on the crowning achievement of human brain evolution: the prefrontal cortex. Not only is the human brain three times larger than the brain of our closest living primate relatives, the great apes, but the human prefrontal cortex is also larger than expected for our brain size. Our prefrontal cortex is what allows us to override ancient, evolved impulses in the service of honoring commitments, abiding by social norms, and exercising our moral responsibilities. We are privileged to have this remarkable organ, and we fathers would all do well to make use of it.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-raising-children-can-change-a-fathers-brain
Mary:
Oxytocin and parenting..the hormone that prepares us for loving and caring for human infants, that we now know is operative in fathers as well as mothers, can be found in all "vertebrate species" as the article states. How is the production and release of oxytocin triggered? Through physical stimuli in the mother's body, uterine contractions, nursing, through cues between the pregnant mother and the expectant father, and, crucially, through contact with the infant. The cues we react to have been long known...the visual markers of infant "cuteness," large head, big eyes, large forehead, small limbs, etc all expressing “neotony” — that is, "I'm a baby." These markers are interestingly also those that appear when animals are selected and bred for “tameness,” as in the Russian experiments with foxes, who got cuter and more puppylike with each successive generation —fluffier curlier tails, floppy ears, shorter faces, etc.
I think the production and rise in oxytocin is probably stimulated by other parts of close contact — skin to skin contact, and smell, for instance. And perhaps the most important stimulus is in the gaze. We look into each other's eyes, we "see" and "recognize" the connection and similarity at the same time it is forged...in that particular and unique contact of the gaze. This is something that also happens in the bonding between ourselves and dogs, the only such link between our own and another species...we willingly and easily make connection by gazing into each other's eyes. And the oxytocin levels rise in both, responding to and cementing the relationship. This dynamic defines and shapes the human/ canine relationship, in which some say we were partners evolving and domesticating each other.
EIGHT SHORT WORDS THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE (THE LAST TWO ARE ESPECIALLY POWERFUL)
~ Five years ago, I read You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment.
It’s like a manual for day-to-day living, written by a Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh.
What I want to highlight today is a meditation Hanh prescribes for people feeling overwhelmed. Some call it a “meditation poem.”
It’s very short:
In, out.
Deep, slow.
Calm, ease.
Smile, release.
Per Hanh’s instructions, I practiced reciting the poem in my mind while I breathed. As I inhaled, I would focus on the word “In.” As I exhaled, “Out.”
Inhale, “Deep.” Exhale, “Slow.” You get the idea.
You don’t even have to worry about modulating your breathing.
In fact, Buddhist practice is generally to let your breath do what it wants to do during meditation.
But you will find that the mere act of monitoring your breath causes you to breathe gently.
When my thoughts were chaotic and unmanageable, Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem really helped me soothe my mind. I would sometimes imagine that I was inhaling cool air directly into my brain. I could relax, I could focus, and I could sleep better.
And you can breathe into any other source of tension in the body. Whatever ails you — your back, your joints, your stomach — try to inhale directly into the pain or discomfort.
You’ll find that you can manage the sensation, even if you still need medical care to treat the underlying cause.
Hanh’s meditation poem is the most portable life-enhancing tool I’ve ever encountered. It’s easy to memorize, and it’s very effective. You can incorporate it into your daily life without setting aside time for meditation, and I hope you will. My mind has been a calmer place since I did so.
“The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
https://medium.com/curious/this-8-word-meditation-changed-my-life-b73af25dc44c
Oriana:
I tried it and found an instant uplift with the word SMILE. I remember a study that showed even a fake smile did lift mood.
Along similar lines: I came across an article that suggested that instead of “have to” it’s better to think in terms of “get to” — e.g. instead of “I have to make dinner” say to yourself “I get to make dinner.” Then you can feel grateful for all the opportunities to do the things that you do. 
detail of Rust by Nyk Fury
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CARBON CAPACITY LIMITS CO2 ABSORPTION BY TREES
~ A new study published in Science reveals a counterintuitive way the warming climate is affecting Fall, breaking with our traditional assumptions of how a hotter world alters the plant life we depend upon for sustenance, air, and shelter. This is critical to know — the leaves which define fall are not only beautiful, they are also a marker of how trees are storing carbon.
"The presence of leaves on deciduous trees not only marks the changing of the seasons, but also defines the period of time in which trees store carbon from the air in leaves, wood, and roots," Christine R. Rollinson, a researcher at The Morton Arboretum, writes in an accompanying perspective.
Scientists previously believed warming temperatures would spur temperate trees to shed their leaves some 2-3 weeks later than usual over the 21st century. But the past evidence was based on how day length and rising global temperatures would affect the falling of leaves, also known as autumn leaf senescence. Warming temperatures lead to longer growing seasons, which leads to delayed leaf senescence.
Or at least, that was what scientists had thought. But this new study instead examines environmental phenomena — increased temperatures, light levels, and carbon dioxide — to determine when trees will shed their leaves. Specifically, they examined how photosynthesis affects growing season productivity, which occurs in the spring and summer.
What they discovered completely goes against the old assumption — instead, the researchers estimate autumn leaves will fall 3-6 days earlier by 2100.
Unexpected Results — Using data on Central European trees from 1948 to 2015, the researchers developed photosynthesis influenced autumn phenology simulation models, which they tested against other models from existing research.
The old models assumed the length of growing seasons determined how much carbon the trees took up from the atmosphere. But this study flips the switch, looking instead at how changing carbon capture — resulting from climate change — affects growing season productivity.
In this study, the scientists assume growing seasons will be longer due to climate change, and they hypothesize greater growing season productivity will decrease the number of cool autumn days required for the leaves to fall.
Their model also offset the effects of warmer autumn temperatures by predicting increased productivity, or photosynthesis-induced growth, in the spring and summer.
Due to lower carbon uptake, the researchers predict that this extended growing season will shorten autumn senescence — the transition from summer through to fall and then winter — by 3-6 days by the end of the century.
Essentially, tree roots and wood can only use and store so much carbon, so they cease to need it at a certain point. From that point on, it's costly for the trees to retain their leaves, so they shed them.
If there is more carbon in the atmosphere, trees will take up that carbon more efficiently, but they won't necessarily keep growing for longer periods of time because they only have so much capacity.
From the abstract:
“Using experiments and long-term observations, we show that increases in spring and summer productivity due to elevated carbon dioxide, temperature, or light levels drive earlier senescence.” ~
https://www.inverse.com/science/climate-change-is-affecting-fall
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CAN PLANTING TREES STOP GLOBAL WARMING?
~ Protecting existing forests and planting new ones are surely good things to do. However, scientists say we must not place too much faith in trees to save us. In particular, last year one research group claimed we can plant a trillion extra trees and remove a quarter of the carbon dioxide currently in the air. These figures have been widely criticized as overhyped and unreliable. Trees will definitely help us slow climate change, but they won’t reverse it on their own.
The underlying problem is that our society is releasing greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide (CO2), that are warming the Earth’s climate to levels we have never experienced before. As a result the great ice sheets are melting, contributing to rising seas, and extreme weather events like hurricanes and droughts are becoming more severe.
The solution is to stop emitting all greenhouse gases, for instance by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources like solar power. Deforestation is actually one of the biggest sources of carbon dioxide, because when trees are cut down much of the carbon stored within them escapes into the air – especially if the wood is burned. For instance, in 2017 land use changes – mostly deforestation – contributed four billion tonnes of CO2 emissions to the global total of 41 billion tonnes of CO2. In other words, if we stopped cutting down trees we would cut our annual emissions by about 10%.
However, simply stopping all our emissions is no longer enough. At this point we have emitted so much CO2, and left emissions cuts so late, that we are almost certain to miss our targets of limiting warming to 1.5C or 2C. That means we must also find ways to actively remove CO2 from the air.
All sorts of technological approaches have been proposed, but trees are an obvious contributor. New trees can either be planted in regions that have been deforested (reforestation) or in places that have never had them before (afforestation). As the trees grow they pull in CO2 through their leaves and convert it into carbohydrates, which they use to grow. So long as a tree lives, that carbon stays within it – and trees can live for decades or centuries. Trees are a natural “carbon sink”.
It follows that we should both stop chopping down forests – especially tropical ones like the Amazon, which store huge amounts of carbon – and start planting more.
There are deeper problems, however, because trees have more than one way to affect the climate.
The first issue is that trees are dark, at least compared to other things that might blanket the land, such as grass or snow. As a result, planting more trees typically makes the land darker. Since dark surfaces absorb more heat, a dark tree-covered surface will trap more of the Sun’s heat – and warm the local climate.
As a result, there is a delicate balance between trees’ ability to take in CO2, reducing warming, and their tendency to trap additional heat and thus create warming. This means planting trees only helps stop climate change in certain places.
Specifically, according to a 2007 study that has been repeatedly confirmed, the best place to plant new trees is the tropics, where trees grow fastest and thus trap the most CO2. In contrast, planting trees in snowy regions near the poles is likely to cause a net warming, while planting them in temperate climates – like that of the UK, much of Europe and parts of the US – may have no net effect on climate.
Others say this problem is overblown. “They’re assuming that snow cover’s going to stay there with warming,” says Beverly Law of Oregon State University in Corvallis. She points out that the polar regions are warming faster than the rest of the planet, so much of the snow may melt in the coming decades – in which case planting trees will not make the ground that much darker. “That’s been kind of a red herring that’s held out there a lot,” says Law.
The other thing trees do is emit volatile chemicals into the air. “That’s the pine-y smell you get when you walk through a forest,” says Dominick Spracklen of the University of Leeds in the UK. These chemicals stick together to form tiny floating particles called aerosols, which have complicated effects.
For example, the aerosols create a faint haze. This scatters sunlight back into space, cooling the planet. “Probably the more important effect is those particles act as seeds for cloud droplets,” says Spracklen. This creates more low cloud, or thicker low cloud, which also bounces sunlight back to space.
However, the trees’ emissions can also lead to warming if they react to form the greenhouse gas methane, or ozone, which is a greenhouse gas at low altitudes. For Nadine Unger of the University of Exeter in the UK, this is a major problem. “The mutual relationships between forests and climate are actually really rather more complex and not fully understood,” Unger told the James Lovelock Centenary conference at the University of Exeter in July 2019.
In 2014 Unger calculated that, by chopping down forests from 1850 to the 2000s and thus preventing them emitting volatiles, we have created a cooling effect that slightly offset the warming from greenhouse gas emissions. Shortly afterwards she wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times headlined “To save the planet, don’t plant trees”.
However, other reforestation experts are critical of Unger’s findings. “The overall effect is quite small,” says Spracklen, who has studied the effects of aerosols. “Then the carbon storage blows all the rest out of the water.” Law agrees, saying the effects of aerosols are also “a red herring”.
So how much can trees really help us solve our climate problem?
In a 2017 study, researchers led by Bronsom Griscom, now at Conservation International, estimated the full potential of “natural climate solutions”. This includes restoring wetlands and other ecosystems, and minimizing emissions from farmland, but the biggest contributors by far were preserving existing forests and reforesting degraded areas.
The team estimated that the natural climate solutions could lock up the equivalent of 23.8 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. That is a little over half our annual emissions, but they emphasize that many of the strategies they studied would not be cost-effective: a more plausible figure would be 11-15 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. This implies natural climate solutions could mop up about 30% of the CO2 we need to deal with every year.
For Law, it is one of the best estimates published to date. The researchers “really did a pretty good job”, she says.
*
There are also surprise benefits of planting trees. For instance, a 2018 study suggested that large-scale tree planting in dry tropical regions would cause a shift in weather patterns, leading to more rainfall on land – enabling more plant growth and therefore more carbon storage.
Also, planting trees is not just about stopping climate change. “As well as the climate emergency, we’re facing a biodiversity crisis,” says Spracklen. Planting trees can help with both, he says, “but only if we do it right”.
At the moment a lot of the trees being planted are monocultures of fast-growing commercial species like acacia or eucalyptus. These have “virtually no biodiversity benefits and may even replace something that was better”. It would be better to restore species-rich forests, he says. In line with this, Law has highlighted that planting rich new forests can boost local biodiversity, as well as improving water availability.
The real uncertainties are not scientific, but socio-political. Put simply, where will people and nations allow the large-scale planting of trees? “As soon as you get down onto the land, there’s people living there and they have aspirations for how they want to live their lives that maybe don’t involve tree-planting,” says Spracklen. “There’s virtually nowhere where land’s just lying idle and you can just come along and do that.”
He points to the Welsh hills, which are severely deforested and consequently lacking in wildlife – but which are politically difficult to reforest because they are dominated by the sheep-farming industry. Similar conflicts over land use exist in all countries.
The message, then, is that trees can play a significant role in stopping dangerous climate change – provided we plant them in the right places. The challenge will be finding ways to fit huge new forests into our societies in such a way that people accept them. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200521-planting-trees-doesnt-always-help-with-climate-change
Oriana:
The message seems to be: Plant the right trees in the right places. But economic and political obstacles may prevent this from being done. Humanity still doesn’t have sufficient “Let’s save the earth” mentality.
I trust the prediction that the population of the earth is actually going to shrink. Thus nature is going to take back more and more land, and recover. Remove the humans, as in the area around Chernobyl, and what happens? An amazingly fast recovery.
Beauty will indeed save the world, as Dostoyevsky predicted, but in an indirect way, and in the long run. In a more immediate sense, what will save the world is the falling birth rate — no longer just a Western phenomenon.
***
GOD AS A LOVING FATHER?
Oriana:
I never saw god as father, in spite of the indoctrination. My father was kind, and perhaps that had something to do with my refusal of the “heavenly father” label. Maybe more important, from the start I noted that Jesus starts calling god “my father” out of nowhere. Nowhere in the Old Testament is god referred to as “father.” Not one OT character addresses god as “father.” He is strictly boss, “Lord,” King of Kings, etc. So I got suspicious when Jesus started the father business, enlarging it to “our” father.
One possible solution was that to him god was not Yahweh — that he meant a different god entirely. The Gnostics adopted that solution, and got exterminated. Another solution, which didn't occur to me at the time, that Jesus (if he existed) was a schizophrenic, and this was his central delusion, his “psychotic insight” that explained everything.
Yet another possibility is that Jesus, if he existed, never called god “father,” but the writers of the New Testament (whose names were NOT Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John) tried to domesticate the bad-tempered Yahweh in this manner, to make him more likable. The precedent for this was Zeus, whom Athena keeps addressing as "Zeu Pater" — "Father Zeus" (well, she had a good reason) — and the Romans mispronounced it as "Jupiter." In any case, thanks to poets, Zeus changed from an obnoxious bully to a more fatherly figure — or at least began “trending” that way.
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CAESAR NERO AND 666
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg8r-enReM4&feature=emb_logo
Using the practice of gematria (the conversion of a name into numerals), Bart Ehrman argues convincingly that “666” was none other than Emperor Nero, the first Caesar to persecute Christians. And yes, it would be Nero who’d make a second appearance as the Antichrist at the End of Days.
In spite of this easy explanation, the mystique of “666” continues. In my neighborhood, no house has “666” as its address. It’s 664 and then 668. And of course there are hotels that skip the 13th floor — that is, it’s simply numbered as the 14th floor. So much for supposedly living in the Age of Science.
*
One of my favorite videos by Bart Ehrman is his explication of the various views of the problem of evil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7cmUCjnCgE (spoiler: Ehrman ultimately leans toward the Ecclesiastes)
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“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” ~ Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago”
Oriana:
My answer to that is that of course no one is perfect, no one is entirely good. Not even the saints were all good. Still, it’s a matter of degree. Most people are mostly good (unless they fall under the spell of a populist demagogue like Hitler or Mao), and a small minority of people are indeed psychopaths, or so warped by an abusive childhood that harming others becomes their way of life. Prison is one way society has long responded, but that way is not entirely successful. We are indeed still wrestling with the problem — though thinkers like Steven Pinker have pointed out that, in spite of the negative bias of the news, huge progress has been made, and violence has dramatically decreased compared with past centuries.
The belief that people are innately evil is not just Christian (we are born “with the stain of the Original Sin”). Conservatives view humans in a dark way, while progressives (like Pinker) are often criticized for daring to believe we are wired mostly for cooperation, and in fact feel good when we help someone. This stems from being a part of a social species, where the success of a group depends on how well its individual members cooperate.
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IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF THE M-RNA VACCINE REVOLUTION?
~ The past few months have brought a number of scientific terms to public attention. We’ve had to digest R (a virus’s reproduction number) and PCR (the polymerase chain reaction method of testing). And now there’s mRNA. This last one has featured heavily in recent news reports because of the spectacular results of two new mRNA vaccines against coronavirus. It stands for “messenger ribonucleic acid”, a label familiar enough if you studied biology, but otherwise hardly a household name. Even in the field of vaccine research, if you had said as recently as 10 years ago that you could protect people from infections by injecting them with mRNA, you would have provoked some puzzled looks.
Essentially, mRNA is a molecule used by living cells to turn the gene sequences in DNA into the proteins that are the building blocks of all their fundamental structures. A segment of DNA gets copied (“transcribed”) into a piece of mRNA, which in turn gets “read” by the cell’s tools for synthesizing proteins. In the case of an mRNA vaccine, the virus’s mRNA is injected into the muscle, and our own cells then read it and synthesize the viral protein. The immune system reacts to these proteins – which can’t by themselves cause disease – just as if they’d been carried in on the whole virus. This generates a protective response that, we hope, lasts for some time. It’s so beautifully simple it almost seems like science fiction. But last week we learned that it was true.
It’s extraordinary that observations originally made in cell cultures in a petri dish have been translated into real life. At the same time, it’s not entirely surprising that the two first Covid-19 vaccines to announce phase 3 results were mRNA-based. They were first off the blocks because, as soon as the genetic code of Sars-CoV-2 was known (it was published by the Chinese in January 2020), companies that had been working on this technology were able to start producing the virus’s mRNA. Making conventional vaccines takes much longer.
It’s possible that the impressive performance of these new vaccines will eclipse that of the others currently in development. It depends on how effective those alternative approaches turn out to be – and results are going to start coming thick and fast. Beyond that, however, there’s the question of whether mRNA could represent the future of all vaccines. If a coronavirus vaccine can be created this fast and this well with mRNA, why not use this approach across the board? In short: will mRNA become the default platform for vaccines from now on? That would mark a huge breakthrough in disease prevention.
We’ll just have to wait and see if it happens. Even if we assume that the full detail of the results, when they come through, corroborates the headline figures, there are things that only time can reveal. How long will protection last, especially in those who are at greatest risk? Are these vaccines efficient enough not only to stop the recipients falling ill when exposed, but also to stop them getting infected altogether – or, failing that, to reduce the transmission of the virus to others?
The other key yardstick by which we judge any new vaccine technology is safety. Unlike drugs, which are given to treat people who are sick, vaccines are offered to everyone. Side-effects are only tolerable if they are pretty mild and short-lived – most people will accept a second of sharp pain followed by a tender upper arm and feeling a bit off-color for a day or two, but that’s all. Severe illness caused by vaccines should preferably be nonexistent, or at least vanishingly rare.
On the face of it, mRNA ought to be safe. After all, it is found in abundance in all the cells in our bodies all the time. It is also a very fragile molecule. It falls apart very easily and is rapidly broken down by proteins designed to do that, which seem to be everywhere. Working with mRNA in the lab is a nightmare because it keeps disappearing. On this basis, it should not hang around in the body for very long after it is injected.
The fact that mRNA is genetic material might lead you to think there’s some risk of genetic side-effects. However, in human cells, while DNA is regularly transcribed into RNA, the reverse doesn’t happen – RNA can’t make it back into DNA and alter our genes. (In fact, making DNA from RNA – so called reverse transcription – is something that only a certain kind of virus, like HIV, can do).
Ultimately though, confidence in the safety of vaccines is something that comes from experience, and it will be the same with mRNA. The reassuring thing is that they have been tested for safety in tens of thousands of study subjects already. Within a short time, that will become millions, and – assuming no unexpected problems appear – the sense of reassurance will grow.
Whether or not mRNA now becomes the preferred way to make novel vaccines, it is clear that a global disaster on the scale of the pandemic spurs innovation at a much faster rate. This is not just the consequence of all the resources and funding made available to those with solutions that might usually be regarded with more skepticism; it is also driven by the remarkable things that humans can achieve when thrust together by circumstances and given a common purpose. While we like to lionize individual heroes and leaders, scientific advances like mRNA vaccines are always the product of the collaborative efforts of many people with diverse skills and backgrounds. Bringing vaccines to the clinic also requires large numbers of brave and altruistic volunteers to take part in clinical trials.
Stepping back, one fact stands out. At the beginning of November, we still did not know whether or not any vaccine would be able to help us overcome this terrible disease. As the month draws to its close, we’re certain that they can. However mRNA vaccines go down in the history books, that in itself is something to marvel at. Human ingenuity, invention and sheer hard work mean we are finally on the road out of this disaster. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/is-this-the-beginning-of-an-mrna-vaccine-revolution?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Mary:
Finding a vaccine in such a new way, (mRNA), and figuring out how to reforest for maximum healing, are so full of promise they give me hope for a future we can't yet imagine, because we're still caught up in the now. The future will be as far from what we imagine as that image of the woman in her private flying saucer was to what has actually come about. Time, is a mysterious thing, hard to capture, always fleeting, in flux, just beyond the words we know.
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GENTLE MEDICINE — WHAT IF WE TOOK FEWER MEDICATIONS?
~ We have a mountain of evidence about the benefits and harms of initiating therapy – this is the point of the vast majority of randomized trials today. However, we have barely any rigorous evidence about the effects of terminating therapy. Since part of gentle medicine is a call to be more therapeutically conservative, we ought to have more evidence about the effects of drug discontinuation.
For example, in 2010 researchers in Israel applied a drug discontinuation program to a group of elderly patients taking an average of 7.7 medications. By strictly following treatment protocols, the researchers withdrew an average of 4.4 medications per patient. Of these, only six drugs (2 per cent) were re-administered due to symptom recurrence. No harms were observed during the drug discontinuations, and 88 per cent of the patients reported feeling healthier. We need much more evidence like this, and of higher quality (randomized, blinded).
Gentle medicine doesn’t mean easy medicine. We might learn that regular exercise and healthy diets are more effective than many pharmaceuticals for a wide range of diseases, but regular exercise and healthy eating are not easy. Perhaps the most important health-preserving intervention during the present coronavirus pandemic is ‘social distancing’, which is completely non-medical (insofar as it doesn’t involve medical professionals or medical treatments), though social distancing requires significant personal and social costs.
In short, as a response to the many problems in medicine today, gentle medicine suggests changes to clinical practice, the medical research agenda, and policies pertaining to regulation and intellectual property.
One policy-level change would be to take the testing of new pharmaceuticals out of the hands of those who stand to profit from their sale. A number of commentators have argued that there should be independence between the organization that tests a new medical intervention and the organization that manufactures and sells that intervention. This could contribute to raising the evidential standards to which we hold medical interventions, so that we can better learn their true benefits and harms.
The most important breakthroughs in medical interventions – antibiotics, insulin, the polio vaccine – were developed in social and financial contexts that were completely unlike the context of pharmaceutical profit today. Those breakthroughs were indeed radically effective, unlike most of the blockbusters today.
Let’s start with clinical practice. Physicians could be less interventionist than they currently are. Of course, many physicians and surgeons are already conservative in their therapeutic approach, and my suggestion is that such therapeutic conservatism ought to be more widespread. Similarly, the hopes and expectations of patients should be carefully managed, just as the Canadian physician William Osler (1849-1919) counseled: ‘One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.’ Treatment should, generally, be less aggressive, and more gentle, when feasible.
Another aspect of gentle medicine is how the medical research agenda is determined. Most research resources in medicine belong to industry, and its profit motive contributes to that ‘obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance’. It would be great if we had more experimental antibiotics in the research pipeline, and it would be good to have high-quality evidence about the effectiveness of various lifestyle factors in modulating depression (for example).
Similarly, it would be good to have a malaria vaccine and treatments for what are sometimes called ‘neglected tropical diseases’, the disease burden of which is massive. The current coronavirus pandemic has displayed how little we know about some very basic but immensely important questions, such as the transmission dynamics of viruses, the influence of masks on mitigating disease transmission, and the kinds of social policies that can effectively flatten epidemic curves.
But there is little industry profit to be made pursuing these research programs. Instead, great profit can be made by developing ‘me-too’ drugs – a new token of a class of drugs for which there already exist multiple tokens. A new selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) could generate great profit for a company, though it would bring little benefit for patients, given that there are already many SSRIs on the market (and, in any case, their demonstrated effect sizes are extremely modest, as I argued in a recent Aeon essay).
Numerous criticisms of medical science have been articulated in recent years. Some critics argue that spurious disease categories are being invented, and existing disease categories expanded, for the aim of profit. Others say that the benefits of most new drugs are minimal and typically exaggerated by clinical research, and that the harms of these drugs are extensive and typically underestimated by clinical research. Still others point to problems with the research methods themselves, arguing that those once seen as gold standards in clinical research – randomized trials and meta-analyses – are in fact malleable and have been bent to serve the interests of industry rather than patients. Here is how the chief editor of The Lancet medical journal summarized these criticisms in 2015:
Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
How should medicine face these problems? I coined the term ‘gentle medicine’ to describe a number of changes that medicine could enact, with the hope that they would go some way to mitigating those problems. Some aspects of gentle medicine could involve small modifications to routine practice and present policy, while others could be more revisionary. ~
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-gentle-medicine-could-radically-transform-medical-practice
Mary:
The profit-driven basis for our health care system is responsible for much that is wrong with the pharmaceutical industry. First and foremost it is an industry, primarily dedicated to making a profit. So the push is to increase your customer base...so, more and more things get redefined as "illness" requiring medical "treatment." Thus new ailments like scanty eyelash disease...so far for me the most ridiculous of these. But we also have broadening of definitions like autism, and the proliferation of listings for newly considered psychological illnesses.
Then you want to capture more and more of the existing market, so you have the proliferation of many medicines almost identical in effect for the largest customer categories — like diabetics and the depressed. It's the same phenomenon you see everywhere, as with toothpaste, hundreds of "choices" of basically the same product, with slight differences posing as giving you some advantage. False choices pandering to a false sense of individualized care. Of course those rare “orphan diseases” are left in the backwash. Not enough potential customers, so, no interest.
The pharmaceutical industry panders shamelessly to the public, running exploitative ads that urge viewers to go and ask their doctor for this or that particular drug. They paint fuzzy warm pictures of hope for metastatic cancer patients, offering “more time, more life.” Also offering help to pay for these new outrageously expensive meds you now feel you must have. This too a shameless ploy, as the help is always temporary. After you're already taking the drug, and are convinced you need it, the discount ends and there you are, sure to make tremendous effort and sacrifice to continue on that drug.
Gentle medicine has little chance as long as all is founded on the profit motive.
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ending on beauty:
Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come into the woods you must leave behind
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.
~ Wendell Berry, Sabbaths
