Dr. Dawley's Press Conference

David Rogers

To many people, salamanders are no more than slimy creatures that crawl around on four legs. But to Dr. Ellen Dawley, they display many mysterious chemical interactions. On Nov. 14, Dawley came to the Myrin Library at Ursinus College to speak about her research on the red backed salamander.

                According to Dr. Dawley, salamanders are very territorial vertebrates that use a process called chemosensation to interact with each other. During chemosensation, the salamanders use chemoreceptor cells to facilitate mating, social interactions and territorial displays of dominance. In Dr. Dawley’s research she noticed that salamanders experience an up-regulation of chemoreceptor cell proliferation in late spring compared to other seasons. The question she investigated is how long do these chemoreceptors generated in late spring survive and are they able to function as receptor cells?

                In order to conduct her experiment, Dr. Dawley collected red backed salamanders from Montgomery County, MD in May and June. The salamanders were injected with a solution called BrdU which is used to mark the birthdate of vomeronasal epithelial cells. The salamanders were kept separate in petri dishes, and then eventually killed and dissected. They were separated into different sections in order to identify which sections of the body generated the most epithelial cells.

                Dr. Dawlye found that many of the new cells generated were in fact receptor cells. Much of the BrdU cells found were vomeronasal receptor cells that were born in May, and could become functional in the summer. These cells, which were born in late spring, remained viable throughout the summer and into the fall. These results support her supposition that the salamander has specific behaviors during the summer that rely on chemoreception.

                Salamanders are used to moist areas, so the warm, dry days of summer present a challenge to the salamander when searching for valuable territory. Because of this, they are very aggressive and territorial during the summer. Territories with more access to food are guarded much more aggressively, and the most aggressive territorial salamanders are therefore much larger.

                The salamanders also use their smelling capabilities to assist them in the summer.

                “They can gauge the quality of a territory using chemosensory,” Dr. Dawley said.

                Additionally, males use fecal pellets to advertise the foraging quality of their territory. Female salamanders smell the fecal matter and are able to use chemosensory to identify the quality of food in the territory. This suggests that chemosensory during the summer assists territorial process as well as mating processes.

                Very few other animals have shown to up-regulate the proliferation of chemoreceptor cells during seasonal periods. Dr. Dawley’s findings are unique and will hopefully lead to more practical applications in humans and other animals. If a similar process of up-regulation could be applied to humans, the human body could possibly create solutions to brain damage and other tissue damage. This is an idea that may be far in the future, but Dr. Dawley may have helped initiate the process.

Alternative Assignment

Early in the post, I like the description of how the global economy has become, with corporations being treated like humans. I feel like the author critiqued this subject briefly, but very well. However, When he gets into positivism, he makes unwarranted connections, almost implying that the holocaust could happen again if people practice positivism.
The author then goes on to compare the holocaust eugenics mentality to the war on terror. He suggests that after 9/11, the country began to develop an anti-Islam sentiment, almost as if they are a race that needs to be exterminated. While this is true for some people, it is unfair of the author to generalize the situation. The Islamic people did not become an inferior race after 9/11, they just happened to be some of the enemies of the United States after 9/11.
While his claims on Harris and Atheists are a bit extreme, and generalizing, I do find them very interesting. He suggests that today;s atheists have become nothing more than the religious zealots they criticize. This idea is based in the fact that no matter what religion, Americans are united by a fear/hatred of Islam. I think the idea of a national sentiment overpowering religious (or non-religious) beliefs is interesting, because it tests people's true beliefs and morals.
Despite this interesting criticism, I believe that the author made Harris seem like an overly authoritative figure, who only speaks in absolute truth's. The author took a few Harris quotes, and assumed that what Harris said is some type of dogma that is followed by the masses. This happens often in journalism, where a writer takes a bit of somewhat interesting information, and blows it out of proportion in order to support an attractive story. The author does not know what Harris truly thinks, and if Harris were to respond negatively to this article, he could devalue the entire article.
Beyond these flaws, there was one that really bothered me - the verbosity. I think the author attempted to sound more intelligent by using bigger words and more circuitous language. I hate it when author's do this, as it is usually easy to see through. Once I realized that I didn't like the writing style, I realized that I had to deal with it for the rest of the article, and it completely turned me off to whatver the writer was trying to say.

New research has pointed to stomach bacteria as an indicator of whether someone is fat or thin. The stomach contains trillions of bacteria, some that make bacteria and some that digest foods. This research was led by an experiment involving human stomach bacteria and mice. The stomach bacteria from obese people was placed in mice, and the mice became fat. When the bacteria from skinny people was placed into the mice, they remained lean. 

Scientists like Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis, want to isolate the bacteria that is responsible for this phenomenon, ideally leading to a method in which the beneficial bacteria is transplanted to obese people. This would hopefully lead to a bacteria that promotes thinness. 

The mice experiment also revealed that proper dieting can lead to a change from the "fat" bacteria to the "lean" stomach bacteria. This suggests that people do not have a predetermined type of bacteria in their stomachs.

Dr. GOrdon believes that the process of isolating the correct bacteria "could take many decades." 

Responses to Embryos article & Genetically Modified Food article

I really think that the author of the Human Rights for Embryos did a good job organizing her stance on the issue into a brief article. The lead was strong, and brought up the impending decision on this political and medical decision right away. Even though it was an opinion piece, I felt like most of the statements that were made were backed up by some sort of scientific research, or expertise. However, there was one sentence that came off as a little bit too harsh. It was the one where Caplan says one of the advocates "has no idea what she is talking about". If it was up to me, I would say that this is great, and provides emotion to the piece. Writing an opinion article opens up the opportunity of bashing people like this. However, if I was an editor, I might have taken out that sentence and worded it a different way, simply because the general public could find it aggressive. Also, there were a few paragraphs in the middle that seemed to reiterate the same point over and over again. This point being that fertilized eggs only have a 50% chance of developing into humans. Overall, it was a very strong opinion piece.

I found the GW food article to start out very strong, only to get jumbled in later paragraphs. The first paragraph told a story of people destroying parts of a rice plant, which did a good job showing the public opinion of GM food. The next paragraph summed up the public opinion with numbers. However, the article never really went into detail about the process in which GM food is made. Also, the article made quick transitions into other topics, without introducing them, and there was a weak correlation between them. For example, after setting up the stage for a discussion about animal mistreatment, the article jumps to plant diseases. That confused me. It then goes into a completely unnecessary paragraph about the author's trip to Switzerland. Overall, I think the author has chosen a good topic, and has a lot of good material, but it was not organized correctly. A lot of different points were brought up, but the author never went into extensive detail about anything.