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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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“I hope I shall never be obliged for this to sell my notes,” declares the exceedingly upright Colonel Manly in Royall Tyler’s 1787 American comedy, The Contrast, referring to the paper money paid to him for his service as a soldier in the Revolution. “I may be romantic, but I preserve them as a sacred deposit. Their full amount is justly due to me, but as embarrassments, the natural consequences of a long war, disable my country from supporting its credit, I shall wait with patience until it is rich enough to discharge them.” Tyler’s Colonel Manly is just one example of the way early American writers sought to legitimize unsecured paper money at a time when it was still a novel concept, English professor Jennifer Baker argues in her forthcoming book Securing the Commonwealth. To finance the war, the colonies and the Continental Congress issued paper money that was not immediately redeemable for gold or silver. Instead, the governments promised that they could be exchanged for gold at some specified future date—assuming the Revolution was successful. As a result, paper money—and the debt and speculation it represented—were seen by some writers not just as necessary evils but as potentially positive ways to finance communal undertakings and bind the new country together through interdependence. Baker examines the works of several eighteenth-century writers who had a positive view of judicious debt. Even the estimable Benjamin Franklin, who is better known for his warnings about borrowing, demonstrates the value of speculation in his Autobiography. “So much of Franklin’s success depends on debt—on friends lending money and on business contacts,” says Baker. “I see the Autobiography as a work that shows the importance of borrowing to the entrepreneur. Now this alone is not a news flash, but I believe he extends that lesson to the country itself. The country is kind of a fledgling entrepreneur that needs help getting off the ground.” In addition to canonical writings such as Franklin's, Baker has also taken a look at the messages on continental paper money itself. There she finds words and images that support the idea of interdependence and a common endeavor. They included Depressa Resurgit (“Tho' oppressed it rises”), a prediction of victory; Tribulatio Ditat (“tribulation improves”), an encouragement illustrated by a hand threshing wheat; and Exitus In Dubio Est (“the end is uncertain”), what Baker calls “a frank reminder that the colonist must act without complete assurance of victory.” Fortunately for Colonel Manly and the others who held on to their paper money, the U.S. government finally redeemed it in full in 1793.
The Chemistry of Melancholy At Gerard Sanacora’s clinic, some patients can’t sleep, take no pleasure whatsoever from life, and have so completely lost their appetites that, Sanacora says, “we need to put a feeding tube in them or they’ll die.” Other patients can sleep 16 hours straight, and when awake, experience violent mood swings and binge on food. The people in both groups actually suffer from severe depression. But they have very different forms of the disease. In a paper that appeared in the July issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, Sanacora and his colleagues have for the first time shown significant differences in brain chemistry between those diagnosed with melancholia (the insomniacs) and those who have the other variety, which clinicians call atypical depression. The finding may have important clinical benefits. Extreme versions of the two different types of depression are easily diagnosed by their symptoms, but less extreme versions are harder to identify. And the two types don’t respond to the same therapies. Sanacora, who directs the Yale Depression Research Program, says choosing the best medication or combination of therapies for a patient is a trial-and-error process that can take weeks. His study may be a step toward eliminating the guesswork. Sanacora’s team used a brain imaging technique to check the levels of two key chemicals—glutamate and GABA (aminobutyric acid)—that help transmit messages in the brain. In subjects with melancholic depression, they found significant increases in glutamate and reductions in GABA. People with atypical depression also had significant increases in glutamate, but their GABA levels were comparable to those of healthy subjects. Sanacora plans to study depressed patients to determine if their responses to cognitive-behavioral therapy can be predicted by their levels of GABA and glutamate before treatment. Finding predictive biological markers “remains a distant dream,” he says, “but we’re one step closer.”
The Trouble with Memory Though the temperature was close to triple digits, Yale physician Charles A. Morgan wore a ski mask to hide his identity as he entered a stifling room where a POW had just undergone a round of questioning. “Roll up your sleeve,” Morgan told the captive, who'd been manhandled by an interrogator and was in no mood to offer any resistance. The masked doctor found a vein, inserted a syringe, and drew blood. “Spit in the cup,” he said. The POW complied, and as Morgan left the room, blood and saliva samples in hand, the captive was led away to a cell. This was not, however, Abu Ghraib. Morgan, an associate professor of psychiatry at the medical school, was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he was studying the abilities of soldiers enrolled in what he calls an “amazingly realistic” survival training program to recall the identities of their interrogators. Both folk wisdom and countless courtroom dramas have long suggested that the victim of this, or any, kind of traumatic event should forever retain every detail—and make the most reliable witness. “It’s common to hear a crime victim say, ‘I’ll never forget that face,’” says Paul Thomas, a lawyer with the federal defender’s office in Connecticut. Yet Morgan, whose research was funded by, but not conducted for, the military, has found that most of the time, the high stress level that accompanies a direct traumatic experience actually decreases the accuracy of recall. “Memories can be very vivid—and very wrong,” he says. For the research, which was published in the July issue of the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Morgan and his Yale team studied 509 active-duty personnel in the Navy, Marines, and Army. The survival-school training involves two weeks of classroom study followed by a three-day “laboratory,” in which each trainee is let loose in the countryside, tries to avoid capture, and then, when caught—and they’re always caught—is locked up at a mock POW camp for interrogation sessions that involve either relatively low-stress mental trickery or high-stress physical abuse, or both. (Because Morgan had spent time questioning the soldiers during classes, he put on the ski mask when he entered the interrogation room to avoid being recognized.) “It’s a very intense exercise,” says Morgan, who served as an officer in the Navy reserves. “The trainees lose an average of 22 pounds, and their stress hormones can be so high that cases of poison ivy they’ve contracted while they were on the run spontaneously go away.” A day after “release,” each soldier is asked to identify the interrogator. The researchers used one of three law enforcement techniques—a traditional live lineup, a photo spread, and a new method that employs a sequence of photos. Earlier studies had suggested that soldiers subjected to the higher-stress sessions would have the most accurate recall, but Morgan found just the opposite. Only 48 percent of the trainees in the high-stress interrogation group made a correct identification—versus 76 percent of those in the low-stress group. In fact, says Paul Thomas, Morgan’s findings are closer to reality than the courtroom lore of the infallible crime victim. “I’ve had cases in which, an hour after an assault, a victim couldn’t identify the perpetrator,” says Thomas. As part of a follow-up study, Morgan and his team are trying to figure out a way to separate reliable eyewitnesses from also-rans. One line of research involves performance on a face-recognition test. During their survival classes, soldiers were shown two dozen pictures for five seconds each, asked to remember them, and then shown a series of 48 pictures and asked which ones they'd already seen. “Soldiers who did well on this were later the most accurate in identifying their interrogators,” says Morgan, “and those who did badly on it were never accurate.” The team is also studying a small group of soldiers whose accuracy actually improved during high stress. The key to their success seems to be a brain chemical called neuropeptide-Y, a substance known to buffer the negative effects of high amounts of stress hormones. “Soldiers who had the highest levels of NPY had the highest percentage of positive identifications,” says Morgan. “We might be able to use either or both of these tests to screen for recall ability.” Attorneys, however, are not yet demanding blood tests.
Drought’s Equal-Opportunity Effects It’s a doomsday scenario environmentalists sometimes toss around: what would happen if a severe drought hit entire continents at once, parching landscapes from rainforest to grassland to desert? In the past, researchers believed that plant life in each of these areas would respond differently to such a situation because of the unique characteristics of each ecosystem. But according to assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Melinda Smith, that basic assumption may be wrong. In a paper published in the June 10 issue of Nature, Smith and 17 colleagues report that the “rain use efficiency” ratio—the productivity of plant growth per unit of precipitation—is very similar during drought conditions in ecosystems as different as lush forests and dry deserts. The researchers came up with this surprising conclusion by examining several decades' worth of data collected from sites all over North and South America—a tropical forest in Panama, a hardwood forest in Massachusetts, tallgrass prairie in Kansas, a desert in Nevada, and the steppes of Patagonia among them. The data were gathered in the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research program and other efforts. For the analysis reported in Nature, Smith and her colleagues met at a series of workshops held at the University of California-Santa Barbara. They examined annual precipitation and plant growth data and attempted to answer what lead author Travis E. Huxman, a University of Arizona plant physiological ecologist, called “one of the oldest ecological questions: how does water affect how an ecosystem works?” The scientists discovered that rain use efficiency ratios during dry periods remain consistent across the globe regardless of landscape characteristics. “People thought that tropical rainforests wouldn’t respond to drought conditions like deserts do, but these data suggest otherwise,” Smith says. The findings have some frightening implications. If global warming events caused by carbon dioxide emissions produce severe drought in the future, regions that ordinarily produce abundant plant growth, such as rainforests and grasslands, may fare more poorly than anticipated. “According to many models, global warming will decrease water availability,” Smith says, “and based on our results, we would expect much less plant growth than previous predictions would indicate.” John Pastor, a biologist at the Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota, points to the possible long-term repercussions of the climate and growth trends in the group’s model. “These findings suggest that as drought stress increases, we may see widespread declines in productivity across forests, grasslands, and deserts,” says Pastor. “These declines may become economic disasters for the agricultural and timber industries.” He adds that their analysis provides a new, compelling reason for the current administration to place more stringent limits on carbon dioxide emissions. |
Noted The Beinecke’s Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious 230-page medieval work with enigmatic drawings and an unknown language that has attracted many scholarly hypotheses. But according to Gordon Rugg, a senior lecturer in the School of Computing and Mathematics at Keele University in England, devotees—and they are legion—should stop wasting their time. In Scientific American and the journal Cryptologia, Rugg offers evidence that the text of the 400- to 500-year-old manuscript is “a sophisticated hoax.” (He does not contest its age, which is generally accepted as seventeenth century or older.) While Rugg is not the first to cast aspersions, he does demonstrate a plausible modus operandi. Armed with only a “Cardan grille,” a device commonly used by people in the 1500s to create coded messages, Rugg was able to craft many of the grammatical features and “words” used in the text, which he now believes is “cleverly designed nonsense.” Anyone who has ever inhaled knows that smoking marijuana can bring on feelings that are less than groovy. In a study published online in June in the journal Neuropsychopharma- cology, D. Cyril D'Souza, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Yale medical school, and his colleagues showed that when healthy subjects were injected with the active ingredient in pot smoke, they developed temporary schizophrenia-like symptoms such as paranoia, delusions, impaired memory, and emotional withdrawal. D'Souza and his group are examining the action of this chemical, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, on brain receptors to search for clues to the fundamental biology of psychosis. The incidence of breast cancer in the United States is lower among African American women than white women, but the mortality rate is higher for blacks. Yale epidemiologist Beth A. Jones and her colleagues may have solved this mystery. In the August 9 online edition of the journal Cancer, Jones reports that African American women with breast cancer were four times more likely than whites with the disease to have significant mutations in a gene called p53. Its role is to suppress tumors, so the prevalence of altered forms of the gene may account for racial differences in breast cancer outcome. |
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