VIOLENCE WITHIN A SPECIES
More than 60 years ago, the Austrian naturalist Konrad Lorenz noticed that animals naturally endowed with lethal weaponry have inhibitions against using their teeth and claws on their own kind. Animals whose natural weaponry is limited have no such inhibitions.
Lorenz also noticed that people are in the latter category: We are puny creatures with no claws, fragile teeth and weak jaws. We also seem to lack inhibitions against killing our own kind.
In the wake of yet another adolescent killing spree, perhaps it is time to revisit Lorenz's ideas. People simply may not have the innate behavioral wiring to handle the lethal weapons that technology has put within reach of practically anyone.
What Lorenz observed, first published in 1935 in an article entitled ``Morals and Weapons,'' was that wolves, armed to the teeth for the purpose of killing prey animals, don't use this weaponry on other wolves.
He watched wolves in a zoo (where confinement enhances the possibility for violence) and noted that when they quarreled -- over food, sex or just plain cussedness -- the losing wolf soon made a submissive gesture, exposing his neck to the teeth of the winner. This gesture completely inhibited further aggression. The winner was simply unable to bite him, even though he clearly was hankering to.
In 1952, before the molecular basis of evolution was well understood, Lorenz wrote (in his book ``King Solomon's Ring'') that ``when, in the course of its evolution, a species of animals develops a weapon which may destroy a fellow-member at one blow, then, in order to survive, it must develop, along with the weapon, a social inhibition to prevent a usage which could endanger the existence of the species.''
In contrast, two doves he inadvertently left unattended together in a cage pecked each other nearly to death before he came home and rescued the loser. Doves in nature can easily escape another dove bent on mayhem, and the damage they could inflict on a fleeing rival is minimal. They had no need to evolve inhibitions against killing each other.
Recently, chimpanzees and dolphins, hitherto thought of as rather peaceful types, have been found to practice violence. Chimps have been observed practicing what amounts to warfare -- organizing raids on other groups of chimps and killing them. Dolphins are now believed to kill young dolphins and their close relatives, porpoises. Perhaps it is not surprising that (relative to lions and sharks) chimps and dolphins are unarmed by nature.
Of course, it isn't quite that simple. Sociable animals like wolves need more behavioral inhibitions than solitary ones who come together only for mating. Some male birds do indeed fight to the death. But only humans have provided themselves with prosthetic fangs and talons that their behavioral wiring was not designed for.
Violence among teenagers is nothing new. What is new are semiautomatic rifles so user-friendly a child can operate them.
My daughter, a 1989 graduate of the local public high school, came home from a school dance one evening with her face scratched and a few tufts of hair missing, the victim of a fellow student very irate over the usual things high school girls quarrel about. Fortunately, the young lady didn't have a weapon handy.
How much easier is it now, only a dozen years later, for teenagers to procure weapons -- not only knives but also semiautomatics and pipe bombs. Now a jilted girlfriend can take out a dozen classmates before regaining her composure.
I do not mean to compare the transient anger of romantic squabbles with the serious pathology that seems to have been behind many of these youthful shooting sprees. I simply point out that far fewer people would have been killed or injured if the perpetrators had been doing it with homemade bows and arrows.
Surely a take-home message here is that it needs to be much harder to get access to weapons. We can do one another plenty of damage without them.

Published: Friday, September 08, 2000  Edition:  STATEWIDE
Page: A13  Type:  OPINION
Section: EDITORIAL  Source:  Sandy Becker
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WHILE ETHICISTS BICKER, RESEARCHERS WELCOME STEM CELL GRANTS
The National Institutes of Health has published guidelines allowing federal grant money to be used for research on human embryonic stem cells. Such research has never been forbidden, mind you. Private drug and biotech companies have been busily at work ever since the first human ES cell lines were established nearly two years ago. Now publicly funded academic researchers can do it, too. What a welcome step this is, and none too soon.
Mammalian embryonic stem cells are harvested from early embryos that have only a few hundred cells. Most of these are the stem cells that will grow into the baby animal. (The rest have already differentiated into cells that will embed into the uterus or become the placenta and yolk sac, responsible for nutritional and other support of the growing embryo.) The harvested stem cells can be grown in culture indefinitely, nourished by a liquid medium that looks a lot like strawberry Kool-Aid. Like Peter Pan, they are stalled in a childlike state of infinite possibility, growing and dividing in the dish.
However, in response to chemical or physical cues, they can be made to mature on command, differentiating into all the cell types needed to make a complete organism. (They can't be induced to grow into a complete, viable animal; they just make various kinds of cells and tissues.)
I work in a lab at Wesleyan University that uses embryonic stem cells derived from mice. Working with them is as much art as science, since each batch of cells seems to have its own personality, sometimes wayward, which needs to be nudged to keep focused on the purpose of our experiments. When we grow them stuck to a supporting layer of fibroblast cells, they remain stem cells, growing and dividing, but not differentiating. When we allow them to float freely in the nutrient solution, they clump together and grow into complex embryoid bodies, balls of cells containing many differentiated cell types. We coax these embryoid bodies to make blood cells and blood vessels, and study the signaling molecules that may be involved in promoting or preventing this differentiation. Our cell lines can also make neural cells, and we are investigating the molecules that may promote differentiation of nerve cells.
Think of how useful it will be to get control of these processes. Damaged or clogged blood vessels could be instructed to repair or regrow. The blood vessels that nourish malignant tumors could be prevented from forming or induced to regress, starving the tumor. Brain cells lost to disorders such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease might be regrown. Tens of millions of people in this country suffer from diseases that may be helped by stem cell research.
There are understandable qualms about using the cells of human embryos for research. Using mouse cells, however, researchers can only learn for sure what is true for mice, not humans.
More than once, therapies that look promising in mice have failed to work in humans. Mice that lack a protein called leptin eat voraciously and become grossly fat. If they are injected with the missing leptin, they stop stuffing themselves and lose weight. However, when overweight people were injected with leptin in clinical trials, it had no effect.
The NIH guidelines for using human ES cells in research include some restrictions. The guidelines require that prospective donors be approached only after it is clear that their fertility treatments are complete and there are extra, frozen embryos that could be used for research. Grants submitted to the NIH for research using human ES cells will be subject to an extra review process, just to ensure that these guidelines are met. The human ES cell lines already in existence do not meet the NIH guidelines, so we cannot use them in our lab. We must wait while privately funded researchers derive new cell lines, which are derived in accordance with the NIH guidelines.
We are waiting impatiently.

Published: Wednesday, October 9, 1996  Edition:  STATEWIDE
Page: A17  Type:  OPINION
Section: EDITORIAL  Source:  Sandy Becker
Sandy Becker does research in molecular biology at Wesleyan University.
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EXTENDED HOSPITAL STAYS CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH
In all the ballyhoo about ``drive-through mastectomies'' and other instances of patients being rushed out of hospitals by parsimonious insurance companies, no one seems to be reminding us that hospitals are very unhealthy places we should walk out of if we can.
Things have come a long way since Ignatz Semmelweis demonstrated in mid-19th-century Vienna that it was a bad idea for physicians to attend sick people and then deliver babies without washing their hands in between. He traced the high incidence of what was called ``childbed fever'' to microbes carried by doctors from patient to patient.
The Viennese medical establishment was indignant at the suggestion that physicians were spreading disease among their patients, and Semmelweis was ridiculed. Events have proven him right, however, and modern hospitals make extraordinary efforts to prevent the spread of disease- causing microbes. Yet the fact remains that hospitals are a pathogenic microbe's playground.
Think of it. Dozens, even hundreds, of people to infect, most of them weakened by illness, surgery or childbirth, some of them newborns. And doctors and nurses to carry microbes from victim to victim as they make their rounds.
Hospital personnel nowadays have a number of routines to limit the spread of infectious diseases. They wash their hands frequently, using antibacterial soap. Patients wear clean gowns. Vistors are restricted. Surgery is performed with sterile instruments, by doctors and nurses wearing sterile gowns, masks and gloves. Patients with infectious diseases are kept separate from patients hospitalized for childbirth or surgery.
Yet statistics in medical journals suggest that between 1 in 20 and 1 in 7 patients in the United States acquires an infection while in the hospital. Pneumonia is still the leading infectious cause of death, and about one third of pneumonia cases are acquired within hospitals.
Worse yet, infections acquired in the hospital are more likely to be caused by pathogens resistant to common antibiotics. Besides sick people, and those engaged in taking care of them, hospitals are also full of antibiotics. Therefore the microbes found in hospitals are likely to be those that can flourish in an antibiotic-ridden environment.
Connecticut residents may be curious to know how their local hospital's infection rate stacks up. That information is surprisingly hard to come by. Large teaching hospitals occasionally tattle on themselves in medical journals. But this is not the sort of thing a local hospital will put in its annual report.
The Connecticut Office of Health Care Access recently published a study comparing all hospitals in the state on parameters such as death rate and complication rate. But hospital-acquired infections were not part of the study. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention compile data on hospital infection rates submitted voluntarily by participating hospitals. But they guarantee complete anonymity for the information. You can see their point.
Disease-causing microbes make their living by outwitting the human immune system and antibiotics. Some of them are very good at what they do. The one exception is smallpox, now extinct thanks to decades of vaccination programs all over the world.
Therefore, quite apart from the insurance industry's wish to save money by shortening hospital stays, it may be in our interest as patients to walk out of the hospital as soon as we can, and recuperate in the safety of our homes.