Letters to the editors
New York Sixth Sense
To the Editors:
As a New Yorker for all of my adult life, I had a good chuckle at Robert Levine’s article about helpfulness (“The Kindness of Strangers,” May-June). There is a fundamental flaw in the design of this experiment: Despite all his efforts to the contrary, Dr. Levine has managed to measure civility rather than actual helpfulness. Two main factors have skewed his New York numbers: perception of fault, and what he terms “wariness ” but is also known as the “New York sixth sense.”
First let’s talk about perception of fault. New Yorkers do not like to help people who have foolishly brought their problems upon themselves. If you walk down the street dropping your possessions (pens, letters, $20 bills), then you are considered a fool who deserves what you get. The first lesson in New York is to know who’s around you and where your possessions are. Pen-droppers have violated that rule and therefore can probably be classified as “tourists” (a discussion for a different letter).
I howled with laughter when I read the note scribbled on the letter that had been returned, and I think Dr. Levine missed the point entirely. The author was not merely maligning your mother: He was telling you what YOUR problem was. The key word, in both English and Spanish, is “irresponsible.” Only the irresponsible son of an irresponsible puta would be so careless and foolish, as you obviously were.
Now on to wariness. You would have to be better than an Academy Award-winning actor to convince a New Yorker that you are (a) injured if you are not actually injured or (b) blind if you are not actually blind. Furthermore, if you are blind and don’t know how to cross a street by yourself (which all blind New Yorkers actually know how to do), why are you out here? See point number one: “perception of fault.” I wonder if any of the test subjects were asked how convincing they found the performances to be.
I’d like to leave you with a memory that is as vivid as the one the author had in Rangoon when he witnessed help given to a stranger. As I was walking up Seventh Avenue, a middle-aged man suddenly collapsed in front of me. His wife was distraught, and he was dazed, disoriented and unable to stand. Immediately, four of us New Yorkers swung into action, while a group of sympathetic hand- wringing tourists gathered around us. One of us used a cell phone to call 911 (more than once, to ask them where the hell they were), one found a police car and brought the officer over, one sat on the curb next to the man and his wife, speaking to them and calming them, and one procured a pillow and blanket from the (extremely reluctant) staff of a nearby hotel. When the paramedics arrived, we had a quick sidewalk conference and determined that the poor folk would never manage to negotiate a New York hospital emergency room on their own, so the person who had the least pressing schedule that afternoon volunteered to stick by them until they were out of danger. Were we polite? Not really. But effective in a crisis? You bet.
Renee Colwell
New York, New York
To the Editors:
Rarely have I read a magazine article that gripped me as hard as did “The Kindness of Strangers.” Though dyslexic and lazy, I clung to every word until I finished. The article was to me a first thrilling restatement of a thought I have lived with-and spoken of- for 35 years.
Not only does treatment of strangers deteriorate with population density, I kept saying. There is, as in atomic science, a “critical mass,” above which people treat one another horribly. Now Robert Levine shows that that density is about 1,000 persons per square mile. Yes, of course, there are sensible reasons why good people act badly, but so what? I live in a real world, not a possible world.
Thirty-five years ago I was still looking for work in New York City (density 7,500 persons per square mile). Writing, cartooning, illustrating, editing, advertising, publishing-any of these could have had my contribution. But each day of job hunting took on an acrid odor from the receptionists, taxi drivers, bus drivers, news dealers, storekeepers that I did talk with. Real job interviews were rare, and even those were often unpleasant.
Then in 1968 I exited a Broadway matinee into the sunshine. Flagging down one of a taxi pack waiting for the theater crowd, I opened its rear door for my mother and brother. Before I could turn and motion them over, I was hit from the rear with a crushing football-style block that sent me staggering to 10 feet behind the cab. When I was able to look back, I saw a very well-dressed man holding the door for his own significant other.
Call it a last straw if you must; I call it a bale. My neighbors and my family visit New York frequently, but I have never set foot in that repulsive city since that day. Parties? Jobs? Shows? No thanks. Even when a 1973 invitation came from Max Frankel to interview for a job as an editorial-page writer for The New York Times, the center of my particular universe, I turned it down. I often wonder if I would refuse today, and I think I still would.
David Royce
Westport, Connecticut
Antibiotic Alternatives
To the Editors:
Upon reading the article entitled “New Antibiotics and New Resistance,” by Carlos Amabile-Cuevas, in the March-April issue, I felt there were other areas that needed highlighting, particularly nontraditional therapies. No new class of drugs with a novel mode of action has been discovered since nalidixic acid in 1962, suggesting that we must consider alternative methods for combatting antibiotic resistant bacteria. Areas of future interest include bacterial interference, development of antibacterial agents, and bacteriophage therapy.
Bacterial interference, or bacteriotherapy, is the practice of deliberately inoculating hosts with harmless bacteria to prevent infection by pathogenic strains. Pathogenesis is prevented because nonpathogenic bacteria compete with pathogenic bacteria for nutrients and adhesion receptors required for infection. However, parameters for the practical application of bacterial interference remain unknown.
Antibacterial agents refer to any natural or synthetic peptides that kill bacteria by destroying bacterial cell membranes. Examples of this strategy include the synthetic cell-membrane disruptors known as cyclic D,L-[alpha]-peptides. In contrast to any other known class of peptides, cyclic D,L-[alpha]-peptides can self-assemble into flat ring-shaped conformations to form a nanotube. Insertion of these self-assembled structures into the bacterial cell membrane causes holes that collapse transmembrane ion potentials and quickly kill the cell. These cyclic peptides possess a large “sequence space” that allows many structural changes without loss of function. Their targets and tube size can be easily altered through amino acid sequence and the number of residues. Consequently, they have been engineered to target bacterial membranes while excluding mammalian membranes.
Bacteriophage therapy uses viruses to specifically target and destroy bacteria. The strategy is quite attractive for several reasons. Phage particles are narrow-spectrum agents, meaning they target individual strains of toxic bacteria without harming other varieties. Furthermore, DNA manipulation of the phage genome allows the bacterial specificity to be changed, and since bacteriophages mutate in vivo just as easily as their bacterial targets, the therapy is more efficient.
Other ideas that are being piloted are oligosaccharide mimicking and anti-sense inhibition. The first is an anti-infective whereby oligosaccharides are designed to bind bacterial lipoproteins and glycolipids destined for bacterial attachment. The latter uses complementary oligonucleotides to target bacterial DNA, preventing viability.
Sean S. Kardar
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia
To the Editors:
I just finished reading the excellent article “New Antibiotics and New Resistance.” The author mentions a card game developed by his colleague Isabel Nivon-Bolan that illustrates mechanisms involved in acquiring and activating resistance to antibiotics. Can you tell me more about the game?
Shannon Barber
Yellowstone Elk Calf Project
Mammoth hot Springs, Wyoming
Dr. Amabile-Cuevas replies:
I agree with Mr. Kardar that I did not mention a number of interesting options, mostly because of space limitations, but also because they were not within the scope of the article. Furthermore, only those research avenues that can be considered to be in the mainstream were mentioned (and, of course, some of our own work). Phage therapy and probiotics, although very interesting, are still in the realm of “alternative medicine.” In any case, the active search of a wide variety of options is a clear indication of how desperately we need new ways to fight infections.
Probiotics, that is, live bacteria that are administered orally with the goal of preventing colonization by pathogenic bacteria, yield controversial results. For example, while probiotics prevent the colonization of the nose by pathogens (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2003; 77:517-520), they were unable to prevent the recurrence of a gut condition caused by colonizing bacteria (Gut 2002; 51:405-409). The issue was also reviewed in Trends in Microbiology (2001; 9:424-428). In any case, the absolute absence of resistance genes (not only of resistance phenotypes) in such bacteria must be demonstrated to prevent t\he mobilization of resistance traits to pathogenic germs. And it is so far intended as a preventive measure, not as therapy.
Phage therapy was extensively explored in the former Soviet Union. However, the spectrum of phages is so narrow that it may preclude their clinical use: Phages are often so specific that they infect only certain strains of a bacterial species. Furthermore, adding more mobile genetic elements into the equation might have unpredictable consequences; in some natural environments, such as seawater, phages are perhaps the main vehicle for gene transfer, an activity we would not like to increase within a patient. A recent review on phage therapy was published elsewhere (Antimicrobial Agents of Chemotherapy 2001; 45:649-659).
The increase in antibiotic resistance is fostering research in many ways. New drugs or even new strategies are certainly needed, but perhaps more important is the need to avoid the abuses and mistakes of the “antibiotic era.” Much more than the effect of new agents against bacteria in vitro or in a handful of treated patients, it is necessary to look at the big picture before unleashing any other product of our genius.
As for the game: Isabel Nivon-Bolan headed a team here at Fundacion Lusara that developed a card game (“Bugs & Drugs,” she called it) as an educational tool for understanding antibiotic resistance evolution in a dynamic and amusing way. In addition to the great danger that antibiotic resistance poses to public health, it is a super example of biological evolution through natural (or not-so-natural) selection. We are happy to provide on our Web site (www.lusara.org) files that individuals can download and use to produce their own game by printing on pre-cut cards.
The game tries to represent the random factors and competitive processes through which genes are exchanged, resistance is gained and antibiotics select resistant organisms. Each player becomes a type of bacterium, which may gain resistance genes or suffer the effects of antibiotics while struggling to survive and reproduce. In addition to “classic” resistance genes, which are gained by mutation or gene transfer, this game includes more recently discovered resistance mechanisms such as activable resistance phenotypes, and even antibiotic “persistence” gained by growing in a biofilm.
Carbonate Crystal Contamination
To the Editors:
In “Dating Ancient Mortar,” by John Hale, Jan Heinemeier, Lynn Lancaster, Alf Lindroos and [Angstrom]sa Ringbom (March-April), the premise that carbon-14 is fixed in limestone-derived substances at the “exact time of construction,” appears to seriously underestimate long-term chemical alterations of ancient mortars and plasters. Scanning electron microscopy of comparable samples from the pre-79 A.D. Roman town of Pompeii indicates that lime plaster hardening is not restricted to the few hours or days after the plaster dried. Instead, the development of extensive and interlocking lath-like calcium carbonate crystals in Pompeian plaster (Figure 1) is the result of an ongoing process. The authors’ use of radiocarbon analysis of ancient plasters and mortars could not differentiate between ^sup 14^C in the initial lime mix and ^sup 14^C introduced later by atmospheric CO2 associated with calcium carbonate recrystallization.
Peter Grave
University of New England
Armidale, NSW Australia
Dr. Hale and his co-authors reply:
All mortar samples are not alike. Some present problems of long- lasting chemical activity with abundant recrystallizations. As we indicated in our article, for a number of Roman samples “the correct date was indicated by the second rather than the first fraction of carbon dioxide released in the analysis, because the mortar dissolves slowly but contains rapidly dissolving contaminants.” The young calcite crystals shown in the scanning electron micrograph sent in by Dr. Grave fall in this category of contaminants.
In such cases, we plotted the percentage of CO2 extracted from the sample as successive fractions over a period of about 16 hours. The resulting curve or profile raised the question: Which fraction or fractions match the correct historical age? In many mortar samples containing beach sand, the first fraction provided the match. However, with hydraulic and pozzolana mortars as well as contaminated samples, the ^sup 14^C values stabilized around the historically correct date in the middle fractions, after 20 to 40 percent of the sample had been dissolved. Young calcites and recrystallizations dominate the first fractions, yielding dates that are too recent, whereas dead carbon from unburnt limestone residues dominates the last fraction, yielding dates that are too old. We also plotted the values of O2 and ^sup 13^C as the samples dissolved. The values themselves did not accurately reflect the age of the sample, but the point at which these two profiles leveled out showed that the equilibrium stage had been reached, thus helping to identify the fractions with correct ^sup 14^C values.
We believe that if Dr. Grave applies this method to his mortar samples from Pompeii, he will obtain ^sup 14^C dates that match the known historical ages of the Roman buildings.
Manganese y Muerte
To the Editors:
In their interesting and well-reasoned article, “The Ancient Ceramics of West Mexico” (May-June), Robert Pickering and Ephraim Cuevas speculate that surface water, percolating into shaft tombs, could have been one source of manganese for the manganese oxide precipitated onto the surfaces of ceramic figurines by metal- reducing bacteria.
Although this is certainly a possibility in cases where shaft tombs are situated deep enough below the surface for water to acquire manganese in the parts-per-million range through percolation down the soil profile, it seems less likely for more shallow tombs (those less than 5 meters deep). Both diagenetic (trapped in mineral lattices of soil particles) and anthropogenic manganese (adsorbed to soil particles and in clay interlayers as a result of human activity) typically are resistant to leaching at shallow depths, although this depends partly on weathering rates, soil geochemistry and soil pH, among other factors.
In addition to water percolation, perhaps another source of manganese in the tombs was human tissues, which require manganese for bone metabolism and many enzymatic reactions. Necrophilous insects feasting on the remains of a tomb’s occupants could have consumed elemental manganese and carried it with them when they came to rest on ceramic artifacts, such that the ultimate decay of the insects may have allowed their puparia to mineralize with the help of bacteria.
Christian Wells
Department of Anthropology
Arizona State University
Dr. Pickering replies:
I am grateful for Dr. Wells’s thoughtful comments. I can envision an experimental tomb reconstruction that uses infested animal corpses, modern ceramic figurines, etc. to approximate the tomb conditions and to monitor the air quality of the tomb over a period of time. Perhaps that will give us a more definitive answer to the question. Clearly, there are still a number of pieces to the puzzle that we do not yet have.
How to Write to American Scientist: Brief letters commenting on articles that have appeared in the magazine are welcomed. The editors reserve the right to edit submissions. Please include a fax number or e-mail address if possible. Address: Letters to the Editors, American Scientist, P.O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3975 or editors@amsci.org
Figure 1 from Grave, P. 2002. Characterization of the decorated wall-plasters of Casa Delia Caccia Antica (VII 4,48) by quantitative optical and microanalytic methods, in The Casa Delia Caccia Antica (VII 4,48) in Pompeii, Hauser in Pompeji, ed. F. P. Allison and F. Sear. Munich: Hinner.
Copyright Sigma XI-The Scientific Research Society Jul/Aug 2003