News Category: Science
At the Base of the Lightening Rod
Uncovering the mysteries of female sexuality puts Queen’s researcher on the fast track to scientific star status
By Janice Kennedy, Canwest News Service March 7, 2009
Searching online recently for a used piano, Meredith Chivers found what looked like a good prospect, e-mailed the seller and was taken aback by his response. Meredith Chivers? he asked. That Meredith Chivers?
The man had seen the Jan. 25 cover story of The New York Times Magazine. Titled “What Do Women Want?” it featured extensive coverage of the groundbreaking work being done by sex researcher Meredith Chivers, a scientist who is carving out an international reputation as an expert in the field of female sexuality. And yes. The piano buyer was that Meredith Chivers.
Chivers, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., laughs as she recounts the tales of people’s reactions to her line of work. Travelling by plane to international conferences on sexuality, she used to share that information in conversations with curious seatmates.
“But it was like opening a Pandora’s box. Now I just tell people I study cognitive science. They go, ‘Ooh, sounds really interesting,’ and that’s the end of it.”
It wouldn’t be, if they knew who she really was. The fact is Chivers, 36, is on the fast track to international star status—at least, from a scientific perspective—in female sexuality studies, a fairly uncrowded field despite Freud’s famously articulated bafflement more than 80 years ago.
What do women want? Chivers and a small group of other female researchers around the world are finally reconsidering the question, suggesting possible answers. Their work is attracting attention, and sometimes controversy, wherever it appears, and Chivers has become one of the field’s go-to experts.
“It’s been weird,” says Chivers. “To have this kind of recognition so young is odd, I think.”
Research into female sexuality, she says, “is a lightning rod. It attracts all kinds of attention from all kinds of different spheres. And I’ve been getting results that are completely counterintuitive.”
Small wonder she finds herself at the base of the lightning rod. The Ottawa native, who is attractive and personable and nothing at all like the “science geek” she often calls herself, is newly installed at Queen’s, where in April she will assume the prestigious position of Queen’s National Scholar.
Her resume features master’s and doctoral degrees from Chicago’s Northwestern University, research and clinical experience in Chicago and at Toronto’s renowned Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and an eye-popping array of academic honours and awards. She sits on the editorial boards of three respected journals, including Archives of Sexual Behavior, the world’s leading publication in the field. And her impressive body of published papers stretches back to 1996, just a year after her graduation (with a bachelor of science degree in honours psychology) from the University of Guelph. Chivers has also spoken and delivered papers across Canada and the United States, in Europe, and as far afield as Egypt.
Even without reference to the content of her work, she is undeniably hot stuff. And the fallout from January’s New York Times Magazine feature has only turned up the heat. “It was overwhelming,” she says. “I had more than 200 e-mails in response to the article.”
Many were from women who wanted to express gratitude to Chivers for her work, which they felt validated their experiences. But many were also from documentary filmmakers, literary agents and publishers, though she is putting them off for the time being.
Married to psychologist Michael Seto (a professor, pedophilia expert and forensic consultant at the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group’s Brockville site), she has a young son at home, 18-month-old Oliver.
“Any extra time I have I want to spend with him. I don’t want to spend it writing books. But I will. I have a couple I want to write.”
Chivers conducts her experiments—testing volunteer subjects’ degrees of arousal to visual and auditory sexual stimuli—in a small, dimly lit room that locks from the inside. If the test subjects are women (she has also studied male sexuality), they are asked to undress from the waist down and insert a wired measuring device resembling a tampon. Then they relax on a reclining chair to watch movies or images on a monitor in front of them.
“People kind of get this Stanley Kubrick idea from A Clockwork Orange,” Chivers says, “but it’s not like that at all.”
The arousal measuring machine is called a plethysmograph, relatively recently adapted for women, though a male version—employing a device like a rubber band—has been around for decades.
Chivers’s subjects record their own conscious reactions by means of a lever or keypad, and the devices record physiological reactions by measuring the increase in genital blood flow (or, for men, the girth of the penis).
Thanks to the volunteer subjects she has tested over the past decade, and the data she has pored over scrupulously, she has come up with some interesting hypotheses.
In Chicago, she worked with Northwestern University professor Michael Bailey, former chairman of the psychology department, looking, among other things, at the question of bisexuality and co-authoring a paper on arousal patterns in bisexual men. The findings sparked controversy, since they were presented in media reports to suggest that bisexual men were really homosexual. (Proclaimed the 2005 New York Times headline, “Straight, Gay or Lying.”)
Chivers, who has grown wary of the media, says the reports were reductionistic and sensationalist. Sexual orientation, she says, is a complex motivational force that consists of far more than a collection of arousal responses. But she does think there is far more true bisexuality among women, where “there’s a lot more blurring of the lines.” In fact, Chivers believes that exclusively lesbian women may be fairly rare, and that many lesbians still find themselves attracted to men as well as women.
Such observations are what have been grabbing the spotlight for her.
Bailey, who was Chivers’s mentor during her graduate and postgraduate studies, calls her “a bold thinker—not constrained by what others thought.”
For instance, she believes that, contrary to cultural stereotype, women generally are aroused by any portrayal of sexual activity—heterosexual, homosexual, even non-human (she has shown images of mating apes)—no matter what their orientation, even though they don’t always admit to it. Men, on the other hand, tend to be aroused by images that address their specific orientation.
But she refines that further. While previous research had suggested there were no differences in arousal patterns between lesbian and heterosexual women, Chivers discovered that there were. When sexual activity involving couples was portrayed, arousal patterns were similar. But when solitary sexual activity was shown—individuals masturbating, for instance—lesbian women responded more to images of individual women than to the images of individual men.
From this, Chivers draws the preliminary conclusion that, as the level of portrayed sexual activity increases, it trumps personal orientation. Furthermore, it might suggest that lesbian women, to some degree, have a response pattern more typical of men, whose arousal patterns reflect their orientation.
“My hope in doing this work,” she says, “is that I can educate women about their sexuality, and that I can figure out some of the tougher questions.”
She has various lines of research she’s pursuing at the moment. Among them are studies analyzing the conscious and unconscious disconnect she’s observed in women’s arousal responses, sexuality in postpartum women and in cancer survivors, and a question so immense it might intimidate less scientific minds.
She wants to understand nothing less than “what it is that makes people sexual.”
“I never felt uncomfortable talking about sex,” Chivers cheerfully admits. She recalls the favour she did for male classmates at her Catholic high school in Trenton, Ont., where her military father was posted. The guys were desperate for information, so she drew them diagrams of the female anatomy, specifically the location of the clitoris.
In a Catholic school? “Yeah,” she laughs. “But it’s even worse. It was during religion class.”
During an undergraduate course in human sexuality at the University of Guelph, she had to conduct an hour-long seminar on female sexual problems.
“I’ve never been a really comfortable public speaker, but I felt really good about what I was doing.
“Afterward, I remember thinking, ‘If I could do this for the rest of my life, I’d be a pretty happy person’.”
Steep decline in health for women in 40s: study
Women’s health experts say challenges of balancing work and life are taking a dramatic toll
By Tiffany Crawford, Canwest News Service February 19, 2009
Canadian women experience a significant decline in health and quality of life between the ages of 40 and 50, compared to men of the same age, a Statistics Canada study suggests.
The study, released Wednesday, suggests women in their 40s experience more health problems—for example, illness linked to emotional stress—that lead to a poorer quality of life than their male counterparts during that particular decade, says one of the study’s authors, Heather Orpana.
The findings are no surprise to women’s health experts, who say many in this age group are worn out emotionally and physically from so-called “time-hunger” issues—trying to juggle careers, family and other caregiving responsibilities.
“They’re absorbing all of this in a very different way than from generations ago,” said Madeline Boscoe, executive director of the Canadian Women’s Health Network. “So much so that if you were to ask them questions about the quality of their life they would say they had lots of anxiety of some kind or another.”
According to the report’s data, from ages 40 to 50, women’s average health-related quality of life index fell by the equivalent of six percentage points, which is twice the threshold considered clinically important. The data for men in their 40s, on the other hand, did not drop significantly and instead the numbers stabilized, indicating a period of relative good health for men, but not for women.
“The numbers look like a really small decrease, but in actual fact it’s quite large in terms of the impact on one’s daily living,” said Orpana.
“It’s going from a state where you have pain or vision problems, for example, but you can still function to going to a state where you have pain or a vision problem that you can’t corr-
ect.”
Scott Schieman, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto, says men in their 40s may perceive they have a better quality of life because they are confident in their careers and have more senior positions.
“Men in that age group are hitting their stride in their work careers,” he said. “They are also more likely [than women] to get the resources and rewards from the work role and that could be bolstering their sense of well-being.”
While women and men may have equally demanding jobs, men may not have the same stress of child rearing, he said, adding that men may be less anxious about their jobs.
“There’s more sharing of responsibilities going on, but if the burden of child care is falling more on women and they are trying to work at the same time that’s probably taking a major toll as well.”
Another reason why men might see their health-related quality of life as good is because they tend to ignore their health more than women, suggests Dr. Tom Freeman, chair of family medicine at the University of Western Ontario.
“Our socialization is different that way. Women are worrying about birth control and pap smears and regularly visit physicians, but it isn’t until around age 50 that men take any action,” he said.
“There is lots of speculation about why they don’t live as long as women and you know you wonder if they paid more attention to their health they would perhaps live longer?”
The study measured eight attributes: vision, hearing, speech, ambulation, dexterity, emotion, cognition, and pain and discomfort.
Participants were asked to grade each attribute ranging from severely impaired to no impairment.
Orpana said one of the reasons for this drop among women could be attributed to the emotional domain.
For example, of the women studied, those who said they went from being “somewhat happy” in their 30s to “somewhat unhappy” in their 40s would experience that decline in quality of life.
The reasons could be linked to emotional stress including relationship problems, problems with children, job stress or financial problems, said Orpana.
“We know that women are more likely to experience depression than men,” she said. “So that really implies that we need to look further at women in that decade to see why their health quality of life is decreasing so much.”
Band of Sisters - Breast Cancer Patients Test Role of Exercise
When Sue Grayston began chemotherapy last year, a brisk morning workout with musician Bif Naked wasn’t exactly what she was anticipating.
Grayston, a professor in the Faculty of Forestry and Canada Research Chair in Soil Microbial Ecology, found a breast lump in April 2008. She was diagnosed with cancer in May, underwent surgery in June, and began treatment shortly after.
Through a tip from her oncologist, she ended up at CARE (Combined Aerobics and Resistance Exercise), a research trial in UBC’s School of Human Kinetics that studies the role exercise plays in the lives of breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.
Grayston says the trial has had an unintended side effect: establishing a close-knit, emotional bond among patients, including the aforementioned Canadian rocker, that continues long after involvement with the study ends.
Women participating in CARE take part in one of three exercise programs over the course of four to six months: aerobics, high-intensity aerobics, or aerobics combined with strength-training.
Like other participants in the trial, Grayston’s progress at the small gym near Vancouver General Hospital was carefully monitored and recorded by a team of volunteers and UBC graduate students, led by research technician Diana Jespersen.
However, Grayston quickly found the program offered more than just data for CARE’s study.
“One thing they can’t measure at the moment is the support we get from the other women,” she says.
While the research will be published in oncology journals, and may lead to methods that could alter treatment for breast cancer, Grayston says it was the bond forged among the participants that helped her get through chemotherapy.
The trial has allowed her to connect with other women undergoing the same treatment, sharing tips on drugs and doctor’s visits—not to mention the best places in town to buy wigs (chemotherapy patients typically lose most of their hair).
“It’s just made it actually bearable. I don’t know how people could do this without support,” she says.
Led by Dr. Don McKenzie, director of Sports Medicine at UBC and Dr. Karen Gelman of the B.C. Cancer Agency, the trial is a joint venture between UBC, the University of Alberta and the University of Ottawa.
McKenzie is known worldwide for launching the Abreast in a Boat dragon boat racing program, following his study that debunked a long-held belief that upper-body exercise in women treated for breast cancer encouraged lymphedema, an irreversible swelling in the arm and chest.
He says the current research trial could mark a turning point for women undergoing breast cancer treatment.
“After 25 years, we’re starting to appreciate that exercise is as useful in intervention and health care as a lot of the other things we can do.”However, he concedes it can be difficult for a woman undergoing chemotherapy to find the motivation to begin exercising.
“Chemotherapy takes the wind out of your sails,” he says at the project’s small gym. Side effects vary greatly, but patients can experience anemia, nausea, fatigue and depression. It’s hardly the stuff that would prompt a visit to the treadmill.
If it weren’t for CARE, Bif Naked, the study’s first and most high-profile patient, says she would have had difficulty getting out of bed every day.
The Canadian rocker, known offstage as Beth Torbert, announced her breast cancer in a January 2008 interview with the CBC’s George Stroumboulopoulos.
“When I was diagnosed with breast cancer it came as a big surprise to me,” she says. “And had this not been in place for me, I wouldn’t have done anything. I would have probably just stayed in bed the whole time.”
Seventeen women have finished the program at UBC, and another 25 are currently involved. In all, 300 women will take part at the three universities.
For graduates of the UBC trial, their three-day-a-week exercise regimen has evolved into a weekly morning walking group, though Torbert jokes that she and her friends see it more as a gang.
“It’s really fascinating, psychologically and emotionally, how integral this group of people became to each other in very unusual circumstances,” she says. “It’s not that we cried together; we laughed together”.
“It’s probably somewhat unheard of for anyone to have a grand old time during breast cancer treatment, especially during chemotherapy, but I assure you, we have a riot.”
Priming the Brain to Recover from Stroke
For the 300,000 Canadians living with the aftermath of a stroke, partial paralysis and loss of independence is a daily reality.
Now a UBC brain stimulation technique that primes the brain to relearn and retain old movements is showing encouraging results for faster and more effective recovery. A wand, connected to a computer, is placed adjacent to persons head and a stimulus is applied.
“Currently, there are no drugs to help stroke patients regain mobility,” says Lara Boyd, UBC assistant professor of Physical Therapy in UBC’s Faculty of Medicine. “Thus far, physical therapy has proven to be an effective treatment for stroke patients to regain mobility. However, one of the biggest challenges is the time and amount of practice it takes for the brain to relearn an old movement.”
The two-part study tests a healthy brain first to ensure the technique is safe and that there are no adverse effects and then applies the same technique to a stroke-affected brain. The study is currently in the second phase.
Following a stroke, the affected part of the brain is no longer active because of the loss of blood flow, which causes brain cell death. The area of the brain affected by the injury determines the patient’s inability to move, see, remember, speak, reason and read and/or write.
“One of the reasons that it is so difficult for the brain to recover from a stroke and reorganize itself is that the side of the brain that is damaged becomes suppressed while the undamaged side becomes hyperactive,” says Boyd, who is a Canada Research Chair in Neurobiology of Motor Learning. “The left and right side of the brain become unbalanced. It becomes more difficult for the affected side of the body to move because the damaged side of the brain is suppressed. Conversely, the unaffected side of the body moves much easier because the undamaged side of the brain becomes hyperactive.”
This negative feedback loop helps explain why it becomes increasingly difficult for stroke patients to regain mobility.
“Fortunately, the brain is an amazingly dynamic organ that can reorganize itself,” says Boyd, whose current study looks at the benefits of applying an electromagnetic stimulus to the stroke affected section of the brain. “What we want to do is to stimulate and enhance brain cell reorganization around the damaged part of the brain.”
In doing so, Boyd believes that the brain can reorganize itself and find an alternate pathway to performing a previous movement.
The first part of the study tested individuals who had never suffered a stroke. The participants received an electromagnetic stimulus and were then asked to practice a specific movement. Participants who received the stimulus demonstrated increased and improved learning for 15 – 20 minutes following the stimulus.
“Preliminary results of our research on non-stroke patients show that if you pre-excite the brain by applying an electromagnetic stimulus, motor learning and retention of skill is improved and retained,” says Boyd. “We are currently applying this technique to the stroke affected brain and the available data is positive. We are quite optimistic that this approach will work and we expect results in the coming months.”
According to the Heart and Stroke Foundation, each year, there are between 40,000 to 50,000 strokes in Canada and close to 16,000 Canadians die.
Colour Boosts Brain Performance and Receptivity to Advertising, Depending on Task: UBC Study
A new University of British Columbia study reconciles a debate that has long raged among marketers and psychologists: What colour most improves brain performance and receptivity to advertising, red or blue?
It turns out they both can, it just depends on the nature of the task or message. The study, which could have major implications for advertising and interior design, finds that red is the most effective at enhancing our attention to detail, while blue is best at boosting our ability to think creatively.
“Previous research linked blue and red to enhanced cognitive performance, but disagreed on which provides the greatest boost,” says Juliet Zhu of UBC’s Sauder School of Business, author of the study which will appear in the Feb. 5 issue of Science Express. “It really depends on the nature of the task.”
Between 2007 and 2008, the researchers tracked more than 600 participants’ performance on six cognitive tasks that required either detail-orientation or creativity. Most experiments were conducted on computers, with a screen that was red, blue or white.
Red boosted performance on detail-oriented tasks such as memory retrieval and proofreading by as much as 31 per cent compared to blue. Conversely, for creative tasks such as brainstorming, blue environmental cues prompted participants to produce twice as many creative outputs as when under the red colour condition.
These variances are caused by different unconscious motivations that red and blue activate, says Zhu, noting that colour influences cognition and behavior through learned associations.
“Thanks to stop signs, emergency vehicles and teachers’ red pens, we associate red with danger, mistakes and caution,” says Zhu, whose previous research has looked at the impact of ceiling height on consumer choices. “The avoidance motivation, or heightened state, that red activates makes us vigilant and thus helps us perform tasks where careful attention is required to produce a right or wrong answer.”
Conversely, blue encourages us to think outside the box and be creative, says Zhu, noting that the majority of participants believed incorrectly that blue would enhance their performance on all cognitive tasks.
“Through associations with the sky, the ocean and water, most people associate blue with openness, peace and tranquility,” says Zhu, who conducted the research with UBC PhD candidate Ravi Mehta. “The benign cues make people feel safe about being creative and exploratory. Not surprisingly it is people’s favourite colour.”
The study finds that these trends carry over to our receptivity to consumer packaging and marketing messages. Using a series of fictional ads and product packages, researchers explored how colour impacts our receptivity to consumer packaging and advertising.
It found that when the background colour was red, people formed more favorable evaluations of products when its ad featured specific product details as opposed to evocative, creative messaging. However, when the background was blue, the opposite pattern of results emerged.
Similarly, people were more receptive to a new, fictional brand of toothpaste that focused on negative messages such as “cavity prevention” when the background colour was red, whereas people were more receptive to aspirational messages such as “tooth whitening” when the background colour was rendered in blue.
For samples of advertisements used in the study or researcher photos, visit: http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/download
Scientists unravelling mysteries of Saskatchewan meteorite
Researchers who found chunks of a meteorite in Saskatchewan last November believe they’re getting close to answering a key question: where in space did it come from?
University of Calgary graduate student Ellen Milley, who was part of the team that found space rocks in an area known as Buzzard Coulee southeast of Lloydminster, was at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon Monday to talk about what the team has learned.
So far, it looks like the meteorite didn’t come from the asteroid belt beyond the orbit of Mars, she said.
The road to reaching that conclusion began when the space rocks fell Nov. 20.
It was a night when hundreds of people across Western Canada witnessed a spectacular fireball across the sky caused by the estimated 10-tonne rock.
Video surveillance cameras at motels and gas stations captured the flashes of brilliant light and the shadows they cast. A week later, Milley was part of the team led by U of C geologist and geophysicist Alan Hildebrand at Buzzard Coulee. It was she who spotted the first meteorite fragment in a frozen pond.
Later, she studied the flashes and shadows from the various surveillance and amateur videos.
She used the information to plot the fireball’s path as it fell to Earth and then tried to figure out its orbit.
Milley’s tentative conclusion, which she discussed in Saskatoon Monday, was that it didn’t look like the space rock came from beyond the orbit of Mars.
“It looks like it’s a very kind of tight inner solar system orbit,” she said. “It’s not something that’s extended into the asteroid belt.”
If she’s correct, it would be the first time researchers have found debris from a meteorite so close to Earth, Milley said.
In terms of the composition, Milley and her colleagues have determined it’s a relatively common type of meteorite with a high iron content.
However, there is still much more to learn about it, they say.
More than 100 fragments have already been recovered, but this spring, researchers will be resuming their search for more.
They’ll be scouring the fields around Buzzard Coulee in search of an estimated two tonnes of rock that are believed to be studding the ground.
Monday, February 9, 2009 CBC News
Trees dying faster, scientists discover
Warming the likely culprit, says UBC professor who’s seen rate double in 17 years
By Gordon Hamilton, Vancouver Sun – January 23, 2009
On seven plots of ancient forest deep in the Capilano and Seymour watersheds, University of B.C. biogeography professor Lori Daniels has made an alarming discovery: The trees she is monitoring are dying off.
The death rate of the forest giants has, in fact, doubled since she first started studying them as a graduate student 17 years ago.
Now her finding is part of a comprehensive study of forests across western North American that links an increase in tree mortality to climate change.
Trees all across the West are dying at twice the rate they were 20 years ago, according to a report by Daniels and 10 other scientists to be published today in Science magazine.
“We are losing trees faster than we are gaining trees,” Daniels said in an interview Thursday.
In every instance, mortality rates have doubled, states the report, led by a U.S. Geological Survey team.
At the same time, average temperatures have climbed by one degree Celsius, making climate change the most likely cause, Daniels, an expert in old-growth forests, said.
The death rate is expected to continue to rise as temperatures go up, leading to sparser forests less able to act as carbon sinks, leading to even more warming.
The scientists say the trend is expected to continue.
Daniels studied more than 1,200 trees in old-growth forest plots on the North Shore. Beside noting the increasing death rate of older trees, she found that the undergrowth trees that would typically replace the old giants are suffering as well. They are not filling in the vacant spaces left when the veterans fall.
“It’s possible that if trees are stressed because of warmer temperatures causing them to die, the same stress is constraining their growth,” she said of evidence showing growth in younger trees is not as robust.
The U.S. Geological Survey team was put together by California scientist Phil van Mantgem, who noted increased mortality in Sequoia forests. He raised the issue with colleagues across the West, including Daniels, who had been monitoring their own plots for years, and the team was formed. The study, the largest of its kind in North America, gathered evidence from 76 plots in forests more than 200 years old.
The scientists conclude that tree death rates have doubled in 17 years in the coastal forests and in 29 years in Interior forests. Trees are dying across a wide variety of forest types, at all elevations. All sizes are dying and a variety of species, including pines, firs and hemlocks.
Mortality rates were less than one per cent a year when the scientists first began monitoring several decades ago, but are now two per cent, Daniels said.
“That might seem really small, but mortality rates work like interest in a bank account. They compound over time,” she said.
Over a 50-year period, out of 100 trees only 36 will survive at the current mortality rate, she said. Twenty years ago, 65 would survive.
That degree of change is alarming, she said.
Climate change is being pinpointed because the one-degree change in temperature means snow packs are smaller. That leads to longer dry periods in summer, when trees are stressed by drought, Daniels said.
“Increased temperature is going to change not only the metabolic rate in the trees, but their need for water. We have detected both an increase in temperature and an increase in the water deficit, which means there is a water shortage for these trees at the same time the temperature is going up,” Daniels said.
Warmer temperatures are also proving a boon to insect pests that are attacking and killing trees—from the mountain pine beetle, that’s devastated forests from northern B.C. to Colorado, to the tiny Western hemlock looper, which was responsible for a significant number of tree deaths in and around Daniels’ old-growth plots.
The findings of the team are not isolated. Researchers in B.C. have found increased tree mortality elsewhere. The obvious example is the Interior, where warmer winters are being blamed for the massive mountain pine beetle outbreak.
But on the B.C. coast in 2004, ministry of forests researchers began documenting an increasing death rate among yellow cedars. In the last four years, they have found more than 47,000 hectares of dying trees from the Alaska border to Kingcome Inlet. Insect pests and fungi have been ruled out, forest pathologist Stefan Zeglen said. They suspect a warmer climate has led to decreased snow packs. Snow disappears earlier in the year and exposes fragile tree roots to damaging spring frosts.
UBC Researchers Discover Gene Mutation that Causes Eye Cancer
A University of British Columbia geneticist has discovered a gene mutation that can cause the most common eye cancer—uveal melanoma.
Catherine Van Raamsdonk, an assistant professor of medical genetics in the UBC Faculty of Medicine and a team of researchers, have discovered a genetic mutation in a gene called GNAQ that could be responsible for 45 per cent of the cases of uveal melanoma.
The findings, published today in Nature, will allow researchers to develop therapeutic interventions against some melanomas.
“We discovered that GNAQ regulates melanocyte survival,” says Van Raamsdonk. “When the GNAQ gene is mutated it leads to unregulated growth of melanocytes. Since cancer is a disease of unregulated cell growth, our findings led us to the discovery that a genetic mutation of the GNAQ gene causes uveal melanoma.”
Uveal melanoma is a cancer arising from melanocytes located in the uveal tract. The uveal tract is one of the three layers that make up the wall of the eye. A melanoma is unregulated growth of melanocytes. Melanocytes are also found in the skin and are cells linked to a life-threatening form of skin cancer.
The mutation to GNAQ leads to the activation of a signaling pathway that has previously been implicated in many other types of melanoma. The researchers also found that this mutation is a key factor in the development of a type of benign skin mole—blue naevi.
“Prior to our work, the mutations responsible for uveal melanoma were completely unknown,” says Van Raamsdonk. “No other research looked at mutations in GNAQ. The next step is to develop an effective treatment by targeting the specific biological processes that this mutated gene controls.”
Uveal melanoma, the most common eye cancer, affects one in 13,000 people. It is a highly aggressive cancer without any effective treatment options once it metastasizes. Although it only accounts for approximately five per cent of all melanomas, it represents the most common eye cancer in the United States.
The research was funded by a grant from the Canadian Institute for Health Research and performed with support from collaborators at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics at Child & Family Research Institute in British Columbia, Stanford University and the University of California at San Francisco.
The Faculty of Medicine at UBC provides innovative programs in the health and life sciences, teaching students at the undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels, and generates more than $200 million in research funding each year. http://www.med.ubc.ca
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is the Government of Canada’s agency for health research. CIHR’s mission is to create new scientific knowledge and to catalyze its translation into improved health, more effective health services and products, and a strengthened Canadian health-care system. Composed of 13 Institutes, CIHR provides leadership and support to more than 11,000 health researchers and trainees across Canada. http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca
Ovarian cancer not just one disease: study
Pamela Fayerman, Canwest News Service
Published: Monday, December 01, 2008
Ovarian cancer is actually different diseases with five distinct subtypes, an international team led by Vancouver scientists has shown.
The team drew its conclusion after doing a molecular analysis of centrally banked tumour-tissue samples from 500 B.C. women who got ovarian cancer over 25 years, many of whom died.
Their findings help explain why most women diagnosed with such cancer die: Not only is the disease being diagnosed too late, but the stock approach to treatment has been ineffective, since ovarian cancer is not a “monolithic entity.”
“We’ve had one recipe, which is usually surgery followed by the same chemotherapy, irrespective of the tumour type, because we didn’t know any better,” said study co-author, Dr. Dianne Miller of Vancouver General Hospital and the B.C. Cancer Agency.
“So, to me, as an oncologist working in ovarian cancer for the past 18 years, the impact of this study means everything,” she said.
“In the past, we’ve bundled everything together and haven’t exploited the differences in tumour types but, as a result of this research, we can treat patients differently because subtypes have unique (molecular characteristics),” Miller added.
In the three-year study, published Tuesday in the PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine, the researchers identified 21 biomarkers – molecular characteristics exhibited by tumours in each subtype.
Subtypes respond differently to chemotherapy, and treatment regimens are already starting to change because the researchers have been sharing their discoveries at meetings around the world.
“All too often, ovarian cancer is lethal, but what we’ve shown in this research is that if you are going to fight the battle, you must fight it one subtype at a time,” said lead author Dr. David Huntsman, a pathologist at the cancer agency and VGH. “And this paper sets a new course, because you can’t change treatment until you change research.”
Since some subtypes are rare, Huntsman said he hopes scientists globally collaborate and share resources. The biomarkers are not “100 per cent ready for prime time” to be used as routine diagnostic markers, he said.
Huntsman said the work moves ovarian cancer research to a place where other cancer researchers were a few decades ago when they realized that leukemias and lymphomas had many subtypes. That paved the way to tailored diagnostic tests and treatments, which have been a boon to improving survival odds.
University of B.C. medical school dean Gavin Stuart, an ovarian cancer expert who was not involved in the study, said subtyping is akin to an “analysis of handwriting in identifying individual persons.”
“This allows us to better understand the optimal approach to therapy in women affected by this disease.”
About 200,000 women around the world (2,400 in Canada) get ovarian cancer every year, and more than half die from the disease.
If the cancers are detected in the earliest stages, about three-quarters of women may survive to five years, but the vast majority are diagnosed when the cancers have spread into the pelvis, stomach and liver, or to distant areas such as the brain. In such cases, the death rate is 85 per cent at five years.
With vague symptoms such as bloating and constipation, it’s often called a silent disease.
The research was funded by the Canary Foundation, the B.C. Cancer Agency, Vancouver General Hospital, the UBC Hospital Foundation, the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and by unrestricted grants from Eli Lilly and Sanofi Aventis pharmaceutical companies.
Research lends hope to superbug battle
Findings may lead to new therapies, treatment for ailments
Vancouver Sun, December 2, 2008
by Amy O’Brian
Aside from ad campaigns urging people to think twice before taking antibiotics, there is little the medical community has been able to do to prevent the steady march forward of superbugs.
But new research by a team of scientists from several institutions, including Simon Fraser University and the University of B. C., has lent new optimism to the f ight against superbugs, which are caused by increasing resistances to antibiotics.
The scientists’ findings, published Monday in Genome Research , are expected to lead to new therapies and treatments for bacterial infections and diseases.
The researchers were able to pinpoint gene clusters that boost the ability of ordinary bacteria to cause diseases.
“Why this is notable is that previously, people had clues that these little gene clusters are probably responsible for causing disease and virulent strains,” said Fiona Brinkman, an SFU molecular biologist who participated in the research.
“But we are able to show now through infection models and extensive analysis that yes, indeed, these gene clusters are causing this increased ability for this bug to cause disease.”
The findings are particularly significant to children suffering from cystic fibrosis because they are susceptible to bacteria that are ubiquitous in our environment and are therefore very difficult to treat with antibiotics. The bacteria lead to infections that are often fatal, but the team’s research — which included genome sequencing — showed that the bacteria aren’t necessarily to blame.
“What we found was these sort of gene clusters in the genome that seemed to cause enhanced ability of this bug to compete against other strains,” Brinkman said. “ We think that these gene clusters are the critical feature that’s causing this to have an increased virulence.”
The research has not immediately generated a way to treat the infections to which cystic fibrosis patients are susceptible, but it could lead scientists to a way of treating them without depending on antibiotics.
Dinosaur eggs mislabelled for years
Fossilized nest in Calgary collection turns out to be one-of-a-kind
Jamie Komarnicki, Canwest News Service
Published: Vancouver Sun, Friday, November 14, 2008
The first clue something was wrong was the shape of the dinosaur eggs—long and pointed at one end rather than smooth and round.
The fossilized nest that contained five of the 12-centimetre-long eggs sat mislabelled in a private Calgary collection for years, its significance undetected.
But a closer look by University of Calgary paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky determined the eggs were not, in fact, the rounded, “dime-a-dozen” duck-billed dinosaur find.
Rather, the eggs belonged to a small theropod, or meat-eating dinosaur, closely linked to birds—making the fossil the first known nest of its kind.
“This is a brand new nest to North America and worldwide,” said Zelenitsky, lead author of a paper published Thursday in the journal Palaeontology.
But the scientific detective work doesn’t stop there.
Researchers still don’t know the exact identity of the mysterious mother who abandoned the eggs 77 million years ago to the swelling waters on a sandy river beach, Zelenitsky said.
But they have picked up clues of her reproductive habits.
The mother dinosaur hunkered down on the banks of a fast-flowing river in the Montana badlands, said Francois Therrien, a co-investigator in the study and curator of dinosaur paleoecology at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.
She built a sandy mound, then laid about a dozen eggs, two at a time, placing them in a ring around the nest before climbing atop to keep them warm, he said.
These behaviours are closely identified with the brooding habits of birds—details that further cement the significance of the discovery, Therrien said.
“This nest reveals that modern birds aren’t unique in the way they reproduce; they actually inherited a lot of ways that they lay eggs from their dinosaur ancestors,” Therrien said.
“This tells us what we see as modern birds laying eggs and the way the eggs are shaped, it’s an actual, gradual acquisition of traits through time.”
The fossilized nest was discovered near Cut Bank, Mont., in the 1990s and belonged to a private Calgary collection.
It had been labelled the more common hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur.
Examining the collection several years ago, Zelenitsky noticed the unusual patterns of the eggs. Realizing the significance of the nest if it belonged to a meat-eater, she began an in-depth investigation when the fossils arrived at the Royal Tyrrell.
Researchers have since narrowed the possible mother down to two likely candidates: a small raptor called a dromaeosaurid, or an ostrich-like caenagnathid.
“It’s going to be one of those two; neither one of those two types of nests are known,” Zelenitsky said.
The dinosaur likely weighed about 40 kilograms and was 2.5 to three metres long, she said.
The mother’s identity may only be truly revealed if another nest of this type is discovered with an adult atop, or embryos inside the eggs, Zelenitsky said.
“As more and more of these dinosaur nests are uncovered, it just keeps putting all of the pieces together,” she said.
The fossilized nest goes on display at the Royal Tyrrell at the end of the month.
T. Rex had a nose for hunting, Alberta researchers say
In the first study of its kind, scientists at the University of Calgary and the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alta., compared the skulls of a range of prehistoric meat-eating dinosaurs and found that, when it came to a sense of smell, T. rex and its fellow Tyrannosaurs were, indeed, the kings.
The researchers looked at 18 therapods, the group of extinct carnivorous land dinosaurs that includes both T. rex and smaller predators like Velociraptor mongoliensis. They also looked at the primitive bird-ancestor Archaeopteryx and the modern American alligator.
They based their findings on the impressions left in the skulls of the dinosaurs by olfactory bulbs, the part of the brain associated with smell. Even after accounting for the different sizes of the dinosaurs, the Tyrannosaur group of therapods still possessed unusually large olfactory bulbs, suggesting a keen sense of smell, said University of Calgary paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky.
Dromaeosaurids, another group of therapods that includes the velociraptor, also had a relatively strong sense of smell while another group called Ornithomimosaurs, or ostrich dinosaurs, had a relatively low sense of smell.
Zelenitsky and François Therrien, the curator of dinosaur palaeoecology at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, and Yoshitsugu Kobayashi from Hokkaido University in Japan published their findings this week in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
T. rex followed nose to food sources
Dinosaur experts have known for some time that T. rex had a good sense of smell, and some have even suggested that its finely tuned sniffer meant it was more likely to have been a scavenger than a predator.
But Zelenitsky said that meat-eating birds alive today are more likely to have large olfactory bulbs compared to their plant-eating kin, so having a keen sense of smell does not necessarily limit the T. rex to scavenging.
She and her co-authors suggest that it may have used its sensitive nose to be active in low-light conditions or to perform certain activities such as locating food sources.
“The anatomical data suggests it was a predator, but it wouldn’t have passed on a dead animal if it saw one,” she told CBC News.
Sense of smell important to primitive birds
Zelenitsky and her colleagues were also surprised that the Archaeopteryx also seemed to have had a strong sense of smell relative to its size and when compared with modern birds.
“Birds aren’t thought to have a keen sense of smell. They are more known for their vision,” said Zelenitsky.
It could be that the sense of smell must have remained important to the first primitive birds, she and her co-authors wrote, though Zelenitsky suggested more work was needed to study how dinosaurs’ olfactory bulbs compare with living birds.
A quarter of the specimens used in the study were found in Alberta, said Zelenitsky, with the remainder taken from fossil finds all over the world, including Mongolia, China, Madagascar and the United States.
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