Day: March 19, 2008

Autoimmune epidemic

I’m afraid I don’t have much interesting to say about this link, but I just can’t scrape my jaw off the floor. There’s a story on Alternet about the incidence of autoimmune disorders, The Autoimmune Epidemic: Bodies Gone Haywire in a World out of Balance. I’m simply floored by some of the accounts, the numbers, and the whole phenomenon. I wish I had something to add, but I thought the least I could do was point out the story to some of our readers.

The autoimmune system is of special interest to those of us concerned about how environmental factors affect the development of organisms, including humans, because it is one of the clear cases of a system that gets substantial input from the environment to accomplish basic functions. We also find that it offers all sorts of interesting examples of non-genetic forms of heredity, including influences in utero and the widely-recognized importance of breast feeding for shaping the immune system. Less widely understood are the effects of changing environment on immune system functions in things like allergies.

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Obama and Race

The importance of history, the role of our own personal lives, a recognition of the power of our ideas and the stains of our faults, the emphasis on the strength of both inequality and hope.  Barack Obama’s speech on race in the United States, on the terrible patterns of the past and the foundational hopes and ideas of this nation, embodies much that I have found in trying to understand people’s lives on their own terms, those lives as both driving the same repeating patterns and offering the possibility of change. 

It was luck that I had decided to post a series on race today, and Obama’s speech, and the array of reactions today, were more than worthy inclusions—they were necessary.  Obama captures the movement towards a new way of managing our problems, of integration and reconciliation, of the best ideas presented clearly rather than as decisions hidden behind the doors of power.  Oh, he is a hard-core democrat, and I have as much cynicism about the possibility of our government working towards change.  History provides both lessons, of tragedy and triumph, and always at a cost.  And yet… 

Obama is reflexive, he sees the limits of knowledge, he sees the value of emotion as well as reason, he can judge vociferous ideas and statements but still cherish a person, he draws on his own experience to think about the larger lessons.  He is, as he says, against our continued tendency to “simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.”  We simplify politics, we simplify brain biology, we simplify anthropology—and thus distort our engagement with our own larger reality.

Race is about that distortion, and using that distortion to justify the discrimination Obama so eloquently argues against.  It is an old theme in anthropology, the theme that really founded the field in the United States.  There is no manifest destiny in our biology; we forge it, for ourselves and too often against others.  It is time to turn the page, both back to our foundational moments and forward to what we can now do. 

Parents’ stress, children’s health

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchTo all the stressed-out parents out there, here, let me just hand you a bit more to worry about. A research team led by Dr. Mary T. Caserta at the University of Rochester (more on her research here) have an article in press at Brain, Behavior, and Immunity entitled, ‘The associations between psychosocial stress and the frequency of illness, and innate and adaptive immune function in children’ (abstract here, unfortunately, I couldn’t find a downloadable version of the whole article). 169 school-aged children and their parents were studied through health diaries and over seven sequential visits, each separated by six months (three years total, by my quick calculation). At these visits, children were tested for human herpesvirus 6 reactivation and general measures of immune function were examined, such as ‘natural killer (NK) cell function and the percentage of CD4 and CD8 cells associated with immune control of cytomegalovirus (CMV).’

The study was to test the relation between parental stress and children’s immune systems:

Family processes have a substantial impact on children’s social and emotional well-being, but little is known about the effects of family stress on children’s physical health. To begin to identify potential links between family stress and health in children, we examined associations between specific aspects of family psychosocial stress and the frequency of illnesses in children, measures of innate and adaptive immune function, and human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6) reactivation.

The researchers found that parental stress was associated with the illness rates in their children. Although HHV6 activation rates did not increase, the rate of illness in the children (according to the diaries, presumably) and the activation of the children’s immune systems were both elevated. It’s not entirely clear to me from the abstract, so I’ll have to wait for the full write-up to get a sense for the mechanisms involved. The researchers concluded, ‘There is an association between specific psychosocial stress exposure and rates of illness and immune function in normally developing children.’

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Wednesday Round Up #3

Race 

The New York Times, How Race Is Lived In America
Series of articles focused on how race relations are defined by “daily experience, in schools, in sports arenas, in pop culture and at worship, and especially in the workplace”

American Anthropological Association, RACE: Are We So Different?
“Looking through the eyes of history, science and lived experience, the RACE Project explains differences among people and reveals the reality – and unreality – of race.”

The New York African Burial Ground
“Return to the past to build the future”
Also check out the lead researcher’s report, “An Examination of Enslaved Lives, A Construction of Ancestral Ties”

Jennifer Eberhardt, Imaging Race (pdf)
American Psychologist article on brain imaging and the “social psychological responses associated with race”

Barack Obama’s Speech on Race
Full transcript here; Video, with comments across the spectrum, here
And for those people coming here, seeking more commentary on Obama’s speech, I now have a post on Obama and Race.

Embodiment & Sense Making

20/20, Blind People Who Interact with the World like Dolphins & Bats
Humans can echolocate!  Absolutely amazing.

Mind Matters, Thinking With The Body
Reading, Movement, and Embodied Cognition

CF Kurtz & DJ Snowden, The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-making in a Complex and Complicated World
Challenging three basic assumptions—order, rational choice, and intent—in decision making

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #3”