Americans have long worried about conflicts between scientific and religious beliefs. For the most part, this ambivalence has not threatened the practice and teaching of biology--until recently.  Americans have long been ambivalent about science. Conflicting attitudes toward science are not uncommon among industrialized countries—Canadians, Europeans, and Japanese, for example, also appreciate the benefits of science but worry about potential impacts on society. What sets Americans apart is that their reservations center primarily around religion. And now, as the United States struggles to maintain its undisputed position as world leader in science and technology, religious ideology has spilled over into the public sphere to a degree unmatched in other industrialized societies. Religious groups are turning scientific matters like stem cells and evolution into political issues.Though some see the growing influence of ideology over scientific issues as a threat to America's standing as global science leader, a leading analyst of public attitudes toward science sees it as an opportunity for increasing scientific literacy. “Even though the scientific community can feel besieged by this anti-science sentiment,” says Jon D. Miller, who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School, “most people really haven't made up their mind about this issue and, in fact, really haven't even thought about it.” Rather than fretting about the cultural divide—or worse, doing nothing—Miller urges scientists to do their part to bridge the gap.Since 1979, the proportion of scientifically literate adults has doubled—to a paltry 17%.Miller has devoted his 30-year career to studying public understanding of science and technology and its implications for a healthy democracy. To possess what Miller calls civic scientific literacy, one must have the capacity to make sense of competing arguments in a scientific debate. Over the year leading up to the 2004 US election, Miller polled a national panel of adults to track their grasp of the ongoing debate about stem-cell research. A year before the election, over a third of adult respondents had never heard the term, even though the issue had dominated the headlines. By the eve of the election, only a few more respondents said they had heard about stem cells. How could so many people manage to remain oblivious to one of the most contentious issues of the election?Most people don't have a cognitive framework for understanding stem cells, Miller explains. “Science happens so fast now that most adults couldn't possibly have learned about stem cells when they were in school.” And without this underlying schema, most people aren't going to pay attention to stem cells or any other unfamiliar scientific term. “People tune out things that they think are scientific or complicated,” he says. “If you are science averse and think you couldn't possibly know any science, the minute you hear ‘cell,’ ‘stem cell,’ ‘nanotechnology,’ ‘atomic,’ ‘nuclear,’ you turn the off switch.”said they had a good understanding of stem cells—21% in 2004, up from 9% in 2003—but only 9% of respondents could define the term when asked, compared with 8% in 2003. And, surprisingly, the number of voters with strong opinions dropped significantly. A year before the election, 17% were opposed—“likely reflecting the influence of religious groups”—and 15% were in favor. As discussions raised distinctions between adult and embryonic stem cells and between morality and scientific benefits, most people realized the issue was more complex than they had originally thought. “At the end of the election, only 2% were strongly opposed and only 2% were strongly in favor,” Miller says. “It shows that a little bit of scientific literacy won't solve the problem when you have a debate.”As time went on, more peopleScience and Engineering Indicators, a biennial national report on public understanding of science and technology published by the National Science Board . Since 1979, he says, the proportion of scientifically literate adults has doubled—to a paltry 17%. The rest are not savvy enough to understand the science section ofThe New York Times or other science media pitched at a similar level. As disgracefully low as the rate of adult scientific literacy in the United States may be, Miller found even lower rates in Canada, Europe, and Japan—a result he attributes primarily to lower university enrollments.For two decades, Miller served as principal investigator of the public attitudes section of theScientific literacy doesn't call for a deep understanding of Maxwell's equations or Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium, but it does require a general understanding of basic scientific concepts and the nature of scientific inquiry. The first national survey of American scientific literacy was serendipitously completed two months prior to the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, providing a baseline measure of public attitudes toward science just before the space race. People were asked about strontium 90 (a radioactive by-product of nuclear weapons tests) and the Salk vaccine—terms that dominated the newspapers at the time. But when Miller tried to replicate the survey 20 years later, it was clear that questions based on topical headlines couldn't produce accurate measures of scientific literacy over time. “You need to find more enduring measures,” he says. So he developed questions focusing on atoms, molecules, and other basic concepts, and discovered that “a lot of people have no clue about these things.”DNA in a newspaper, would you have a clear understanding of what that means, a general sense of what it means, or not much idea?’” If respondents said they had a clear understanding, they would be asked to define DNA in their own words. “I got things like the ‘Dow Jones News Association,’” Miller says, laughing. “If you don't know what DNA is, you can't follow the stem-cell debate.”“When I first started asking about DNA,” he says, “I used an open-ended question that asks, ‘If you saw the termWhen it comes to monitoring and interpreting public attitudes toward science and technology, leaders in national science organizations like the National Science Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine have long turned to Miller, an avuncular political scientist who has also advised the European Commission as well as government agencies in China, Japan, and a host of other countries. With the recent spate of high-profile lawsuits aimed at getting evolution out of public classrooms and ongoing opposition to stem-cell research, his services have been in especially high demand. Miller has long been worried about a burgeoning anti-science movement. The current climate is even more troubling, he says, with the emergence of organized attacks on science against the backdrop of the new culture wars.To measure public acceptance of the concept of evolution, Miller has been asking adults if “human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals” since 1985. He and his colleagues purposefully avoid using the now politically charged word “evolution” in order to determine whether people accept the basics of evolutionary theory. Over the past 20 years, the proportion of Americans who reject this concept has declined (from 48% to 39%), as has the proportion who accept it (45% to 40%). Confusion, on the other hand, has increased considerably, with those expressing uncertainty increasing from 7% in 1985 to 21% in 2005.One-third of Americans think evolution is “definitely false.”Because simple true–false questions exaggerate the strength of both positions, Miller also asked more nuanced questions in 1993 and 2003. Again, the proportion of adults holding tentative or uncertain positions increased, but the percentage holding strong positions remained steady over the past 10 years. One-third of Americans think evolution is “definitely false”; over half lean one way or another or aren't sure. Only 14% expressed unequivocal support for evolution—a result Miller calls “shocking.”In a graph showing acceptance (represented by blue bars) and rejection (represented by red bars) of evolution in nine European countries and the United States from a recent survey Miller conducted, red bars for the United States overshadow the blue bars for every other country. And in a 2005 survey measuring the proportion of adults who accept evolution in 34 European countries and Japan, the United States ranked 33rd, just above Turkey. No other country has so many people who are absolutely committed to rejecting the concept of evolution, Miller says. “We are truly out on a limb by ourselves.”New York Times opinion piece that for the first time in American history a political party has become an arm of a religious organization. The United States is the only country in the world where a political party has taken a position on evolution.It's not that Americans are rejecting science per se, Miller maintains, but longstanding conflicts between personal religious beliefs and selected life-science issues has been exploited to an unprecedented degree by the right-wing fundamentalist faction of the Republican Party. In the 1990s, the state Republican platforms in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Oregon, Missouri, and Texas all included demands for teaching creation science. Such platforms wouldn't pass muster in the election, Miller says, but in the activist-dominated primaries, they drive out moderate Republicans, making evolution a political litmus test. Come November, the Republican candidate represents a fundamentalist agenda without making it an explicit part of the campaign. Last year, Miller points out, former Senator John Danforth, a moderate Missouri Republican, wrote in aTo gauge the extent of fundamentalism's reach into American life, Miller evaluated adults' responses to three statements: the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally; there is a personal God who hears the prayers of individual men and women; and human beings were created by God as whole persons and did not evolve from earlier forms of life. In 2005, 43% of American adults agreed with all three statements.“The age of nonpartisan science is gone.”The era of nonpartisan science is gone, says Miller, who urges scientists and science educators to learn the rules of this new game and get behind moderate Republicans as well as Democrats to protect the practice and teaching of sound science. Given the partisan attack on evolution and stem-cell research, he thinks scientists need to learn more about how the political process works. They need to be willing to run for the school board, write $500 or even $5,000 checks to support moderate candidates, and defeat Christian right-wing candidates. “Scientists need to become involved in partisan politics and to oppose candidates who reject evolution or attack scientific research,” he says. “It takes time, money, and paying attention to the issues.”Clearly, increasing scientific literacy is a long-term challenge. The US pre-collegiate science and math education system is broken. US high-school student performance ranks behind every European and Asian country, according to the 2003 Trends in International Math and Science Study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. Given that over half of high-school graduates don't go on to get college degrees, that's something to be concerned about. But Miller takes heart from the fact that, unlike any other country in the world, the United States requires the 47% of kids who do go to college to take a year of science—a distinction that may help the United States recover its flagging scientific standing. College professors would do well to remember that today's undergraduates are apt to be functioning 40 to 50 years from now, he says. “It's the last chance to teach people who are going to become important leaders in the community, and we should take this opportunity seriously.”For all the sobering statistics and challenges ahead, Miller remains undaunted. While it's unlikely that hard-core anti-evolutionists and stem-cell opponents will change their minds anytime soon, he says, “we've got a lot of ambiguity in the middle. The game is still in play. We ought not to say, ‘Gee, Americans are stupid,’ but, ‘There are a lot of Americans who would be willing to listen to us if we were to go out and make good arguments.’”And as Miller's research shows, when you get away from the religiously charged issues, there is an even greater opportunity to increase scientific literacy. In a new study that investigates models of adult informal learning, now under review at a leading journal, he shows that public understanding of antibiotics increased substantially over a 17-year period. In 1988, just 26% of adults in a national survey knew that antibiotics do not kill both viruses and bacteria. By 2005, 54% knew that antibiotics kill only bacteria—an increase that Miller attributes to informal learning through a variety of sources.Miller sees opportunities for learning everywhere and may be one of the few people in the scientific community to see an upside to Big Pharma's ubiquitous direct-to-consumer TV drug ads. By saying that cholesterol levels derive from two sources—diet and family history—commercials for Lipitor and other cholesterol-reducing statins introduce the notion that genetics is probabilistic rather than deterministic in a very basic way that people can understand, he explains. “But if you say that genetic predisposition is ‘probabilistic,’ you've just lost 90% of the people.”The limiting step in enhancing scientific literacy is not people's capacity for learning, Miller says, as much as it is interest. When Americans are diagnosed with cancer or some other life-threatening disease, “the vast number of these people go online and learn more science in the next 12 months than a typical undergraduate will ever learn. It is impressive how much people can learn with the proper motivation. We need to get people to be savvy about how to find the information and make sense of it.”Miller urges scientists to take comfort in the fact that the majority of Americans are not anti-science, but simply don't know how exciting scientific discovery can be. “We must be cautious and not presume that our society feels strongly about what scientists do one way or another. There's a lot of work to be done for us to tell people what we do, why we do it, and why it's important,” he advises. Given the pace of biomedical discoveries in the 21st century, he adds, it's likely that more and more scientific issues will reach the public agenda. “We're going to be revisiting various versions of these questions again and again. But there's a large segment of Americans who still haven't made up their mind on these issues. We in the scientific community have to treat them seriously, talk to them, and make our arguments. This is a great opportunity for us.”As executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), Eugenie Scott leads the effort to defend the teaching of evolution in US public schools. And she's got her work cut out for her: more anti-evolution legislation was introduced in just the first six weeks of 2006—12 bills in nine states—than in any year in history. Addressing scientists and science educators at AAAS, Scott blamed the recent legislative onslaught on the legacy of an “enormously decentralized” public education system in which each of 17,000 independent school districts could teach completely different science courses. In an attempt to rectify this situation, the first National Science Education Standards were published in 1996, and many states adopted standards based on the national guidelines. Since many of the same people were involved in both efforts, Scott explained, evolution is largely included in state standards.“What that has meant is that for the first time in many states, school districts are faced with the prospect of needing to teach evolution,” Scott said. And they must do so by the end of 2007. Ironically, this mandate comes from President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, enacted in 2002. The law effectively links annual student assessments to curriculum standards, which means that if a requirement is in the standards, it must be taught. Thanks to No Child Left Behind, the schools where Bush's fundamentalist constituents send their kids are now teaching evolution, in many cases for the first time. The result? “If you don't want evolution to be taught, you need to attack the standards,” Scott said.as if scientists are arguing about whether living things descended with modification from common ancestors.”And the attacks have come fast and furious, often following a similar pattern. “First, they will try to get evolution out,” she said. When that fails, they try to get “intelligent design” in. When that fails, they try to get some form of “evidence against evolution” taught, including “teach the controversy.” When anti-evolution groups say “teach the controversy,” Scott wryly pointed out, “they don't mean teach the controversy over whether birds descended from dinosaurs. They're not saying teach the controversy over sympatric and allopatric speciation. They're saying teach the controversyAs the state education standards have come up for review over the past five years, the NCSE has increasingly encountered campaigns to teach “alternate theories.” In Dover, Pennsylvania, the school board passed a policy in 2004 that read: “Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin's theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design. Note: Origins of life will not be taught.” Launching the first explicit legal challenge to intelligent design, parents sued the school district. At first, the legal team narrowly focused their strategy on attacking intelligent design, the team said, because they knew a judge would ask who the intelligent designer is. But since the legally problematic “gaps/problems” language was wrapped up in intelligent design in this case, the team saw an opportunity to “sink both” and head off cases down the line that used the evidence-against-evolution approach. The strategy paid off.US District Judge John Jones ruled that the Dover policy violates the Establishment Clause, which mandates the separation of church and state: “In making this determination,” he wrote, “we have addressed the seminal question of whether intelligent design is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that intelligent design cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.”Though buoyed by the decision, Scott has seen too many battles to let her guard down. “Intelligent design may be dead as a legal strategy but that does not mean it is dead as a popular social movement,” she said. Creationists will find other ways to get evolution out of the schools, noting that phrases like “sudden emergence theory” and “creative evolution” have already surfaced. She cautioned scientists and educators to remain vigilant in the face of ongoing challenges from the anti-evolution movement. “It's got legs,” she said. “It will evolve.”


Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice is an important addition to the literature on the science and politics of environmental health decision making. In clear prose, Corburn provides a “descriptive, analytic, and prescriptive understanding of local environmental-health knowledge” through what he calls “street science” (p. 217). Street science is a framework that joins local insights with professional scientific techniques, with concurrent goals: to improve scientific inquiry and environmental health policy and decision making.Jason Corburn’s Street Science are four case studies from Greenpoint/ Williamsburg, in New York City, where diverse racial and ethnic, low-income populations practice what Corburn calls “science on the streets of Brooklyn.” These studies were centered on complex environmental health issues: subsistence fishing risks, asthma, childhood lead poisoning, and small sources of air pollution. Some of the larger issues addressed through these particular studies include the limits of traditional risk assessment and the politics of mapping health and environment risk. Through these studies, Corburn provides a theoretical model for understanding key characteristics of what he calls “local knowledge,” its paradoxes, and contributions to environmental health policy. Street science, at its best, identifies hazards and highlights research questions that professionals may ignore, provides hard-to-gather exposure data, involves difficult-to-reach populations, and expands possibilities for interventions, resulting in “improved science and democracy.” One of the strengths of this book is that it succeeds where most studies of local knowledge fail, “scaling up” and providing generalizations about the nature of local knowledge, how it is acquired, the typical problems that occur when local and scientific knowledge conflict and why.At the heart of Drawing from social science, particularly science and technology studies, Corburn explicitly calls for environmental and public health researchers, policy makers, and urban planners to become “reflective practitioners.” At the same time, he is careful to reject the idea that street science is a panacea. It does not devalue, but rather revalues science. He is not calling for a populism where the “community” replaces “experts,” but for a better understanding of how knowledge “co-produced” among local and professional constituencies can lead to better health, science, and politics.The greatest strength of the book is in the details about the particular interventions that street science made in these four examples. One of the stronger cases was in the story about subsistence fishing. Local residents added to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Air Toxics Modeling and Cumulative Exposure project by contributing local knowledge to the dietary exposure assessment. The U.S. EPA had no idea that local residents consumed contaminated fish from the East River, but as a result of community challenges to the U.S. EPA’s risk assessment models, the agency was able to conduct angler surveys and to more accurately represent the real-life exposures that local residents faced. Local knowledge was culturally sensitive, linked with the environmental justice movement, successfully used intermediaries, and was low-cost enough to be incorporated successfully into the U.S. EPA’s practices. Corburn does not claim that each example of street science is successful or equivalent with one another. But even these failures and limits are instructive. For policy makers and health researchers who face hostile communities, his accounts of conflictive public meetings in Greenpoint/ Williamsburg offer a good guide to “what goes wrong and why.”Street Science is an essential and critical investigation into the science and politics of local knowledge and environmental health justice at this crucial juncture.Agencies such as the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences are increasingly recognizing community-based research and environmental justice concerns . At the same time, more focus and funding is being channeled into investigating and eliminating health disparities. Corburn’s


We read with great interest your editorial “The Impact Factor Game” . We notiIn total, 6,090 journals are indexed by SCI, most of which are published in English. However, there are many more scientific journals in the world. Over 6,300 local scientific journals are published here in China, but Chinese journals are rare in the SCI database and most of them have no impact factors.PLoS Medicine [Some may argue that the SCI database only includes the high-quality journals, but this is not necessarily the case. As a paper published in Medicine  has showLanguage accounts for much in today’s database, especially when we are searching it for evidence. Language bias should not be neglected. A language revolution could contribute to scientific progress.


Straddling the Chilean–Argentine border high in the Andes, near a field of glaciers, lies an ore body that by mining industry estimates is large enough to yield 750,000 ounces of gold, 30 million ounces of silver, and 5,000 tons of tradable copper concentrate  every year for 20 years. Whether these valuable metals would stay in the ground, at least for the foreseeable future, or be extracted in an open pit mine is the topic of an ongoing tug-of-war between environmentalists and Canada’s Barrick Gold Corporation, the claim holder and one of the world’s largest gold miners.Just about any new extractive industry proposal will attract protests, says Vincent Borg, Barrick Gold’s senior vice president of corporate communications. He says Pascua-Lama, as the proposed mine is called, has been a target of environmentalists’ wrath just because it’s the latest large mine on the drawing table. But the Pascua-Lama case includes a few unique twists: perhaps 5% of the metals lie under glaciers, the site sits on land in two countries, and as gold and silver mines go, it is at a high altitude, a little over 15,000 feet above sea level. Tremors from regional earthquakes also are no stranger to Huasco Valley. According to the USGS, the region saw 6.7-magnitude earthquakes in 2006 and 2002, while a 6.8-magnitude event occurred in 2003.By now, hoops have been jumped through, most i’s dotted and t’s crossed, protests conducted, and appeals exhausted. Just about all of the major players on this issue, for and against, say that the mine will almost certainly open in the near future. However, some activists are grasping at a thin thread of hope that new appeals to Chilean regulatory agencies, as well as other legal maneuvers could halt the project.What concerns me is that this particular mine has a very high resource value. That can drive people to assuming and making promises about a project that just realistically can’t be upheld.— Jim Kuipers, Kuipers and Associates LLCMuch of the initial attention on Pascua-Lama focused on the issue of the glaciers that cover a portion of the site’s deposits. To get at some of the metal deposits, Barrick Gold at one time planned to relocate parts of three of the smaller glaciers, called Toro 1, Toro 2, and Esperanza.Melt from all of the glaciers—which developed during the last ice age, don’t fully renew each winter, and have already diminished by 50–70% over the last 20 years—feeds primary sources of water used by local farmers and other inhabitants. The prospect of destroying glaciers, especially ones that indigenous people depend on so heavily, drew a flurry of attention from local activists and environmental groups in Chile and Argentina and from abroad. But Borg argues that these three glaciers are so small compared to the surrounding glaciers that they contribute little to the Huasco Valley watershed—less than 0.5%, by Barrick Gold’s estimate.All that said, the whole glacier issue is now moot anyway, according to Borg: “The glaciers will not be moved as part of the actual project that was approved.” That’s because new Chilean president Michelle Bachelet said during her campaign and after taking office that she wouldn’t allow the glaciers to be touched. So the deposits that currently lie under these glaciers will stay put, Borg says, even if the ice covering them should disappear naturally later in the project.Despite the glaciers’ surviving the mine unscathed, local groups worry that, like problematic mines in locations elsewhere, this mine will contaminate local water supplies, says David Modersbach, an independent activist who lives in Rosario, Argentina. Water impacts are usually the most troublesome issue associated with all types of mining, but especially with hard-rock mines like Pascua-Lama.The water problems associated with hard-rock mining are essentially twofold: those associated with exposing buried rock, and those associated with accidents involving chemicals such as cyanide, mercury, and ammonia, which modern hard-rock miners use to extract gold and silver from pulverized rock. According to the U.S. EPA, mines can also affect waterways in other, more subtle ways, by altering natural drainage patterns, impounding water, diverting streams, and a host of other practices.Acid mine drainage forms when the sulfide minerals in which gold and silver hide mix with specialized bacteria, air, and water. These acidic waters also can leak from natural rock formations, although in vastly smaller quantities. When sulfides are churned up and exposed to air, then introduced to water, they produce sulfuric acid, a medium in which these bacteria thrive. The nurtured bacteria oxidize the minerals further, resulting in a chain reaction that can produce water acidic enough to dissolve iron tools.Unconstrained acid mine drainage can damage ecosystems when it finds its way into waterways and groundwater alike. It can also pepper waterways with potentially toxic metals—such as arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury, zinc, iron, copper, aluminum, manganese, and chromium—that the acidic water leaches from the rock it flows through. Acid mine drainage has cost hundreds of millions of dollars to remediate in the past two decades alone, according to EPA estimates. Ideally acid mine drainage is controlled, usually by sequestering the depleted ore (“tailings”) and waste rock behind dams and other enclosures designed to prevent water from flowing through the sulfide minerals.The other hazard that hard-rock mines pose to waterways is inadvertent releases of cyanide. Like virtually all gold or silver mines nowadays, Pascua-Lama will use cyanide to strip minute flecks of gold and silver from ore. In the “vat leach” process planned for Pascua-Lama, ore is pulverized and poured into enormous vats. Sodium cyanide solution—the annual use of a typical mine is measured in hundreds of tons—is mixed with the pulverized ore. Cyanide trickling through the ore collects gold and silver particles, forming water-soluble gold– or silver–cyanide compounds. The tailings are deposited in vast pools and held in place by dams.According to Borg, the Pascua-Lama project has included in its design significant facilities to minimize the possibility of surface and subterranean water coming in contact with waste rock as well as a comprehensive system of passive and active barriers to collect, store, treat, and reuse any water that does come in contact with the waste rock. This will ensure the quality of the water downstream of the project. The mine will also include state-of-the-art facilities for controlling acid mine drainage, for handling cyanide , and for monitoring water quality.But according to a U.S. government mining expert who is familiar with the Pascua-Lama site and who asked not to be identified, the altitude and terrain of the site present unique challenges. In more hospitable locales, even the most up-to-date acid mine drainage prevention technologies, tailings holdings facilities, and cyanide handling schemes have failed, he says. In the past three decades, several tailings dams around the world have collapsed, and many more have leaked leftover cyanide and trace heavy metals leached from the ore. In some cases, even when enclosures have worked well, acid mine drainage has appeared from unanticipated spots outside the enclosures.For the Pascua-Lama operation, the source says, the company would need “great engineering” to prevent the environmental damage that hard-rock mines often inflict. Once the mine closes, he says, restoring the site will be especially difficult because ecosystems at such high altitudes are fragile and slow-growing.Besides dam failure, there is the possibility of cyanide tanker trucks crashing into or near waterways, dumping hundreds of gallons of cyanide into bodies of water. It is the prospect of just this kind of spill that most worries local residents, especially farmers, says Antonia Fortt, an environmental engineer at the Santiago office of Oceana, a Washington, DC–based environmental group. “On the Chilean side they are going to build their roads for the trucks of the mine just next to the river. These trucks will carry not just explosives and other materials, but also cyanide. We have had accidents with cyanide before, here in Chile,” she says. “If we have a spill of cyanide, it would be just a disaster.”Fortt also notes that the trip will be precarious because of the mine’s extreme elevation; trucks will be pummeled by seasonal high winds near the summit. Further, she says, the company’s plan to dump waste rock at the headwaters of the Estrecho River could be equally, albeit more gradually, damaging if the rocks start generating acid.Many modern mines in developed countries—including U.S. sites in states such as Montana, Idaho, and Alaska—are getting better at mitigating the environmental risks posed by mines, says Jim Kuipers, an independent mining consultant and mining facility inspector for Kuipers and Associates LLC of Butte, Montana. “In a case like Pascua-Lama it is more difficult to predict what will happen in that kind of circumstance,” he says. Further, he adds, “It is fair to say that the ability to control it may be much more difficult just because of the climate, the topography, and issues like that.”A few other mines have operated, with mixed success, in similarly strenuous environments, Kuipers says, and learning from them will be critical in properly designing this mine.Kuipers also voices concerns about the speed of the Pascua-Lama permitting process, which took just 18 months compared to an average of 4-plus years for a U.S. mine. He says Chile holds mining companies to much lower standards, explaining, “If this site were in the United States, I think it would warrant a much harder look from the permitting standpoint: a full-blown environmental impact statement, adequate opportunity for public opinion, not just from the opposition standpoint but from a technical standpoint. . . . You would want very competent agencies with experienced people looking at it. And even then I would expect you would still have problems with this mine, but hopefully you would have foreseen those problems and identified ways to deal with them. But in this case I don’t see any way they could have possibly done this, as quickly as it has been escorted through the permitting process.”Adds Kuipers, “What concerns me is that this particular mine has a very high resource value. That can drive people to assuming and making promises about a project that just realistically can’t be upheld.”Besides the mine’s state-of-the-art facilities, Borg says that if the quality of the water drops below Chilean and Argentine standards, the company will stop operations until the problem can be fixed. The catch, warns Joan Kuyek, national coordinator for the Ottawa-based watchdog group MiningWatch Canada, is that other than the mining company’s good word, there is not much to compel it to adhere to this agreement.Pascua-Lama, like other mines in the region, doesn’t have to provide a financial guarantee that it will protect surrounding terrain or restore the site to pre-mine conditions. In most of the developed world, including the United States and Canada, mining companies must post reclamation bonds, typically for tens of millions of dollars, to ensure that a detailed and periodically updated mining closure plan is followed. Borg says a reclamation bond will not be posted for Pascua-Lama; instead, he says, “The most significant aspects of the closure requirements will be built into the project from the beginning of construction.”Many of the activists who oppose this mine say that they consider Pascua-Lama—for which 75% of the deposits lie in Chile and 25% lie in Argentina—a test case for future mines in pristine environments in the Andes in Argentina and Chile and on the long border that divides them. The Treaty of Mining Integration between the countries allowing such dual-country operations was ratified in 2000 and signed into law in 2004.El Mostrador.On 13 June 2006 the Chilean National Environmental Commission agreed to endorse 2 of 46 complaints filed against the decision to allow the Pascua-Lama project to proceed. A week later, a Chilean court returned two of Barrick Gold’s Pascua Lama mining leases to a prospector who had agreed to sell them but had never received full payment from the company. The leases are listed as Barrick’s property in a 2004 protocol to the Treaty of Mining Integration; there is a slim chance that the recent ruling would therefore invalidate this protocol, according to an analysis published 26 June 2006 in the Chilean newspaper In the meantime, barring any further legal action, the company plans to begin construction at Pascua-Lama in September 2006, with production slated to begin three years later. At this point activists are not optimistic about the future of the region. “If everything goes okay with this one, the gold companies could start to exploit all of the Andes to the south,” says Fortt. “It’s very likely that all other further projects could be approved for them, and they could get all of their environmental permits. If so, we don’t think we will be able to stop other companies from coming. Through all the valley, agriculture has been developed. If they are allowed to destroy the valley—which is so pure—what keeps them from doing it anywhere else?”


PLoS Computational Biology, Cannarozzi, Schneider, and Gonnet published evidence that rodents form an outgroup to human and dog [In a recent contribution to  and dog , in disa and dog ,3. The aThe problem of determining the evolutionary relationship between all extant mammals has a long history. Traditionally, morphological features were used to group “like” mammals together in a tree, purportedly reflecting their phylogeny. More recently, molecular data have generally confirmed these inferences, but have also led to surprising revisions. While sequence analysis is more objective than morphology, it nevertheless emerged that it has its own set of issues, and some phylogenies remain contentious. In , CannaroIt is well-known that phylogenetic inferences can be biased, and may be inaccurate even with strong bootstrap or posterior support. Felsenstein showed that in parsimony analyses, long branches in the phylogeny tend to attract one another . In contThe recently emerging consensus on mammalian phylogeny based on molecular data is surprisingly different from the traditional, morphological phylogeny ,3. It prThese considerations throw some doubt on both the parsimony and maximum likelihood analyses. What about the genome rearrangement argument? After all, genome rearrangements are large-scale but relatively infrequent events, so that the parsimony approximation might be justified. However, the opossum genome had not yet been assembled, and the authors had to resort to chicken, which diverged ∼310 Mya from the mammalian lineage, considerably earlier than the opossum did. Moreover, there is strong evidence for hotspots of breakage  and breax when compared with y, each occurrence in x is expected to be located opposite a gap in a whole-genome alignment of species x to y. In contrast, if the family is ancestral to x and y, a proportion of TEs will have survived in both species and will align. To quantify the evidence for these alternatives, I defined a statistic A(y|x)  as the proportion of nucleotides from a particular TE family in species x that is aligned to a secondary species y. This statistic is near-zero if a family of TEs is specific to x, and non-zero if it is ancestral to the species split. For an outgroup x and a particular family of TEs, the statistics A(y|x) are thus expected to be consistent across ingroup species y . In contrast, for an ingroup species, some TE families may be ancestral with respect to another ingroup, but lineage-specific when compared with the outgroup. Provided such TE families exist, this would then determine the topology of the phylogeny.I thus considered whether the reported tree might be incorrect. To investigate the issue, I used a simple  summary statistic based on the distribution of transposable elements (TEs) in pairwise alignments, which does not require an outgroup genome to root the phylogeny. If a family of TEs is specific to lineage The results  show cleNumerous recent studies support this conclusion. When many taxa are analyzed simultaneously, the dog consistently appears as an outgroup to human and mouse, when using either nuclear or mitochondrial DNA ,9,14–16.Taken together with the possible influence of LBA on the analysis of Cannarozzi et al. , it appe


A fundamental problem in neuroscience is understanding how working memory—the ability to store information at intermediate timescales, like tens of seconds—is implemented in realistic neuronal networks. The most likely candidate mechanism is the attractor network, and a great deal of effort has gone toward investigating it theoretically. Yet, despite almost a quarter century of intense work, attractor networks are not fully understood. In particular, there are still two unanswered questions. First, how is it that attractor networks exhibit irregular firing, as is observed experimentally during working memory tasks? And second, how many memories can be stored under biologically realistic conditions? Here we answer both questions by studying an attractor neural network in which inhibition and excitation balance each other. Using mean-field analysis, we derive a three-variable description of attractor networks. From this description it follows that irregular firing can exist only if the number of neurons involved in a memory is large. The same mean-field analysis also shows that the number of memories that can be stored in a network scales with the number of excitatory connections, a result that has been suggested for simple models but never shown for realistic ones. Both of these predictions are verified using simulations with large networks of spiking neurons. A critical component of cognition is memory—the ability to store information, and to readily retrieve it on cue. Existing models postulate that recalled items are represented by self-sustained activity; that is, they are represented by activity that can exist in the absence of input. These models, however, are incomplete, in the sense that they do not explain two salient experimentally observed features of persistent activity: low firing rates and high neuronal variability. Here we propose a model that can explain both. The model makes two predictions: changes in synaptic weights during learning should be much smaller than the background weights, and the fraction of neurons selective for a memory should be above some threshold. Experimental confirmation of these predictions would provide strong support for the model, and constitute an important step toward a complete theory of memory storage and retrieval. A critical component of any cognitive system is working memory—a mechanism for storing information about past events, and for accessing that information at later times. Without such a mechanism, even simple tasks, such as deciding whether to wear a heavy jacket or a light sweater after hearing the weather report, would be impossible. Although it is not known exactly how storage and retrieval of information is implemented in neural systems, a very natural way is through attractor networks. In such networks, transient events in the world trigger stable patterns of activity in the brain, so by looking at the pattern of activity at the current time, other areas in the brain can know something about what happened in the past.There is now considerable experimental evidence for attractor networks in areas such as inferior temporal cortex –3, prefrWhile the basic theory of attractor networks has been known for some time –14, moviMost of these problems have been solved. The first, that Dale's law was violated, was solved by “clipping” synaptic weights; that is, by using the Hopfield prescription , assigniIn spite of these advancements, there are still two fundamental open questions. One is: how can we understand the highly irregular firing that is observed experimentally in working memory tasks ? AnsweriSeveral studies have attempted to get around this problem, either directly or indirectly ,27–29. MThe second open question is: what is the storage capacity of realistic attractor networks? That is, how many different memories can be stored in a single network? Answering this is critical for understanding the highly flexible and seemingly unbounded memory capacity observed in animals. For simple, albeit unrealistic, models the answer is known: as shown in the seminal work of Amit, Gutfreund, and Sompolinsky , the numHere we answer both questions: we show, for realistic networks of spiking neurons, how irregular firing can be achieved, and we compute the storage capacity. Our analysis uses relatively standard mean-field techniques, and requires only one assumption: neurons in the network fire asynchronously. Given this assumption, we first show that neurons fire irregularly only if the coding level is above some threshold, although a feature of our model is that the foreground neurons are slightly more regular than the background neurons. We then show that the maximum number of memories in our network—the capacity—is proportional to the number of connections per neuron, a result that is consistent with the simplified models discussed above. These predictions are verified with simulations of biologically plausible networks of spiking neurons.To address analytically the issues of irregularity and storage capacity in attractor networks, we consider a model in which neurons are described by their firing rates. Although firing rate models typically provide a fairly accurate description of network behaviour when the neurons are firing asynchronously ,40, theyEN neurons in the former and NI in the latter.  We represent the firing rate of the ith neuron in pool Q by Qiv. As we show in the section “Fast fluctuations,” and discuss below, the time evolution equations for the firing rates are given byEτ and Iτ are the excitatory and inhibitory time constants, Qih is the synaptic input to the ith neuron in pool Q, and QF(h) is a function that tells us the steady state firing rate of a neuron receiving synaptic input h. This function, which has a relatively stereotyped quasi-sigmoidal shape, can be determined analytically  for specific noise models += x if x > 0 and 0 otherwise), and j of type R is connected to neuron i of type Q. We assume that the connection probability is independent of type, soEK excitatory and IK inhibitory neurons, and every neuron receives, on average, EK excitatory and IK inhibitory connections, whereWhile n cortex . Both cac, is assumed to be much smaller than 1, leading to a sparsely connected network . With nonzero background synaptic weights, however, the capacity no longer scales as 1/a. Consequently, we expect that the maximum capacity cannot be improved much by using sparser codes.Solving K−1/2, the foreground weights, A, scale as K−1, and the coding level, a, is sufficiently high, then both the background and foreground neurons should operate in the balanced regime and the neurons should fire irregularly. The second prediction is that the number of memories that can be stored is proportional to the number of excitatory connections per neuron, EK.Our mean-field analysis gave us two predictions. The first is that if the background synaptic weights, the To test these predictions, we perform simulations with large networks of spiking neurons. We start by finding, for a particular network size, parameters such that both foreground and background neurons exhibit irregular activity. We then increase the size of the network while scaling the synaptic weights according to the above prescriptions. If the larger networks continue to exhibit irregular activity, then our predicted scalings are correct. To test the relation between storage capacity and number of connections per neuron, we calculate the storage capacity for networks with different sizes. A linear relation would indicate a scaling consistent with our predictions.i of type Q, denoted QiV, evolves according toτ is the membrane time constant, sτ is the synaptic time constant, rV and tV are the nominal resting and threshold voltages, Vi0 determines the actual resting and threshold voltages, , j in population R to cell i in population Q, Eɛ and Iɛ are the excitatory and inhibitory reversal potentials, respectively, the notation j ∈ R means sum over only those cells of type R, δ(·) is the Dirac δ-function, kth spike emitted by neuron j, and i of type Q. The external input is modeled asQexv.Each neuron is modeled as a conductance-based quadratic integrate and fire (QIF) neuron. Dendritic trees and axonal arborizations are not considered. The spikes generated in any neuron immediately affect all the postsynaptic neurons connected to it. The membrane potential of neuron Vi0, which has the effect of making the resting membrane potential and threshold of each cell different. This was not explicitly modeled in our mean-field analysis, although it would not have made much difference—it would have only added to the quenched noise.There are two features of these equations that are worth commenting on. First, the connection strengths, j spikes and neuron i is at rest, then the PSP generated at neuron i will have peak amplitude RV, so we writeQδR, is the Kronecker delta, and RV is in mV, then Q when a neuron in pool R fires . In all three networks, K. The second is that the mean excitatory and inhibitory firing rates scale linearly with the external input, as predicted by a, to 0.1, and increased Our first step in assessing our mean-field predictions is to build a network that operates in the balanced regime and supports retrieval states. To test whether a network is operating in the balanced regime, we rely on two indicators. One is that it exhibits irregular firing, quantified by the coefficient of variation (CV)—the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean interspike interval—and that the CV is independent of t = 2 s, neurons selective for one of the patterns receive an excitatory external input lasting for 100 ms; and at t = 27.3 s, the same neurons receive an inhibitory external input, which again lasts for 100 ms. The blue line is the mean firing rate of the foreground neurons, the black line is the mean firing rate of the excitatory neurons (both foreground and background), and the red line is the mean firing rates of the inhibitory neurons.In β is a factor of about two higher, and there is just one stored pattern instead of five. With the higher input, the background and foreground rates are in the range reported from neurons in, for example, anterior ventral temporal cortex  = K−1/2[−|IIJ| Eh0 + |EIJ|Ih0]. Thus, whether Eδν is an increasing or decreasing function of K depends on whether |IIJ|Eh0 is larger or smaller than |EIJ|I0h. However, as we have seen, typically Eh is negative. Thus, we expect Eδν to be proportional to K−1/2 with a positive constant of proportionality, which means that Eδν is a decreasing function of K. Combining that with the above picture, we conclude that when K increases, minβ also increases. This is shown explicitly in minβ  increase in the quenched noise, and thus the storage capacity still scales as EK.The first question to ask, then, is: exactly how big is the fine-tuning problem? In other words, how much noise can we add to the learning rule without having a huge effect on the storage capacity? This can be answered by considering a learning rule in which the weight changes during learning a pattern are not quite perfect. Specifically, let us consider the following modification of p1/2 smaller than the background weights, and therefore the amount of fine-tuning depends on how many patterns are stored. Because of the low storage capacity found in these networks , even wq of changing its value during learning,q and 0 with probability 1 − q. Let us define the coupling strength slightly differently than in β ∼ O(1). With this definition, the mean memory strength, Eaβ/K(1 − a), as in EK, so the maximum number of patterns scales as EK. We thus use ijA in all of our analysis.We should also point out that it is possible for the weight changes associated with the structured part of the connectivity to be on the same order as the background, although at the expense of storage capacity. Let us consider a third learning rule in which each synapse has a probability


Radiofrequency (RF) waves have long been used for different types of information exchange via the airwaves—wireless Morse code, radio, television, and wireless telephony . Increasingly larger numbers of people rely on mobile telephone technology, and health concerns about the associated RF exposure have been raised, particularly because the mobile phone handset operates in close proximity to the human body, and also because large numbers of base station antennas are required to provide widespread availability of service to large populations. The World Health Organization convened an expert workshop to discuss the current state of cellular-telephone health issues, and this article brings together several of the key points that were addressed. The possibility of RF health effects has been investigated in epidemiology studies of cellular telephone users and workers in RF occupations, in experiments with animals exposed to cell-phone RF, and via biophysical consideration of cell-phone RF electric-field intensity and the effect of RF modulation schemes. As summarized here, these separate avenues of scientific investigation provide little support for adverse health effects arising from RF exposure at levels below current international standards. Moreover, radio and television broadcast waves have exposed populations to RF for > 50 years with little evidence of deleterious health consequences. Despite unavoidable uncertainty, current scientific data are consistent with the conclusion that public exposures to permissible RF levels from mobile telephony and base stations are not likely to adversely affect human health. A vast number of communication networks interconnect societies worldwide, and cellular wireless technology networks make up an increasing fraction of this number. The presence of radiofrequency (RF) waves from wireless technologies has become ubiquitous. Mobile telephony (construction and operation of telephones or telephonic systems) is relied on by > 1.4 billion people, or around 20% of the world’s population. Given that the public is frequently reminded that we are all surrounded by ever-present electromagnetic fields (EMFs), which some call “electro-smog,” it is not surprising that some individuals and groups express concern about possible health effects from low-level, chronic exposure to a variety of RF sources. To help address this concern, the World Health Organization (WHO) convened a “Workshop on Base Stations and Wireless Networks” as part of its “International EMF Project” to discuss the state of the science in RF health effects. In this article we provide a summary of several key points addressed at the workshop.RF waves have long been used for different types of wireless broadcast, such as for wireless Morse code, radio, television, and so on. The radio-wave spectrum spans the frequency range from about 0.5 MHz in the AM radio band up to about 30,000 MHz in the radar band. RF-emitting devices have become commonplace in homes, offices, and schools. In addition to the increasing prevalence of cellular telephones, there has been continuing expansion of wireless Internet access, such as WiFi, into homes, schools, workplaces, and public areas. “WiFi” is an abbreviation for “Wireless Fidelity,” and is used generically when referring to any type of wireless technology that supports local, over-the-air computer communication via a wireless local-area network (WLAN). Typically, the transmission frequency is approximately 2.4 GHz, and WiFi provides data-transmission rates in the range of 1–50 Mbps (megabytes per second). “WiMAX” is a long-range version of WiFi. Cellular wireless technology is now capable of delivering voice, text, images, music, and other data to consumers everywhere, and it relies on an extensive network of fixed antennas, or base stations, for relaying information using RF signals. The number of base stations required increases with greater mobile phone use (requiring extensive micro-cell or pico-cell distributed antenna systems in urban areas), with market competition (enabling more operators to provide services), and with new technological capabilities . 3G (or 3-G) is short for “third-generation” mobile telephone technology. The services associated with 3G provide the ability to transfer both voice data  and nonvoice data .The public, regulators, and scientists have questioned whether there are possible health consequences of this mushrooming mobile phone technology, particularly because the handset operates in close proximity to the human body and because large numbers of base station antennas are required. Although the RF levels produced by base stations at consumer locations are much lower than those from use of the phone handset, the more continuous exposure from base stations has produced a greater public concern.The total electromagnetic energy available, in terms of effective radiated power from an RF source (or antenna), varies widely according to source type, as shown in W/m2). Alternatively, the intensity of radiowaves can be given in terms of electric field intensity, where the units are volts per meter (V/m). These two metrics are mathematically related to each other when considering locations many wavelengths distant from the antenna (or the RF source). That is, the energy flux per unit area (S) is proportional to the square of the electric field intensity (E):Radiofrequency exposure is typically quantified as RF energy flux per unit area, for example, watts of RF energy crossing a square meter of area .For example, RF energy of 1 W/m2.The relevant RF energy flux  is at exposure points where people may intercept the RF energy, and is measured in power per square meter of surface area. A comparison of energy fluxes in this regard is given in Within the home and office environment, a variety of other sources of RF energy are used. Spot measurement data often show that, where a particular RF source is the focus of concern, other, less visually obvious sources may give greater contributions to exposure. The data also show that exposures vary greatly, even at similar distances from base stations, illustrating the dramatic effect of the local environment on RF signals through physical processes such as reflection, diffraction, and mutual interference of signal elements traveling through multiple, different paths .For assessing occupation RF exposure in the context of base station antennas, a “compliance boundary” can be used, defined so that for personnel outside the boundary, RF levels are low enough to be in compliance with relevant safety standards. The size and shape of a given compliance boundary varies with frequency, with type of antenna, and with antenna power output. For a typical base-station antenna running at 25 W, the compliance boundary has the shape of a cylinder with a diameter of 3 m, and a height corresponding to the antenna height plus about 0.5 m. The height is centered on the antenna, and the cylinder wall begins about 0.1 m behind the radiative front of the antenna and extends to about 2.9 m in front of the antenna. This virtual space encloses the volume where the RF signal may be in excess of ICNIRP occupational standards, but for all distances outside this cylinder, RF levels are low enough to be considered safe . By compBoth measurement surveys and theoretical predictions show that RF levels from base stations and wireless technologies generally decrease with distance from the device . That is, the greater the distance from the antenna, the lower the RF. Under conditions typical for public exposure to base stations and for wireless consumer devices, the RF energy fluxes are > 100-fold below international RF guidelines for public locations. However, in very close proximity to base-station antenna elements under occupational conditions , or immediately adjacent to wireless local area network (LAN) and Bluetooth transmitters, there is the possibility that RF absorption limits for the general public may be exceeded . Thus, tCellular telephone radio waves transmit information that is encoded into electromagnetic waves by means of “modulation,” which refers to the patterns of change in the frequency and/or amplitude of the RF carrier wave. As cellular telephone technology has advanced, the modulation patterns have become increasingly complex, and the question arises as to whether a high-frequency modulated RF wave might have greater potential for health effects than a pure sinusoidal RF wave. The applicability of fundamental physics to all systems, and particularly to biology, permits one to conclude that modulation is unlikely to lead to unexpected RF interactions with ions, molecules, cells, and organisms—i.e., interactions substantially different from unmodulated RF .Modulation introduces a spread of frequencies into the RF signal, but the frequency bandwidth of the net RF signal generally remains a small fraction of the central, carrier frequency. This means that the most representative frequency range for modulated electromagnetic waves is that of the (high-frequency) RF carrier, not the (low-frequency) modulation pattern. Even though the power of the RF signal may vary in step with the modulation frequency, the transmitted RF spectrum contains no electromagnetic waves at the modulation frequency. Characteristics of the bandwidth, carrier wave, and modulation depth for some typical RF sources are summarized in As Tumorigenicity studies in laboratory animals provide some insight as to the biological effects of RF modulation and of RF exposure generally. Elder recently reviewed 36 publications that reported tumorigenicity assays in rodent species, after RF exposure in the frequency range applicable to mobile telephony {Elder JA, personal communication; [these studies are in the WHO EMF Database ]}. Tablep < 0.05 significance level, for 68 tests, about three to four positive results would be expected by chance alone. These data do not tend to support the idea that modulated RF is more potent than non-modulated RF, because three results reaching p < 0.05 appeared in 15 tests of nonmodulated RF (CW only), i.e., 20%, whereas the remaining 4 results reaching p < 0.05 appeared in 63 tests of modulated RF, i.e., 6%. Overall, the weight of evidence in animals exposed for extended periods, up to lifetime exposures of 2 years, at a variety of frequencies and modulations, suggests that exposure to modulated RF does not increase risk of tumor development  fast enough to respond to and detect changes in the central RF frequency, or b) sensitive to the RF power changes occurring at the modulation frequency. For a), scientists have not been able to identify biological structures capable of the necessary high-frequency RF tuning or bandwidth discrimination. For b), being sensitive to the power changes in the signal would require a biological structure that is nonlinear at low power levels , which has not as yet been identified by biologists or anatomists. If “rectification” by biological structures were to occur, it remains difficult to envision how a tiny amount of modulated RF power, occurring at “nonthermal” levels below existing exposure RF standards, would lead to deleterious effects on biological systems. Living systems have considerable thermal output, overall thermal inertia, and efficient thermal regulation. Those nonthermal mechanisms that rely on nonlinear responses  have high RF–electric-field thresholds. RF levels capable of electroporation would in themselves produce hazardous tissue heating  the first, mechanistic or transduction step in the multistep pathway has eluded intensive scientific search . Even th−12) of a newton (N) of force. The weight of 1 cm3 of water (mass = 1 g) is ~ 0.01 N. The mass of a human cell, approximately 10 μm in size would be 10−9 g, and would weigh (in air) approximately 10−11 N, or 10 pN. Considering a protein molecule that has 100 unbalanced electric charges (+ or −), we can calculate the maximum force of 45 V/m on this molecule to be ~ 0.0007 piconewtons (pN). This is > 10,000-fold smaller than the smallest forces known to modify protein molecule function. For example, the electric force on a 100-fold-charged protein molecule embedded in the cell membrane would be about 160 pN, because of the electric field from the normal resting cell-membrane potential (~ 70 mV over 7 nm). That is, typical cell membrane voltages result in robust electric-field forces on cell-membrane proteins, which are known to modify function, such as open and close ion channels. Forces 10,000 times smaller can be expected to be without effect.The magnitudes of endogenous forces that are known to act at the cellular level to modify protein structures have been measured and can serve as a basis for comparison to forces produced by RF fields . Thus, tExamination of the magnitude of the possible biophysical interactions  of electromagnetic fields with living matter shows that, under modulated RF exposure conditions allowed by the current safety limits, there does not appear to be an overlooked hazard specific to RF modulation, with the possible exception of RF in the form of very short, high-intensity pulses, which are far more energetic than any pulses encountered in cellular telephone technology . For RF Consideration of the possible mechanisms by which mobile-telephony RF can interact with the body does not reveal a means by which modulated RF, specifically, could lead to adverse effects.Most cellular studies indicate an absence of effects on DNA, and generally biological data, including results from animal studies, do not demonstrate an increased risk of cancer from exposure to RF fields . ReassurThe ongoing INTERPHONE collaboration is a multicenter, comprehensive study on mobile phones and cancer. It is coordinated by the International Agency on Research on Cancer (IARC), a specialized cancer agency of the WHO, and researchers in 13 countries are taking part using a common protocol. The INTERPHONE protocol is a population-based, case–control study correlating head and neck tumors with mobile-phone use by persons 30–59 years of age who reside in the study regions. Exposure assessment is reliable because it is based on individual records of cell phone use. Because of pooling of data from all participating centers, the study is statistically powerful.For example, the risk of acoustic neuroma in relation to mobile phone use has been assessed via six population-based, shared-protocol, case–control studies in four Nordic countries and the United Kingdom. The authors concluded that there was no association of risk with duration of use, lifetime cumulative hours of use, or number of calls, for phone use overall or for analogue or digital phones separately . Recent There have also been other studies of mobile telephone users, particularly on brain tumors (and less often on other cancers and on symptoms). Results of these studies to date give no consistent or convincing evidence of a causal relation between RF exposure and any adverse health effect . A 4-yeaAnother approach that has been used is to compare temporal trends in disease rates with temporal trends in prevalence of cell phone use. For example, trends in acoustic neuroma incidence in England and Wales were found not to lag behind trends in cell phone use in a correlated fashion . BecauseSeveral epidemiologic studies of potential cancer risk have used proximity to commercial broadcast transmission towers as the measure of RF exposure. However, individual RF exposures are not necessarily related to distance. None of these epidemiologic studies has provided sound evidence that RF exposure from the transmitters increased the risk of cancer or any other health effect ,2) ] standar2) :2ICNIRP Guidelines: 40–60 V/m or 4.3–10 W/m“Italian Exposure Limit”: 6 V/m“Paris Charter”: 2 V/m, 24-hr average, indoors2“Salzburg Protection Value”: 1 W/m“Swiss Regulation”: 4–5 V/m at full power.The issues that most often drive more localized RF guidelines are not established health risk per se, but rather risk perceptions . In thisThe proposed [RF] standard also recommends that it is generally sensible to minimize exposure which is unnecessary or incidental to achievement of service objectives or process requirements, provided this does not introduce other risks and it can be readily achieved at modest expense. The term “modest expense” implies some type of cost–benefit analysis. Appropriate application of the Precautionary Principle requires that the policies be tailored such that the time, effort, expense, and risk of any “protective measures” be commensurate with what the society expends on other public risks of similar magnitude. However, if scientific research is not able to establish “apparent risks” in a quantitative way, making such a calculation is problematic.If a basis for precautionary limits cannot be provided, then the danger behind promoting arbitrary limits and superfluous safety factors is that reliance on logical, science-based policy will be undermined in favor of unreasoned, fear-based, poorly thought out actions. Such actions, rather than providing reassurance, will likely trigger concerns, amplify unwarranted anxieties, and likely divert scarce resources into areas yielding little or no public health benefit . DespiteDespite reassuring scientific evidence, some people perceive risks from mobile telephony RF exposure as likely and possibly severe. Several reasons for public fear have been proposed, including media announcements of new and unconfirmed scientific studies, leading to a feeling of uncertainty and a perception that there may be unknown or undiscovered hazards. Risk perception cannot be understood as a monolithic concept; rather, communicating “risk” is a unique challenge because it focuses on three major elements that are difficult to convey to a lay public: complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity , 2006.The first barrier to easy risk communication is complexity. In everyday life, people perceive causal connections to be simple. In most scientific assessments of risk, causal connections are highly complex. Causes and effects are not obvious, and there are many intervening variables that obscure possible relationships. Often facility with quantitative methods is required, and appreciation of the fact that “the devil is in the details.” Even though most scientists agree that health impacts of mobile telephony RF are unlikely (but not impossible), a lay audience will often assume that complexity is used to “pull the wool over their eyes.”x exposure will cause (has caused) adverse outcome y. For example, science can rarely make definitive statements about what has “caused” a particular disease like cancer. The best we can do is to calculate probabilities linked to different causal pathways. In terms of risk communication, conveying the different types of uncertainty to a lay audience poses major challenges. People misunderstand uncertainties as being an indicator for bad science or sloppy risk assessment. In the face of uncertainty, a lay audience will typically resort to the simplistic strategy: “Better safe than sorry.”The second barrier to explaining risk is uncertainty. Most risks have a hypothetical component, and we cannot say with certainty that The third component of risk that is difficult to communicate is ambiguity. Ambiguity refers to the existence of divergent or contested interpretations and perspectives on the severity associated with a potential health threat. Not only can scientific interpretations have an ambiguous component, but ambiguity also emerges with regard to selection of appropriate values, priorities, assumptions, ethics, distributions of risk, and quality of life parameters to be applied. In the face of “duelling experts,” a lay audience will often assume that the correct interpretation is midway between the two perspectives offered, because a lay audience has limited ability to recognize fringe positions.To deal with these problems in risk communication, the public needs to be provided access to accurate information and education on scientific consensus positions. First, the solution to complexity is not a simple prohibition of a given technology. Rather, it must be recognized that scientific inquiry can test for harmful effects, but it can never prove that something is safe. This asymmetrical relationship is difficult to communicate, but one approach is to encourage people to realize that absolute safety is not a requirement that they can or do impose on any societal activity . Second, science deals with uncertainty by incorporating safety factors. That is, safety guidelines are not bright boundary lines between “good” and “bad,” but rather they incorporate an adequate margin of safety so that even exceeding the exposure guideline would not lead one to anticipate ill effects. Third, in dealing with ambiguity, lay audiences need to be educated that the scientific consensus does not necessarily lie midway between the opinions they are offered. Hypothetical risks need to be recognized at such, and in a scientific, secular world, explanation patterns that are counter-factual, paranormal, and metaphysical are not valid. Although the natural human ability to sympathize with the victims of disease is to be admired, the associated desire to pin the blame for inexplicable diseases on a nearby environmental factor is misguided. That is, when individuals contract diseases, and when we have little idea as to what specifically caused the disease in question, that ignorance somehow sounds like evidence in favor of focusing on “unknown” risks such as RF or EMF. But this lack of knowledge is not evidence.Perhaps the most important element of risk communication is to assure audiences that RF standards have been and continue to be under ongoing scrutiny. Large numbers of scientists, medical doctors, and public health professionals of disparate orientations and areas of expertise sift existing data and contribute new data in an ongoing risk assessment effort. The vast majority of human cancers are likely caused by unavoidable environmental exposures  or to processes inherent to life itself  . In scieAs outlined above, our best scientific understanding indicates that there are no health consequences of base-station RF exposure, and no adverse effects are foreseen at the RF levels typical of cellular telephone technology. This viewpoint is not only consistent with the conclusions of the WHO workshop on “Base Stations and Wireless Networks,” but it is also consistent with numerous other public health reviews on the safety of wireless technologies, although most public health agencies continue to favor “additional research.” Some of these blue-ribbon, consensus-group conclusions are mentioned below.Several groups in Great Britain have evaluated potential health effects of RF. The The UK Health Protection Agency   also hasIn a specific review of cellular telephone technology , the ageThe Health Council of the Netherlands  has prepARPANSA prepared a fact sheet titled “What about base stations and telecommunication towers–are there any health effects?” ARPANSA concluded that “the weight of national and international scientific opinion is that there is no substantiated evidence that RF emissions associated with living near a mobile phone base station or telecommunications tower poses a health risk” . ARPANSAThe Royal Society of Canada has an “Expert Panel on Potential Health Risks of Radiofrequency Fields from Wireless Telecommunication Devices,” and their most recent update (2004) notes that “all of the authoritative reviews completed within the last two years have concluded that there is no clear evidence of adverse health effects associated with RF fields” .The advice of the U.S. Health Physics Society  is that there is no reason to believe that cellular base station towers could constitute a potential health hazard to nearby residents or students .At present, the only established effects that can result from excessive exposure to RF energy are related to tissue heating. Although RF energy can be absorbed by living organisms to some degree at any frequency, available data do not demonstrate adverse health consequences at exposure levels below internationally accepted limits, which do not allow significant heating. In summary, none of the recent research or reviews of research have concluded that permissible RF exposure levels from mobile phones and their base stations lead to adverse health consequences.Although scientists generally assign low priority to conducting research on base stations or other wireless technologies having such weak RF signals, some gaps in knowledge still exist . Researc


This article, which grew out of conversations between a former drug rep and a physician who researches pharmaceutical marketing, reveals the strategies used by reps to manipulate physician prescribing.  It's my job to figure out what a physician's price is. For some it's dinner at the finest restaurants, for others it's enough convincing data to let them prescribe confidently and for others it's my attention and friendship...but at the most basic level, everything is for sale and everything is an exchange.—Shahram AhariYou are absolutely buying love.—James Reidy In 2000, pharmaceutical companies spent more than 15.7 billion dollars on promoting prescription drugs in the United States .Unlike the door-to-door vendors of cosmetics and vacuum cleaners, drug reps do not sell their product directly to buyers. Consumers pay for prescription drugs, but physicians control access. Drug reps increase drug sales by influencing physicians, and they do so with finely titrated doses of friendship. This article, which grew out of conversations between a former drug rep (SA) and a physician who researches pharmaceutical marketing (AFB), reveals the strategies used by reps to manipulate physician prescribing.During training, I was told, when you're out to dinner with a doctor, “The physician is eating with a friend. You are eating with a client.”—Shahram AhariReps may be genuinely friendly, but they are not genuine friends. Drug reps are selected for their presentability and outgoing natures, and are trained to be observant, personable, and helpful. They are also trained to assess physicians' personalities, practice styles, and preferences, and to relay this information back to the company. Personal information may be more important than prescribing preferences. Reps ask for and remember details about a physician's family life, professional interests, and recreational pursuits. A photo on a desk presents an opportunity to inquire about family members and memorize whatever tidbits are offered ; these are usually typed into a database after the encounter. Reps scour a doctor's office for objects—a tennis racquet, Russian novels, seventies rock music, fashion magazines, travel mementos, or cultural or religious symbols—that can be used to establish a personal connection with the doctor.Good details are dynamic; the best reps tailor their messages constantly according to their client's reaction. A friendly physician makes the rep's job easy, because the rep can use the “friendship” to request favors, in the form of prescriptions. Physicians who view the relationship as a straightforward goods-for-prescriptions exchange are dealt with in a businesslike manner. Skeptical doctors who favor evidence over charm are approached respectfully, supplied with reprints from the medical literature, and wooed as teachers. Physicians who refuse to see reps are detailed by proxy; their staff is dined and flattered in hopes that they will act as emissaries for a rep's messages.  to groom for the speaking circuit. Physicians invited and paid by a rep to speak to their peers may express their gratitude in increased prescriptions see . AnythinAn official job description for a pharmaceutical sales rep would read: Provide health-care professionals with product information, answer their questions on the use of products, and deliver product samples. An unofficial, and more accurate, description would have been: Change the prescribing habits of physicians.—James Reidy Pharmaceutical companies monitor the return on investment of detailing—and all promotional efforts—by prescription tracking. Information distribution companies, also called health information organizations , purchase prescription records from pharmacies. The majority of pharmacies sell these records; IMS Health, the largest information distribution company, procures records on about 70% of prescriptions filled in community pharmacies. Patient names are not included, and physicians may be identified only by state license number, Drug Enforcement Administration number, or a pharmacy-specific identifier . Data thPharmaceutical companies are the primary customers for prescribing data, which are used both to identify “high-prescribers” and to track the effects of promotion. Physicians are ranked on a scale from one to ten based on how many prescriptions they write. Reps lavish high-prescribers with attention, gifts, and unrestricted “educational” grants . CardiolReps use prescribing data to see how many of a physician's patients receive specific drugs, how many prescriptions the physician writes for targeted and competing drugs, and how a physician's prescribing habits change over time. One training guide states that an “individual market share report for each physician…pinpoints a prescriber's current habits” and is “used to identify which products are currently in favor with the physician in order to develop a strategy to change those prescriptions into Merck prescriptions” .Pharmaceutical Executive article states, “A physician's prescribing value is a function of the opportunity to prescribe, plus his or her attitude toward prescribing, along with outside influences. By building these multiple dimensions into physicians' profiles, it is possible to understand the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of their behavior.” [A havior.”  To this havior.” .The goal of this demographic slicing and dicing is to identify physicians who are most susceptible to marketing efforts. One industry article suggests categorizing physicians as “hidden gems”: “Initially considered ‘low value’ because they are low prescribers, these physicians can change their prescribing habits after targeted, effective marketing.” “Growers” are “Physicians who are early adopters of a brand. Pharmaceutical companies employ retention strategies to continue to reinforce their growth behavior.” Physicians are considered “low value” “due to low category share and prescribing level” .Pharmaceutical Representative, Fred Marshall, president of Quantum Learning, explained, “… One type might be called ‘the spreader’ who uses a little bit of everybody's product. The second type might be a ‘loyalist’, who's very loyal to one particular product and uses it for most patient types. Another physician might be a ‘niche’ physician, who reserves our product only for a very narrowly defined patient type. And the idea in physician segmentation would be to have a different messaging strategy for each of those physician segments ” [In an interview with gments ” .Pharmaceutical Executive, Ron Brand of IMS Consulting writes “…integrated segmentation analyzes individual prescribing behaviors, demographics, and psychographics  to fine-tune sales targets. For a particular product, for example, one segment might consist of price-sensitive physicians, another might include doctors loyal to a given manufacturers brand, and a third may include those unfriendly towards reps” [In ds reps” .http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/12054.html), which allows physicians the opportunity to withhold most prescribing information from reps and their supervisors . According to an article in Pharmaceutical Executive, “Reps and direct managers can view the physician's prescribing volume quantiled at the therapeutic class level” and can still view aggregated or segmented data including “categories into which the prescriber falls, such as an early-adopter of drugs, for example….” [In recent years, physicians have become aware of—and dismayed by—script tracking. In July 2006, the AMA launched the Prescribing Data Restriction Program . Patients like samples too; it's nice to get a little present from the doctor. Samples also double as unacknowledged gifts to physicians and their staff. The convenience of an in-house pharmacy increases loyalty to both the reps and the drugs they represent.Some physicians use samples to provide drugs to indigent patients ,15. UsinStudies consistently show that samples influence prescribing choices ,15,17. RWhile it's the doctors' job to treat patients and not to justify their actions, it's my job to constantly sway the doctors. It's a job I'm paid and trained to do. Doctors are neither trained nor paid to negotiate. Most of the time they don't even realize that's what they're doing…—Shahram AhariDrug costs now account for 10.7% of health-care expenditures in the US . In 2004Physicians view drug information provided by reps as a convenient, if not entirely reliable, educational service. An industry survey found that more than half of “high-prescribing” doctors cited drug reps as their main source of information about new drugs . In anotWhether or not physicians believe in the accuracy of information provided, detailing is extremely effective at changing prescribing behavior, which is why it is worth its substantial expense. The average annual income for a drug rep is $81,700, which includes $62,400 in base salary plus $19,300 in bonuses. The average cost of recruiting, hiring, and training a new rep is estimated to be $89,000 . When exAs one of us (SA) explained in testimony in the litigation over New Hampshire's new ban on the commercial sale of prescription data, the concept that reps provide necessary services to physicians and patients is a fiction. Pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars annually to ensure that physicians most susceptible to marketing prescribe the most expensive, most promoted drugs to the most people possible. The foundation of this influence is a sales force of 100,000 drug reps that provides rationed doses of samples, gifts, services, and flattery to a subset of physicians. If detailing were an educational service, it would be provided to all physicians, not just those who affect market share.Physicians are susceptible to corporate influence because they are overworked, overwhelmed with information and paperwork, and feel underappreciated. Cheerful and charming, bearing food and gifts, drug reps provide respite and sympathy; they appreciate how hard doctor's lives are, and seem only to want to ease their burdens. But, as SA's New Hampshire testimony reflects, every word, every courtesy, every gift, and every piece of information provided is carefully crafted, not to assist doctors or patients, but to increase market share for targeted drugs see . In the


Spurred by recent developments abroad to design new approaches to chemical management, the University of Massachusetts Low-ell Center for Sustainable Production sponsored a two-day conference in April 2005 to stimulate similar productive changes in the United States. The event attracted a mix of some 170 environmentalists, government officials, academics, product representatives, and chemical industry representatives.The conference aimed to initiate the kind of multi-stakeholder dialogue that the European Commission created in the late 1990s. The European effort has resulted in a draft regulation called REACH , which calls for manufacturers and importers to identify and report the properties of the substances they use and sell. Other international actions, such as the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, which set a goal of achieving sound global management of chemicals by 2020, have also heightened the need for better U.S. chemical policies. Discussions begun at this workshop may eventually lead to public policy supporting a safer and more competitive U.S. chemical industry.Speakers opened the meeting with talks on the current thinking of chemical policy as well as specific policies and industrial protocols. Then participants broke out into workshops on various subjects. One group focused on the promotion of innovative industry initiatives, “green chemistry,” and alternative materials. Others dealt with improving information flows in supply chains and beyond, integration of U.S. and global chemical initiatives, and incorporation of improved chemicals management into business processes.One theme repeated throughout the conference was the need for improved communication about what’s in the products that people buy, and greater transparency of the people who make the products. “The thing that I really noticed about [participant feedback] was the importance that people placed on information—the flow of information, the access to information, who’s responsible, where it’s stored,” said center director Kenneth Geiser.A second repeating theme was support for green chemistry, chemical processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances in economically viable ways. Paul Anastas, director of the Green Chemistry Institute in Washington, DC, said he noticed a recognition that such scientific innovations “can be both economically profitable and environmentally preferable.”Geiser said there also was nearly universal agreement by participants that the current U.S. chemicals policy, largely embodied in the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, is outdated. “Almost everyone I talked to felt that the current chemicals policy system needs overhauling,” he said. “It’s interesting that the business folks felt the same way; it’s not working for them, either.”The Lowell Center will compile a report on the conference in the next few months. Geiser believes the conference’s goal has been met. “I think we created an enthusiasm for moving forward,” he said. “That was pretty much what we wanted.”


The hypothesis of a “molecular clock”—a constant rate of mutation over evolutionary time—revolutionized phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary relationships among organisms. Using the assumption of this constant rate, one can determine the time since two organisms diverged from a common ancestor simply by toting up the number of DNA sequence differences between them. Thus, the molecular clock provided an important tool for constructing phylogenies, “trees” of relatedness, for organisms as diverse as primates and protists.However, the constancy of the mutation rate, both between different groups and within a single group over time, has been repeatedly challenged. As a result, the molecular clock has been largely abandoned in recent years for constructing phylogenetic trees. In its place has arisen a model that accepts that each branch may have its own rate of mutation. Relatedness between two organisms can still be determined and trees can still be drawn, but without a constant mutation rate, no estimate can be made of the time since divergence, and thus the position in time of the last common ancestor—the “root” of the tree—cannot be calculated.An alternative approach, termed a “relaxed molecular clock,” has been developed to overcome the difficulties of both the molecular clock and unrooted phylogeny models. In a new study, Alexei Drummond, Andrew Rambaut, and colleagues describe a new approach to relaxed-clock analysis, showing that it can be used to simultaneously construct accurate trees and infer times of divergence.Previous attempts to reintroduce a molecular clock into relaxed phylogenetics have posited differing, but correlated, rates of mutation along different branches. But filling in these rates requires specifying the topology of the tree—knowing who's related to whom—beforehand. This is often poorly known, and may be the very question phylogeneticists are trying to answer.Drummond et al. took a different approach. Using a set of artificial DNA sequences generated and mutated to form a rooted tree, they tested five different models of rate variations to determine which most accurately modeled the simulated evolution of this group. The five models included a strict molecular clock, in which mutation rates were the same on all branches at all times, as well as various modifications in which rates were correlated or uncorrelated among the branches. Using the phylogenetic analysis program called BEAST, they found that the most robust model—the one that did best under various starting conditions—was neither the strict molecular clock nor the correlated models, but the “uncorrelated relaxed-clock” models, in which the mutation rates in each branch are allowed to vary but within particular constraints.They then tested their models in several real sets of data, including viruses, marsupials, plants, bacteria, and yeast. In the plant dataset, which was known to have the most “clock-like” evolution, the strict molecular clock model did best, not surprisingly. But the relaxed-clock model performed best overall among all the datasets, drawing trees that were closest to known relationships with the fewest missteps. And, unlike in the unrooted phylogenic approach, they were able to assign times of divergence to each branch on the tree.The model developed by the authors promises to bring the very important question of time back into phylogenetic analysis. The ability of the model to create accurate trees may also make it of use even to scientists whose main interests are in understanding phylogenetic relationships, rather than the timing of evolutionary divergence.