Sam Volchenboum has his head shaved by Joshua Crosby, Sept. 24, 2009 (photos by David Christopher)

A researcher will do a lot for grant money, the fuel necessary to power a laboratory’s work. Sam Volchenboum, a pediatric oncologist at the University of Chicago Medical Center, took that adage to its follicular extreme last week, volunteering to go bald for funds from the St. Baldrick’s Foundation.

St. Baldrick’s, a California-based organization which raises funds for pediatric cancer research, asks their volunteers and award recipients to shave their heads in solidarity with cancer-stricken children who have lost their hair to chemotherapy. Thursday evening, Volchenboum went under the razor himself, shedding his dark brown hair with the help of Joshua Crosby, a 13-year-old cancer survivor. A small price to pay, Volchenboum said, for a $330,000 award that will help him design faster and more specific diagnostic tools for neuroblastoma.

“It can often take a while and be a little frustrating to get to the diagnosis,” Volchenboum said. “Despite all we know about this disease, even with aggressive treatment - chemo and radiation and surgery - over half of the kids will still die from their disease.”

Despite what its name implies, neuroblastoma is not brain cancer, but rather a cancer of the sympathetic nervous system that connects the spinal cord to organs of the body. Though it’s rare as far as diseases go - with only about 800 new cases a year in the US - it’s nevertheless the most common solid-tumor cancer seen in children and is responsible for about 15% of childhood cancer deaths. But not all neuroblastomas are fatal; in fact, some tumors in infants even regress spontaneously without treatment. That wide variation in prognosis presents a challenge to oncologists, Volchenboum said, who must decide the best course of treatment for a child with neuroblastoma, doing as much as possible to attack the tumor without over-treating with therapies that can be toxic and harmful in an adult, never mind a growing kid.

“We need to be able to sub-stratify the patients to predict outcome better,” Volchenboum said about the goals of his project. “There are probably some patients that will do poorly despite any conventional treatments, so let’s give this patient emerging therapy, let’s try something new. Likewise, there are some patients with apparent high-risk disease who get lots of therapy and are ultimately cured but may not have needed all that therapy.”

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A relatively simple food web, believe it or not. (from Allesina & Pascual, 2009)

Ecologists drifted long ago from the simplistic model of the food chain to food webs, intricate, multi-tendril interactions between species that paint a more accurate picture of an ecosystem’s network. But, as with most sciences, as the models become more complex, so too does the analysis required to answer questions about the role each animal plays in an ecosystem. In a chain, if you remove one piece, the whole network falls apart. But how do you rank the importance of organisms in a system that looks like the tangle of wires behind an entertainment center?

Stefano Allesina, a brand new assistant professor in the University of Chicago Department of Ecology & Evolution (like, really brand new, as in moved into town last week) found the answer to this question in a brand name rapidly taking over our lives: Google. Specifically, he got a hunch that the algorithm Google uses to operate its search engine could be turned into a tool for detecting what species are most integral to an ecosystem’s health.

“One of the main problems in conservation is to forecast what’s going to happen if the species we are looking at is going down or going toward extinction,” Allesina said. “This single extinction can cascade in the loss of other species that are apparently unrelated, because all things are interdependent and it’s a very complex machinery. Or you could take away one piece and maybe the whole thing will reshape itself.”

So Allesina, and his collaborator Mercedes Pascual from the University of Michigan, constructed a computer model, published earlier this month in PLoS Computational Biology, to find vulnerabilities in an ecosystem. As Allesina describes it, they tried to help the cause of conservation by looking for the best way to destroy an ecosystem.

“How can we damage the network in the fastest possible way? How can we take away the most important species first so we can make the whole system collapse? It’s the best solution, but it’s actually not very good for the environment,” Allesina laughed.

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