In May, with more than four months of professional baseball left to be played, there are plenty of fans of hapless teams hanging on to hope that this year is finally their year.

Those thin threads of hope have an analog on the field: The fortunes of teams valued at hundreds of millions of dollars hang on the soft tissue holding together the elbows and shoulders of a couple dozen twenty-somethings who can heave a baseball nearly 100 miles per hour.

What better way then to protect those fortunes — not to mention the lucrative salaries paid directly to players — than to set pitchers to a training program that applies the best scientific research on the wear and tear of repeated throwing and teaches the sort of proper form that can prevent injury?

Because information to guide those decisions is available.

“Using biomechanics, we can identify a pitcher whose, say, arm is too high or too low and in a dangerous position,” said Glenn Fleisig, research director at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Ala. “And we can tell them how to change to reduce the likelihood of injury.”

Of course, you can lead a coaching staff to science, but you can’t make them change.

If these young players grow up to coach, they’ll likely be passing down to their players the wisdom they’re learning now, from their coach. Photo: The Suss-Man (Mike)

“If you think about how the decisions get made on when and how guys work out, for the most part, it’s folklore,” said Will Carroll, a sportswriter who specializes in injuries from mundane to traumatic. “It’s hand-me-down wisdom that coaches learned from their coaches. It’s not what they’re reading in sports medicine journals.”

Not that there is any shortage of research in sports medicine journals.

Since the Major League Baseball season started in early April, Fleisig and collaborators have published studies on elbow tendon replacement surgery, six-week throwing programs for high school-aged baseball players and shoulder nerve injuries particularly prevalent in volleyball players.

When elbow ligaments and tendons are repeatedly moved in a unnatural way, injury is common. Surgery is often required for players to continue playing without pain and further injury. Photo: Magnus Manske

“He’s a busy guy,” Carroll said. “I know him well, and it’s my business to know what he’s up to. But I don’t even know all the stuff that Glenn’s done.”

For his part, Fleisig continues to churn out scientific studies, expecting a new breed of coach will make use of it.

“When we set up ASMI, it was as a research center,” said Fleisig, a biomedical engineer. “We’re not coaches. We’re scientists. We try to supply the coaches with useful information.”

A complex motion

For all the hitting, running, catching and sliding that electrifies fans, nothing can happen in a baseball game until a pitch is thrown. And describing the thrown ball in terms of biomechanics slows the pace of the game to a crawl. In fact, it took Duquesne University athletic training professor Peggy Houglum more than 1,200 words to describe the process for a book on musculoskeletal injuries.

Standing 60 feet, 6 inches from the plate and the batter, the pitcher begins the action — which generally takes place in one smooth and unbroken motion — with a windup that lines up the body parts for the synchronized movements that propel the ball toward the catcher. This often involves starting with the throwing hand and ball in the glove, joined in front of the pitcher, and progresses with a slight step backwards against the “pitching rubber,” a slab of white rubber that marks the point atop the mound from which pitchers must work.

“The body winds up so that all segments of the body from the legs to the arms are able to contribute to the ball’s propulsion,” Houglum wrote.

It’s an action Carroll sees reaching back into our distant past.

“There’s a physiologist, William Calvin, who wrote a book about it, suggesting our brains grew and our speech centers evolved alongside the center that coordinates throwing,” Carroll said. “Throwing a spear straight and hard once, and then going to pick it up, is a completely natural thing.

“What isn’t natural is throwing a baseball 100 times over a couple hours.”

The high speed of a player delivering a pitch requires high-speed, sensor-aided imaging to sort out all the moving parts. Photo: ASMI

Set atop the rubber, a right-handed pitcher ends up facing to their right, toward third base. The pitcher’s hands separate as a stride forward begins. The throwing hand and the ball reach back, while the glove hand moves toward the target.

The striding foot strikes the ground, and “that’s when the pelvis rotates toward the batter,” Fleisig said. “And the pitcher’s trunk follows it, rotating, but there’s some lag in the shoulders.”

It takes a brief moment for the shoulders to turn to match the pitcher’s waist and trunk, for the flexed arm to straighten and whipsaw toward the plate, and it makes all the difference in the world.

“This is a fraction of a second. It’s not even clear on much video,” Fleisig said.

To much lag focused a great deal of the acceleration on the ligaments in the elbow. Too little lag means asking too much of the shoulder in creating the acceleration require to throw with impressive speed.

“It’s the difference between a good pitcher and a great pitcher, or a pitcher with or without too much stress on the arm,” Fleisig said.

And it’s measurable. Or, at least, it is now.

Coaching by feel

“The old-timers — the men who coached pitchers decades ago — just watched,” he said. “They put in their time as players, watched a lot of baseball and tried to describe their experiences to the players they coached.”

But there’s only so much that can be gleaned from observing at real speed.

“They could see whether a pitcher was taking a long or short stride as they threw, and where the arm slot was — whether a pitcher was throwing with their hand high up above their shoulder or lower and to the side,” Fleisig said. “They could talk about how to grip the ball, but the rest was just guessing.”

The first major stress on coaching came with the introduction of video as a coaching tool.

“It was eye-opening,” Fleisig said. “They saw things they couldn’t understand.”

To throw a curveball — which drops faster toward the plate than the arc of a normally thrown ball thanks to a great deal of spin imparted by the pitcher — coaches believed the pitcher’s hand needed to be situated on the side of the ball. Their fingers, led by their little finger, pulled down on the front of the ball. Or so it was thought.

“The first coaches to watch a curveball thrown on video were probably cursing their players out for doing it wrong, because they’re seeing each curve thrown with the hand on the back of the ball and the thumb coming down first,” Fleisig said.

Video revealed that the pitcher’s hand was behind the ball on pretty much every pitch, whether it was a garden-variety fastball or a pitch with funky spin that made it fall or slide sideways. But the pitcher — and the coach who had no other way to describe the proper way to throw — understood only how it felt to throw a curveball.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“And it feels like you’ve got your hand on the side, and you’re pulling with your pinky first,” Fleisig said. “So once they figure out that it looks different than it feels, they’ve got a dilemma: How do you teach ideal technique? Do you teach it like it feels, or like it looks on this new video tool?”

ASMI’s work is presenting coaches with a new dilemma. The Institute has a library of more than 2,000 athletes from little league-aged kids to elite professional pitchers.

“We put two dozen reflective markers on them, and they throw from the pitcher’s mound in our laboratory while our cameras and computers record all the movements from windup to the follow-through after the release the ball,” Fleisig said.

The result is a complicated stick figure, which is compared by ASMI “biomechanists” with advanced degrees in ergonomics and biomechanical engineering against the range of other recorded pitchers.

“We’re watching the angle of their forearm to upper arm as they stride, where their front foot lands, the way their trunk swivels around to help generate speed as the arm moves through the throwing motion,” Fleisig said.

The American Sports Medicine Institute (ASMI) biomechanically evaluates this pitcher by placing white censors on his joints and ligaments, and monitoring his pitch. Photo: American Sports Medicine Institute

Timing and angles are crucial to a pair of the most important factors of a pitcher’s success: throwing hard and keeping the throwing arm in good working order.

“We know the biomechanics of proper pitching, the combination of good ball velocity without excessive stress on the elbow and shoulder,” Fleisig said. “We also know the difference in adults and children throwing fastballs and curveballs. The current challenge is to spread the science to the field.”

That’s the new dilemma.

“The questions have been out there. The need has been out there. This science hasn’t always been out there,” Fleisig said. “When major league teams come to us, they bring the best pitching coaches. And those coaches are in the same position the last generation was in. How do I translate these new scientific findings into things I can teach to pitchers?”

If this young pitcher is guided by a well-informed coach, he can take steps to avoid injury very early in his career. Photo: Paul-W

An ounce of prevention

And how does that knowledge get applied to prevent injury?

“In most cases, I don’t think it does,” said Carroll, whose baseball season workday is spent writing about pitchers who have torn a ligament or loosen the capsule of tissue around the shoulder that keeps the arm bone from pulling slightly free of its socket during the powerful whip of the pitching motion.

On Monday Kansas City Royals pitcher Danny Duffy was diagnosed with a torn ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow on his throwing arm.

It’s no small thing that many baseball fans are well-acquainted with the UCL, and no small thing that the tear was not a career disaster for Duffy. He’ll just have a surgical repair known as “Tommy John surgery,” named for a Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher who was the first patient to have his UCL replaced with a piece of tendon from elsewhere in his body.

“The thing about these Tommy John surgeries nowadays, they’re so efficient at doing them. Danny is going to come back even better, even stronger,” Royals manager Ned Yost told the Associated Press. “It’s just missing out on Danny’s development for a year and Danny’s production for a year which is what hurts.”

Rehabilitation following Tommy John surgery is so refined that almost all patients recover completely, according to Carroll, and often within nine or 10 months (compared to 18 months before John began pitching again).

Click here to view the embedded video.

“What’s bothering most people a bit is that there are surgeons doing 500 of these surgeries, and we’re seeing the number of high school kids in the operating room growing,” Carrol said.

While the odds say Duffy will return without losing his skills, the Royals have lost the services of a young pitcher working for the (relatively) low price of just under $500,000.

The Washington Nationals spent much of last season without young phenom Steven Strasburg, who still made several million dollars. The Boston Red Sox are paying pitcher John Lackey, who is rehabbing from a Tommy John procedure in November and out of commission for most or all of this season, more than $15 million in 2012.

Major League Baseball pitchers Danny Duffy of the Kansas City Royals, John Lackey of the Boston Red Sox, and Stephen Strasburg of the Washington Nationals all underwent Tommy John surgery to correct a problem caused by the unnatural repetition of the pitching motion. Photos: Duffy: Keith Allison from Owings Mills, USA, Lackey: Keith Allison, Strasburg: dbking

“How much is a year worth?” Carroll asked. “For teams without so much money, who are relying on one guy, they could be screwed.”

And with so much money at stake, Carroll wonders why a trip to a place like Birmingham for a morning-long session with a researcher like Glenn Fleisig isn’t a must for every pitcher on every major league roster.

“There are clues that teams can look for to decide whether a pitcher’s throwing motion is bad, but why look for clues?” Carroll said. “We can do the examination, look at the science and say here’s how much force there is on your shoulder. Here’s how much force there is on your elbow. And we know these are the norms.

“For what you have at stake, why not just spend a couple thousand dollars to send them to Glenn?”

In a study posted online May 9, Nathan Bridges and colleagues analyzed data from an eye-in-the-sky called Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Using a high-resolution telescope, the researchers measured the movement of sand dunes over a 105-day span.

The fine-grained images showed that the dunes are indisputably on the move, says Bridges, a senior scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. “Even though Mars has a very thin atmosphere and high-speed winds are rare, the dunes are moving.”

The research group saw movement both in entire dunes, and in the ripples on their surface. Across one meter of dune front, they calculated an annual sand movement totaling about 2.3 cubic meters. “If you had a children’s sandbox, that would fill it with sand in a year,” Bridges says.

On Mars, as on Earth

And that, he adds, is within the range of movement seen in some Earthly dune fields. “We are not making the case that Mars has the fastest dunes, but they do move like some on Earth. Mars is an active planet, maybe not as active as Earth, but we are seeing significant movement.”

How much wind is needed to move sand when the atmosphere is less than one percent as dense as Earth’s? The grains would start moving in a wind of about 20 to 30 meters per second (40 to 50 miles per hour, measured at a height of 1 meter), Bridges says. “That is about 10 times what you need on Earth, due to the atmospheric density difference.”

Such winds do blow — rarely — on Mars, but once the sand starts moving, it’s easier to keep it rolling, he says. “Recent research by my colleagues has found … a lower-speed wind can sustain the movement.” Under the reduced gravity of Mars, a grain stays aloft longer, giving the wind more time to accelerate it. When the high-speed grain hits the sand bed, a high-energy collision impels more sand grains into motion.

Mars: A moving planet

At any rate, the discovery proves that wind needs no help from water in moving dunes, Bridges says. “We have seen dunes in images since the 1970s, but there was a question, were they currently active, moving? Mars has a very thin atmosphere and it would need high-speed winds to move sand, and those are very rare. So it’s been an open question, how much sand is moving now, and was more moving in the past?”

On Earth, water is highly erosive, but Mars has no liquid water, “so one agent of erosion on Earth is lacking,” says Bridges. “There is a lot of evidence for erosion — craters that appear to be filled in with dirt, and the primary mechanism is wind.”

And lasting sandblasting

Wind does not just move sand — it also creates sand, Bridges says. His group calculated that the natural Martian sandblaster sand would erode 1 to 50 microns off rock per year, about the same rate as in Victoria Valley.

That sandblasting would provide a source of the sand that litters so much of the red planet, Bridges says. “Erosion is occurring today, so wherever you have sand, and moderate winds, you are likely to get significant amount of erosion from rocks.” That could then create silt or more sand.

When we see all these eroded terrains, “you don’t have to evoke any past climate to explain this,” he says. “It’s a current process, and it was likely occurring for billions of years.”

Science is the best way to dig out the truth of the natural world, but that doesn’t prevent many people from denying truths that are inconvenient or contrary to their preconceptions or faith.

ENLARGE

U.S. 30, east of Blair, Neb. June, 2011, Iowa DOT

The stunning floods, tornadoes, droughts and heat waves in 2011 caused more Americans to accept global warming — even if climate whizzes are chary of attributing individual weather events to the warming trend.

In the last month, denial of global warming has subsided in the wake of a string of floods, droughts and heat waves, culminating in the “summer in March,” 2012. Although Americans’ attitudes toward warming ebb and flow, on April 17, a Yale University poll reported that 69 percent think global warming is affecting the weather in the United States.

In the same month, however, a Discovery Channel series called “Frozen Planet” attracted ire when scientists noted that it documented massive melting at the poles, but ignored the “why?” question. Scientists have said for decades that polar warming would be an early sign of global warming.

In the recent past, this phenomenon of “denialism” has also appeared in doubts about issues that have long been settled in the scientific community, such as whether:

An April conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison delved into the origin and development of denialism. Is a refusal to face facts growing more common? Are there better ways to explain how the world works?

Denial in the brain

Scientists, by training, are professional skeptics, but if after decades of debate 97 percent of them accept the link between greenhouse gases and global warming, why are so many unconvinced? “The theory is that if we tell people what we know, they will change,” says Arthur Lupia, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, but that ignores how people really listen and make decisions.

Speaking to a high-level gathering of science journalists in Madison, Lupia said the problem does not reside with the audience. “The problem is us. Our expectations aren’t consistent with how humans react to information, what they will listen to, or what they will remember. People don’t pay attention, or they don’t remember what we said or what we intend them to remember.”

To change an opinion, you must first attract and then hold the audience’s attention, but attention wanders all the time. No matter how important you think your message is, Lupia says, “Biology does not change its rules … about when people will think about things that challenge them. … If I am saying something abstract, that does not connect to your core aspirations,” you may be more interested in counting tiles on the ceiling.

Can you hear me now?

To communicate with a general audience, Lupia says, “You have to make it close, concrete, immediate. I understand the joy of telling the whole story about climate, but there are some audiences that can’t handle it; in their reality, it’s not the most immediate thing. They might be more receptive if you make the conversation about pollution, energy security or energy costs.”

Information is filtered by attention and ideology, Lupia concludes. “Learning is always an away game. All the real action occurs in the audience’s heads,” he says.

Reasoning: Logical or “motivated”?

Ideally, science adheres to logical reasoning: the conclusion must be true if the premises are true.

But psychologists say it’s common to see “motivated reasoning,” the tendency to fit new information into existing attitudes.

Making a judgment or decision can often involve a “fundamental tension between believing what you want and believing what you have to believe based on the information in front of you,” says Peter Ditto, professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California-Irvine.

“There is overwhelming evidence” that hopes, fears and social connections affect our judgments, Ditto adds, “but it’s not just that we believe whatever we want. I want to be taller, but I don’t believe that because the data won’t let me.”

Since processing information and making judgments have major emotional components, the standards for evidence are skewed in favor of reinforcing our preconceptions. We are more skeptical about ideas that are new, or that conflict with our thoughts and opinions, Ditto contends.

Over the course of evolution, bad events — but not beneficial ones — forced our ancestors to focus on whether to fight or flee. “People are the same way about information,” says Ditto.

The social element in motivated reasoning surfaced in a 1950s experiment, when six people convinced a seventh, the only real subject, that two lines were equally long. One line was clearly shorter than the other, Ditto says, “But six of them are confederates, and a substantial number of [subjects] go with the obviously wrong answer. That’s the power of having other people who believe as you do. It’s much easier to believe something that does not comport with reality if a whole bunch of others” hold the same erroneous belief.

History of denialism

Although denial of global warming and the erroneous link between vaccines and autism both originated in the 1990s, the organized rejection of evolution dates to the 1920s, when some American Christian fundamentalists promoted creationism — a Biblical explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.

In a 2009 survey, 87 percent of scientists, but only 32 percent of all Americans, agreed that organisms have evolved over time through natural processes. Thirty-one percent of Americans thought humans and other living things “have existed in the present form since the beginning of time.”

Scientists and other Americans certainly have a different understanding of how organisms change through time!

Scientist data and general public data from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press surveys, May-June 2009. For question wording, see survey toplines. Numbers may not sum to 100 due to rounding. Reprinted from Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Much of the attention to the issue comes from battles over teaching of evolution or creationism in public schools, but there is “a lot of misunderstanding,” about the anti-evolution movement in the United States, says Ronald Numbers, a professor of the history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and longtime student of the movement.

Although creationism is commonly considered a backlash against science, “Virtually nobody in the movement [in the 1920s] thought of themselves as anti-scientific,” Numbers says. “They were denying the scientific status of evolution.”

The dictionary defines science as “organized, certain knowledge about nature, and they said, ‘Nothing is certain about evolution, nobody has seen it.’”

During the 1970s, primarily in response to court decisions, creationism morphed into “creation science” or “scientific creationism,” Numbers says. “The anti-evolutionists realized that evolution had a great deal of scientific support … so their approach was that they, too, were scientific.”

Unlike most anti-evolutionists in the 1920s, the new creationists used a literal interpretation of the Bible to date creation to less than 10,000 years ago. But this created a problem, Numbers says, since according to the Bible, on the sixth day, “God created the animals and Adam named them all.”

No way Adam could rattle off the more than 1 million names of the modern species so quickly, but Numbers notes that the Bible refers to “kinds,” not “species.” If those “kinds” — created in Eden and saved on Noah’s ark — were equivalent to taxonomic families, they could have evolved into the profusion modern species.

“So creationists can accept evolution within the family, and all the evidence for speciation is welcome, because in only about 4,300 years since the flood, they have to have evolution of all the species,” says Numbers. “It’s evolution in fast-forward,” but only among closely related species.”

Even if “kind” equals family, anti-evolutionists exempt humans from this reasoning, allowing them to reject human descent from apes — our fellow hominids.

“It’s strange, I know,” says Numbers. “They are anti-evolution, but most of the evidence evolutionists use against them, they are happy to embrace! One thing that has not been true for 50 years, but lingers in the popular mind, is that creationists deny all forms of evolution.”

The manual of denialism?

Evolutionary biologists regard evolution through natural selection as the organizing principle of biology. Yet for 30 or 40 years, surveys have shown a substantial fraction of Americans, even a majority, who do not “believe in” evolution, Sean Carroll, vice-president for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, told the denial conference.

Carroll, who like many biologists is aghast at the effort to squeeze evolution into a biblical straitjacket, says, “The denial of evolution was my introduction to denialism.”

ENLARGE

American Museum of National History

In 1954, children got a “Polio Pioneer” card, and a piece of candy after getting a jab of polio vaccine.

Typically, biologists have approached the evolution debate by amassing evidence, but “it’s never been about the data,” maintains Carroll, who is also a professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And if it’s not about the data, what are we talking about?”

An earlier example of denialism occurred in the 1950s, after Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine, a breakthrough that halted a dreaded, paralyzing disease.

Many chiropractors, Carroll found, opposed vaccines since they negated the central premise of chiropractic — that all disease results from misalignment of the vertebrae. “It shocked me. They actively opposed, disputed the efficacy of the polio vaccine. The opposed the March of Dimes, and federal and state efforts to get everybody vaccinated.”

Five hallmarks of denialism

The opposition continued — even after the polio epidemic tapered off as a result of the mass vaccination that started in 1955, says Carroll. And he identifies the tactics used then as a “playbook” of science denial that is echoed in more recent struggles over evolution, vaccines and global warming:

We just don’t agree!

Add it up, and the theme is this: The science must not be allowed to endanger a key philosophy, Carroll says.

But the cost of denialism is high, Carroll maintains. “It’s difficult, as an evolutionary biologist, to realize that half the county is deaf to anything you have to say, especially if the story you have to tell is about a magnificent achievement, understanding the complex relationship of living things on the planet, the deep history of our species.”

To reach young people, Howard Hughes has begun producing and giving away a series of videos on evolution called The making of the fittest.

Go to links for videos

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

To bring science to the masses, Hughes has produced videos on evolution; this one describes how cold-water fish evolved “anti-freeze” genes.

The idea is to engage in storytelling — to help people understand and remember facts by putting them into a narrative framework, Carroll says. As a professor, he’s seen the power of a story. “When I got lost, off-topic, and students see me years later, they say they still remember some of those stories, and I know they don’t remember any of the genetics. Stories count.”

Time (dis)honored tactics

Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California at San Diego, has written about the “merchants of doubt.”

The message, she says, is simple: The facts are not all in. We need to hold judgment until the scientists agree.

This kind of corrosive doubt — in the face of scientific certainty — is “very depressing” if you “believe that knowledge is power,” Oreskes says. “Knowledge is not powerful enough — an ideology is more powerful still. It’s about ideas, not facts.”

During the last half-century, she says, “Political powers are willing to attack rational truths, and those who deliver them.”

There is also money at stake in many of the issues, especially in the case of climate change, which threatens the fossil-fuel industry.

Car exhaust from eutrophication&hypoxia; smoky butt from Raul Lieberwirth

What do these have in common? Many companies in the oil and tobacco industries have sown seeds of doubt about the long-term effects of their products.

The model for such campaigns, Oreskes said, came from the tobacco industry in the 1960s. Facing growing evidence linking their profitable product to lung cancer, the industry settled on a strategy of promoting “Questions, manifested in a memorable maxim: “Doubt is our product.”

And for decades, doubt helped big tobacco deride and deny a tidal wave of evidence that cigarettes cause lung and heart disease.

December, 2011, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

After the crazy weather of the past year, pollsters have seen a bump in the number of Americans seeing “solid evidence” for global warming.

The same strategy, Oreskes says, was adapted to undermine “nuclear winter” (the discovery that huge clouds of ash and dust released during nuclear war could freeze and starve the planet), the dangers of the insecticide DDT, acid rain caused by power-plant pollution, the ozone hole, and global warming.

The tactics were to “challenge the evidence, claim the science is not settled, cherry-pick the data, to demand balance from journalists and threaten to sue if they don’t,” says Oreskes.

Changing the climate change story

The basic physics of global warming have been known for 100 years, Oreskes said. Scientists started exploring the subject with early computerized climate models in the 1980s.

In 1992, Oreskes said, the first President George Bush, “Called for concrete action to protect the planet. We had political leadership that committed us to doing something, yet we never did take the concrete steps that Bush called for. It’s a story about political challenges, selling uncertainty, about science in the age of denial.”

The doubters, funded by the oil industry, included some prominent Cold-War physicists who had been advocates for Ronald Reagan’s anti-missile defense system. “They said the science was unsettled, that it would be premature to act,” says Oreskes, who was intrigued to find that one of those physicists, Frederick Seitz, had been a consultant to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company.

In 1998, Seitz organized a petition against the Kyoto Protocol, the first international agreement to control greenhouse gases.

Seitz and his fellow doubters, Oreskes says, “Found a new enemy: environmental extremism. You see anxiety about environmentalists as socialists, using climate change as a lever to effect social or economic change.”

What began with a handful of people with roots in the Cold War has since spread to “a range of free-market think tanks, including the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute,” Oreskes says.

The arguments against the settled scientific debate over warming, she adds, “are not just different interpretation of the data; that’s a normal part of scientific life. This is not about normal scientific claims. These are the scientific equivalent of saying Belgium invaded Germany during World War I.”

Why deny? Because it works, Oreskes implies. Almost 25 years after the scorching summer of 1988 brought global warming into the public sphere, the United States has yet to get serious about controlling greenhouse gases.

“We ignore the facts of nature at our peril,” says Oreskes. “Ignoring them is not going to make them go away.”

Microsoft’s April 9 deal to spend $1.3 million apiece on 800 patents from AOL was another skirmish in the patent wars that have engaged the technosphere. Just last summer, we watched a blizzard of headlines, lawsuits, and billion-dollar bills:

We wonder: Is this a situation that only a patent lawyer could love, or are these purchases and lawsuits the inevitable price of progress in our high-tech world? Are they the inevitable outgrowth of a venerable system that, for all its flaws, is still better than nothing?

Patents are licenses to exclusively make and market an invention that are inscribed in the U.S. Constitution. The concept is simple — and ridden with inherent conflict. If you invent a small device (a “midget widget”) that is new, useful, and “not obvious” to people skilled in the art of widgetry — your widget can be protected by a U.S. patent.

If I make or sell a widget that uses your invention (that “infringes on your patent”), you can sue me for damages, and a court may order me to close my widget-works.

So far, my invention has benefited me, my employees and customers, but when the patent (which must explain the inner workings of my midget widget) expires after 20 years, it becomes available to anybody.
And so (in theory) patents stimulate innovation and progress by conferring a short-term monopoly in return for short- and long-term social and economic benefits.

But what sounds good on paper can hide complexities that only a patent lawyer could love:

“Greasing the wheels of innovation” or “throwing sand in the gearbox”?

It’s not hard to find claims that the patent system is “broken,” and nobody disputes that “bad patents” have been issued for innovations that are obvious, inane or unworkable.

Patent battles are nearly as old as the U.S. patent system: Eli Whitney spent years in court trying to enforce his patent against infringers who cobbled together homemade cotton gins. His “victory” came just one year before the patent expired.

Lawyer-letters about patent infringement are a dreaded fact of life in technology industries, but no matter who wins, patent battles transfer money from the buyers of phones and computers to patent lawyers.

The pace of U.S. patent awards has picked up to about 200,000 per year, and some with a dog in the fight say the system does protect the rights of inventors.

The sentiment is not universal.

Adam Jaffe, an economist at Brandeis University, co-wrote a book on the patent system² that refers to a “broken patent system” in the subtitle. Jaffe says patents cut both ways. “Patents are important in fostering innovation, because 99.9 percent of the time, inventing something is just the first step. You require a significant investment … to get something from the invention stage to actual production, and unless you are independently wealthy, you need someone who is hoping to make money to take you through the development stage.”

And that “someone” may view a strong patent as your most valuable asset.

Software and high-tech patents?

Innovation “is a very complicated process,” Jaffe adds. “In most cases multiple ideas are interacting. In the extreme case, in software and high technology, people say a product might invoke 100,000 patents. It can get very messy.”

When the United States started issuing large numbers of software patents in the 1990s, the inexperienced patent examiners issued many dubious patents. Although the examinations have gotten more stringent, some still think software should be exempt, or patented under different standards.

Searching for competing inventions in software, for example, is comparatively difficult, and the search is the basis of the patent examination.

In most cases, says Tim Berners-Lee, a commentator on tech issues, software developers don’t bother doing thorough patent searches, which, he maintains, could require more patent lawyers than exist on earth.

Trolling for profits?

Although patent disputes are nothing new, they have been systematized by “patent trolls” — companies that own, defend and license a library of patents. Depending on your point of view, trolls are:

NPR covered a prominent case of trolling, complete with shadowy, unoccupied offices.

But even if trolls can be a barricade to innovation, “in practice it will be very difficult to change the rules in such a way as to prevent that,” says Jaffe. Would you allow infringement suits only from those who are moving a patented idea toward the market? “Say I’ve got an invention and am looking for a company that has the resources to bring it to market… and someone else comes along and steals the idea. Are you saying I can’t sue because I am not on the market?”

As with many parts of the patent system, finding faults is easier than fixing flaws, he indicates. “I don’t disagree that in a sense people are abusing the system by amassing piles of patents, but it’s naïve to think you can tweak the system to shut that down.”

First-to-file, or first to invent?

The America Invents Act, signed into law September, 2011, made what former commissioner of the Patents and Trademark Office Robert Stoll calls “the most revolutionary change in patent law in 60 years.”
The changes start with the basis for obtaining a U.S. patent. Previously, you had to prove that you were the first to invent something; now you must be the first inventor to file.

“First-to-file” will make life simpler, Stoll told an audience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in April, by deleting disputes about who made the invention first. “First-to-file provides more certainty to the system, and reduces the ugly interference cases that don’t provide much benefit to the United States.” (An interference proceeding now determines whether someone made the invention before the patent applicant.)

“First-to-file really favors large companies that have sufficient resources to get to the patent office first,” argues Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the private, not-for-profit technology transfer arm of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “and it disadvantages independent inventors and universities. I expect filing costs will go up.”

Got an app for that patent?

Here’s the snag: When you invent a molecule that could make a tire last forever, you may not know right away if it’s worth filing a patent application. Under first-to-invent, you could wait as much as one year to file.

Filing a patent can cost tens of thousands of dollars, which is money you could better spend on research that might show that your invention is solid — or as evanescent as a rainbow.

But under first-to-file, you lose if an inventor in Berlin or Tokyo files an app before you have time to decide. “AIA has weakened the grace period and the ability of independent inventors to test out the invention, and appropriately get financing to help with filing,” says Gulbrandsen.

Gulbrandsen also charges that the new law contains, “So many undefined terms that they will be litigating it for 15 years. They have essentially thrown out 100 years of case law; it’s a full employment act for lawyers.”

Winnowing the chaff — or weakening the patent system?

Although interference proceedings are now history, Gulbrandsen says AIA contains too many new ways to challenge patents. “There used to be two principal ways to attack a U.S. patent, and that made them strong. Now there are literally nine ways, and that weakens them overall. For a university, this will mean increased expense [for defending existing patents], and many of them won’t be able to bear that.”

Since its founding in 1925, WARF has contributed $1.24 billion to UW-Madison as royalties from more than 2,300 patents for inventions by university researchers. It has become a significant source of income to the university’s researchers and a model for other university patent offices.

A strong patent system has benefited the United States, says Gulbrandsen. “It’s necessary for innovation, and the last thing you want to do, if you want to create jobs, is to weaken the patent system, and that is exactly what we have done” with AIA.

But Jaffe, although no fan of the patent system, sees a benefit in these after-the-fact challenges, since “the vast majority” of the 200,000 U.S. patents granted each year are trivial (like that baling-wire-and-chewing-gum flying machine). Because the patent office must judge a flood of applications with limited resources, “It cannot do an exhaustive analysis, and it would be crazy to invest the resources to get it right every time.”

Under the new system, after the initial patent examination culls the obvious chaff, Jaffe says, competing inventors could contest a wobbly patent. Now, he says, “You have the opportunity, at least in theory, to go to the patent office and say, ‘This wasn’t really novel.’”

Although it’s easy to criticize the patent office, Jaffe says it has more expertise than the federal courts, the final resting place for most patent disputes.

Who benefits, who gets hurt?

In the ideal world — where patents are perfectly drawn — innovation wins. “I equate patents and innovation,” says Gulbrandsen. But despite its promising moniker, the America Invents Act “makes it more difficult for the inventor to raise the funds necessary to bring the invention to market. One of the best tools an entrepreneur or a startup has to raise money is a patent. It gives some assurance to investors that if they provide the funding, they will be able to recover it and get a return. The patent gives you the right to exclude others. Weakening the patent system increases the risk for investors, and that’s bad for inventors.”

University technology-transfer offices are going to suffer, says Gulbrandsen, who directs one of the oldest and largest in the nation, since many of them must wait to file a patent until they have found a business that wants to pay for filing and license the patent. “Although WARF is an exception, under first-to-file, you don’t have time to find a licensee, and so most universities tech-transfer offices will drop out.”

Individual inventors, Gulbrandsen notes, seldom have a patent lawyer on retainer.

Still, too much protection stifles innovation, says Jaffe, who says the system requires balance. “I don’t think first-to-file changes a lot. The rest of the world has been on that for a long time. There are going to be impacts in both directions, but in most cases, first-to-invent is just a source of conflict, because it’s harder to establish. This just simplifies things and reduces controversy, which is a very good thing.”

Scientists have thought for a decade that iron-bearing structures in the homing pigeon’s beak help the bird find its location by “reading” Earth’s magnetic field. Now, it turns out that this iron occupies cells that battle infection, rather than nerve cells.

Oops!

The new results leave a chasm in our understanding of bird navigation, says Charles Walcott, an expert on the subject at Cornell University, who was not involved in the study. “It’s astonishing that we have what seems like a terribly simple-minded problem. Take a homing pigeon any direction, and after circling a couple of times, it heads for home … and we don’t understand how these animals do this?”

Study leader David Keays, of the Institute for Molecular Pathology in Vienna, did not set out to debunk a beautiful theory, but rather to explore the nerve cells in the beak that supposedly register magnetism. “My background is in molecular biology and genetics, and I thought there must be some incredible biology involved. I wanted to get a handle on the molecules and create an artificial receptor.”

Because the “magnetic neurons” in the beak contained iron, Keays applied a blue stain that gloms onto iron. Christoph Treiber and Marion Salzer generated one-quarter million slices for microscope slides, each one-hundredth of a millimeter thick.

(Makes us dizzy … Didn’t they outlaw slavery?)

A fly in the ointment!

Although the magnetic neurons were said to number just six, iron-rich cells showed up all over the beak. One beak had about 108,000 blue-stained cells while another had just 200, Keays says. “This did not make sense. If these were magnetoreceptors, we would expect a similar number in birds of the same age and sex.”

When the scientists treated the samples with stains that attach to neurons, there was almost no overlap with the iron-bearing areas.

As questions accumulated, the researchers got a lucky break. One bird’s infected beak attracted blue cells that resembled macrophages, immune cells that fight infection (and also process iron). “You could see the cells’ tentacles engulfing other cells,” Keays says.

Stains that attach to immune cells overlapped heavily with the iron stain, Keays says; further evidence that the iron was inside macrophages, not neurons.

The study is “quite interesting and convincing,” says Walcott, and it explains why scientists have found no connection between the iron crystals and the nervous system. “If this is going to be seen as a sense organ, I think the two ought to be connected.”

Paradigm paranoia

Although the new study overthrows the accepted explanation for the pigeon’s magnetic mastery, Walcott says magnetism isn’t the whole story in navigation; birds also use vision, memory and smell.

Looking at the sun can help the bird figure out direction, but magnetic methods are needed to find a location on the globe.

Confusingly, birds seem to have a mechanism in the eye that detects Earth’s magnetic field. But because this works only when the sun is shining, it’s unlikely to explain nighttime navigation.

Keays says attitudes have changed since he “released a cat among the pigeons” at a conference a year ago. “Half of the audience wanted to hug me, they had been very skeptical, but the other half wanted to kill me.”

Since then, however, “We were able to persuade some big players in the field that the original reports were wrong. I think the great thing about science is that it is a self-correcting enterprise. If we get it wrong, somebody is going to come along and work out what the truth is.”

At this point, though, mystery rules. “It’s absolutely clear that birds, pigeons, can detect magnetic fields,” Keays says, “but the way they do that is the mystery.”

As farmers north of the equator get ready to plant their seeds, we’ve started wondering about agriculture before Columbus. Conventional wisdom says Native Americans were mostly hunters and gatherers. When they did farm, their slash-and-burn techniques exhausted the soil, forcing them to clear new fields.

Although Native Americans domesticated corn, tomatoes and potatoes, their farms were generally unproductive, and most of their plant food came from gathering tubers, greens, berries and shoots.

But as we learned at a series of talks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this picture needs editing:

The provision of permaculture

Until the 1960s, the government of Canada enforced assimilation of First Nation children at boarding schools that banned ancestral languages and practices. The goal was to homogenize Canada’s population, but suppressing culture also squelched knowledge of the traditional methods for raising and gathering food.

When the police boats arrived in British Columbia in the 1930s, to take children to boarding schools, Adam Dick (tribal name Kwaxsistalla) escaped, and went to live in secluded locations with his grandparents for about a decade.

Dick, a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly Kwakiutl) tribe, has become a link to a vanishing past. “His people have learned from him, they all benefit from his teaching,” says Nancy Turner, in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria (Canada).

Turner, who has spent a career studying indigenous agriculture, says knowing what to look for is key to understanding native agriculture on the coast of British Columbia. “They used perennial cultivation. ‘Keep it living’ was part of their philosophy, and it shows the way they value other life. A lot of perennial plants were being cultivated, but outsiders saw this as random plucking.”

People in the First Nations of British Columbia ate 35 species of roots, 25 greens, berries, even the inner bark of some trees, Turner says.

Overall, coastal people used 250 species of plants for food, tea, fuel, construction, fiber, canoes, dye and glue, Turner says.

When the natives harvested bark and wood from a living tree, they took what they needed without killing the tree. “They believed trees have sentient life, and called these ‘begged from’ trees,” Turner says. “‘We have come to beg a piece of you today.’”

“Gardens” in the water

The same attitude of “stewardship and caring” also applied to aquatic food, Turner says, especially the all-important salmon. “The salmon streams were carefully tended, and even cleaned. If the stream changed course, Adam and the others were taught by the elders to transplant [salmon] eggs to the new stream channel.”

Similarly, she says, people moved rocks to “create the most productive clam beds on the coast.”

Courtesy Nancy Turner.

Small plots of springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii), about to blossom in British Columbia produced “immense quantities” of roots that were “regarded as indispensable to good health,” says Turner. In this permaculture, the harvesters replanted segments of the roots for another crop.

This was more like farming and harvesting than hunting-and-gathering, Turner insists. But the colonists, more interested in survival and profit than the people they were displacing, “were blind to these practices. They had in mind Mr. McGregor’s garden, with a fence and rows you can harvest. They looked at these things, but they did not see them.”

Restoring the foods

Most cultures give a central role to the production, preparation and consumption of food. What happens when the land that grew traditional foods is drowned by dams?

That’s the conundrum facing Linda Different Cloud Jones, an activist and student from the Lakota Sioux Nation. “The loss of biodiversity is the greatest challenge on traditional lands,” she told an audience in March at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “and the loss of one culturally important species has significant impact.”

The Lakota people “are stereotyped as the people of the plains,” says Jones, “but we are also people of the river, or were a people of the river, until, in the 1950s and ’60s, when dams built in the Pick-Sloan project changed the way of life for the Lakota forever.”

Standing Rock, the Lakota reservation, is sandwiched between the Dakotas, and borders the Missouri River. “Overnight, hundreds of thousands of acres of native land was underwater,” said Jones. “All the plant and animal species in the riparian cottonwood forest were gone.”

The underground seedpods of the hog peanut (AKA mouse bean), were collected by prairie voles. These small mammals, which the Lakota called “mice,” cached the big seeds underground.

Lakota women found the caches with a stick and removed the seeds, Jones said, but “They always left a gift, dry berries, animal fat or corn. They would sing, ‘You have helped sustain my children during this coming winter, and we will not let your children go hungry.’ Their song echoed from the trees, and it seriously breaks my heart that my young children will never see that.”

A sustainable yield?

The song revealed that “an entire world view and behavior went along with this one plant species,” Jones said, and both suffered when dams flooded the forest. “We haven’t eaten these for 50 or 60 years. With the death of this one plant was the death of a little piece of our culture.”

The hog peanut was part of a larger cycle, Jones says. In spring, “We would tap box elder maples for syrup, then collect biscuit root, wild strawberries, currants, juneberries, cattail shoots, and acorns in December. Nothing was ripe at exactly the same time. When the plants are no longer there, the cycle is broken.”

Jones, a Ph.D. student at Montana State University, is attempting to grow the hog peanut as a form of “ecocultural restoration.” “Research for the sake of research was not what I wanted to do,” she says. “I wanted to change the world for my people, to make their lives better.”

Millions of people made a living for thousands of years in the New World, she says. “Everyone always thought that when European people colonized the Americas, they were coming into a pristine place, but we were managing the landscape for thousands of years.”

Iroquois corn

Corn is an indisputable triumph of Native American agriculture. The plant, domesticated thousands of years ago in Mexico and Central America, was a staple of the American diet and is now the largest crop in the world (global production in 2009 was 819 million metric tons).

Although natives also invented the highly productive “three sisters” companion-cropping technique, their agricultural prowess has been underestimated, says Jane Mt. Pleasant, an associate professor of horticulture at Cornell University.

Although the Native Americans had transformed a weed into the phenomenally productive crop maize, “There are claims by scholars, archeologists, geographers and historians that native agriculture was predominantly shifting cultivation… largely marginal, not too productive,” Mt. Pleasant says.

In “shifting cultivation” (a politically correct locution for “slash and burn”), farmers move to new plots as they exhaust their soil. According to this logic, native farmers in North America “sowed the seeds of their own destruction through environmental degradation,” says Mt. Pleasant, who directs the American Indian Program at Cornell.

But Mt. Pleasant says this is bunk. Rather, she contends that:

The soil should be the starting point for understanding agriculture, says Mt. Pleasant. While many soils on the Eastern Seaboard are not great, large parts of upstate New York had good soil that still supports productive farms.

About 300 years ago, the Iroquois Confederacy, a union of five (later six) tribes, lived in the area, and evidence for their farm productivity comes, ironically, from armies that sought to destroy them. “The quantity of corn which we found in store in this place, and destroyed by fire is incredible,” wrote the governor of New France in 1687.²

The French attacked the Iroquois, who were allied with France’s great enemy, Great Britain.

Slash ‘n burn, or sustainable agriculture?

Then in 1779, a soldier sent by General George Washington reported that his unit had destroyed at least 200 acres of Iroquois corn and beans that was “the best I ever saw.”

“This was not backyard gardening, not primitive farming,” Mt. Pleasant says. “They were dynamic, producing farmers on really good soils.”

In modern tests of corn varieties believed to resemble those grown by the Senecas, one of the Iroquois tribes, Mt. Pleasant got yields of 2,500 to 3,000 pounds per acre (45 to 54 bushels per acre or 2,800 to 3,400 kilograms per hectare).

This was far above the 500 kilograms per hectare of wheat grown in Europe.

Turner calculated that the Iroquois could support roughly three times as many people on an acre as contemporaneous Europeans could with their wheat crops.

Part of the advantage, she says, comes from maize’s inherent productivity. But observers have long wondered how this production could have occurred with neither plow nor draft animals, usually deemed the hallmarks of agricultural progress.

Plows, however, are now viewed as mixed blessing by many soil scientists. Although they prepare a good seedbed and bury weeds, they expose soil to the air, which encourages oxidation of humus, the organic content that supports essential microorganisms.

Although, after plowing, the humus briefly releases a burst of nitrogen, the depletion of organic matter and increased erosion continue for decades.

And thus on balance, Mt. Pleasant says the lack of the plow was an advantage, because planting with hand tools saves soil organic matter.

“If you are not tilling, and start with good soil, you are not going to lose fertility,” Mt. Pleasant says. “The system is stable as long as the crop yields are moderate and there is no plowing.”

But without plowing, there was no need for slash and burn.

Overall, Mt. Pleasant says, the new data provide a “quite different” perspective on agriculture. “Who were the primitive farmers? This is sustainable agriculture at its highest level.”

Rethinking agriculture

This type of revelation changes our view of the origin of agriculture, says Eve Emshwiller, an assistant professor of botany at UW-Madison who organized the seminar on native agriculture and who studies oca, a root crop grown in the Andes. “We have always talked about hunter-gatherers as if one day they were gathering food and noticed a plant growing from seed and thought, ‘We could gather seeds and start farming,’ as if this brilliant idea happened all of a sudden.”

Aside from historical curiosity, why worry about how native Americans grew their crops? One reason is the growing interest in sustainable agriculture, says Emshwiller. As agriculture faces the challenge of feeding more people without further damaging soil and water, older traditions could contribute.

Looking at other ways to grow and gather food will broaden our perspective, Emshwiller says. “There were a lot of people who were not considered agriculturalists, who were [supposedly] just gathering from the wild. But if you really understand what they were doing, there is not a sharp line between gathering and farming. There is a huge continuum of ways that people manage resources and get more from them.”

As honeybee colonies in the United States and Europe continue to suffer from a mysterious syndrome called colony collapse disorder (CCD), scientists are scrambling for answers. Another answer arrived this week, with a publication¹ that implicates a widely used insecticide.

CCD endangers many crops, but none more than almonds, which are pollinated by bees in more than a million hives trucked to California during the flowering season. Trucking stresses the bees, and stress is one of several likely contributors to the collapse syndrome.

Indeed, CCD could be several conditions lumped under one name, but here’s the trademark: The bees die away from the hive, obscuring the cause or causes of the collapse.

In the new study, scientists in France glued radio frequency identification tags to bees. Half were fed non-lethal doses of thiamethoxam, a common insecticide, then all the bees were released 1 kilometer from the hive. At the hive, the scientists used a radio-frequency gizmo to count how many flew home.

The tags did not affect the results, says Mickaël Henry, a researcher at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, in Avignon. “Previous studies have shown that they do not impair movement or behavior of bees, or their time budgets for foraging activity.”

In any case, the control bees also sported tags.

What’s wrong?

How did the insecticide reduce the return rate so significantly? Most likely by causing difficulties with orientation, or locomotor activity, or both, Henry says.

When the experiment was repeated over a distance of just 70 meters, 92 percent of exposed and 98 percent of control bees returned, so both sets of bees were able to fly. The major impairment of exposed bees on the unfamiliar, longer route suggests that the insecticide was most damaging to the ability to learn a new route.

The neonicotinoid insecticides, the category that includes thiamethoxam, trigger nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, which are normally excited by a signal from a neurotransmitter. According to the new study, “Effects of sublethal neonicotinoid exposures in honey bees may include abnormal foraging activity, reduced olfactory memory and learning performance, and possibly impaired orientation.”

These insecticides make bees stupid, in other words.

The experiment was designed to count how many bees failed to return rather than pinpoint the reasons for that failure, Henry stresses. “The next step is to go into deeper detail about the behavior, with time-activity budgets, and looking at their foraging.”

Not the whole story

“This is a nice study, and it does clarify something that a lot of people have pointed to in the disappearance of bees,” says Phil Pellitteri, a faculty associate in entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Insecticides have been known to cause bees to get lost, that’s one symptom of collapse. But colony collapse is a complex thing, and you can’t hang it all on one factor.”

Honeybees have long been attacked by viruses, protozoans and mites, Pellitteri says, and pesticides may decrease immunity, thus increasing susceptibility to pathogens. These, combined with the stress of long-distance travel and the scarcity of natural foraging grounds “are the general direction a lot of CCD research is pointing to. It’s a number of things, and their interactions.”

Henry and colleagues fed their data on return rates into a mathematical model, which predicted a perilous slide in colony populations. “The disappearances we observed may cause the colony to reach a population size low enough to be sensitive to other stressors,” he says. “Most bees are exposed to pesticides, and this confirms that exposure can put the colony at risk of collapse; this is the take-home message.”

On March 10, atmospheric chemist “Sherry” Rowland of the University of California-Irvine died in the company of his son and his wife of almost 60 years. Rowland became prominent in the 1970s after warning that common chemicals would destroy ozone 10 kilometers above Earth, exposing life to a shower of harmful radiation.

While exploring how chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) degrade after being released into the atmosphere, Rowland and graduate student Mario Molina realized the CFCs would float to the upper atmosphere, be cleaved by sunlight, and release chlorine that would destroy ozone through a chain reaction.

(Ozone contain three oxygen atoms; most oxygen molecules contain two oxygens.)

By intercepting cancer-causing UV radiation, ozone in the stratosphere allows life to exist on Earth. Significant damage to this ozone would cause an epidemic of human and animal cancer, and likely damage plants as well.

This alarming prospect was not popular in industries that relied on CFCs, but it sparked a long and largely successful effort to restrict and then ban production of the chemicals.

And although Rowland never retreated from his findings, his calm, charismatic personality helped his cause. Ralph Cicerone, now the president of the National Academy of Sciences, recalls collaborating with Rowland on CFCs. “We talked on the phone nearly every day. I considered Sherry to be my best friend, and over time I learned that many people considered him to be their best friend, too. In the midst of the debates over CFCs, he never exaggerated the dangers, always cited the science, and treated other people with dignity and respect.”

What must a scientist do?

According to the University of California-Irvine’s press service, Rowland knew his results mattered far beyond the lab: “Mario and I realized this was not just a scientific question, but a potentially grave environmental problem involving substantial depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. Entire biological systems, including humans, would be at danger from ultraviolet rays.”

At the time, scientists were studying the health implications of ozone-bearing smog in the lower atmosphere, but few people knew or cared about “good” ozone in the stratosphere.

The sudden notoriety of CFCs had a certain irony: The chemicals were invented in the 1920s at General Motors, maker of Frigidaire brand refrigerators, as a stable, non-toxic alternative to the ammonia and explosive propane used in air-conditioning and refrigeration.

CFCs later were used to expand plastic foam, clean electronic parts, and propel paint and deodorant in the mushrooming aerosol-spray business.

Antarctic ozone hole, 2011

   

Video: NASA

Chlorine and bromine in the upper atmosphere cause rapid ozone destruction in the super-chilled polar winter. Although the ozone “hole” (blue) is declining with the phase-out of CFCs, it still recurs.

They publish lest we perish!

Rowland’s 1974 study¹ ignited a long squabble over CFC production. Aerosol Age, the spray-can industry’s trade journal, implied that Rowland was a member of the Soviet KGB who wanted to destroy capitalism!

CFCs remained a back-burner issue, however, until the British Antarctic Survey discovered an alarming absence of ozone in 1985. The “Antarctic ozone hole” gave the theoretical worry sudden significance, and as the industry gradually found substitutes for CFCs, the ozone hole stopped expanding.

Today, as we watch the faltering response to global warming, it’s comforting to recall that the ozone threat prompted prompt collective action: The Montreal Protocol, a treaty to restrict CFC production, became effective in 1989 and has since been tightened after further alarm over ozone destruction, and 196 nations — essentially all of them — have signed the original Protocol. Production of ozone-depleting substances has fallen by more than 95 percent.

“CFCs were extremely useful compounds and their use was pervasive,” says Rudy Baum, editor in chief of C&EN (Chemical and Engineering News). “Although manufacturers maintained that there would be dire consequences if the use of CFCs were restricted or banned, it became clear pretty quickly that alternatives could be found in most cases.”

And yet ozone is still a problem, as shown by a 40 percent drop in Arctic ozone in the winter of 2010-2011. Continuing destruction is blamed on the stability of CFCs and the fact that the replacements, while less damaging, still destroy ozone. “Ozone can be thought of as a patient in remission, but it’s too early to declare recovery,” said Susan Solomon of the University of Colorado.

Not bounded by the lab walls

Nonetheless, the Montreal protocols are considered an epochal case of planetary preventive medicine, and Rowland, Molina and Paul Crutzen, who also worked on CFCs, were awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

But for 10 or 15 years, Rowland had played the role of maverick — speaking outside the laboratory about the importance of what he had found inside it. It’s not a comfortable role for many scientists; many find it safer to stay in the lab and let others figure out what to do with their results.

Jonathan Fink, vice-president of research at Portland State University, says “The culture of science is pretty deep in terms of how we are trained. Most science grad students are taught to focus on being the best at something, rather than thinking about the application of what they do to society.”

All along, Rowland explained the science and gently reminded us of our stake in an intact ozone layer. He continued to study atmospheric chemistry, mentor younger scientists, and show by example how scientists could speak responsibly about what their results mean for the rest of us.

Somehow, Rowland managed to fight his battles without making enemies, at least outside the industries that had inadvertently begun calamitous destruction of ozone.

Why do scientists like Rowland speak out? “Because they’re scientists and scientists are addicted to facts and what facts tell them,” says Baum. “I knew Sherry Rowland pretty well — I was the West Coast correspondent for C&EN from 1991 to 2004 … he was a gracious, dignified, reserved individual, certainly not a rabble-rouser. But he knew that his science was solid and that it told him that humans were doing something that would have catastrophic consequences if they didn’t stop. So he spoke out. Simple as that.”

A new disaster unfolds

Even before the Montreal Protocol was signed, climate scientists were starting to warn that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would enhance the greenhouse effect and trigger global warming. In testimony to the U.S. Senate in the torrid summer of 1988, NASA climatologist James Hansen linked rising temperatures to rising levels of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels.

The debate over global warming and climate change had begun, and going public put Hansen in much the same position as Rowland had occupied 15 years before. Via email, Hansen credited Rowland and atmospheric scientist Don Hunten as “role models… . They showed that it was possible to do first-rate science and also uphold our responsibility to make clear the implications of our research for society.”

Rowland redux?

Until then, Hansen had been a well-regarded but faintly visible NASA expert in planetary atmospheres. He had studied Venus, where an atmosphere choked with carbon dioxide produces a “runaway greenhouse effect” that raises the surface temperature to 460° C.

After making news in 1988, Hansen retreated from the public discussion of warming, but in the early 2000s, as temperatures continued to rise, he began to speak up again. In 2005, after the Bush White House tried to muzzle him, he went public with a vengeance.

Why? Journalist Mark Hertsgaard, who has written extensively about global warming and repeatedly interviewed Hansen, says he “thinks like a scientist, believes if you find the information, and present it properly, the truth should carry the day. I think he came out of hibernation in 2005 only because he felt he had to. He looked around and saw that the information alone was not carrying the day.”

Hansen’s regular emails combine climate facts with political opinions for a broad audience. For example, a recent commentary argued that “Scientists attempt to communicate, but are flummoxed by the ability of the profiteers to manipulate democracies. The scientific method (objective analysis of all facts) is pitted against the talk-show method (selective citation of anecdotal bits supporting a predetermined position).”

On Aug. 29, 2011, Hansen was arrested at the White House with hundreds of others protesting the Keystone XL tar-sand oil pipeline. Tapping such a vast reservoir of carbon, Hansen believes, will bring us that much closer to a “tipping point” on greenhouse warming. “Now we’ve got the spectacle of one of the world’s foremost climate scientists getting arrested and urging others to get arrested,” says Hertsgaard. “This is way beyond speaking out.”

Hertsgaard, a native of Minnesota, says it’s “very hard for [Iowa native] Jim Hansen the person to speak out.” In the Midwest, Hertsgaard says, “it is just not seemly to draw attention to yourself or bring up a topic that is likely to discomfort others. … but it’s not corny to talk without irony about the importance of doing the right thing.”

The scientific culture

A fully indoctrinated scientist is chary of talking much beyond the lab, Hertsgaard says. “Many scientists very much frown on taking the public agitator role, and that’s another tribute to Hansen’s courage. He was prepared not only to take brickbats from the Exxon-Mobil front groups, but to endure the judgment of his own peers, who said ‘That’s not what scientists do.’ He remembers that he’s not just a scientist, he’s a human being too.”

Despite the successful example of the Montreal Protocol, the global warming problem is vastly harder to solve, says Baum of C&E News. “The scale of fossil fuel use is several orders of magnitude larger …. Humans consume between 80 million and 90 million barrels of petroleum every day, and that represents only about a third of the fossil fuel that is consumed.”

Finally, while the specter of cancer caused by increased UV radiation is unsettling, “people actually like the warmer conditions, at least for now,” Baum wrote. “We didn’t have a winter in Washington, D.C., this year … and people loved it.”

So will the environmental victory over CFCs that started with Rowland and Molina be mirrored by serious action over global warming? Maybe not, says Spencer Weart, a long-time chronicler of warming. Comparing the ozone battle to the fight over global warming “is like comparing a single battle to a world war. Ozone depletion (once the ozone hole was detected) was clearly an urgent problem, with a straightforward solution. But with global warming, it’s hard for people to worry much about something that seems remote in space and time — isn’t it just a problem for polar bears and our grandchildren?”

Slowing warming “will require wholesale changes in our entire world economy,” Weart says. “And that must begin with government regulation of the fossil fuels industry, the largest concentration of economic power the world has ever seen. The pushback has been fierce, beginning with industries that suspected their profits would be restricted, and extending to people who fear governmental threats to their freedom.”

Rowland was once libeled as a Soviet spy, but “Scientists who have put themselves into politics like Jim Hansen … have been subject to ad hominem attacks: crude vilification and direct threats far beyond anything that Rowland experienced.”

Hansen and his colleagues, says Weart, “have persisted nevertheless. For the logic of their scientific understanding forbids them from keeping silent about the dangers they foresee.”

As the science of genetics advances, the task of informing patients has grown both more complicated and more essential. Good communication must reflect the science of the genetic situation and the attitudes and beliefs of patients and their families, says Roxanne Parrott, professor of communication arts and sciences, and health policy, at Penn State.

Photo: futurowoman

This child may one day choose to know the genetic risks passed down from her parents.

In starting a new study, Parrott used a survey to elicit attitudes and beliefs from family members and patients with three genetic conditions: Down syndrome, Marfan syndrome and neurofibromatosis. The results, she says, confirm the idea that communication must reflect the audience: “There is not a one-size-fits-all notion of how to communicate about genetic conditions, but there are enough patterns that we don’t have to adapt to each individual or family member.”

Although some genetic mutations always cause disease, more raise the risk without spelling doom — and that’s often a hard concept to get across, she adds. “There is so much media attention to genetic determinism,” so those who would communicate with patients must realize that many people assume that having a gene means getting a disease, when in fact more disease genes raise the odds of getting that disease, but are also affected by environmental and behavioral factors.

Talking genes blues

Communications researchers “have focused on the threat, and on trying to motivate people to take action,” says Parrott, “and this is correct, as long as we package the message in ways that can help them change their behavior and reduce the threat.”

A fearsome genetic test

Huntington’s disease, a hereditary neurological disorder, was one of the first diseases linked to a single gene. Huntington’s progressively attacks motor, mental and emotional abilities.

Photo: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Digital ID: cph 3c30859

American folk singer Woody Guthrie died from Huntington’s disease in 1967. His son Arlo Guthrie chose to be tested for HD and found that he does not carry the mutation.

HD is caused by a dominant mutation in the Huntington gene, so any child of a parent with HD has a 50 percent risk of inheriting the disease. Huntington’s is the archetype of genetic determinism: if you have the mutation, HD is inevitable.

Once the genetic test became available, a child of a parent with HD could be tested for the mutated gene. This is a difficult decision: Would you rather live in uncertainty, or get tested and possibly learn you will develop a fatal, incurable disease?

Messages about the genetic contribution to heart disease, cancer and diabetes should reflect the needs of patients with disparate beliefs, says Parrott. She and co-author Kathryn Peters, a genetic counselor, found that each group was about equally common among family members and diagnosed patients. “When we think about communication, these four frameworks represent quite different things to listen for, ideas to probe for, and a different approach to communication.”

In an online survey of 541 patients and family members, Parrott and Peters found that some beliefs were misconceptions while others were accurate, and that despite the media emphasis on single mutations as causing disease, not everybody thought “that genes alone determine health.”

Genes are relative

One interesting result came from the “integrated relativists,” who talked about how behavior, religious faith and social support “could come together to predict health,” Parrott says. That is a rather sophisticated attitude concerning genomic information, she adds.

Unfortunately, “The integrated folks were the most uncertain about their future, and how things would work out with their diagnoses,” says Parrott. “That’s probably a good indication of having almost too much information, conflicting information. Their integrated perspective puts them in a situation where they … believe that a lot of things contribute to their health, and they don’t know what to do about it.”

Learning what’s inside your genes can have a psychological impact, Parrott adds. “How do you know who to tell? How could this affect your personal relationships? When do you start having these conversations? Does your identity become a package of genes?”

Should an artificial waterway in Chicago be closed to block two highly destructive fish from entering Lake Michigan and then the other four Great Lakes?

On Feb. 27, the Supreme Court said ‘no’ when it declined to revisit an appeal by the State of Michigan, which wanted to compel closure of the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal. The canal, created to drain stormwater and wastewater from Chicago, could allow silver and bighead carp from the nearby Des Plaines River to enter Lake Michigan.

Since the two carp, native to Asia, escaped from fish ponds in the South in the 1970s, they have occupied much of the Mississippi River system, and have become extremely abundant in rivers near the Canal. Biologists, state agencies and the Great Lakes Commission warn that once the fish reach Lake Michigan, they will likely spread through the five lakes, then into the St. Lawrence River.

The Great Lakes hold almost 20 percent of the world’s fresh water and border eight states and two Canadian Provinces. Given the silver carp’s fearful jumping habits, and the potential for both species to steal food from the mouths of sport fish, the invasion could threaten recreational boating and commercial, sport and tribal fishing that gross $16.4 billion per year.¹

Although the Great Lakes already house at least 180 invasive species, ecologists warn about irreparable harm from Asian carp. They say prevention is cheaper and easier than eradication — which may be a practical impossibility.

Originally, the watersheds of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River were separate. The two were united by the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which drains stormwater and treated wastewater into the Mississippi River system.

Don’t fence me out!

Although three electric “fences” across the canal have apparently managed to block the fish from entering Lake Michigan, many scientists view the barriers as stopgaps at best, and Asian carp DNA has been found several times beyond the fences.

While that DNA suggests that the carp are already in Lake Michigan, the fish have not been found there. Still, ecologists, accustomed to studying the disastrous aftermath of invasives on land and in water, would love to protect the Great Lakes from the carp by closing the canal. That would also protect the Mississippi River from invasion from the Lakes.

“The Asian carp situation is analogous to medicine, where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” says Jake Vander Zanden, a professor of zoology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an expert on freshwater invasive species. “It makes so much more sense to keep them out, rather that let them in and deal with the consequences forever.”

The shipping industry, reliant on these waterways, wants to keep the Chicago waterways open, said Mark Biel, chairman of UnLock Our Jobs by email. “Nobody wants to see the Asian carp get into the Great Lakes… This is, however, a manageable issue that requires a long-term, comprehensive plan, and separation is simply not a solution. Given the size, scope and complexity of separating the two bodies of water, it’s clear that the costs would be enormous and the timeline — if it’s possible at all — would do nothing to address the immediate threat of Asian carp.”

Invasions can be expensive. The Environmental Protection Agency figured that just the invasives delivered in ballast water cut commercial fish landings by 13 percent to 33 percent in the U.S. Great Lakes, at an annual cost of $200 million. The estimate did not cover Canada’s part of the lakes, or species that arrived by other means.

What’s the problem with carp? What can be done to prevent their entry into the Great Lakes and beyond? Are invasive species always so damaging to ecosystems?

What’s the beef about carp?

Asian carp are heavy-bodied fish native to Asia that have occupied large parts of the Mississippi River watershed, where their rapid reproduction, voracious feeding (up to two or three times their body weight in plant and animal plankton per day), and made-for-home-video jumps are making life miserable for native fish and fishing people alike. The two carp considered most threatening to the Great Lakes — silver and bighead — originated in Southern fish ponds, where they were placed as natural vacuum cleaners to suck plankton from dirty ponds.

Since at least 1980, when the escape of the silver and bighead was detected, that voracious appetite was transformed from selling point to sticking point.

You might observe — correctly — that species have been moving since life began. It’s true that invasions are an old story, but it’s only half the story: the process has been force-fed by commerce and technology. “This is a natural process; it was once a trickle, but the rate at which it happens now is so devastating,” says Vander Zanden. “With globalization, trade, travel, things are moving so fast, it’s a fundamentally different process, and the implications are huge.”

It’s impossible to predict exactly how well Asian carp would fare in the Great Lakes; their abundance will depend on temperature, food supply, the emergence of diseases and predators, and factors that we can’t predict. But the lakes have a wide variety of habitats, and inevitably some would be conducive to the invaders.

The fundamental reason why invasive species reach nuisance levels resides in the predators, diseases or competitors they leave behind in their homeland. In the new habitat, the traveling species often gets an unfair advantage, enabling it to grow to astonishing abundance and crowd out native species.

Asian carp provide a perfect example of the process. They were deliberately imported to work on Southern fish ponds, and their ability to outcompete native fish for food and habitat “has led to the widespread establishment of Asian carp in the Mississippi River, impacting the natural balance of the aquatic ecosystem,”².

Can we keep carp from the greatest lakes?

On January 31, 2012, the Great Lakes Commission, an international body charged with maintaining the environmental and economic vitality of Earth’s largest lakes, issued a report describing three options for physically separating the two giant drainages to block invasions in both directions. The report was greeted by a number of officials from the region, including Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel.

The Obama Administration opposes closure of the Chicago canal, and in February it proposed to spend $51.5 million on Asian carp research. The money will buy more trapping and netting, to assess whether the fish have reached Lake Michigan, research on fish trapping with chemical attractants, and noisemakers to scare carp from entrances to the lake.

The focus on Chicago is misleading, according to Biel, who notes that the Great Lakes and Mississippi River Interbasin Study, from the Army Corps of Engineers, found “18 aquatic pathways throughout the region (not just Chicago alone) by which the Asian carp could get into the Great Lakes. The existence of these other pathways, which cannot simply be closed, demonstrates the importance of a regional solution to control Asian carp populations. That’s why we have to expand our sights beyond Chicago to determine a comprehensive control plan that implements measures in all of the pathways… .”

Philip Moy is a senior scientist at the Aquatic Sciences Center at UW-Madison who previously worked on the issue for the Corps of Engineers. “Electric barriers buy us time, and we need to do two things,” Moy says. “We should look into additional barrier technologies that can be added to augment the electrical approach… . We need to look pretty hard at the Great Lake Commission report suggesting that the lake and river can be re-separated. It would cost a lot of money, a century of infrastructure has built up there, but what’s the logic of waiting another 10 years to get started on a project that can take a generation to complete?”

The “mid-system separation alternative” proposed by the Great Lakes Commission was estimated to cost $3.26 to $4.27 billion. The latest federal appropriation for monitoring and research related to Asian carp will bring the three-year cost for controlling Asian carp in the area to $156.5 million.

Separation, Biel wrote, “would effectively end waterborne commerce through the Chicago Area Waterway System. The Great Lakes Commission report mischaracterizes how vessels could move containers around the Chicago rail gridlock, giving the impression that there would be a way to facilitate both separation and continued cargo movement.”

Muscling in on the mussels

There are good reasons why zebra and quagga mussels are often mentioned in discussions about invasives in the Great Lakes. Since the zebra entered the lakes in ballast water used to stabilize ships a couple of decades ago, it has clogged water intakes at power plants and water utilities.

Along with a later arrival, the quagga mussel, the zebra has eaten enough plankton to change the ecology of the lakes, and the zebra is now spreading to smaller lakes and rivers.

To prevent further hitchhikers in ballast water, ships now must replace their ballast water in the ocean with salt water, which carries organisms that are unlikely to survive in the freshwater lakes. “Every ship coming in is inspected by the Coast Guard before it reaches the Great Lakes,” Moy says, “and we haven’t discovered another ballast-related species since 2006. In the lakes, there is a growing spirit of cooperation between the companies that operate ships and the states.”

p. 74, “Aquatic invasive species in the Rio Bravo/Laguna Madre Ecological Region”

Salt-water invaders are carried in ballast water and through the pet and fishery trades.

Species invasions also plague smaller lakes, which explains the growing push to prevent the movement of invasive fish, mollusks and plants, by requiring boaters to clean and dry their boats and trailers as they leave a lake.

In Wisconsin, at least, that effort seems to be succeeding, even though not every boater complies, Moy says. “Some people say, ‘If this guy didn’t do it, it’s not the end of the world if I don’t also,’ but it usually takes multiple introductions over time to establish a population. If we reduce the number of introductions per year, we reduce the potential for establishment. Every person makes a difference.”

Buying time, but could time be on our side?

As ecologists pursue the science of invasives, what to do about the carp now knocking on the door of the Great Lakes? Biel, of the shipping industry, says, “Despite the uptick in hysteria on this issue, Asian carp populations in Illinois haven’t actually moved up river in six years. That said, we fully support funding the existing electric control barriers because their effectiveness has been demonstrated over and over again.”

Despite “substantial strides” in controlling Asian carp in Illinois and Indiana, including a third electric barrier and physical barriers along the Des Plaines River and the Illinois and Michigan Canal, “there’s simply not enough being done by other Great Lakes states,” Biel says. “Continued calls for lock closure remain a higher priority for our neighbors and other like-minded groups than actually implementing tactics for prevention.”

During the years it would take to seal the Chicago waterways, control technology may improve, says Moy, who points to fresh ideas from the U.S. Geological Survey. Instead of using the pesticide rotenone as a “big hammer” to kill all fish, he says, the Survey is testing a coating for rotenone that would make a deadly fish feed. Once sprinkled in the water, carp and other filter feeders would eat the feed, but only Asian carp have the enzyme that can dissolve the coating to release the rotenone. “It’s much more specific; an elegant application that takes advantage of the fish’s feeding behavior and internal physiology, using an existing, certified” chemical agent, Moy says.

There are benefits to working several angles at once, Moy adds. “These invasions are not inevitable. We can reduce the rate of invasions and the number of introductions per year, and that reduces the likelihood of establishment, and each year we delay introduction to a lake gives research time to come up with a solution.”