Marlene Zuk, author of RIDDLED WITH LIFE, essay in New York Times

A Great Pox’s Greatest Feat: Staying Alive
By MARLENE ZUK
New York Times, April 29, 2008

The findings were hardly earth-shaking. They dealt with an obscure bacterial infection found in an equally obscure group of natives in Guyana. Nonetheless, they made headlines.
Why? Because the disease was syphilis. The new research suggested that syphilis originated as a skin ailment in South America, and then spread to Europe, where it became sexually transmitted and was later reintroduced to the New World.

The origin of syphilis has always held an implied accusation: if Europeans brought it to the New World, the disease is one more symbol of Western imperialism run amok, one more grudge to hold against colonialism. Sexually transmitted diseases have always taken on moralistic overtones — they seem like the price of pleasure. We tell ourselves that if we can just make everyone behave responsibly, we can halt the attack.

But we may not have as much say as we might like to think. Infectious diseases are caused by living beings that spread from one host to another, and natural selection will favor anything that increases that spread — say, a higher probability of becoming airborne, or a better means of attaching to the gut wall.

The syphilis bacterium, Treponema pallidum, has no nervous system or brain, no consciousness with which to plot an attack. But it has an ability that is even better: it can reproduce at a rate that leaves us in the evolutionary dust. For any S.T.D., making the host more likely to have sex will benefit the pathogen that causes it. And syphilis may be a case in point.

Detailed records of syphilis infection start appearing in Europe from 1495, and a fearsome disease it was. Smallpox was called smallpox to distinguish it from the great pox, syphilis, which evoked this description from Ulrich von Hutten in 1519: “Boils that stood out like Acorns, from whence issued such filthy stinking Matter, that whosoever came within the Scent, believed himself infected. The Colour of these was of a dark Green and the very Aspect as shocking as the pain itself, which yet was as if the Sick had laid upon a fire.”

Two points are noteworthy about this vivid account. First, it contrasts markedly with modern experiences with the disease. Although serious in its overall effects — which can include heart problems, brain damage and infertility — the rash and other overt symptoms of syphilis are now much more muted, and the disease may go undetected for some time, which helps explain why it is so hard to control. Second, it is reasonable to suppose that a sufferer of the symptoms von Hutten describes would be unlikely to get a lot of dates.

These two observations led Rob Knell, a scientist at Queen Mary University in London, to propose (in a 2004 paper in The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London) that they were connected. If a syphilis-ridden individual were less likely to have sex, and hence spread the disease, it would behoove the disease organism to evolve a less acute effect on its hosts. Syphilis became less severe, he argued, because it was transmitted more readily if victims were still attractive to the opposite sex.

And while these changes were too rapid to be attributed to humans’ evolving resistance to the disease, he continued, for the syphilis bacteria, even a few years represents many thousands of generations. So we have syphilis itself to thank for the lessening of its symptoms. The disease is still serious, of course. But the rapid evolutionary change is striking.

Conventional wisdom used to hold that all diseases eventually evolved toward a more benign state, a “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” rationale. The muting of syphilis notwithstanding, we now realize that is not the case.

Diseases can evolve to become more virulent, more benign or neither — it all depends on what’s in it for them. For some diseases — cholera, for instance — killing the host is immaterial if the pathogen can spread via contaminated water sources. But sexually transmitted diseases must get around via sex. From the pathogen’s perspective, simply sitting around in the intestinal tract waiting for a too cursory bout of hand washing is unsatisfactory.

The disease organism from which syphilis arose is spread through simple skin contact. In chilly Europe, that’s too chancy a mode of transmission. Sex, on the other hand, is a fairly reliable means of transport, even for a delicate bacterium.

So you might blame Columbus, not for wreaking havoc on the New World through the spread of a sexually transmitted infection, but for wearing clothes. If he and his fellow Europeans had been more prone to going about au naturel, maybe the great pox wouldn’t have been so great after all.

Marlene Zuk is a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of “Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex and the Parasites that Make Us Who We Are.”

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Lou Ureneck, author of Backcast, podcasted

Listen to Nashville Public Television's "A Word on Words with John Seigenthaler" which featured Lou Ureneck's Backcast.

To Listen, click here.

Richard Thompson Ford's THE RACE CARD in The Nation

Hearts and Minds
By Thomas J. Sugrue

This article appeared in the May 12, 2008 edition of The Nation.

In The Race Card, Richard Thompson Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School, grapples with our myopic focus on individual racist thoughts and actions rather than persistent structural inequality. Ford chronicles our impoverished racial discourse, in which "cheap theatricality stands in for valuable insight" and "simplistic dogma masquerades as analysis." Though he doesn't use the term, Ford describes a sort of false consciousness wherein personal slights, interpersonal disputes and legitimate differences of opinion are elevated to the status of racism.

Ford plucks his examples from the garish world of celebrity culture: O.J. Simpson's attorneys painting him as a victim of a racist conspiracy; Oprah Winfrey turning a rude encounter with snobby French salesclerks at an Hermès shop in Paris into a cause célèbre; and rapper Jay-Z's boycott of Cristal Champagne because its corporate flack dissed "'hip hop' culture." There is more than a little sensationalistic fluff padding Ford's accounts of spurious charges of racism (do we really need another rehash of "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit"?). But when he gets into real-life examples, such as taxi drivers refusing to pick up black passengers (it's the logical consequence of persistent residential segregation, concentrated poverty and crime, not usually the bad intentions of cabdrivers), and the disparate racial impact of Hurricane Katrina (the real villain here is not George Bush but instead systematic racial segregation, the marginalization of the black poor and long-term disinvestment), his insights are bracing. Ford also challenges the slippery ways that aggrieved individuals (including the obese, people with tattoos and piercings, and white critics of affirmative action) have created a politics and jurisprudence of prejudice analogous to racism. "Fat is not the new black," Ford argues, dismantling arguments that when airlines require overweight passengers to pay for two seats or gymnasiums decline to hire a person of size to run an exercise class, it is the equivalent of systematic Jim Crow. "Weightism and looksism aren't problems of social order or of social injustice," as were laws that excluded blacks as a group from the full prerogatives of citizenship.

Ford's critique of the race card is rooted in a larger, institutional understanding of racial discrimination. "Our tools for describing, analyzing, and righting racial injustice assume that racial injustices are the work of racists," he writes. Such tools create confusion when applied to what Ford provocatively calls "racism without racists," which is what occurs when people get trapped in the legacies of discriminatory policies. The result is disabling. The scandal-hungry media feast on ridiculous or exaggerated charges of racism while ignoring the real problems of racial inequality in their midst. Whenever the race card gets played, by either a multiculturalist or an opponent of affirmative action, it trivializes racial inequality and oppression and harms the cause of civil rights: "Practices that create a permanent underclass," he writes, "are unjust in a different and more profound way" than isolated, arbitrary acts of prejudice. Fingering a few bigots--rightly or wrongly--does nothing to challenge pervasive educational and housing segregation, the black-white wealth and health gaps, or the disproportionate impact of the prison-industrial complex on young black men.

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Paul Goldstein's A Patent Lie in Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly, Week of 4/21/08
A Patent Lie
Paul Goldstein. Doubleday, $24.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-385-51718-8

Goldstein, a Stanford law professor and intellectual property expert, delivers on the promise of his thriller debut, Errors and Omissions (2006), with this outstanding sequel. Michael Seeley, who's living in seclusion in Buffalo, N.Y., agrees at his estranged brother's urging to travel to San Francisco to take on a patent infringement case that Vaxtek, a small company, is bringing against St. Gall, a Swiss pharmaceutical giant, over an AIDS vaccine. Robert Pearsall, the lead plaintiff's attorney, apparently committed suicide on the eve of trial. Surprised that Pearsall, known for his meticulous preparation, didn't depose Lily Warren, a St. Gall employee who claimed to have invented the vaccine, Seeley pursues that loose end, only to find that Warren's version of events raises questions about not only Seeley's clients but also his predecessor's death. In lean prose, Goldstein masterfully portrays the intricate courtroom maneuvering and the ethical dilemmas of trial attorneys. Scott Turow fans will welcome this complex protagonist. (June)

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Anthony Lewis' Freedom for the Thought That We Hate in Harvard Magazine

Book Review
Freeing Speech
How judge-made law gave meaning to the First Amendment

by Richard H. Fallo, Harvard Magazine. May-June 2008

Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment offers a lucid and engaging overview of American free-speech law. The former Nieman Fellow has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, and this volume puts the skills that earned him those accolades much on display. Again and again, he brings to life the dramatis personae in leading cases, plucks out moving or telling quotations, and explains who won and who lost in order to provide a clear introduction to First Amendment doctrine.

Lewis ’48, NF ’57, styles the book “a biography.” In fact, it is more nearly a history in which unfolding events are presented as teaching by example—sometimes positive and sometimes negative example. He begins by sketching the hated traditions of British censorship against which the American ideals of free speech developed. By the late eighteenth century, various state constitutions included guarantees of freedom of the press. When the Constitution of the United States that emerged from the Philadelphia Convention contained no bill of rights, there was widespread sentiment that the omission needed to be rectified. The first Congress thus drafted and the states ratified a Bill of Rights, the First Amendment of which guarantees that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

Interestingly, however, there is considerable uncertainty about what the Framers and ratifiers of the First Amendment understood it to protect. Accordingly, in Freedom for the Thought That We Hate, Lewis scrupulously avoids claiming that the “original understanding” of the First Amendment’s reach resolves contested cases that have come before the Supreme Court. First Amendment law, Lewis emphasizes, is almost exclusively judge-made law, nearly all fashioned in the past 90 years.

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Lou Ureneck, author of BACKCAST, Op-Ed in Boston Globe

Caught hook, line, and sinker
By Lou Ureneck
Boston Globe, April 7, 2008

THE WINTER ice that now locks the streams and brooks across northern New England soon will be breaking up. For a lot of us, this means the Opening Day of the trout-fishing season is just about upon us - the day when the waters are officially open to fishermen to cast their lines.

Winter may not be over, but we know it's exhausted - out of breath - and spring is about to overwhelm it with longer days, warm sunshine, and skunk cabbage poking up along the streamsides. There will be the magical appearance of pussy willows, and the bursting of the swamp maple's winter buds into tiny red flowers.

As I get older, all of this is reassuring - the earth's tilting to the sun, songbirds up from the south or down from the tree tops to pick up worms, and the chance to get back to the swollen streams with a fishing rod. When I was a boy, Opening Day was pure excitement - sorting my hooks and sinkers the night before, rewinding the line on my reel, patching leaky hip boots. It made no difference that the fishing is nearly always poor on Opening Day - the water cold and high and murky from snow melt and runoff, rocking the flooded alders along the banks.

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Anthony T. Kronman's EDUCATION'S END in Commentary Magazine

Education's End by Anthony T. Kronman
Reviewed by Ben Wildavsky
Commentary Magazine, April 2008

Anthony Kronman tells two compelling stories in this new book on the demise of the humanities. The first is brief and autobiographical. In the mid-1960’s, he dropped out of Williams College, eager to give his life meaning by taking an active part in the great social changes of his time. He spent seven months in Chicago, ringing doorbells and attending meetings as a community organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. But the sense of purpose he was seeking eluded him, and before long he was back at Williams. There, enrolling in a seminar on existentialism, he was soon eagerly anticipating intense weekly discussions of Kierkegaard, Sartre, and the Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Not only was the course’s central question—how best to live—a weighty one, but, he writes, he learned something unexpected and life-changing: “the meaning of life is a subject that can be studied in school.” This conviction, in turn, led Kronman to his life’s work as an academic. Armed with a law degree and a Ph.D. in philosophy, he has spent most of his career as a professor and dean at Yale Law School, and in recent years has taught in the university’s elite freshman humanities program. It also led him to write this extended manifesto. For, after decades in the university, Kronman is saddened and alarmed that a subject that should by rights be at the center of an undergraduate education—“the exploration of life’s mystery and meaning through the careful but critical reading of the great works of literary and philosophical imagination”—has instead been relegated to “the margins of professional respectability.” Hence his second, more detailed story: an earnest, densely reasoned account of just how this happened, and how it might be fixed

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Christopher Lane, Author of SHYNESS, article in The Scotsman

Sometimes anxiety is just a normal reaction
By CHRISTOPHER LANE
The Scotsman, April 5, 2008

IN THE US, almost half of the population is described as being in some way mentally ill, and 200 million prescriptions are written annually to treat depression and anxiety. These statistics have sparked a debate about whether people are taking more medication than is needed, for problems they may not have.
Those who defend such widespread use of prescription drugs insist a significant part of the population is under-treated and under-medicated. Those opposed note that, for example, diagnosis of bipolar disorder has rocketed by 4,000 per cent and that over-medication is impossible without over-diagnosis.

To help settle this dispute, I studied why the number of recognised psychiatric disorders has ballooned in recent decades. In 1980, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders added 112 disorders to its third edition (DSM-III). Some 58 more appeared in the revised third and fourth editions. The manual is the bible of American psychiatry, and the addition of even one new disorder has serious consequences. So why add so many?

I was granted access to unpublished memos, letters, and voting data from 1973-1979 when the DSM-III task force debated each disorder. Some of the work was meticulous, but the overall approval process was more capricious than scientific.

DSM-III grew out of meetings that many participants described as chaotic. The expertise of the task force was limited to neuropsychiatry, and the group met for four years before it occurred to members that it might be biased.

Some lists of symptoms were knocked out in minutes and the field studies used to justify their inclusion sometimes involved a single patient. Experts pressed for the inclusion of illnesses as questionable as "chronic complaint disorder", whose traits included moaning about taxes and the weather.

Social anxiety disorder was given official recognition in 1980 and by the 1990s experts insisted as many as one in five Americans suffered from it. Yet Isaac Marks, the specialist who originally recognised social anxiety in the 1960s, resisted its inclusion as a se
parate disease. The list of behaviours associated with the disorder, such as avoidance of public toilets, gave him pause. By the time a revised task-force added dislike of public speaking to the symptom list in 1987, the disorder seemed sufficiently elastic to include virtually everyone on the planet.

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