Panelists to discuss affirmative action Sept. 17

Updated 4:00 PM September 2, 2003

Research notes

Gene identified for disease that mimics AMD
Kellogg scientists have been studying a family whose members have an eye disease that looks like age-related macular degeneration (AMD), but has a pattern of inheritance that is less common and results in an exceptionally high incidence of the disease among family members in the study.

In the August issue of Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, scientist Radha Ayyagari of the Kellogg Eye Center and her collaborators identify the gene associated with this unusual macular disease. She reports on the Tyr141Cys mutation in gene RDS.

Ayyagari says the marked similarity between AMD and the AMD-like disease will help researchers learn more about the molecular basis of AMD. The findings could have even greater significance because Ayyagari and her colleagues suspect that some individuals with AMD also may harbor the RDS mutation.

AMD is a progressive disease affecting the macula, the area of the retina responsible for central vision that enables us to drive, read and identify faces. It affects about 1.65 million individuals in this country each year; the first symptoms tend to appear at age 60 or older.

In addition to Ayyagari, coauthors of the paper are: Dr. Shahrokh Khani, Athanasios Karoukis, Joyce Young, Rajesh Ambasudhan, Tracy Burch, Richard Stockton, Richard Alan Lewis, Lori Sullivan, Stephen Daiger and Elias Reichel.
-—Betsy Nisbet, Kellogg Eye Center

Horned dinosaur discovered in India
A team that includes a U-M paleontologist has identified from bones collected in India a stocky, carnivorous dinosaur with an unusual head crest.

A stocky, carnivorous dinosaur with an unusual head crest has been identified from bones collected in India. American and Indian scientists, working with support from the National Geographic Society, have named the animal Rajasaurus narmadensis.(Illustration by Todd Marshall (c) 2003 National Geographic Society)

The dinosaur belongs to a lineage of predatory dinosaurs known from the southern continents, and the discovery represents the first skull ever assembled of a dinosaur of any kind from India.

U-M paleontologist Jeff Wilson co-led the team with Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago, Suresh Srivastava of the Geological Survey of India and Ashok Sahni of Panjab University. The research was funded by the National Geographic Society and the American Institute of Indian Studies.

“It’s fabulous to be able to see this dinosaur, which lived as the age of dinosaurs came to a close,” says Sereno, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence. “It was a significant predator that was related to species on continental Africa, Madagascar and South America.”

The team has named the newly identified animal Rajasaurus narmadensis, which means “regal dinosaur from the Narmada.” (The bones were found near the Narmada River in western India.) The new species is described in the Contributions of the Museum of Paleontology of U-M (August 2003). The team will donate casts of the dinosaur’s skull to Panjab University and the Geological Survey of India.

Wilson said the 30-foot-long dinosaur was heavy and strong and would have pursued a diet that included the long-necked sauropod dinosaurs that roamed the Narmada region. It had a distinctive look. “There is a bone that protruded from the top of its head, so we think it had some kind of horn on top,” Wilson says. “Its closest relatives had either one horn or two.”
—Nancy Ross-Flanigan, News Service

Sex, Prozac and the media
A new analysis of the media’s coverage of depression, anti-depressant drugs and related issues over the past 15 years shows a significant shift in how newspapers and magazines portray mental health problems.

Instead of describing depressive illnesses in terms of specific symptoms and medical terms, as they did when the era of Prozac began in the late 1980s, the printed news media now are far more likely to depict women’s mental issues in relation to gender-stereotyped roles, such as marriage, motherhood and menopause. But during the same time, descriptions of depression in men have not shifted in the same way.

The new findings, made by researchers at the Depression Center and recently published online by the journal Social Science & Medicine, show that gender stereotypes increasingly pervade popular media discussions of mental illness.

From women’s magazines to the health section of the daily paper, the study shows a shift toward the “medicalization” of deviation from women’s traditional roles, and the increasing description of mental illness in emotional, not medical, terms. Meanwhile, men’s depressive illness increasingly was described in terms connoting work, aggression or athletics.

The study’s lead author was Dr. Jonathan Metzl, an assistant professor of psychiatry and women’s studies and director of the Program in Culture, Health and Medicine at the Medical School.
—Kara Gavin, UMHS Public Relations

Overtime: It’s not just for the money
It isn’t just the money that makes overtime so important to blue-collar workers, according to a U-M study presented Aug. 18 in Atlanta at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

“Aside from the material rewards, working overtime is a way of showing that you belong and can work as hard as anyone,” says Elizabeth Rudd, a sociologist at the Institute for Social Research (ISR). “It’s also a way of improving your social status. As one worker told us, there’s a stigma about doing factory work, but if you work a lot of overtime, you make enough money to shrug it off.”

With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Rudd and colleagues at the ISR Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life have been conducting research at a Detroit-area auto parts plant to learn more about work and family issues facing blue-collar manufacturing workers. So far, the researchers have interviewed 53 hourly and salaried workers, attended union meetings and social functions and spent time working on the line.

Working overtime allows blue-collar workers to consume the same commodities as secure and successful white-collar professionals, Rudd points out. As a result, second homes, boats, SUVs and other high-ticket accouterments of higher social status have a value to blue-collar workers that is more than merely monetary. At the same time, Rudd found, workers recognize the irony that they don’t really have the time to enjoy these luxury items because they’re always working.
—Diane Swanbrow, News Service

Gene discovered that controls severity of neurological disease in mice
U-M scientists have discovered a gene that turns a chronic inherited neurological disorder—which produces tremor and muscle weakness in laboratory mice—into a lethal disease that paralyzes and kills them within a few weeks of birth.

Called Scnm1 for sodium channel modifier 1, the gene is one of a small group of recently discovered modifier genes that interact with other genes to alter the physical effects of inherited diseases.

There are many inherited diseases—including cystic fibrosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and epilepsy—in which symptoms vary widely, even between members of the same family. Understanding how modifier genes work could help scientists solve a fundamental mystery of genetics: Why do people with identical genetic mutations often differ in the severity or age of onset of the same inherited disease?

"In our study with mice, we found that the severity of neurological defects caused by mutations in a gene called Scn8a are determined by another gene, Scnm1, which is located on a different chromosome," says Miriam Meisler, professor of human genetics in the Medical School. "Scnm1 is expressed in many human cells, which suggests that it could modify the severity of a wide range of inherited disorders in humans, including other neurological diseases."

Meisler conducted the study with David Buchner, a U-M graduate student, and Michelle Trudeau, a U-M research associate. Results were published in the Aug. 15 issue of Science.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
—Sally Pobojewski, Medical School Communications

Mixed race, multi-ethnic Americans less likely to stereotype
Many people tend to buy into at least some stereotypes about their own race, except those who identify themselves as multi-racial, according to new research.

A great deal of research on bi-racial Americans has focused on the caught-between-two-worlds theory of mixed race people feeling like they are neither white nor Black and how they can feel rejected by both of their ancestral races, making it harder for them to relate to their parents and suffering from low self esteem and low academic performance. But U-M researcher Margaret Shih's findings show people from mixed race backgrounds are far more open-minded than the majority of Americans who have a mono-racial background.

"The only group that didn't seem to react to the stereotypes were the mixed race groups," says Shih, an assistant professor of organizational psychology. "They are less likely to buy into the racial stereotype. There can be advantages to being at a disadvantage socially. People are a lot more resilient than we think they are."

Asking test subjects a question as simple as whether they were male or female or about their racial background could alter scores on standardized tests, Shih found.

Subjects given a math test and asked whether they were Asian tended to perform slightly better than Asians not asked about race because they at least subconsciously were swayed by the racial stereotype of Asians being better at math than non-Asians, Shih reports in a paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. Non-Asian subjects also showed a boost in performance when reminded of Asian stereotypes. Similarly, those asked to identify their sex, when answering "female," could score slightly lower than women not asked about their gender, her research found.
—Joseph Serwach, News Service

High cost of vaccine may keep some doctors from giving it
The high cost of the life-saving Prevnar vaccine for young children is affecting how doctors choose to provide it, and causing some to steer parents to public vaccination clinics, a new U-M-led study finds.

While the vast majority of nearly 700 children's doctors surveyed in the study are recommending the vaccine—which protects against bacterial meningitis and other diseases—almost one in three harbors concerns about the cost, especially if many children they see don't have insurance that covers their shots.

The results are published in the September issue of Pediatrics by researchers at the U-M Health System and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The findings have immediate implications for the parents of toddlers, who may learn they have to pay out of pocket or travel to another location to get the $260, four-shot series that's recommended for all children under age 2 by the CDC. Both options are sizable obstacles for many families and may mean some children don't get vaccinated.

The lead author is Dr. Matthew Davis, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Medical School. Davis is a member of the U-M's Child Health Evaluation and Research Unit, which has a CDC grant to study vaccine issues. The study co-author is Dr. Gary Freed, chief of the Division of General Pediatrics. In addition to Davis and Freed, the authors include Serigne Ndiaye of the CDC's National Immunization Program; and Dr. Christopher Kim and Sarah Clark of the U-M CHEAR Unit, part of the Division of General Pediatrics in the Department of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases. Davis and Kim also hold academic positions in the Division of General Medicine of the Department of Internal Medicine.

The study was funded by the CDC through a cooperative agreement with the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine.
—Kara Gavin, UMHS Public Relations

Parasites prevent ants from protecting coffee plants
Azteca ants are voracious predators that live on coffee plants and aggressively defend their territories. That's generally good for the coffee plants, which are protected in the process against all sorts of insect pests.

But the whole system goes awry when parasitic flies called phorids enter the picture. When they get the chance, the flies lay eggs in Azteca ants' heads, but they also influence the ants' behavior, with far-reaching results, a U-M graduate student has discovered.

"When phorid flies appear near an ant nest, the ants all run back inside the nest, severely limiting their ability to search for or attack their prey," said Stacy Philpott, who presented her findings Aug. 5 at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. "The result in itself is surprising since most people think of a parasite as something that kills its host, not as something that has an effect by changing the behavior of its host."

In experiments conducted on coffee plantations in Mexico, Philpott—now a graduate student instructor—found that Azteca ants are more efficient predators than other ants, finding and eliminating caterpillars and other potential pests from coffee plants faster than other common ants in the same farms. But when she compared ant attacks on caterpillars on coffee plants where phorids were found with those on phorid-free plants, she found that the numbers of ants patrolling the plants were cut in half when phorids were present. In addition, ants took more than twice as long to carry away caterpillars on plants with phorids, and some caterpillars on those plants escaped ant attacks altogether.
—Nancy Ross-Flanigan, News Service

Quantum logic gate lights up
Physicists have taken another important step toward making a quantum computer. Duncan Steel, The Peter S. Fuss Professor in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science
(EECS) and Physics at U-M, and co-workers have created a logic gate using two electron-hole pairs—also known as "excitons"—in a quantum dot.

Classical computers deal with binary logic, and the bits being processed must be either 0 or 1. Quantum computers, on the other hand, exploit the ability of quantum particles to be in two or more states at the same time. A quantum bit or "qubit" can therefore be 0 or 1 or any combination of the two. This means that a quantum computer could, in principle, outperform a classical computer for certain tasks. However, all the quantum computers demonstrated so far only have contained a handful of qubits.

Although qubits have been made with trapped photons, atoms and ions, it generally is thought that it should be easier to build working devices with solid-state systems. Several teams have made significant progress with the superconducting approach to solid-state quantum computing. Now Steel and co-workers at U-M, Michigan State, the Naval Research Laboratory and the University of California, San Diego. have demonstrated the first all-optical quantum gate in a semiconductor quantum dot.

For more information, visit http://www.physics.lsa.umich.edu/nea/news/articles/August03/logic.htm.

—Belle Dumé, PhysicsWeb

Research notes

More Stories