Cousins

Cycling

It's been a very busy week and especially busy weekend. This weekend Brian participated in the Ride to Conquer Cancer. I am SO proud of him. Last fall, a coworker at Behr Energy Services was diagnosed with cancer. The company rallied behind her, doing various fund raising activities to raise money to pay for maid services while she underwent treatment. In the spring, company president Todd Wilson suggested creating a team to participate in this weekend's ride; Brian got things organized and four riders (in the picture, from left to right, Cristofor, Brian, Todd and Bruce) signed up and raised over $15,000 for the Alberta Cancer Foundation. This is the second year for this fundraiser and it raised an amazing 7.3 million dollars.

Cancer sucks. The word itself is terrifying, and it seems to attack with feral intensity. I'm a scientist, so when I think of cancer I think of the biochemical process involved in cancer onset. I know that cancer is a failure of the cell's own self-destruction signals; a breakdown of the delicate pact between individual cells who may have an interest in rampant reproduction, and the body, who needs them to work together and agree to shut down when they're told.

But cancer has a personal impact on everyone. In 2005 my beloved dad, who got me interested in science in the first place, was diagnosed with throat cancer. At this point, the science of it meant nothing to me, I was just angry. My dad started treatment at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre in Calgary, and the treatment also sucked. Because tumors are collections of rampantly dividing cells, cancer treatments are targeted to interrupt the biochemistry involved in cell division. This means that the treatment has a high level of collateral damage on healthy cells that happen to be dividing. Cancer treatments are like playing whack-a-mole with a sledgehammer and hoping you don't wreck the machine.

My dad survived. His doctors and nurses were incredible, and I truly believe that he couldn't have gotten better treatment anywhere else.

Research drives advances in cancer survival. Cancer sums up a variety of disorders that result in the breakdown of the cell's self-destruction pathways, leading to rapid cell division. Because the breakdown of this cascade can happen for a myriad of reasons, cancer is complex and pernicious. The public is often frustrated by the lack of progress in cancer research, but that is a result of the truly mind boggling complexity of the disease. The high rates of cancer incidence fuels this frustration; according to the Canadian Cancer Society, 40% of women and 45% of men will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes, and roughly 25% of Canadians will die of cancer. This is complex disease with alarming prevalence.

Clearly more research is needed, and this is one field that has a great deal of support. The $7.3 million raised by this weekend's ride is the most money raised in one event in the Alberta Cancer Society's history, and it will be well spent. The support and dedication of the organizers, volunteers, and riders means a great deal to all patients and survivors. And it means a great deal to me.

Link here to Brian's blog about his ride.

Pot of Gold

I'm working on the EXPERIMENT THAT WILL NOT DIE (it's like The Cat Came Back song - the experiment didn't work, the very next day, no the experiment didn't work, it really is a pisser, no the experiment didn't work, she'll never enjoy mat leave this way......) but in the mean time, I thought I would share a little uplifting photo. We've had some good summer rain storms this week - thunder and lightning and a pouring rain clearing to sunshine - and the plants are happy and so am I. Driving home the other night we saw this:




































A beautiful rainbow! And if you look closely you can see that it ends in our car. It's a sign, and it's true. The treasure is in the car - and we have everything we ever wanted. And no, it's not the Sirius Satellite Radio. Thanks for ruining the moment.

Cranky Friday

The mom tank is down to fumes today and I've noticed a distinct increase in whininess from my darling little girl as well. It made me wonder if there's something about Fridays. I notice my crankiest posts have been written on Fridays and if you ask Brian he will probably agree that most of my plaintive phone calls for him to come home early are on Fridays. As the time of Hannah's mornings seem to be inversely proportional to her age, by the time Friday rolls around I'm usually a bear and am reliant on an unhealthy amount of coffee. Now, I'm a scientist, so I thought it through and the only logical conclusion is that the problem is me - I'm tired after a long week and really looking forward to the hallowed tradition of the Saturday morning sleep in. I say hallowed because it's sacred. SACRED. To everyone in the house but Hannah and Brian. But the dog is on my side.

Take last Friday. It is a testament to Hannah's sweetness that it wasn't until she was seven months that she learned how to really drive me insane. The WHINING. Very uncharacteristic. Can't imagine who she got it from. So she whined all day. It was raining. Stella was on a course of prednisone for her lupus (some time I will tell you about all the obscure ailments that Stella has been victim to - including the $3000 bladder infection - but this time it's doggy lupus) which makes her hungry. She eyed me all day with a feral desperation that said that I was one scold away from being a giant milk bone. The goddamn internet kept cutting out. The internet is my lifeline to other adults - after a couple hours without internet I start to shake and would stage a home invasion on the neighbours if I thought they had wireless. And do you THINK I could LEAVE THE HOUSE just ONCE without forgetting SOMETHING that requires me to run back inside AFTER I've locked the door? And why why WHY does the bottle warmer use STEAM to warm bottles? Don't they know that steam burns more than hot water due to the LATENT HEAT OF EVAPORATION OF WATER FOR FUCK SAKES?? AND WHY DOES MY HOUSE SMELL LIKE ONIONS?!?!? Brian got home at 6:30 and he got a baby thrust into his arms and I ran. RAN. Drove to the sushi place to meet friends, where the host made me wait until my entire party was assembled. And I swear to God if the owner came within ear shot he was going to get it, sushi knife be damned.

Last week we all survived. This week, I preemptively went for a swim on Thursday to work out the cobwebs, so today I was happy as a clam. But Hannah, after her afternoon nap, was not. WHAT THE. OK, so now I'm starting to wonder. This behaviour belies the pattern - if I'm happy, but she's not, then it's HER, NOT ME. I KNEW IT! My poor sweet girl. Is it a tooth? Is it gas? Or is it just Friday?

All right Hannah. Just for you we will get into the car and drive to Mr. Sub for a foot long pizza sub. But I won't enjoy it.

First Beautiful Weekend

It's been a cold, rainy, even slightly snowy, spring. This last weekend was the first spate of really nice weather that we've had, and our little family made the best of it. Good thing - it's raining again.

Leaking out of the Pipeline

There was a really interesting article in the New York Times earlier this week which has been giving me a lot of thought. It deals with that thorny question of why there are so few women in science and engineering faculties. It's a big question for me, as I am tempted to dive through the BP sized hole in my career and leave the scientific pipeline myself.

The pipeline refers to the years of university, graduate school, post doctoral training, and slavish years as early faculty that are required to obtain that holy grail of the scientific endeavour, the tenured position. The leaks are women leaving the pipeline at every stage. For example, in the field of geology in 2003, women made up 42% of BA/BSc recipients, 45% of MSc recipients, 39% of PhDs, 26% of assistant professors, 14% of tenured associate professors and a paltry 8% of full professors (Leaks in the pipeline, Holmes and O'Connel, 2007, Nature 446:346).

I don't think there's any doubt as to the major reason that women leave the profession in droves: the road to a professorial job is long, arduous, pays poorly, involves a great deal of travel, upheaval, and little support. For example, in my field, a postdoc on support from his/her supervisor can expect to make between 30-45k; if you have a fellowship that can improve the situation, but even then most fellowships are two years in length. Add to the difficulty that this is usually after 5-6 years of graduate school, and you are expected to postdoc in another institution, and have roughly 5 years to prove yourself capable of building your own research program, and you can see how the prospect starts to lose its appeal.

In 2005, Larry Summers, the then President of Harvard, gave a speech at the NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce where he famously expounded on the lack of women in upper levels of science. He was widely excoriated for having said that women aren't as good at math and science and men, but in fact that isn't what he said. As well as acknowledging the lifestyle reasons that women leave science, he spoke on research that suggests that while the average intelligence of men and women is equivalent, the distribution of mathematical/scientific intelligence amongst males may be higher. This means that the extremes of the distribution, or the best at science and mathematical reasoning, will be more likely to be male (by the same token, if intelligence is normally distributed, the dumbest will also be male).

Clearly this is a provocative argument. Luckily, it's testable. The authors of the study "Sex differences in the cognitive abilities: a 30 year examination" (Wai et al. Intelligence, article in press) looked at the SAT and ACT scores of seventh graders over 30 years. The use of two separate types of standardized testing helps balance the inherent biases in standardize tests, and the long time scale allows for inferences of cultural influences on test-taking ability. The results showed that while mean intelligence was equivalent between the sexes, males were overrepresented in the highest math and science reasoning scores, and women were overrepresented in the highest verbal reasoning scores.

I haven't ranted about this yet, but I want to emphasize that one study is never enough to firmly determine whether something is true. Standardized tests are notoriously culturally biased, and even by grade seven children are inundated with gender stereotypes that may discourage either gender from performing their best. However, the demonstration of this trend across 30 years is compelling. In fact, in the 80's, the bias towards males in math and science reasoning was much more pronounced; the ratio has dropped, but has leveled at its current value of roughly 3:1 for the last twenty years. The distribution of ability between men and women requires far more study: is this a trend also seen in other countries? At different ages? Does performance on one of these tests correlate with future ability?

More importantly, what does this mean in terms of how few women there are in science? This is where Larry Summers' address and the New York Times article become more nuanced. Both suggest that as well as social factors, inherent ability may play a role. Theoretically, the high powered institutions such as Harvard hire the brightest scientists, probably those individuals who are in the top 0.1% of the distribution. If the distribution of mathematical intelligence is skewed, then these positions can't help but be filled by men.

Well, I don't think that anyone thinks that the situation is that simple, and in Larry Summers' defense, he never said that it was. (Did he deserve to lose his job over what he said? I don't think so. If you read the text of his speech, he clearly says that there are social reasons that contribute to the lack of women in science, and also admitted to being deliberately provocative. Is provocative so bad in a representative of higher learning?) Still, in my experience, the women who leave science were just as bright as those men who stayed in the game. And I also don't think that every scientist, male or female, was necessarily drawn from the brightest of the population.

The truth, from my perspective, is that the pipeline just gets to be too long, and largely runs steeply uphill. Perhaps it's true, as Larry Summers said, that jobs that require complete devotion and ruthless competitiveness tend to be filled by men because they are more willing to give it all. To spend nights and weekends away from young families, and be constantly, mentally devoted to their subject. And maybe because men find it easier to be competitive, driven, aggressive and demanding (isn't that right, Hillary?)

How science got to be such a high powered career I'll never know. It seems ridiculous to be classed as such, especially once you've met a few scientists. Regardless, increased support for women in science can't help but improve their representation. Some input from the verbally talented gender can't but help those Big Bang Theory types.

Just in case you're having a bad day....

Musical Baby

I'm convinced, at seven months, that Hannah is a musical genius. Here is the evidence: 1) when playing her baby piano, I played three tones (high C - G - low C) and she responded by singing the same tones! Only once, true, but still. 2) She has a demanding ear - while singing her to sleep the other night, I tried out a new song. She pulled out her soother, let out a cry, and tried to shove her soother in my mouth. Point taken. 3) My mom insists she has perfect rhythm. Whether Hannah's rhythm is perfect, or my mom's imperfect, I'm not quite sure yet. But I do know that Hannah loves singing (hers, daddy's and mine, but mostly hers), music, and the sing song rhymes of her children's books. This lead me to wonder if musicality is a innate human characteristic? And is it true that playing Mozart for babies (and fetuses in the womb) can increase intelligence?

First of all, let's put to rest the Mozart Effect. I think it was simply a commercial phenomenon to sell CDs and make mothers feel guilty. The original research (Rauscher, Shaw and Ky, 1993, Nature, 365:611) showed that a short exposure to Mozart increased participants' abilities to do spatial tasks. Participants were adults, and were given either muzak, Mozart, or silence to listen to, then given a spatial reasoning task. The tests showed that the participants who listened to Mozart had a temporary increase in spatial IQ. I have to emphasize three things: the effect was temporary, it was on spatial IQ only, and the participants were adults.

Undaunted, in 1997, Don Campbell published "The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit" followed in 2002 by "The Mozart Effect for Children: Awakening Your Child's Mind, Health and Creativity With Music." In these books, Campbell encouraged parents to play specially selected classical music to babies and children to increase their intelligence. The idea gained such popularity that Georgia governor Zell Miller proposed including funds in the state budget that would provide all Georgian children with a recording of classical music. (State representative Homer DeLoach said "I asked about the possibility of including some Charlie Daniels or something like that, but they said that they thought the classical music has a greater positive impact. Having never studied those impacts too much, I guess I'll just have to take their word for that.")

While few would dispute that listening to music can have a powerful effect on mood and relaxation, the supposition that listening to classical music has lasting effects on general intelligence just isn't supported by evidence. However, most mothers would agree that their children respond powerfully to music. In fact, 33 week fetuses are capable of recognizing music as different from background noise, and by 35 weeks slow their movements as if they are paying attention to what they are hearing (Kisilevsky et al. 2004, Developmental Science, 7:550). In a charming experiment, Hepper (1991) showed that 2-4 day old infants showed a decrease in movement and increased alertness when they heard the theme to a television programme their mothers had watched while pregnant (Hepper 1991, Irish Journal of Psychology, 12:95). The way that mothers talk to their infants has a musical quality - sing song, high pitched, and rhythmical - that infants respond to. So if babies are so responsive to music at such a young age, is musicality an innate, rather than cultural, human characteristic?

The science isn't clear on this and I had to wade through a lot of deeply turgid psychological papers to get any answer at all. (Notice that if it's psychology, it's turgid, but if it's biology, I have no problem with it? Talk about biases.) Evolution works on the premise that the trait in question can be inherited and has an adaptive value for the organism. So first of all, is music heritable? Music is important to all cultures around the world. This would suggest that it is more than simply a cultural phenomenon, because if it were, you would expect that there would be a few cultures that don't have music at all. So then if we accept that music is heritable, is it a trait that gives adaptive value? This question is a lot more difficult.

Long recognized by the designers of IQ tests, people come with different types of intelligence including linguistic, spatial, physical, emotional and general. I'm paraphrasing, I think I once read that there were as many as 12. It has been hypothesized that part of the evolution from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens involved an integration of these intelligences. In other words, what is characteristic of humans is a certain flexibility of the mind, making representation, inference, even poetry possible. It may be that because music involves aspects of language, movement, and emotion, that it helps the developing brain integrate these different arenas of intelligence. However, the lack of experimental evidence showing that music helps general intelligence makes that a harder argument to swallow. Alternatively, music may be a byproduct of the integration that happens naturally anyway (Cross, 1999. Is Music the Most Important Thing We Ever Did? Music, Development and Evolution. In: Music, Mind and Science, Ed: Suk Won Yi).

Predictably, I would like to run an experiment and re-evolve humans to determine which is true - but given a lack of time, employment and common ancestor, that's just not possible. So instead, I will keep singing to my darling little girl and imagine our ape-like ancestors, singing around a campfire, slowly getting smarter.