All A Life in Science stories

Louise Ivers: 'I can’t sleep at night because of the things that I see.'

404132862 — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:27:17 -0400

Louise Ivers gently lifted the 7-month-old by his forearms, hoping he would pull himself up as a healthy child a third his age might.

But his head hung limply back, eyes wide, upper body slack.

At 7 months, when a healthy child would be sitting up on his own and thinking about crawling, this baby boy was unable to control his head, unable to pull himself from the sheets. Gently, she laid him back.

M. Judah Folkman, biomedical pioneer, dies at 74

404132862 — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:55:01 -0500

One of Harvard Medical School’s (HMS) most forward-looking and innovative physician-scientists, M. Judah Folkman, died suddenly Monday (Jan. 14) after suffering a heart attack at the Denver International Airport in Denver. He was 74.

Gonzalo Giribet

404132862 — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:42:07 -0500

They had sifted through the forest floor’s leaves and dirt for days, looking for a tiny type of daddy longlegs native to New Zealand, but had little more than dirty hands to show for it.

Gonzalo Giribet, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, managed to remain upbeat, but with each passing day the sick feeling in doctoral student Sarah Boyer’s stomach grew. The two had traveled halfway around the world looking for the daddy longlegs as part of Boyer’s dissertation.

No daddy longlegs, no dissertation.

From overviews of landscapes to inner views of cells

404132862 — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:24:17 -0400

The photographs are stunning abstracts that look as though they should be hung above a mantle or in a fine art gallery. But these aren’t primarily works of art; they are images of scientific phenomena. The images were made by Felice Frankel, a senior research fellow at Harvard University’s Initiative in Innovative Computing.

Frankel brings an artistic perspective to science, enabling the world to see the work with a fresh perspective. Even her fellow researchers gain new insights.

Viviany Taqueti: Writer, doctor, public servant

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 10:29:40 -0400

As a young girl, Viviany Taqueti followed her doctor father as he made rounds in the two hospitals he built in the jungles of Brazil. Sitting on the banks of the muddy, mighty Amazon River, Taqueti decided that she wanted to be like him, a person who improves the lives of others and who believes that you can do anything you set your mind to.

Today, she sits near the banks of the Charles River, a petite 25-year-old who just earned her M.D. from Harvard Medical School and who has learned not to think much about the obstacles to becoming a physician, scientist, teacher, and writer — all at once.

Ancient knowledge

705287540 — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:11:03 -0500

It is 11 a.m. on a sticky tropical Saturday and Ian Graham is lying on his side in the dried grass before a 1,300-year-old stone building in the Maya city of Yaxchilan in Chiapas, Mexico. Propped on one elbow, Graham is digging at the earth with a stick, scraping the dirt from around a stone.

He scrapes for a few moments, dribbles some water from his water bottle to loosen the hard earth, and then scrapes some more.

Jane Goodall: A life in the field

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:20:12 -0400

As a girl in England, Jane Goodall had a toy chimpanzee named Jubilee — a harbinger of the primatologist she was to become and of the jubilant audiences that greet her at every turn in adulthood.

Beginning in 1960, her groundbreaking studies of chimpanzees in the African wild led to a series of revelations that revolutionized the scientific understanding of these close human relatives.

Goodall, a onetime secretary who skipped past a bachelor's degree to do a doctorate in ethnology at the University of Cambridge, famously discovered that chimpanzees make and use tools, thrive in socially complex families, and even engage in warfare.

Measuring one of the universe's building blocks

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:37:46 -0400

Electrons are everywhere. There are trillions of them around you as you read this. They help make your computer, TV, cell phone - even the universe - work.

Every atom boasts a thin cloud of them orbiting its core, or nucleus. When they jump from one orbit to another, they create the electric and magnetic forces that power the universe. Their behaviors in the most energetic orbits determine the chemical properties of everything you can think of.

Wakeley examines ancestral lines

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:26:51 -0400

John Wakeley is devising new ways to trace the evolutionary road taken by humans and the creatures with whom we share planet Earth by creating new models that examine how DNA has changed over time.

A theoretical population geneticist, Wakeley's research focuses on how our DNA changes as it is passed from generation to generation. He is examining how the tendency of humans to live in groups separated by ethnicity or by physical barriers like mountains and rivers affects DNA's random changes.

Understanding groupings of individuals can be critical to figuring out why our DNA carries particular patterns today. That's because changes in patterns of genetic variation due to genetic drift - one of the major forces behind evolution - occur more rapidly in smaller populations and subpopulations.

Blogging from the Ugandan forest

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:25:50 -0400

A Web log, or blog, co-written by Harvard researcher Ian Gilby, working in Uganda's Kibale Forest, makes vivid the family lives of chimpanzees. The blog, on the Anthropology Department Web site, also provides an unusual glimpse into the daily life of a field scientist.

The blog was the brainchild of Alex Georgiev, a graduate student in anthropology who was working with Gilby last fall to update the Kibale Chimpanzee Project's Web site. Georgiev argued that the Web site ought to have changing features that bring people back again. The blog was one way to do that, Gilby said.

In addition to drawing people to the Web site, however, Gilby said the blog is a new way for scientists to communicate to the public.

Spar takes on boom in baby biz

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:25:22 -0400

The field of reproductive technologies has become a fast- growing and profitable economic sector. "Parents choose for different traits, clinics woo clients, and specialized providers earn millions of dollars," points out Harvard Business School Professor Debora Spar in her book, "The Baby Business: How Money, Science and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception."

Some parents pay up to $100,000 to produce what others make for free. Spar doesn't judge if this market is either good or evil, but with her research hopes to start a public debate about the need to establish governmental oversight.

The baby industry, Spar notes, expanded beneath the radar of most business analysts. This is, she says, partly because clients generally recoil from the notion that their families are - at least in part - the result of "market activity." In addition, there has been little call for governmental regulation of this new and unique business.

The development of the baby industry took off, says Spar, in 1978 with the birth of Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby. Today desperate couples go through round after round of in vitro fertilization (IVF) at an average cost of $12,400 per try, even though the success rate hovers around 27 percent and drops as low as 9 percent if the woman is over 40. Those who do give up can turn to adoption, along with about 120,000 other U.S. families each year, paying out up to $35,000 per child.

Professor shines light on shadowy condition

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:24:28 -0400

Sandra Fallman avoided mirrors. Walking down sidewalks during dates, she would avoid bright storefront lights, walking near the curb to stay in the shadows. She put 25-watt bulbs in her apartment lights, not to set the mood, but to provide cover. Fallman suffers from a little-known mental condition called body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). Sufferers are ashamed of certain aspects of their physical appearance because of exaggerated or imagined defects. But, unlike most of us who have flaws that we live with, these blemishes take over sufferers' lives, force them indoors, and cause them to shun contact with others.

"We don't just think we're ugly. We think we're grotesque and disfigured," said Fallman, a Marblehead resident who has been treated at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Body Dysmorphic Disorder Clinic.

The clinic, one of just a few in the United States, is run by Sabine Wilhelm, an associate professor of psychology in Harvard Medical School's Psychiatry Department and the clinic's founder and director.

The clinic provides drug therapy and a combination of cognitive and behavioral therapy that helps sufferers slowly remake their self-image and reform the behavior that goes with it.

Three weeks in tiny tunnel pay off

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:43:04 -0400

After three weeks in a tiny tunnel 50 feet below an ancient Maya pyramid in the Guatemalan jungle, Peabody Museum researcher Bill Saturno finally got to view his prize. Fine lines and dramatic colors emerged from the tunnel's gloom, depicting a story of the gods who created the Maya world.

"It's really like a Mayan book opens up," Saturno said of the mural. "I was awestruck by its state of preservation."

The 30-foot mural depicts the patron god of kings making sacrifices at the four trees that Maya mythology say are holding up the corners of the world. The Maya maize god then emerges and sets up the fifth tree in the center, completing the world's creation.

Using physics to understand biology

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:23:38 -0400

Anita Goel is using the tools of physics to examine one of the most basic processes of biology, the way genetic information is extracted from DNA molecules and how this process is influenced by the environment.

Goel, an associate of the Physics Department, is hoping her unique approach will lead to both a new understanding of this critical and complex process and to new ways to manipulate and control it.

Goel completed Harvard's M.D.-Ph.D. program last spring, earning her doctorate in physics, rather than in biology or chemistry - fields more conventionally related to medicine.

But Goel, who was named one of the world's 35 most promising researchers under the age of 35 this fall by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review Magazine, said that she's always been intrigued by the ability of physics to explain the most basic processes of the universe, including those underlying life.

"We understand so much about atoms and molecules, but do we really understand the basic physics of life?"

Today Goel wears several hats as she seeks to illuminate those basic processes. She is continuing her academic research, which attempts to understand how an enzyme called DNA polymerase replicates a single molecule of DNA, reading and writing genetic information.

She views the polymerase as a tiny, nanoscale motor because it moves along a strand of DNA by converting chemical energy into the mechanical energy needed for movement, much like an automobile converts the chemical energy in gasoline into the vehicle's motion.

"DNA polymerase is a motor intrinsically. It converts chemical energy into mechanical motion. We're trying to look at it, probe it, and understand how it works - and how the environment around it influences its behavior," Goel said. "[We're asking,] 'Can we develop knobs that control the motor?'"

Einstein's rings in space

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:42:18 -0400

In a 1936 paper, Albert Einstein described how the gravitational field from a massive object can warp space and thereby deflect light. In special cases, the light from a distant object can be so distorted that it creates a complete ring known as an "Einstein ring." The distortion maps the distribution of matter creating the warp and brightens the light source to make otherwise too-faint galaxies visible.

"An Einstein ring is one of the most dramatic demonstrations of the general theory of relativity in the cosmos," said Adam Bolton of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "It provides an unique opportunity to study the most massive galaxies in the universe."

The optical illusion created by warped space is called gravitational lensing. It is nature's equivalent of having a giant magnifying lens in space that bends and amplifies the light of more distant objects. In gravitational lensing, light from a distant galaxy can be deflected by an intervening galaxy to create an arc or multiple separate images. When both galaxies are exactly lined up, the light forms a bull's-eye pattern, called an Einstein ring, around the foreground galaxy.

Astronomers now have combined two powerful astronomical assets, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, to identify 19 new gravitational lens galaxies, adding significantly to the approximately 100 gravitational lenses previously known. By studying the arcs and rings produced by these lens candidates, the astronomers can precisely measure the mass of the foreground galaxies. Among these 19, they also have found eight new Einstein rings. Only three such rings had previously been seen in visible light.

These newly discovered lenses come from an ongoing project called the Sloan Lens ACS Survey (SLACS). A team of astronomers, led by Adam Bolton of CfA and Leon Koopmans of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands, selected its candidate lenses from among several hundred thousand optical spectra of elliptical galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. They then used the sharp eyes of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to make the confirmation.