http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
You t'ink-a you smart
you foolish-a boy
Tomorrow you start
In my-a employ!
You unner-a-stan'?
You like-a my plan —?"
Pirelli the Barber in "Sweeney Todd" by Stephen Sondheim.
History would have been much different if the parson had found a different tradesman in need of an apprentice in the weeks following the disappearance of Sweeney Todd's parents. Somehow, the Bloody Blacksmith of Bowler Street doesn't have the same ring to it as the Demon Barber. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire But shortly after he became a ward of the court, Sweeney was turned over to a cutler, the trade responsible for, among other things, manufacturing and sharpening knives and razors.
Under the sign of the "Pistol and C" in Great Turnstile, Holborn, the aptly named John Crook had set up shop, fashioning any number of articles from backgammon tables to gunpowder, but specializing in razors. Apprentices in the 18th century were little more than slaves to their masters, and foul treatment at the hands of the teacher was the norm. The students lived in disheartening poverty, and those orphans who had no one to stand up for them, were most cruelly used.
"Any person, master or journeyman, man or woman, housekeeper or lodger, who would undertake to provide food, lodging and instruction, could take an apprentice," wrote Dorothy George. "All the earnings of the apprentice, whether they were for the master or a third person, became the property of the master."
A report issued by the government around the time of Todd's apprenticeship to Crook, reveals a common practice: "The master may be a tiger in cruelty... (and) few people take much notice. The greatest part of those who now take poor apprentices are the most indigent and dishonest, Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire and it is the fate of many a poor child, not only to be half-starved and sometimes bred up in no trade, but to be forced to thieve and steal for his master, and so is brought to the gallows into the bargain."
Young Sweeney Todd almost fell into that common trap, when two years after he joined Crook's shop he was arrested and convicted of petty larceny. The details of the crime are scarce, whether Crook was the victim or co-conspirator was never recorded. Sweeney could have walked the steps to the hangman's noose for a theft conviction, but since he was just 14 years old, the judge at Old Bailey took pity on the orphan and sentenced him to five years in Newgate Prison. The mercy shown to Sweeney Todd was, as noted above, unusual. Children trained as pickpockets were hanged for as little as the theft of a handkerchief, and any kind of shoplifting was punishable by death.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
also 5.als.0004004 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Department of the Air Force, Current and past records management regulations
Washington, D.C. Report of Air Force Research Regarding the Roswell Incident, July 1994
Dept of the Army, Washington, D.C. Current and past records management regulations
Dept of the Navy, Washington, D.C. Air accident reports, July 1947
Air Force Safety Agency, Kirtland Air Air accident reports, July 1947
Force Base, N. Mex.
Air Force History Support Office, 509th Bomb Group and RAAF monthly
Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, histories, July and August 1947
D.C.
National Security Agency, FOIA records, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy
Fort Meade, Md.
Military History Institute, Army War Army Counterintelligence Corps reports,1947
College, Carlisle, Pa.
Army Central Security Facility, Army Counterintelligence Corps reports, 1947
Fort Meade, Md.
Central Intelligence Agency, Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects (Robertson
Langley,Va. Panel) report FOIA records, Ground Saucer Watch, Inc.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, FOIA records on unidentified flying objects
Washington, D.C.
National Atomic Museum, Kirtland Air 509th Bomb Group historical information, 1947
Force Base, N. Mex. RAAF base newspaper Atomic Blast, July
and August 1947
\a Project Sign was the predecessor to Project Blue Book.
Our search of government records was complicated by the fact that some records we wanted to review were missing and there was not always an explanation. Further, the records management regulations for the retention and disposition of records were unclear or changing during the period we reviewed.
We also queried the National Security Council, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Department of Energy, the FBI, DOD, and the CIA to determine what government records they have on the Roswell crash. We did not independently verify the information provided to us in their written responses.
In addition to physically examining government records, we contacted the following federal activities to determine whether they had any information about the Roswell crash:
# Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama;
# Air Force Aeronautical Systems Center, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio;
Department of the Air Force, Current and past records management regulations
Washington, D.C. Report of Air Force Research Regarding the Roswell Incident, July 1994
Dept of the Army, Washington, D.C. Current and past records management regulations
Dept of the Navy, Washington, D.C. Air accident reports, July 1947
Air Force Safety Agency, Kirtland Air Air accident reports, July 1947
Force Base, N. Mex.
Air Force History Support Office, 509th Bomb Group and RAAF monthly
Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, histories, July and August 1947
D.C.
National Security Agency, FOIA records, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy
Fort Meade, Md.
Military History Institute, Army War Army Counterintelligence Corps reports,1947
College, Carlisle, Pa.
Army Central Security Facility, Army Counterintelligence Corps reports, 1947
Fort Meade, Md.
Central Intelligence Agency, Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects (Robertson
Langley,Va. Panel) report FOIA records, Ground Saucer Watch, Inc.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, FOIA records on unidentified flying objects
Washington, D.C.
National Atomic Museum, Kirtland Air 509th Bomb Group historical information, 1947
Force Base, N. Mex. RAAF base newspaper Atomic Blast, July
and August 1947
\a Project Sign was the predecessor to Project Blue Book.
Our search of government records was complicated by the fact that some records we wanted to review were missing and there was not always an explanation. Further, the records management regulations for the retention and disposition of records were unclear or changing during the period we reviewed.
We also queried the National Security Council, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Department of Energy, the FBI, DOD, and the CIA to determine what government records they have on the Roswell crash. We did not independently verify the information provided to us in their written responses.
In addition to physically examining government records, we contacted the following federal activities to determine whether they had any information about the Roswell crash:
# Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama;
# Air Force Aeronautical Systems Center, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio;
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Mexican Newspaper 6.new.00100 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/pingTHE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
303. Mexico Receives No Japanese News
In answer to a circular requesting information as to the reception and dissemination of Domei news reports, Minister Miura replied on September 18, 1941 that no government organization, news agency or newspaper in Mexico was receiving Japanese dispatches. He also reported that the transmission of Domei news items by way of San Francisco had been discontinued since early in September.[842]
304. Minister Miura Foresees Difficulty in Shipping Machinery to Japan
Reporting that since the Presidential order had been issued in Mexico "nerves had become sharpened" regarding export smuggling, the Japanese Minister on September 18, 1941 advised that the transportation of the machinery of the Pacific Petroleum Company to Japan would arouse suspicion and perturb the employees. A shipment of all the machinery at one time would be conspicuous and difficult since the machinery was scattered widely.
Although applications for export permits were being made, it was evident that it would be difficult to obtain them. However, since the machinery would pass customs without inspection as Legation property, there seemed to be no other solution than to have holders of diplomatic passports take a part of the bulky machinery with them as personal luggage whenever they left Mexico.[843]
After investigating the possibilities of obtaining some special machinery which Tokyo had requested, Mr. Miura reported that there would be many difficulties in buying and transporting the equipment, especially, if it became known that it was to be sent to Japan. This stemmed from the reluctance of Mexican businessmen to offend the United States. Furthermore, the Pacific Petroleum Company insisted that it would pay only after the machinery had been put aboard, and refused to take responsibility for putting it on board.[844]
305. Japanese Companies Attempt Barter Despite Mexican Restrictions
Tokyo learned on September 18, 1941 that the Mitsui Company in Mexico, before July 15, 1941, had been attempting to contract for 580 bottles of mercury in anticipation of the possible executive embargo. As a result of working through certain Mexican officials and a fee of 15,000 pesos for Mr. Maximin Camacho, on September 7, 1941 the Mexican Foreign Minister had approved the export of mercury. Another Japanese agent, Mr. Fugio Kata, believed that he would obtain the consent of General Maximin Camacho, a brother of the Mexican President, to barter 20,000 boxes of artificial silk for 10,000 bottles of mercury. Since Foreign Minister Padilla had given no indication that he would approve this transaction and General Camacho could be reached only through intermediaries, the Japanese officials in Mexico suggested that they be permitted to move slowly, especially in view of Mexican reluctance to offend the United States.[845]
The Mitsui representative had been instructed to work with the Legation in securing mercury, but since he was acting without consulting Legation officials, Minister Miura asked that the Mitsui Office be ordered to instruct its representative that such negotiations were a matter of national policy and were not to be handled by Mitsui as a company or as individuals. He asked that Japanese naval officials also be advised to this effect.[846]
306. Japan Transports American Money for the German Legation
On September 18, 1941 the Heiyo Maru left Manzanillo with three trunks filled with Japanese diplomatic documents. One contained $100,000 in American currency belonging to the
[842] III, 590.
[843] III, 591.
[844] III, 592.
[845] III, 593, 594.
[846] III, 595.
[179]
German Legation. Minister Miura advised Tokyo on September 20, 1941 that the trunks had been securely sealed and entrusted to the Captain of the ship.[847]
307. Minister Miura Requests Increased Expense Allowances
In an attempt to persuade the Japanese Foreign Office to increase the expense allowances of its Legation staff in Mexico, the Japanese Minister pointed out on September 23, 1941 that the standard of living in Mexico had risen sharply. Contributing factors to an advance in Mexican prices were a previous rise in the United States and the scarcity of materials caused by the American armament program. According to the Japanese Minister, Mexico had become more dependent on American economy since the Mexican-American treaty of July. The advance in prices, amounting to 40 or 50 per cent, had made it difficult for the Legation staff to keep up appearances and maintain its prestige. It was necessary, therefore, that the staff's allowance be increased until it reached the level of other Japanese diplomatic establishments.[848]
308. Japanese Foreign Minister Attempts to Expedite Barter Negotiations
Since the Azuma Maru in Tokyo was about to sail, Foreign Minister Toyoda asked on September 24, 1941 that the Japanese Minister in Mexico request the Mexican Foreign Office to instruct the Mexican Minister in Tokyo as to its wishes in this respect. Minister Miura also was asked for any suggestions he might have.[849]
In accordance with this request, Minister Miura paid a visit to the Under Secretary of the Mexican Foreign Office on September 21, 1941 to inform him that the Mexican Minister in Tokyo had made representations to the Japanese government regarding the bartering of fuel oil for silk. Japan had approved the plan, and in return had submitted a concrete proposal, which had not yet been answered. The Mexican Minister replied that no decision concerning general principles could be reached until a technical study of the amount, price, and method of payment had been completed.[850]
Minister Miura then stated that a misunderstanding must exist, since Japan had already accepted Mexico's proposal. Furthermore, a boat, already loaded with silk, would arrive at Manzanillo during the first part of October, and Japan desired a settlement of the commercial agreement before the ship reached port. The Under Secretary agreed to accelerate the study of problems concerned, but said that the Foreign Office did not have time to arrange the matter on such short notice.[851]
309. Tokyo Accepts Mexican Inspection of Parcel Post
Although Minister Miura had been informed that the policy of opening diplomatic parcel post in the presence of Mexican customs officials would be objectionable to the Japanese government, the Japanese Minister had by September 25, 1941 made no representations concerning his government's reaction. He explained that other diplomatic establishments had considered it as a simple routine matter and reported it to their governments.
Since neither the German nor Italian staffs in Mexico had protested, Minister Miura felt that it would be unwise for Japan alone to protest, especially since the measure applied only to packages addressed to diplomats as individuals and not to those sent to their offices. Other nations had taken this same emergency step. For this reason Minister Miura had replied to the Mexican government only that he had reported the measure to his Foreign Office.[852] Two days later, Tokyo notified him that it had no objections to his action.[853]
[847] III, 596.
[848] III, 597.
[849] III, 598.
[850] III, 599.
[851] Ibid.
[852] III, 600.
[853] III, 601.
180
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
310. Japan Considers Evacuating Its Nationals in Mexico
In reply to a request from Tokyo it was announced on September 27, 1941 that no Japanese were awaiting evacuation in Mexico. However, seven persons connected with the Pacific Petroleum Company would have to return to Japan in the near future. If the situation grew worse, the staff, its employees and families, totaling fifty-three, as well as employees of the commercial companies of Assenjo, Mitsui, Mitsubishi and 20 other persons would have to be evacuated.[854]
311. Mitsui Company Considers Kato Barter Scheme
Since the Kato firm had devised a scheme to trade 10,000 flasks of mercury for 20,000 cases of rayon thread, with 10 per cent of the rayon price to be paid to high ranking Mexican government officials, the Mitsui Company, on September 29, 1941, asked its representative to promote competition among other Japanese firms since the price appeared to be exorbitant. Furthermore, it appeared to be impossible to secure 10,000 flasks of mercury in Mexico. Since Japanese officials had urged that the firms cooperate in this venture which was to be handled in the name of one firm, the Kato and Mitsui firms would soon confer. The Mitsui agent was advised to spare no effort in improving the situation.[855]
312. Foreign Minister Toyoda Requests Further Information on Kato Proposal
On the same day, September 29, 1941, the Japanese Foreign Minister asked Minister Miura's opinion regarding the Mitsui-Kato proposal. Though Japan desired to complete a trade agreement before the Azuma Maru's arrival at Manzanillo, the Mexican government's telegram to its Minister in Tokyo, received on September 27, 1941, had given no hope for a speedy settlement.[856]
313. Japanese Military Officials Plan in Mexico to Leave for Japan
On September 29, 1941 the Military Service Bureau, Air Service Headquarters and the Army Technical Headquarters in Japan were informed by the Japanese Military Attache in Washington that Lt. Colonel Nakano and Major Omori would leave Manzanillo, Mexico on October 7, 1941 aboard the Azuma Maru. By following a direct route from the southwest coast of the United States, the Azuma Maru would probably arrive in Japan about November 21, 1941. Another Japanese Army officer, Colonel Oka, was in San Francisco awaiting to depart aboard a Japanese tanker.[857]
314. General Camacho is Appointed to Cabinet
The appointment on September 29, 1941 of General Maximino Avila Camacho, brother of the Mexican President, to the post of Minister of Communications was reported to Tokyo on September 30, 1941. This action could be considered as a step toward solidifying the government, Minister Miura said. The appointment was probably of great importance in view of the appearance of an anti-Cabinet feeling on the part of labor.[858]
315. Minister Miura Suggests Selling Japanese Silk in Mexico
Replying on September 30, 1941 to the Foreign Minister's dispatch informing him that the Azuma Maru would sail for Mexico and the disposal of its shipment of silk would be left to his
[854] III, 602-603.
[855] III, 604.
[856] III, 605.
[857] III, 606. This message was not translated until March 10, 1945.
[858] III, 607.
[181]
judgment, Minister Miura declared that no explanation had ever been given him as to the reason for shipping the silk. Since the negotiations being conducted by the Kato and Mitsui firms had aroused Mexico's hope of procuring rayon, and since Mexico knew that Japan realized how desperate was its need, the sending of the unloaded ship back to Japan would have a disastrous effect upon Japanese-Mexican relations.[859] The Japanese Minister suggested, therefore, that the rayon be distributed in equitable amounts to various Mexican concerns in order to improve relations between the two countries. He asked the Japanese Foreign Office to instruct the Captain of the Azuma Maru to unload at Manzanillo.[860]
Since Minister Miura felt that this was a blunder which had occurred as the result of some scheme of the Japanese Navy he stated that if the Foreign Office, knowing the trade situation with Mexico, had issued orders at the instigation of the Japanese Navy, it had acted unwisely. If the orders had been issued in ignorance, he felt that those entrusted with Mexican trade matters had better examine themselves.[861]
Advising Tokyo that the Mexican Minister would soon call at the Japanese Foreign Office,[862] Minister Miura said that he had called on the Mexican Vice Foreign Minister on October 1, 1941. He had been informed that there was little prospect of any agreement being reached concerning the proposed barter of silk for oil. However, since the rayon had already been shipped, Mexico proposed to purchase it for cash. Minister Miura replied that though the rayon should be shipped back, and he had had nothing to do with the shipment nor the barter discussions, he would dislike seeing the rayon returned.[863]Consequently, despite the profits which could be made from selling at the current market price, he suggested that the rayon be sold at the price stipulated in the contract made before the Presidential embargo was imposed.[864]
316. The Pacific Petroleum Company Ceases Operations
On October 2, 1941 Tokyo was informed by the Japanese Minister that the Pacific Petroleum Company in Mexico had ceased operations as of September 30, 1941.[865]
317. Minister Miura Reports on American-Mexican Negotiations (October 2, 1941)
The Japanese Minister reported on October 2, 1941 that Foreign Minister Ezequiel Padilla had revealed in a newspaper interview that Mexico was negotiating with the United States' State Department though Mexico's Ambassador to Washington, and that the Minister of Finance, Mr. Eduardo Suarez, had departed for Washington to discuss pending problems between America and Mexico. The Mexican Foreign Minister had declared that he would inform his people in the near future of the united friendship that existed between the two countries of America and Mexico. According to an American dispatch, the United States had approved a loan of eight to thirty million American dollars to stabilize Mexican money.[866]
318. Japan Releases Silk Shipment for Sale
Forewarned by Minister Miura of the nature of the Mexican Minister's instructions in regard to Mexico's rejection of the barter proposal, the Japanese Foreign Office replied to the Mexican Minister on October 2, 1941 that it would delay in answering formally until the opinion of several officials had been received.[867]
[859] III, 608.
[860] Ibid.
[861] Ibid.
[862] III, 609.
[863] III, 609-610.
[864] III, 610.
[865] III, 611.
[866] III, 612.
[867] III, 613.
[182]
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
On October 3, 1941 the Mexican Minister, Mr. Amezcua, had been informed by Foreign Minister Toyoda that in view of Japanese-Mexican relations, the shipment of silk would be released for sale in Mexico. He was asked to notify the Mexican Foreign Office, since it was necessary that fuel oil be made available to the Azuma Maru. Minister Miura was instructed to press the oil matter because negotiations with Argentina and Peru might be delayed.[868]
319. Japanese Agents Propose to Smuggle Oil for Germany
By October 4, 1941 Japanese Military Attache Commander Kyoho Hamanakia had arranged, at the request of the German Naval Attache in Tokyo, to load petroleum products as bunker oil on Japanese ships which touched Manzanillo. After arriving in Japan, the unused portion of petroleum would be turned over to the German Naval Attache in Tokyo for disposal. Officials of Japanese companies were exerting efforts to obtain fuel oil so that the secret plan would not fail.[869]
320. Mexico Discovers Smuggled Mercury at Manzanillo
On October 6, 1941 Minister Miura reported to Tokyo that Mexican custom officials at Manzanillo had discovered smuggled exports of mercury and other materials which were to be shipped on the Azuma Maru. Minister Miura had learned of this when a special Associated Press correspondent had telephoned the Minister for his opinion in the matter.[870]
Articles in Mexican newspapers, the Excelsior, the Universal and Nobedades, were transmitted to Tokyo on the same day. The Excelsior declared that the discovery of a large amount of mercury and lead which was to be smuggled out in the Azuma Maru made it apparent that customs officials had been deceived and international agreements had been violated. According to officials making an investigation at Manzanillo, the mercury contained in bottles weighing 76 pounds each had been camouflaged in all sorts of commercial shipments. The Nobedades reported that certain elements were continuously working to establish Manzanillo as a supply base for the Axis countries.[871]
321. Japanese Navy Attache Leads Attempts to Acquire Fuel Oil
Tokyo had learned that difficulty was being encountered in getting fuel oil for the Terukawa Maru. On October 8, 1941 a company representative in Mexico was directed to keep in close touch with the Japanese Naval Attache in such matters.[872]
322. Pacific Petroleum Company Ships Machinery on Azuma Maru
The precision machinery of the Pacific Petroleum Company had been transported to Japan on the Terukawa Maru, which left Acapulco on October 6, 1941. The head of the company, Mr. Kubota, was asked to arrange with the Foreign Office and Naval Ministry to unload the shipment after its arrival in Yokohama, and to have the machinery insured for a value of $17,300.[873]
323. Mexican Foreign Office Denies Japanese Request for Oil
Keeping Tokyo informed of subsequent developments in regard to the Azuma Maru and having called on the Foreign Office Under Secretary on October 7, 1941, Minister Miura re-
[868] Ibid.
[869] III, 614.
[870] III, 615.
[871] III, 616.
[872] III, 617.
[873] III, 618.
[183]
ported that the Under Secretary had reiterated his thanks for Japan's decision to sell the shipment of artificial silk in view of the general trend of Japanese-Mexican relations. Although the Under Secretary was in favor of supplying fuel oil to ships sailing from Manzanillo to Yokohama, he refused fuel for either one-way or round trips to Valparaiso on the grounds that such an understanding was precluded by certain agreements. Voicing his opinion with reluctance when questioned by Minister Miura as to how the Mexican government could supply fuel oil, he answered that the Mexican Petroleum Bureau should be questioned in that respect.[874]
324. Minister Miura Blames Minister Amezcua for Barter Failure
Investigating the reason for the failure of the barter negotiations, Minister Miura discovered through the Under Secretary of the Mexican Foreign Office that the Mexican Minister to Tokyo, Mr. Amezcua, had given his home government no reports concerning the attitude of Japan.
Since it was his opinion that a grave mistake had been made by Minister Amezcua in regard to details of the barter, Minister Miura advised that the Japanese Foreign Office use the utmost discretion in future dealings with him.[875]
325. Minister Miura Suggests Using Illegal Methods
On October 8, 1941 Minister Miura suggested that Japan should not follow open diplomatic means in obtaining Mexican petroleum, but should effect a settlement of this practical problem by other methods. He had received the impression that even though the United States had or had not instituted a practical embargo of petroleum products to Japan, Mexico would not dare to contract or pledge supplies to Japan.
Pointing out that there had been no lack of oil for Japanese ships when the purchases had been made by the ships themselves, Minister Miura said that he and the Japanese Naval Attache agreed that it would be well not to be too fastidious about the matter of procuring petroleum, and it should be left in the hands of Japanese Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire representatives.[876]
326. Two Japanese Army Officers Sail Aboard the Azuma Maru
On October 9, 1941 the Japanese Ministry in Mexico City notified the Embassy in Washington that Lt. Colonel Nakano and Major Omori had sailed aboard the Azuma Maru as scheduled. On the same day, October 7, 1941, Messrs. Waki, Uchida, Yoshioka, Kaneko and Morimura had arrived in Mexico City to await further orders.[877]
327. Mexican Newspapers Suggest Recall of Japanese Representatives
Reporting again on October 14, 1941 concerning the unfortunate discovery of mercury and lead smuggled aboard the Azuma Maru, the Japanese Minister summarized recent editorials which had appeared in various Mexican newspapers. Each paper had published vindictive articles saying that the true character of the Military and Naval Attaches of a certain Eastern country had finally become apparent. On October 12, and 14, 1941 the Excelsior had suggested that the Foreign Office should request the withdrawal of foreign diplomats if they were responsible for this incident.[878]
[874] III, 619.
[875] III, 620.
[876] III, 621.
[877] III, 622-623.
[878] III, 624.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
303. Mexico Receives No Japanese News
In answer to a circular requesting information as to the reception and dissemination of Domei news reports, Minister Miura replied on September 18, 1941 that no government organization, news agency or newspaper in Mexico was receiving Japanese dispatches. He also reported that the transmission of Domei news items by way of San Francisco had been discontinued since early in September.[842]
304. Minister Miura Foresees Difficulty in Shipping Machinery to Japan
Reporting that since the Presidential order had been issued in Mexico "nerves had become sharpened" regarding export smuggling, the Japanese Minister on September 18, 1941 advised that the transportation of the machinery of the Pacific Petroleum Company to Japan would arouse suspicion and perturb the employees. A shipment of all the machinery at one time would be conspicuous and difficult since the machinery was scattered widely.
Although applications for export permits were being made, it was evident that it would be difficult to obtain them. However, since the machinery would pass customs without inspection as Legation property, there seemed to be no other solution than to have holders of diplomatic passports take a part of the bulky machinery with them as personal luggage whenever they left Mexico.[843]
After investigating the possibilities of obtaining some special machinery which Tokyo had requested, Mr. Miura reported that there would be many difficulties in buying and transporting the equipment, especially, if it became known that it was to be sent to Japan. This stemmed from the reluctance of Mexican businessmen to offend the United States. Furthermore, the Pacific Petroleum Company insisted that it would pay only after the machinery had been put aboard, and refused to take responsibility for putting it on board.[844]
305. Japanese Companies Attempt Barter Despite Mexican Restrictions
Tokyo learned on September 18, 1941 that the Mitsui Company in Mexico, before July 15, 1941, had been attempting to contract for 580 bottles of mercury in anticipation of the possible executive embargo. As a result of working through certain Mexican officials and a fee of 15,000 pesos for Mr. Maximin Camacho, on September 7, 1941 the Mexican Foreign Minister had approved the export of mercury. Another Japanese agent, Mr. Fugio Kata, believed that he would obtain the consent of General Maximin Camacho, a brother of the Mexican President, to barter 20,000 boxes of artificial silk for 10,000 bottles of mercury. Since Foreign Minister Padilla had given no indication that he would approve this transaction and General Camacho could be reached only through intermediaries, the Japanese officials in Mexico suggested that they be permitted to move slowly, especially in view of Mexican reluctance to offend the United States.[845]
The Mitsui representative had been instructed to work with the Legation in securing mercury, but since he was acting without consulting Legation officials, Minister Miura asked that the Mitsui Office be ordered to instruct its representative that such negotiations were a matter of national policy and were not to be handled by Mitsui as a company or as individuals. He asked that Japanese naval officials also be advised to this effect.[846]
306. Japan Transports American Money for the German Legation
On September 18, 1941 the Heiyo Maru left Manzanillo with three trunks filled with Japanese diplomatic documents. One contained $100,000 in American currency belonging to the
[842] III, 590.
[843] III, 591.
[844] III, 592.
[845] III, 593, 594.
[846] III, 595.
[179]
German Legation. Minister Miura advised Tokyo on September 20, 1941 that the trunks had been securely sealed and entrusted to the Captain of the ship.[847]
307. Minister Miura Requests Increased Expense Allowances
In an attempt to persuade the Japanese Foreign Office to increase the expense allowances of its Legation staff in Mexico, the Japanese Minister pointed out on September 23, 1941 that the standard of living in Mexico had risen sharply. Contributing factors to an advance in Mexican prices were a previous rise in the United States and the scarcity of materials caused by the American armament program. According to the Japanese Minister, Mexico had become more dependent on American economy since the Mexican-American treaty of July. The advance in prices, amounting to 40 or 50 per cent, had made it difficult for the Legation staff to keep up appearances and maintain its prestige. It was necessary, therefore, that the staff's allowance be increased until it reached the level of other Japanese diplomatic establishments.[848]
308. Japanese Foreign Minister Attempts to Expedite Barter Negotiations
Since the Azuma Maru in Tokyo was about to sail, Foreign Minister Toyoda asked on September 24, 1941 that the Japanese Minister in Mexico request the Mexican Foreign Office to instruct the Mexican Minister in Tokyo as to its wishes in this respect. Minister Miura also was asked for any suggestions he might have.[849]
In accordance with this request, Minister Miura paid a visit to the Under Secretary of the Mexican Foreign Office on September 21, 1941 to inform him that the Mexican Minister in Tokyo had made representations to the Japanese government regarding the bartering of fuel oil for silk. Japan had approved the plan, and in return had submitted a concrete proposal, which had not yet been answered. The Mexican Minister replied that no decision concerning general principles could be reached until a technical study of the amount, price, and method of payment had been completed.[850]
Minister Miura then stated that a misunderstanding must exist, since Japan had already accepted Mexico's proposal. Furthermore, a boat, already loaded with silk, would arrive at Manzanillo during the first part of October, and Japan desired a settlement of the commercial agreement before the ship reached port. The Under Secretary agreed to accelerate the study of problems concerned, but said that the Foreign Office did not have time to arrange the matter on such short notice.[851]
309. Tokyo Accepts Mexican Inspection of Parcel Post
Although Minister Miura had been informed that the policy of opening diplomatic parcel post in the presence of Mexican customs officials would be objectionable to the Japanese government, the Japanese Minister had by September 25, 1941 made no representations concerning his government's reaction. He explained that other diplomatic establishments had considered it as a simple routine matter and reported it to their governments.
Since neither the German nor Italian staffs in Mexico had protested, Minister Miura felt that it would be unwise for Japan alone to protest, especially since the measure applied only to packages addressed to diplomats as individuals and not to those sent to their offices. Other nations had taken this same emergency step. For this reason Minister Miura had replied to the Mexican government only that he had reported the measure to his Foreign Office.[852] Two days later, Tokyo notified him that it had no objections to his action.[853]
[847] III, 596.
[848] III, 597.
[849] III, 598.
[850] III, 599.
[851] Ibid.
[852] III, 600.
[853] III, 601.
180
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
310. Japan Considers Evacuating Its Nationals in Mexico
In reply to a request from Tokyo it was announced on September 27, 1941 that no Japanese were awaiting evacuation in Mexico. However, seven persons connected with the Pacific Petroleum Company would have to return to Japan in the near future. If the situation grew worse, the staff, its employees and families, totaling fifty-three, as well as employees of the commercial companies of Assenjo, Mitsui, Mitsubishi and 20 other persons would have to be evacuated.[854]
311. Mitsui Company Considers Kato Barter Scheme
Since the Kato firm had devised a scheme to trade 10,000 flasks of mercury for 20,000 cases of rayon thread, with 10 per cent of the rayon price to be paid to high ranking Mexican government officials, the Mitsui Company, on September 29, 1941, asked its representative to promote competition among other Japanese firms since the price appeared to be exorbitant. Furthermore, it appeared to be impossible to secure 10,000 flasks of mercury in Mexico. Since Japanese officials had urged that the firms cooperate in this venture which was to be handled in the name of one firm, the Kato and Mitsui firms would soon confer. The Mitsui agent was advised to spare no effort in improving the situation.[855]
312. Foreign Minister Toyoda Requests Further Information on Kato Proposal
On the same day, September 29, 1941, the Japanese Foreign Minister asked Minister Miura's opinion regarding the Mitsui-Kato proposal. Though Japan desired to complete a trade agreement before the Azuma Maru's arrival at Manzanillo, the Mexican government's telegram to its Minister in Tokyo, received on September 27, 1941, had given no hope for a speedy settlement.[856]
313. Japanese Military Officials Plan in Mexico to Leave for Japan
On September 29, 1941 the Military Service Bureau, Air Service Headquarters and the Army Technical Headquarters in Japan were informed by the Japanese Military Attache in Washington that Lt. Colonel Nakano and Major Omori would leave Manzanillo, Mexico on October 7, 1941 aboard the Azuma Maru. By following a direct route from the southwest coast of the United States, the Azuma Maru would probably arrive in Japan about November 21, 1941. Another Japanese Army officer, Colonel Oka, was in San Francisco awaiting to depart aboard a Japanese tanker.[857]
314. General Camacho is Appointed to Cabinet
The appointment on September 29, 1941 of General Maximino Avila Camacho, brother of the Mexican President, to the post of Minister of Communications was reported to Tokyo on September 30, 1941. This action could be considered as a step toward solidifying the government, Minister Miura said. The appointment was probably of great importance in view of the appearance of an anti-Cabinet feeling on the part of labor.[858]
315. Minister Miura Suggests Selling Japanese Silk in Mexico
Replying on September 30, 1941 to the Foreign Minister's dispatch informing him that the Azuma Maru would sail for Mexico and the disposal of its shipment of silk would be left to his
[854] III, 602-603.
[855] III, 604.
[856] III, 605.
[857] III, 606. This message was not translated until March 10, 1945.
[858] III, 607.
[181]
judgment, Minister Miura declared that no explanation had ever been given him as to the reason for shipping the silk. Since the negotiations being conducted by the Kato and Mitsui firms had aroused Mexico's hope of procuring rayon, and since Mexico knew that Japan realized how desperate was its need, the sending of the unloaded ship back to Japan would have a disastrous effect upon Japanese-Mexican relations.[859] The Japanese Minister suggested, therefore, that the rayon be distributed in equitable amounts to various Mexican concerns in order to improve relations between the two countries. He asked the Japanese Foreign Office to instruct the Captain of the Azuma Maru to unload at Manzanillo.[860]
Since Minister Miura felt that this was a blunder which had occurred as the result of some scheme of the Japanese Navy he stated that if the Foreign Office, knowing the trade situation with Mexico, had issued orders at the instigation of the Japanese Navy, it had acted unwisely. If the orders had been issued in ignorance, he felt that those entrusted with Mexican trade matters had better examine themselves.[861]
Advising Tokyo that the Mexican Minister would soon call at the Japanese Foreign Office,[862] Minister Miura said that he had called on the Mexican Vice Foreign Minister on October 1, 1941. He had been informed that there was little prospect of any agreement being reached concerning the proposed barter of silk for oil. However, since the rayon had already been shipped, Mexico proposed to purchase it for cash. Minister Miura replied that though the rayon should be shipped back, and he had had nothing to do with the shipment nor the barter discussions, he would dislike seeing the rayon returned.[863]Consequently, despite the profits which could be made from selling at the current market price, he suggested that the rayon be sold at the price stipulated in the contract made before the Presidential embargo was imposed.[864]
316. The Pacific Petroleum Company Ceases Operations
On October 2, 1941 Tokyo was informed by the Japanese Minister that the Pacific Petroleum Company in Mexico had ceased operations as of September 30, 1941.[865]
317. Minister Miura Reports on American-Mexican Negotiations (October 2, 1941)
The Japanese Minister reported on October 2, 1941 that Foreign Minister Ezequiel Padilla had revealed in a newspaper interview that Mexico was negotiating with the United States' State Department though Mexico's Ambassador to Washington, and that the Minister of Finance, Mr. Eduardo Suarez, had departed for Washington to discuss pending problems between America and Mexico. The Mexican Foreign Minister had declared that he would inform his people in the near future of the united friendship that existed between the two countries of America and Mexico. According to an American dispatch, the United States had approved a loan of eight to thirty million American dollars to stabilize Mexican money.[866]
318. Japan Releases Silk Shipment for Sale
Forewarned by Minister Miura of the nature of the Mexican Minister's instructions in regard to Mexico's rejection of the barter proposal, the Japanese Foreign Office replied to the Mexican Minister on October 2, 1941 that it would delay in answering formally until the opinion of several officials had been received.[867]
[859] III, 608.
[860] Ibid.
[861] Ibid.
[862] III, 609.
[863] III, 609-610.
[864] III, 610.
[865] III, 611.
[866] III, 612.
[867] III, 613.
[182]
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
On October 3, 1941 the Mexican Minister, Mr. Amezcua, had been informed by Foreign Minister Toyoda that in view of Japanese-Mexican relations, the shipment of silk would be released for sale in Mexico. He was asked to notify the Mexican Foreign Office, since it was necessary that fuel oil be made available to the Azuma Maru. Minister Miura was instructed to press the oil matter because negotiations with Argentina and Peru might be delayed.[868]
319. Japanese Agents Propose to Smuggle Oil for Germany
By October 4, 1941 Japanese Military Attache Commander Kyoho Hamanakia had arranged, at the request of the German Naval Attache in Tokyo, to load petroleum products as bunker oil on Japanese ships which touched Manzanillo. After arriving in Japan, the unused portion of petroleum would be turned over to the German Naval Attache in Tokyo for disposal. Officials of Japanese companies were exerting efforts to obtain fuel oil so that the secret plan would not fail.[869]
320. Mexico Discovers Smuggled Mercury at Manzanillo
On October 6, 1941 Minister Miura reported to Tokyo that Mexican custom officials at Manzanillo had discovered smuggled exports of mercury and other materials which were to be shipped on the Azuma Maru. Minister Miura had learned of this when a special Associated Press correspondent had telephoned the Minister for his opinion in the matter.[870]
Articles in Mexican newspapers, the Excelsior, the Universal and Nobedades, were transmitted to Tokyo on the same day. The Excelsior declared that the discovery of a large amount of mercury and lead which was to be smuggled out in the Azuma Maru made it apparent that customs officials had been deceived and international agreements had been violated. According to officials making an investigation at Manzanillo, the mercury contained in bottles weighing 76 pounds each had been camouflaged in all sorts of commercial shipments. The Nobedades reported that certain elements were continuously working to establish Manzanillo as a supply base for the Axis countries.[871]
321. Japanese Navy Attache Leads Attempts to Acquire Fuel Oil
Tokyo had learned that difficulty was being encountered in getting fuel oil for the Terukawa Maru. On October 8, 1941 a company representative in Mexico was directed to keep in close touch with the Japanese Naval Attache in such matters.[872]
322. Pacific Petroleum Company Ships Machinery on Azuma Maru
The precision machinery of the Pacific Petroleum Company had been transported to Japan on the Terukawa Maru, which left Acapulco on October 6, 1941. The head of the company, Mr. Kubota, was asked to arrange with the Foreign Office and Naval Ministry to unload the shipment after its arrival in Yokohama, and to have the machinery insured for a value of $17,300.[873]
323. Mexican Foreign Office Denies Japanese Request for Oil
Keeping Tokyo informed of subsequent developments in regard to the Azuma Maru and having called on the Foreign Office Under Secretary on October 7, 1941, Minister Miura re-
[868] Ibid.
[869] III, 614.
[870] III, 615.
[871] III, 616.
[872] III, 617.
[873] III, 618.
[183]
ported that the Under Secretary had reiterated his thanks for Japan's decision to sell the shipment of artificial silk in view of the general trend of Japanese-Mexican relations. Although the Under Secretary was in favor of supplying fuel oil to ships sailing from Manzanillo to Yokohama, he refused fuel for either one-way or round trips to Valparaiso on the grounds that such an understanding was precluded by certain agreements. Voicing his opinion with reluctance when questioned by Minister Miura as to how the Mexican government could supply fuel oil, he answered that the Mexican Petroleum Bureau should be questioned in that respect.[874]
324. Minister Miura Blames Minister Amezcua for Barter Failure
Investigating the reason for the failure of the barter negotiations, Minister Miura discovered through the Under Secretary of the Mexican Foreign Office that the Mexican Minister to Tokyo, Mr. Amezcua, had given his home government no reports concerning the attitude of Japan.
Since it was his opinion that a grave mistake had been made by Minister Amezcua in regard to details of the barter, Minister Miura advised that the Japanese Foreign Office use the utmost discretion in future dealings with him.[875]
325. Minister Miura Suggests Using Illegal Methods
On October 8, 1941 Minister Miura suggested that Japan should not follow open diplomatic means in obtaining Mexican petroleum, but should effect a settlement of this practical problem by other methods. He had received the impression that even though the United States had or had not instituted a practical embargo of petroleum products to Japan, Mexico would not dare to contract or pledge supplies to Japan.
Pointing out that there had been no lack of oil for Japanese ships when the purchases had been made by the ships themselves, Minister Miura said that he and the Japanese Naval Attache agreed that it would be well not to be too fastidious about the matter of procuring petroleum, and it should be left in the hands of Japanese Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire representatives.[876]
326. Two Japanese Army Officers Sail Aboard the Azuma Maru
On October 9, 1941 the Japanese Ministry in Mexico City notified the Embassy in Washington that Lt. Colonel Nakano and Major Omori had sailed aboard the Azuma Maru as scheduled. On the same day, October 7, 1941, Messrs. Waki, Uchida, Yoshioka, Kaneko and Morimura had arrived in Mexico City to await further orders.[877]
327. Mexican Newspapers Suggest Recall of Japanese Representatives
Reporting again on October 14, 1941 concerning the unfortunate discovery of mercury and lead smuggled aboard the Azuma Maru, the Japanese Minister summarized recent editorials which had appeared in various Mexican newspapers. Each paper had published vindictive articles saying that the true character of the Military and Naval Attaches of a certain Eastern country had finally become apparent. On October 12, and 14, 1941 the Excelsior had suggested that the Foreign Office should request the withdrawal of foreign diplomats if they were responsible for this incident.[878]
[874] III, 619.
[875] III, 620.
[876] III, 621.
[877] III, 622-623.
[878] III, 624.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
results align u.04.98 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
When a tsunami over the Indian Ocean region flattened villages along India’s southeastern coast on December 26, 2004, the mammoth wall of water left behind not just unthinkable tragedy, but also a remarkable legacy of human resilience. Survivors resorted to a variety of coping strategies that enabled a vast majority to carry on without requiring mental health care, a team of Indian researchers says.
The tsunami killed more than 280,000 people, mainly in Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka, according to the World Health Organization. India lost at least 12,400 people. More than 1 million Asians found themselves homeless, and the tsunami created other problems for another 5 million people.
Amid unprecedented devastation, residents of four hard-hit fishing villages in India’s southeastern state of Tamil Nadu employed diverse tactics to deal with myriad losses and to cultivate hope and meaning, say psychiatrist Prathap Tharyan of Christian Medical College in Vellore, India, and his colleagues. A survey of 643 villagers conducted by his group nine months after the tsunami identified symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in only about 6 percent of the villagers, mainly children and those who had lost loved ones in the disaster.
“These intrepid communities assiduously constructed many individual, social and spiritual barricades against chaos and despair,” Tharyan says.
“The new findings confirm that only a small percentage of people are severely affected by the tsunami,” at least from a mental health perspective, remarks WHO psychiatrist Mark van Ommeren. Still, that modest proportion translates into 250,000 to 500,000 people across South Asia in need of long-term mental health care, he notes.
Tharyan’s conclusion stems from group meetings conducted with villagers in September 2005. Two team members who spoke the local language led one-hour discussions with six groups of 10 to 15 fishermen, housewives, community leaders and young people.
The researchers’ analysis of those sessions appears online and in an upcoming Social Science & Medicine. Survey results will be submitted for publication later this year.
Most villagers lived in temporary shelters, as their village had not yet been rebuilt. Fishermen were beginning to resume daily work.
Nearly all participants had been caught in tsunami waves and had lost property and loved ones. They reported being easily startled by rampant rumors about new tsunamis and by routine noises that called to mind the roar of tsunami waves. Mothers said that their children displayed some of the worst such anxiety. Parents whose children died and women whose husbands perished in the disaster were still suffering inconsolable grief. The villagers regard widowhood as a serious loss of status and security for women. Stress disorder symptoms often appeared in people who displayed intense, ongoing grief.
Yet these people still lived near the sea and many had returned to daily routines. Their Hindu faith, spiritual conviction of oneness with the universe and regard for “mother sea” remained strong, Tharyan says.
Most participants cited religious beliefs as central to their well-being. Local ceremonies for the deceased and for distressed survivors, as well as visits from esteemed spiritual leaders, greatly aided the villagers. So did a belief that the dead would be reincarnated into higher forms of life.
In addition, community leaders frequently visited the bereaved. Social gatherings commemorated the dead. Youth attended self-help groups that boosted their confidence about rebuilding villages. Many individuals felt that God had chosen them to survive and that they had suffered less than many others had.
Tharyan’s results align with an estimate, released one month after the tsunami by WHO in Geneva, that 5 to 10 percent of tsunami survivors would develop post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental disorders. At the time, WHO officials emphasized that faith and other cultural factors play an enormous role in how people react and cope with disastrous events.
The Indian villagers used coping strategies that are strikingly similar to those of 9/11 survivors in New York City, comments psychologist George Bonanno of Columbia University. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Indians and New Yorkers gained comfort from the bonding of neighboring communities, felt tremendous pride in their post-disaster efforts and emphasized that they could have suffered much worse fates.
Nine months after 9/11, New York City’s post-traumatic stress disorder rate was slightly lower than what Tharyan reports for Indian villagers nine months after the tsunami, Bonanno says.
When a tsunami over the Indian Ocean region flattened villages along India’s southeastern coast on December 26, 2004, the mammoth wall of water left behind not just unthinkable tragedy, but also a remarkable legacy of human resilience. Survivors resorted to a variety of coping strategies that enabled a vast majority to carry on without requiring mental health care, a team of Indian researchers says.
The tsunami killed more than 280,000 people, mainly in Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka, according to the World Health Organization. India lost at least 12,400 people. More than 1 million Asians found themselves homeless, and the tsunami created other problems for another 5 million people.
Amid unprecedented devastation, residents of four hard-hit fishing villages in India’s southeastern state of Tamil Nadu employed diverse tactics to deal with myriad losses and to cultivate hope and meaning, say psychiatrist Prathap Tharyan of Christian Medical College in Vellore, India, and his colleagues. A survey of 643 villagers conducted by his group nine months after the tsunami identified symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in only about 6 percent of the villagers, mainly children and those who had lost loved ones in the disaster.
“These intrepid communities assiduously constructed many individual, social and spiritual barricades against chaos and despair,” Tharyan says.
“The new findings confirm that only a small percentage of people are severely affected by the tsunami,” at least from a mental health perspective, remarks WHO psychiatrist Mark van Ommeren. Still, that modest proportion translates into 250,000 to 500,000 people across South Asia in need of long-term mental health care, he notes.
Tharyan’s conclusion stems from group meetings conducted with villagers in September 2005. Two team members who spoke the local language led one-hour discussions with six groups of 10 to 15 fishermen, housewives, community leaders and young people.
The researchers’ analysis of those sessions appears online and in an upcoming Social Science & Medicine. Survey results will be submitted for publication later this year.
Most villagers lived in temporary shelters, as their village had not yet been rebuilt. Fishermen were beginning to resume daily work.
Nearly all participants had been caught in tsunami waves and had lost property and loved ones. They reported being easily startled by rampant rumors about new tsunamis and by routine noises that called to mind the roar of tsunami waves. Mothers said that their children displayed some of the worst such anxiety. Parents whose children died and women whose husbands perished in the disaster were still suffering inconsolable grief. The villagers regard widowhood as a serious loss of status and security for women. Stress disorder symptoms often appeared in people who displayed intense, ongoing grief.
Yet these people still lived near the sea and many had returned to daily routines. Their Hindu faith, spiritual conviction of oneness with the universe and regard for “mother sea” remained strong, Tharyan says.
Most participants cited religious beliefs as central to their well-being. Local ceremonies for the deceased and for distressed survivors, as well as visits from esteemed spiritual leaders, greatly aided the villagers. So did a belief that the dead would be reincarnated into higher forms of life.
In addition, community leaders frequently visited the bereaved. Social gatherings commemorated the dead. Youth attended self-help groups that boosted their confidence about rebuilding villages. Many individuals felt that God had chosen them to survive and that they had suffered less than many others had.
Tharyan’s results align with an estimate, released one month after the tsunami by WHO in Geneva, that 5 to 10 percent of tsunami survivors would develop post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental disorders. At the time, WHO officials emphasized that faith and other cultural factors play an enormous role in how people react and cope with disastrous events.
The Indian villagers used coping strategies that are strikingly similar to those of 9/11 survivors in New York City, comments psychologist George Bonanno of Columbia University. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Indians and New Yorkers gained comfort from the bonding of neighboring communities, felt tremendous pride in their post-disaster efforts and emphasized that they could have suffered much worse fates.
Nine months after 9/11, New York City’s post-traumatic stress disorder rate was slightly lower than what Tharyan reports for Indian villagers nine months after the tsunami, Bonanno says.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
evidence 8.evi.0002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
The clear, slightly yellowish amniotic fluid that envelops unborn babies during pregnancy harbors previously unidentified and unrecognized infection-causing microbes, researchers report online August 26 in PLoS ONE. The study adds evidence to the premise that infectious microbes found in amniotic fluid can cause premature birth.
“We were surprised with the amount of unexpected bacteria we found in the fluid and the fact we encountered new species of bacteria,” says physician Daniel DiGiulio of the Stanford University School of Medicine and lead author of the study.
Screening the amniotic fluid with both conventional methods and a novel DNA sequencing approach, the scientists identified infectious bacteria or fungi in 25 of the 166 women in the study. That prevalence for infection — 15 percent — is 50 percent higher than in past studies, DiGiulio says. The level of infection is likely even higher because the tests do not yet identify all pathogenic material in the fluid, he adds.
“We only know the names of relatively a few of all the bacteria that exist, and a lot of them are difficult to culture or can’t be cultured with our current technology,” comments physician Robert Goldenberg of the Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia. He was not surprised by the results and suspects that as scientists continue to study amniotic fluid with improved techniques many more pathogens will be identified.
A baby born before 37 weeks is considered premature. In 12 percent of pregnancies in the United States, babies are born prematurely. Early birth is the leading cause of neonatal death worldwide, according to the National Institutes of Health.
In about half of those cases, the trigger of the premature birth remains unknown, DiGiulio says. But doctors suspect that infection-causing microorganisms living in the amniotic fluid probably trigger a response from a woman’s body. The microbes can infiltrate the sack from the vagina or by way of the bloodstream from other parts of the body, including the mouth. As a result, the immune system tries to fight the infection, causing inflammation that can cause contractions and birth of the child.
To better study if infection leads to early birth, DiGiulio and colleagues, including researchers at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, studied the amniotic fluid of 166 women who went into preterm labor at the Hutzel Women’s Hospital in Detroit from 1998 to 2002. Of the total, 113 women delivered prematurely and 25 showed infection. All 25 women with infected fluid gave birth prematurely.
Of those women, the ones harboring the highest number of infectious bacteria had their babies the earliest — a telling sign of the link between infection and premature birth, DiGiulio says.
“There’s lots of evidence that inter-uterine infections cause preterm birth, especially early preterm birth,” notes Goldenberg.
But DiGiulio says studies have yet to confirm that infections do in fact cause preterm labor or premature birth. To show definite causality, much larger studies need to be done, he explains. Currently he and his colleagues are studying fresh, rather than stored, amniotic fluid to see if it is possible to identify the infections before they induce preterm labor or premature birth. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
“If we can do that,” he says, “we could potentially create a treatment for these infections and prevent a lot or possibly all of premature births.”
The clear, slightly yellowish amniotic fluid that envelops unborn babies during pregnancy harbors previously unidentified and unrecognized infection-causing microbes, researchers report online August 26 in PLoS ONE. The study adds evidence to the premise that infectious microbes found in amniotic fluid can cause premature birth.
“We were surprised with the amount of unexpected bacteria we found in the fluid and the fact we encountered new species of bacteria,” says physician Daniel DiGiulio of the Stanford University School of Medicine and lead author of the study.
Screening the amniotic fluid with both conventional methods and a novel DNA sequencing approach, the scientists identified infectious bacteria or fungi in 25 of the 166 women in the study. That prevalence for infection — 15 percent — is 50 percent higher than in past studies, DiGiulio says. The level of infection is likely even higher because the tests do not yet identify all pathogenic material in the fluid, he adds.
“We only know the names of relatively a few of all the bacteria that exist, and a lot of them are difficult to culture or can’t be cultured with our current technology,” comments physician Robert Goldenberg of the Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia. He was not surprised by the results and suspects that as scientists continue to study amniotic fluid with improved techniques many more pathogens will be identified.
A baby born before 37 weeks is considered premature. In 12 percent of pregnancies in the United States, babies are born prematurely. Early birth is the leading cause of neonatal death worldwide, according to the National Institutes of Health.
In about half of those cases, the trigger of the premature birth remains unknown, DiGiulio says. But doctors suspect that infection-causing microorganisms living in the amniotic fluid probably trigger a response from a woman’s body. The microbes can infiltrate the sack from the vagina or by way of the bloodstream from other parts of the body, including the mouth. As a result, the immune system tries to fight the infection, causing inflammation that can cause contractions and birth of the child.
To better study if infection leads to early birth, DiGiulio and colleagues, including researchers at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, studied the amniotic fluid of 166 women who went into preterm labor at the Hutzel Women’s Hospital in Detroit from 1998 to 2002. Of the total, 113 women delivered prematurely and 25 showed infection. All 25 women with infected fluid gave birth prematurely.
Of those women, the ones harboring the highest number of infectious bacteria had their babies the earliest — a telling sign of the link between infection and premature birth, DiGiulio says.
“There’s lots of evidence that inter-uterine infections cause preterm birth, especially early preterm birth,” notes Goldenberg.
But DiGiulio says studies have yet to confirm that infections do in fact cause preterm labor or premature birth. To show definite causality, much larger studies need to be done, he explains. Currently he and his colleagues are studying fresh, rather than stored, amniotic fluid to see if it is possible to identify the infections before they induce preterm labor or premature birth. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
“If we can do that,” he says, “we could potentially create a treatment for these infections and prevent a lot or possibly all of premature births.”
Saturday, May 2, 2009
top 7.top.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Like a basketball team that plays best against its toughest opponents, the parasite that causes malaria is showing signs of thwarting the most potent drugs currently used against it. Scientists report that top-line drugs called artemisinins take nearly twice as long to knock out the parasite in people who contract malaria in western Cambodia as the drugs take in other areas — suggesting the parasite is finding ways to thwart the drugs’ effects.
Physician Arjen Dondorp of Mahidol University in Bangkok presented the findings on October 27 in Washington, D.C. at a joint meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the American Society for Microbiology.
Hints of artemisinin weakening have emerged bit by bit over the past few years in a handful of reports from Southeast Asia, and most scientists are still loath to call the trend outright drug resistance. But the reports are worrisome, says Philip Rosenthal, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco.
“If we lose the artemisinins, that would be a major problem,” he says. “The pipeline for new antimalarial drugs … is very limited now. We’re dependent on artemisinins to be the backbone of therapy for years to come.”
Many scientists share Rosenthal’s uneasiness about the Cambodia findings.
“It could potentially be disastrous,” says Steven Meshnick, a parasitologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ironically, the unsettling news comes at a time when malaria seems to be in retreat in some parts of the world, thanks in part to increased funding for programs, he says. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Artemisinins are playing a substantial role in that favorable trend. Derived from sweet wormwood extracts, the artemisinins have shown dramatic success against even Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes the most lethal bouts of malaria. But because artemisinins are quick-acting, potent drugs, they work best when taken in tandem with one of the other slower-acting antimalaria drugs. The artemisinin wipes out most of the parasites, and the other drug lingers to mop up the stragglers. That keeps any lingering parasites from surviving to cause resistance, says Meshnick.
The World Health Organization now recommends such combination therapy with artemisinins as a first-line therapy against malaria worldwide.
But in Cambodia, up to three-fourths of artemisinins are taken on their own. And many people stop taking them early, making parasite clearance from the body less than a sure thing.
What’s more, since artemisinins have been used in Cambodia for decades, malaria in that region has had a long time to evolve a way around them, Dondorp says.
To assess any budding signs of resistance, Dondorp and his colleagues tested 40 malaria patients in western Cambodia and 40 others being treated in nearby Thailand. Patients in Cambodia took more than 80 hours on average to clear the parasite from their bodies after receiving a standard combination therapy that included an artemisinin. In Thailand, clearance took only 48 to 60 hours after a similar treatment. There were also more cases of outright treatment failure in the Cambodian group.
Cambodia has been a crucible of resistant malaria for decades. As early as the 1950s and 1960s, public health officials in Cambodia started to see resistance to other antimalaria drugs. The trend has continued in recent decades.
Many factors may be conspiring to give Cambodia this dubious distinction. The hot climate is certainly right for malaria. But beyond that, Meshnick says, people from all over Southeast Asia show up in western Cambodia for gem mining, and mosquitoes that spread malaria there might mix many parasitic strains by hopping from person to person. That scenario invites gene recombination and mutations, risking the development of virulent drug-resistant strains, he says.
Also, the people in western Cambodia aren’t particularly poor. Ironically, a decent income makes them less dependent on regulated, government-supervised drug programs for malaria and allows them to buy drugs on the open market — with risks.
Dondorp says roughly half of unregulated artemisinin pills bought in Cambodia are fake. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire This thriving trade in counterfeit artemisinin began with pills without any drug content whatsoever, but these were foiled by dye tests that exposed them. Now the black-market sellers add 10 percent artemisinin to circumvent simple dye tests that detect a lack of the drug.
“This is actually worse,” Dondorp says, since a weak dose exposes the parasite to the drug and increases the risk of resistance.
The plan for Cambodia starts simply enough: “First we need to get monotherapy out of the market and replace it with combination therapy,” Dondorp says. “If we do that, malaria cases will go down by 60 to 70 percent.”
While that strategy would help in the short run, the surviving parasites would be more resistant than ever, he concedes. “We would have to continue double therapy until eradication, and our models show that that would take 10 years.”
Like a basketball team that plays best against its toughest opponents, the parasite that causes malaria is showing signs of thwarting the most potent drugs currently used against it. Scientists report that top-line drugs called artemisinins take nearly twice as long to knock out the parasite in people who contract malaria in western Cambodia as the drugs take in other areas — suggesting the parasite is finding ways to thwart the drugs’ effects.
Physician Arjen Dondorp of Mahidol University in Bangkok presented the findings on October 27 in Washington, D.C. at a joint meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the American Society for Microbiology.
Hints of artemisinin weakening have emerged bit by bit over the past few years in a handful of reports from Southeast Asia, and most scientists are still loath to call the trend outright drug resistance. But the reports are worrisome, says Philip Rosenthal, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco.
“If we lose the artemisinins, that would be a major problem,” he says. “The pipeline for new antimalarial drugs … is very limited now. We’re dependent on artemisinins to be the backbone of therapy for years to come.”
Many scientists share Rosenthal’s uneasiness about the Cambodia findings.
“It could potentially be disastrous,” says Steven Meshnick, a parasitologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ironically, the unsettling news comes at a time when malaria seems to be in retreat in some parts of the world, thanks in part to increased funding for programs, he says. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Artemisinins are playing a substantial role in that favorable trend. Derived from sweet wormwood extracts, the artemisinins have shown dramatic success against even Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes the most lethal bouts of malaria. But because artemisinins are quick-acting, potent drugs, they work best when taken in tandem with one of the other slower-acting antimalaria drugs. The artemisinin wipes out most of the parasites, and the other drug lingers to mop up the stragglers. That keeps any lingering parasites from surviving to cause resistance, says Meshnick.
The World Health Organization now recommends such combination therapy with artemisinins as a first-line therapy against malaria worldwide.
But in Cambodia, up to three-fourths of artemisinins are taken on their own. And many people stop taking them early, making parasite clearance from the body less than a sure thing.
What’s more, since artemisinins have been used in Cambodia for decades, malaria in that region has had a long time to evolve a way around them, Dondorp says.
To assess any budding signs of resistance, Dondorp and his colleagues tested 40 malaria patients in western Cambodia and 40 others being treated in nearby Thailand. Patients in Cambodia took more than 80 hours on average to clear the parasite from their bodies after receiving a standard combination therapy that included an artemisinin. In Thailand, clearance took only 48 to 60 hours after a similar treatment. There were also more cases of outright treatment failure in the Cambodian group.
Cambodia has been a crucible of resistant malaria for decades. As early as the 1950s and 1960s, public health officials in Cambodia started to see resistance to other antimalaria drugs. The trend has continued in recent decades.
Many factors may be conspiring to give Cambodia this dubious distinction. The hot climate is certainly right for malaria. But beyond that, Meshnick says, people from all over Southeast Asia show up in western Cambodia for gem mining, and mosquitoes that spread malaria there might mix many parasitic strains by hopping from person to person. That scenario invites gene recombination and mutations, risking the development of virulent drug-resistant strains, he says.
Also, the people in western Cambodia aren’t particularly poor. Ironically, a decent income makes them less dependent on regulated, government-supervised drug programs for malaria and allows them to buy drugs on the open market — with risks.
Dondorp says roughly half of unregulated artemisinin pills bought in Cambodia are fake. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire This thriving trade in counterfeit artemisinin began with pills without any drug content whatsoever, but these were foiled by dye tests that exposed them. Now the black-market sellers add 10 percent artemisinin to circumvent simple dye tests that detect a lack of the drug.
“This is actually worse,” Dondorp says, since a weak dose exposes the parasite to the drug and increases the risk of resistance.
The plan for Cambodia starts simply enough: “First we need to get monotherapy out of the market and replace it with combination therapy,” Dondorp says. “If we do that, malaria cases will go down by 60 to 70 percent.”
While that strategy would help in the short run, the surviving parasites would be more resistant than ever, he concedes. “We would have to continue double therapy until eradication, and our models show that that would take 10 years.”
Thursday, April 30, 2009
pacinian 2.pac.993 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
More than 30,000 neuroscientists from around the world gathered in Washington, D.C., November 15–19 for the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Presentations covered the science of nerves and brains on scales from molecules to societies.
Offerings the second day of the meeting, November 16, are sampled here: surprising insights about the brain on age, one of the first studies to investigate the brains of dyslexic women, a new finding about head trauma, and details on how the skin senses touch.
Dyslexia’s female twist
Women’s brains have a different read on dyslexia than men’s brains do. Women diagnosed with this severe disability in reading and other facets of written language show a right-brain deficit in tissue volume, in contrast to a primarily left-brain volume reduction already reported for dyslexic men, according to a team led by neuroscientist Guinevere Eden of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Tissue volume provides one sign of neural function. Until now, researchers have only studied the neural basis of dyslexia in men and in mixed-sex groups that contained only a minority of women.
Eden’s group used an MRI scanner to examine brain volume in eight women who had dealt with dyslexia since childhood and eight women with no reading or language problems. Participants ranged in age from 19 to 25. Dyslexic women exhibited a relative reduction of tissue volume in part of the right parietal lobe. It’s hard to know how this brain area relates to reading, says study coauthor Tanya Gerner, a Georgetown neuroscience graduate student
“This finding stands in stark contrast to volume reductions in the left temporal lobe reported previously for dyslexia in males,” Gerner says.
The team also studied brain volume in girls with dyslexia. Nine school-age girls ages 7 to 13 and diagnosed with dyslexia displayed reductions in tissue volume not just in one brain area, but in a variety of areas, compared with eight girls of the same age group who had no reading problems. Earlier studies have observed comparably widespread reductions in neural volume among dyslexic boys, relative to their male peers who have at least average reading ability.
It appears that boys and girls with dyslexia start out with similar types of neural volume deficits that diverge by adulthood to different sides of the brain, Gerner says. The reason remains unclear, she adds. As dyslexic boys and girls receive special reading instruction throughout schooling, their brains may compensate for initial reading difficulties in sex-specific ways, she theorizes. —Bruce Bower
Anatomy of the brain that ages well
People who are mentally vigorous at age 80 can have more plaques in their brains than their normal-aging counterparts. At the same time, these higher-performing brains hosted fewer tangles, which are denser, more harmful clumps of proteins.
Plaques are diffuse clumps of proteins in the brain, and clumps of the protein beta-amyloid are often associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The finding could spur research into possible benefits of having plaques, says study leader Changiz Geula. One guess is that plaques may serve as safe repositories for harmful proteins that would otherwise float around in the brain, Geula adds.
The surprising preliminary finding comes from a new study called the SuperAger Project, which departs from the traditional way of studying the aging brain. Instead of examining the brains of people who suffer from age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s —what Geula calls “shrinkers”— the team wants to figure out what happens in the brains of people who age well. “We want to know what can be learned from these brains,” says Geula, of Northwestern University.
His team examined brains of 14 elderly high-performers called superagers. They qualified by showing cognitive ability equal to that of a 50-year-old, having been cognitively stable for at least three years, or by achieving at least one major life accomplishment, such as writing and publishing a book, after age 80.
The study’s goal is to identify many features of superaging brains, such as which genes and molecules may be important for mental agility at older ages. These features could lead to clues about why some people stay so sharp for so long.
The SuperAging Project is in its infancy: Geula calls the study’s sample size of 14 “puny,” but these types of in-depth studies on brains that surpass expectations may lead to new understanding of the aging process, he says. —Laura Sanders
Protein could stop post-trauma brain swelling
Brain swelling following an injury is anything but swell. It can lead to damaged tissue and, in some cases, the resulting pressure can lead to death.
Scientists hunting for ways to prevent swelling—which occurs when water accumulates in brain cells—have recently turned to a small protein called erythropoietin. Produced naturally in the body, the protein has been long known for its role in blood cell production, but erythropoietin may also prevent water uptake by brain cells, reports Eli Gunnarson of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.
After a brain injury, ions and other molecules can accumulate inside cells, a build-up that spurs water accumulation. Water can enter brain cells through a channel known as aquaporin 4. Experiments by Gunnarson’s team with cell cultures and excised brain tissue showed erythropoietin lessened the amount of water taken up by the cells. And in experiments with mice whose brains were overloaded with water, treatment with erythropoietin reduced swelling significantly more than a salt solution did.
Gunnarson’s team thinks that erythropoietin may prevent the aquaporin 4 channel from opening by interfering with calcium ions, which give the aquaporin channel the go-ahead to open.
Erythropoietin is already given to people as treatment for specific diseases such as anemia. Gunnarson says it’s a promising treatment for cell swelling, if its action can be localized. “The mechanisms of cell swelling are quite complicated,” she says. —Rachel Ehrenberg
Good vibrations
The fast-adapting “touch receptor” that alerts the brain when someone brushes by you, and allows elephants to pick up on vibrations from miles away, is now touching off new interest from scientists.
Pacinian corpuscles, small onion-shaped receptors in the skin, are first in line to pick up sensations and transmit messages to the brain. Those corpuscles were long thought to be activated by mechanical means. New findings show that these receptors can also talk to neurons through the release of chemical agents. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
The corpuscles are composed of a delicate nerve ending surrounded by a helmet-like capsule. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire The portion of the capsule that sits next to the nerve develops from Schwann cells, a type of glial cell associated with other types of touch receptors in the body. Scientists had believed that the receptor’s ability to pick up signals was due to the mechanical properties of its helmet-like capsule.
Lorraine Pawson of Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y., and collaborators isolated PC receptors from cats and then stimulated the receptors with a tiny probe for one-half to four seconds. The researchers then added an agent to block GABA, a messenger chemical known to suppress nerve impulses. Those and further experiments showed that the capsule can signal the nerve chemically, probably with molecules from the glial cells.
More than 30,000 neuroscientists from around the world gathered in Washington, D.C., November 15–19 for the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Presentations covered the science of nerves and brains on scales from molecules to societies.
Offerings the second day of the meeting, November 16, are sampled here: surprising insights about the brain on age, one of the first studies to investigate the brains of dyslexic women, a new finding about head trauma, and details on how the skin senses touch.
Dyslexia’s female twist
Women’s brains have a different read on dyslexia than men’s brains do. Women diagnosed with this severe disability in reading and other facets of written language show a right-brain deficit in tissue volume, in contrast to a primarily left-brain volume reduction already reported for dyslexic men, according to a team led by neuroscientist Guinevere Eden of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Tissue volume provides one sign of neural function. Until now, researchers have only studied the neural basis of dyslexia in men and in mixed-sex groups that contained only a minority of women.
Eden’s group used an MRI scanner to examine brain volume in eight women who had dealt with dyslexia since childhood and eight women with no reading or language problems. Participants ranged in age from 19 to 25. Dyslexic women exhibited a relative reduction of tissue volume in part of the right parietal lobe. It’s hard to know how this brain area relates to reading, says study coauthor Tanya Gerner, a Georgetown neuroscience graduate student
“This finding stands in stark contrast to volume reductions in the left temporal lobe reported previously for dyslexia in males,” Gerner says.
The team also studied brain volume in girls with dyslexia. Nine school-age girls ages 7 to 13 and diagnosed with dyslexia displayed reductions in tissue volume not just in one brain area, but in a variety of areas, compared with eight girls of the same age group who had no reading problems. Earlier studies have observed comparably widespread reductions in neural volume among dyslexic boys, relative to their male peers who have at least average reading ability.
It appears that boys and girls with dyslexia start out with similar types of neural volume deficits that diverge by adulthood to different sides of the brain, Gerner says. The reason remains unclear, she adds. As dyslexic boys and girls receive special reading instruction throughout schooling, their brains may compensate for initial reading difficulties in sex-specific ways, she theorizes. —Bruce Bower
Anatomy of the brain that ages well
People who are mentally vigorous at age 80 can have more plaques in their brains than their normal-aging counterparts. At the same time, these higher-performing brains hosted fewer tangles, which are denser, more harmful clumps of proteins.
Plaques are diffuse clumps of proteins in the brain, and clumps of the protein beta-amyloid are often associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The finding could spur research into possible benefits of having plaques, says study leader Changiz Geula. One guess is that plaques may serve as safe repositories for harmful proteins that would otherwise float around in the brain, Geula adds.
The surprising preliminary finding comes from a new study called the SuperAger Project, which departs from the traditional way of studying the aging brain. Instead of examining the brains of people who suffer from age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s —what Geula calls “shrinkers”— the team wants to figure out what happens in the brains of people who age well. “We want to know what can be learned from these brains,” says Geula, of Northwestern University.
His team examined brains of 14 elderly high-performers called superagers. They qualified by showing cognitive ability equal to that of a 50-year-old, having been cognitively stable for at least three years, or by achieving at least one major life accomplishment, such as writing and publishing a book, after age 80.
The study’s goal is to identify many features of superaging brains, such as which genes and molecules may be important for mental agility at older ages. These features could lead to clues about why some people stay so sharp for so long.
The SuperAging Project is in its infancy: Geula calls the study’s sample size of 14 “puny,” but these types of in-depth studies on brains that surpass expectations may lead to new understanding of the aging process, he says. —Laura Sanders
Protein could stop post-trauma brain swelling
Brain swelling following an injury is anything but swell. It can lead to damaged tissue and, in some cases, the resulting pressure can lead to death.
Scientists hunting for ways to prevent swelling—which occurs when water accumulates in brain cells—have recently turned to a small protein called erythropoietin. Produced naturally in the body, the protein has been long known for its role in blood cell production, but erythropoietin may also prevent water uptake by brain cells, reports Eli Gunnarson of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.
After a brain injury, ions and other molecules can accumulate inside cells, a build-up that spurs water accumulation. Water can enter brain cells through a channel known as aquaporin 4. Experiments by Gunnarson’s team with cell cultures and excised brain tissue showed erythropoietin lessened the amount of water taken up by the cells. And in experiments with mice whose brains were overloaded with water, treatment with erythropoietin reduced swelling significantly more than a salt solution did.
Gunnarson’s team thinks that erythropoietin may prevent the aquaporin 4 channel from opening by interfering with calcium ions, which give the aquaporin channel the go-ahead to open.
Erythropoietin is already given to people as treatment for specific diseases such as anemia. Gunnarson says it’s a promising treatment for cell swelling, if its action can be localized. “The mechanisms of cell swelling are quite complicated,” she says. —Rachel Ehrenberg
Good vibrations
The fast-adapting “touch receptor” that alerts the brain when someone brushes by you, and allows elephants to pick up on vibrations from miles away, is now touching off new interest from scientists.
Pacinian corpuscles, small onion-shaped receptors in the skin, are first in line to pick up sensations and transmit messages to the brain. Those corpuscles were long thought to be activated by mechanical means. New findings show that these receptors can also talk to neurons through the release of chemical agents. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
The corpuscles are composed of a delicate nerve ending surrounded by a helmet-like capsule. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire The portion of the capsule that sits next to the nerve develops from Schwann cells, a type of glial cell associated with other types of touch receptors in the body. Scientists had believed that the receptor’s ability to pick up signals was due to the mechanical properties of its helmet-like capsule.
Lorraine Pawson of Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y., and collaborators isolated PC receptors from cats and then stimulated the receptors with a tiny probe for one-half to four seconds. The researchers then added an agent to block GABA, a messenger chemical known to suppress nerve impulses. Those and further experiments showed that the capsule can signal the nerve chemically, probably with molecules from the glial cells.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
shred 1.shr.0003004 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
There may be no single, simple explanation for reports of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Witness the first evidence that people who report such recall display either of two cognitive profiles, one signaling a susceptibility to retrieving false memories and the other a tendency to have forgotten earlier recollections of actual abuse.
Members of the first group typically salvage child sex-abuse memories gradually via psychotherapy that includes hypnosis and other suggestive techniques, say psychologist Elke Geraerts of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and her colleagues. Those in the second group suddenly recover memories of abuse, due to unexpected reminders of what happened, the researchers assert in the January Psychological Science.
The new research is based on the results of memory tests taken by 120 middle-aged volunteers, mostly women. The work reveals that different ways of remembering and forgetting correspond to how people recover memories of child abuse.
Spontaneous recall of actual childhood sexual abuse often produces an illusion of not having remembered those events earlier, Geraerts contends. Her team refers to this phenomenon, which hinges on having recalled the same event in different contexts, as the forgot-it-all-along effect.
Psychologist and study coauthor Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has documented real-life instances of the forgot-it-all-along effect. One woman, when asked to attend a talk on child molestation, suddenly remembered having been fondled by a family friend while on vacation at age 9. The woman believed that she hadn’t recalled the abuse for decades. But her former husband reported that she had told him about the incident on several occasions, always in an unemotional tone.
“The purpose of my research is to reconcile both sides in the recovered-memory debate,” Geraerts says. One side holds that memories of childhood sexual abuse are blotted out of consciousness, or repressed, because they’re too traumatic and can be recalled only many years later. An opposing view contends that many recovered-memory reports are falsehoods, often inadvertently fostered by psychotherapists.
Geraerts proposes a third option: Depending on the context in which they’re retrieved, recovered memories are either false or portray actual abuse that had already been remembered and forgotten.
“These data show how people who were sexually abused as children may later recover their memories of abuse without the memories previously having been repressed,” remarks Harvard University psychologist Richard McNally.
Contrary to McNally’s view, the forgot-it-all-along effect does in fact illustrate a type of repression, one in which a person submerges overwhelming feelings linked to a traumatic memory, at least until prompted by the right cue, Stanford University psychiatrist David Spiegel suggests. The memory is there, but not fully experienced. “I’d bet that emotional-memory recovery improves recall for the content of an abusive experience,” Spiegel says.
Geraerts can’t rule out that some psychotherapy patients in her study recovered memories of actual child abuse and that some spontaneously recovered memories that were false, notes psychologist Kathy Pezdek of Claremont Graduate University in Calif. “It’s surprising that there were still big differences in the cognitive profiles of the psychotherapy and spontaneous recovery groups,” she says.
Among the volunteers Geraerts and her coworkers recruited, equal numbers reported one of four scenarios: that they had spontaneously recovered child sex- abuse memories outside of psychotherapy, that they had gradually reclaimed such memories with a psychotherapist’s assistance, that they had never forgotten having been sexually abused during childhood or that they had never been abused.
Volunteers first completed a false-memory test. They studied word lists, each containing related words such as bed, rest and tired. On subsequent trials, everyone tended to recall falsely that new but related words, such as sleep, had been on the first lists. But people who had recovered child sex abuse memories in psychotherapy made such mistakes far more often than did members of the other three groups.
Geraerts says this finding indicates that memories gradually recovered during psychotherapy should be treated cautiously, even if the data say nothing about the accuracy of any individual’s recovered memory. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET
Spiegel cautions that people quickly derive the gist of related words and use that knowledge to guide recall on the false-memory test. The volunteers’ mistakes reflect accurate gist knowledge, so such responses don’t correspond to false memories of abuse, in his view. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET
Participants in Geraerts’ study also performed a test that measured their tendency to forget what they had just remembered. Volunteers studied target words, such as palm, each accompanied by a related word, such as hand. An initial memory trial required recall of partial target words, say p**m, paired with the initial related word or another related word, such as tree. A second memory trial presented partial target words paired only with original related words. Volunteers then reported whether target words that they recalled on the second trial were words they had also recalled on the first trial.
Only the group that had spontaneously recovered memories of child sex abuse frequently forgot that they had already recalled words that had been paired with new words. Similarly, members of this group may have forgotten earlier recollections of actual abuse because those recollections occurred in different contexts, Geraerts suggests.
Because many such individuals are abused at an early age by people they know and trust, the abuse is initially recalled as weird and confusing, she posits. The same abuse gets interpreted as traumatic and sexual only after reminders in adulthood spark spontaneous recall.
Spiegel disagrees. Sexual abuse by a family member or friend is experienced as highly traumatic by young kids because it threatens their sense of safety, can’t be easily classified and is considered by children to be their own fault, he asserts.
In other studies, Geraerts’ team has found that people with spontaneously recovered memories of child sex abuse are particularly good at willing away thoughts about unpleasant personal experiences and often fail to notice when distressing thoughts pop into awareness.
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Comments 2
* While in high school, my cousin was expeariencins false memories of sexual molestation. His psychologist diagnosed him with schizo-affective dissorder and told him that she was convinced that his father raped him as an infant. Later we learned from primal theoropy that my cousin was expeariencing false memories associated with his circumcision. I'm glad that I do not have total recall of mine. I read studies that the hippocampus can develope an amnesia effect caused from forced infant sexual trauma, causing it to underdevelope with age.
Fred Rhodes Fred Rhodes
Dec. 7, 2008 at 10:08am
* Elke Geraerts states, "The purpose of my research is to reconcile both sides in the recovered-memory debate,..." On what grounds does she assume the two "sides" can, or should, be reconciled? It would do the science of psychology much good to finally discredit the "recovered memory" side altogether. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
In the 20 years I have been reading about "recovered memories", I have not seen one shred of credible evidence that this hypothetical phenomenon is real. To the contrary, the best-designed experiments have clearly demonstrated that false memories can be easily planted by therapists, especially if the subject is hypnotized. The "recovered memory" concept does not even qualify as a hypothesis because it has no basis in evidence, but instead springs from anecdotes and unsupported assertions.
"...(F)alsehoods, often inadvertently fostered by psychotherapists", indeed! Are hypnotizing psychotherapists somehow exempt from responsibility for the damage they do? The entire "recovered memory" episode has inspired nothing but appallingly destructive quackery by them. It has devastated families, sent innocent people to prison, and cast the shadow of "molestation" over the lives of unwitting "victims", who were, in fact, never touched. Whatever happened to "First do no harm?" How can accusations with such grave implications as child abuse, possibly be "inadvertent?"
Psychology will never be a legitimate science until it rids itself of this type of rubbish. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
There may be no single, simple explanation for reports of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Witness the first evidence that people who report such recall display either of two cognitive profiles, one signaling a susceptibility to retrieving false memories and the other a tendency to have forgotten earlier recollections of actual abuse.
Members of the first group typically salvage child sex-abuse memories gradually via psychotherapy that includes hypnosis and other suggestive techniques, say psychologist Elke Geraerts of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and her colleagues. Those in the second group suddenly recover memories of abuse, due to unexpected reminders of what happened, the researchers assert in the January Psychological Science.
The new research is based on the results of memory tests taken by 120 middle-aged volunteers, mostly women. The work reveals that different ways of remembering and forgetting correspond to how people recover memories of child abuse.
Spontaneous recall of actual childhood sexual abuse often produces an illusion of not having remembered those events earlier, Geraerts contends. Her team refers to this phenomenon, which hinges on having recalled the same event in different contexts, as the forgot-it-all-along effect.
Psychologist and study coauthor Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has documented real-life instances of the forgot-it-all-along effect. One woman, when asked to attend a talk on child molestation, suddenly remembered having been fondled by a family friend while on vacation at age 9. The woman believed that she hadn’t recalled the abuse for decades. But her former husband reported that she had told him about the incident on several occasions, always in an unemotional tone.
“The purpose of my research is to reconcile both sides in the recovered-memory debate,” Geraerts says. One side holds that memories of childhood sexual abuse are blotted out of consciousness, or repressed, because they’re too traumatic and can be recalled only many years later. An opposing view contends that many recovered-memory reports are falsehoods, often inadvertently fostered by psychotherapists.
Geraerts proposes a third option: Depending on the context in which they’re retrieved, recovered memories are either false or portray actual abuse that had already been remembered and forgotten.
“These data show how people who were sexually abused as children may later recover their memories of abuse without the memories previously having been repressed,” remarks Harvard University psychologist Richard McNally.
Contrary to McNally’s view, the forgot-it-all-along effect does in fact illustrate a type of repression, one in which a person submerges overwhelming feelings linked to a traumatic memory, at least until prompted by the right cue, Stanford University psychiatrist David Spiegel suggests. The memory is there, but not fully experienced. “I’d bet that emotional-memory recovery improves recall for the content of an abusive experience,” Spiegel says.
Geraerts can’t rule out that some psychotherapy patients in her study recovered memories of actual child abuse and that some spontaneously recovered memories that were false, notes psychologist Kathy Pezdek of Claremont Graduate University in Calif. “It’s surprising that there were still big differences in the cognitive profiles of the psychotherapy and spontaneous recovery groups,” she says.
Among the volunteers Geraerts and her coworkers recruited, equal numbers reported one of four scenarios: that they had spontaneously recovered child sex- abuse memories outside of psychotherapy, that they had gradually reclaimed such memories with a psychotherapist’s assistance, that they had never forgotten having been sexually abused during childhood or that they had never been abused.
Volunteers first completed a false-memory test. They studied word lists, each containing related words such as bed, rest and tired. On subsequent trials, everyone tended to recall falsely that new but related words, such as sleep, had been on the first lists. But people who had recovered child sex abuse memories in psychotherapy made such mistakes far more often than did members of the other three groups.
Geraerts says this finding indicates that memories gradually recovered during psychotherapy should be treated cautiously, even if the data say nothing about the accuracy of any individual’s recovered memory. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET
Spiegel cautions that people quickly derive the gist of related words and use that knowledge to guide recall on the false-memory test. The volunteers’ mistakes reflect accurate gist knowledge, so such responses don’t correspond to false memories of abuse, in his view. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET
Participants in Geraerts’ study also performed a test that measured their tendency to forget what they had just remembered. Volunteers studied target words, such as palm, each accompanied by a related word, such as hand. An initial memory trial required recall of partial target words, say p**m, paired with the initial related word or another related word, such as tree. A second memory trial presented partial target words paired only with original related words. Volunteers then reported whether target words that they recalled on the second trial were words they had also recalled on the first trial.
Only the group that had spontaneously recovered memories of child sex abuse frequently forgot that they had already recalled words that had been paired with new words. Similarly, members of this group may have forgotten earlier recollections of actual abuse because those recollections occurred in different contexts, Geraerts suggests.
Because many such individuals are abused at an early age by people they know and trust, the abuse is initially recalled as weird and confusing, she posits. The same abuse gets interpreted as traumatic and sexual only after reminders in adulthood spark spontaneous recall.
Spiegel disagrees. Sexual abuse by a family member or friend is experienced as highly traumatic by young kids because it threatens their sense of safety, can’t be easily classified and is considered by children to be their own fault, he asserts.
In other studies, Geraerts’ team has found that people with spontaneously recovered memories of child sex abuse are particularly good at willing away thoughts about unpleasant personal experiences and often fail to notice when distressing thoughts pop into awareness.
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* Comment
Found in: Humans and Psychology
Share & Save
* slashdot slashdot
* digg digg
* facebook facebook
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* del.icio.us del.icio.us
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Comments 2
* While in high school, my cousin was expeariencins false memories of sexual molestation. His psychologist diagnosed him with schizo-affective dissorder and told him that she was convinced that his father raped him as an infant. Later we learned from primal theoropy that my cousin was expeariencing false memories associated with his circumcision. I'm glad that I do not have total recall of mine. I read studies that the hippocampus can develope an amnesia effect caused from forced infant sexual trauma, causing it to underdevelope with age.
Fred Rhodes Fred Rhodes
Dec. 7, 2008 at 10:08am
* Elke Geraerts states, "The purpose of my research is to reconcile both sides in the recovered-memory debate,..." On what grounds does she assume the two "sides" can, or should, be reconciled? It would do the science of psychology much good to finally discredit the "recovered memory" side altogether. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
In the 20 years I have been reading about "recovered memories", I have not seen one shred of credible evidence that this hypothetical phenomenon is real. To the contrary, the best-designed experiments have clearly demonstrated that false memories can be easily planted by therapists, especially if the subject is hypnotized. The "recovered memory" concept does not even qualify as a hypothesis because it has no basis in evidence, but instead springs from anecdotes and unsupported assertions.
"...(F)alsehoods, often inadvertently fostered by psychotherapists", indeed! Are hypnotizing psychotherapists somehow exempt from responsibility for the damage they do? The entire "recovered memory" episode has inspired nothing but appallingly destructive quackery by them. It has devastated families, sent innocent people to prison, and cast the shadow of "molestation" over the lives of unwitting "victims", who were, in fact, never touched. Whatever happened to "First do no harm?" How can accusations with such grave implications as child abuse, possibly be "inadvertent?"
Psychology will never be a legitimate science until it rids itself of this type of rubbish. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Sunday, April 12, 2009
place 7.pla.1992 3 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Tattoos on the skin can say a lot about a person. On a deeper level, chemical tattoos on a person’s DNA are just as distinctive and individual — and say far more about a person’s life history.
A pair of reports published online January 18 in Nature Genetics show just how important one type of DNA tattoo, called methylation, can be. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University report the unexpected finding that DNA methylation — a chemical alteration that turns off genes — occurs most often near, but not within, the DNA regions scientists have typically studied. The other report, from researchers at the University of Toronto and collaborators, suggests that identical twins owe their similarities not only to having the same genetic makeup, but also to certain methylation patterns established in the fertilized egg.
Methylation is one of many epigenetic signals — chemical changes to DNA and its associated proteins — that modify gene activity without altering the genetic information itself. Methylation and other epigenetic signals help guide stem cells as they develop into other types of cells. Mistakes in methylation near certain critical genes can lead to cancer.
The Johns Hopkins group has now shown that DNA methylation is more common at what they call “CpG island shores” instead of at the CpG islands that most researchers have focused on. CpG islands are short stretches of DNA rich in the paired bases cytosine and guanine, letters “C” and “G” in the genetic alphabet. Methyl groups attach to cytosine bases in DNA.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
CpG islands are located near the start sites of genes and help control a gene’s activity. It’s been thought that planting a methyl group on an island declares the nearby gene off-limits, blocking activity.
Researchers have thought of methylation as a type of long-term memory, preserving environmental effects on genes long after those cues have disappeared, says Rolf Ohlsson, a geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
Scientists have long suspected that differences in epigenetic marks shaped by environmental cues could account for why identical twins don’t look, behave or get sick exactly alike despite having identical genetic makeups. But no one had mapped out all the places, if any, where epigenetic marks differ between twins.
Now a team led by Arturas Petronis of the University of Toronto has explored all of the CpG islands dotting the genome to see which sport methylation flags. The team compared the methylation patterns of twins from monozygotic pairs — twins created when a single embryo splits. Although the twins had identical DNA, their methylation of CpG islands varied. But the methylation patterns in monozygotic twins were more similar than those in fraternal twins, who develop from separate eggs. And the group found that the amount of variation between monozygotic twins correlates with the time the embryo split: Counterintuitively, twins from an early-splitting embryo have more similar methylation patterns than twins from a later split.
Epigenetic patterns established in the early embryo are carried throughout life, with some differences introduced by the environment and others by random chance and error in replicating the patterns as a person develops. DNA is reproduced with high fidelity — mistakes happen in about one in a million bases — but the process of reproducing epigenetic patterns in dividing cells is more error-prone, with one in a thousand epigenetic marks going awry.
Petronis thinks the similarity between monozygotic twins results not from shared DNA sequences but from having come from the same embryo. “We don’t see any reason to think that the DNA sequence makes up the epigenetic profile,” Petronis says.
But swimming away from CpG islands may offer a different perspective. Andrew Feinberg, director of the Epigenetics Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and colleagues embarked on a genome-wide tour to chart DNA methylation in different human tissues. The researchers had expected that each tissue would have a characteristic methylation pattern, indicating which genes are turned off and which are turned on to build a liver, spleen, brain or other tissue. Often researchers examine methylation only at CpG islands, but Feinberg says that most islands are surprisingly free of methylation in most tissues.
“We were always a bit skeptical of this island thing,” he says. So the team used a method that could reveal every place in the genome where a methylation flag was staked.
The team did find characteristic patterns in each tissue type, but not in CpG islands, where researchers expected. Methylation flagged DNA in liver, spleen and brain at thousands of places along the CpG island shores. The shores contained about 76 percent of the methylation flags shown to be characteristic of specific tissue types.
“This is a discovery that is totally unexpected,” says Ohlsson. Feinberg’s team has found “a signature of the genome that we weren’t aware of before.”
DNA in mouse tissues also has “shore” methylation patterns similar to those in corresponding human tissues. About 51 percent of the shores methylated in mouse tissues were also methylated in human tissues, indicating that DNA methylation of CpG island shores is an ancient, and important, method of controlling genes, Feinberg says.
When looking at colon tumors, the team found that methylation patterns in the shores of the cancer cells were more eroded than those in healthy colon cells. Feinberg says a breakdown in the patterns may cause colon stem cells to develop inappropriately, leading to cancer.
Unpublished research by Dag Undlien of the University of Oslo, done on sabbatical in Feinberg’s lab, indicates that monozygotic twins share more shore methylation patterns than fraternal twins do, and are even more similar than Petronis’ research suggests, Feinberg says.
Feinberg thinks evidence from his lab, though preliminary, indicates that DNA sequence does help determine epigenetic patterns. He calls Petronis’ report, “a terribly interesting paper,” but adds, “I think there may be a stronger genetic contribution than is suggested by his data.” http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
Regardless of who is correct, Ohlsson says that Feinberg’s discovery of CpG island shores will force scientists “to refocus our efforts to figure out what DNA methylation is doing.”
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Comments 4
* The researchers used in-bred mice strains to essentially do the experiment suggested by James Boettcher. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG Some epigenetic marks are made during development in the womb, but many are already established in egg and sperm that lead to the fertilized embryo.
The researchers speculate that early splitting twins are more similar because the split occurs before differentiation of cells toward specific cell types. Early-splitting embryos therefore contain the same basic epigenetic program. In later-splitting embryos, one twin would carry epigenetic marks established as the cells it originated from began to differentiate. Those marks would be absent in the other twin and vice versa, leading to greater epigenetic diversity in the late-splitting twins.
Tina Hesman Saey Tina Hesman Saey
Feb. 24, 2009 at 4:55pm
* Beyond Darwin 200
Melatonin Switches On Mostly Intercell Maintenance
Wake up.
Re-think-plan-do-assess Epigenetics, Sleep And Melatonin works.
A. "Epigenetics reveals unexpected, and some identical, results"
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40060/title/Epigenetics_reveals_unexpected%2C_and_some_identical%2C_results
One study finds tissue-specific methylation signatures in the genome; another a similarity between identical twins in DNA’s chemical tagging.
I humbly suggest : Re-think-plan-do-assess Epigenetics Works, founded on scientific conception that genes and genomes are organisms.
B. "Sleep, Melatonin, Cancers And Beyond Darwin 200"
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/100/122.page#1412
I humbly suggest: Re-think-plan-do-assess works, founded on scientific conception that genes and genomes are organisms.
C. Apparent functional aspects of melatonin
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Neurology.html#Melatonin
Melatonin is a hormone secreted by the human pineal gland during night-time darkness, and it is now being marketed in the US as a nutritional supplement. The hormone is an indoleamine compound derived from the amino acid *tryptophan, with *serotonin as an intermediate precursor.
1) The most important role of melatonin in all species is to provide a hormonal signal of night-time darkness. The secretion of the hormone is tightly controlled by the *circadian pacemaker. 2) Melatonin is a phylogenetically ancient hormone, found even in some single-cell organisms and in some plants. 3) At the cellular level, melatonin receptors are members of the superfamily of *G protein-coupled receptors...Activation of these receptors inhibits *cyclic AMP production by the enzyme adenylyl cyclase.
cAMP (cyclic AMP) acts as an intracellular hormone (i.e., a chemical messenger). Cyclic AMP is derived from ATP in a reaction catalyzed by the enzyme adenylyl cyclase (also called adenyl cyclase and adenylate cyclase).
I humbly suggest: Melatonin, the phylogenetically ancient hormone, was evolved by the genome during the early single-cells eons when they evolved community life cultures and graduated from sunlight-only to metabolism-too energy production. Melatonin's role was to signal that the genes are asleep, their functional activities are shut off, and it is time for the security and maintenance crews to do their tasks, especially to clean up the intercell environment, for keeping the community of cells in proper state.
D. It all adds up to:
Gene: a primal Earth's organism. (1st stratum organism)
Genome: a multigenes organism consisting of a cooperative commune of its member genes. (2nd stratum organism)
"Life's Manifest"
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/112.page#578
Dov Henis
(Comments From The 22nd Century)
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-P81pQcU1dLBbHgtjQjxG_Q--?cq=1
Dov Henis Dov Henis
Jan. 29, 2009 at 3:08pm
* Isn't the "characteristic pattern of methylation" placed on the embryo by the mother? I wonder if there are any twins born by IVF to different mothers? Maybe they could do that with mice and see if there are substantial differences in methylation when the mothers of the twins have different genes.
James Boettcher James Boettcher Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Jan. 24, 2009 at 2:11am
* Interesting article - can you please confirm the statement in chapter seven that *early* splitting monozygotic twins are *more* similar in their methylation patterns than late-splitting ones? Seems to me it should be the other way are. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Tattoos on the skin can say a lot about a person. On a deeper level, chemical tattoos on a person’s DNA are just as distinctive and individual — and say far more about a person’s life history.
A pair of reports published online January 18 in Nature Genetics show just how important one type of DNA tattoo, called methylation, can be. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University report the unexpected finding that DNA methylation — a chemical alteration that turns off genes — occurs most often near, but not within, the DNA regions scientists have typically studied. The other report, from researchers at the University of Toronto and collaborators, suggests that identical twins owe their similarities not only to having the same genetic makeup, but also to certain methylation patterns established in the fertilized egg.
Methylation is one of many epigenetic signals — chemical changes to DNA and its associated proteins — that modify gene activity without altering the genetic information itself. Methylation and other epigenetic signals help guide stem cells as they develop into other types of cells. Mistakes in methylation near certain critical genes can lead to cancer.
The Johns Hopkins group has now shown that DNA methylation is more common at what they call “CpG island shores” instead of at the CpG islands that most researchers have focused on. CpG islands are short stretches of DNA rich in the paired bases cytosine and guanine, letters “C” and “G” in the genetic alphabet. Methyl groups attach to cytosine bases in DNA.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
CpG islands are located near the start sites of genes and help control a gene’s activity. It’s been thought that planting a methyl group on an island declares the nearby gene off-limits, blocking activity.
Researchers have thought of methylation as a type of long-term memory, preserving environmental effects on genes long after those cues have disappeared, says Rolf Ohlsson, a geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
Scientists have long suspected that differences in epigenetic marks shaped by environmental cues could account for why identical twins don’t look, behave or get sick exactly alike despite having identical genetic makeups. But no one had mapped out all the places, if any, where epigenetic marks differ between twins.
Now a team led by Arturas Petronis of the University of Toronto has explored all of the CpG islands dotting the genome to see which sport methylation flags. The team compared the methylation patterns of twins from monozygotic pairs — twins created when a single embryo splits. Although the twins had identical DNA, their methylation of CpG islands varied. But the methylation patterns in monozygotic twins were more similar than those in fraternal twins, who develop from separate eggs. And the group found that the amount of variation between monozygotic twins correlates with the time the embryo split: Counterintuitively, twins from an early-splitting embryo have more similar methylation patterns than twins from a later split.
Epigenetic patterns established in the early embryo are carried throughout life, with some differences introduced by the environment and others by random chance and error in replicating the patterns as a person develops. DNA is reproduced with high fidelity — mistakes happen in about one in a million bases — but the process of reproducing epigenetic patterns in dividing cells is more error-prone, with one in a thousand epigenetic marks going awry.
Petronis thinks the similarity between monozygotic twins results not from shared DNA sequences but from having come from the same embryo. “We don’t see any reason to think that the DNA sequence makes up the epigenetic profile,” Petronis says.
But swimming away from CpG islands may offer a different perspective. Andrew Feinberg, director of the Epigenetics Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and colleagues embarked on a genome-wide tour to chart DNA methylation in different human tissues. The researchers had expected that each tissue would have a characteristic methylation pattern, indicating which genes are turned off and which are turned on to build a liver, spleen, brain or other tissue. Often researchers examine methylation only at CpG islands, but Feinberg says that most islands are surprisingly free of methylation in most tissues.
“We were always a bit skeptical of this island thing,” he says. So the team used a method that could reveal every place in the genome where a methylation flag was staked.
The team did find characteristic patterns in each tissue type, but not in CpG islands, where researchers expected. Methylation flagged DNA in liver, spleen and brain at thousands of places along the CpG island shores. The shores contained about 76 percent of the methylation flags shown to be characteristic of specific tissue types.
“This is a discovery that is totally unexpected,” says Ohlsson. Feinberg’s team has found “a signature of the genome that we weren’t aware of before.”
DNA in mouse tissues also has “shore” methylation patterns similar to those in corresponding human tissues. About 51 percent of the shores methylated in mouse tissues were also methylated in human tissues, indicating that DNA methylation of CpG island shores is an ancient, and important, method of controlling genes, Feinberg says.
When looking at colon tumors, the team found that methylation patterns in the shores of the cancer cells were more eroded than those in healthy colon cells. Feinberg says a breakdown in the patterns may cause colon stem cells to develop inappropriately, leading to cancer.
Unpublished research by Dag Undlien of the University of Oslo, done on sabbatical in Feinberg’s lab, indicates that monozygotic twins share more shore methylation patterns than fraternal twins do, and are even more similar than Petronis’ research suggests, Feinberg says.
Feinberg thinks evidence from his lab, though preliminary, indicates that DNA sequence does help determine epigenetic patterns. He calls Petronis’ report, “a terribly interesting paper,” but adds, “I think there may be a stronger genetic contribution than is suggested by his data.” http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
Regardless of who is correct, Ohlsson says that Feinberg’s discovery of CpG island shores will force scientists “to refocus our efforts to figure out what DNA methylation is doing.”
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* Comment
Found in: Body & Brain and Genes & Cells
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Comments 4
* The researchers used in-bred mice strains to essentially do the experiment suggested by James Boettcher. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG Some epigenetic marks are made during development in the womb, but many are already established in egg and sperm that lead to the fertilized embryo.
The researchers speculate that early splitting twins are more similar because the split occurs before differentiation of cells toward specific cell types. Early-splitting embryos therefore contain the same basic epigenetic program. In later-splitting embryos, one twin would carry epigenetic marks established as the cells it originated from began to differentiate. Those marks would be absent in the other twin and vice versa, leading to greater epigenetic diversity in the late-splitting twins.
Tina Hesman Saey Tina Hesman Saey
Feb. 24, 2009 at 4:55pm
* Beyond Darwin 200
Melatonin Switches On Mostly Intercell Maintenance
Wake up.
Re-think-plan-do-assess Epigenetics, Sleep And Melatonin works.
A. "Epigenetics reveals unexpected, and some identical, results"
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40060/title/Epigenetics_reveals_unexpected%2C_and_some_identical%2C_results
One study finds tissue-specific methylation signatures in the genome; another a similarity between identical twins in DNA’s chemical tagging.
I humbly suggest : Re-think-plan-do-assess Epigenetics Works, founded on scientific conception that genes and genomes are organisms.
B. "Sleep, Melatonin, Cancers And Beyond Darwin 200"
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/100/122.page#1412
I humbly suggest: Re-think-plan-do-assess works, founded on scientific conception that genes and genomes are organisms.
C. Apparent functional aspects of melatonin
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Neurology.html#Melatonin
Melatonin is a hormone secreted by the human pineal gland during night-time darkness, and it is now being marketed in the US as a nutritional supplement. The hormone is an indoleamine compound derived from the amino acid *tryptophan, with *serotonin as an intermediate precursor.
1) The most important role of melatonin in all species is to provide a hormonal signal of night-time darkness. The secretion of the hormone is tightly controlled by the *circadian pacemaker. 2) Melatonin is a phylogenetically ancient hormone, found even in some single-cell organisms and in some plants. 3) At the cellular level, melatonin receptors are members of the superfamily of *G protein-coupled receptors...Activation of these receptors inhibits *cyclic AMP production by the enzyme adenylyl cyclase.
cAMP (cyclic AMP) acts as an intracellular hormone (i.e., a chemical messenger). Cyclic AMP is derived from ATP in a reaction catalyzed by the enzyme adenylyl cyclase (also called adenyl cyclase and adenylate cyclase).
I humbly suggest: Melatonin, the phylogenetically ancient hormone, was evolved by the genome during the early single-cells eons when they evolved community life cultures and graduated from sunlight-only to metabolism-too energy production. Melatonin's role was to signal that the genes are asleep, their functional activities are shut off, and it is time for the security and maintenance crews to do their tasks, especially to clean up the intercell environment, for keeping the community of cells in proper state.
D. It all adds up to:
Gene: a primal Earth's organism. (1st stratum organism)
Genome: a multigenes organism consisting of a cooperative commune of its member genes. (2nd stratum organism)
"Life's Manifest"
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/112.page#578
Dov Henis
(Comments From The 22nd Century)
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-P81pQcU1dLBbHgtjQjxG_Q--?cq=1
Dov Henis Dov Henis
Jan. 29, 2009 at 3:08pm
* Isn't the "characteristic pattern of methylation" placed on the embryo by the mother? I wonder if there are any twins born by IVF to different mothers? Maybe they could do that with mice and see if there are substantial differences in methylation when the mothers of the twins have different genes.
James Boettcher James Boettcher Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Jan. 24, 2009 at 2:11am
* Interesting article - can you please confirm the statement in chapter seven that *early* splitting monozygotic twins are *more* similar in their methylation patterns than late-splitting ones? Seems to me it should be the other way are. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
twins 4.twi.1001002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Tattoos on the skin can say a lot about a person. On a deeper level, chemical tattoos on a person’s DNA are just as distinctive and individual — and say far more about a person’s life history.
A pair of reports published online January 18 in Nature Genetics show just how important one type of DNA tattoo, called methylation, can be. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University report the unexpected finding that DNA methylation — a chemical alteration that turns off genes — occurs most often near, but not within, the DNA regions scientists have typically studied. The other report, from researchers at the University of Toronto and collaborators, suggests that identical twins owe their similarities not only to having the same genetic makeup, but also to certain methylation patterns established in the fertilized egg.
Methylation is one of many epigenetic signals — chemical changes to DNA and its associated proteins — that modify gene activity without altering the genetic information itself. Methylation and other epigenetic signals help guide stem cells as they develop into other types of cells. Mistakes in methylation near certain critical genes can lead to cancer.
The Johns Hopkins group has now shown that DNA methylation is more common at what they call “CpG island shores” instead of at the CpG islands that most researchers have focused on. CpG islands are short stretches of DNA rich in the paired bases cytosine and guanine, letters “C” and “G” in the genetic alphabet. Methyl groups attach to cytosine bases in DNA.
CpG islands are located near the start sites of genes and help control a gene’s activity. It’s been thought that planting a methyl group on an island declares the nearby gene off-limits, blocking activity.
Researchers have thought of methylation as a type of long-term memory, preserving environmental effects on genes long after those cues have disappeared, says Rolf Ohlsson, a geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Scientists have long suspected that differences in epigenetic marks shaped by environmental cues could account for why identical twins don’t look, behave or get sick exactly alike despite having identical genetic makeups. But no one had mapped out all the places, if any, where epigenetic marks differ between twins. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Now a team led by Arturas Petronis of the University of Toronto has explored all of the CpG islands dotting the genome to see which sport methylation flags. The team compared the methylation patterns of twins from monozygotic pairs — twins created when a single embryo splits. Although the twins had identical DNA, their methylation of CpG islands varied. But the methylation patterns in monozygotic twins were more similar than those in fraternal twins, who develop from separate eggs. And the group found that the amount of variation between monozygotic twins correlates with the time the embryo split: Counterintuitively, twins from an early-splitting embryo have more similar methylation patterns than twins from a later split.
Epigenetic patterns established in the early embryo are carried throughout life, with some differences introduced by the environment and others by random chance and error in replicating the patterns as a person develops. DNA is reproduced with high fidelity — mistakes happen in about one in a million bases — but the process of reproducing epigenetic patterns in dividing cells is more error-prone, with one in a thousand epigenetic marks going awry.
Petronis thinks the similarity between monozygotic twins results not from shared DNA sequences but from having come from the same embryo. “We don’t see any reason to think that the DNA sequence makes up the epigenetic profile,” Petronis says.
But swimming away from CpG islands may offer a different perspective. Andrew Feinberg, director of the Epigenetics Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and colleagues embarked on a genome-wide tour to chart DNA methylation in different human tissues. The researchers had expected that each tissue would have a characteristic methylation pattern, indicating which genes are turned off and which are turned on to build a liver, spleen, brain or other tissue. Often researchers examine methylation only at CpG islands, but Feinberg says that most islands are surprisingly free of methylation in most tissues.
“We were always a bit skeptical of this island thing,” he says. So the team used a method that could reveal every place in the genome where a methylation flag was staked.
The team did find characteristic patterns in each tissue type, but not in CpG islands, where researchers expected. Methylation flagged DNA in liver, spleen and brain at thousands of places along the CpG island shores. The shores contained about 76 percent of the methylation flags shown to be characteristic of specific tissue types.
“This is a discovery that is totally unexpected,” says Ohlsson. Feinberg’s team has found “a signature of the genome that we weren’t aware of before.”
DNA in mouse tissues also has “shore” methylation patterns similar to those in corresponding human tissues. About 51 percent of the shores methylated in mouse tissues were also methylated in human tissues, indicating that DNA methylation of CpG island shores is an ancient, and important, method of controlling genes, Feinberg says.
When looking at colon tumors, the team found that methylation patterns in the shores of the cancer cells were more eroded than those in healthy colon cells. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET Feinberg says a breakdown in the patterns may cause colon stem cells to develop inappropriately, leading to cancer.
Unpublished research by Dag Undlien of the University of Oslo, done on sabbatical in Feinberg’s lab, indicates that monozygotic twins share more shore methylation patterns than fraternal twins do, and are even more similar than Petronis’ research suggests, Feinberg says.
Feinberg thinks evidence from his lab, though preliminary, indicates that DNA sequence does help determine epigenetic patterns. He calls Petronis’ report, “a terribly interesting paper,” but adds, “I think there may be a stronger genetic contribution than is suggested by his data.” http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET
Regardless of who is correct, Ohlsson says that Feinberg’s discovery of CpG island shores will force scientists “to refocus our efforts to figure out what DNA methylation is doing.”
* Print
* |
* Comment
http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET
Found in: Body & Brain and Genes & Cells
Share & Save
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* digg digg
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Comments 4
* The researchers used in-bred mice strains to essentially do the experiment suggested by James Boettcher. Some epigenetic marks are made during development in the womb, but many are already established in egg and sperm that lead to the fertilized embryo.
The researchers speculate that early splitting twins are more similar because the split occurs before differentiation of cells toward specific cell types. Early-splitting embryos therefore contain the same basic epigenetic program. In later-splitting embryos, one twin would carry epigenetic marks established as the cells it originated from began to differentiate. Those marks would be absent in the other twin and vice versa, leading to greater epigenetic diversity in the late-splitting twins.
Tina Hesman Saey Tina Hesman Saey
Feb. 24, 2009 at 4:55pm
* Beyond Darwin 200
Melatonin Switches On Mostly Intercell Maintenance
Wake up.
Re-think-plan-do-assess Epigenetics, Sleep And Melatonin works.
A. "Epigenetics reveals unexpected, and some identical, results"
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40060/title/Epigenetics_reveals_unexpected%2C_and_some_identical%2C_results
One study finds tissue-specific methylation signatures in the genome; another a similarity between identical twins in DNA’s chemical tagging.
I humbly suggest : Re-think-plan-do-assess Epigenetics Works, founded on scientific conception that genes and genomes are organisms.
B. "Sleep, Melatonin, Cancers And Beyond Darwin 200"
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/100/122.page#1412
I humbly suggest: Re-think-plan-do-assess works, founded on scientific conception that genes and genomes are organisms.
C. Apparent functional aspects of melatonin
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Neurology.html#Melatonin
Melatonin is a hormone secreted by the human pineal gland during night-time darkness, and it is now being marketed in the US as a nutritional supplement. The hormone is an indoleamine compound derived from the amino acid *tryptophan, with *serotonin as an intermediate precursor.
1) The most important role of melatonin in all species is to provide a hormonal signal of night-time darkness. The secretion of the hormone is tightly controlled by the *circadian pacemaker. 2) Melatonin is a phylogenetically ancient hormone, found even in some single-cell organisms and in some plants. 3) At the cellular level, melatonin receptors are members of the superfamily of *G protein-coupled receptors...Activation of these receptors inhibits *cyclic AMP production by the enzyme adenylyl cyclase.
cAMP (cyclic AMP) acts as an intracellular hormone (i.e., a chemical messenger). Cyclic AMP is derived from ATP in a reaction catalyzed by the enzyme adenylyl cyclase (also called adenyl cyclase and adenylate cyclase).
I humbly suggest: Melatonin, the phylogenetically ancient hormone, was evolved by the genome during the early single-cells eons when they evolved community life cultures and graduated from sunlight-only to metabolism-too energy production. Melatonin's role was to signal that the genes are asleep, their functional activities are shut off, and it is time for the security and maintenance crews to do their tasks, especially to clean up the intercell environment, for keeping the community of cells in proper state.
D. It all adds up to:
Gene: a primal Earth's organism. (1st stratum organism)
Genome: a multigenes organism consisting of a cooperative commune of its member genes. (2nd stratum organism)
"Life's Manifest"
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/112.page#578
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Dov Henis
(Comments From The 22nd Century)
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-P81pQcU1dLBbHgtjQjxG_Q--?cq=1
Dov Henis Dov Henis
Jan. 29, 2009 at 3:08pm Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
* Isn't the "characteristic pattern of methylation" placed on the embryo by the mother? I wonder if there are any twins born by IVF to different mothers? Maybe they could do that with mice and see if there are substantial differences in methylation when the mothers of the twins have different genes.
James Boettcher James Boettcher
Jan. 24, 2009 at 2:11am
* Interesting article - can you please confirm the statement in chapter seven that *early* splitting monozygotic twins are *more* similar in their methylation patterns than late-splitting ones? Seems to me it should be the other way around, intuitively.
Tattoos on the skin can say a lot about a person. On a deeper level, chemical tattoos on a person’s DNA are just as distinctive and individual — and say far more about a person’s life history.
A pair of reports published online January 18 in Nature Genetics show just how important one type of DNA tattoo, called methylation, can be. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University report the unexpected finding that DNA methylation — a chemical alteration that turns off genes — occurs most often near, but not within, the DNA regions scientists have typically studied. The other report, from researchers at the University of Toronto and collaborators, suggests that identical twins owe their similarities not only to having the same genetic makeup, but also to certain methylation patterns established in the fertilized egg.
Methylation is one of many epigenetic signals — chemical changes to DNA and its associated proteins — that modify gene activity without altering the genetic information itself. Methylation and other epigenetic signals help guide stem cells as they develop into other types of cells. Mistakes in methylation near certain critical genes can lead to cancer.
The Johns Hopkins group has now shown that DNA methylation is more common at what they call “CpG island shores” instead of at the CpG islands that most researchers have focused on. CpG islands are short stretches of DNA rich in the paired bases cytosine and guanine, letters “C” and “G” in the genetic alphabet. Methyl groups attach to cytosine bases in DNA.
CpG islands are located near the start sites of genes and help control a gene’s activity. It’s been thought that planting a methyl group on an island declares the nearby gene off-limits, blocking activity.
Researchers have thought of methylation as a type of long-term memory, preserving environmental effects on genes long after those cues have disappeared, says Rolf Ohlsson, a geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Scientists have long suspected that differences in epigenetic marks shaped by environmental cues could account for why identical twins don’t look, behave or get sick exactly alike despite having identical genetic makeups. But no one had mapped out all the places, if any, where epigenetic marks differ between twins. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Now a team led by Arturas Petronis of the University of Toronto has explored all of the CpG islands dotting the genome to see which sport methylation flags. The team compared the methylation patterns of twins from monozygotic pairs — twins created when a single embryo splits. Although the twins had identical DNA, their methylation of CpG islands varied. But the methylation patterns in monozygotic twins were more similar than those in fraternal twins, who develop from separate eggs. And the group found that the amount of variation between monozygotic twins correlates with the time the embryo split: Counterintuitively, twins from an early-splitting embryo have more similar methylation patterns than twins from a later split.
Epigenetic patterns established in the early embryo are carried throughout life, with some differences introduced by the environment and others by random chance and error in replicating the patterns as a person develops. DNA is reproduced with high fidelity — mistakes happen in about one in a million bases — but the process of reproducing epigenetic patterns in dividing cells is more error-prone, with one in a thousand epigenetic marks going awry.
Petronis thinks the similarity between monozygotic twins results not from shared DNA sequences but from having come from the same embryo. “We don’t see any reason to think that the DNA sequence makes up the epigenetic profile,” Petronis says.
But swimming away from CpG islands may offer a different perspective. Andrew Feinberg, director of the Epigenetics Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and colleagues embarked on a genome-wide tour to chart DNA methylation in different human tissues. The researchers had expected that each tissue would have a characteristic methylation pattern, indicating which genes are turned off and which are turned on to build a liver, spleen, brain or other tissue. Often researchers examine methylation only at CpG islands, but Feinberg says that most islands are surprisingly free of methylation in most tissues.
“We were always a bit skeptical of this island thing,” he says. So the team used a method that could reveal every place in the genome where a methylation flag was staked.
The team did find characteristic patterns in each tissue type, but not in CpG islands, where researchers expected. Methylation flagged DNA in liver, spleen and brain at thousands of places along the CpG island shores. The shores contained about 76 percent of the methylation flags shown to be characteristic of specific tissue types.
“This is a discovery that is totally unexpected,” says Ohlsson. Feinberg’s team has found “a signature of the genome that we weren’t aware of before.”
DNA in mouse tissues also has “shore” methylation patterns similar to those in corresponding human tissues. About 51 percent of the shores methylated in mouse tissues were also methylated in human tissues, indicating that DNA methylation of CpG island shores is an ancient, and important, method of controlling genes, Feinberg says.
When looking at colon tumors, the team found that methylation patterns in the shores of the cancer cells were more eroded than those in healthy colon cells. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET Feinberg says a breakdown in the patterns may cause colon stem cells to develop inappropriately, leading to cancer.
Unpublished research by Dag Undlien of the University of Oslo, done on sabbatical in Feinberg’s lab, indicates that monozygotic twins share more shore methylation patterns than fraternal twins do, and are even more similar than Petronis’ research suggests, Feinberg says.
Feinberg thinks evidence from his lab, though preliminary, indicates that DNA sequence does help determine epigenetic patterns. He calls Petronis’ report, “a terribly interesting paper,” but adds, “I think there may be a stronger genetic contribution than is suggested by his data.” http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET
Regardless of who is correct, Ohlsson says that Feinberg’s discovery of CpG island shores will force scientists “to refocus our efforts to figure out what DNA methylation is doing.”
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Comments 4
* The researchers used in-bred mice strains to essentially do the experiment suggested by James Boettcher. Some epigenetic marks are made during development in the womb, but many are already established in egg and sperm that lead to the fertilized embryo.
The researchers speculate that early splitting twins are more similar because the split occurs before differentiation of cells toward specific cell types. Early-splitting embryos therefore contain the same basic epigenetic program. In later-splitting embryos, one twin would carry epigenetic marks established as the cells it originated from began to differentiate. Those marks would be absent in the other twin and vice versa, leading to greater epigenetic diversity in the late-splitting twins.
Tina Hesman Saey Tina Hesman Saey
Feb. 24, 2009 at 4:55pm
* Beyond Darwin 200
Melatonin Switches On Mostly Intercell Maintenance
Wake up.
Re-think-plan-do-assess Epigenetics, Sleep And Melatonin works.
A. "Epigenetics reveals unexpected, and some identical, results"
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40060/title/Epigenetics_reveals_unexpected%2C_and_some_identical%2C_results
One study finds tissue-specific methylation signatures in the genome; another a similarity between identical twins in DNA’s chemical tagging.
I humbly suggest : Re-think-plan-do-assess Epigenetics Works, founded on scientific conception that genes and genomes are organisms.
B. "Sleep, Melatonin, Cancers And Beyond Darwin 200"
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/100/122.page#1412
I humbly suggest: Re-think-plan-do-assess works, founded on scientific conception that genes and genomes are organisms.
C. Apparent functional aspects of melatonin
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Neurology.html#Melatonin
Melatonin is a hormone secreted by the human pineal gland during night-time darkness, and it is now being marketed in the US as a nutritional supplement. The hormone is an indoleamine compound derived from the amino acid *tryptophan, with *serotonin as an intermediate precursor.
1) The most important role of melatonin in all species is to provide a hormonal signal of night-time darkness. The secretion of the hormone is tightly controlled by the *circadian pacemaker. 2) Melatonin is a phylogenetically ancient hormone, found even in some single-cell organisms and in some plants. 3) At the cellular level, melatonin receptors are members of the superfamily of *G protein-coupled receptors...Activation of these receptors inhibits *cyclic AMP production by the enzyme adenylyl cyclase.
cAMP (cyclic AMP) acts as an intracellular hormone (i.e., a chemical messenger). Cyclic AMP is derived from ATP in a reaction catalyzed by the enzyme adenylyl cyclase (also called adenyl cyclase and adenylate cyclase).
I humbly suggest: Melatonin, the phylogenetically ancient hormone, was evolved by the genome during the early single-cells eons when they evolved community life cultures and graduated from sunlight-only to metabolism-too energy production. Melatonin's role was to signal that the genes are asleep, their functional activities are shut off, and it is time for the security and maintenance crews to do their tasks, especially to clean up the intercell environment, for keeping the community of cells in proper state.
D. It all adds up to:
Gene: a primal Earth's organism. (1st stratum organism)
Genome: a multigenes organism consisting of a cooperative commune of its member genes. (2nd stratum organism)
"Life's Manifest"
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/112.page#578
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Dov Henis
(Comments From The 22nd Century)
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-P81pQcU1dLBbHgtjQjxG_Q--?cq=1
Dov Henis Dov Henis
Jan. 29, 2009 at 3:08pm Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
* Isn't the "characteristic pattern of methylation" placed on the embryo by the mother? I wonder if there are any twins born by IVF to different mothers? Maybe they could do that with mice and see if there are substantial differences in methylation when the mothers of the twins have different genes.
James Boettcher James Boettcher
Jan. 24, 2009 at 2:11am
* Interesting article - can you please confirm the statement in chapter seven that *early* splitting monozygotic twins are *more* similar in their methylation patterns than late-splitting ones? Seems to me it should be the other way around, intuitively.
changes 2.cha.0002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
People who don’t typically get distressed by routine events that might unnerve others seem to have a reduced likelihood of developing dementia in old age, concludes a study of elderly Swedish people published in the Jan. 20 Neurology. http://Louis1J1Sheehan1Esquire.us
Physician Laura Fratiglioni of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and her colleagues studied 506 people in their 80s who didn’t have dementia upon enrolling in a long-term medical study. All participants agreed to take personality tests, filling out a questionnaire that assessed what scientists call neuroticism, a state of being easily distressed. The questions also revealed how extroverted a person is. http://Louis1J1Sheehan1Esquire.us
Interviews of the participants determined whether a person was likely to be socially active or to live a more isolated life.
Over the six-year study, 144 of the participants developed dementia. An analysis of the personality and lifestyle data suggested that people with low levels of neuroticism and high scores on extrovert traits were the least likely to develop dementia. When addressed in the context of an individual’s lifestyle — ranging from social butterfly to shut-in — the findings suggested that having a socially integrated lifestyle may provide a buffer against the pro-dementia risk of being easily distressed. But in people leading more isolated lives, having low neuroticism scores still seemed to offer some protection against dementia.
The researchers accounted for differences among the participants in age, gender, education, depression symptoms, vascular problems, genetic factors linked to Alzheimer’s risk and cognitive function at the start of the study.
The findings confirm past reports suggesting that personality and lifestyle factors can contribute to dementia risk in some way other than well- established risk factors, says neuropsychologist Robert Wilson of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Those factors include amyloid-beta plaques, Lewy body deposits, tau tangles in cells and brain-tissue damage from strokes.
Wilson’s group has conducted autopsy studies of people and found no relationship between neuroticism and plaques or the other familiar hallmarks of dementia. “There must be some sort of novel mechanism involved that somehow renders you more likely to express dementia,” he says. “No one is sure what it is.”
There are theories. For example, people with high neuroticism scores also have high circulating levels of stress hormones. “Generally, that’s bad for you over time,” Wilson says. Studies in animals suggest that these extra hormones damage parts of the brain implicated in memory and thinking, he says.
The new study and other research linking personality and lifestyle to dementia risks will help to focus researchers’ attention on this remaining riddle, he says. “If we could understand why personality traits like neuroticism contribute to risk … it might offer insights into novel ways to reduce that risk.” These might include exercise, antidepressants or dietary changes, Wilson says. http://Louis1J1Sheehan1Esquire.us
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire The study suggests that an active lifestyle may buffer against the negative effects of high neuroticism, even in extroverts, says study coauthor Hui-Xin Wang, a research scientist also at the Karolinska Institute. "But it is difficult to say to what extent lifestyle intervention can offset a person's basic personality characteristics," she cautions. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
People who don’t typically get distressed by routine events that might unnerve others seem to have a reduced likelihood of developing dementia in old age, concludes a study of elderly Swedish people published in the Jan. 20 Neurology. http://Louis1J1Sheehan1Esquire.us
Physician Laura Fratiglioni of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and her colleagues studied 506 people in their 80s who didn’t have dementia upon enrolling in a long-term medical study. All participants agreed to take personality tests, filling out a questionnaire that assessed what scientists call neuroticism, a state of being easily distressed. The questions also revealed how extroverted a person is. http://Louis1J1Sheehan1Esquire.us
Interviews of the participants determined whether a person was likely to be socially active or to live a more isolated life.
Over the six-year study, 144 of the participants developed dementia. An analysis of the personality and lifestyle data suggested that people with low levels of neuroticism and high scores on extrovert traits were the least likely to develop dementia. When addressed in the context of an individual’s lifestyle — ranging from social butterfly to shut-in — the findings suggested that having a socially integrated lifestyle may provide a buffer against the pro-dementia risk of being easily distressed. But in people leading more isolated lives, having low neuroticism scores still seemed to offer some protection against dementia.
The researchers accounted for differences among the participants in age, gender, education, depression symptoms, vascular problems, genetic factors linked to Alzheimer’s risk and cognitive function at the start of the study.
The findings confirm past reports suggesting that personality and lifestyle factors can contribute to dementia risk in some way other than well- established risk factors, says neuropsychologist Robert Wilson of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Those factors include amyloid-beta plaques, Lewy body deposits, tau tangles in cells and brain-tissue damage from strokes.
Wilson’s group has conducted autopsy studies of people and found no relationship between neuroticism and plaques or the other familiar hallmarks of dementia. “There must be some sort of novel mechanism involved that somehow renders you more likely to express dementia,” he says. “No one is sure what it is.”
There are theories. For example, people with high neuroticism scores also have high circulating levels of stress hormones. “Generally, that’s bad for you over time,” Wilson says. Studies in animals suggest that these extra hormones damage parts of the brain implicated in memory and thinking, he says.
The new study and other research linking personality and lifestyle to dementia risks will help to focus researchers’ attention on this remaining riddle, he says. “If we could understand why personality traits like neuroticism contribute to risk … it might offer insights into novel ways to reduce that risk.” These might include exercise, antidepressants or dietary changes, Wilson says. http://Louis1J1Sheehan1Esquire.us
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire The study suggests that an active lifestyle may buffer against the negative effects of high neuroticism, even in extroverts, says study coauthor Hui-Xin Wang, a research scientist also at the Karolinska Institute. "But it is difficult to say to what extent lifestyle intervention can offset a person's basic personality characteristics," she cautions. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
gates 1.gat771772.8 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
You wouldn’t ask a toddler to wear an adult’s shoes or to chow down its dad’s caloric intake. That’s why clothes, menu portions, even video lengths are adapted to the diminutive sizes appropriate to young children. Yet all too often, medicines are tested in adults and then dispensed in what amounts to an almost one-size-fits-all approach.
Sure, cough-syrup labels recommend that the number of teaspoons administered should be loosely based a patient’s weight. Yet the efficacy of medicine doesn’t necessarily scale with weight alone. It may relate to breathing rate or blood volume, which in children may not scale up or down proportionately with height or weight. Similarly, a therapy’s benefit may scale with the size of an organ — one that may fail to grow much prior to puberty, or with the production of some breakdown enzyme that doesn’t get revved up until a child is at least 6 years old.
One timely example came to light last week involving Vicks VapoRub. It turns out that the mucus buildup fostered by inhaling Vicks vapors may disproportionately risk closing off a young child’s airways, not only because those airways are far narrower than in adults to start with, but also because the walls of major airways in babies are flimsier — less rigid.
For such reasons, pediatricians have reiterated until they’re blue in the face that children are not just small adults.
The pharmaceutical industry, however, has tended to treat children as if they were merely light-weight grown-ups. Or ignored youngsters entirely. According to the World Health Organization, “More than 50 percent of medicines prescribed for children have either not been developed specifically for children or have not been proven to be effective and safe for their use.”
“Children are suffering and dying from diseases we can treat, and yet we lack the critical evidence needed to deliver appropriate effective, affordable medicines that might save them,” argues Carissa Etienne, Assistant Director-General for WHO in Geneva, Switzerland. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US As such, she contends, “We must take the guess work out of medicines for children.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
In has stepped wealthy benefactors: Bill and Melinda Gates (of Microsoft fame). WHO announced today that their foundation has just donated $9.7 million to work with the United Nations Children’s Fund — better known as UNICEF — to conduct research on establishing child-size dispensing rates for critical medicines. They’re especially needed for treating diarrheal diseases. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US About 160 children around the world every hour die from such diseases. Currently few medicines outside the developed world have been formulated to successfully treat them.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Although it’s great that the Gates Foundation has stepped forward, the travesty is that the world’s pharmaceutical firms and health agencies didn’t beat them to the punch.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
You wouldn’t ask a toddler to wear an adult’s shoes or to chow down its dad’s caloric intake. That’s why clothes, menu portions, even video lengths are adapted to the diminutive sizes appropriate to young children. Yet all too often, medicines are tested in adults and then dispensed in what amounts to an almost one-size-fits-all approach.
Sure, cough-syrup labels recommend that the number of teaspoons administered should be loosely based a patient’s weight. Yet the efficacy of medicine doesn’t necessarily scale with weight alone. It may relate to breathing rate or blood volume, which in children may not scale up or down proportionately with height or weight. Similarly, a therapy’s benefit may scale with the size of an organ — one that may fail to grow much prior to puberty, or with the production of some breakdown enzyme that doesn’t get revved up until a child is at least 6 years old.
One timely example came to light last week involving Vicks VapoRub. It turns out that the mucus buildup fostered by inhaling Vicks vapors may disproportionately risk closing off a young child’s airways, not only because those airways are far narrower than in adults to start with, but also because the walls of major airways in babies are flimsier — less rigid.
For such reasons, pediatricians have reiterated until they’re blue in the face that children are not just small adults.
The pharmaceutical industry, however, has tended to treat children as if they were merely light-weight grown-ups. Or ignored youngsters entirely. According to the World Health Organization, “More than 50 percent of medicines prescribed for children have either not been developed specifically for children or have not been proven to be effective and safe for their use.”
“Children are suffering and dying from diseases we can treat, and yet we lack the critical evidence needed to deliver appropriate effective, affordable medicines that might save them,” argues Carissa Etienne, Assistant Director-General for WHO in Geneva, Switzerland. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US As such, she contends, “We must take the guess work out of medicines for children.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
In has stepped wealthy benefactors: Bill and Melinda Gates (of Microsoft fame). WHO announced today that their foundation has just donated $9.7 million to work with the United Nations Children’s Fund — better known as UNICEF — to conduct research on establishing child-size dispensing rates for critical medicines. They’re especially needed for treating diarrheal diseases. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US About 160 children around the world every hour die from such diseases. Currently few medicines outside the developed world have been formulated to successfully treat them.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Although it’s great that the Gates Foundation has stepped forward, the travesty is that the world’s pharmaceutical firms and health agencies didn’t beat them to the punch.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
tubulin 5.tub.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire As cells get older, they don’t lose their hair or teeth. Instead, they lose control over their nuclear membrane, the protective barrier that encases DNA in the nucleus, concludes a study published in the Jan. 23 Cell.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US This age-dependent leakiness may be closely tied to cell deterioration and age-related diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, the new work suggests.
“The implications of this study for our study of brain aging and for neurodegenerative diseases are potentially profound,” comments John Woulfe, a specialist in age-related diseases at the University of Ottawa in Canada. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire The new findings, he says, represent “an important step forward by bringing the gateway to the nucleus, the nuclear pore, into the fray.”http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Nuclear membranes are like screen doors on a porch: They let the refreshing breeze in but keep the mosquitoes out. The double-layered membrane allows nuclear entry for VIP proteins, most of which control gene activity. The proteins travel into the nucleus through channels in the membrane called nuclear pores.
Meanwhile, damaging chemicals and proteins that float around in the cell’s cytoplasm, the jellylike liquid that surrounds the nucleus and other organelles, are rebuffed by the membrane.
Using cells from small worms called Caenorhabditis elegans and cells from rats, Martin Hetzer of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., and colleagues found that the proteins that form a nuclear pore stay in the same location for the remainder of the cell’s life. The researchers monitored the location of these pore proteins by marking several of them with green fluorescent protein. After seeing that the pore proteins stay in the same place on the same cells, the researchers concluded that these pores “exhibit extreme stability.”
These nuclear pores are unusually long-lived for cell parts, says Hetzer. Just as drivers replace worn-out parts as cars get older, most cell parts are constantly replaced. But nuclear pores are in it for the long haul. “We think that pores are among the most stable, if not the most stable, structures in our cells,” says Hetzer.
Because nuclear pores don’t get repaired or replaced, Hetzer and colleagues next wanted to know whether the pores maintain a high level of performance even as the cell ages.
The researchers found that old cells’ nuclear membranes allow entry to molecules that are excluded in cells’ younger days. Fluorescently labeled molecules normally too large to enter the nucleus slipped right through old nuclear membranes, while younger nuclear membranes performed perfectly.
Perhaps most dangerous, a protein called tubulin that is usually restricted to the cytoplasm was able to slip through the nuclear membrane of old cells, the researchers saw.
Filamentous tangles of tubulin in the nuclei of cells have been linked to the aging process and to neurodegenerative diseases. These nuclear filaments are known to increase with age, but their origins have been a mystery, says Hetzer. Patients with Parkinson’s disease have such tangles in cells in a brain region known to be affected by the illness. “We speculate that the nuclei in these patients are leaky,” says Hetzer.
The research team’s next step is to study the link between leaky nuclear membranes and age-related diseases. If leaky nuclei contribute to the cellular degeneration seen in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, then leaky nuclei may “represent a viable future therapeutic target,” says Woulfe.
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Comments 3
* Aging, Leakiness Of Nucleus Membrane
The Aging Whole Being A Construct Of Its Constituents
A. "As cells age, the nucleus lets the bad guys in"
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40136/title/As_cells_age%2C_the_nucleus_lets_the_bad_guys_in
A study tracks a growing 'leakiness' in the membrane of the cell nucleus that could contribute to aging and even to diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
B. The nucleus membrane is an organ, a functional organ of the genome organism
All biological materials, of all forms, 'age'-change with time and with environments-circumstances. The list of possible age-related pore-leakiness effectors comprises a variety of 'aging' facors that continuously modify the functionality of the pore and modifies also the characteristics of the constituents of the inventory of materials within the outer cell membrane, the largest organ of the genome.
C. "Aging Not Approachable With Oversimplification". Aging Is A Closed Chain.
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/100/122.page#1318
Aging genes age genomes age cells age cellular organisms and vice versa, the whole WHOLE being a construct of its constituents...
Dov Henis
(Comments From The 22nd Century)
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-P81pQcU1dLBbHgtjQjxG_Q--?cq=1
Life's Manifest
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/112.page#578
Dov Henis Dov Henis
Jan. 27, 2009 at 10:52am
* Continued healthy living;quality vegetables; fruits; grains,etc.; clean water and air need to be pursued for all and especially for the young. Does the protein,tubulin slip through the old cells of elderly healthy adults as easily as through the old cells of elderly, unhealthy adults, as evidenced in the research referred to in the above article?
corina nicumber corcan09 http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Jan. 25, 2009 at 4:36pm
* You don't suppose this is related to free radicals, and their effect on proteins? http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US This would certainly explain the neuro-protective effects of all of the antioxidants. Since these proteins are not replaced in the life of the cell, and the long life of neurons, this would be a fruitful area of research, if we are to improve not only length of life, but also quality of life in older people. Sadly, unless these nuclear pore proteins can be repaired, a life of stress and chemical abuse could not be undone, no matter how much Vit-E you take when the symptoms of Parkinsons, or dementia ,or alcoholic neuropathy set in.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire As cells get older, they don’t lose their hair or teeth. Instead, they lose control over their nuclear membrane, the protective barrier that encases DNA in the nucleus, concludes a study published in the Jan. 23 Cell.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US This age-dependent leakiness may be closely tied to cell deterioration and age-related diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, the new work suggests.
“The implications of this study for our study of brain aging and for neurodegenerative diseases are potentially profound,” comments John Woulfe, a specialist in age-related diseases at the University of Ottawa in Canada. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire The new findings, he says, represent “an important step forward by bringing the gateway to the nucleus, the nuclear pore, into the fray.”http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Nuclear membranes are like screen doors on a porch: They let the refreshing breeze in but keep the mosquitoes out. The double-layered membrane allows nuclear entry for VIP proteins, most of which control gene activity. The proteins travel into the nucleus through channels in the membrane called nuclear pores.
Meanwhile, damaging chemicals and proteins that float around in the cell’s cytoplasm, the jellylike liquid that surrounds the nucleus and other organelles, are rebuffed by the membrane.
Using cells from small worms called Caenorhabditis elegans and cells from rats, Martin Hetzer of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., and colleagues found that the proteins that form a nuclear pore stay in the same location for the remainder of the cell’s life. The researchers monitored the location of these pore proteins by marking several of them with green fluorescent protein. After seeing that the pore proteins stay in the same place on the same cells, the researchers concluded that these pores “exhibit extreme stability.”
These nuclear pores are unusually long-lived for cell parts, says Hetzer. Just as drivers replace worn-out parts as cars get older, most cell parts are constantly replaced. But nuclear pores are in it for the long haul. “We think that pores are among the most stable, if not the most stable, structures in our cells,” says Hetzer.
Because nuclear pores don’t get repaired or replaced, Hetzer and colleagues next wanted to know whether the pores maintain a high level of performance even as the cell ages.
The researchers found that old cells’ nuclear membranes allow entry to molecules that are excluded in cells’ younger days. Fluorescently labeled molecules normally too large to enter the nucleus slipped right through old nuclear membranes, while younger nuclear membranes performed perfectly.
Perhaps most dangerous, a protein called tubulin that is usually restricted to the cytoplasm was able to slip through the nuclear membrane of old cells, the researchers saw.
Filamentous tangles of tubulin in the nuclei of cells have been linked to the aging process and to neurodegenerative diseases. These nuclear filaments are known to increase with age, but their origins have been a mystery, says Hetzer. Patients with Parkinson’s disease have such tangles in cells in a brain region known to be affected by the illness. “We speculate that the nuclei in these patients are leaky,” says Hetzer.
The research team’s next step is to study the link between leaky nuclear membranes and age-related diseases. If leaky nuclei contribute to the cellular degeneration seen in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, then leaky nuclei may “represent a viable future therapeutic target,” says Woulfe.
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* Comment
Found in: Biology, Body & Brain and Genes & Cells
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Comments 3
* Aging, Leakiness Of Nucleus Membrane
The Aging Whole Being A Construct Of Its Constituents
A. "As cells age, the nucleus lets the bad guys in"
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40136/title/As_cells_age%2C_the_nucleus_lets_the_bad_guys_in
A study tracks a growing 'leakiness' in the membrane of the cell nucleus that could contribute to aging and even to diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
B. The nucleus membrane is an organ, a functional organ of the genome organism
All biological materials, of all forms, 'age'-change with time and with environments-circumstances. The list of possible age-related pore-leakiness effectors comprises a variety of 'aging' facors that continuously modify the functionality of the pore and modifies also the characteristics of the constituents of the inventory of materials within the outer cell membrane, the largest organ of the genome.
C. "Aging Not Approachable With Oversimplification". Aging Is A Closed Chain.
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/100/122.page#1318
Aging genes age genomes age cells age cellular organisms and vice versa, the whole WHOLE being a construct of its constituents...
Dov Henis
(Comments From The 22nd Century)
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-P81pQcU1dLBbHgtjQjxG_Q--?cq=1
Life's Manifest
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/112.page#578
Dov Henis Dov Henis
Jan. 27, 2009 at 10:52am
* Continued healthy living;quality vegetables; fruits; grains,etc.; clean water and air need to be pursued for all and especially for the young. Does the protein,tubulin slip through the old cells of elderly healthy adults as easily as through the old cells of elderly, unhealthy adults, as evidenced in the research referred to in the above article?
corina nicumber corcan09 http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Jan. 25, 2009 at 4:36pm
* You don't suppose this is related to free radicals, and their effect on proteins? http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US This would certainly explain the neuro-protective effects of all of the antioxidants. Since these proteins are not replaced in the life of the cell, and the long life of neurons, this would be a fruitful area of research, if we are to improve not only length of life, but also quality of life in older people. Sadly, unless these nuclear pore proteins can be repaired, a life of stress and chemical abuse could not be undone, no matter how much Vit-E you take when the symptoms of Parkinsons, or dementia ,or alcoholic neuropathy set in.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
patent 0.pat.001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
The phrase patent medicine comes from the late 17th century[1] marketing of medical elixirs, when those who found favour with royalty were issued letters patent authorising the use of the royal endorsement in advertising. The name stuck well after the American Revolution made these endorsements by the crowned heads of Europe obsolete. Few if any of the nostrums were actually patented; chemical patents came into use in the USA in 1925, and in any case attempting to monopolize a drug, medical device, or medical procedure was considered unethical by the standards upheld during the era of patent medicine. Furthermore, patenting one of these remedies would have meant publicly disclosing its ingredients, which most promoters wanted to avoid.
Instead, the compounders of these nostrums used a primitive version of branding to distinguish themselves from the crowd of their competitors. Many familiar names from the era live on in brands such as Luden's cough drops, Lydia E. Pinkham's vegetable compound for women, Fletcher's Castoria, and even Angostura bitters, which was once marketed as a stomach remedy. Many of these medicines, though sold at high prices, were made from quite cheap ingredients. Their composition was well known within the pharmacy trade, and druggists would sell (for a slightly lower price) medicines of almost identical composition that they had manufactured themselves. To protect profits, the branded medicine advertisements laid great emphasis on the brand-names, and urged the public to accept no substitutes.
At least in the earliest days, the history of patent medicines is coextensive with the history of medicine itself. Empirical medicine, and the beginning of the application of the scientific method to medicine, began to yield a few effective herbal and mineral drugs for the physician's arsenal. These few tested and true remedies, on the other hand, were inadequate to cover the bewildering variety of diseases and symptoms. Beyond these patches of knowledge they had to resort to occultism; the "doctrine of signatures" — essentially, the application of sympathetic magic to pharmacology — held that nature had hidden clues to medically effective drugs in their resemblances to the human body and its parts. This led medical men to hope, at least, that, say, walnut shells might be good for skull fractures. Given the state of the pharmacopoeia, and patients' demands for something to take, physicians began making "blunderbuss" concoctions of various drugs, proven and unproven. These concoctions were the ancestors of the several nostrums.
Touting these nostrums was one of the first major projects of the advertising industry. The marketing of nostrums under implausible claims has a long history. In Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), allusion is made to the sale of medical compounds claimed to be universal panaceas:
As to Squire Western, he was seldom out of the sick-room, unless when he was engaged either in the field or over his bottle. Nay, he would sometimes retire hither to take his beer, and it was not without difficulty that he was prevented from forcing Jones to take his beer too: for no quack ever held his nostrum to be a more general panacea than he did this; which, he said, had more virtue in it than was in all the physic in an apothecary's shop.
Lydia Pinkham's Herb Medicine (circa 1875) remains on the market today.
Within the English-speaking world, patent medicines are as old as journalism. "Anderson's Pills" were first made in England in the 1630s; the recipe was allegedly learned in Venice by a Scot who claimed to be physician to King Charles I. The use of letters patent to obtain exclusive marketing rights to certain labelled formulas and their marketing fueled the circulation of early newspapers. The use of invented names began early. In 1726 a patent was also granted to the makers of "Dr. Bateman's Pectoral Drops"; at least on the documents that survive, there was no Dr. Bateman. This was the enterprise of a Benjamin Okell and a group of promoters who owned a warehouse and a print shop to promote the product.
A number of American institutions owe their existence to the patent medicine industry, most notably a number of the older almanacs, which were originally given away as promotional items by patent medicine manufacturers. Perhaps the most successful industry that grew up out of the business of patent medicine advertisements, though, was founded by William H. Gannett in Maine in 1866. There were few circulating newspapers in Maine in that era, so Gannett founded a periodical, Comfort, whose chief purpose was to propose the merits of Oxien, a nostrum made from the fruit of the baobab tree, to the rural folks of Maine. Gannett's newspaper became the first publication of Guy Gannett Communications, which eventually owned four Maine dailies and several television stations. (The family-owned firm is not related to the giant Gannett Corporation, publisher of "USA Today.") An early pioneer in the use of advertising to promote patent medicine was the New York businessman Benjamin Brandreth whose "Vegetable Universal Pill" eventually became one of the best selling patent medicines in the United States [2] “…A congressional committee in 1849 reported that Brandreth was the nation’s largest proprietary advertiser… Between 1862 and 1863 Brandreth’s average annual gross income surpassed $600,000…”[3] For fifty years Brandreth’s name was a household word in the United States[4] Indeed, the Brandreth pills were so well known they received mention in Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick[5].
Kickapoo Indian "Sagwa", sold at medicine shows http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
Another method of publicity undertaken mostly by smaller firms was the "medicine show," a traveling circus of sorts which offered vaudeville-style entertainments on a small scale, and which climaxed in a pitch for the nostrum being sold. Muscle man acts were especially popular on these tours, for this enabled the salesman to tout the physical vigour offered by the potion he was selling. The showmen frequently employed shills, who would step forward from the crowd and offer "unsolicited" testimonials about the benefits of the medicine for sale. Often, the nostrum was manufactured and bottled in the same wagon that the show travelled in. The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company became one of the largest and most successful medicine show operators; their shows had an American Indian or Wild West theme, and employed many Native Americans as spokespeople. The medicine show lived on in American folklore and Western movies long after they had vanished from public meeting places.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
The phrase patent medicine comes from the late 17th century[1] marketing of medical elixirs, when those who found favour with royalty were issued letters patent authorising the use of the royal endorsement in advertising. The name stuck well after the American Revolution made these endorsements by the crowned heads of Europe obsolete. Few if any of the nostrums were actually patented; chemical patents came into use in the USA in 1925, and in any case attempting to monopolize a drug, medical device, or medical procedure was considered unethical by the standards upheld during the era of patent medicine. Furthermore, patenting one of these remedies would have meant publicly disclosing its ingredients, which most promoters wanted to avoid.
Instead, the compounders of these nostrums used a primitive version of branding to distinguish themselves from the crowd of their competitors. Many familiar names from the era live on in brands such as Luden's cough drops, Lydia E. Pinkham's vegetable compound for women, Fletcher's Castoria, and even Angostura bitters, which was once marketed as a stomach remedy. Many of these medicines, though sold at high prices, were made from quite cheap ingredients. Their composition was well known within the pharmacy trade, and druggists would sell (for a slightly lower price) medicines of almost identical composition that they had manufactured themselves. To protect profits, the branded medicine advertisements laid great emphasis on the brand-names, and urged the public to accept no substitutes.
At least in the earliest days, the history of patent medicines is coextensive with the history of medicine itself. Empirical medicine, and the beginning of the application of the scientific method to medicine, began to yield a few effective herbal and mineral drugs for the physician's arsenal. These few tested and true remedies, on the other hand, were inadequate to cover the bewildering variety of diseases and symptoms. Beyond these patches of knowledge they had to resort to occultism; the "doctrine of signatures" — essentially, the application of sympathetic magic to pharmacology — held that nature had hidden clues to medically effective drugs in their resemblances to the human body and its parts. This led medical men to hope, at least, that, say, walnut shells might be good for skull fractures. Given the state of the pharmacopoeia, and patients' demands for something to take, physicians began making "blunderbuss" concoctions of various drugs, proven and unproven. These concoctions were the ancestors of the several nostrums.
Touting these nostrums was one of the first major projects of the advertising industry. The marketing of nostrums under implausible claims has a long history. In Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), allusion is made to the sale of medical compounds claimed to be universal panaceas:
As to Squire Western, he was seldom out of the sick-room, unless when he was engaged either in the field or over his bottle. Nay, he would sometimes retire hither to take his beer, and it was not without difficulty that he was prevented from forcing Jones to take his beer too: for no quack ever held his nostrum to be a more general panacea than he did this; which, he said, had more virtue in it than was in all the physic in an apothecary's shop.
Lydia Pinkham's Herb Medicine (circa 1875) remains on the market today.
Within the English-speaking world, patent medicines are as old as journalism. "Anderson's Pills" were first made in England in the 1630s; the recipe was allegedly learned in Venice by a Scot who claimed to be physician to King Charles I. The use of letters patent to obtain exclusive marketing rights to certain labelled formulas and their marketing fueled the circulation of early newspapers. The use of invented names began early. In 1726 a patent was also granted to the makers of "Dr. Bateman's Pectoral Drops"; at least on the documents that survive, there was no Dr. Bateman. This was the enterprise of a Benjamin Okell and a group of promoters who owned a warehouse and a print shop to promote the product.
A number of American institutions owe their existence to the patent medicine industry, most notably a number of the older almanacs, which were originally given away as promotional items by patent medicine manufacturers. Perhaps the most successful industry that grew up out of the business of patent medicine advertisements, though, was founded by William H. Gannett in Maine in 1866. There were few circulating newspapers in Maine in that era, so Gannett founded a periodical, Comfort, whose chief purpose was to propose the merits of Oxien, a nostrum made from the fruit of the baobab tree, to the rural folks of Maine. Gannett's newspaper became the first publication of Guy Gannett Communications, which eventually owned four Maine dailies and several television stations. (The family-owned firm is not related to the giant Gannett Corporation, publisher of "USA Today.") An early pioneer in the use of advertising to promote patent medicine was the New York businessman Benjamin Brandreth whose "Vegetable Universal Pill" eventually became one of the best selling patent medicines in the United States [2] “…A congressional committee in 1849 reported that Brandreth was the nation’s largest proprietary advertiser… Between 1862 and 1863 Brandreth’s average annual gross income surpassed $600,000…”[3] For fifty years Brandreth’s name was a household word in the United States[4] Indeed, the Brandreth pills were so well known they received mention in Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick[5].
Kickapoo Indian "Sagwa", sold at medicine shows http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
Another method of publicity undertaken mostly by smaller firms was the "medicine show," a traveling circus of sorts which offered vaudeville-style entertainments on a small scale, and which climaxed in a pitch for the nostrum being sold. Muscle man acts were especially popular on these tours, for this enabled the salesman to tout the physical vigour offered by the potion he was selling. The showmen frequently employed shills, who would step forward from the crowd and offer "unsolicited" testimonials about the benefits of the medicine for sale. Often, the nostrum was manufactured and bottled in the same wagon that the show travelled in. The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company became one of the largest and most successful medicine show operators; their shows had an American Indian or Wild West theme, and employed many Native Americans as spokespeople. The medicine show lived on in American folklore and Western movies long after they had vanished from public meeting places.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
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