6:45 PM - The Opposite of a History Lesson

Eric Kandel is 80 years old, was present at the first Society for Neuroscience meeting in 1969, is 9 years removed from winning the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine. He’s also so well known at the Neuroscience meeting, he can go by one name, “like Bono,” said SfN president Tom Carew in his introduction to tonight’s Presidental Lecture. So you might have expected Kandel’s talk to be a history lesson, a retelling of how he uncovered the cellular chain of events that underlie learning and memory in sea slugs, fruit flies, mice and, by extension, you and me.

But Kandel, looking like The Sopranos’ Uncle Junior and speaking with Woody Allen’s Brooklyn accent, had very little interest in looking back. After 75 minutes of him excitedly flashing through graphs and figures explaining recent findings in his laboratory at Columbia University, he could only narrow his talk down to four conclusions. My thesis adviser, who was sitting next to me, leaning over and whispered in amazement, “these aren’t conclusions at all, he’s still forging ahead.”

That relentless drive in someone so late in his career was infectious. Kandel said the goal of his talk was to explain how a person remembers his first love for the rest of his life, as if that was a simple quest, but his lecture portrayed science as it should be: a never-ending story, with each answer giving birth to several more questions. While some researchers settle on a single technique and pass the torch to younger researchers when the limits of that technique are reached, Kandel proved that he has stayed on the cutting edge of science, bringing fresh talent into his lab to apply new tools to his endless questions about how neurons encode memory.

As a result, almost a decade after his Nobel victory, Kandel was excitedly telling 10,000 of his colleagues about a new cellular signal, called CRB-3 in mice, which he humbly described as “a new class of functional proteins” and “an entirely new model of synaptic plasticity.” The work was backed up with the latest in genetic, cellular biology and imaging evidence, testimony to both Kandel’s ability to keep up with the fast-moving world of science as well as the sprawling world of neuroscience itself.

“One of the wonderful things that has happened in my forty years in the society, is that neuroscience, which really was quite fragmented when I entered the field…has become a unified organism,” Kandel said.

read more

The classic slogan for Lay’s potato chips is “Betcha’ can’t eat just one!,” and anyone who’s ever sat down with a new bag of chips and systematically worked their way down to the bottom of the bag in an almost hypnotic state knows the truth of that message. Portion size has been shown in many studies to be a contributor to overeating, as scientists find that people tend to eat the food that’s placed in front of them rather than stopping when their hunger is satisfied. Some might say this behavior is culturally programmed by millions of mothers telling children to “clean their plates” - a good strategy for broccoli, but a rather unhealthy one when faced with a heaping mound of french fries.

But there may also be a biological reason driving people to eat whatever amount of food is placed in front of them, to the detriment of their own personal health. Today in the Journal of Neuroscience, University of Chicago neurobiologists Hayley Foo and Peggy Mason publish experiments that indicate rats get into a zone while eating or drinking something they like that actually reduces their sensitivity to pain. While eating a chocolate chip or having sugar water or regular water infused into their mouths, rats are slower to move their feet away from a hot light-bulb than when they are not eating or drinking. The implication is that rats are so focused on finishing the food in front of them, they are less susceptible to distractions…such as, for instance, a hot foot.

“It’s a strong, strong effect, but it’s not about hunger or appetite,” Mason said. “If you have all this food in front of you that’s easily available to reach out and get, you’re not going to stop eating, for basically almost any reason.”

In the wild, where food is scarce, a resistance to distraction while eating is a good skill to have. If a wild rat is eating a hard-earned nut, it would rather ignore that mild pain in its foot rather than flee the scene and risk losing the nut to another hungry animal. But for humans in modern society, where the next meal is only as far as the nearest supermarket or McDonald’s, an unshakable focus on finishing the food in front of you and drowning out distractions (like a little voice inside your head reminding you how many calories you’re consuming in that Big Mac), is decidedly unhealthy.

“We’ve gotten a lot more overweight in last 100 to 150 years,” Mason said. “We’re not more hungry; the fact of the matter is that we eat more because food is readily available and we are biologically destined to eat what’s readily available.”

read more

Dr. Funmi Olopade and Dr. Mary Ann Malloy at the Harold Washington Public Library in Chicago, September 22, 2009 (photo by Rob Mitchum)

On Monday we previewed Dr. Funmi Olopade’s public lecture at the Harold Washington Public Library in Chicago titled “Nature, Nurture and Breast Cancer.” For that post, I talked about some recent work from Olopade’s research group that compared the types of breast tumors found in West African women with the tumors seen most often in black and white American women. That research indicated that there likely is a genetic difference between women of African origin and Caucasian, North American women that leads to fewer breast cancer cases but a  higher rate of aggressive, harder-to-treat tumors in black women here and abroad. But the patients from Senegal and Nigeria which Olopade’s group studied also showed different proportions of tumors when compared to African-American women, suggesting a strong role for environmental factors in causing breast cancer as well.

In her library appearance Tuesday evening with NBC reporter Dr. Mary Ann Malloy, Olopade expanded upon those mysterious “environmental factors” that likely contribute to the higher breast cancer numbers in North America. To a rapt audience, Olopade listed off the most well-known and common risk factors for breast cancer: age, family history and “the most important risk factor,” being a woman.

(Chicago Public Radio’s Chicago Amplified is supposed to post audio from Tuesday night’s event, but it’s not up yet. I’ll add a link when it’s available.)

But even to a crowd that, judging from their questions, was very well informed about breast cancer medicine and science, Olopade inspired gasps of surprise by rattling off some less-publicized environmental factors: breastfeeding, age at childbirth, even height. Many of these factors, in combination with more mundane things like lack of moderation in diet, exercise and alcohol intake, are behaviors more commonly seen in rich countries where women have achieved a more equal status in their work and private lives.

“I think what we’re still struggling with is, as we get more affluent and as people live the good life, then you see the rising incidence of breast cancer,” Olopade said. “We want people to have the good life, but what is it about the good life that is predisposing us to breast cancer?”

read more

Whether you call it pop, soda, a soft drink or lower-case coke, sugary, carbonated beverages have become a staple of the American diet. And as we all know, the American diet is not exactly the healthiest. So with obesity racking up an estimated $150 billion a year in health care costs - which, as you may have heard, is in the news lately - some researchers have considered whether Coke, Pepsi and their sucrose-packed brethren should be subject so the same type of “sin tax” that has been applied in the past to alcohol and tobacco by some governments.

Here in ScienceLife’s home state of Illinois, carbonated soft drinks (as well as most candy) were recently reclassified from being considered as food to “general merchandise” - a seemingly innocuous change that actually means a sales tax increase from 2.25 percent to 10.25 percent in Chicago. In Illinois, the switch was justified as a way to generate much-needed revenue for state services, but could it also have a direct public health benefit by discouraging people, particularly children and teenagers, from drinking hundreds of calories in soda pop each day?

In this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, seven public health experts assess the best methods of improving public health through taxation of soft drinks. Soda is already taxed in 33 states, according to the article, at an average of 5.2%. But research indicates that those taxes have only marginal effects on soda consumption and obesity. One recent study out of UIC found only “weakly significant” effects of tax rate on the body mass index of children “at risk” of being overweight. In NEJM, the authors immediately state that the current tax rates are too small to have an effect on consumption - after all, a 5% tax on a 75-cent can of Coke is less than 4 cents, hardly enough to get someone to switch to water.

But the authors go on to suggest different methods of taxation that could be more effective in motivating people to change their beverage behavior. Rather than imposing an increased sales tax on all soda purchases, the authors suggest a tax of 1 cent per ounce on beverages with “added caloric sweetener” - your standard sugary Coke or Pepsi, but not your Nutrasweet-infused Diet versions. So a 12 oz. can of soda would set you back 12 cents, and a convenience-store fountain drink behemoth would cost almost a dollar extra, but if you opt for the diet version, no tax. Thus, the authors hope the tax will encourage (or financially push) consumers to make healthier decisions rather than merely opting for cheaper sugary drinks.

read more