Together, the ingredients of a traditional Asian diet — soy, green tea and vegetables in the cabbage family — may create a potent anti-cancer force in the human body, says OSU nutrition scientist Emily Ho. Sorting out the biological and chemical mechanisms that explain the apparent protective power of these and other nutrients — particularly zinc — is the focus of Ho’s research.

“In the development of cancer, there’s not just one thing going wrong at the cellular level — there are a lot of different things going wrong,” says Ho, an assistant professor in the College of Health and Human Sciences and the Linus Pauling Institute. “Like a lot of chronic diseases, cancer has a complex etiology. So instead of looking for one magic bullet for cancer prevention, it makes more sense to look at a combination of nutrients.”

The Asian diet may contain the secret to preventing the most prevalent cancer among American men: prostate cancer. Ho, whose parents are Chinese-Canadian immigrants, points to the stunning gap between U.S. and Chinese rates: fewer than two cases per 100,000 Shanghai-born Chinese versus 58 cases among U.S.-born Caucasians. But even more revealing is how that gap narrows dramatically when Chinese men live in the U.S. for five years or more — catapulting to 23 cases, according to recent data published in the International Journal of Cancer Research. And even though U.S.-born Chinese have lower rates of prostate cancer than U.S.-born Caucasians (37 cases versus 58), their incidence remains staggeringly high when compared to their Chinese-born peers.

Clearly, life in America puts men at greater risk for prostate cancer. Diet is the most likely culprit, according to Ho. Along with several of her LPI colleagues, Ho is looking hard at the soy-tea-veggie synergy — and the West-East dietary gap. Americans eat just 1 to 3 milligrams of soy each day, compared to the Japanese intake of 10 to 50 milligrams. Fewer than 10 percent of Americans drink even one cup of green tea a day, while the Asian diet typically includes three or four cups. And those critical cruciferous vegetables? Only 12 grams a day in the U.S., versus 55 grams in Japan.

“In the U.S., most of the cruciferous vegetables are either cabbage or broccoli,” notes Ho. “In Asia, we eat a whole gamut of cruciferous vegetables, things like bok choy and other traditional Asian greens that are not widely consumed by the typical American family.”

In addition, she has zeroed in on a single nutrient with a unique link to the prostate: zinc. Ubiquitous in the body — found in muscles, bones, organs, cells and fluids — this trace element is most concentrated in the male reproductive system. Semen’s zinc level is 100 times higher than blood’s. And the prostate gland, which produces seminal fluid, contains the highest zinc concentration of all soft tissues.

To Ho, zinc deficiency is a likely smoking gun in the prostate cancer mystery.

“We know that as prostate cancer develops, zinc levels decrease in the epithelial cells — the cells that line the prostate gland,” she says. “But we don’t know why. It intrigues me. I want to try to figure it out.”

Ho’s fascination with the complexities and conundrums of science began when she was growing up near Toronto, the daughter of an engineer and a nurse. While other students were slogging through biology and math because they had to, she was riveted to cell diagrams and algebraic equations. It was at the University of Guelph where she found her field — along with a mentor to guide her way. A summer research internship with a biologist studying genetic mutations and antioxidants in fruit flies awakened Ho’s interest in DNA and antioxidant nutrients. That in turn led her to the nutrition department, where a professor named Tammy Bray was also doing antioxidant research. Bray’s work seemed less theoretical than the fruit fly studies, more immediately applicable, more directly linked to pressing problems. Nutrition science appealed to Ho’s pragmatic and altruistic streaks. Inspired, too, by Bray’s deep reserves of drive and dedication, she became Bray’s protege.

“Tammy definitely has one of those infectious, enthusiastic personalities,” says Ho. “She’s a tough lady to keep up with, so everyone in her lab has a really strong work ethic and a lot of passion about what they do.”

Ho followed her mentor to Ohio State University to get her Ph.D., and then went to UC Berkeley for postdoctoral work. After Bray became dean of the OSU College of Health and Human Sciences, Ho applied for a position in the Nutrition and Exercise Sciences department. “I’m very happy to have Tammy as my boss again,” says Ho, whose husband, Malcolm Lowry, is also at OSU, doing immunology research in the Microbiology Department.

Ho is attacking the prostate-cancer riddle on a number of fronts — both in the lab and in the field. Just understanding the biochemistry of zinc presents a tangle of challenges. As a component in more than 300 proteins, such as p53 — a DNA-repair protein that becomes mutated in more than half of human tumors — it clearly plays a role in fending off rogue cell growth. “We know that zinc combats oxidative damage from free radicals,” Ho says. “We know that it plays a role in DNA repair, and that it has important anti-inflammatory properties. We know that it helps shut off proliferation of mutant cells. But the mechanism for these processes is still unknown.”

The world’s best food source for zinc is the oyster. Half a dozen fried oysters will give you 100 percent of your daily requirement. Coming in second is beef, although three ounces of pot roast provide only half the zinc in six of the slippery shellfish. But as Ho cautions, loading up on any one nutrient — particularly in synthetic form as a tablet or capsule — may not be effective in promoting health and preventing disease. Her research, and that of her fellow LPI scientists, suggests that whole foods and natural, full-spectrum supplements contain not just essential nutrients, but essential combinations of nutrients. In rat studies, for instance, she and her colleagues have found soy and tea together have a much stronger anti-tumor effect than either food alone. The same two foods also combine to significantly reduce hyperplasia (rapid, abnormal enlargement) in rat prostates. “Soy and tea,” Ho says, “may inhibit signals in proteins that ultimately contribute to cancer.”

She’s looking, too, at the other key ingredient of the Asian diet — cabbage-type vegetables — in prostate-cancer risk. Collaborating with Oregon Health & Science University, she is conducting a “retrospective” study, looking back at the dietary histories of 400 to 500 older men. Of particular interest is how much broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and other cruciferous veggies they’ve eaten. Blood will be examined, too, for tell-tale DNA changes called “epigenetic alterations,” which scientists now know can lead to abnormalities that in turn lead to cancer.

“What we’re finding,” says Ho, “is that sulforaphane, a compound that’s found in cruciferous vegetables, can help reverse some of these epigenetic alterations.”

That certain elements, minerals, vitamins and compounds occur side-by-side in nature is, Ho says, “no accident.” Teasing out the mechanisms of one microscopic substance — zinc, for instance — is daunting enough. Figuring out the interactive roles of an entire complex of substances is the holy grail of the nutrition sciences.

For Ho, that quest comes down to something very personal, something very human. “I feel like the research we do — even though it’s mostly basic science, with my students working at a lab bench with a pipette — ultimately could have a big impact on my own family and yours,” she says. “That’s what’s exciting for me.”

A rare specimen in the soup

Marry? Or not marry?

The Malthus analogy

In the rural West, geography defines us.

I live with my husband and teenage daughters on the shoulder of Red Owl Mountain, one of the many mountains that make up the Swan Range, which is part of the crazy quilt of ranges that forms the Rocky Mountains in northwest Montana. Our cabin lies at the north end of a shoestring valley between the Swan Range and the Mission Mountains. The Swan River flows through this valley, with the Continental Divide a few miles east, as the eagle flies. The grizzly and wolf populations outnumber the human population here, giving new meaning to coexistence and sustainability.

Since moving here in the mid-1990s, we had heard wolves howl from the shoulder of our mountain. We had found their tracks pressed into the snow outside our cabin door. But we had never seen them — not until one misty August morning while my young daughters and I knelt in our garden, peacefully pulling weeds. A doe burst out of the forest and tore across the meadow, two wolves in close pursuit. One black, the other gray, they closed in on the doe’s haunches. In less than two heartbeats they pierced the woods on the far side of the meadow, leaving a wake of quaking vegetation.

This drama, which unfolded not 20 feet from us, sparked my quest to understand these large predators — both in relation to eco-systems and to human beings. My inquiry has taken me into wolf dens with field biologists and has led me to a wolf kill on my land so fresh the earth was still wet with blood. It has taken me to contentious meetings with hotheaded ranchers and equally hotheaded wolf advocates. It has compelled me to spend early morning hours perched atop a high knoll overlooking Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley, observing wolf life unfold in all its drama.

At every turn, the wolves have surprised me — with their courage, with their heedlessness of the politics of humans, with their big hearts and big feet. But far from giving me romanticized notions, my intimacy with wolves has left me with a pragmatic understanding of their feast-or-famine existence and tooth-and-claw role in a biotic community.

Cristina Eisenberg is a Ph.D. student in Forestry and Wildlife, OSU College of Forestry. She is currently at work on a book about trophic cascades, Landscapes of Hope: Trophic Cascades and Biodiversity, for Island Press.

So Jing, 21, decided to use that experience as motivation to study medicine and become a pediatrician. In her first year at OSU, she wanted to learn to diagnose and solve problems, and she jumped at a chance to learn those skills in a research laboratory. “It was the first lab I found that was looking for a freshman to do real research. Dr. Nonogaki was specifically looking for someone to take on their own projects, which was pretty unique and very exciting,” she explains.

As she learned laboratory techniques, Jing found that she was not alone. Other undergrads were doing research in her area, the Integrative Seed Biology Program, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. Established by Associate Professor Hiro Nonogaki in the Department of Horticulture, the program offers undergraduates a chance to gain research skills while they discover how seed genes function.

“I think it is good for undergraduate students to do this research,” Nonogaki says, “and to present their findings at conferences. It is important for them to be exposed to real scientific research and to experts in the field. This is part of learning and helps students to be successful.”

Working with Nonogaki, post-doctoral researchers and graduate students, undergrads in the lab explore the genes that control germination in seeds. They are focusing on Arabidopsis (a weed that is an important model system for plant biology) and tomato. Such knowledge can illuminate the fundamental processes that guide embryo growth and development and lead to practical applications for the global seed industry.

In her research, Jing begins by identifying seeds that show a mutation in a gene known as a transcription factor. These genes operate somewhat like light switches, turning other genes on and off. After finding seeds with transcription factor mutations, Jing allows the seeds to sprout, observes the growing plants and documents the results. She then compares the plants to those grown from seeds with normal germination patterns. Her goal is to identify the molecular mechanisms at work and the consequences of the mutation.

With the smile of a proud teacher, Nonogaki points out that Jing has accomplished more than her research results. In 2005, she received a research grant through the Ernest and Pauline Jaworski Scholarship for Underserved Undergraduates in Plant Science. She also received an award for her presentation in OSU’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute summer research program.

In 2006, Jing was selected to study at the University of Freiburg in Germany through RISE (Research Internships for Science and Engineering). The German Academic Exchange Service created the program to bring Canadian and American undergraduates to Germany to study with Ph.D. students.

Ultimately, Jing believes her lab work will set her apart from other candidates in the competitive medical school application process. She is keeping her fingers crossed. This summer, she has been invited to participate in the Summer Undergraduate Program in Population, Health and Aging at Western Washington University, where she will also work in the Demographic Research Laboratory.

Regardless of what the future may hold, Nonogaki is pleased with the work that his undergraduate researchers are doing. “We have a deal, I teach them how to work in the lab, and they teach me American slang. It’s how I learn a lot of new words,” he laughs.

Patrick Luke

Every spring, the Umatilla people of northeastern Oregon join other Columbia River tribes in celebrating the return of the salmon. Growing up on the reservation in the foothills of the Blue Mountains east of Pendleton, Patrick Luke learned to appreciate the bond between fish and people. When he wasn’t helping to tend the family’s horses, he was fishing with his dad for salmon and steelhead on the Columbia and the Umatilla rivers.

After graduating from Weston McEwen High School in Athena, Oregon, he left home at age 17 to join the U.S. Marines, serving in Beirut, Lebanon. Discharge in hand, Luke headed to Alaska where he worked on crabbers, longliners and salmon boats out of Sitka, Dutch Harbor and Kodiak, going as far as the Bering Sea.

Now, Luke is casting his future in a new direction. He wants to help repair the fraying link between fish and people by becoming a fisheries biologist (or “a fish doctor,” according to his 8-year-old son Cody). Fish and the aquatic communities they depend on, Luke believes, are “important to all of us, Native or not.”

Working on the slippery decks of commercial fishing boats did little to prepare Luke for academic pursuits. The transition to university life was difficult, he says, but he had help from friends and mentors in OSU’s Native Americans in Marine and Space Science (NAMSS) program and at the university’s cultural centers, particularly the Native American Longhouse. And then there is his work ethic: “I look at school like a full-time job,” he says.

In addition to his coursework, the senior in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife has walked the streambeds of northeast Oregon. His quarry: invasive New Zealand mudsnails that can degrade ecosystem integrity, consuming algae that fuel the aquatic food web on which salmon and other fish depend.

Last summer, during a National Science Foundation-sponsored Research for Undergraduates program at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, he worked with mentors Tony d’Andrea (College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences), Ted DeWitt (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) and Brett Dumbauld (U.S. Department of Agriculture) to study ghost shrimp in Yaquina Bay.

Ghost shrimp are native to Pacific Coast estuaries from Baja to British Columbia and of particular interest to oyster farmers whose operations can be disturbed by the shrimp’s tunnel building activities. The research is aimed at understanding the patterns of ghost shrimp distribution and when and under what conditions they spawn and molt through their five life stages.

Inspired by the memory of his dad’s respect for education, Luke has succeeded in ways that still seem to surprise him. He received a first runner-up award from the Oregon Chapter of the American Fisheries Society in 2006 for his poster on the mudsnail. And he capped off his Yaquina Bay experience by receiving top honors for his poster in a class on coastal ecology and resource management.

For his senior project, Luke is focusing on western American shad, a prolific non-native species in the Northwest. He has been collecting samples for genetic studies of shad strains from several river systems and comparing them to shad populations in the eastern U.S.

Ultimately, Luke’s journey is personal. “I know what a lot of people value. I’m passionate about my research and what I try to do. What I do affects the fish, and the fish affect the people.”

Coming of age in a new land is an American story. Children who bridge two cultures — their parents’ homeland and their adopted country — struggle to find a transnational identity and to succeed. In a child’s mind, memories of friends, familiar play places and sounds compete with a strange world and unintelligible language. In school, peers dress differently and may ignore or make fun of a newcomer. It’s a common experience, no matter a child’s previous social status, ethnicity or place of origin.

For Mexican children coming to Oregon with their families, the journey often includes farm labor, worries about legal status and adjustment to a cold climate. A team of Oregon State University and University of Oregon researchers has now collected some of their stories in a new report, “One-and-a-Half Generation Mexican Youth in Oregon: Pursuing the Mobility Dream,” due to be published in the Latino Research Review, a journal at the State University of New York at Albany.

“It’s really difficult for us to be the first in the family to go to college. We have to learn English, learn the American way of how professors expect you to behave and do in school. You have to deal with everyday discrimination and prejudice.”
Student participant in mobility study

The authors — Erlinda Gonzales-Berry (chair, Department of Ethnic Studies), Marcela Mendoza (University of Oregon) and Dwaine Plaza (associate professor, Department of Sociology) — interviewed a dozen Oregon State University students who were 7 to 15 years old when they left friends and family behind to start a new life in el Norte. The youths’ parents, undocumented farmworkers, legalized their status through the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The researchers’ goal was to identify the barriers — personal, social and economic — that keep many of these youths from fully contributing to their new homeland.

The late 20th century increase in Mexican immigration resulted in a 144 percent rise in Oregon’s Hispanic population between 1990 and 2000. The authors analyze the youths’ experiences in the context of this history and of acculturation theory, which relates identity development to crossing cultural divides. They conclude with recommendations for public policies aimed at increasing the chance that children in similar circumstances will be successful in their new country.

While the report protects students’ identities, it describes memories of home and stories about crossing the border, going to school and the crucial support of families and peers in adjusting to college life. Common themes stand out: nostalgia for childhood, dependence on families, struggles with language and prejudice and alienation in high school.

At OSU, these students found support through OSU’s cultural centers, especially El Centro Cultural César Chávez, as well as the Migrant Education Program and the Minority Education Office. Several reported that involvement in MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan), a nationwide student movement, transformed their lives.

The students’ experiences have important lessons for policymakers. “Given the growing number of Latino/Hispanic school children in the Oregon school system today,” the authors conclude, “policymakers and educators need to think about how to equip them with the tools and strategies for successful integration rather than having them experience downward assimilation in the future.”

In the following interview, she describes her youth, her OSU experience and her current work.

Terra: What do you remember most about your early years in Mexico?

Molina: I remember the good times I spent with my immediate and my extended family. I lived in Mexico City until I was in fifth grade. I remember my school and friends. I loved being involved in school. I was one of the six students who were chosen, based on their academic standing and good behavior, to escort the Mexican flag every Monday during a ceremony (our pledge of allegiance). This was a very prestigious role to have, and my parents were very proud of me. My father who had already been living in The Dalles, Oregon, sent me some money so that my mother could afford to buy the expensive uniform I had to wear.

On the weekends my aunts, uncles and a long list of cousins would get together and enjoy some delicious authentic Mexican food, including quesadillas, tacos, pozole — all kinds of elaborate meals. My life in Mexico was great; I was very happy.

Terra: What was it like for you leaving home and spending the rest of your youth in the United States?

Molina: At first, the idea of coming to the United States and reuniting with my father, whom I had not seen in one year, was exciting. He would send us many letters with pictures of the places he visited in Oregon and the fields in which he worked, the food he ate, the stores, the schools and pictures of Mt. Hood and the snow-covered pine trees. To me and my siblings, the U.S. seemed like a paradise; we couldn’t wait to come.

Several months before my father actually arrived in Mexico to pick us up, my mother had already taken us out of school, because once I moved into 6th grade and my brothers into high school she would not have been able to afford our uniforms, books and supplies that were required. She had no money and no choice.

My parents have always valued education, and my father knew that the only way for his children to continue with their education was to bring them here to the U.S. And so in December of 1989 we arrived in The Dalles. Even though we had dreams of coming here, the reality of us leaving our homeland didn’t really sink in until we had been living here for one month. I was 11 years old, and once we settled in, I began to feel extremely homesick, depressed, angry, confused and frightened. Once I started school all those feelings intensified even more, because I didn’t speak English, and I didn’t look like the rest of the students in school.

That period of my life and the rest of my teen years were difficult. I missed my school, friends and relatives. Once I began to speak English and became bilingual and bicultural, it was even more stressful. My parents and I began to clash. They had different expectations of me. They wanted to raise me the way teens are raised in Mexico, but we were not there, and I wanted to experience the life of teens here in the U.S. For example, I wasn’t allowed to go to prom because my parents could not understand what that was all about. My youth years were a struggle for me and my older siblings, but especially more for my parents. They could not understand that I was living in two different worlds and trying to balance the expectations of both. They were living in another country, but remained in their Mexican world.

Terra: Tell us about your experience at Oregon State — academics and community.

Molina: I had a great life-changing experience at OSU. It has been the best decision I ever made, and the best time I’ve ever had.

When I was a junior in high school, I went on a college visit with the migrant program. We visited several colleges, but once we visited OSU, I was convinced. The Latino students at the time made us feel extremely welcome; they were enthusiastic about their time at OSU. I also met Latino professors and staff, and they too were very nice and encouraging. The campus seemed not too small or too big. It was the perfect size for a Mexican girl used to living in a small town.

Most of the students that I also met on that visit were involved in campus with several student-run organizations such as the Centro Cultural Cesar Chavez, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA), the Hispanic Student Union and others. After learning about all the activities that the MEChA students had accomplished on campus and the cultural events they were planning, I knew right away that I would become a MEChistA (a member of MEChA).

And so during the five years that I spent at OSU, I was a leader of MEChA, external coordinator for the Centro Cultural Cesar Chavez for two consecutive years, a radio host with OSU KBVR, sat on the Kalmekak Community Outreach advisory board and earned my Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in ethnic studies and sociology.

Being involved with the campus community was the easy part for me, but being the first one in my family to go to college and being away from home were the most difficult. My academic experience was also challenging, especially when I experienced unpleasant discrimination or racist acts from professors and students. I experienced my very first racist experience towards the end of my first year, and it was really difficult to heal from it and continue my studies. At one point I almost dropped out, but OSU has great support systems established for students of color such as the Minority Educational Offices, Ethnic Studies Department, College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP), EOP, the four cultural centers and others. I am thankful that I got involved with all of these resources, and if it weren’t for their existence on campus, I probably would not be today sharing my college experience. All of these experiences, the good and the bad, have shaped the person I am today, and I would love to do it again.

Terra: How did OSU prepare you for the work do you do now?

Molina: At OSU I learned many, many leadership, organizing and communication skills as well as academic knowledge. Being part of the College of Liberal Arts really gave me a well-rounded education. Therefore the work that I do now involves putting in practice everything that I learned. My ethnic studies degree helped me to create BilingualHire, Inc., a Chicano consulting business with the help of two other OSU alumni (one of them my husband). Our services include cultural competency seminars and Spanish language trainings. We also provide motivational and leadership workshops for youth and adults. Through our business we connect employers with bilingual professionals to help them advance their careers and retain our talented Chicanos/Latinos in Oregon.

With my sociology degree I have worked in the nonprofit sector as program manager, and today I work part-time as an academic adviser for the College Assistance Migrant Program at Portland Community College, Rock Creek Campus.

In the volunteer part of my life, which is essential for my growth and happiness, I have volunteered for four years as a producer and co-host of “Tonalli,” a Spanish radio talk show on KBOO 90.7FM. I am a trustee of the Portland Women’s Union Foundation and the current chair of the Chicano/Latino Alumni Association (CHAOSU).

Terra: What has your experience taught you about the ability of Mexican children growing up in the U.S. to make a difference in their communities, to lead productive lives?

Molina: Mexican children who grow up in the U.S. have tremendous assets to make a difference in our communities. Our experiences in and outside of the educational system equip us with the strength we will need as we move into adulthood. We are more resilient than others and are fully bilingual and bicultural, which is important because those skills allow us to be the link between mainstream culture and Mexican or Latino culture. We become advocates of civil rights, education, health and environment.

We can navigate two different worlds but, at the same time, keep a balance between the expectations and traditions of both. Some people can do it much more easily than others, but for the most part, once we get into our 30s or 40s, we are pretty much settled into the two worlds. And, yes, most of us end up living very productive lives.

This approach, he argues, misses a rich teaching opportunity.

An historian of the life sciences, Farber worries about U.S. schools’ lackluster record on teaching Charles Darwin’s world-rocking discoveries. He laments the findings of a 2000 study by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, showing that 19 states do a “weak to reprehensible job,” 12 omit the word “evolution,” and four skip over biological evolution altogether. Despite court rulings upholding evolution’s rightful — indeed, central — place in science classes, countless children are denied instruction in this linchpin of biological principles because it contradicts the religious tenets of certain conservative congregations and communities.

“If we can move the study of biology toward what excites biologists and away from that makes students’ eyes glaze over, we shall have accomplished an important and valuable task.”
Paul Farber
chair, OSU Department of History

The debate over life’s origins and transformations is as divisive today as it was during the famous Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925, when a Tennessee teacher was tried for suggesting that humans evolved from apes. But the way Farber sees it, evolution offers a perfect platform for exploring the fundamentals of scientific investigation with students — and in the process, shifting their thinking on this highly charged question.

It begins, he says, with an understanding of the nature and history of science. Students should be taught that science is not a rigid set of explanations to be memorized but a dynamic process, changing over time as a “lineage” of questions is posed and tested. Farber posits that if students better understood how scientists derive facts, hypotheses, theories and laws, they might better distinguish between various ways of knowing — that knowledge built upon a chain of evidence is of an entirely different sort than that contained in, say, scriptural texts.
Listen in

Students should learn, too, that today’s titanic clash of beliefs about evolution is not inevitable. Many leading theologians and scientists of Darwin’s day found natural selection to be perfectly compatible with Christianity. “The majority of the American biologists who accepted evolution in the late-19th century did not believe it posed any threat to religion, but, quite the contrary, felt their religious beliefs were strengthened by it,” Farber notes. “It is not an either/or situation: science or religion.”

Once students see that “there are many ways to reconcile evolution with religion,” he concludes, “they realize that evolution is not the flame-breathing dragon of atheism, but a theory that explains biological phenomena, that relates bodies of information, and that guides research, and like other aspects of science, is open to many philosophical and religious interpretations.”

Ramirez is a clinical assistant professor in the College of Pharmacy. In addition to teaching classes on pharmacy management and operations, she meets daily with a dozen or more residents at Mid Valley Housing Plus, a residential support facility in Corvallis for people with mental illness. She shares an office with Mid Valley case manager Sam Ortiz where she answers residents’ questions, administers medications — some by court order, others on request — and serves as a liaison with physicians.

No longer focused only on dispensing prescriptions, pharmacists increasingly serve as consultants and sometimes as lifelines for people with chronic illness — diabetes, high blood pressure, schizophrenia. The hope is that as specialists in drug effectiveness and interactions, pharmacists can help stabilize lives and reduce hospital visits. For people with mental illness, that includes staying out of jails and homeless shelters.

In collaboration with OSU faculty members Ann Zweber in Pharmacy and Ray Tricker in the Department of Public Health, Ramirez will evaluate the consequences of her work at Mid Valley, documenting impacts on patient quality of life, interactions with police and visits to the emergency room. Just getting started, the research could have broad implications for developing an innovative role for pharmacists in the health care system.

“I have a patient that I see once a week,” says Ramirez, who serves on boards of directors at Mid Valley and the Oregon State Pharmacy Association. “He let me know that he was hearing voices, and the voices were telling him not to take his medications, not to listen to me anymore. So I got a hold of his physician, made some adjustments to his medications, called and checked on him to make sure he was taking them, to see if the voices had come back. He’s doing much better now.

“Now that’s hard to quantify. What did that do? Did it save him a hospital trip? Maybe,” she adds.

As a mental health specialist, Tricker served on the Governor of Oregon’s Task Force on Mental Health in Oregon. In 2006, he invited Ramirez to work at Mid Valley. The nonprofit organization now accommodates about 65 clients. Two to three new requests for services — a warm apartment, transportation, counseling, case management (known in mental health circles as an Assertive Community Treatment model) — arrive weekly, says Tricker, who is also on Mid Valley’s board and has worked with the nonprofit organization for more than a decade.

At OSU, he offers students in his public health courses the chance to work with Mid Valley residents. Students gain valuable field experience, assisting residents with everything from shopping to a regular exercise program known as Walking Warriors.

“The goal is to find ways to create conditions that prevent people from relapsing,” Tricker says.

In her meetings with Mid Valley residents, Ramirez sees the need daily. “These patients have multiple psychiatric issues,” she says. “They know that unless they see someone every day, their chances of staying on their medication are not as good.”

Framed by OSU's library of ocean sediment cores collected from around the world, Robert Duncan (right) explains to Paul Walczak of Nehalem, Oregon, how the cores are catalogued. Then a master's student, Walczak is now a faculty research assistant in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. (Photo: Dennis Wolverton)

When Jeremiah Oxford, a master’s student from Coos Bay, Oregon, isn’t in class or writing a paper, he puts his mind to that most unacademic of tasks: grinding rocks. Tedious as it might sound, his work in Robert Duncan’s lab in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences isn’t a punishment. Instead, he is preparing samples of volcanic rock that, when analyzed by a recently developed dating technique, may add details to the story of Earth’s violent past.

Students and other scientists in Duncan’s lab use rocks from around the world — the Columbia River basin, western India and undersea mountains from the South Pacific to the North Atlantic — to reveal a pattern of massive lava flows that make Mount St. Helens seem puny in comparison. These events occurred millions of years ago, says Duncan, associate dean for student programs, and had wide-ranging consequences, from the creation of petroleum reservoirs to global extinctions of plant and animal species.

Duncan and his team were the first to apply a chemical dating technique to the study of massive lava flows. Their reports have been widely cited in the scientific literature, resulting in Duncan becoming one of the 250 most frequently cited geoscientists in the world, according to the ISI Web of Science, a scientific information service.

Educational opportunity — the chance for students to be engaged in science — is the other side of the research coin for Duncan, the Rohm Professor of Oceanographic Education at OSU. Created in 1991 by a gift from Alice Rohm, the endowment supports his work with initiatives such as the Native American Marine and Space Science (NAMSS) program, Teachers at Sea and Suitcase Lessons, a set of marine science educational activities.

“I enjoy working with students and helping to excite them with the opportunity to do research,” says Duncan who teaches introductory oceanography. He also directs the NAMSS program, pairing students with faculty mentors in five OSU colleges. In turn, these students teach elementary and middle school students through OSU’s SMILE (Science and Math Integrative Learning Experiences) program and the annual Salmon Camp at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. NAMSS students have a 95 percent graduation rate, with 55 percent going to graduate school.

http://oregonstate.edu/dept/terra/2007/04/a-student%E2%80%99s-view/

Sam VanLaningham

To become a research scientist and a teacher — that’s Sam VanLaningham’s goal. The OSU Ph.D. student from Ellensburg, Washington, received his master’s degree working with Andrew Meigs in the Department of Geosciences. For his Ph.D., VanLaningham walked next door to study with Bob Duncan and Nick Pisias in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences geochronology lab. In 2006, the United States Science Support Program of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program awarded him a Schlanger Ocean Drilling Fellowship, which includes a $28,000 annual stipend for his research.

Here’s his story:

My research

Bob Duncan, Nick Pisias and I have developed a new technique using Bob’s argon gas source mass spectrometer to fingerprint land-derived sediments in the ocean. We have two goals:

• Track how rivers express climate change in the Pacific Northwest
• Track past ocean circulation patterns in the Pacific Ocean

We want to better understand the total range of climate variability along the margin of western North America through time.

Exciting results

To make the long journey from the land into the deep ocean, soils and other sediment grains have to be pretty small. Studying these tiny grains can be difficult, and there is a need for techniques that can overcome this problem. Such sediments provide a valuable continuous record of geologic history.

We are using Bob’s lab in a novel way to “fingerprint” these fine-grained materials. We have shown it to work well for the Pacific Northwest, and we are now using it to study sediments in other parts of the world, such as the North Pacific. If we confirm some of our initial results there, we may have a big impact on how we view past ocean circulation in the Bering Sea and the Pacific.

My own career

Bob’s 30 years of experience in geochronology have made it possible for me to explore new techniques that could contribute to the field of Earth science. Having a mentor with this expertise has allowed me to explore my own creativity with new methods. Working with Bob has provided me with the conceptual and critical thinking skills that I need to succeed in making my own contributions to science, education and the public.

Working in the lab

Bob has been a very reliable, positive and supportive mentor for me. Moreover, his fellow soccer coach and good friend, Nick Pisias, is my co-adviser. Together, they use time-tested psychological coaching techniques, which they have honed with teenage soccer players, on me.

I’m not sure if they were expecting to need such tactics with an adult male, but their good-cop-bad-cop approach has been just what the doctor ordered for the development of my career and my own personal growth. They have offered me every opportunity a graduate student would ever need. They have picked me up when I was down, and they have pushed me to become my best and to go beyond what I thought I was capable of. I feel lucky to have been able to work with them.

When Marcy Cottrell Houle headed to the Zumwalt Prairie in the 1980s with her topo maps, tree-climbing gear and raptor leg bands to study hawks, she assumed wildlife and cows were incompatible. After all, that was the prevailing view — and there were millions of overgrazed acres across the West to prove it. So when the OSU grad student found hawks flourishing alongside cows in the northeastern Oregon rangelands, she was stunned.

Livestock, she hypothesized, might actually enhance native ecosystems if — and it’s a big if — it is managed for the health of the vegetation.

A quarter-century later, OSU is following up on Houle’s work with new research at the Zumwalt, one of North America’s last native bunchgrass prairies. A study designed to tease out the optimal stocking rates — cows per acre — for healthy populations of ground-nesting birds began in November 2005 with funding from the National Research Initiative of the USDA Cooperative Research, Education and Extension Service. The research team, led by ecologist and avian specialist Pat Kennedy, will compare the impacts of low, medium and high concentrations of cows on grassland birds of national conservation concern, such as horned larks, western meadowlarks and savannah sparrows. Under investigation, too, are the insects they eat — mainly crickets and grasshoppers — along with soils and plants.

For the experiment, four 400-acre parcels have been fenced off in the Nature Conservancy’s Zumwalt Prairie Preserve. Each parcel has been further divided into pastures, in which different concentrations of cows — from zero to as many as 20 or 30 — will be grazed.

“The range condition of an area of grassland is truly the pulse beat of the health of the ecosystem.”
Marcy Cottrell Houle
The Prairie Keepers

The team hopes to shed more light on those earlier findings of Houle and others — findings that suggest benefits to well-managed grazing. Kennedy, a professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife whose office at OSU’s Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center is west of the Zumwalt, just over the Wallowa Mountains, expects moderate numbers of cows to have a neutral — or even positive — impact on the prairie ecosystem. “At very low stocking rates and in areas where there are no cattle,” she explains, “high grass densities may actually be prohibitive for feeding and nesting of native bird populations.”

Kennedy’s colleague Tim DelCurto concurs. “I expect we will see that grazing to a certain degree stimulates good forage rates,” says DelCurto, a beef cattle specialist who runs the Eastern Oregon research center.

And what’s good for forage on the Zumwalt — deep-soiled bunchgrass species such as Idaho fescue and bluebunch wheatgrass — is also good for the cows that eat it. DelCurto calls it a win-win strategy. “We can have our cake,” he says, “and eat it, too.”

By identifying how a deadly strain of bacteria causes Johne's disease in cattle, Luiz Bermudez and Marta Alonso-Hearn, hope to provide the basis for new treatments and shed light on human illness.

Little matters more to dairy farmers than the purity of their product and the health of their animals. So when Warren “Buzz” Gibson, co-owner and herd manager at the Lochmead Dairy in Junction City, Oregon, heard six years ago that an incurable cattle disease called Johne’s (pronounced “yo-knees”) could threaten his reputation for quality, he had all of his cows tested and continues to monitor annually, despite never having had a positive test.

Across the Oregon Coast Range at the Tillamook Creamery Association, Mark Wustenberg works with farmers to test for Johne’s and manage their herds to reduce other disease risks. “Our goal is to make sure this disease does not adversely affect our milk supply,” says the association’s vice president for dairy services.

Statewide, more than 50,000 cows in 200 of Oregon’s 350 herds are tested annually for the disease, according to the Oregon Department of Agriculture. Of herds tested in Oregon, Johne’s appears to be present in 60 to 70 percent at a low level (1 to 2 percent) of infection, says ODA field veterinarian Bruce Mueller. While other cattle diseases such as brucellosis have waned, the Johne’s threat has stimulated a national research and education campaign funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) at universities across the country, including OSU.

Gibson, Wustenberg and their peers have good reason to be vigilant. The cause of Johne’s — a bacterium known as Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis (or MAP) — can survive for years in soil without losing its ability to infect. The organism lives in manure left by infected animals in pastures and barn stalls. When it reaches a newborn calf, it spreads slowly through the animal’s system with no apparent ill effects. But within two to five years, growing intestinal distress leads to diarrhea, weight loss and reduced milk production. By the time symptoms appear, death is imminent.

The MAP bacterium infects dairy herds worldwide and has been estimated to cost the U.S. industry $200 million annually in lost milk revenues alone. The financial impact soars to $1.5 billion when reduced milk production, decreased feed efficiency and expenses for replacement cattle are taken into account.

Moreover, a possible association between Johne’s in cattle and Crohn’s disease in people raises human health concerns. For now, studies to determine whether the same organism causes both diseases have reached differing conclusions. According to the Johne’s Information Center at the University of Wisconsin, no cases of Crohn’s have been linked to milk consumption.

Before he came to OSU in 2002, microbiologist Luiz Bermudez studied the Johne’s pathogen in wild and domesticated animals. Because of its importance to the animal agriculture industry, he now leads a research team that has discovered new details about how the organism goes about its dirty work in cattle. While a vaccine and other treatments can now reduce the severity of the disease, what Bermudez and his colleagues are learning could lead to more effective medications.

Understanding the tricks that MAP uses to evade an animal’s immune system could also improve treatment for other infectious diseases. That’s because as a class of microorganisms, Mycobacteria are responsible for scourges such as tuberculosis, leprosy, chronic lung problems and secondary infections in AIDS patients. Some Mycobacteria are common in soil and water. Others live harmlessly in humans until stress compromises our immune systems, giving the microbes an opening to multiply and cause further harm.

Most Deadly Infection

Conventional wisdom about Johne’s holds that transmission most commonly occurs through the consumption of manure-contaminated grass and hay. However, in 2006 Bermudez and his colleagues reported in the journal Infection and Immunity that it may be through another route — when a newborn calf first sucks at its mother’s udder — that the most deadly infection occurs. They compared the infectious ability of MAP cells grown in milk to those grown in a standard laboratory broth. The result: Those milk-raised cells were more than 10 times as effective in entering a model animal cell. “This is the most infectious form of the microorganism that the calf can get,” says Bermudez.

That report followed a series of papers describing the ability of Mycobacteria to invade host cells and to thrive inside those cells without being destroyed by the host’s immune system. Now, unconfirmed results of further research suggest that the OSU team has identified a mechanism that could prove to be the organism’s Achilles heel: the genes and proteins involved in binding the pathogen to a host cell and getting it inside the cell. Like a Trojan horse, once inside cell walls, MAP subverts the cell’s own machinery, eventually killing it and releasing a new wave of infection (see sidebar illustration). The new work was conducted by a team including lead author Marta Alonso-Hearn, Lia Danelishvili and Lisbeth Meunier-Goddick at OSU and Dilip Patel, a former OSU scientist now at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

“The bacteria are not supposed to get inside those cells,” says Bermudez. “For the first time, we have shown that the bacterium has a mechanism that interacts with the host cell and makes the host cell ingest it. This is a very sophisticated mechanism.”

Until a more effective vaccine or a less costly treatment is found, however, monitoring and prevention through good sanitary practices are still a farmer’s best protection, adds Bermudez. He serves on the scientific advisory board of a national research initiative known as the Joint Integrated Johne’s Disease Program at the University of Minnesota, a collaboration of 21 universities funded by the USDA.

For Buzz Gibson, testing for Johne’s amounts to good insurance. Annually, he insists that his veterinarian take blood and fecal samples from 35 to 40 cows and send them to the ODA Animal Health Lab in Salem for analysis. “I want to be ready. I don’t want to wake up one morning and see a headline linking Johne’s and Crohn’s,” he says.

The Lochmead dairy milks 580 Holsteins daily, supplying the company’s 44 Dari Mart stores from Cottage Grove to Corvallis. The herd is now one of four in Oregon — in addition to those owned by Dean and Patti Tohl in Tillamook, Jack Perrin in Woodburn and OSU in Corvallis — to receive the state’s highest level of certification for those that have tested negative for Johne’s.

“In times of trauma and stress,” she would tell her visitors, “books and stories can buttress children’s self-concept, cultivating self-worth and calming the storm.”

So at the turn of the millennium, the OSU associate professor for counseling education teamed up with OSU’s social science reference librarian — Associate Professor Paula McMillen — to develop literature-based tools and trainings for grad students preparing to work with troubled kids.

A paper-and-pencil questionnaire designed by Pehrsson for evaluating children’s books has evolved into the Bibliotherapy Education Project, featuring a searchable database of 600 titles. The project Web site, launched in 2003, has drawn queries from 40 states and at least half-a-dozen countries. The professors have developed workshops for mental health professionals, which they are adapting for teachers and librarians. With funding from the Association for Creativity in Counseling, a branch of the American Counseling Association, they are conducting a national study to investigate the scope and reach of bibliotherapy across the U.S. Another study exploring cultural responses in book choices aims to sharpen counselors’ sensitivities and, ultimately, to enhance the development of positive ethnic, racial or cultural identity among young clients.

“All the research I do,” says Pehrsson, “is aimed at improving counselor competency in working with children.”

Monsters To Vanquish

Long before they teamed up at OSU, both professors had discovered the therapeutic powers of the technique known as “bibliotherapy,” defined variously as “helping with books,” “guided dialogue about books” or “literature as a catalyst for growth and healing.” Pehrsson and McMillen each used bibliotherapy in their previous careers, McMillen as a clinical psychologist and Pehrsson as a pediatric nurse, play therapist and family counselor. The technique, which is used with people of all ages, is especially suited to kids. Related to other expressive techniques such as play therapy and art therapy, it gives children a psychological pathway — a backdoor of sorts — to feelings they’re not able to analyze, articulate or access directly.

Bibliotherapy — coined as a term in 1916 and established as a practice at the Menninger Clinic in the 1930s — has grown steadily in popularity among teachers, school counselors, mental-health therapists and librarians. Today, bibliotherapy is a many-headed creature. It looks quite different from setting to setting, morphing to meet client needs and practitioner expertise, spanning a continuum from “developmental” to “clinical” — from wrestling with the normal ups and downs of life, to dealing with extreme trauma or emotional disturbance. A teacher or librarian will typically use stories developmentally to address topics like starting kindergarten, fending off bullies or understanding cultural differences. Clinical interventions, on the other hand, belong strictly in the offices of trained mental health professionals.

Ironically, even as the child taps deep emotions through a fictional character — a motherless bat named Stellaluna who tries to fit in with a flock of birds, a cub named Koko Bear whose parents are divorcing, a little girl named Sara whose best friend, Rune, drowns in a lake — that character shields her from those feelings’ full impact. The story forms a “safe container,” a place to explore emotions while keeping a comfy distance from them; they are, after all, happening to Stellaluna or Koko Bear or Sara, not to the child. Couched in metaphor, wrapped in fantasy, fictive emotions can instruct, gently, through example and empathy. “Books can provide a buffer, a psychological distance or safety net for exploring issues that can elicit emotional intensity,” Pehrsson says.

Unlike a sleepy-eyed bedtime story, clinical bibliotherapy is hard work. “We’ve got worries to figure out,” Pehrsson would tell her young clients. “We’ve got monsters to vanquish!”

Bibliotherapy can enhance personal insight, suggest alternatives, diminish isolation, clarify values, stimulate discussion, foster empathy and nurture ethnic identity and pride, according to Pehrsson and McMillen. It can be applied, they say, to an “astounding” range of problems: Aggressiveness, adoption, addiction, grief, depression, nightmares and homelessness are just a few.

But it’s not without dangers and drawbacks. The OSU professors warn that bibliotherapy’s benefits depend heavily on the practitioner’s training and skill. While skillful story work can help kids cope with tough circumstances, a clumsy or careless venture into stories about sensitive topics — death, divorce, abuse, abandonment — can further disturb or damage a vulnerable child, they caution. Says Pehrsson: “If it’s a really scary topic and you open that book, you may be pushing something on the child they’re not ready for.” Adds McMillen, “All the things that can make bibliotherapy powerful in a positive way can make it powerful in a negative way.”

One Enchanted Story

“The right story at the right moment is an arrow to the heart. It can find and catch what is hiding inside the reader (or the listener), the secret hurt or anger or need that lies waiting, aching to be brought to the surface.”
Bruce Colville
children’s author, 1990

Bibliotherapy’s power stems from the ancient and universal enchantment of stories, the professors explain. Fairy tales, fables, myths and epic narratives have been vehicles of culture and wisdom throughout human history. “We are creatures who learn through stories,” says Pehrsson, who is clinical editor of Play Therapy magazine. “Stories, like human lives, have a beginning, a middle and an end. For children to understand and make sense of the world, a story is a very logical fit. It’s how we’re wired.”

Related to bibliotherapy is a strategy that Pehrsson calls “collaborative story writing” or “co-storying.” The therapist starts a story (“Once upon a time long, long ago, there was a…”) and the child picks up the thread. One of Pehrsson’s former clients, a little girl named Savannah, invented a character called “Savannah Horsie.” When Pehrsson suggested that “Savannah” was feeling scared or sad or worried, the child quickly and firmly corrected the therapist — “Not Savannah — Savannah Horsie!” When the feelings were safely contained within the invented character, the little girl was free to explore different scenarios and alternative endings with Pehrsson, who would pose such questions as, “What would happen if…?” Eventually, the child was able to transfer the feelings to her own life.

“I would start by reading a story aloud about a character who’s been through a similar situation — a character who models resiliency or success but also the pain and the sadness that goes along with it,” Pehrsson explains. “Over time, children would start to tell their own stories about the character. And the character would become stronger and braver.”

The theory behind this transformation was first described by bibliotherapy pioneer Caroline Shrodes in 1950. She explained the underlying dynamic — what happens in the subconscious mind — as a series of three processes: identification, catharsis and insight. First, the child recognizes his own feelings in the character. Second, his repressed or conflicted feelings begin to surface. Third, his recognition of the universality of his experience makes him feel less isolated and thus more empowered.

“Allegorical stories can bypass conscious and unconscious defenses,” Pehrsson explains.

Unfortunately, the current evidence for the effectiveness of fictional story therapy is mostly anecdotal. Although studies show therapeutic benefits for self-help books for adult mental-health problems such as anxiety and sexual dysfunction, rigorous research on using imaginative literature in clinical or school settings is still on the horizon. Several of Pehrsson’s master’s and doctoral students, under her guidance, are conducting research projects that will move the field forward, quantitatively (see sidebar). Her emerging counselor cadre is making important contributions to a scientific literature base that may validate what Pehrsson knows from experience: Stories have the power to heal.

• College of Education
• OSU Foundation
• Association for Creativity in Counseling
• OSU’s Pehrsson Named Clinical Editor of Play Therapy Magazine (7-20-06)

She resolved to help.

With guidance from Dale-Elizabeth Pehrsson, her Ph.D. committee chair in the College of Education, Kagume is designing a study using traditional African stories to enhance coping and quality of life among victims of HIV/AIDS. The study will be both a descriptive and statistical analysis of the impact of bibliotherapy — the use of books and stories for emotional healing — in Kenyan support groups. To ensure the cultural and psychological suitability of the books, Kagume will rate them with the Bibliotherapy Evaluation Tool developed by Pehrsson and McMillen. To get hard data about the effectiveness of bibliotherapy, she and Dana Doerksen, fellow Ph.D. candidate and co-researcher from Eugene, Oregon, will administer a pretest and a posttest using a Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) scale for HIV/AIDS-affected patients. One such scale is the MOS-HIV (Medical Outcomes Study HIV Health Survey) developed by the Centers for Disease Control. A control group will also be used. Because quantitative data on the effectiveness of bibliotherapy — particularly the use of fiction — are scarce, Kagume and Doerksen’s research will add valuable findings to the field.

In-depth interviews will capture personal narratives about HIV and bibliotherapy. “The interviews will give voice to people experiencing HIV/AIDS,” says Doerksen. “For many researchers, self-reported data such as these are at least as important as statistical data.”

The daughter of school administrators, Kagume left Kenya’s lush, coffee-rich highlands for undergraduate study at the University of Nairobi. When she headed to OSU to earn a master’s in business administration, she barely knew where Oregon was. “I just heard that it doesn’t snow here,” she says ruefully, glancing out at the frozen remnants of the latest winter storm. But by the time she finished her MBA, she knew her heart would never be in balance sheets and bottom lines.

“I realized it was important to me to do something that adds value to people’s lives,” she explains.

Doerksen had her introduction to Africa when she spent a month in Tanzania as a staff member with World Vision, an international agency dedicated to empowering local communities with projects such as health clinics, water treatment, education for girls and micro-loans for women. “It was right after 9/11,” she says. “I grew more during the three or four weeks I spent there than at any other time in my life.”

Because of the stigma of HIV/AIDS in Kenya, patients typically wait too long to seek medical help and then keep their diagnosis a secret from friends and family. “If you’re not talking about it,” Kagume says, “you’re probably not taking your meds and you’re definitely not getting any emotional support.”

In the summer of 2008, Kagume and Doerksen plan to travel to Kenya to collect data. They hope to get assistance from the Kenya Network of Women Living with HIV in identifying subjects for their study.

When her dissertation is done, Kagume intends to put her Ph.D. in counseling to work in a Kenyan community mental health agency. Local stories and books will, she says, play an important role in her professional practice. “When stories relate to what’s happening in clients’ lives,” she says, “they can improve their emotional functioning and live more fully as members of their community.”

As wildfire lays waste to forests, it lays a foundation for the future. To study the relationship between forests and fire, Alan Tepley uses tree cores. Jorge Ramirez uses mathematics. Welcome to ecosystem informatics.

In the life of a forest, fire can be a frequent and demanding companion. How often the flames visit and whether they stay low, licking the tree trunks, or flare into the canopy, becoming what foresters call a “stand replacement fire,” can determine the character of the forest for centuries. Or until the next fire.

It’s a story that two OSU Ph.D. students are coming to know intimately. Alan Tepley (forest science and geosciences) and Jorge Ramirez (mathematics) are part of a research team that is taking a hard look at how fire affects the forests of Oregon’s western Cascades. In this steep ridge and valley terrain, the plot gets complicated. Fires can be fickle, burning one stand completely while leaving its neighbors untouched or lightly scorched. The result is a crazy quilt of stands with varying ages and compositions.

What controls these kinds of fires — and thus the structure of our forests — is of concern to policymakers as well as to scientists. The nation regularly spends more than $1 billion a year fighting forest fires, and western U.S. forests are expected to be at greater risk of burning in a warmer world. The long-term consequences of a more intense fire regime are poorly understood.

Through painstaking fieldwork and mathematical modeling, Tepley, Ramirez and their colleagues are demonstrating how forest stands evolve in the face of fires that occur repeatedly over centuries. Their work is supported by a National Science Foundation-funded education program (see sidebar).

Coring Into the Past

For his part, Tepley has looked to the forest. During the past two summers, he has pointed his gray Honda Civic toward the mountains, hiking deep into the woods. He has twisted tree-coring devices (breaking them more than once) into the hearts of centuries-old Douglas firs, hemlocks and red cedars.

The pencil-thin cores contain a record of growth rings that reveal a tree’s age and its yearly growth. Across the Fall Creek and Blue River watersheds, Tepley has collected data for almost 2,000 trees in 77 linear plots, each longer than a football field. Some of the sites are in one of the nation’s premier forest research facilities, the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, which also served as his base camp.

Back in Corvallis, Tepley is scrutinizing each core under a microscope. He has already identified six distinctly different forest histories, each representing what scientists call a successional pathway. Each is associated with a position on the landscape, from shady north-facing slopes to sunny hillsides. Tepley’s cores show that stands in the Fall Creek watershed tend to burn more frequently and less severely than those in the neighboring Blue River watershed. All stands in Fall Creek show evidence of fire within the last 200 years, but in Blue River, several stands show no fire evidence within the last 400 to 500 years.

Terrain turns out to be critical in setting the stage for how severely and how often fire visits a given stand of trees. “In certain locations, topography may consistently either reduce fire frequency or moderate fire severity,” Tepley has written in summarizing his work to date. “These places may function as refuges for old trees. Also, they may play important roles as a seed source for plant species or as temporary habitat for animal species following disturbance to the surrounding landscape.”

Tepley began his forest ecology career in Michigan where he has worked in oak-hickory, jack pine, and northern hardwoods forests. The son of a physicist and a social worker received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Michigan. For the state’s natural heritage program, he reviewed land surveyor notes from the early 1800s, contrasting frequent observations of burned trees with modern forests in which fire had been suppressed. “For me, fire has always been a part of studying forests,” he says.

Insight From Mathematics

Since the 1970s, researchers have known that the western Cascades represent something special in forest fire science. That’s because many different forest histories exist side-by-side in these mountains, the result of what scientists call a “mixed-severity fire regime.” Tepley and his advisers — Julia Jones in the Department of Geosciences and Fred Swanson, a U.S. Forest Service scientist who conducted much of that work in the ’70s and is associated with the OSU Department of Forest Science — hope the tree core data will reveal just how such fire regimes influence the modern forest.

“There’s been a lot of controversy in the Pacific Northwest about ancient forests, which mainly are 500-year-old stands that were regenerated after fires during the 1500s. So the character of the landscape for which Northwesterners feel an affinity was shaped by the history of fire,” says Jones.

“We have a forest today that results from a particular, maybe even a peculiar, series of events,” she adds. “We tend to think of that as inevitable, but it wasn’t.”

In short, the modern forest could have turned out differently. Had fires burned more frequently or more intensely in the past, today’s forests could have stands with different ages or proportions of species. To think about what different fire histories might mean for forest development, the forest scientists have turned to mathematics and Jorge Ramirez.

Born and raised in Medellín, Colombia, Ramirez received his civil engineering degree at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Both his parents are mathematicians, and he equally enjoys soccer and collaborating with scientists to solve problems. For OSU fire researchers, the problem is how to relate the age structure of the forest to the frequency and intensity of fire.

Ramirez’s fire model — a set of equations that describe forest development as a function of fire — is intended to help scientists explore this issue by enabling them to see the consequences of different fire patterns. “This model is not for prediction. It is a conceptual model. The point is to get insight,” Ramirez says.

Ramirez started with simple assumptions. “We assume fires occur randomly in time at a fixed rate. We assume a fire will kill trees under a certain age. There will be some rules about how trees (regenerate) after a fire. Let’s see what that gives you,” he says. Mathematicians can help scientists reduce the complexity of what they observe in nature, “to bring it (the process) back to the bare bones.”

For Tepley, Swanson and Jones, modeling is also a tool for thinking about the future forest. “The data I have represent what has happened over the past 500 years. But ultimately it would be interesting to know what else could happen,” Tepley says. “Modeling has the ability to picture the range of possibilities.”

Knowing those possibilities could help guide forest management if climate change affects precipitation, temperatures, insect outbreaks and fire in the Northwest. “Were refuges buffered from past climate variability?” asks Swanson. “Might they be buffered in the face of future climate change? If we want to encourage old growth in the future, are those the places where we might have the best chance of being successful?

Nontoxic, soy-based adhesives and wood-plastic composites are some of the new products emerging from Kaichang Li’s OSU laboratory in the Department of Wood Science and Engineering.

Soy may help prevent cancer not only on your kitchen table but also in your kitchen table.

Across campus from OSU’s Linus Pauling Institute, where nutrition scientists have been studying soybeans’ place in a healthful diet (see “The Zinc Link,” page 22), another OSU scientist has found a way to use those same protein-rich beans in everyday wood products — paneling, cabinets, desks and, yes, the table where you eat your meals. These soy-based wood composites are free of the cancer-causing chemical formaldehyde, which for decades has been a mainstay of adhesives used in plywood, particleboard and furniture.

The wood adhesive breakthrough of Kaichang Li, an associate professor in OSU’s College of Forestry, is just one of many bio-based products and processes under investigation in labs across the university. While Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski, the Oregon Innovation Council and others work to secure Oregon’s prominence in the new “carbohydrate economy”— drafting bills to boost bio-fuels development and considering a new bio-products research initiative — OSU scientists are at work on the technical challenges. Among them: wood-plastic composites made from recycled carpets, botanical sources of natural rubber, wastewater-generated electricity, cellulose as a source of ethanol and edible coatings for fresh foods (see Growing Technology sidebar.)

Although Li made his bio-based discovery just a few years ago, his interest in nontoxic composites dates back to his post-doctoral studies at the University of Georgia, where he was researching ways of making wood pulp with fungi. His Scandinavian colleagues told Li about seeing the “reddish skin” of woodworkers using formaldehyde-based glues in their native Sweden. “They all said those glues are nasty materials to work with,” says Li.

But it wasn’t until a weekend at the Oregon Coast several years later that true inspiration hit. Equipped with a plastic bucket and rubber boots, Li was scouring the craggy outcroppings for mussels in anticipation of a savory seafood dinner. Suddenly, he was struck by the tenacity with which the blue-shelled mollusks clung to the rocks, even as waves pummeled mercilessly and tides tugged relentlessly. Taking some of these tough little shellfish back to his lab, he began investigating their natural superglue. Prior studies of the proteins forming the mussels’ stringy, clingy tentacles showed a unique combination of amino acids, clearly an evolutionary adaptation to the mussels’ ecological niche. Such a powerful, waterproof bond was just what the woodproducts industry needed to replace the formaldehyde-based formulas, Li concluded.

The trouble was, mussel protein is rare. It wouldn’t be practical or, more to the point, cost-effective, to use it directly. Still, the idea had formed and, just like those stubborn mussels, Li wasn’t about to let go. The scientific question he began to investigate with funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture was, Can you convert an abundant protein — such as soy — into a strong and water-resistant adhesive like the mussel protein? The commercial question was, Can you make the new adhesive at a price competitive with the traditional resin, which costs only about 30 cents a pound?

Li was pretty sure the answer to both questions was yes. “Protein is protein,” he points out, “and all proteins consist of different combinations of amino acids.”

In comparing mussel and soy proteins, Li discovered that the amino acid compositions of the two proteins are quite distinct. Mussels contain high levels of certain amino acids that are lacking in soy. At the same time, mussels lack certain amino acids that are abundant in soy. So, using mussels as a model, Li and his research group experimented with chemically modifying the soy protein. They blocked some of the soy amino acids, those that the mussels lack. Simultaneously, they transferred mussel amino acids into the soy. “We turned soy proteins into mussel adhesive proteins,” Li says.

Manufacturing the mussel-mimicking adhesive via the chemical-modification route, however, would be too costly. So, to make the new adhesives competitive with traditional adhesive technologies, Li developed a “curing agent” that could readily modify soy under heat during the production of wood-composite panels.

Finally, with funding support from Columbia Forest Products and Hercules Inc., Li’s group honed the process for commercial use, running scaled-up experiments and mill trials.

“For 50 years,” Li says, “the wood products industry has been arguing about what levels of formaldehyde emissions are safe for humans. But now some companies are taking a different approach — instead of explaining how much formaldehyde is wafting out of their wood products, they’re saying, ‘Our products are essentially formaldehyde-free.’”

Li’s bio-based breakthrough — which he calls a “whole new concept” in wood composites — is revolutionizing the nation’s $4.4 billion wood adhesives industry. The Portland-based behemoth Columbia Forest Products — North America’s largest manufacturer of hardwood plywood and hardwood veneer — is carving out a significant niche in the fast-growing “green” housing and construction fields. It took less than three years after OSU patented three adhesive formulas and licensed them to Delaware-based chemical giant Hercules Inc., for Columbia to convert its seven hardwood plywood plants to the nontoxic soy-based adhesives. The company, which produces more than half of U.S. interior wood composites, estimates that it replaced 47 million pounds of formaldehyde-based resins with soy-based adhesives in 2006.

This year, Columbia is beginning production of formaldehyde-free particleboard. Plywood and particleboard have distinct adhesive requirement, Li notes. Plywood uses the glue to bind thin layers of wood. Particleboard, on the other hand, is formed from sawdust-like bits of wood bonded together. One particleboard plant can consume as much adhesive as five plywood plants, according to Li.

“Particleboard creates a dramatic new demand for soy-based adhesives,” he notes.

For Oregon, whose forest industry employs more than 85,000 workers statewide, novel wood products like Li’s adhesive help fuel demand and bolster communities, particularly in rural counties hit hard by recent downturns in logging and manufacturing. Wood-plastic composites offer another potential boost. Li’s research team is developing a nontoxic alternative for outdoor construction: decks, cabins and children’s play structures. The new material, besides being strong and lightweight, would be free of such hazardous chemicals as arsenic and chromate, found in some treated wood.

The research focuses on the adhesion between the water-absorbing wood and the water-resisting plastic. Better adhesion translates to stronger materials. A novel wood-plastic composite using recycled carpets and wood is the team’s latest breakthrough.

Wood can also be a competitive source of liquid fuel in Oregon. A recent analysis by OSU economists found that ethanol made from wood cellulose yields the highest “net energy” return (84 percent), compared with canola (69 percent) and corn (20 percent) after subtracting production and transportation costs.

Just as fuels made from these sources can reduce U.S. dependence on foreign petroleum, soy-based adhesives can lessen the nation’s need for foreign sources of natural gas, from which formaldehyde is derived. “I get lots of phone calls about this new adhesive,” says Li. “One person said, ‘This is one of the greatest inventions I’ve seen in the past 50 years in terms of affecting peoples’ lives.’”

Cellulose Power

Professor Michael Penner in the Department of Food Science and Technology is studying one of the holy grails of the bio-based fuel industry: the economical conversion of woody plant materials into ethanol and other value-added products. In the Pacific Northwest, where woody biomass is an abundant source of potential energy, the search for enzymes that can break down the tough-walled cellulose holds huge promise. Unlike the starches found in agricultural crops like corn, which can be easily converted to sugar and then to liquid fuel, woody materials are, in Penner’s words, “recalcitrant” to conversion — that is, they require extra chemical intervention before they reach the simple-sugar stage. Penner’s lab is working on cost-effective ways to attain this critical “sugar platform.”

Bleaching Agent

Fungi that commonly colonize old tree stumps may benefit the paper industry and the environment. In the Department of Chemical Engineering, Christine Kelly is using white-rot fungi and yeast to create a nontoxic alternative for bleaching paper. She has transferred a gene from the fungi, which produce an enzyme that degrades lignin, into yeast that can be cultivated under industrial conditions.

While the enzyme — manganese peroxidase — has shown promise as a bleaching agent in the laboratory, Kelly and Curtis Lajoie, a research professor in Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, are refining the production process. Their goal is to coax the yeast to create an active, stable and highly concentrated enzyme that can replace currently used chemicals.

Microbe Energy

Turning sewage into voltage is the aim of Assistant Professor Hong Liu’s research in OSU’s Department of Biological and Ecological Engineering. Some bacteria living in wastewater can kick off electrons from pollutants. So Liu is developing microbial fuel cells to capture the energy stored in wastewater, while simultaneously treating the water. She envisions a day when developing nations, such as her native China, will have waste-treatment facilities powered by the very waste they process, making them energy self-sufficient and thus more widely affordable.

Liu is also working with Kaichang Li in Wood Science and Engineering to generate electricity from wood. A mixture of the hundreds of small, organic compounds in hydrolyzed wood, the researchers have recently discovered, can be converted directly into electricity with microbial fuel cells. “Liu and I are seeking funding to build the world’s first integrated, portable, compact system for generating electricity directly from wood,” says Li.

Natural Rubber

OSU agronomist Daryl Ehrensing is part of a private-sector initiative to develop a domestic source of natural rubber. With support from Akron, Ohio-based start-up Delta Plant Technologies, Ehrensing is principal investigator for the Department of Crop and Soil Science breeding program to grow a high-yield variety of the Russian dandelion. The plant, native to Kazakhstan, produces a high-quality latex that can be used in auto and aircraft tires. Other universities working on the project are Ohio State, Washington State and Montana State. In another rubber-related project at OSU, this one funded by a German rubber chemical company, Kaichang Li in Wood Science and Engineering is investigating ways to use cellulose crystals instead of silica and carbon black in tire manufacturing.

Food Coatings

Yanyun Zhao, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology, is focusing on the freshness, health benefits and market value of foods. She is developing biodegradable and edible films and coatings to prolong the shelf-life of perishable delicacies such as strawberries and other small fruits. Other projects include vacuum impregnation and infusion techniques for value-added fruit and vegetable products.