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Sense of Place

Leopold near Chihuahua, Mexico, 1938
Photo: Starker Leopold

An era ago, a student of Nature named Aldo Leopold, after many years of living alongside the great American wilderness, wrote a classic book illustrating how a sense of place can become embedded in a person’s being. Some time later, an Austrian biologist stood on the banks of the Danube river and waxed poetic about his homeland. This man was Konrad Lorenz, and among his many discoveries as one of the founders of the field of animal behavior, or ethology, was that of imprinting. Imprinting is the process by which a young animal learns who its parents are. Gazing on this river, he mused that perhaps we imprint on the landscapes we belong to

Lorenz with his hand-reared greylag geese.

The basis of this thinking is of course clear - humans, as much as other animals, go through critical phases of development in our youth in which we are exposed to certain environmental cues - social, musical, cultural, and perhaps (critically) ecological. It's natural to think that the lack of exposure to nature for those of us who grow up in urbanized environments may be in part responsible for the vast disconnect between individuals and the land in such places, a trend that Leopold was much aggrieved by.

Imprinting is a fascinating concept. We now know that developmental or environmental experiences (e.g. nutrition deprivation) can leave a mark even on the very stuff of life itself - our DNA. These effects might last over multiple generations, incredible as that sounds (see the Swedish Hunger Study). But I wonder if the reverse can also be true: it often happens that we are attracted to places and things we have absolutely no prior experience of. Can a craving for something missing lead us to pursue a novel connection to something very very old...?

I like connecting disparate ideas, so let's that stew for a minute.

I had an overnight guest yesterday who's a graduate student visiting our lab from the University of Nebraska. Our conversation started off with a fascinating topic that is now gaining traction in ecology - the so-called 'Landscape of Fear'. Briefly, the idea behind the landscape of fear is something like ecosystem imprinting - namely, that prey species are affected not just directly by predation itself (i.e. being eaten), but that fear alone can drive their dynamics. So, for instance by animals adjusting their movement and behavior in response to perceived risks.

Fear not, grasshopper.  Pic: Bob Handelman

But what really blows my mind are how such seemingly subtle interactions can cascade throughout entire ecosystems. Thus the death of a humble grasshopper, can leave a unique signature on the very soil in which it died depending on whether or not it was exposed to the risk of being hunted by a spider. This in turn can affect what grows on that soil. The mere presence of the spider's silk can affect the propensity of a plant to get eaten. Guppies that are stressed alter the ecology of entire ponds, from the algae upwards. Multiply this by all the many species on earth, and all their interactions, and all the inorganic substrates on which these interactions occur - and you get a tiny inkling of the complexity one has to grapple with in ecology.

Over breakfast this morning our conversation flowed in a different direction - also about landscapes, yet this time about attraction rather than fear. Despite being transplants from urban coastal urban areas, we both felt an inexplicable sense of connection to mountains. How could this be? We had not grown up near mountains - indeed, I never experienced snow until I was in my twenties. Yet upon moving out West, gazing up at the Rockies had almost moved moved us tears.This experience seems to be shared by many. In a collection of essays in the book "Snow Leopard," biologist Jan E. Janecka describes arriving in the rugged Himalayan highlands of Mongolia for the first time in his life and yet feeling as though he had returned home, so strongly did the landscape resonate with him. Is it something about the sheer awe mountains inspire? Not necessarily - for other people may be attracted to deserts, and still others to oceans (having always been a stone's throw from the deep blue seas, personally I have never been drawn to it when near or missed it from afar)...

In my case, I could trace the source of at least some of my sentiments. You see, I spent my childhood in Sri Lanka with a healthy dose of old western TV programming - the ones from the US were circa 1960s-70s.  One of my favorites was Marty Stouffer's Wild America. Big and small, the wildlife was all there - from chipmunks to cougars, marmots to moose. And bighorn sheep, who featured in the theme song.  These programs captured the spirit of the landscape he knew, loved, and belonged to - the Colorado Rockies. I'm quite sure it played a major role in my wanting to become a biologist, despite having had no interactions with nature other than with the caterpillars in my back yard. A documentary film maker, making films perhaps a decade before I was born, transmitted a message that left a mark somewhere in my psyche such that when I arrived on that very landscape the sense of familiarity made my breath catch in my throat.

A small patch of non-rainforest forest outside Kandy, Sri Lanka.

Does this explain the mystery? Well...not quite. Because I am also attracted to another, very distinct landscape, something I had never seen on television, and indeed something I thought I had dreamed until I actually came across it back where I came from. These are the tropical non-rainforests. They go by many names, and vary in appearance, but they share some features -  they are drier, have a more open canopy, and are more sunlit than rainforests.

Two diametrically different landscapes.

And now here I'm going to cut loose and speculate. Given the existence of a landscape of fear, might not the opposite be true - could there also be a landscape of love? The so-called 'Pastoral Idyll' some say might reflect a very old human attraction to the type of landscapes (some of) our ancestors successfully made a living in - open meadows dotted with streams and woodlands. Whether or not this particular hypothesis is true, it would be intriguing to understand the mechanism that draws some of us to particular landscapes, for certainly the phenomenon exists. Perhaps in some cases, we are able to finger the source, and in others the causes are more diffuse.

And by extension, might it be that individuals - animal or human - who experience this profound contentment of place also leave a mark on their surroundings when connected to them in life or death, altering the very structure of these places in much the same way as those humble grasshoppers and guppies? And as we lose sense of place, when the native species are driven extinct and the identity of landscapes are lost, might we not be losing more than species and their interactions? Dust to dust...

For a more academic treatment, see Sense of Place on Wikipedia.

In Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Education

I just watched a very inspiring Daily Show.

Now that's not a sentence once expects to come across very often (no offense, Jon), but it was an interview with Malala Yousafzai.  Malala, now sixteen, is an outspoken Pakistani activist for education as the most important tool for solving the multitude of problems facing humanity. I've got to hand it to her father as well for clearly being the guiding role model in her life. She was shot in the head by the Taliban last year for her efforts, but fortunately for all of us, she made it.

Malala shares this view with me, my parents, and the innumerable other immigrants who came to the United States seeking a better life for themselves and their children thinking that education would enable greater opportunities in life.  This is why now, in the midst of our government's ridiculous shutdown, I look around at the ailing public school system of this once-great country and feel very sad.

The other day I was astonished to learn that the high school that my friends and I spent four years of our lives, receiving the FREE education that sent us on to good universities and even medical school, had slid down a hole. It was now gang territory, with police cars frequently on patrol. Some families are being forced to make a ridiculous choice – give up their homes to  move to a better public school district, or fork out  the tuition for private school. How did this happen?

Well, people blame the shifting demographics. Yes, the community make-up is now much less white middle class than it used to be fifteen years ago, when I graduated.  But is that really all there is to it? Blaming demography smacks of - and I'll say it outright - racism. No, what's really at the bottom of it, as always, is economics. Many of those kids filling up my old high school probably have hard-working parents. Probably some of them have two or more jobs to make ends meet, legally or illegally, doing the work that no one else wants to do. So life's probably tough and there's probably little time left over to supervise the math homework. And this is to say nothing of the state of the school itself - I have no idea how much financial resources are now available to my old school district.

I hope it's better off than the sorry state of Philadelphia schools. Philly is another place I've got fond memories of, having spent six years of my life in grad school at Penn.  What fundamentalist religious groups elsewhere have tried to do with bombs, Pennsylvania Republicans have managed to accomplish by mucking around with their budget - namely, to rob a generation of their right to an education. The great irony of this fate befalling Philadelphia, home of the Liberty Bell and birth place of the US Constitution, cannot escape notice. So many come to the United States seeking better lives, and education as the means to achieve it.

It seems that not a year goes by that I don't hear of some atrocious piece of idiocy concerning budget cuts to public school programs - at all levels, including the valuable public university system. The saddest thing - I just don't understand why. What does crippling education accomplish, except to undermine the very future of this country? It's scary as hell because to me it's personal. If my newly-arrived parents, knowing nothing about the US system, had unknowingly placed me in a school that was struggling, my life would be very different right now.

As people like Malala courageously fight to ensure that every child has the chance to get a decent education, she puts our politicians to shame.  She may only be sixteen, but she exhibits so much more maturity than the clowns in power, I hope they take a lesson from her.

Women lead nearly half of US households, yet still lag behind in science

The role of women in the workplace is a perennial topic of discussion as we collectively aspire to the ideal of gender equality. I'd like to juxtapose two interesting trends about women in the US that seem to be much-discussed this year.  The first is a study released this week by the Pew Research Center that has been grabbing headlines with the finding that 40% of households with children under the age of 18 have women as the top earner.  These so-called "breadwinner moms" break down into two distinct categories: those who out-earn their husbands, and those who are single parents. The former (37%) are affluent, well-educated and mostly white, while the latter (67%) tend to earn less, are less likely to be college educated, and mostly non-white.

Now let those numbers stew for a moment, while you consider another set of facts.

The US National Science Foundation finds that, while women earn around 50% of the doctorates in science and engineering, they comprise only 21% and 5% of full professors in science and engineering respectively, as reported in a special section of the journal Nature earlier this year.

Let's combine these two pictures.

Nearly 3 out of 4 adults surveyed in the Pew study said the growing number of working mothers made it harder for families to raise children.  In science, the overlap between a woman's reproductive years and those critical to career advancement (graduate school, postdoc) are responsible for a dramatic decline in the number of women who even apply for faculty positions. Women were much more likely than men to decide against careers as research faculty if they planned to have children, or already had them, during their postdoc (28-41% vs. 17%-20% respectively). From personal observation, the worst scenario seems to be for academic couples who often have to struggle to find jobs in the same city let alone the same institution (while dual-hires do occur, it's far from guaranteed however family-friendly the institution). Meanwhile, the gender gap in science is pervasive and grows as one looks at successively higher levels: women receive less funding on average, are much less likely to be asked to serve on scientific advisory boards, and less likely to hold positions at successively higher ranks within academia. Is it any surprise then that many women simply opt out, or are forced to?

What gives?

Well, of course it seems that women have to sail against headwinds of bias that are encultured in both genders at a very young age that positions of leadership and power are masculin. Scientists of both sexes tend to judge females more harshly than males (where do you stand? Try the Implicit Association Test). This applies both inside and outside science, since the flipside of the Pew data is that men are still by and large the dominant wage earners (how many single dads out there and how much are they earning, I'd like to know?). If you do the math, it means that in households with kids under the age of 18 just under 15% of them are headed up by women who are out-earning their husbands despite the increasing fraction that are getting college or even graduate degrees.  This is not news.

The less examined issue is the model of "success" pursued by the US.

What does it take to be "successful" in science or anything else? What does it take to be in that 15%? If Sheryl Sandberg is your role model, i.e. someone who delights in answering emails at 2 a.m. and being on the go 24-7, then we're in trouble.  Because the imbalance is not just about women, it's about our priorities in life.  Too often, in the US you are expected to "work hard and play hard," but what isn't mentioned is that when you work hard, someone else has to pick up the slack. What these numbers are telling me is that it's still women that are doing the picking up.  This is because it is still more socially acceptable - and indeed expected - that men pursue professional aspirations while women tend to household matters, regardless of whether they both work.  Clearly, in a workplace that is blind to the family circumstances of individuals, one expects that a household in which one partner is wholly devoted to their career and the other chooses to be devoted to raising a family will be more efficient in advancing the professional aspirations of that single professional, than a household in which both must work out compromises in terms of career and family time (or geographic location). Although it doesn't matter in principal which sex does what, these data and what I actively see around me suggest that it's still predominantly women opting to dial back on their careers.

Clearly, the implicit difficulty of balancing family and career stem from the fact that there is an overwhelming social pressure to devote one's life to one's career in order to succeed, and there are very few voices advocating for a more holistic understanding of success for either women OR men. This is why there is a certain degree of backlash against feminism classically construed. Why is it that we're debating whether women can have it all, without asking men the same? How do men feel about working manic hours and sacrificing time with their children in order to make the next deadline, prepare for the next meeting, or meet whatever yardstick of professional achievement is placed before them? It's time to recognize what constitutes a good enough life.

In science as in anything else, it's also easy to see that a competitive environment selects for a certain kind of personality, male or female. The words "energetic," "assertive," and "dominating" come to mind. The same attributes likely influence the outcomes of decisions in households with dual-career couples. To be sure there are women with these attributes, but as I look around my peers I must say they are not in the majority. It's not that women have simply to be asked to join the alpha male success club, but that the nature of the club needs changing. Gender-based social norms run deep, and they are self-reinforcing.

Institutionalizing gender equality means providing paternity as well as maternity leave. And in science, it means recognizing that people of a certain age are mature adults regardless of where they are in their careers - i.e. male and female postdocs should be permitted to fulfill family duties without suffering more than those who have no such cares. Family-friendly policies such as on-site daycare centers and maternity or paternity leave in any workplace are necessary steps to balancing the demands of work and family but they only go so far.

Advancing women, societally, means that we recalibrate our expectations of both sexes.

On Science Serving Society, from a DC Insider

I recently attended a talk by Dr. Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist who was basically in charge of running NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmostpheric Administration) from 2009-2013.  One of the most highly cited ecologists since, well ever, she was part of Obama's 'Dream Team' of science advisors. During those four years, NOAA went from one turbulent challenge to another including the Gulf Oil spill and multiple extreme storm events like hurricane Irene.

Her talk, under the theme of "Science Serving Society" was fascinating in terms of both content and delivery.  There was not a powerpoint in sight, instead she took us to a "field trip" to that strange foreign country known as Washington DC via a series of twelve short stories that illustrated the culture and habits of yonder parts.  I thought I'd share some little nuggets of wisdom here by way of some quotes that stuck:

"People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care"  - Referring to the situation of concerned fishermen anxious about their livelihoods following the disastrous Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf. Point: Researchers may harbor a wealth of detailed knowledge, but applying it takes more finesse and the ability to relate to people.

"Wait a minute, I thought you were a scientist...but I just understood everything you said!" - VP Joe Biden to Dr. Lubchenco while being briefed on fisheries in the gulf. Point: Scientists need to think about how well they're communicating. The onus is on us to do it clearly and understandably.

"I don't need to your weather satellites, I've got the weather channel." - Congressman to Dr. Lubchenco, in reference to the ageing fleet of weather satellites that were in orbit at the time. Point: It's easy to forget that others don't know what you know. Though she was gracious about this, to me the fact that this elected official didn't realize that weather reports on TV relied on publicly funded weather satellites set off additional alarm bells at the clear inadequacy of standards we have for holding office.  Just as doctors, accountants, and lawyers have to pass examinations, perhaps politicians should be tested on basic competence.

Paraphrase: Scientists have a contract with the public...Sometimes we academics tend think of students who go outside it as failures.  Instead of writing them off, we actually need to encourage many more to go into policy. Referring to the disconnect between the classic priorities of scientists and needs of both science and society.

"It looks as wholesome as peaches and apple pie...But I think it's a serious threat...and the whole community needs to scream bloody murder if it goes through." - In reference to the so-called "High Quality Research Act (which I blogged about earlier here).

Thanks Dr. Lubchenco, for being such a fabulous female role model and reminding us to step back and look at the big picture.

What's the use of science?

The so-called "High Quality Research Act" proposed by representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), wants research funded by the National Science Foundation to benefit the interests of the United States by advancing "national health, prosperity, or welfare" and securing "national defense by promoting the progress of science". It also wants science to solve problems that are actually important to society while not duplicating research that has already been funded by NSF.   It may seem at first that this proposal by the Chair of the Science, Technology and Space Committee is a noble attempt to hold scientists to high standards and make sure that valuable taxpayer dollars are spent on useful research.  So what's all this fuss about peer review?

Gene patents. The story is still not resolved!

It is hard to believe that almost one year has passed since my last post. That year was very busy, so busy in fact that I did not have any inspiration to read and write anything aside from what is directly relevant to my research. Realizing how Koyaanisqatsi my life has become, I am trying re-balance it.

I just read a small news piece in the journal Science about the ongoing U.S. Supreme Court case on gene patents. Can you believe that this issue is still unresolved? If you are a reasonable person who understands what genes are, I think it is pretty obvious that they cannot be patented. It's like trying to patent, say, "the left lung", or "the red blood cells", or any other part of human organism. It's absurd. Of course, corporations are concerned with one question, and that question is no not whether something is reasonable/ethical/fair/etc or not. The question is about money. If they could make money by patenting the left lung, they certainly would. The only reason they do not do it is because the absurdity of such intention is obvious. Lungs are big. Everybody can feel them. Everybody understands what they are doing. Nobody would accept the idea that their very own lung in their very own chest would by owned by somebody else. At least I hope nobody would! Genes on the other hand are small. Nobody can see them. Very few people really understand what they are doing. So, the absurdity of the statement that somebody would own some part of you is suddenly blurred.

Just so you know, the company that currently owns the patents to BRCA genes, and by doing so has effectively monopolized the market of breast and ovarian cancer testing, is Myriad Inc. The fact that Dr. Walter Gilbert, a Nobel Prize winner in 1980 in chemistry and a Harvard professor, sits on their board of directors and endorses such absurd legal actions is very disappointing.

If you are wondering what kind of arguments can the Myriad attorneys possibly present in favor of patenting genes, here is one:  "isolated" BRCA genes are laboratory products and, unlike chromosomes, they do not occur in nature. By the same logic, "isolated" left lungs are laboratory products and, unlike entire human bodies, do not occur in nature. (Welcome to the world of legal language.)

Good day!