Author Archives: Ashley Mooney

The Phishing Market Beyond the Internet

April 29th, 2013

By Ashley Mooney

Most people have heard of phishing scams on Internet, in which a person is tricked into giving up their money or identity by a clever ruse.

Temptations like this are found throughout all of capitalist society, says George Akerlof, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences. He discussed ideas from his upcoming book, “Phishing for Phools” wth a Duke audience on April 25 to kick off “Decision Making Across the Disciplines,” a two-day symposium sponsored by the Duke Center for Interdisciplinary Decision Sciences.

Akerloff studies connections between individual’s decision biases and larger economic phenomena.

George_Akerlof

George Akerlof won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 for his research on economic decision making. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

“Standard economics assumes that the people are smart, they may not know everything but they can be smart,” he said. “But there may be only one way in which you can be smart, but there are many, many ways in which you can be stupid.”

Akerlof, who is also Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, developed his idea of phishing for phools from his paper, “The Market for ‘Lemons,’” which secured his Nobel nod.

“A fool with an f is a stupid or silly person, but it’s perfectly possible to make an error when… making a perfectly intelligent decision,” he said. “Somebody who makes a mistake is a phool with a ph.”

Although markets have the ability to maximize wealth, Akerlof said it is a double-edged sword.

“Free markets open us up to be phools. They open us up to those who seek to influence us to do what they want, but it’s not necessarily good for our sake,” he said. “We live in a world where some 5 billion adults can phish us for being a phool.  We’ve intentionally opened ourselves up to such exploitation because of obvious advantages, but then we must also think about the other side.”

Markets, Akerlof noted, aim for three weak spots: emotional weaknesses, cognitive weaknesses and ignorance due to blocked channels of information.

Phish

Phishing is common on the internet, but occurs throughout the market. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

When people are aware of phishing, it has relatively little effect. But when one doesn’t know about a phish, it can have a major impact. He proposed that obesity, product misinformation and the recent economic recession were all caused by phishing for phools.

“In the United States, the goal of almost every businessman is to get you to spend your money,” he said. “Life in capitalist economy is a continual temptation.”

Akerlof said according to economics textbooks, people decide on their demand by budgeting spending and then choosing the things that will maximize their happiness. But most people, he added, are not honest with themselves and as a consequence do not engage in rational budgeting.

“A very significant fraction of consumers are worried about how they’re going to make ends meet,” Akerlof said. “Almost 50 percent of people probably could not come up with $2,000 in a month for unforeseen situations.”

The only way to prevent phishing is to know about it, and to make informed decisions with that knowledge.

“Phishing for phools… creates bad equilibrium, especially if we don’t know about phishing for phools, we think that markets are totally benign,” Akerlof said.

Summer camp inspires allergy research

March 5th, 2013

By Ashley Mooney

Courtesy of Nicole Leung.

For some undergraduates, research ideas stem from summer camp.

Junior Nicole Leung, a biology major concentrating on pharmacology, is doing an independent study on allergies and pediatric immunology. She works in Dr. Wesley Burks’ lab at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and explained that her interest in allergies first started when she was a volunteer at a summer camp.

“I was taking care of a little boy who was allergic to so many foods and he had to carry an epi-pen around with him all the time,” she said. “It was my first exposure to such a serious problem with allergies.”

“It was really hard for me to see a boy who was so close to being normal be completely abnormal during camp,” she said, adding that because of the boy’s severe allergies, he was very shy and had a hard time making friends.

Leung saw the challenge of severe allergies again in college when a gluten allergy started to affect her freshman-year roommate.

Now, Leung is trying to understand whether people can develop a long-term tolerance to food allergies, even though there is currently no cure for allergic diseases. The lab is also developing immune-system therapies to sensitize patients to allergens and see how long they can withstand the allergic effects.

“Very little is known about allergies, but they tell a lot about our immune system,” she said, adding that “as the human population grows, I think that allergies are going to be a major concern in the future, so this field has great potential.”

In Leung’s previous research, she compared several allergy tests to find which best predicts the severity of allergic reactions. Most common allergy tests, like the skin-prick test and the blood-based ImmunoCAP test, do not determine how severely people may be allergic to certain substances.

Courtesy of Nicole Leung.

“They only will tell you that you’re allergic but you might not have a reaction to it,” she said.

Using a statistical analysis, Leung found that the basophil activation test has a much higher correlation to severity than the skin-prick or ImmunoCAP tests.

“With the basophil activation test, we mix allergens in blood and try to see whether a certain allergen will cause basophils to degranulate and release histamines, which is what triggers the allergy symptoms,” she said. “Because these activated basophils expose CD63 molecules on their surface, we can determine the percentage activated and use cutoff points to identify whether the person is allergic.”

She added that the test only requires a small amount of blood and is a relatively quick procedure. But there are still questions of how it can be applied to clinical practice.

For Leung, the hardest aspect of research is digging through background information to find out how to move her project forward.

“None of the articles point you to a clear answer, and that is the most challenging part of research. But it is also the most exciting part because you get to test your own hypotheses,” she said.

Besides her allergy research, Leung also works in a neuroeconomics lab that looks at risky decision-making in gambling. The lab uses eye trackers to measure how much a test subject’s eyes dilate and how often they shift their eyes between two choices—one risky option, and one safer one.

Although Leung said she has a more direct role in the design and implementation of her allergy research, she said she enjoys meeting and interacting with the families who participate the neuroeconomics study.

Tracking the cell transitions that cause cancer

March 4th, 2013

By Ashley Mooney

Courtesy of Tristan Bepler.

Researchers think that for cancer to develop, damaged cells have to undergo certain transitions that cause them to spread, or metastasize.

Junior Tristan Bepler, a biology and computer science major, is testing this hypothesis, studying two types of cell transitions scientists have linked to the spread of cancer. He works in the lab of Mariano Garcia-Blanco, professor of molecular genetics and microbiology, and looks at the mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition, or MET, and the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition, or EMT. Mesenchymal cells are more motile, while epithelial cells tend to be fixed in rows.

The hypothesis is that when epithelial cells form tumors, like in colon, prostate or breast cancer, the cells at the edge of the tumor have to turn to mesenchymal cells for the cancer metastasize. Then, “the mesenchymal cells can leave the tumor, get into the blood stream and spread around your body,” Bepler said.

In order for cells to latch onto cells in new locations, they have to transition back to epithelial cells through MET. Bepler’s research focuses on whether MET or EMT are necessary for metastasis.

Most of Bepler’s daily activities involve culturing cells and handling the rats the lab uses in for the research.

The scientists grow tumors in the rats, they inject them under the skin on their flank. “When we’re growing tumors, we have to measure the size of the tumors and weigh the rats to make sure they’re not gaining too much weight,” Bepler said. “Once the tumors get too large, we have to sacrifice the rats and dissect them. We collect their tumors and their lungs, then we can section them and look at fluorescence, which is how we track MET and EMT.”

Although the project is in the basic sciences, it has the potential for clinical use. If EMT is necessary for diseased cells to spread, drugs that block the transition may be effective in treating certain types of cancer. Clinical application is still a long way down the road, though, Bepler said.

Choosing to study metastasis, rather than viruses, which the lab also investigates, “really wasn’t driven by a desire to study cancer at the time,” Bepler said. “I really didn’t know anything, so I decided I would do the cancer side.”

A Durham, N.C. native, Bepler began his lab work the summer before his freshman year. “When you first start working in the lab, you basically work as a lab tech. Your mentor says, ‘do this experiment,’ and you do the experiment,” he said. “It’s sometimes hard to feel like what you’re doing is important or like you’re really involved in the project because you’re just working as a lab tech, you’re not intellectually involved.”

“The key is to get into the biology of what’s going on or think about the experiments and then it becomes a lot more interesting, because after a while you come up with good ideas for experiments, and you become a little more independent and can do your own experiments,” he said.

Bepler added that he prefers working with rats, as opposed to mice, because they are more friendly and do not bite as often.

Blasting away glioblastomas

February 21st, 2013

By Ashley Mooney

The purple area of this brain is a glioblastoma tumor.

Some undergraduates get to see the fruits of their lab labor early in their careers.

Junior Anirudh Saraswathula, a biology major and neuroscience minor, has been doing research at Duke since his first week on campus.

He started as a work-study student in professor of cell biology Blanche Capel’s lab, but said the basic sciences were not his true passion. Now, Saraswathula works on translating basic research with the Duke Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program.

“A lot of what I do in the lab involves looking at protocols that are used in basic science research and trying to apply them to what we’re doing here,” he said. “So a lot of it is going to be culturing cells from patients, and then doing a variety of tests depending on what it is that I want to do.”

He is currently studying immune-system therapy for glioblastoma, a type of malignant brain tumor. By reprogramming a patient’s T-cells, researchers can direct the immune system to fight glioblastoma. Although Saraswathula was not involved in developing the treatment, he is working to evaluate the treatment’s mechanism and its long-term effects on the immune system.

“One of the reasons that brain tumors are so devastating (with treatment they can extend survival to about 18 months) is that they’re just so recurrent,” he said. “These types of tumors also change who you are as a person because of where they happen.”

Saraswathula’s day-to-day work involves culturing tissue, using flow cytometry — a technique used to sort cells, detect biomarkers and engineer proteins — and PCR, which copies DNA.

Saraswathula is also studying the quality of T-cell responses to different clinical trials and understanding whether certain types of B-cells are repressing the function of the tumor vaccine.

“Those projects are focused on future trials. How can we improve, how can we modify these therapies to better improve the immune system’s response in order to fight these tumors,” he said.

Although he began his research just for the experience of doing it, Saraswathula said that applicability is now what is most important to him.

“If I discover some obscure gene in stem cells, there’s not going to be any real application there for maybe 30 years,” he said. “With my current research, if I find something, [in] the next trial a few years from now, there will be a patient getting the drug, and I would have had a contribution to that.”

Grad Student Sees Yawning Gap in Animal Welfare

January 18th, 2013

by Ashley Mooney

Sometimes a middle-school nickname becomes a career.

Graduate student Jingzhi Tan, yawned loudly during a quiet class in middle school in China, garnering the nickname Hippo. So now he’s at Duke, studying yawning behaviors in bonobos.

Jingzhi “Hippo” Tan is a graduate student working on bonobos’ love of strangers.

So-called ‘contagious yawning’ has been found in many species besides humans and other great apes, including baboons, monkeys and dogs. Tan found that bonobos are more likely to yawn along with strangers than they are to yawn with animals they already know. (They also prefer to share food with strangers first.)  In the future, he hopes to do a similar study with chimpanzees, but must first modify the structure of the experiment.

“The bonobo study that we just did is technically unethical to do with chimps—you can’t put two strange chimps together because they’re going to kill each other,” Tan said. “Later we’re trying to develop a task that is chimp-friendly and we’re going to use it for comparison between a variety of species.”

His studies on great apes, he said, will hopefully reveal more about the human mind and aid wildlife conservation efforts.

Tan noted that there is no better way of understanding the human mind than studying its evolution. Through his studies, Tan hopes to uncover the constraints of human problem-solving abilities, which will help solve problems relating to conservation.

“There is a gap between people who want to conserve nature versus people who are making decisions and policies. Usually what they do is alienate each other,” Tan said. “You can’t actually do something unless you really understand the mind of people.”

Likasi, a resident of the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in Kinshasa, where Hippo does his work. (Jingzhi Tan)

As an undergraduate at Peking University, Tan studied under the only cognitive evolution professor in all of China. He is now the first Chinese person to study great apes in Africa.

Tan said he is concerned that chimps are apparently being illegally exported to China, where they end up in the entertainment industry. Tan said there is one reality show that features three chimps—dressed in human clothes—choosing fruit at a supermarket. Another pair of infant chimps were forced into a fake wedding, complete with a wedding dress, and received national media attention.

China needs stronger animal welfare laws, Tan said. “Going back to the big picture, in the next decade, if you want to help bonobos in Africa or any other animals in Africa, we have to get China involved. Right now it’s just completely empty and blank.”

The new blood diamond is your cell phone

December 13th, 2012

by Ashley Mooney

There is an African proverb that says “when the elephants fight, the grass suffers.”

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the elephants are militias and the grass is the women, said John Prendergast, co-founder of Enough Project, an organization that fights to end genocide.

Congolese rape victims assemble outside of a peace hut. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Prendergast, who spoke at Duke Nov. 29, said the DRC is now the home of the deadliest war since World War II. The conflict has been created in part by large corporations seeking a variety of natural resources within the region throughout the past 150 years. Currently, the Congo is the main source of gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten, which are used to power electronics such as cell phones, laptops and digital cameras.

“Congo is now the most dangerous war because powerful corporations have come to [the country] for the last few centuries to take whatever they want, and structured the state to facilitate that,” he said. His talk was part of the Ferguson Family Distinguished Lectureship series on the Environment and Society.

The nation is currently riddled by struggles between the Congolese armies, militias and other groups from bordering nations Rwanda and Uganda. Many of the groups utilize brutal tactics throughout mineral-smuggling networks, and, Prendergast said, use sexual violence at the center of their methodology.

“[There has been] no other war in the world where the link between our consumer appetites and sexual violence is so direct,” he said. “All of these groups use rape as a means of social control… They target women to humiliate and destroy the will of the community.”

Prendergast has dedicated himself to the pursuit of peace in the region for over 30 years and has lobbied several companies – including Apple – to use free-trade models of mineral trade.

“Unless international capital or profit-seeking capital is regulated in some way, it will trample all over human rights,” he said.

Prendergast credited Duke’s student body for leading the nation in the Conflict-Free Campus Initiative, which 115 schools are involved in.

The way to create peace, he said, is to pressure the United States government to encourage the United Nations and other countries to support “an African-led peace process in Congo,” which deals with the root causes of the issue.

“We aren’t going to solve all of the Congo’s problems sitting here – we aren’t going to solve them in the United States or Europe,” he said. “But we can play a major role in supporting the Congolese to find those solutions.”

He added that until everyone is more aware of the root cause – the demand for phones, laptops and other electronics – the conflict will not end.

“When you log onto your laptops tonight, remember they wouldn’t be so cheap without minerals from the Congo,” he said. “When you answer your cell phone or make a call, remember… all of the women of the Congo who have survived sexual attacks.

Even ferns get Gaga

October 23rd, 2012

by Ashley Mooney

Biology professor Kathleen Pryer discussed the sex lives of ferns with a group of students Monday in the Center for LGBT Life.

“We’re trying to develop a new lifecycle (of ferns) that we hope textbooks will pick up,” Pryer said. “There are a range of ways that ferns have sex and each of these has is own evolutionary consequences and genetic outcomes.”

At the lunchtime lecture, Pryer also revealed her lab’s newly discovered fern species, Gaga germanotta, named after pop star Lady Gaga.

By naming a species after somebody outside of the world of scientific research, Pryer said she wanted to give Lady Gaga a namesake that will recall her activism efforts.

“The work that she’s done, the money that she’s put behind the Born This Way foundation, I think is incredible,” Pryer said. “She’s a real champion for justice and equality, and I wanted to do this so that she would have a scientific namesake—something that will last forever long after she’s gone.”

Lady Gaga also bears some likeness to a fern gametophyte, which is a fern early in its developmental cycle. At the 2010 Grammys, Lady Gaga wore a costume that strongly resembles a gametophyte, Pryer said.

The new species is part of a genus containing 19 species that were originally listed as cheilanthes. True cheilanthes—ones that have kept their original designation—are South American ferns that are nearly indistinguishable from Gaga ferns in appearance. Their differences, she said, are in their DNA.

“When we line up all our sequence data [of the Gaga ferns]… in a particular gene there is a string of GAGA,” she said. “The closest relatives of the genus Gaga doesn’t have that synapomorphy.”

Flowering plants—the most diverse types of plants on the planet with approximately 350,000 species—reproduce using seeds. Ferns on the other hand reproduce through spores contained on the undersides of their leaves.

Pryer noted that many people do not understand the vast diversity of ferns. There are about 12,000 species, including the typical forest ferns, aquatic ferns, desert ones and ferns that are the size of trees.  Pryer’s main focus has been on desert ferns—most of which appear similar but have different DNA patterns.

Beyond the variation in appearance of fern species, Pryer said the plants have multiple mating strategies, even though textbooks usually only teach one form.

Pryer describing the fern lifecycle often depicted in textbooks. Credit: Ashley Mooney.

One of the lifecycles they’re investivating involves a bisexual gametophyte, which is usually the first gametophyte in a population to mature. It forms a notch where it produces archegonia while antheridia develop on the outside. Most ferns have archegonium—the female component where eggs are located—and antheridia, which contain sperm. The gametophyte emits a pheromone that signals to all nearby developing gametophytes that they should become male.

Pryer said the diversity she found in ferns is only one type of sexual diversity in the world, and she hopes that a common interest in such differences will connect her field with the general population.

“We live in this world and we’re all interested in diversity in many different ways,” she said. “This makes a connection between what [scientists] do and human diversity and it also makes people who are Gaga fans say, ‘hey, what’s up with these botanists.’ I’m hoping that we can engage the two communities. When people talk about interdisciplinary work, I’m taking it to ‘the edge of glory.’”

YouTube Video about the naming: 19 Species of Ferns Named for Lady Gaga

Duke Today coverage: http://today.duke.edu/2012/10/gagafern

 

A “Neurodiverse” View of Poetry

September 26th, 2012

By Ashley Mooney

Why is an English professor working with brain scientists? To change our understanding of the interaction between autism and poetry.

Autism spectrum disorder is often characterized by an inability to comprehend figurative language, especially metaphors. But poet Ralph Savarese, an associate professor of English at Grinnell College currently doing a residency with the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences as a Mellon Humanities Writ Large Fellow, has found the exact opposite to be true in his interactions with people who have autism.

“One of the supposed symptoms of autism is an inability to deal with figurative language—metaphor, simile, irony, jokes—and what I can tell you is, it is not true about certain autistic subtypes, particularly literate classical autistics,” he said.

Literate classical autistics are the most severely autistic, and often nonspeaking. Savarese, who also teaches creative writing workshops to people with autism, noted that although it often takes years to teach these people how to read, once learned “there is absolutely no failure of figurative knowledge, indeed just the opposite is enormous sensitivity to metaphor [and] simile.”

Poetry is not abstract, but rather is about the concrete particulars of life, Savarese said, which lines up nicely with an autistic neurology. He noted that poetry or lyrical language could serve as a neurocosmopolitan meeting place. Neurocosmopolitanism means to be comfortable with various neurologies.

“What would [neurocosmopolitanism] mean as a doctor or as an English professor who might have somebody with autism in his classroom?” he asked. “It’s not just that I’m demanding that autistics learn how we do things, it’s that we learn how they do things.”

What would it mean to be comfortable with all matter of neurologies, what would it mean to find common ground or talk or find a way to communicate respectfully with somebody whose brain is different, he added.

Rather than seeing disability as “an occasion for pity or demonization,” Savarese instead reframes autism as a type of neurodiversity—a neurological difference.

“For the last 30 years we’ve had this notion of diversity drilled into us, why not neurodiversity,” he said. “It’s true that autistics can do some things better than us and some things worse than us.”

Unlike 30 years ago, there are now many people who have autism across the spectrum who have written about their experiences, he said. With a large volume of literature at hand, people can now familiarize themselves with both the traditional medical view from an outsider’s perspective and insider accounts. He added that people should familiarize themselves with both because they generate different notions of the world.

Savarese has a personal connection to autism. His adopted son DJ is nonspeaking autistic who types to communicate. DJ, who started school at Oberlin College three weeks ago, is also the first nonspeaking autistic person to ever get into a highly selective college, he said.

“It’s not that I’m unrealistic—I’ve lived with the challenges of autism for 14 years,” Savarese says. “I’m not saying there aren’t significant challenges with autism, but I refuse to describe autism in the way that it has been typically described.”

He noted that although his son has significant motor and communication challenges, his memory and pattern recognition are astonishing. “His memory is photographic, and he’s just like, ‘are you kidding me, you all are retarded.’”

Savarese noted that the struggle in how to treat people with autism was exemplified in an interview that his son did. In the interview, he was asked if autism should be treated, and DJ typed in response, “yes, treated with respect.”

Although the most famous disability rights adage is “nothing about us without us,” he said, adding that there is a division between the literature written by autistics and scientific research that rarely makes an appeal to those with autism.

“What you see is somebody a lot like you or me going to some other culture that is very different from our own and insisting that culture operate the way that ours does,” he said. “Almost everything that I stand for is in opposition to many of the ideas [of what autism is] and the ways in which the ideas have been propagated. There is this idea autistics have no awareness of the self or others…. I just don’t buy it.”