Photo by Justin Kern

For this week betwixt holidays, I will be tinkering with the blog’s design and taking care of assorted other housekeeping tasks. So if the site is experiencing technical difficulties when you visit this week, never fear - barring WordPress catastrophe, we’ll be back with new posts in the new year.

Provided the site remains readable as I remodel, enjoy these highlights from 2009, the blog’s best year ever (Editor’s note: also the blog’s first year ever).

The beautiful photo at left of the University of Chicago in winter is by Justin Kern, a graduate student here who has more excellent photography around the city at The Windy Pixel.

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5) The Passion of Francis Collins (July 12): President Obama’s choice for director of the National Institutes of Health seemed simple on its face, but generated a firestorm of controversy from scientists such as Jerry Coyne and Steven Pinker. Blog founder Jeremy Manier, who interviewed Collins multiple times for the Chicago Tribune, shared his thoughts on the controversy and debated with Coyne in the comments.

4) Lilly’s Law: A Diabetes Registry for Illinois (August 18): When Lilly Jaffe was 6 years old, University of Chicago doctors discovered that her diabetes was caused by a rare genetic mutation that could be treated with pills instead of insulin injections. The publicity around Lilly’s story, including a Chicago Tribune story by the late Peter Gorner, eventually led to the creation this year of a statewide registry for children with juvenile diabetes, which researchers hope will lead to improved diabetes treatment and research.

3) Shaving Your Head for Science (September 28): Pediatric oncologist Samuel Volchenboum’s grant from the St. Baldrick’s Foundation for research on the genetic signatures of neuroblastoma carried an unusual prerequisite - a public head-shaving. Before and after pictures included.

2) Darwin/Chicago 2009 - The Digest (November 2): A busy year of celebrations for Charles Darwin’s 200th anniversary reached the doorstep of the University of Chicago on Halloween weekend. I was there all weekend updating the blog from talks by the world’s leading experts on evolution’s past, present and future.

1) Foundational Research: Our (Ig) Nobel Prize (October 7): The Medical Center may not have pulled down any Nobels this year, but the Annals of Improbable Research saw fit to recognize work done here to invent a bra that can double as a gas mask in case of emergency. Director of Communications John Easton told the story of this, er, uplifting project.

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Dr. Angelo Scanu and James Eisenbart examine a model of cholesterol in 1989.

In today’s New England Journal of Medicine, a large team of geneticists unveil evidence for a genetic polymorphism that increases the risk for cardiovascular disease in as many as 1 out of 6 people. That’s pretty big news. But the culprit identified in their genome-wide assay is not a new character on the cardiology scene: Lp(a) lipoprotein, an unusual particle that has been known in the field for nearly 50 years.

It just so happens that we have one of the world’s foremost experts on Lp(a) here at the University of Chicago Medical Center in Angelo Scanu, a professor of cardiology who has been with the hospital since 1961. Scanu, who also is known for biochemically characterizing the “good cholesterol” HDL, was the first to publish in 1987 that the structure of Lp(a) resembles plasminogen, an agent involved in breaking up blood clots. That finding suggested that Lp(a), discovered in 1963 by Norwegian researcher Kåre Berg, could somehow interfere with the removal of clots, an effect that might lead to blockage and heart attacks.

“We discovered something that overnight, made the field just go, “Boom,” Scanu said. “It brought cardiology together with the field of thrombosis.”

But while studies repeatedly showed that Lp(a) was associated with an increased risk for cardiovascular disease, researchers could not determine whether high Lp(a) levels were the cause of the disease or the result. That mystery was due in part to several struggles, including:

• Lp(a) blood levels vary widely between different ethnic groups, varying by almost 1000 times among individuals. Further, average Lp(a) levels are much higher in people of South Asian or African origin than people of European descent.
• Lp(a) is only found in humans and some non-human primates, making animal research nearly impossible.
• No drug has been shown to effectively reduce Lp(a) levels, save niacin, which can only do so at doses that cause serious side effects. Drugs commonly prescribed to lower cholesterol such as statins have no effect on Lp(a) levels.
• Despite decades of studies showing an association with cardiovascular disease, nobody is really sure what Lp(a) actually does!

Hence Scanu’s diagnosis of Lp(a), a particle he has spent three decades studying, as “a miserable snake,” a mysterious and frustrating particle.

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flickr photo of Charles Jencks' "Bootstrap DNA" by mira66

If you want to describe cancer in the fewest words possible, try this: When Genetics Go Wrong. All cancers can be traced back to genetic mutations, either in genes meant to help the cell “self-destruct” when damaged or in genes that promote the replication of cells. Tracking down the genetic origin of a particular cancer - as Janet Rowley did in the ’60s and ’70s with chronic myelogenous leukemia - can point the way to new, effective treatments. But so far, these have been isolated victories chipping away at the complex and diverse world of cancer, where countless other genetic varieties reside.

Various projects are starting up to address try and map cancer’s genetic landscape, from the work published last week in Nature describing the genomes of two cancer cell lines to the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Genome Atlas. These efforts seek to find new ways of diagnosing, treating and understanding cancer by focusing on the genome not of patients but of the tumor itself, looking for the unique genetic “errors” that caused good cells to go bad. To be most effective, such projects will require close cooperation between researchers at all levels of science, from the laboratory to the clinic to computational analysis centers.

Fortunately, all of those elements already exist at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where a unique twist on cancer genetic research has already been underway for the last year. The Chicago Cancer Genome Project, a collaboration that is bringing together experts from virtually every corner of the Medical Center, is an ambitious effort with a local focus, a merger of biology, computational science and medicine that could reshuffle the how cancer is categorized and how new treatments are discovered and tested.

“It’s a long road from having a piece of genome sequence to actually implementing that into patient care, but the path is at least clear enough that we can shine a light down it and see the end,” said Kevin White, professor of human genetics and ecology & evolution. “If we know enough about the genetic basis of the tumors we should be able to at least connect the dots and draw a path toward clinical trials, and if those work out, toward actually getting things into the clinic.”

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When an adult snores, it’s annoying. When a kid snores, it’s mostly cute. But as David Gozal, chairman of pediatrics at Comer Children’s Hospital explains, those nighttime noises aren’t always innocuous.

“Snoring is not benign in kids,” Gozal said. “Snoring is clearly something that we need to not just make fun of but actually think that it has consequences on learning, behavior, the cardiovascular system, and diabetes. It can also exacerbate many existing conditions associated with learning, intelligence and behavior.”

“Those effects are silent for the most part in children, but nevertheless, if let go for a long time, they can cause damage that could be irreversible and lead to onset of disease in adults earlier and more severe than otherwise would be appropriate.”

Yet while awareness and diagnosis of sleep disorders in adults has improved over recent years, the pediatric end of the field has lagged somewhat behind. Conducting an overnight sleep study - which involves a night in the hospital or sleep center bed attached to a multitude of wires - is unpleasant enough for adults; just try performing one on a sleep-deprived 8-year-old. The number of sleep technicians and doctors trained to record and analyze the unique characteristics of sleep in children is also a fraction of those available for adult studies, Gozal said. That means very few sleep centers are able to conduct sleep studies in children, which produces waiting lists as long as one year in some areas.

And yet, better screening technology is needed to sort out relatively harmless “primary snoring,” seen in around 1 out of every 10 kids, from the more harmful obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Often associated with adult, overweight males, OSA reflects the occurrence of frequent breathing “pauses” during sleep, which may lead to as many as hundreds of  short episodes without oxygen and abrupt awakenings during a single night of sleep. Gozal’s research found that about 3 percent of children suffer from OSA, but the condition is often undiagnosed, and sometimes even treated (through surgical removal of the tonsils and adenoids) based upon mere reports of chronic snoring.

“This is not a trivial proposition,” Gozal said. “And yet because there’s so little choice, parents and physicians decide to pursue surgery because there’s not enough access to the diagnostic tool. If it were easy, and not as expensive and inconvenient, it would allow everybody to get tested and know whether you have sleep apnea or you don’t before going to surgery.”

That’s the kind of clinical problem that inspires creative science, and Gozal’s research group at his old home, the University of Louisville, and his new, the University of Chicago, have been working toward a simpler way of testing children for obstructive sleep apnea. Recognizing that OSA causes changes in kidney function in mice and humans, Gozal hypothesized that kids with sleep apnea could be identified due to differences in what comes out of their kidney: urine. By measuring the proteins from kids diagnosed with OSA and comparing their “urinary proteome” to kids without the sleep disorder, Gozal’s team hoped to identify candidate proteins that could be used in, simply put, a pee test for sleep apnea.

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Illustration from BMJ by Brendan Halyday

Is Santa Claus a risk factor for obesity, swine flu and drunk-driving? And if you saw such a headline, would you think it was a joke?

That’s the cautionary tale floating about on this (admittedly slow) science news week, as a scientific article in the esteemed British Medical Journal entitled “Santa Claus: a public health pariah?” kicked up a bit of a storm. An AP story on the paper, which describes it as “light-hearted research” deep in the story, nevertheless seemed to play the findings of epidemiologist Nathan Grills straight, amusingly when it contained conclusions such as “Santa is a late adopter of evidence-based behavior change and continues to sport a rotund, sedentary image.”

The actual paper is, sadly, subscription-only and unlinkable, but from the text excerpted on the BMJ website, it’s hard to believe that people weren’t tipped off by the author citing Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me in the second paragraph. The AP article, hilariously, cites Grills’ finding of a “very high Santa awareness,” his suggestion that Santa should swap out fireplace cookies for carrots, and his personal experience with the disease-spreading potential of traditional Santa visits.

More disturbingly, Grills said Santa’s close-up contact with sniffling, coughing kids made him a one-man outbreak waiting to happen, with swine flu the biggest seasonal concern.

“Unsuspecting little Johnny gets to sit on Santa’s lap, but as well as his present, he gets H1N1 influenza,” Grills warned.

Grills said he donned a Santa suit himself - and deemed the experience a public health nightmare. “I was kissed and hugged by snotty-nosed kids at each performance and was never offered alcohol swabs to wipe my rosy cheeks between clients,” he wrote.

Okay, so maybe the AP was in on the joke, but according to this Newsweek article, many commentators skimmed over the “light-hearted research” part and wrote scathing replies to Grills’ “findings,” inevitably lumping it in with the ridiculous “War on Christmas.” The bulk of that punditry seems to have been written off the press release (or the AP story), without bothering to check the clearly marked-as-satirical original journal article - another example of a troublesome trend in a journalism industry with fewer and fewer specialized science journalists. Missing some sly Australian humor in a British science journal is harmlessly embarrassing, but relying on intermediaries with an agenda to explain a science finding related to climate change or health care costs is a whole different animal.

Hopefully, the whole silly episode is a holiday lesson for journalists twice over: 1) always check the original article and 2) yes, Virginia, scientists do have a sense of humor.

Hyde Park Research Flurries

There’s been a lot of great research around the University of Chicago this week that hasn’t fallen into our territory at the Medical Center. Not that we’re jealous - we had cancer-fighting nanodiscs and sharp-toothed dinosaurs, after all! But in case you missed these stories from other departments around campus, here’s a quick review.

From our colleagues in Psychology came the latest in a fascinating series of papers looking at how social isolation affects the risk of acquiring breast cancer. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the paper by Gretchen Hermes and Martha McClintock found that isolating rats elevated the stress-related hormone corticosterone, an observation previously seen in the very social species. But as the animals were allowed to grow into “middle age” (about 15 months) the isolated rats also showed a much increased chance of contracting mammary tumors - 135% more tumors and 84 times the tumor load (which takes into account tumor size) of socialized control rats. “There is growing interest in relationships between the environment, emotion and disease,” Hermes told the BBC. “This study offers insight into how the social world gets under the skin.” (see also Time, Reuters, and U.S. News & World Report)

A good case of lemonade-from-lemons came from the Divinity School, where a miniature book thought to be a 16th-century artifact turned out to be a very well-crafted forgery. The Archaic Mark, an illustrated Greek translation of the Gospel of Mark, has been in the University’s collection since 1937. But questions have always lingered about the book’s authenticity, until Alice Schreyer, Director of the Special Collections Research Center brought together experts in imaging and Biblical texts to settle once and for all whether it was the real deal. The conclusion? It’s a fake, possibly made as late as the early 20th century. But it’s a good one, with an animal hide covering that legitimately dates back to Medieval times, and the University will give it a second life as an example of skilled forgery. “It’s actually tremendously satisfying to have a definite result,” Margaret Mitchell, a Divinity School professor, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “Scholarship depends as much as possible [about] being absolutely certain about these things.”

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I don’t have the social media expertise to judge why particular videos go viral, what pushes certain clips to the tipping point that allows them to tear across the internet and demographics. Most of these videos seem to be of the squirrel-on-water-skis curiosity variety, but every once in a while, a significant scientific finding penetrates into collective internet consciousness.

Judging from my twitter feed (and the fact that even TMZ comes up in a Google search for the topic), I think it’s fair to say that “Coconut-carrying octopus” has officially moved into this thin slice of Venn diagram. If you’re not one of the 600,000 people who have already viewed the video, here it is:

The clip, showing a veined octopus in Indonesia using coconut shells as an oceanic mobile home comes from a paper published in Current Biology earlier this week, “Defensive tool use in a coconut-carrying octopus.” As the paper describes, this is more than mere curiosity, as “the use of tools has become a benchmark for cognitive sophistication” which has been seen before in chimpanzees and birds but not as often in the more “primitive” invertebrates (The microecos blog provides evidence that this is not, in fact, the first time invertebrates have been observed to use tools).

As the University of Chicago’s Jerry Coyne pointed out on his blog, the octopus’ use of the coconut shells is true tool use (unlike a hermit crab’s use of shells for protection), because it carries the shells around and constructs them into a home when needed. That awkward carrying motion, called “stilt-walking” by the authors, seen in the video above is actually what makes the shells a tool, because the octopus is actually more vulnerable when carrying the shell - the animals have deduced that the delayed benefit of using the shells is worth the immediate risk.

Why do scientists care, beyond the aesthetic value of “aw, look at the cute octopus…he thinks he’s people!”? Showing the capacity for tool use earlier in the evolutionary lineage (vertebrates have only been around for a fraction of the time, by comparison), suggests that “cognitive sophistication” occurred much earlier in the history of life on Earth than previously thought. That’s interesting for scientists reconstructing how complex thinking evolved, but also lends credence to the field of organismal biology, the idea that biological truths about humans, such as the development of language, can be studied in other species of animals. So even as such discoveries make us humans feel somewhat less unique - I always thought I was the best at making pillow forts - they still advance our view of how we came to be. I’m not sure the video has much to say about the climate change conference in Copenhagen, but it also possesses more than mere cuteness, lending it an additional viral quality - a bit of information is hopefully left behind as it spreads from host to host.

The latest in our video series where experts from the University of Chicago Medical Center answer frequently asked questions about popular medical topics. To suggest a topic or a question, please contact the editors.

As much a part of modern holiday tradition as presents, parades and parties is the New Year’s resolution to lose weight, a yearly pledge motivated by over-eggnogging and a pained look at the scale. In 2006, a Wall Street Journal poll found that about a quarter of adults who make a New Year’s Resolution pledge to lose weight, exercise more and eat better - the most popular resolution grouping. Now if everyone was successful in their resolution, you might expect that percentage to drop, but January’s goals often fade away as the calendar pages flip through the months.

To hear some ideas about how people can break out of that New Year’s Resolution diet cycle, I went to Mary Russell, a dietitian and director of nutrition services at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Russell said she has heard all the questions about how to start a successful diet, and said that if she knew all the answers she’d be a billionaire. But in our video conversation, Russell shared a number of useful and easy-to-implement tips for making this year’s weight-loss resolution stick, such as keeping a food diary, reducing portion sizes, and planning your grocery shopping around healthy options on sale.

One interesting thread (expanded upon in the third video below) was Russell’s discussion of how the concept of “the healthy diet” has changed over the past few decades. Each year seems to bring another trendy diet that claims to have unlocked the secrets of weight loss through emphasizing certain types of food over others, and Russell warns against these “magic food” diets. But the classic concept of losing fat via low-fat foods has been modified somewhat, most dramatically by the “Mediterranean diet“: the usual fruits and vegetables, but also “healthy fats” such as fish, nutes, olive oil or canola oil, and - most excitingly for some - moderate portions of red wine. Unlike a lot of fad diets, the Mediterranean diet has held up to scientific scrutiny - this New England Journal of Medicine article found twice the weight loss with a Mediterranean diet versus a traditional low-fat plan.

Enjoy the clips, and as Russell says, start thinking about changing eating habits now, rather than waiting for the arbitrary January 1st to shift into a healthier lifestyle.

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We spend a lot of time on ScienceLife talking about human disease and intricate biological research, so it’s important to take a break every once in a while and stir the inner 8-year-old in all of us with one glorious word: DINOSAURS!

Woah! That fine illustration by artist Jorge Gonzalez depicts three Triassic carnivores, the uppermost of which is Tawa hallae, a new species described last week in the journal Science as a sort of uniter-not-divider of early dinosaurs. Appearances to the contrary, Tawa hallae did not fly in from outer space to invade the Earth 215 million years ago, but the unusual features revealed by a complete fossil found in New Mexico in 2006 have prompted reconsideration of the dinosaur evolutionary tree and theories about how far early dinosaurs traveled across the super-continent of Pangea.

The University of Chicago can claim several A-list paleontologists, such as Paul Sereno and Neil Shubin, on faculty, but our representative on the Tawa hallae paper showcases the importance of educating future stars of the field - Nathan Smith, a graduate student in the evolutionary biology program and a research associate at Chicago’s Field Museum. Smith was involved in the dig, at New Mexico’s famous Ghost Ranch, that uncovered a nearly complete Tawa skeleton and bones from six other members of the species, as well as the analysis of the skeleton, which places it as a relative of several species formerly thought to be weird cousins of dinosaur evolution.

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(flickr photo by kjten22)

Brain tumors are some of the hardest cancers to treat - unresponsive to treatment, difficult to access surgically, and quick to grow. Surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy drugs may all be enlisted to fight off a malignant glioma, but still the prognosis is often measured in months, according to Maciej Lesniak, associate professor of surgery and director of the Brain Tumor Center at the University of Chicago Medical Center. That creates a demand for inventive thinking about creative strategies to target tumor cells and extend the life of patients with brain cancer, Lesniak said.

“There have been advances in new therapies, but they haven’t been significant enough to make a tremendous difference in terms of extending the life of patients,” Lesniak said. “That puts you in a situation where due to the desperation, you start to look at novel, exciting and potentially interesting ways of developing new therapies for an incurable disease.”

Creative strategies such as really, really tiny magnetic golden pancakes.

Scientists from the Center for Nanoscale Materials and the Material Sciences Division at Argonne National Laboratory have been studying the “magnetic vortex state” of microdiscs - small iron-nickel discs so small that even “microscopic” over-characterizes their size - for several years. Applying even a weak magnetic field to these discs causes them to rotate, a property that Argonne’s Dong-Hyun Kim, Elena Rozhkova and Valentyn Novosad thought would be a possible weapon against cancer cells. If one could attach these discs to tumor cells, then expose them to a magnetic field to set them rotating, would their vibrations tear the cells apart?

The microdiscs (courtesy of Argonne)

That rather odd hypothesis was demonstrated to work in a recent paper published in the journal Nature Materials (News & Views article here), at least in the controlled environment of the test tube. Researchers coated the microdiscs in gold (to prevent rejection by the cells) and attached an antibody to target the discs to cancer cells but not normal cells. After giving the discs time to bind to cells, a very weak, alternating magnetic field - about the same strength as a magnetic screwdriver, Novosad said - was applied to the cells at a low frequency for 10 minutes.

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A Familiar Idea of the Year

One of my favorite year-end wrap-ups is the New York Times Magazine “Year in Ideas” issue, a far-flung digest of creative innovations across multiple fields. This year’s issue comes out on Sunday, but is already viewable online, and a sneak-peek led me to a familiar idea - Stefano Allesina’s model of ecological food webs based on Google’s search engine algorithm. We wrote about Allesina, an assistant professor of evolution and ecology, and his research back in September, as did a lot of media outlets who couldn’t resist the Google angle, but it’s great to see his work receiving even more prominent attention. Excitingly, the blurb talks about how some researchers are looking to apply Allesina’s Page Rank-based model to other topics, such as financial markets and cell signaling. And there’s a really snazzy graphic too!

There’s other great science stuff in the Ideas issue, such as how named cows produce more milk, a glow-in-the-dark dog, and how to write music for animals (and why tamarin monkeys prefer Tool and Metallica)

A Plague of Earworms

Speaking of music science (my favorite topic of all), there has been a flood of interesting articles on the science of music lately, including an entire issue of the journal The Psychologist devoted to the topic. From that issue, I learned that:

• “fans of rock and rap were more likely than others to consider suicide and to self-harm,” but “thoughts of suicide and self-harm precede an interest in rock.”
• Various studies have found an effect of music upon variables such as foot pain, pulse, blood pressure, chronic pain, stress hormones and even allergic responses
• Dogs like Beethoven more than Black Sabbath: “The classical music was arguably the most soothing, and it is interesting that it led to the dogs spending more time resting, more time quiet, and less time standing. In contrast, arguably the least soothing music, heavy metal, led to more time barking.”

Another fascinating scientific study of music has to do with a phenomenon common to most people: earworms, otherwise known as having a song stuck in your head. These crafty creatures, also known variably as stuck song syndrome, brainworms, or involuntary musical imagery, have been featured in popular books on the brain and music such as Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music and Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, but have been reported as far back as Mark Twain in an 1876 Atlantic Monthly article. However, despite all this attention, there is very little scientific data about earworms, other than some vague notions that they may be related to obsessive-compulsive disorder, may be more common in musicians than non-musicians, and may be more commonly associate with jingles and TV show themes than other types of music.

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Back when I covered the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, one of the coolest talks I heard was from Elizabeth Phelps, a scientist at NYU who studies fear conditioning. At the meeting, Phelps presented unpublished data on a method of eliminating fear memories that sounded like science fiction - specifically, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Today, that research was published in the journal Nature, which has also posted a very cool video demonstration of the procedure (with some nice, scary ambient background music to up the sci-fi factor).

The method capitalizes on a peculiar aspect of memory called reconsolidation. Basically, if you think of memory as a library, every time you recall a particular event, person, or association, it’s like checking out a book. While that book is in your possession, you can change it - scrawling a note in the margins, or ripping out a page - before checking it back in to the library. That process is called reconsolidation, the idea that memories are vulnerable to being changed when they are recalled. 

Other groups have shown in rats and humans that treatment with a particular drug during reconsolidation can help eliminate a memory. One study published last year used a drug called propranolol, normally used to treat hypertension, to try and block emotionally painful memories in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder - patients were asked to recall the “traumatic event,” then given the drug, and researchers found a decrease in stress response when asked to again recall the event a week later. But treating people with drugs to zap away painful emotions associated with memories could carry unwanted side effects, both of the drug itself and of the potential for losing desirable memories alongside those one wishes to eliminate. So Phelps’ drug-free method promises a “non-invasive” and specific means of stripping the fear away from phobias.

The video does a better job of explaining the experiments, but think of it like this: if you are scared of spiders, every time you see a spider you check out a book from your memory library called - to draw from a personal fear - “Spiders Are Scary.” If you check out that book and are repeatedly exposed to spiders that don’t do anything harmful to do you (a process called extinction), you’ll gradually replace the pages of “Spiders Are Scary” with evidence that they are not, in fact, all that frightening. When you return the book, it has been changed, and the next time it’s checked out (when, for instance, you come across a tarantula in your attic), the fear response will be smaller. In Phelps’ experiments, the effect lasted up to 1 year in people manipulated during their reconsolidation period, and was specific to the stimulus that test subjects were “reminded” of, suggesting a long-lasting and very selective elimination of a fear memory.

It’s not quite “Eternal Sunshine.” As Phelps rightly points out in the Nature video, this is the elimination of an association, not a specific memory of a person, place, or event - you could remove the fear of spiders, but not your awareness that such a thing as spiders exists. But as a relatively simple manipulation of the brain’s library for memory, it’s a treatment that could be a life-saver for people with PTSD or crippling phobias.

The latest in our video series where experts from the University of Chicago Medical Center answer frequently asked questions about popular medical topics. To suggest a topic or a question, please contact the editors.

In late November, the news was a confusing place for women’s health. In one week, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force released new recommendations on how often women should receive mammograms, concluding from computer modeling data that women in their 40s did not need yearly screening for breast cancer. Shortly thereafter, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists changed their guidelines on screening for cervical cancer, advising that women do not need to be screened until age 21 and can be given pap smears less frequently than the yearly tests previously recommended, as long as they are not considered to be at risk for cervical cancer.

Despite widespread press coverage, many women have been left with questions about their own individual need for breast and cervical cancer screening. Dr. Nita Lee, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Chicago Medical Center, agreed to sit down for a Dr. FAQ interview and address several common patient questions about pap smears and other issues related to cervical cancer. Lee emphasizes that the new guidelines of pap smears every two or three years only applies to the population of women that have had no abnormal smears in the past; women who have previously had cancer, have a history of cervical dysplasia, or who may be immunocompromised still require yearly screenings. Lee also talks about the HPV vaccine, which protects women from the virus thought to cause the majority of cervical cancer cases.

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A Google data center in Oregon

As scientific technology advances in leaps and bounds, the amount of data generated by innovations such as sophisticated gene sequencers, electronic medical records, high-resolution brain scans threatens to drown the scientists who operate them in numbers and bytes. The idea that a researcher can sit down with a spreadsheet, a statistics program and a thermos of coffee to do the data analysis for their experiment may soon be as outdated as running calculations with a quill pen and an abacus. So how will scientists find the needles in data haystacks that grow ever more monstrous? 

The solution, said UIC’s Robert Grossman in a visiting lecture at the University of Chicago Monday, may lie in the same technology that - at it’s most basic - allows you to check your e-mail from every internet-ready computer in the world. Cloud computing, one of the tech industry’s biggest buzzwords at the moment, may be the solution to science’s growing data problem, Grossman said, clearing the way for computation that is powerful, fast, and affordable enough to be useful for research that is frequently becoming too “data-intensive” to be handled in-house.

“Partly what’s going on is the amount of data in all these different dimensions is growing faster than our ability to manage it,” Grossman said. “The first time you can’t turn around and look at imaging data and medical records and all the different modalities of data that you can’t handle in your own lab, then your discipline has become data-intensive.”

Grossman knows of what he speaks; he’s the director of the Laboratory for Advanced Computing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And speaking to a roomful of scientists as part of the Chicago Biomedical Consortium - an ongoing collaboration between the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and UIC - Grossman was thrilled to deliver an optimistic message to scientists facing their own data problems that there is a solution, and that he can help.

Unfortunately, science is  a little slow out of the blocks, Grossman said, as large government organizations such as the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy that usually conduct large-scale computations have until recently retained a focus on more inflexible grid-style computing. Meanwhile, internet giants Google, Yahoo and Amazon have thrown hundreds of millions of dollars into data centers capable of the more nimble forms of computation afforded by cloud computing. All of us are familiar with the results of that investment: every time we log into Gmail, we’re accessing the Google cloud, and every time Amazon predicts a book would be interested in or Yahoo customizes an advertisement based on our browsing history, that’s the cloud too. 

Grossman emphasized that the cloud can help scientists do more than check their e-mail, particularly researchers without easy access to very expensive, massive computer grids. Smaller clouds devoted to scientific computing are forming at Grossman’s UIC center and at national laboratories such as Argonne, and pieces of the massive internet company clouds can be rented out by anyone with a credit card (and considerable experience in computer programming, I imagine). Recently, University of Chicago researcher Kevin White has used Grossman’s Cistrack cloud to analyze the data collected in the modENCODE project, an effort to build a library of regulatory elements that control genetic expression in fruit flies over the course of their entire lives - a data set far too large for traditional analysis. 

While there’s still much to be done to create data centers that for science that rival the data centers for Google ad placement, Grossman said that Chicago’s scientists are privileged to be near the epicenter of computer experts collaborating to tailor both the cloud and the grid to answer research questions.

“We’re the center for this because we all talk to each other and like each other,” Grossman said. “We’re at a critical mass in Chicago.”

When Marco Polo made his famous journey to find a better route from Asia to Europe, his travels produced the Fra Mauro map, the 15th-century medieval view of how the known world was laid out. As you can see at left, it kind of resembles what we know now thanks to additional exploration of both the terrestrial and outer-space kind. But it’s still only a vague approximation, accurate in some parts (such as the boot of Italy) and malformed in others (what is going on with West Africa?).

Today, even with amazing advances in imaging that allow us to view ripples of activity as the brain works, science remains in the early stages of neural cartography, possessing only a rough draft of how the brain connects that will surely look primitive to future neurobiologists. The various structures of the brain have been known for decades, even centuries, thanks to surgical dissection. But how those brain regions interact and connect, and how those billions of connections add up to the amazing computational ability of the human brain, remains a monumental challenge.

That challenge comes to mind when reading two brand-new papers from the laboratory of Murray Sherman, professor and chair of neurobiology at the University of Chicago Medical Center and a specialist in the field of neuroanatomy. Much of Sherman’s research is dedicated to a brain region known as the thalamus, a structure located practically in the very center of the brain. What most students are taught about the thalamus is that it is a kind of sensory crossroads for the brain, passing along information from the visual, auditory and somatosensory (touch) systems to the relevant areas of cortex, where that information undergoes complex processing. But whether the thalamus merely makes sure the information gets to the right place and then shuts up, or whether it alters the information and stays a part of the conversation as it is processed, remains a subject of debate.

These two papers score points for the latter scenario, where the thalamus is a conductor of sensory information rather than a mere pit stop along the way to the cortex. In the first, published by Brian Theyel, Daniel Llano and Sherman in Nature Neuroscience yesterday, a novel imaging technique is used to prove that the thalamus continues to shuttle information between cortical areas even after the initial handoff. The second paper, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Charles Lee and Sherman, finds that the thalamus receives two different streams of auditory information, implying that its role is more complicated than mere conduit.

“These experiments not only give you a new way of looking at how cortex functions, but also answers a question about what most of the thalamus is doing,” Sherman said. “People who study how the cortex functions now have to take the thalamus into account. This can’t be ignored.”

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