Mark Pine

Today, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne writes about Memorial Day:

Why is it that every Memorial Day, we note a holiday set aside for honoring our war dead has become instead an occasion for beach-going, barbecues and baseball? The problem arises because war-fighting has become less a common endeavor than a specialty engaged in by a relatively small subset of our population.

Not since the Vietnam War has America had an army comprised mainly of draftees. So traumatic, divisive and deteriorating was that war that Richard Nixon campaigned in 1968 on a pledge to end the draft, and the conversion to an all volunteer force was completed by the early 1970s. Since then, with few exceptions, presidents and political leaders have realized that Americans will not support a military draft except in time of immediate, grave national danger. Maintaining the nation’s capacity to project power around the world, our leaders have agreed, depends on the all-volunteer military.

From the viewpoints of the commanders, including the Commander-in-Chief, the result has been good. Few people doubt the excellence of America’s forces and their ability to prevail in any battle. The military has become a professional force, staffed by specialists, integrated across the service branches. It is a force of efficient, highly mobile mission specialists, always at the ready, deployable on orders of the president and the generals.

But in consequence, the members of the military increasingly see themselves as separate from the general population of Americans. This morning on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, two different callers—a man and a woman, both members of the military—spoke of the military members’ courage, dedication, willingness to die, and superiority of character to that of the American populace as whole.

A music rap video, “Troops,”, presented in full during the C-SPAN program, gave powerful voice to the esprit de corps of the military. Joe Roos, a soldier in the 34th Red Bull Infantry Division, created the film during a deployment in Iraq. It showed scenes of military action spliced with rap-talking soldiers, who described themselves as motivated, dedicated, loyal, dutiful, respectful, selfless, filled with honor, integrity, and personal courage—”the best.”

Watching, I experienced both admiration and fear, effects equally intended by the creator, I surmise. On this day of commemoration, it is the former feeling that should swell strongly in our hearts.

But our national pride, I think, must be tempered in years to come by caution. America was established in the Revolutionary War, which was fought mainly by farmers who left home to join the ranks in the fight. Our two greatest wars, the Civil War and World War II, were fought mainly by draftees, who took time out from non-military lives. These military conflicts, which most deeply expressed and bestowed our national character, were not fought by a professional military. And some conflicts fought in contradiction (my view) to our ideals—the Mexican American, Spanish American, Vietnam, and second Iraq Wars—were.

Dionne writes today about the disjunction between the military cadres and most other Americans. When our forces our not deployed overseas, most live [pdf] on bases in only 6 states, five of which lie in the Deep South. Almost half our forces reside in the eleven states of the former Confederacy. “The isolation of our military is part of a larger Balkanization of our nation into political and social classes that have little empathy for each other,” he says.

In other nations, we often witness military coups that assume control of government, when elected officials act contrary to the military’s wishes. We think, of course, that such a take over could not happen in the United States. Civilian control of our armed forces is a bedrock principle of our constitution, and our military leaders appear to support it whole-heartedly.

Still the pervasive polarity and discord of politics in our nation today is some cause for discomfort. One wonders whether it could happen one day that distrust of government and its paralysis could grow to the point that many Americans might accept, even welcome, a military take over.

(Personal note: I was double-deferred during the Vietnam era, as a medical student and also following the draft lottery with a number based on my birthday greater than 300.)

Perhaps no single statistic better reflects the life-supporting qualities of a society that its rate of infant mortality. If that is true, then despite all the wars and catastrophes, the world is becoming of better place for humans to live.

Next week, the British medical journal The Lancet will report a study of infant mortality rates in 187 countries. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supported the survey. The results, already available to the press, have been widely reported.

Globally, 7.7 million children will die this year, according to the article in the NY Times on Sunday. Since 1990, when 11.9 million children died, infant mortality has decreased by more than a third, despite the increase in population.

Infant mortality dropped rapidly in some of the poorest regions of the world, including nations in Latin America, north Africa and the Middle East, which have experience declines of 6% a year. Improvements in rates of vaccination; the treatment of AIDS, diarrhea, and pnemonia; and use of insecticide bed nets to prevent malaria have made important contributions to the decline.

Dr. Mickey Chopra, chief of health for Unicef, credited much of the achievement to governments that “fully supported child survival and primary care” like those in Malawi, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Rwanda. Also, Dr. Flavia Bustreo, director of the WHO-administered Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, said women are having fewer children and waiting longer than two years between children, and those trends enhance child survival.

That points to improvements in the education and empowerment of women as important factors in reducing infant mortality, since these advancements of women are known to correlate with reduced fertility rates.

But compared to the achievements of less developed nations, reductions of infant mortality in the U.S. have been less impressive, the LA Times reported on Monday. America now ranks 42nd, behind most other advanced nations, having fallen from 29th place twenty years ago. In reaction, the newspaper reported the comments of Dr. Christopher Murray, one of the authors of the Lancet article, who said “There are an awful lot of people who think we [Americans] have the best medical system in the world. The data is so contrary to that.”

The article continued,

Even many countries that already had low child mortality rates, such as Sweden and France, were able to cut their rates more rapidly than the U.S. over the last two decades.

The U.S. mortality rates defy traditional explanations, such as a nation’s diversity, high number of immigrants and persistent pockets of poverty, Murray said. Australia, another diverse country with a large immigrant population, cut its child mortality rate over the last two decades more than the U.S. Australia now ranks 26th in the world.

Murray said high child mortality rates were not limited to black and Latino populations in the U.S. In fact, researchers have found high rates among higher-income whites, a group that traditionally has better access to medical care. The data instead suggest broader problems with the nation’s fragmented, poorly planned healthcare system, Murray and other healthcare experts say.

In a similar vein, a report on the Lancet article by the BBC focused on the infant mortality rate in the U.K., which like that in the U.S., has not declined as rapidly as many other nations. The British are now 33rd in the world, having declined from 12th place since 1970. The country is now the lowest ranked nation in Western Europe.

To hazard a guess at the single factor common to both the U.S. and the U.K. that might underlie their comparatively disappointing infant mortality statistics, I’d point the widening rich/poor economic disparities in both countries.

The BBC reported in 2005 that the income gap between the richest and poorest people was wider in the U.S. than any other nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, except for Mexico and Turkey. The richest 10% of Americans made 17 times more money than the poorest, and the richest 10% of Britons made 9 times more than the poorest 10%. Moreover, the article reported that the economic inequality has widened during the same period of time, the last two to three decades, during which these two countries have fallen in infant mortality rankings.

The widening income disparities imply that poor people may be less able to afford health care for their children than previously. Perhaps also they are working harder, with both mothers and fathers taking second jobs and having less time and energy to see to their children’s health needs.

I’ve just about given up eating at restaurants. Perhaps on very special occasions—my children come to town, I make a long trip—or when for some reason there’s no choice, I dine out. But most often when I think about what I’ll be eating at most eateries, I sigh and decide to skip it.

It’s not the quality of the food, per se, or worries about germs, it’s the sugar, fat and salt. There’s just about nothing to order at most restaurants that isn’t loaded with sugar, fat and salt.

On Tuesday, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the organization that publishes Nutrition Action Healthletter, posted a story on the mind-boggling excess of some restaurant-chain meals:

• A breakfast of Bob Evans Cinnamon Cream Stacked and Stuffed Hotcakes? 1380 cal and 34 g of fat. If that ever made sense, it’s was for farmers going out to plow their fields with oxen.
• A dinner of P. F. Chang’s Double Pan Fried Noodles Combo? 1820 cal and 7690 mg of salt. Go ahead and raise your BP by 10-20 mmHg.
• A desert of the Cheesecake Factory Chocolate Tower Truffle Cake? 1670 cal and 48 g of fat. Enough to fuel a 30-mile bike ride.

These are extreme examples, but most restaurant food suffers from the same mix of fat and salt and sugar, particularly at chain restaurants. David Kessler, former Commissioner of the FDA and a pediatrician on the faculty of UCSF, explained why the eating places do it. In the book The End of Overeating, he wrote about the research food companies have done on maximizing the taste, palatability, and appetite stimulating properties of food. They have discovered how to blend sugar, fat and salt into foods to produce concoctions that are so extremely rewarding to eat that instead of being satisfied by eating them, we are stimulated to want to eat more and more. Unfortunately, the food that does that is overloaded with unhealthy calories.

Most restaurants, particularly the chains that depend on keeping customers coming back, have applied the results of the food research and adopted the same food-company philosophy of leaving us wanting to eat more.

About five years ago, when I passed age 60, I decided I could no longer ignore my excess weight. I wished to live a vigorous old age, so I had to lose the fat or lose my health. I’ve since kept close track of what I consume and lost 40 lbs.

Today, I’m so conscious of the calories, fat, sugar and salt in what I eat, that I can’t seriously consider eating at restaurants more often a few times a year.

In today’s post, I write on panic attacks, a health problem that is the subject of a recent article in Scientific American and has concerned me personally.

Panic attacks may be related to levels of pH at certain synapses in the brain, according to the article in SciAm last week by Richard Maddox, a physician and an expert on the subject. The synapses in question contain acid-sensing ion channels (ASIC) that respond to decreases in pH. The article reports on research at the University of Iowa on mice that were genetically modified to lack the gene for ASIC. As a result, the animals lost much of their normal fear responses. The experimenters then restored the gene to the mice, but only in the neurons of the amygdala, a region of the brain involved in emotions. Then the mice regained their normal fear responses.

The finding may be relevant to understanding the physiology of panic attacks, the sufferers of which show unusual sensitivity levels of acid in their brains. Panic patients often experience attacks on inhaling CO₂, which acts as an acid in the body, perhaps because it lowers pH levels at these ASIC-containing synapses in their brains. The Iowa research also suggests the possibility of treating panic attacks with a medication that blocks the action of ASICs.

For about 20 years I suffered from panic attacks several times a year, although in the last 5 years, the attacks have decreased and may have subsided altogether. The panic episodes were exactly like the description provided in the lede of the SciAm article:

My heart starts to race, I can’t breathe, I get all sweaty, and I feel very scared – like I am about to die.

I would literally feel that I was about to die, a fear often exacerbated by reflux indigestion that caused substernal pain mimicking a heart attack. On several occasions, I ended up in the ED of a nearby hospital to rule-out an MI, which it never was.

The attacks would tend to happen on days when I was out of sorts due to emotional stress and loss of sleep. The immediate trigger would usually be a bout of strenuous exercise. An avid cyclist, I sometimes rode 50 miles or more. I would occasionally experience a panic episode while climbing a steep hill and breathing very heavily. Perhaps I was unusually sensitive to levels of brain acidity on those days, which had risen in response to the strenuous exercise and the resulting build up of lactic acid.

In 2001, Maddox published on a relationship of lactic acid build up and panic attacks. Studies of lactate levels in anxious patients, he wrote, showed that “these patients (who had many of the clinical features of panic disorder) were often found to have higher than normal lactate levels during exercise.”

Additionally, in 1990, Maddox and Mateo-Bermudez investigated the relationship of serum lactate levels and hyperventilation to panic attacks. It is known that hyperventilation increases lactate levels and triggers panic attacks. The probable mechanism is that hyperventilation lowers blood CO₂, which produces alkalosis. To return pH toward normal levels, the body breaks down glucose and produces more lactic acid. Studying panic patients and controls, they found that significantly higher lactate levels occurred specifically in those panic patients who experienced a panic attack in response to hyperventilation.

It seems likely that strenuous exercise, hyperventilation and elevated serum lactate levels are all connected together in the pathophysiology of panic attacks. When a panic episode would hit me while climbing a hill, the attack followed the arduous exercise and rapid deep breathing of the climb. Both of those would have increased my blood lactic acid and could have triggered my panic episode.

In the paper last week, Maddox called attention to one more factor, a specific vulnerability. It is possible that panic attacks occur in people who have acid-sensing ion channels in their neuronal synapses, which are more sensitive to elevated lactic acid. The hypothesis may also point to a possible explanation of why I was more vulnerable to panic on days when I was stressed-out. Perhaps my ASIC sensitivity was greater on those days.

Researchers in Sweden and the U.S. asserted last week that creative thought and schizophrenic thinking share similar neurophysiologic mechanisms involving dopamine neurotransmission. Their investigation connected “divergent thinking,” a style of thinking involving unusual or bizarre associations, to reduced density of dopamine receptors in the thalamus, a part the brain that relays neuronal impulses from one brain region to another. The scientists also pointed out that low dopamine receptor density is associated with a particular genetic variant, that might be more common among both creative individuals and the mentally ill. The scientists did their work at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a substance that is released into synapses between neurons in the process of transmission of neuronal impulses. It is one of many brain neurotransmitters, and it has long been connected with schizophrenia. Anti-schizophrenic drugs are known to work, in part, by occupying dopamine receptors and blocking neurotransmission.

According to a report in ScienceDaily, Dr. Frederick Ullén, one of the researchers, discussed the D2 receptor, they type of dopamine receptor the scientists investigated. He explained,

“Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus,” [and] this could a possible mechanism behind the ability of healthy highly creative people to see numerous uncommon connections in a problem-solving situation and the bizarre associations found in the mentally ill.

If increased information flow underlies both creativity and schizophrenia, that could explain why creative people come quickly to unusual ideas and why anti-schizophrenic drugs would reduce bizarre thinking and the manifestations of mental illness.

Genius and madness have long been connected. The Independent, the British newspaper, noted that geniuses including the composer Schumann, the playwright Strindberg, the author Kafka and the philosopher Wittgenstein were schizotypal personalities.

Last year, the magazine Psychology Today published an article on schizophrenic thought and genius, which suggested that the reduction of a neurophysiologic function called “latent inhibition” might diminish filtering of emotions and sensations. Reduced latent inhibition is known to be associated with schizophrenia, the article reported, but it might also be beneficial for creativity. The condition sounds very similar to the low signal filtering in the thalamus, which the researchers at Karolinska and the NIH investigated and reported on.

The FDA will consider approval of a new medicine to boost female sex drive, according to the Washington Post this morning. Boehringer Ingelheim, the pharmaceutical company that holds the patent on the drug, found that the drug, which adjusts the same neurotransmitters that antidepressants affect, didn’t work to treat depression, but it did energize the libido of some women participating in the clinical trials.

But to get FDA approval for a new medicine, the drug has to treat a medically-defined condition, and what is the condition that would be treated by a drug to boost female sex drive? The Post reports, “Critics say that the pharmaceutical industry played a central role in defining HSDD [hypoactive sexual desire disorder] as an official psychiatric disorder and exaggerated its scope by funding key research.” The condition has been included in recent versions of the DSM, the diagnostic manual used by American psychiatrists. Once a disease is defined, then pharmaceutical companies are entitled to develop and market medicines for it, providing they prove to the FDA that they are effective and safe.

A similar scenario played out a number of years ago with the drug Xanax, a potent anti-anxiety medication. At the time that the drug was developed by Upjohn (a pharmaceutical company that is no longer in existence), there were already a number of good drugs of that kind—among them Valium, Librium and other drugs which, like Xanax, are called benzodiazepines. Upjohn decided to market Xanax especially for panic disorder. To that end, the company played a role in getting the psychiatric association to separate out panic disorder from general anxiety disorder in the DSM. That allowed the FDA to consider and then grant the company approval to market Xanax for panic. Nevertheless, the other benzodiazepine anti-anxiety drugs work for panic, too.

Debate and criticism of the use of drugs to treat behavioral problems began in the 1950s with the psychiatrist-turned-libertarian-philosopher, Thomas Szasz, who wrote “The Myth of Mental Illness.” Szasz’s thesis was that problem behaviors may be very disturbing, but they are not true diseases. He objected to the medical model of mental illness—he considered it a misplaced metaphor—and the involuntary hospitalization of the mentally ill and their treatment with psychiatric drugs.

Last week, ScienceDirect reported on a recent scientific paper that reviewed the subject of the medicalization of normal “human conditions,” such as menopause, pregnancy, infertility, baldness, obesity, sleep disorders, etc. Treatment of these conditions in the medical system added $77 billion (3.9%) to the cost of health care in this country, the article said.

To my mind, the most troubling use of drugs to treat such human conditions may be the widespread use of psychiatric medications to treat young children with angry tempers. A week ago, the Los Angeles Times ran the story, “Time to reexamine bipolar diagnosis in children?” It’s worth quoting a few of the first paragraphs:

In the last 15 years, diagnoses of bipolar disorder in children have skyrocketed as much as fortyfold, according to some estimates. The condition — defined by severe mood swings, between depression and mania, lasting for weeks or month at a time — has traditionally been considered a lifelong condition in adults and is treated through tranquilizers and antidepressants.

Some psychiatrists argue that many of these children are being misdiagnosed. They worry that the medications the kids are prescribed could affect developing nervous systems and say that the symptoms generally do not fit the traditional guidelines for diagnosing bipolar disorder. Rather than having episodic mood swings, these children tend to have temper outbursts that involve yelling and physical aggression and are rarely in a positive mood for more than a day. Doctors also note that many kids tend to grow out of these behaviors with time.

In a draft of the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — the American Psychiatric Assn.’s bible — a new label, temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria, is proposed for these behaviors instead. Unlike bipolar disorder, the new label doesn’t specify that the disorder is a lifelong condition.

Beyond the problem of labeling children with a life-long condition on the basis of behavior in early childhood, the diagnosis of bipolar disorder entails treatment with the most powerful drugs used in psychiatry. The effects of the drugs on growth and development is unknown, particularly in the long term. But on the other hand, making a correction by creating a new diagnostic category, “temper dysregulation disorder” will likely result—as history shows—in pharmaceutical companies developing and marketing new, expensive, patented medicines to specifically treat it.

Without doubt, severe cases of sexual dysfunction (both the male and female variety), panic attacks, mood swings in childhood, and other behavioral problems merit consideration as illnesses, particularly if there are physiological abnormalities that are correlated with them. I am not a Szaszian, and I do believe, for instance, that schizophrenic adults and autistic children should be treated with psychiatric medications, as necessary. The problem is that the diagnosis of medical conditions that manifest mainly as behavioral abnormalities has been deeply influenced by pharmaceutical companies intent on developing and marketing patented medications.

When the PhRMA companies get involved, it is not only the severe cases that get medicated. The drugs always get used much more frequently, because the companies and their sales forces have the incentive—the imperative—of expanding their use of the drugs as widely as possible. And many people end up swallowing the pill—figuratively and literally—whether they are adults who want to have better sex or they are children who have very bad tempers.

The answer is not really, not as the media hype has portrayed it.

Although he has accomplished a marvelous technical feat of genetic engineering, what Venter did is to copy and synthesize the genome of a naturally occurring form of bacteria. Then he modified some portions of it, and inserted it into a hollow cell—a cell from which the genome had been removed—of a closely related bacterium.

This morning, the NY Times summarized Venter’s achievement this way: “Dr. Venter copied the DNA from one species of bacteria and inserted it into another. The second bacteria made all the proteins and organelles in the so-called ‘synthetic cell,’ by following the specifications implicit in the structure of the inserted DNA.”

A report in Science described the work as follows:

…the stepwise creation of a bacterial chromosome and the successful transfer of it into a bacterium, where it replaced the native DNA. Powered by the synthetic genome, that microbial cell began replicating and making a new set of proteins. The synthetic genome created by Venter’s team is almost identical to that of a natural bacterium.

In 1995, according to the Science article, Venter and his crew initiated a project to identify a minimal genome of a free-living organism. To do so, they investigated a group of bacterial called Mycoplasma, which are very simple organisms. In intermediate steps toward their goal, in 2007 and 2008, they succeeded in transfering the genome from one microbe into another and synthesizing an artificial chromosome matching that of M. genitalium, which has the shortest genome known.

To prove that he had identified a minimal, life-sustaining gene set, in 2009 Venter extracted the DNA from M. mycoides bacteria, modified it, and reinserted it into a hollow cell of M. capriolum, a species closely related to mycoides. In the work reported yesterday, Venter had another company synthesize the mycoides DNA from scratch in 1000 pieces. Then he and his staff pieced the DNA together and inserted it into another hollow mycoides cell. It took several tries to get it right, with the result that the new mycoides cell has survived, reproduced, and formed a colony of M. mycoides bacteria, all having the artificial genome.

The stories make clear that there are some extremely important things that Venter did not do. To my mind, the most critical is that he simply copied the genome of an existing living organism. He has not determined the functions of the individual genes nor how they work together. Although he has created an artificial genome that works in a pre-existing cell of the same type, he does not understand why it works. And he lacks the information necessary to build a new life form by selecting from a kit of individual genes, as though, to use a metaphor, he were building a new structure from Lego blocks.

Moreover, almost as significantly, he did not synthesize an artificial cellular environment—the hollow cell that hosted the artificial genome and enabled it to work and reproduce. There is no reason to believe, on the basis of the reports, that he has determined which components of the hollow cell are necessary or how to create an artificial cell that would allow a synthetic genome to function.

Nevertheless, Venter has indeed built a form of life that the earth has never seen before. And his work is an important step on the way to true creation of life. However, other genetic engineers have done the same kind of thing, albeit by inserting or deleting only a few genes.

As with all forms of genetic engineering that creates new life, I believe the main potential ethical problem with doing this kind of work concerns the possibility of interfering with the operation of the biosphere—the interrelated web of life of our planet—should the artificial organism be released purposely or accidentally onto the earth.

In my view, it is fine—desirable, in fact—to do this sort of work in the laboratory, as part of scientific research to understand the basis of life. It may also be a good to synthesize new life forms capable of benefitting life on earth, including human life.

But in my view, it is not ethical or wise to release newly synthesized forms of life free into the environment, to do and multiply as they will. If Venter were to release his new bacterium into the biosphere, it might well succeed and reproduce. But it would not stay where he put it and the remain in the form it is for long. It would move, swap genes with other organisms, evolve, and develop along an evolutionary path that no natural organism would have traveled.

Humans do not know enough about the biosphere to know what we do when we introduce gene-engineered organisms free in the world. It’s true that for thousands of years humans have used breeding in farming to modify natural organisms and create new ones. But those newly bred organisms incorporated genes closely related to those they already possessed. GE, however, allows the insertion of extremely different genes from sources unrelated and far-removed.

The relationship of genetic engineering to breeding technology is like the relationship of the jet and auto to that of the horse and buggy. And, the potential effects on the environment of GE are also like that of modern transportation technology in comparison to animal-based transportation—perhaps even like nuclear bombs in comparison to the fire-crackers.

On February 12 Science magazine focused an issue on “food security”—the problems of feeding the population of the world and supplying enough energy to do so. On page 809, a remarkable graphic, “What It Takes to Make That Meal,” displayed the amounts of energy required to produce different types of food. It showed that the foods that have the lowest energy costs to produce are also the foods that are the healthiest to eat.

Not surprisingly, it indicated that beef is one of the most energy-intensive foods, requiring 9.4 MJ (megajoules) of energy input to yield 0.8 MJ of nutrition. (1 MJ = 239 nutritional cal.) In other words, if you factor in the corn, etc., in the feed, the workers’ salaries, the costs of transporting cattle and beef, and the other energy-costs of beef production, then a 6-oz portion of top sirloin (trimmed to 1/8 in fat, before cooking), which holds 336 cal, requires about 4000 cal to produce. (Ratio: About 12:1)

In contrast, for the rice you might have with the steak, the cost-consumption ratio is much lower. A 3-oz portion of long-grain white rice, before cooking, which supplies 315 nutritional cal, requires about 500 cal to produce. (Ratio: About 1.6:1)

Vegetables are usually less costly to produce in terms of energy. Carrots, for example, requiring 0.5 MJ (120 cal) to produce yield 0.21 MJ (50 cal) of nutritional energy. (Ratio: 2.4)

One part of the graphic showed the energy of food production for a week’s worth of food in the U.K. (where the diagram was created). Per person, consumption of 73 MJ (about 17,500 cal, 2500 cal/day) requires 338 MJ (81,000 cal) to produce, a net ratio of 4.6 for all the food typically eaten. Food production itself requires about half the energy; transportation about 9%; packaging about 7%; and storage and cooking at home about 31%.

What is the most efficient food, the one that costs the least to produce for the most nutritional energy? Oil. Astonishingly, the nutritional energy yield of oil is larger then the energy requirement to produce it. It takes only 0.2 MJ (48 cal) to produce .5 MJ (120 cal) or 1 TB of oil. The extra energy comes from the sun. Consuming oil is like eating by sunbathing, except the solar energy doesn’t go to tanning (or melanoma-making), it goes into fueling the body.

And oil, according to most medical authorities, is one of the healthier foods, particularly the mono- and polyunsaturated kind, like oil from soybeans. These oils supply essential fatty acids needed as components of the body, have beneficial effects on cardiovascular health, and may help prevent cancer and chronic inflammatory diseases.

Indeed, as a generalization, it seems that the most beneficial foods with respect to health—vegetables, grains, beans, and plant oils—are those that are least costly to produce in terms of energy consumption. They are the simplest, least processed foods, the ones that in consumption are closest in form to what nature gives us.

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled out life sentences without the possibility of parole for teenage criminals. The case involved a 17-year old convicted of home-invasion robbery, his second crime.

In the editorial accompanying the news article, the NY Times writes today that the decision “recognizes that children mature and should not be irrevocably punished for a childhood act short of killing.” The opinion says “recent scientific evidence showing a fundamental difference between the minds of juveniles and adults.” And it quotes Justice Kennedy, who “noted that the brain matures through late adolescence” and said, “juvenile actions are less likely to be evidence of an ‘irretrievably depraved character.’”

The newspaper’s reasoning does not make clear why murder should be excluded from crimes covered under the decision. The truth of its statements about adolescents does not change when the crime is murder.

In an amicus brief [pdf] to the court, the AMA provided a summary of scientific findings on adolescents and their developing brains. The medical association said adolescents are “risky, impulsive, and sensation-seeking, … less capable of controlling their impulses, … more emotionally volatile and susceptible to stress and peer influences.” The brief explained that

brain imaging studies reveal that adolescents generally exhibit more neural activity than adults or children in areas of the brain that promote risky and reward-based behavior. These studies also demonstrate that the brain continues to mature, both structurally and functionally, throughout adolescence in regions of the brain responsible for controlling thoughts, actions, and motions.

Concurring, the American Psychological Association also submitted an opinion [pdf] to the court:

Recent neuroscience research shows that adolescent brains are not yet fully developed in regions related to higher-order executive functions such as impulse control, planning ahead, and risk evaluation. That anatomical immaturity is consonant with juveniles’ demonstrated psychosocial (that is, social and emotional) immaturity.

In 2001, Christopher Pittman, a pre-teen of 12, murdered his grandparents. He was tried as an adult and could have been give a life-sentence. But psychiatrists testified that a significant factor in the commission of the crime was that Pittman had been prescribed antidepressants just prior to the murders and suffered a rare psychotic reaction at the time of the crime. In 2004, the FDA reviewed evidence and concluded that children and adolescents are unusually vulnerable to suicidal reactions while taking antidepressants, particularly in the first weeks of treatment. And most psychiatrists consider suicidality and homicidality to be closely related behavioral abnormalities.

Reactions to drugs (prescribed or self-administered) are another way that the differences of young, developing brains of children and adolescents may become manifest. And many, perhaps most, adolescents who commit crimes have ingested one or more psychotropic substance before doing so. Taking into account the possible effect of the (prescribed) drugs, the Pittman’s judge sentenced him to the minimum allowed sentence, 30 years in the penitentiary.

It should make no difference if the crime is murder. A child or adolescent criminal remains capable of great change, maturation, and redemption despite the nature of the crime. No child or adolescent should be sentenced to remain in prison for the rest of his or her life.

As everyone knows, the female sex is the gentler sex. In comparison with men, women are more yielding and supportive (except when they’re not). But though they are conventionally considered the weaker sex, women have considerable power to influence emotions.

Psychologists have now demonstrated some of that influence in controlled experiments. In one study reported last week by CNN, scientists at the University of Wisconsin showed that girls can reassured by simply talking to their mothers, and that effect can be seen in the levels of their hormones.

Two groups of girls 7 to 12 years old were tasked with making a difficult presentation in front of an audience, after which they watched a movie. Between the presentation and the film, one group of girls got hugged and soothed by their mothers. The second group talked to their mothers on the phone. But a third group of girls, the control group, made the presentation and watched the movie without contacting their mothers.

Before, during and after, the presentations, the scientists determined the girls’ levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, and oxytocin, a hormone associated with feelings of love and trust. The cortisol levels of all three groups of girls rose substantially before the presentation. Then the levels dropped rapidly to normal in the girls in the first two groups, who had contact with their mothers. But cortisol rose even further in the girls in the third group, and their oxytocin levels did not rise.

One of the most remarkable results was that the effects of just talking on the phone was as effective as physical contact among the girls that had contact with their mothers.

In another experiment, reported last week in ScienceDaily, men and women were tested in situations of risking money in making an investment or gambling. Before the test, the subjects were greeted by either a male or female experimenter, who patted them on the shoulder, shook their hand, or made no physical contact at all.

The participants who were touched by the women greeter took larger risks than those who did not. And on a survey after the experiment, those who had contact with the women responded on average that they had felt more secure felt more secure emotionally than the other subjects did. Moreover, the effects on risk-taking and feelings was stronger for the pat on the shoulder than the handshake. Remarkably, no effect at all on risk-taking or emotions occurred among the participants who had contact with the man.

Both studies point to a remarkable ability of women, in contrast to men, to be reassuring. There’s evidence that this effect may be mediated at least in part by the hormone oxytocin. In the first experiment, the levels of that hormone rose significantly among girls who had physical or verbal contact with their mothers. It’s plausible also that the subjects of the second experiment who had contact with the women experienced a rise in their levels of this hormone.

Numerous psychological and physiological investigations have demonstrated that oxytocin, which plays a major role in breast feeding and other maternal behaviors, increases feelings of trust and security and other emotions involved human relationships, and it reduces feelings of stress and unhappiness.

Also appearing last week, a study of ethical decision-making by researchers at Indiana University pointed to noteworthy difference between women and men. The study was reported in ScienceDaily and the paper can be found here [pdf].

In the experiment, several hundred undergraduate men and women imagined themselves as the physician of both a woman and her husband. The subjects were asked to decide whether to comply with the woman’s request not to inform her husband that she was infected with genital herpes. Before deciding, the subjects were shown one of several alternative videos on a computer, each showing the woman explaining her situation. She was worried about her marriage and said of telling her husband about her herpes, “I’m sure he couldn’t handle it. He’d explode! I’d lose my marriage, the house, everything.”

In some of the videos, the woman was visualized as a computer animation with jerky movements, while in other videos the woman was played by a human actress or visualized by a computer animation with smooth movements. The results showed that more than half the women subjects (52%) chose to comply with their patient’s request. In contrast, less than half the men (45%) went along, and the difference was statistically significant.