“The surge in obesity in this country is nothing short of a public health crisis, and it’s threatening our children, it’s threatening our families, and more importantly it’s threatening the future of this nation.”
— First Lady Michelle Obama

Romping in the backyard at Cozy Corners family childcare home, Avery and Lauryn are boosting their health by doing what kids do naturally - running, jumping and playing. (Photo: Nancy Froelich)

When the doorbell chimes, the toddlers instantly forget about the movie flickering on the giant TV screen. Scrambling over the plush sofa and scooting past the coffee table, the five preschoolers at Cozy Corners family childcare home cluster curiously by the door to see who’s here.

These pintsized Albany residents have, after all, seen Beverly Hills Chihuahua before. What they haven’t seen are the mysterious high-tech gadgets Oregon State University doctoral student Kelly Rice starts unloading from her backpack soon after childcare provider Michelle Hoyt ushers her in.

“What are they, what are they?” the kids clamor, crowding around.

“They’re called accelerometers,” Rice tells the wide-eyed boys and girls, who range in age from 2 to 5. “They tell us how much activity you guys are getting while you’re here. Who wants to be first?”

“Me! Me!” Riley yells.

“OK, Riley, come on over here.” She wraps a black elastic belt around Riley’s waist and cinches up the Velcro. “We need to make it nice and snug because the last thing we need is a floppy accelerometer,” she tells him.

The matchbook-sized electronic monitor on his left hip will keep track of activity levels (sedentary, light, moderate, vigorous) by recording the frequency and magnitude of movement. Riley and his playmates will wear the accelerometers for a week during Phase One of an OSU study led by Associate Professor Stewart Trost. This initial activity data will form a baseline, along with each child’s body mass index (the ratio of height to weight, used to estimate the proportion of fat to lean tissue), for gauging progress at the study’s end.

Listen to .mp3 audio of Stewart Trost

Stewart Trost

Cozy Corners is one of 60 Oregon childcare homes in seven economically diverse counties along the I-5 corridor that are participating in the Healthy Home Child Care Project. Half of the homes will use the obesity-combating techniques devised by Trost and his team. The other half will serve as a “control” group for comparison, as well as receive training in food allergies.

The program’s premise: You don’t need fancy jungle gyms or pricey cuisine to make kids healthy and keep them that way. Rather, ordinary household items like card tables and couch cushions can get kids moving, and small changes like switching to skim milk can add up to big benefits.

“We’re making the intervention as simple as possible,” says Rice, who is coordinating the study. “We’re looking for really little things that can make a huge difference, things like giving kids balls and bats to play with, adding a couple of veggies to the lunch menu — teeny little steps.”

Essentially, the program will plug into kids’ innate love of running and jumping and introduce fun, fresh foods like fruit pizza to compete with the “bubblegum-flavored cereal” and “Hot Pockets” children see every day on TV, says Trost.

“Just like puppies and lambs and kittens, kids have a natural inclination to play,” he says. “Active play is inherent to normal development. Yet our studies have shown that kids in family childcare settings are getting only about five minutes of physical activity per hour, on average.”

Designer Diabetes Gear

The statistics are alarming. Nearly 30 percent of American kids are overweight or obese. Their parents are even heavier, with two-thirds tipping the scales at excessive numbers. If trends continue, fully 50 percent of kids born this year will end up with Type 2 diabetes in their lifetimes. Just imagine: Half of Americans soon could be tucking a diabetes testing meter (these days, they come in designer colors like “Tickled Pink” and “Purple Fusion”) into their purse or pocket along with their iPod and cell phone.

It was these startling trends — along with her pediatrician’s warnings about her own daughters’ marginal BMIs — that inspired First Lady Michelle Obama to plant an organic garden at the White House and to launch a national campaign to curb childhood obesity. She has gone so far as to demonstrate how easy exercise can be by hula-hooping on the South Lawn. The changes she made in her own household — a ban on weekday TV, smaller portions, low-fat milk, water bottles and apple slices in lunchboxes, grapes on the breakfast table, brightly colored veggies for dinner — she described to USA Today as “very minor stuff.” But the payoff was surprisingly big. “These small changes resulted in some really significant improvements,” Obama reported.

These are just the kinds of practical strategies Trost and his graduate students are using in their program, which is built around the theme “Journey to Healthy Child Care Home.” Kids will map their make-believe travels and send postcards to friends and family along the way. The program is funded by the National Institute for Food and Agriculture.

Participating childcare homes in Benton, Linn, Lane, Yamhill, Polk, Marion and Washington counties were identified through local “resource and referral” agencies (“R&Rs,” which train providers and help parents find quality facilities). Assistant Professor Kathy Gunter is leading the program design and will train OSU county Extension faculty to use it. They, in turn, will train the providers.

“It’s a train-the-trainers, capacity-building approach,” says Trost. “Our goal is to translate research into practice in a sustainable, community-based way.”

With these kinds of novel approaches, Trost has rocketed to prominence in his field. “Stewart has rapidly become one of world’s foremost researchers of issues related to physical activity in children and youth,” notes Professor Russell Pate of the University of South Carolina. “He has developed an international reputation for his work on measurement and promotion of physical activity in kids.”

Illustration by Scott Laumann

Bi-Mart seems an unlikely springboard for social change. Yet tucked away in a corner of a store on the edge of Springfield, pharmacist Kathy Hahn is waging a militant campaign against pain.

“I’m kind of an activist,” she says, leaning close to her listener and whispering the word “activist” as if confiding a dark secret. “When I see something that’s wrong all day every day, I’m the type that says, ‘I’m going to do everything in my power to change that.’”

What she’s changing is the way chronic pain is managed in Oregon. In her 20 years as Bi-Mart pharmacy manager, she has seen legions of patients — combat veterans, fibromyalgia sufferers, accident victims, people with auto-immune disorders and degenerative diseases — who suffer needlessly because their pain is poorly controlled. The twin fears of patient addiction and illegal drug trafficking scare doctors away from prescribing opium-based medications for many of the 76 million Americans living with chronic pain, Hahn explains. And pharmacists often behave judgmentally when patients come to the counter with high-dose prescriptions for opioids.

“Many pharmacists think people who use Vicodin or Percocet are all potential addicts, and they treat them horribly — horribly! — whispering to the technician, looking at the patient with suspicion,” she says. “A pharmacy that does not understand pain management can be the biggest barrier in the health-care chain.”

Far from being content with just filling “scrips,” Hahn teaches in OSU’s College of Pharmacy as an affiliate faculty member, chairs the Oregon Pain Management Commission (the first of its kind in the United States) and serves as Oregon co-leader for the American Pain Foundation. She also is active in Death with Dignity, Oregon’s first-in-the-nation assisted suicide law.

Listening to Patients

From a curtained consultation room overlooking the Bi-Mart pharmacy counter, Hahn keeps a sharp eye out for patients who might need her expertise or just a cheerful “hello.” When Vietnam vet Richard Ketter shuffles up, bent low over a shopping cart, his hat decorated with buttons and pins — including a purple heart — Hahn calls out to him.

“Hi, Mr. Ketter, how are you today?”

“Good. Gettin’ ready to go prospectin’ for gold out in Arizona.”

The news is nothing short of miraculous. Injuries suffered during a helicopter crash in Vietnam left the 65-year-old Ketter with a painfully damaged leg. Unable to get the meds he needed through Veteran’s Affairs, he searched online for a new doctor and was steered to Hahn. She in turn referred him to Dr. Martin Klos, who accepts patients like Ketter whom “no one else will touch.”

“Kathy and Dr. Klos saved my life,” says Ketter, who admits to nearly giving up on life before finding help. “They’re the only people who seem to care.”

Passing the Torch

As the chair of the 17-member Oregon Pain Management Commission, Hahn helps set policies and guidelines to improve the lives of patients. One controversial issue is medical marijuana.

“The commission understands that marijuana can have tremendous medical value,” she says. “It is a travesty that more money has not gone into investigating and developing it. I believe that its niche is going to be neuropathic pain, and neuropathic pain — if you look at the whole spectrum of pain — is the monster. It is the one that is most difficult to treat.”

As a teacher and mentor, Hahn is passing the torch to a new generation of pharmacists, raising awareness and providing guidance during students’ six-week rotations at Bi-Mart. “What the students have to learn is that it takes a village to take care of a pain patient,” she says. “I want them to do a paradigm shift before they leave here. I want them to become advocates.”

— Lee Sherman

To support OSU pharmaceutical research, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

The Fibromyalgia Challenge: Q&A with Kathy Hahn

Fibromyalgia: Fibromyalgia makes you feel tired and causes muscle pain and “tender points.” Tender points are places on the neck, shoulders, back, hips, arms or legs that hurt when touched. People with fibromyalgia may have other symptoms, such as trouble sleeping, morning stiffness, headaches, and problems with thinking and memory, sometimes called “fibro fog.” (National Institutes of Health)

Terra: Who are some of the most vulnerable patients dealing with chronic pain?

Kathy Hahn: Probably my best examples are middle-aged women with fibromyalgia. I try to champion these women, because there are still so many people who still don’t believe that fibromyalgia exists. There are so many things we don’t know about the disorder and how to treat it. We have some patients who are on some pretty heavy medication, and they often are discriminated against.

Terra: In what ways are they discriminated against?

Hahn: I had one patient in her 40s who had been going to another pharmacy that was being very judgmental. They weren’t keeping her medication in stock, not doing any of the things they needed to do to facilitate a smooth treatment and make sure she didn’t run out. A pharmacy can either be a help or a hindrance. For example, if you’ve got a patient saying, “My insurance company won’t pay for this medication,” the pharmacy can jump through the right hoops, work with the doctor and be a facilitator in getting the medication through the insurance process. The pharmacy has to be a big partner in helping patients with chronic pain. They are the gatekeepers of the medications. If they become judgmental, everything falls apart.

Terra: Part of your mission is to encourage patients to advocate strongly for what they need, right?

Hahn: Yes, and that can be very difficult, especially for the fibromyalgia patient who is isolated and alone. You get these women who’ve had more and more trouble and pain and can’t get out of bed, and they lose everything – they lose their job, they lose their spouse, they lose their family, they lose their home – and trying to teach them how to advocate for themselves is tough. You’re trying to pull them back in. You’re trying to teach them: “You’re not alone. You are not alone!” We teach them how to access resources, encourage them to get a computer and find online communities for discussion and information. We have to stop them from every day just curling up on the couch and thinking, “Should I continue breathing today, or not?”

nvestigating the link between human and animal health is a critical focus for Cyril Clarke, dean of OSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine, as he leads the college in a new era of veterinary research. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

Veterinarians, as everyone knows, care for dogs, cats and livestock. Less well-known is their role in safeguarding human health.

“It’s important to point out the strengths and critical assets that veterinarians bring to public health,” observes Cyril Clarke, Lois Bates Acheson Dean of Veterinary Medicine.

Clarke ticks off the key intersections of animal-human health one by one. First, the vast majority of emerging infectious diseases worldwide — swine flu, avian flu, HIV-AIDs and Ebola, to name a few — have animal origins. Next, 80 percent of pathogens that pose a national-security threat — infectious agents like anthrax, for instance — are transferred to humans from animals. And food-borne illnesses such as salmonellosis and E-coli infection, which sicken thousands of Americans each year, typically are traced to livestock.

“Veterinarians really are the guardians of a safe food supply,” says Clarke, who grew up in South Africa and began eyeing a veterinary career during summers at his grandparents’ farm near Kruger National Park. “They are responsible for investigating the causes of diseases linked to contaminated foods and for maintaining a healthy food supply.”

Too, animal studies can reveal the causes of and cures for human illnesses. Researchers have developed well over 400 animal models of human disease, Clarke says. Studies with mice, for instance, have resulted in new understandings of tumor progression in lung cancer, as well as suggesting new diagnostic methods and therapies. Golden retrievers, which can carry spontaneous mutations in the dystrophin gene that causes a condition similar to Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, have shed light on this lethal childhood disease.

Clarke’s own research program at Oklahoma State University, in fact, was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and other agencies that support human health studies. That’s because his investigations of microbial pathogens in bovine respiratory disease — studies spurred by his initial professional interest in agriculture and livestock — illuminated principles of immune response and antimicrobial resistance that have applications in human health.

It is at this nexus of human-animal health where Clarke and his OSU colleagues in the human health sciences are laying the groundwork for a signature program that they hope will gain recognition nationally and internationally — what he calls an “area of critical mass and excellence.” Clarke is working closely with fellow deans Tammy Bray (College of Health and Human Sciences) and Wayne Kradjan (College of Pharmacy) to design a multidisciplinary research and graduate program that will blend together and build upon OSU’s strengths in the health sciences. Under the university’s realignment plan, the three colleges are being folded into an overarching Division of Health Sciences.

“As we look to the future, the College of Vet Med will have a much larger research program — one that is overlaid and undergirded by an inter-departmental, cross-disciplinary graduate program in comparative (cross-species) health sciences,” says Clarke. “We will also be enhancing our opportunities for outreach so that we can extend new knowledge to our stakeholders and constituents.”

To support the College of Veterinary Medicine at OSU, contact the Oregon State University Foundation.

Rural landowners depend on access roads to move livestock and farm equipment. (Photo: Jesse Abrams)

Beautiful landscapes may inspire us, but it takes more than scenery to create community vitality. Wallowa County and rural communities across the country struggle with economic development, a future for their youth and the cultural tensions that arise from changing land ownership. For more than a decade, such issues in Wallowa have been addressed by Wallowa Resources, one of the nation’s leading nonprofit natural resources organizations.

“Wallowa Resources shows us what is possible. There are few places you can go in the country to get this range of innovative thinking about rural communities,” says Oregon State University forestry professor John Bliss.

So it was natural for Bliss and Associate Professor Kate MacTavish in Human Development and Family Sciences to partner with Nils Christoffersen, Wallowa Resources executive director, in the creation of an experiential learning course for OSU graduate students. Since 2005, students have spent 10 September days living with families and meeting with community leaders from Garibaldi on to the coast, to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Central Oregon, to Wallowa County in the northeast corner of the state.

For students, the experience has been unforgettable. Caitlin Bell, who participated in 2008, had this to say on her final exam: “I was faced repeatedly with the formidable and humbling task of dismantling my assumptions and preconceptions and rebuilding knowledge from scratch. I learned, among many things, that rural residents are innovative, entrepreneurial, and warmly hospitable people who value community, simple living, and hard work.” Wallowa Resources reprinted her remarks in a 2009 newsletter.

The Communities and Natural Resources course has spawned student projects that arm local decision-makers with useful information about trends in education, land use, forests and other topics, adds Christoffersen. For example, two students working with MacTavish – Devora Shamah and Brooke Dolenc – surveyed Wallowa County high school students and graduates to find out what drives their aspirations. They discovered that while about a third of high school students wanted to live in Wallowa County as adults, about one quarter of graduates were actually doing so. Dolenc’s and Shamah’s reports are available online in the OSU Scholar’s Archive.

OSU’s relationship with Wallowa County is just one example of the close partnerships between the university and rural communities through Extension and agricultural experiment stations. In addition, the OSU Rural Studies Program has established formal agreements to do research in Wallowa and Tillamook counties and has been active in Lake, Coos and other counties as well.

A signature effort has been the development of “community indicators” of vitality. OSU students and faculty have collaborated with local citizens to identify markers that allow leaders to prioritize goals and evaluate progress in reaching them. Wallowa County was the focus of a recent effort led by Lena Etuk, a social demographer with OSU Extension and the College of Health and Human Sciences. With funding from the Ford Institute for Community Building, she worked with Wallowa Resources and a team of volunteers to outline 26 indicators of vitality in social, economic and environmental health and community capacity.

Reports for Oregon counties, including Tillamook and Wallowa, are available online here.

Related story: The Mythbuster

To support OSU Extension or the Rural Studies Program, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

New OSU research leader comes to Corvallis from NOAA.

Richard “Rick” Spinrad, who has overseen national research initiatives from leadership positions in the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Navy, will join OSU in July as vice president for research.

Spinrad earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. at OSU in the 1970s and 1980s. He returns to Oregon with a wealth of experience tightly aligned with the university’s research priorities in climate change and sustainability.

As NOAA’s assistant administrator for research, he directed programs in oceanography, atmospheric sciences and climate, including the National Sea Grant College Program and Climate Program Office. In his previous NOAA post, he directed navigation services, including the National Geodetic Survey, the National Marine Sanctuaries Program and the Office of Coastal Resource Management. He also represented U.S. interests in the establishment of a global tsunami warning system.

Spinrad succeeds John Cassady, who retired in January.

Tiny fruit fly gives a giant headache to Oregon's berry and tree fruit growers.

It’s a pest not much bigger than the head of a pin. But for Oregon farmers, the tiny fruit fly has the potential to take a giant bite out of yields — and profits.

The spotted wing Drosophila has made its way to Oregon from its native Southeast Asia, turning up first in wine grapes late last summer and then invading berries, cherries, plums, peaches and other fruit crops across 13 counties. Willamette Valley growers lost up to 20 percent of their blueberries and raspberries and as much as 80 percent of their late-season peaches.

“This is an insect that, up to last year, had never been seen in the continental United States,” says OSU research entomologist Amy Dreves.

In February, to help head off a crisis in the state’s $500 million tree-fruit and berry industry, the Legislature gave $225,000 to a team of researchers from OSU and the state and national departments of agriculture for monitoring and controlling the fly. Among the team’s tasks are sampling fruits to detect infestations, mapping outbreaks, testing traps, developing natural baits, doing outreach and training growers.

“It is crucial to find infestations of this pest as early as possible, when they can still be treated effectively,” warns Dreves.

People who want to monitor the spotted wing Drosophila in their home gardens can learn how to make a trap and identify the insects through a series of videos produced by Dreves and Tiffany Woods of Extension and Experiment Station Communications.

To support OSU research on crop production, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

March 15, 2010: “The Bridge Team’s goal for today was to determine the geographical extent of bridge damage from the Chilean earthquakes. We did this by driving nearly 450 miles south along Route 5 (the Pan American Highway) from Santiago to Temuco, keeping along the outer edge of the zone of strong shaking (about 50 miles or so inland). To put this into Pacific Northwest context, it would be very similar to driving from Seattle to southern Oregon along I-5 after a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake off the Oregon/Washington coast.”
— Blog post from OSU civil and construction engineer Scott Ashford

Ashford visited Chile as a member of the international Chile Earthquake Reconnaissance Team sponsored by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. The quakes that have devastated Chile and Haiti in recent months, he notes, are reminders that Oregon, too, sits poised for heavy shaking. The Cascadia Subduction Zone shifts abruptly every 300 to 400 years or so, and the next time it does, experts predict destruction and dislocation from the Pacific shoreline inland to Portland and the Willamette Valley. A tsunami could follow in the earthquake’s wake.

To help Oregonians prepare, Oregon Sea Grant outreach specialist Patrick Corcoran is working with coastal communities. “We may have as little as 15 minutes’ warning for a potential tsunami, and the damage from an earthquake could be immediate,” says Corcoran, who coordinates the Coastal Storms Program at OSU. “We all need to be prepared to help ourselves.”

Ashford and Corcoran are among more than a dozen OSU faculty who are sharing their expertise in engineering, geology, communications and marine sciences with Chilean colleagues.

More information on tsunami preparedness is available at OSU Extension.

In his research on marine reserves, a graduate student taps his experience with both fish and humans.

Redfish Rocks is home to a diverse collection of marine species — and to a unique collaboration among fishermen, university scientists and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The jagged reef off the shores of Port Orford, one of two pilot sites in Oregon’s developing marine reserve network, was established by coastal residents who wanted to “have a local say and carve out benefits” for their community. Those are the words of the Port Orford Ocean Resource Team, a grassroots nonprofit launched in 2008 to protect local fish stocks — particularly BOFFFFs (Big Old Fat Fertile Female Fish) — and to engage in scientific research.

That’s where Tom Calvanese comes in. The OSU Marine Resource Management graduate student has studied fish in the Hawaiian and San Juan Islands and California’s Channel Islands, but he also has a decade of experience in some of the grittiest territory in community organizing: mobilizing services for the homeless and for indigent HIV/AIDS patients.

The study of rockfish movements at Redfish Rocks that he is designing with his adviserScott Heppell, assistant professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, will not only draw upon his undergraduate research at the universities of Hawaii, Washington and San Francisco State, but will also employ his skills working with disparate actors from multiple disciplines and perspectives.

“Marine reserves are a perfect storm of public policy and science — a contentious issue with a lot of complexity that this work will help to illuminate,” says Calvanese, who recently received a $5,000 Oregon Lottery grant to help support his project. “I see conflict as an opportunity. If we can harness that conflict constructively, it enriches the process and leads to meaningful change.”

Pankaj Jaiswal is a co-creator of the new Gramene database that helps plant breeders develop new crop varieties (Photo: Truen Pence)

To find the genes that enable a crop — ryegrass or wheat, for example — to resist disease or tolerate drought can mean endless searching, not through one haystack but through many. And success is only the beginning of time-consuming breeding trials. Now scientists, farmers and plant breeders who feed the world have a new scientific resource at their disposal to help them cut through the DNA clutter.

An online gold mine known as the Gramene database is really a library of datasets, says one of its creators, Pankaj Jaiswal, assistant professor in Oregon State University’s Department of Botany and Plant Pathology and a faculty member in the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing. While a post-doctoral scientist at Cornell University, Jaiswal helped to create the database, research tools and educational information that are revolutionizing the application of genomics to crop development. He continues to be one of Gramene’s principal investigators with colleagues at Cornell and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

Supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), Gramene focuses on grasses (family name: Gramineae), including wheat, corn and rice, which collectively provide about half of the world’s calories.

“What’s unique about Gramene,” says Jaiswal, “is that it builds relationships between scientists who work from a purely genetics and breeding perspective and the people who work from the molecular and biochemical perspective. It tries to bridge the gap between these two.” To develop crops with desirable characteristics, crop breeders can identify genes that are associated with specific traits, such as cold hardiness, disease resistance or flowering time.

And by providing genetic information about multiple species, the database bridges genomes that have been fully sequenced and are relatively well described, such as corn and rice, and those that are less well known, such as wheat and ryegrass. Commonalities between different genomes can generate important clues for breeders of new plant varieties.

Scientists use Gramene for basic science — understanding evolutionary relationships among difference species, for example — as well as for studies that seek innovations in plants for biofuel production or disease resistance. In 2008, USDA and university scientists, including Reed Barker of the Agricultural Research Service in Corvallis, used Gramene to identify likely candidates for disease resistance genes in perennial ryegrass, a mainstay of Oregon’s grass seed industry. The close similarities with disease resistance genes in rice, which had been studied and described in detail, led them to suggest that the ryegrass genes might have the same function.

Judging by the traffic on its website, Gramene has been a global hit. In the last year alone, its data files have been downloaded or viewed in more than 140 countries by about 220,000 visitors. Scientists have cited it as a model for an emerging plant knowledge system, says OSU plant geneticist Todd Mockler. Mockler’s lab participated in the recently completed sequencing of a small grass plant, Brachypodium, whose genome is now stored on Gramene. Brachypodium is a promising model for grass genomics studies.

Jaiswal, an acknowledged leader in developing standardized vocabularies (what scientists call “ontologies”) for the rapidly expanding plant genome sciences, also trains breeders and farmers to use Gramene. “We try to avoid too many scientific terms,” he says with a nod to the technical language of his profession, “but we can’t do that all the time.”

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To support OSU research in biotechnology, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

OSU news release, Dec. 26, 2010. Pankaj Jaiswal contributed to the compete genome sequence of the woodland strawberry, a relative of commercially bred strawberry varieties. The plant shares genes with other fruit crops, including peaches, apples, cherries and plums.

In one of the Earth's most active fault zones, OSU geoscientist John Nabelek and colleagues are defining the forces that created Mt. Everest and threaten millions of people. (Photo courtesy of John Nabelek)

On a computer generated diagram of seismic profiles from Nepal and Tibet, John Nabelek traces a thin blue line. “That’s the interface between the Indian and the Eurasian tectonic plates,” he says. The earthquake-prone, mountainous terrain above it is home to an estimated 40 million people.

“It is very steep. In earthquakes, landslides come tumbling down,” says Nabelek, an associate professor in Oregon State University’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. “Construction is not up to par, so there, you’re looking at a huge disaster.”

With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Nabelek leads an international team of scientists on a quest to understand the underlying geology of the Himalayas. In 2009, they created the most complete seismic image of the Earth’s crust and upper mantle in the region and discovered some unusual geologic features that may explain how it has evolved. The study is known as Hi-CLIMB, Himalayan-Tibetan Continental Lithosphere during Mountain Building.

“The research took us from the jungles of Nepal, with its elephants, crocodiles and rhinos, to the barren, wind-swept heights of Tibet in areas where nothing grew for hundreds of miles and there were absolutely no humans around,” Nabelek says. “That remoteness is one reason this region had never previously been completely profiled.”

Waterbed Geology

A lack of scientific consensus on how two continental plates collide has led to competing theories about the Himalayas. Some researchers have proposed that the heat generated by the collision has melted so much rock that the Tibetan plateau floats above it as though on a waterbed.

“There could be small pockets of fluid, but our study shows there are not large amounts of fluid here,” says Nabelek. “The building of Tibet is not a simple process. In part, the mountain building is similar to pushing dirt with a bulldozer, except in this case, the Indian sediments pile up into a wedge that is the lesser Himalayan mountains.”

The interface between the subducting Indian plate and the upper Himalayan and Tibetan crust is the Main Himalayan thrust fault, which reaches the surface in southern Nepal. The new images show that it extends from the surface to mid-crustal depths in central Tibet, but the shallow part of the fault sticks, leading to historically devastating mega-thrust earthquakes.

“The deep part is ductile and slips in a continuous fashion. Knowing the depth and geometry of this interface will advance research on a variety of fronts, including the interpretation of strain accumulation from GPS measurements prior to large earthquakes,” Nabelek adds. The study is continuing with funding from NSF and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Nabelek also studies the Cascadia subduction zone, in which the relatively dense Juan de Fuca plate dives beneath North America. “The advantage of working in Tibet is that you can get on top of it. You can work on it. With the Cascadia, most of the mega-thrust is offshore about 100 miles.”

His emphasis in Cascadia is in the southern portion of the Juan de Fuca plate offshore from the Oregon-California border, a region known as the Gorda Deformation. Scientists don’t yet know why so much seismic activity occurs in this area. Most of the Juan de Fuca plate is relatively calm.

In another project funded by the NSF-EarthScope program, Nabelek will use the crustal imaging techniques employed in Nepal and Tibet to study the Earth’s crust under parts of Nevada. That project is scheduled to start this summer.

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To support OSU research on Earth systems, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

Scott Baker’s investigations of whale and dolphin DNA have taken him from Alaska’s humpback feeding grounds to the illegal marine mammal trade in Asia and an Academy Award-winning documentary. (Photo: David Baker)

For most Americans, eating a relative of Flipper or Keiko would be as unthinkable as dining on Lassie or Smokey Bear. But in some seafaring cultures, dolphins and whales are traditional foods, sold in supermarkets right alongside the fish fillets and beef cutlets.

The sale of meat from whales and dolphins accidentally drowned in fishing nets or left over from “scientific” whaling operations is allowed in some countries as “exceptions” to the international moratorium on commercial whaling. Trouble is, neither customers nor enforcers eyeing the packages of fresh or frozen steaks or stew meat can distinguish a minke whale taken in the scientific whaling program from, say, an illegally killed gray or humpback whale.

That’s where Scott Baker comes in.

The OSU conservation geneticist is one of the world’s foremost experts in using DNA to identify specific populations of cetaceans — whales, dolphins and porpoises — and thereby detect the unlawful sale of protected species. Baker travels frequently to Japan and South Korea, where he holes up in cramped hotel rooms in Tokyo or Seoul with his portable genetics lab, listening for a knock at the door. When the secret code is tapped out, he cracks open the door and a local collaborator, who has been covertly trolling grocery stores and sushi bars, furtively passes him a bagful of bloody meat for analysis.

This cloak-and-dagger science was documented in the Academy Award winning eco-thriller The Cove, in which Baker was cast (see sidebar).

“No scientist has contributed more to our understanding of cetacean genetics than Scott,” says Phillip Clapham, a cetacean scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “In particular, his innovative use of genetic analysis to detect and track illegal or unreported trade in whales and other wildlife has given scientists and managers a powerful tool to assess the extent of this traffic and its impact on populations. He’s been one of the major players in the field of whale biology worldwide.”

Catcher in the Bay

Height, as everyone knows, is an advantage in basketball games and presidential elections. But in marine science? Surprisingly, it can be — at least at New College of Sarasota, Florida. For a pioneering dolphin study launched while he was a student there, Baker’s 6-foot-4-inch stature gave him an edge over his shorter classmates. That’s because he could stand in the shallow waters of Sarasota Bay, his head well above the surface, while helping to use a seine net for the capture and release of wild dolphins.

“The researchers tended to enlist tall undergraduates for the hard work,” Baker says, laughing.

As a kid in Alabama, Baker vacationed on the Gulf Coast every summer with his dad (an electrical engineer and decorated veteran of Omaha Beach and the Battle of the Bulge) and his mom (an activist and humanitarian in the nuclear freeze movement and many other causes). “When you live in a place like Birmingham, the Gulf of Mexico is sort of like paradise — except for the mosquitoes and sand flies and jellyfish,” he says, grinning. The Gulf was where he first became intrigued by dolphins. But it was in that shallow Florida bay as he wrapped his arms around individual bottlenoses to process them for the study — weighing, measuring, tagging, drawing blood, taking tissue samples — where the animals etched a deeper impression on his psyche.

“Those kinds of things change your life,” says Baker, who left New Zealand’s University of Auckland in 2006 to become associate director of OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute. “How many people get to have an experience like that — capturing and releasing wild dolphins for a groundbreaking scientific study?” He adds, “We caught a lot of dolphins.”

Describing himself as “not terribly sentimental,” Baker nevertheless admits to being charmed by the joie de vivre of dolphins. Whales, on the other hand, are hard to relate to. He calls them “extremophiles,” a term borrowed from deep-ocean biologists who apply it to such exotic creatures as cold-seep tubeworms and giant hydrothermal vent clams — organisms that live in Earth’s most extreme environments. Not only have whales shed such basic mammalian characteristics as hind limbs during their evolutionary history, they can dive as deep as 5,000 feet, live as long as 200 years and travel as far as 6,000 miles during annual migrations.

“Whales are so alien,” Baker says. “They’re fascinating and magnificent animals, but it’s hard for us to imagine their world. Dolphins are much more like humans.”

Brain Train

During discussions of cetacean genetics, Scott Baker’s train of thought passes through a hundred switches, side rails and branch lines, diverging down one surprising aside after another. For him, everything in biology is connected to cetacean genetics.

Ask him about genetic diversity among whales, for instance, and he’ll tell you a story about cheetahs — a story with an Oregon angle, no less — from a Scientific American article that strongly influenced his early career. At Southern Oregon’s zoological park, Wildlife Safari, cheetahs were mysteriously dying of a common feline virus that causes only sniffles in housecats, suggesting a weakness in the big cats’ immune systems. The resulting gene-pool study by U.S. National Cancer Institute scientist Stephen O’Brien piqued Baker’s curiosity about the impact of genetic “bottlenecks” (large die-offs in a population caused by natural or human forces, such as the intensive whaling during the 19th and 20th centuries) on long-term species survival among the great whales.

Ask Baker about the human bond with wild animals, and he’ll engage you in an exploration ranging from the philosophy of Descartes to the methods of Jane Goodall to the quantifiable self-awareness of pigs, chimps, crows and (of course) dolphins. If you venture into the topic of evolution, you’ll dive with him into the Eve Hypothesis (the theory that all humans share DNA traceable to the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens in Africa about 200,000 years ago), take a detour into Mendel’s peas, then veer from Darwin’s (mistaken) hunch that whales evolved from bears to the current scientific thinking: Today’s oceanic behemoths had a hoofed, hippo-like ancestor. If you’re still with him, you’ll careen around a hairpin turn, returning to the origins of modern humans to look in on the late pioneer of molecular evolution Allan Wilson of UC Berkeley, who discovered the “molecular clock” (using genetic mutations to date evolutionary changes).

Genes on Screen

By this point in the conversation, your brain will probably verge on overload. But Baker is just getting warmed up. As he talks, he frequently jumps up from his seat to scan his bookcase for a relevant article, or swivels to his computer screen to pull up a DNA barcode or digital map showing worldwide distribution of humpbacks, which he has studied since his years as a Ph.D. student at the University of Hawaii.

He’s at his most animated when talking about those early discoveries — such as one stunning, predawn revelation in a darkroom where he was developing “autoradiographic” images of humpback whale DNA. These were some of the first “DNA fingerprints” derived from small skin samples, which Baker had collected with a biopsy dart fired from an inflatable research boat in Southeast Alaska’s Inside Passage and Central California’s coastal waters, as well as in Hawaii and the Gulf of Maine. (Previously, whales and dolphins had been ID’d photographically by natural markings on their fins, flukes and flippers.) The finding he made that night in 1988 was a breakthrough in the just-emerging field of molecular ecology — using molecular markers for clues to relationships among individual whales and the ancestry of populations.

“I remember pulling out the first autorad that showed samples from feeding grounds in Southeast Alaska side-by-side with samples from California, and there was no overlap between the two populations,” he says. “All individuals from Southeast Alaska had one pattern, and not one individual from California had that pattern. It was like, wow!”

These population-level variations in DNA, which geneticists call “fixed differences,” pointed to ancient migration pathways swum again and again and again over tens of thousands of years. The black-and-white barcode he stared at that night supported his hypothesis that migratory routes from winter calving to summer feeding grounds had persisted for hundreds of generations — in other words, across evolutionary time. Biologists call this enduring continuity “maternally directed fidelity,” that is, patterns taught from mother to calf and reflected over eons in mitochondrial (maternally inherited) DNA, which scientists denote as mtDNA.

“This was one of the first discoveries we made using molecular methods,” he says. “What we were seeing in whales was a very distinct population substructure. The markers showed that despite their mobility, despite their ability to travel 12,000 miles roundtrip on each migration, these animals keep returning to the same place year after year, generation after generation. They don’t wander around. It was puzzling, because these aren’t terrestrial animals isolated by canyons and rivers and mountains — they’re out there in the ocean with no obvious barriers. Who would have thought the ocean would be so subdivided? Who would have thought whales would treat the ocean the same way bears treat their habitat, inheriting their mothers’ home range and returning there each year?”

Scott Baker was featured in "The Cove"

In the seaside village of Taiji, Japan, there’s a jarring juxtaposition: Jolly-looking tour buses shaped like happy dolphins putter up and down the streets by day, while by night fishermen secretly slaughter hundreds of panic-stricken dolphins in a nearby inlet and sell them as meat.

This sinister irony permeates the Academy Award-winning movie, The Cove, produced by the Ocean Preservation Society. Scientific adviser and cast member Scott Baker is delighted by the accolades, not because they widen his fame outside science circles but because recognition from the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards and the Sundance Film Festival means broader exposure for the movie, which critics have characterized as an “eco-thriller.” That, in turn, means more international pressure to end the carnage.

“There has been tremendous resistance to the movie in Japan,” says Baker, a leader in international efforts to uncover black-market trade in products from protected species of whales and dolphins. “The Tokyo International Film Festival initially turned down the film, but under pressure from American actors like Ben Stiller, they agreed to allow one showing outside the formal festival. The international press was relegated to the back of the auditorium.”

Baker, associate director of OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, acts as the film’s scientific voice on dolphin biology and the health risks to humans who eat dolphin meat, which is high in mercury (mercury levels are concentrated in organisms that are, like dolphins, high up in the food chain). As the world’s first scientist to use DNA to identify whale species being butchered for human consumption, Baker appears in the movie both as an expert “talking head” and as a DNA detective, hunkered over a portable genetics lab in a Tokyo hotel testing samples purchased, covertly, in Japanese fish markets.

“We spent days filming in that hotel room — a room not much bigger than my office,” recalls Baker. He describes director Louie Psihoyos as “visionary but meticulous,” shooting “tons of film” to tell the story of the annual killing of more than 1,200 dolphins in Taiji.

Baker’s science-based scenes of DNA identification and his comments on the threat of mercury contamination in dolphin meat are a counterpoint to the movie’s main storyline: An intrepid team of cinematographers and activists (including the dolphin trainer of the 1960s TV series Flipper), wearing camouflage and night-vision goggles, risk arrest and even death to capture video and underwater acoustics during the slaughter.

Besides being a gripping piece of filmmaking, the movie highlights a heartbreaking issue of massive proportions: the international black market in wildlife. From elephant tusks and rhino horns to bighorn sheep antlers and panther pelts, the illegal trade in endangered animals is worth an estimated $5 billion to $8 billion a year worldwide. Cetaceans are lucrative commodities in that grisly enterprise. In Japan or Korea, for instance, a whale killed in coastal fishing nets can sell for more than $100,000 wholesale. Dolphins, too, bring in fat cash: Aquariums pay $150,000 for a live animal.

But it’s the dead ones that most worry Baker, a longtime delegate to the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Despite the IWC’s 1986 moratorium on whaling, Japan, Korea, Iceland and Norway continue the hunt, either under the guise of science or under an “objection” (basically, a rejection of the commission’s authority to regulate whaling). Loopholes in the commission’s 1986 moratorium, it turns out, are big enough for a whale to swim through — and die in. A “scientific whaling” loophole allows a limited number of whales to be killed for research and the remains to be sold. A “bycatch whaling” loophole allows fishermen to sell whales and dolphins that become entangled in fishing nets. Hundreds of protected animals die unreported each year because of the laxity of IWC rules and regs, Baker says. “The continued sale of ‘legal’ whale products acts as a cover for other illegal, unreported and undocumented hunting,” he argues.

Still, whales are afforded at least some measure of protection by the IWC. Dolphins, on the other hand, have none at all from the IWC or other international conventions (although many individual nations have outlawed dolphin killing).

Forensic genetics is a potent weapon in the fight to save wildlife. Baker’s technique — a method of quickly amplifying segments of DNA called a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) — is the same one used by crime-scene investigators to match “perps” to body fluids, hair and other tissue they leave behind. PCR is used for all sorts of investigations, from nabbing moose poachers to detecting cystic fibrosis in eight-celled human embryos. Indeed, Baker and his Ph.D. student Merel Dalebout were using PCR in 2002 when they discovered a new species of beaked whale, the first new whale species in 15 years and the first to be described primarily by DNA.

Working with the Oregon Department of Transportation, Oregon State University engineers conducted the only real-world test of a road tax system based on miles traveled.

Praise the gas tax. For every gallon pumped into pickups, SUVs and miserly subcompacts, Oregonians put 24¢ into the state highway fund and another 18.3¢ into the federal. On top of that, two Oregon counties (Washington and Multnomah) and 21 cities add their own levies for local roads. In 2005, about 80 percent of Oregon’s road revenues depended on fuel taxes.

Since 1919, when Oregon became the first state in the nation to levy a gas tax, the revenue stream has been as reliable as winter rain in Portland. Today, it generates about $400 million annually, but in the near future, with the push for energy independence and electric cars in particular, paying for pavement may become more difficult. Fewer gallons in our vehicles will mean less money to keep roads, highways and bridges safe and in good repair.

As Nissan, General Motors and other manufacturers continue to develop electric vehicles, there is still only one demonstrated alternative to a gas tax in the nation: Oregon’s vehicle mileage fee concept. In a pilot test organized by the Oregon Department of Transportation and completed in 2007, Oregon State University engineers showed that such a system is technically viable.

When the project began four years earlier, monitoring mileage was a new venture for OSU’s Mobile Technology Solutions Laboratory. Director David Porter specializes in data capture and analysis, and, while colleague David Kim worked for General Motors for 10 years before coming to OSU, he and his team simulated production line efficiencies (they were honored in 2005 for saving GM more than $2 billion). Nevertheless, ODOT had decided to create an electronic data collection system, says agency manager Jim Whitty, and was attracted by the engineers’ expertise in combining on-the-fly detection (laser scanning, bar coding, radio frequency identification) with communications and data management.

In a presentation to an ODOT task force (the Road User Fee Task Force, also known as “rough-tough”), Porter and Kim reviewed a range of technology options for recording mileage electronically and transmitting data to computer-equipped gas pumps. “ODOT saw we had expertise in evaluating technologies, what potentially would work for the requirements given by the legislature,” says Porter. “So we wrote the functional requirements and technical specifications of the technology. Then we found a company that could implement it. We tested it and administered the technology portion of the pilot for ODOT.”

Testing, Testing

It wasn’t the first technology pilot test for Porter and his team. In an evaluation of flat-bed scanning technologies for PSC Corporation of Eugene (now Psion Teklogix, an international mobile computing company), they had built and operated a supermarket check-out stand. For the U.S. Post Office, they had tested an invisible-ink labeling system that could speed the processing of magazines and catalogs. They had done projects for the U.S. Army, Symbol Technologies and Wavelink Corporation.

Nevertheless, the Portland test was an eye-opener. Porter and Kim had tried out the mileage tracking devices in their own cars in Corvallis, but in Portland, they would be working with 285 motorists and two eastside independent gas stations. In addition to different vehicle brands and makes, there would be comparisons of two different systems, one based on GPS (global positioning system) technology and the other on a diagnostic device, standard equipment in cars made after 1996. And when things went wrong, they would have to drive the 160-mile round trip to make repairs.

As with any new technology, things did go wrong. Just producing the devices turned out to be more difficult than planned, but a custom electronics manufacturer, MegaTech of Corvallis, stepped in to finish the job. Other problems cropped up as the pilot test got under way: dead car batteries, stolen GPS units and unreliable data links.

Fortunately, those were the exceptions to a system that otherwise worked smoothly. For most participants, the mileage monitoring devices operated flawlessly and transferred data to gas station billing systems without missing a byte. In its final report, ODOT concluded that “using existing technology in new ways, a mileage fee could be implemented to replace the gas tax as the principal revenue source for road funding.”

Privacy Concerns

The project spurred plenty of comment on news media websites, most often about motorists’ privacy. “We always do our best to avoid putting that element at risk,” says Porter. “We feel confident that we will be able to protect privacy to a very high level.” Still, he agrees, some people might oppose the technology regardless of engineered safeguards.

The vehicle mileage fee concept needs further testing, and Whitty envisions another pilot project using “open-architecture” technologies. “We learned a lot in the first test, especially about public acceptance,” he says. “People like the idea of having a choice, and we’d like to allow motorists to use any kind of technology they want as long as it meets standards for accuracy.”

At the federal level, congressman Earl Blumenauer has proposed legislation (HR 3311) that calls for continued research and pilot tests for a nationwide Road User Fee Pilot Project. Such a system would have to address concerns such as privacy, public acceptance, ease of compliance and administrative cost

Meanwhile, Porter and Kim are working with ODOT on another intelligent transportation technology, roadside devices that record vehicle speeds. By delivering near real-time data to Web-accessible traffic maps, they hope to help drivers avoid congestion as they plan their routes. A test is slated in the next year for U.S. Hwy. 99W near Portland.

To support OSU research on highway safety and convenience, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

In a study funded by the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC) and the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) in 2006, she led the development of three models to examine the effects of mileage fees on how much people drive, how the fees would be distributed among rural and urban motorists and how the tax change would affect different income groups.

Using data from a 2001 national transportation survey, McMullen found that shifting from the gas tax to a mileage fee made little difference in how much motorists would actually pay and thus had little or no effect on how much they drive. She also showed that mileage fees would be slightly more regressive than the gasoline tax. That is, motorists with the lowest incomes would pay a small increase, less than 1 percent of their income, under a mileage fee program. However, that pales in comparison to the more than 5 percent increase that occurred when gasoline prices roughly doubled from 2001 to 2006.

Comparing urban and rural residents, McMullen found that rural drivers would pay slightly less under mileage fees. Even though rural motorists tend to drive more miles, they also tend to have more pickups and other vehicles that get lower fuel mileage. Owners of fuel-efficient vehicles would pay slightly more under a mileage fee system.

A lack of car sales data prevented McMullen and her team from evaluating the impact of mileage fees on vehicle purchasing preferences.

OTREC honored McMullen with its first Researcher of the Year Award in 2009 for her leadership in the analysis. In March 2010, she was elected president of the Transportation Research Forum, an international independent organization of researchers and other professionals.

Her report, Techniques for Assessing the Socio-Economic Effects of Vehicle Mileage Fees, was published in 2008 and is available online.

Sarina Rodrigues: In general, people high on the autism scale don’t do particularly well on tasks where they are asked to read other people’s emotions. We call this skill “empathic accuracy.” But that doesn’t mean people with autism can’t empathize. In fact, there’s one theory that they might be empathizing too much, and they’re so freaked out they can’t respond. There are a whole lot of underlying mysteries that we haven’t solved yet.

Terra: How do you go about measuring empathic accuracy?

Rodrigues: There’s a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes where the subject is shown a series of photos of people’s eyes and asked to guess what emotion the person is feeling. It has gone through a lot of rigorous validation. Researchers have found that performance on this task inversely relates to where people fall on the autism spectrum.

Terra: Researchers know that oxytocin is linked to emotions such as empathy and compassion. Do you think oxytocin research will help shed light on the causes of autism as well?

Rodrigues: There are some researchers right now who are administering oxytocin to people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome to see how it might affect them. One recent study showed that people with autism had variations in their oxytocin receptors – what’s called DNA methylation. DNA methylation alters gene expression in cells so that cells remember where they have been. You can’t change your genes, but things like stress or loneliness or sleep deprivation can change how those genes express themselves in the body. We know there’s a really strong synergy between oxytocin molecules and their receptors. Something seems to be going on there for people who have trouble with social behavior. There’s one provocative and controversial theory that giving synthetic oxytocin to pregnant women to induce labor might cause problems with the fetus. When you flood the body with oxytocin, the receptors might down-regulate to compensate. It’s quite feasible that this could be a culprit in autism.

OSU psychologist Sarina Rodrigues (photo: Karl Maasdam)

You don’t think of voles as paragons of virtue. Yet one species of these drab mouse-like creatures is loyal to its mate for life, helps around the den, cuddles its young, and generally exhibits what humans would call “family values.” Meet the true-blue prairie vole.

Its cousin the meadow vole, however, is a cad. Despite being 99 percent genetically identical to the prairie vole, the meadow vole is profligate in its ways — sleeping around, shirking nest-building and abrogating pup-rearing.

It’s not moral rectitude that makes the difference in voles’ domestic behavior but rather a couple of compounds called oxytocin and vasopressin. Doubling as hormones and neurotransmitters, these neurochemicals are major players in how animals, including humans, relate to each other both romantically and socially. They may even help to explain worldview differences among liberals and conservatives.

Scientists think that animals like the prairie vole, whose cerebral reward centers have evolved to associate vasopressin with pleasure, get more positive reinforcement for pair bonding and therefore seek it out. But exactly how these hormones function in the body and the brain is still largely unknown. Teasing out oxytocin’s and vasopressin’s precise mechanisms drives Rodrigues’ research as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology.

“Oxytocin,” says OSU neuropsychologist Sarina Rodrigues, “is just such a marvelous, amazing and elegant hormone. It’s related to generosity, trust, empathy, mating, pair bonding, parenting. It facilitates social behaviors.”

Stress, Actually

This “elegant hormone” influences stress as well as love, not only strengthening pair bonds and social attachments, but soothing the mind and calming the body when faced with difficult or dangerous situations. Thus, along with the related compounds serotonin, vasopressin and dopamine, it has earned the designation “neuromodulator” — basically, a social lubricant and a brake on stress reactions.

“It dampens how much stress hormone our body releases,” Rodrigues explains. “It curbs our brain’s response to emotional stimuli and even how much our heart freaks out during stress.”

Inspired by her Ph.D. adviser at New York University, Joseph LeDoux, author of The Emotional Brain and the Synaptic Self, Oregon-born Rodrigues started her career dissecting both human and animal brains to map emotions at their source, in a part of the brain known as the amygdala. As a postdoctoral scholar at Columbia University, she studied the brains of psychiatric patients, looking for biochemical clues to mental illness. From there, she headed to Stanford to work with Robert Sapolsky, who discovered that brain cells shrink and die under severe stress. Before joining the faculty at OSU, Rodrigues did yet another postdoc, this time at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, a move she laughingly describes as reflecting her “hippy-dippy” idealism. “Berkeley was my bridge from neuroscience to social psychology,” she says.

Although she sees herself as a “geek” at heart (“I love microscopes and pipettes and test tubes and all that sort of stuff”), she has veered from the merely molecular to the more broadly social. Whether seeking the physical loci of emotions in gray matter or exploring chemical responses to stress, she hopes her neurological knowledge will ultimately benefit the human condition.

“How can we use this information to make people’s lives better?” she wonders. “If we can better understand how people process emotions, we can create tools for dealing with feelings more effectively.”

The Mind’s Eye

Rodrigues’ most recent study, published in the November 2009 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has broken new ground in the field for a couple of reasons. One, it’s the first simultaneous investigation of empathy and stress on a hormonal level. And two, it’s the first to link a specific gene to both empathy and stress reactivity. “This was the first study that really looked at how one gene can affect our social behavior and our stress reactivity in tandem,” Rodrigues says.

If you think of oxytocin molecules as boats floating through the human body, you can think of oxytocin receptors as the docks where the boats tie up. Rodrigues calls these docks “targets.”

“Oxytocin has targets all over our body and brain,” she says. The heart and the spinal cord, even the uterus, have oxytocin docks. It’s not surprising, then, that the hormone affects such maternal functions as uterine contractions and breastfeeding.

Genetic variations in these receptors affect how people respond to hormonal signals from the brain. In her two-pronged experiment, Rodrigues tested the DNA of 200 college students grouped by genotype. Group A had a genetic variation associated with low levels of empathy and social affiliation (emotional bonds with others) and high levels of stress reactivity (jumpiness). Group B, in contrast, had genes associated with strong empathy and low stress reactivity. Each student was then tested for empathy by measuring his or her score on an instrument called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test,” which asks subjects to guess which emotion (such as “hateful, jealous, arrogant or panicked” for one image and “playful, irritated, comforting or bored” for another) is revealed in a photograph of a pair of human eyes. Stress reactivity was gauged by measuring the students’ heart rates after unexpected bursts of noise in a headphone.

The findings were strong and clear: Students in Group A were nearly 25 percent more likely to make an error on the facial expression test, and were also more jumpy on the stress test.

“It does seem that we are biologically hardwired,” Rodrigues says. “We do have a lot of inborn tendencies.”

She cautions, however, that our destinies aren’t ordained by biology. “We are this huge slurry of both nature and nurture, of genes and upbringing and experience,” she says. “It’s our social connections that really chart which trajectory we will go down.”

Rodrigues’ discovery adds to the growing scientific understanding of why some people are more tuned in to the feelings and needs of others. It even bolsters a growing body of literature pointing to oxytocin receptors as possible culprits in autism, which has been associated with the same low-empathy, high-stress variation in Rodrigues’ Group A.

“You can’t change your genes,” Rodrigues points out. “But you can change how genes are expressed.” Extreme loneliness, for example, can weaken genetic defenses against germs. She likens our genetic inheritance to a bottle. Its shape and composition are set. But by capping or uncapping it, by replacing a twist top with a cork, a glass stopper with a funnel, the bottle can be opened or closed, made more receptive or less receptive to new input, turned on or turned off.

Uber-Gooey Group

For young Sarina Rodrigues, it all started with a mystery experiment in her Portland high school chemistry class. “We had no idea what we were making,” she recalls. The blending of sucrose crystals, 3M glucose, protein pellets, solidified mixed esters, 4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde, sodium chloride, sodium bicarbonate and water yielded something a teenager could appreciate: peanut brittle. An apprenticeship at a neuroscience lab arranged by the same St. Mary’s Academy chemistry teacher set her on her current path.

She recently got a shock after testing her own DNA. To her astonishment, she found that she was born with a genetic predisposition for low empathy, high stress reactivity.

“At first I wanted to keep it a secret,” she confesses. “I like to think that I’m a very caring person with empathy for others. But In fact, 75 percent of the people in our study were in the low-empathic, high stress-reactive group. The uber-gooey, lovey-dovey, very empathic, low stress-reactive people were a really small proportion of our sample. Many of us have to really work at forming social bonds and not freaking out.”

To support research in the OSU College of Liberal Arts, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

You’ve heard of scout camp, church camp, even fat camp. But spit camp? That’s where scientists like Sarina Rodrigues go to study the practical applications of using saliva in the lab. A company called Salimetrics, a spin-off from Pennsylvania State University, offers workshops on using oral fluids as biological specimens for the behavioral, social and health sciences.

“It’s a boot camp on how to study biomarker fluctuations in people’s saliva — the best way to collect it, best time of day, best way to store it, best way to measure it — so I can get it just right,” she explains. “These are tricky things to get from saliva.”

Rodrigues signed up for the Salimetrics Spit Camp because, in her quest to unravel the mysteries of oxytocin, saliva has several advantages over blood (“I don’t want to be pricking people”) and cadavers (“I don’t want to be in the business of collecting fresh human brains”). First, needles aren’t needed. Second, subjects must be alive. And third, people can spit in a cup anytime, anywhere, making it handy and practical.

Saliva diaries are another tool Rodrigues is sharpening up for her research program. She wants to track biochemical changes occurring during varying emotional states. “I want people to take a little saliva sample when they feel really depressed and when they feel really warm and fuzzy to see how that might correlate how the body and brain react to various emotions.”

]]> http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2010/04/the-saliva-diaries/feed/ 1 http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2010/04/finding-a-balance-qa-with-stewart-trost/ http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2010/04/finding-a-balance-qa-with-stewart-trost/#comments Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:31:47 +0000 Lee Sherman http://oregonstate.edu/dept/terra/?p=3862 Terra: Sometimes anti-obesity programs are viewed as placing emphasis on children’s weight rather than on their health.

Stewart Trost: Yes, that’s true. Some programs have tried sending home BMI (body mass index) report cards to parents. They’ve had a lot of push-back from parents saying, “You’re telling me my child’s fat.” It’s difficult, because on the one hand we’re trying not to erode self-esteem. We know that overweight and obese kids have lower self-esteem. They get picked last by schoolmates, and later in life, they’re actually less successful making money. They get all sorts of discrimination. Our challenge is how to frame the issue to say, “We believe you have a health problem” without implying, “You’re a bad person.”

Terra: So how do you avoid making kids and parents feel bad while still getting across the message?

Trost: Unfortunately, we tend to err on the side of maintaining the person’s positive self-image. By doing that, we’re failing to reduce their risk for debilitating diseases. We’ve got a large increase in the prevalence of children with Type 2 diabetes – which used to be called adult-onset diabetes, by the way. And the incidence is disproportionate among Hispanic, American Indian and African American kids.

Terra: When encouraging kids to achieve a healthy weight, do we also risk pushing them toward eating disorders?

Trost: We always fight the “you’re going to cause eating disorders” push-back whenever we go into schools to do a program. There’s a real need to avoid sending the wrong message. Teenage girls are already bombarded with unrealistic messages about body image in the media. So we as parents, educators and health-care providers often just bite our lip and allow them to continue on at an unhealthy weight. The research literature shows that there’s a huge amount of health benefit to a fairly modest weight loss. We’re not trying to create Cosmopolitan cover girls-which unfortunately are Photoshopped to look even skinnier. We’re not focused on weight. Our work is always focused on the behaviors. We’re trying to promote healthier choices for food and more activity.

OSU graduate student Jesse Abrams interviewed ranchers, homeowners, business people and local officials to understand changes unfolding in Wallowa County. (Photo courtesy of Jesse Abrams)

On the 1,300-mile drive from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Corvallis, Oregon, Jesse Abrams took a detour. It was the summer of 2007, and he was pondering his upcoming Ph.D. in forest resources. He pulled into Enterprise, Oregon, the county seat for Wallowa County in the state’s mountainous northeastern corner.

It was a homecoming of sorts. For his master’s degree at Oregon State University, Abrams had worked here in 2003 for a nonprofit organization, Wallowa Resources, spending part of his time on the county’s noxious weed program. Four years later, he had other ideas in mind. As a staff member of the Ecological Restoration Institute in Flagstaff, he had juggled the needs of the environment and community development. Now, he wanted to examine the socioeconomic and land-use changes afoot in resource-dependent rural places.

These concerns hit home in a place like Wallowa County, where 58 percent of the land is in public ownership and where farming, ranching and logging have sustained families for generations. In the 1990s, changes to federal forest management led to the closure of three local sawmills. Later, as retirees and vacation-home buyers moved in — drawn by spectacular scenery and what Abrams calls the “idyll of rural America” — land prices started to rise, making it more difficult for young families to get established.

Local Leadership

These and other trends led some to worry that the county’s heritage was threatened and that its future was in the hands of outsiders, says Abrams. “Rather than having a community’s fate decided by the federal government, special interest groups, the courts or corporations, I wanted to look at how local people can exercise leadership and determine their own future,” he says.

So in Enterprise, the student who grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida, met with three Wallowa Resources representatives to discuss how his project might help the organization address some of the county’s problems and develop local solutions.

Abrams set out to define trends affecting the county’s private lands: changes in ownership, road access, grazing by livestock, forest management, weed control, hunting rights and zoning. He interviewed landowners — both newcomers and long-time residents — and talked with public officials. He analyzed past land-use patterns, land sales records and demographic trends.

OSU forestry professor John Bliss advises Abrams and praises his ability to work hand-in-glove with local people. “He convened community leaders to help him get in touch with local concerns and provide feedback. It takes a mature researcher to maintain the necessary academic independence while engaging with such an advisory group, and Jesse has been extremely effective at it,” says Bliss, holder of the Starker Chair in Private and Family Forestry.

Bliss calls Abrams a “mythbuster.” Contrary to the view that before the 1990s, populations and land uses were stable and communities autonomous, Abrams has demonstrated that Wallowa County’s economy and social networks have always been vulnerable to outside forces. “If you look at the county’s history, what defines it is not continuity but change. From the Homestead Era on, land was not just a family asset. It was a commodity. People bought it, sold it, traded it and carved it up,” says Abrams.

“What’s happening now is new in some ways. It’s the first time a significant proportion of private land in the county has been owned by people who don’t depend on forestry or agriculture for their livelihoods,” he adds.

Abrams hopes that information about past trends will contribute to efforts to manage the county’s spectacular resources. He plans to finish his project in December 2010

–Nick Houtman

Related story: Partners in Rural Vitality

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