ACA, Violence, and Social Networks: Annual Review of Public Health Volume 38

April 21, 2017April 21, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses Volume Annoucement publhealth

We are pleased to remind everyone that the 2017 volume of the Annual Review of Public Health, now online, is published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. This influential content is now freely available to read, reuse, and share. Additionally, all 37 back volumes (1980-2016) are now free to read. Support for this initiative to increase openness and transparency in research is provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Here are a few content highlights for your reading pleasure:

There is still a lot of debate over the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and I recommend the article “The Affordable Care Act’s Impacts on Access to Insurance and Health Care for Low-Income Populations” by Kominski, Nonzee, and Sorensen as interesting background reading. I was particularly interested in the discussion about the people who are still uninsured, and struck by the geographical implications:

Almost 90% of all adults in the coverage gap live in the South, half in either Texas or Florida, which aligns with this region’s high uninsurance rates, limited Medicaid eligibility, and low uptake of Medicaid expansion (37). Consistent with demographic characteristics and policies excluding nondisabled adults in states that did not expand Medicaid, African Americans and childless adults also account for a disproportionate share of individuals in the coverage gap.

Another article that demanded my attention is “Climate Change and Collective Violence” by Levy, Sidel, and Patz. When people talk about the effects of climate change they mostly focus on sea levels and food harvests, but take things a couple of steps further and one of the things you can see is increased violence. Some of the conclusions addressed in this article are quite startling:

Studying conflict in sub-Saharan Africa between 1981 and 2002, Burke and colleagues found a significant association between warmer temperature and civil war. On the basis of their findings, they projected an approximately 54% increase in armed conflict in Africa by 2030, with an additional 393,000 battle-related deaths, assuming wars in the future are as deadly as recent wars.

It’s a complicated and well written article that also addresses some ways of preventing this violence. It’s on the top of my reading list.

Another article on my famed reading list is Valente and Pitts’ article, “An Appraisal of Social Network Theory and Analysis as Applied to Public Health: Challenges and Opportunities.” What drew my interest here was the section about research being done around social media and the Internet’s effect on health:

The evidence suggests that mediated communications can influence individual behaviors but they do so at a rate much lower than face-to-face communications do (37). Still, people can have hundreds, even thousands or more, of online contacts, which increases the potential for much influence. Moreover, some forms of mediated communications may be particularly influential. For example, specialty communities that emerge in forums such as PatientsLikeMe may be very influential because they offer a place where people can share information about extremely important and relevant topics among members of a specific community.

Of course anytime someone is doing research in social media it raises ethics and privacy concerns which the article also addresses as a problem that needs close review. For instance this troubling case:

In a similarly publicized study, Kramer and others (48) used Facebook as a social psychology laboratory and manipulated users’ Facebook News Feeds to induce negative or positive affect to study the social contagion of emotions. Facebook users did not provide overt consent to participate in the study, and many felt that their rights were violated (35). Furthermore, participants of in-person experimental studies are often debriefed when their study participation has concluded to reduce the likelihood that the study’s manipulations and procedures caused harm, yet no such debriefing was performed in this study.

So as usual Public Health provides much food for thought and interesting weekend reading!

Recruitment, Ostracism, and Brain Scans: Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior

April 7, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses Volume Annoucement orgpsych

Browse all the articles in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Volume 4.

Recently, a lot of media attention has focused on how technology businesses recruit, and retain, members of disadvantaged groups. In the turbulent wake of the immigration ban, there has been renewed discussion about hiring immigrants and those from other cultures. I was glad to see authors David Allen & James Vardaman addressing some of these issues in “Recruitment and Retention Across Cultures.” The article looks at how companies recruit workers and how that process is affected by different cultures. They also discuss how these different cultures face the challenge of assembling a diverse workforce:

Firms tend to (sometimes unintentionally) create barriers in the recruitment process by emphasizing job requirements that disadvantage immigrants (e.g., local experience), making negative assumptions (e.g., assuming immigrants have greater family responsibilities), or failing to appreciate immigrant credentials and skills. Additional research is needed to assess how recruitment policies affect immigrant recruitment, evidence that recruitment firms are more open to recruiting immigrants, the efficacy of developing immigrant networks, and the possibility that perceived skills shortages are a function of undervaluing immigrant credentials and skills.

Other research focuses on how differences in national culture affect the implementation of diversity recruitment initiatives. For example, Moore (2015) suggests that managers and employees hold culturally based native categories as to appropriate work roles related to gender. Thus, in a case study, a diversity initiative driven by a German parent company to increase the recruitment of women factory workers did not export as intended to a British context. The author concluded that effective diversity recruitment across cultures requires not only a recognition that cultural differences exist, but also an understanding of how practices and their meanings are recontextualized from one cultural context to another.

I learned a lot of new things from “Comparing and Contrasting Workplace Ostracism and Incivility” by D. Lance Ferris, Meng Chen & Sandy Lim. While I have read a lot about workplace harassment, I hadn’t seen research about incivility and ostracism before.

Workplace incivility has been defined as a subtype of workplace mistreatment that is characterized by low-intensity social interactions that violate workplace norms of respect and yet are ambiguous as to whether they are meant to harm the target of the incivility. As this definition implies, there are three important characteristics associated with uncivil behaviors: their violation of norms, their ambiguity with respect to the hostile intent, and their general low intensity. Typical examples of uncivil behaviors at work that meet these three criteria include making demeaning comments to another individual, interrupting someone, and not speaking to—or ostracizing—someone. Such behaviors are typically viewed as rude and falling short of people’s commonly held expectations for mutual respect at work.

The article also deals with ostracism, “which includes behaviors such as being avoided at work, being shut out of conversations, or having one’s greetings go unanswered at work.” That seems horrible and makes me even more appreciative of my work colleagues who make a point of saying hello even when I’m walking the hallways with my headphones on.

orgpsych-waldman Another article that sparked my imagination is “Neuroscience in Organizational Behavior” by David Waldman, MK Ward & William Becker, which made me wonder if team-building exercises would be more enjoyable if followed by a brain scan instead of a questionnaire. It turns out that the interviews and questions aren’t giving the level of data that other options might:

following a team process, a common practice of researchers is to get team members’ impressions of what the team process was about. Aside from recollection challenges on the part of team members, such assessment assumes an overall quality regarding a team process, rather than allowing for fluid or momentary shifts. As Waldman et al. (2015b) have argued and shown, qEEG neurosensing methods allow for more precise, momentary assessment of team processes and emergent states. In contrast, survey methods are not highly practical for assessing shifts in team processes or emergent states because of the interruption that would be caused. Moreover, although observation could be feasible, it is questionable whether observers can accurately assess phenomena such as team arousal or engagement, whereas neurosensing methods may be able to overcome such challenges”

I’d love to hear what you found interesting in this volume—the comments are open!

Suzanne K. Moses is Annual Reviews’ Senior Electronic Content Coordinator. For 15+ years, she has played a central role in the publication of Annual Reviews’ online articles. Not a single page is posted online without first being proofed and quality checked by Suzanne.

Welcoming the Annual Review of Cancer Biology

March 22, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses Journal News cancerbio

I’ve been looking forward to this series for a long time, and I’m glad to see the first volume fully published. Browse the table of contents for the Annual Review of Cancer Biology, Volume 1.

The autobiography by Harold Varmus, “How Tumor Virology Evolved into Cancer Biology and Transformed Oncology,” is a wonderful starting place for this series. As Dr. Varmus tells his story, he introduces us to a field that constantly changing:

The story I will tell here is about the path that led to this new state of affairs. In that sense, this article differs from the kind of intellectual autobiography that commonly opens a volume of an Annual Reviews journal. Those articles, which I have read with pleasure over several decades, instructively track the development of new methods and the discovery of new facts within a single laboratory in the course of a senior scientist’s long career. I intend to provide my perspective on how a field of biological research—represented by this first volume of the Annual Review of Cancer Biology—began, grew, evolved, and prospered: not an impersonal account, but one that discusses my views of changing tides in cancer research more than the ebb and flow of people, ideas, and findings in my own laboratory.

ca1-varmus It is a thoughtful and interesting history of not only Dr. Varmus’s career but how the field of cancer biology has developed.

Brandon Faubert & Ralph J. DeBerardinis introduced me to new methodologies in their article “Analyzing Tumor Metabolism In Vivo.” Working with live tumors is a new idea for me, and I was amazed at the wealth of information researchers are obtaining.

A comprehensive description of the pathways altered in cancer, the mechanisms by which they are perturbed, and the resulting metabolic vulnerabilities could drastically alter how we understand cancer and how we treat it. A key challenge is to apply systems that reliably report the metabolic features of intact tumors, particularly in patients. Although many current concepts in cancer metabolism derive from observations made in cultured cancer cell lines, research on the metabolic features of living tumors in mice and humans has begun to accelerate. We review some classical concepts in metabolic reprogramming, asking why metabolism is altered in cancer cells (i.e., the benefits of metabolic reprogramming to the cell) and how it is altered (i.e., the mechanisms of metabolic reprogramming). From there, we discuss approaches to investigating the metabolism of intact tumors and new principles in cancer biology arising from these studies.

Last on my reading list is “Resisting Resistance” by Ivana Bozic & Martin A. Nowak because I wanted to know more about the difficulties with targeted therapies and what the latest research looks like. What I discovered was that I’m going to need to dust off my biology textbooks to refresh my background, and that these therapies can evolve resistance.

Targeted therapies, immunotherapies, and improved chemotherapies are being developed to reduce the suffering and mortality that come from human cancer. Although these approaches, and in particular combinations of them, are expected to succeed eventually to a large degree, they all suffer one obstacle: Populations of replicating cells move away—typically in a high-dimensional space—from any opposing selection pressure they encounter. They evolve resistance. It is possible, however, to develop a precise mathematical understanding of the problem and to design treatment strategies that prevent resistance if possible or manage resistance otherwise.

Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, Volume 4

March 14, 2017March 14, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses Volume Annoucement statistics

Investigate the full table of contents for Volume 4 of the Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application.

st4-fingerprint One topic I’ve been tracking for a while is addressed by Stern’s article “Statistical Issues in Forensic Science.” In the past decade, there have been many challenges to accepted forensic science—such as fingerprint analysis. Fingerprints are used by the author to demonstrate how statistical methods could be used to address current problems:

Another concern expressed in the 2009 NRC report is whether the forensic practitioner community has a full appreciation of the role of uncertainty in forensic examinations. For many years (through the early 2000s), it was common for latent print examiners to support a claimed identification by noting that the process they followed had zero error rate. Another popular claim was that the source of a print was identified to the exclusion of all other people that had ever lived or ever would live. Those who work in scientific disciplines and appreciate the role of uncertainty know that such claims are not credible. Recent studies have demonstrated a low but nonzero misidentification error rate for latent fingerprint examiners. In other forensic disciplines, it is common to have examiners testify to a “reasonable degree of scientific certainty.” This language was recently criticized by the NCFS because it does not have a standard definition and might confuse or mislead jurors (NCFS 2016).

Jeffrey T. Leek & Leah R. Jager tackle another much discussed topic in their article “Is Most Published Research Really False?” This has been a concern in many fields for the past several years, and because a lot of the discussion has involved some high-level statistics, I was very glad to find more information from this perspective. The introduction is especially good at laying out some of the possible concerns:

But this system was invented before modern computing, data generation, scientific software, email, the Internet, and social media. Each of these inventions has placed strain on the scientific publication infrastructure. These modern developments have happened during the careers of practicing scientists. Many laboratory leaders received their training before the explosion of cheap data generation, before the widespread use of statistics and computing, and before there was modern data analytic infrastructure. At the same time, there has been increasing pressure from review panels, hiring committees, and funding agencies to publish positive and surprising results in the scientific literature. These trends have left scientists with a nagging suspicion that some fraction of published results are at minimum exaggerated and at worst outright false.

Statistics articles ripped from the headlines? We have one! For example, Dwork et al.’s article “Exposed! A Survey of Attacks on Private Data” offers an introduction to an interesting facet of the privacy discussion: How do we use information publicly while protecting a sensitive dataset:

We focus on the simple scenario in which there is a dataset x containing sensitive information, and the goal is to release statistics about the dataset to the public. These statistics may be fixed in advance or may be chosen by the analyst, who queries the dataset. Speaking intuitively (because we have not yet defined privacy), the goal in privacy-preserving data analysis is to protect the privacy of the individual records in the dataset, even if the analyst maliciously chooses queries according to an attack strategy designed to compromise privacy.

Friday at AAAS 2017: A Science Salad

February 22, 2017March 9, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses News general

schedule-board Today was a little bit of everything as I continued to get a feel for this years conference. I started off by checking in on some of the results from Obama’s 2013 BRAIN initiative to research new methods of treating and preventing brain disorders. This was the first all female panel I have seen at AAAS! It was really heartening to watch these engineers and researchers describe their projects. My favorite being the wearable PET scan! No more having to lay perfectly still in a big tube and pretend you’re on a roller coaster. Now there’s a chance of getting valuable diagnostic data from people who cannot hold still or safely lay down. It’s quite amazing.

From there I headed to a lively discussion about the ethics of gene editing. I found one speaker’s comparison of IVF treatment and gene therapy very compelling. I next found myself listening to Daniel Nocera talk about the chemistry behind his artificial leaves that can turn sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into fuel. I had to pull on all of my old high school chemistry lessons but I followed the discussion enough to be very impressed with the idea.

I especially enjoy the astronomy panels at every AAAS meeting, and usually come away counting down the months until a favored project launches. This year I was introduced to a coming exploration of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Europa has an ocean over a rocky sea bed that is covered by a thick sheet of ice. Those rocks and water make it a good candidate for having some sort of life. NASA is planning for 20 days of battery life on the surface while carrying 42 kg of scientific instruments. The mission is currently planned for 2024–25.

With my head full of space dreams, I found a seat at Naomi Oreskes’s Plenary lecture titled “The Scientist as Sentinel” and listened to her history of scientists as political activists. I was thinking about the good timing of that lecture as I followed a group of young scientists out into the hallway and heard them making plans for the protest on Sunday.

Annual Review of Animal Biosciences, Volume 5

February 17, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses Journal News animal

See the full table of contents for the Annual Review of Animal Biosciences, Volume 5.

The autobiography in Volume 5 of the Annual Review of Animal Bioscience, “My Scientific Journey: From an Agrarian Start to an Academic Setting” by Janice M. Bahr, explores her research in reproductive physiology with an emphasis on her relationships with her mentors and students. After completing her PhD, she planned to take a postdoctoral position or attend medical school; however, she learned that the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign was hiring. “Having been raised on a farm and milked enough cows to have a degree in it, I did know a lot about domestic animals.”

The job did come with challenges:

Little was I aware of the challenges of being the first woman hired in the Department of Animal Sciences of 40 men. I was the only female permanent faculty member for about 20 years. Even though I progressed through the academic ranks at an unprecedented speed, becoming an assistant professor in 1974, an associate professor in 1979, and a full professor in 1983, I was paid less as a full professor than the male associate professors in Animal Sciences. I described this experience as swimming upstream in a stream that had no water. Fortunately, Dr. Reginald Gomes, a distinguished reproductive biologist who became head of Animal Sciences in 1985, realized I was significantly underpaid based on my scholarly accomplishments. Women professors receiving a lower salary compared with their male counterparts were not unusual.

Even after many years of reading autobiographies from female scientists, stories like that still surprise me.

I grew up next to a dairy farm in Southwestern Virginia. Upon moving to Northern California, I found the sight of cows grazing with an ocean view rather befuddling. Reading Dr. W. Barendse’s article “Climate Adaptation of Tropical Cattle” gave me a similar feeling. There are a lot of variables in how “tropical” is defined, and the cattle that live within these regions face a host of challenges that I had never considered:

The issues associated with cattle in the tropics have been known for some time, and few new issues have arisen. For example, Bonsma identified (a) heat, including radiation, temperature, and humidity; (b) feed, including feed quality and the ability to use the feed available; (c) resistance, including to parasites, especially ticks, and to photosensitivity, especially eye cancer and keratosis; and (d) the ability to avoid noxious plants, not only as a feed source but also the physical aspects of thorns and other plant defenses.

I was also intrigued by Dr. Gerald Shurson’s article “The Role of Biofuels Coproducts in Feeding the World Sustainably.” I especially appreciated the section on the debate over food versus fuel, which opened up an interesting perspective on how biofuels could be competition for feedstock:

Grains, sugar, and oilseeds are the primary feedstocks used to produce biofuels, but they are also valuable commodities in food production. Thus, increased competition for these resources between biofuels, food, and food animal industries has served as the foundation for the food-versus-fuel debate. Although increases in biofuels production are expected to continue in some countries, production limits will likely be imposed for future expansion. Incentives for using alternative feedstocks (e.g., cellulosic materials) to produce biofuels are being implemented to maintain or reduce competition for traditional grains and oilseeds in biofuels and coproduct production.

Comments are open if you’d like to share what you found most interesting in this volume.

First day of AAAS 2017 – Policy, Climate, and Social Media

February 17, 2017February 17, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses News

Suzanne is attending the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston, MA, and we hope you enjoy her dispatches from the meeting.

aaas

Part of the joy of attending the meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the multiple tracks: everyone is going to choose sessions for their own reasons and everyone’s experience will be different. My first day started with the “Wicked Problem” of Climate Change. Wicked problems (if you’re not from Boston) are complex with no clear paths to solutions. They are often dependent on rapidly changing conditions and can’t be tackled in a linear way. The session ended up focusing a lot on how to work with people and the importance of seeing climate change discussions from different angles. For example, there were discussions about religious ecology, the neuroscience of denial, and not getting distracted by politics.

I liked the logic of working not globally or locally, but regionally. Instead of working within state lines, look at the ecosystem. For example, think about coastal wetlands instead of Florida. One of the speakers mentioned that farmers in the Midwest are adapting to changing climate conditions. They think about how to increase yield in the different climate, but they won’t say the words “climate change.” So scientists need to find ways of communicating that don’t invoke politically charged terms. There was a fantastic question from the audience from a high school teacher who pointed out that because the problem is multigenerational, we need to look very carefully at educating middle and high school students to continue the research.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Serving Society Through Science Policy” and there are many policy sessions on the schedule. The concerns about the new US administration’s approach to science and data is certainly fueling a lot of discussion in the hallways of the conference center. There are flyers and information about the March for Science, and panels about how to get involved in crafting government science policy.

The hallway conversations about the other big panel of the day, Social Media and Online Engagement, was much lighter than the talk fallowing the policy panel. It’s been interesting to watch this topic evolve in the six years I’ve been attending this meeting. At first, it was scientists seriously discussing whether it was appropriate for them to have an online presence. There were also presentations about Second Life and massive open online courses (MOOCs). Now we’re talking about using Twitter to network and create communities. There are stories of universities encouraging social media posting and tenure committees who see time spent building those communities as valid and important scholarly work. As one of the presenters said, “It’s not a distraction from my career, it is essential to my career.”

My day ended with the address from Barbara Schaal, AAAS President. This began with a recognition of the Junior Academy of Sciences winners, which made me think fondly of my own experiences in the Virginia chapter. Next, there were some awards presented and it was noted that many of the planned presenters, attendees, and one of the award winners were unable to attend due to the immigration ban. This set the tone for the rest of the evening with the President’s address focusing on the importance of science to society and the necessity to defend basic research.

That was my impression of day one. Tomorrow, things start in earnest with deep dives into specific topics of interest. I haven’t set my schedule in stone, but I look forward to discovering new topics and questions.

If you are also attending the AAAS Meeting, let us know what sessions and panels you attended and what you found interesting.

Annual Review of Physiology, Volume 79

February 14, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses Journal News physiol

View the full table of contents for the Annual Review of Physiology, Volume 79.

The first article to catch my attention inthis volume, “A Critical and Comparative Review of Fluorescent Tools for Live-Cell Imaging” by Elizabeth A. Specht et al., conjured for me images of white-coated researchers anxiously holding fluorescent light tubes over microscopes. This amusing vision was, of course, very fleeting, and the last remnants were swept away when I started reading the article and realized biological researchers use the phrase “fluorescent tool” in reference to the fluorescent markers, dyes, and sensors in biological samples. These tools are much more complicated and diverse than I realized and I was very interested in learning about how they work:

This review provides a broad overview of well-established fluorescent tools, with an eye toward recent developments and emerging technologies, and it refers the reader to more comprehensive and detailed reviews on individual techniques and applications. We begin with a discussion of general classes of fluorophores and their advantages and disadvantages for various applications. We then discuss methods for labeling a molecule of interest with a fluorescent moiety—including fluorescent protein fusions, incorporation of fluorescent moieties through nonnatural amino acid substitution, chemical labeling, and antibody labeling—emphasizing applications in live cells. We briefly review applications for monitoring proteins, which are already well established, and then focus on the extension of these techniques to high-throughput proteomics and screening.

Next on my personal reading list is the article by Johannes Overgaard & Heath A. Macmillan titled “The Integrative Physiology of Insect Chill Tolerance.” This article reminded me of when my little brother found a beetle frozen in a pool of ice when we were children. After marveling at it for days he decided to melt the ice so he could examine the beetle more closely and use it as part of an ongoing school science project. We were both quite shocked when the defrosted beetle turned out to be very much alive and not in favor of being used for science projects. (By “shocked” I mean we jumped and screamed when it started moving.)

This article looks at how insects survive ice and cold and the adaptations that make it possible:

The cold tolerance of insects has historically been classified by their ability to tolerate ice formation in the extracellular fluid (freeze-tolerant species) or to avoid freezing by lowering the freezing point of their extracellular fluid [freeze-avoiding species that survive low temperatures above their supercooling point (SCP)]. Studies of freeze tolerance and avoidance have revealed a range of fascinating physiological adaptations that involve accumulation of cryoprotectants, removal of ice nucleators, synthesis of antifreeze proteins, or use of severe dehydration, all of which allow insects to either tolerate or avoid freezing. Nevertheless, the classification of insect species as freeze avoiding and freeze tolerant has received some criticism because it fails to take into account that insect species from warm regions experience loss of homeostasis, cold-induced injury, and death at temperatures above those causing extracellular freezing.

ph79-tongue Finally, I discovered the article by Charlotte M. Mistretta & Archana Kumari, “Tongue and Taste Organ Biology and Function: Homeostasis Maintained by Hedgehog Signaling.” I’ve given some thought to how taste works but because it seems such a basic part of life I forget how complex it actually is. This article certainly reminded me and also included bonus discussion of the hedgehog pathway, one of my favorite names in all of science. As the authors write in the abstract:

The tongue is an elaborate complex of heterogeneous tissues with taste organs of diverse embryonic origins. The lingual taste organs are papillae, composed of an epithelium that includes specialized taste buds, the basal lamina, and a lamina propria core with matrix molecules, fibroblasts, nerves, and vessels. Because taste organs are dynamic in cell biology and sensory function, homeostasis requires tight regulation in specific compartments or niches.

If you found an article in this volume that interests you, please let me know in the comments!

Research partners: Happy Valentine’s Day from Annual Reviews

February 14, 2017February 22, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses Authors biochem, biophys, immunol, physiol

I have a soft spot for the Annual Review autobiographies. I open each volume’s table of contents and eagerly search for them. I’m always interested in how our authors discovered their passion for their field and the interplay between their lives and their science. Among these articles there are a few that are written by husband and wife teams—and they are an extraordinary glimpse into shared lives.

herzenbergs

I first encountered Leonard and Leonore Herzenberg in their article “Genetics, FACS, Immunology, and Redox: A Tale of Two Lives Intertwined,” published in the Annual Review of Immunology in 2004. I was quite taken with the way they handed the narrative back and forth, as well as the humor with which they told their story. I was delighted to find them writing for us again in 2014 for the Annual Review of Physiology, and even more delighted to find they had done a video interview! These two articles remain among my favorites, and I was sad to learn that Dr. Leonard Herzenberg had passed away soon after the video was made.

Here is a snippet from Dr. Leonore Herzenberg about their time in Paris at the Pasteur Institute from the 2004 volume of the Annual Review of Immunology:

…because Len loved hands-on experimentation, I took over much of the data recording, computation, and display (plotting) that was needed. The work was tedious (slide rules were the closest thing to computers at the time). However, it gave me the opportunity to do a preliminary analysis of the data and try novel approaches to analyzing LacZ induction kinetics. Len left this to me. He was more interested in developing methods and experiment designs that would enable clear conclusions without a lot of mathematical interference. This division of labor, which reflects Len’s innate preference for concreteness and my innate love for theory, remains with us even today.

bb-richardsons Drs. Jane and David Richardson wrote “Doing Molecular Biophysics: Finding, Naming, and Picturing Signal Within Complexity” for the Annual Review of Biophysics in 2013. While the article focuses mainly on their research, it is full of stories about their shared experiences, such as this one:

We spent a large fraction of our lives from the early 1970s to the early 1990s in Fred Brooks’ computer graphics lab at the University of North Carolina (UNC). There we accomplished much of our own research in protein structure, acted as guinea pigs for in-depth testing of their software and hardware, and played happily with the science fiction–level gadgets that explored far-out new possibilities such as virtual reality displays, volume rendering, force feedback, fitting models into electron density, or tugging on atoms to move local structure with (more or less) physical realism. Some things worked splendidly and soon became widespread; some failed by being surprisingly unhelpful, making you sick, or whacking you in the chest (their gadgets never just fell apart)…

iy7-kleins

In 1989, George and Eva Klein wrote “How One Thing Has Led to Another” for the Annual Review of Immunology. Their story begins with a whirlwind romance and an intrigue-filled move into Sweden just as the Iron Curtain was falling on Dr. Klein’s Hungarian homeland. From the epilogue of their article:

As each of us is moving towards the approaching darkness, the sun is never setting over the vast oceans of science. It has been a rare privilege to live and work through the times when the genetic material turned from protein to DNA, when adaptive changes in cell populations-including antibody production-were unmasked as Darwinian variations and selection, when GOD became the rearrangement of immunoglobulin genes, violating the dogma that all somatic cells have the same DNA….It was a great time, and it still is, but it is only the stumbling, stuttering, premature foreshadowing of what lies ahead. We have barely scratched the surface.

bi-tabor The story of Celia White Tabor and Herbert Tabor’s work in biochemical research was chronicled along with their personal history in the article “It All Started on a Streetcar in Boston” for the Annual Review of Biochemistry in 1999. Among the scientific discussion are small stories about their lives and friendships, making this an interesting read.

We first met on a Boston streetcar in 1940, being introduced by a mutual friend. Celia was returning from research work at the Massachusetts General Hospital as part of her senior thesis at Radcliffe College, and Herb was returning from a concert by the Boston Symphony. We were married in 1946 after Celia had finished her medical training. We started working together in 1952, and we are still actively collaborating in our studies on various aspects of the biosynthesis and function of polyamines.

Annual Review of Pathology: Mechanisms of Disease, Volume 12

February 3, 2017February 3, 2017 Suzanne K. Moses Journal News pathmechdis

View the full table of contents for the Annual Review of Pathology: Mechanisms of Disease, Volume 12.

pm12-jaffe Elaine S. Jaffe starts this volume off with her autobiographical article “The Microscope as a Tool for Disease Discovery—A Personal Voyage.” Her research involves the classification of hematological malignancies, and this article reveals her passion for all the things that can be discovered through the microscope as well as some surprising information about pathologists:

Looking at a microscopic slide of diseased tissue provides a wealth of information regarding the pathogenesis and pathophysiology of disease. Pathologists are very visual in their approach, and many pursue art or photography as hobbies. Most are adept at recognizing faces or images as well as discerning the varied microscopic patterns.

Sometimes political events highlight portions of our articles that I might not otherwise have noticed. Finding that our articles resonate with current events isn’t unusual, but it may strike you as surprising for an article in the Annual Review of Pathology: Mechanisms of Disease. Perhaps it is less surprising to find such resonances in an autobiography. Dr. Jaffe’s description of her parents and family, who immigrated to the United States from what is now Ukraine, is particularly timely:

My father was born in Steblov, and my mother in Ryzhanovka. My father’s father, who was a cantor, came to the United States in 1914 with his two oldest children, and he expected the rest of the family to follow once he was settled. Cousins who already lived in New York facilitated their arrival… My parents were typical of many immigrant families in their drive to succeed in their new homeland. Our house was always the center for extended family events and gatherings. Political events and intense debate dominated conversations.

Another article of interest is Walsh et al.’s “Humanized Mouse Models of Clinical Disease.” Anyone who has read much medical science realizes that we use animal models for several reasons, as the authors describe:

Animal models are used as surrogates of human biology due to the logistical and ethical restrictions of working with cell and tissue samples from human donors and the biological limitations of culture systems. Small animals such as mice and rats are widely used mammalian model systems due to their small size, ease of maintenance and handling, short reproductive cycle, sharing of genomic and physiological properties with humans, and ability to be readily manipulated genetically.

Of course, these models aren’t perfect, but they are getting closer as humanized mice are altered to more perfectly mimic human systems. I was surprised by how many issues these alterations are letting us research—for instance, to research infectious diseases immunodeficient mice can be grafted with human immune cells so researchers can study the human immune response. I have to note that we are in fact living in the future predicted by the science fiction authors I read as a child.

If you found an article in this volume that particularly interests you, please let me know in the comments!

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Author: Suzanne K. Moses