It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, June 13, 2025
Father-led program shows lasting dietary improvements in Mexican-heritage families
New research published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior highlights lasting health impacts of culturally tailored programs for Latino fathers
Lead author Annika Vahk, PhD, showcases the results of a father-focused nutrition and physical activity program that significantly improved long-term healthy dietary behaviors among Mexican-heritage fathers living in rural US communities. This 6-week program called ¡Haz Espacio para Papi! (Make Room for Daddy!) led to sustained increases in fruit and vegetable intake and healthy behaviors up to 2.5 years after completion. Findings point to the importance of culturally relevant, family-centered interventions, particularly those that prioritize familism and build skills together as a unit.
Credit: Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior
Philadelphia, June 11, 2025 –A recent study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, published by Elsevier, shows that a father-focused nutrition and physical activity program significantly improved long-term healthy dietary behaviors among Mexican-heritage fathers living in rural US communities. The 6-week program led to sustained increases in fruit and vegetable intake and healthy behaviors up to 2.5 years after completion.
The program, called ¡Haz Espacio para Papi! (Make Room for Daddy!), was delivered by promotoras (trained community health workers) in Texas border communities. It engaged 59 families with children aged 9–11 and included in-person group sessions, home-based activities, and interactive nutrition education. Fathers were assessed at baseline, after the program, 3–4 months later, and again 2.0–2.5 years later to measure dietary changes and behavior maintenance.
Results showed that participants increased their weekly fruit and vegetable consumption and improved overall dietary behavior scores over time. Fathers with lower education levels saw the greatest gains in vegetable intake, while older fathers tended to consume fewer vegetables than their younger peers.
Lead author of the study Annika Vahk, PhD, Eastern Washington University, Spokane, WA, said, “This study provides important evidence that culturally grounded programs centered on fathers can drive lasting dietary behavior change. Fathers play a vital role in modeling and supporting healthy behaviors in Latino families, and programs like HEPP can help activate that influence.”
The findings point to the importance of culturally relevant, family-centered interventions, particularly those that prioritize familism and build skills together as a unit. Future research should explore expanding the model to include a wider range of family structures and communities.
June 11, 2025—The next time your doctor suggests that you take a genetic test before prescribing a drug, you can thank a group of Black inmates imprisoned outside Chicago 75 years ago. The story starts with malaria research using prisoners but has long been told as if no Black participants were involved at all. That tale is now being rewritten.
Much attention has been paid to malaria research conducted on inmates at Illinois’ Stateville Penitentiary and the fraught ethical issues that the carceral studies raised. Stateville inmates were infected with the potentially fatal mosquito-borne disease from 1945 to 1974 to test the efficacy of various antimalarial treatments—part of a U.S. military-funded effort to protect American troops serving overseas.
The standard version of this history is that African-American prisoners were intentionally excluded from the infamous studies, based on the myth that Black people were immune to malaria.
University of Utah medical ethicists, led by philosophy professor James Tabery, are now shining a light on a buried part of the Stateville story in hopes of revealing how the prison experiments advanced medical science that benefits patients today, and which would not have happened were it not for the participation of Black inmates. The Utah research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and appears June 11 in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association).
The genetic basis of adverse drug reactions
Black inmates at Stateville were eventually brought into the malaria research in 1950—not to test antimalarials, but rather to figure out why the antimalarial drugs, such as primaquine, triggered dangerous adverse reactions in some people. This aspect of the Stateville research, in which at least 80 primaquine-sensitive inmates were studied, helped set the foundation for pharmacogenetics and “precision medicine,” the modern practice of tailoring medical treatment to individuals’ genetic profiles, according to former Utah graduate student Hannah Allen, first author on the study and now an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley.
This study explores the history of research funded by the U.S. Army and led by Alf Alving, a nephrologist with the University of Chicago. The toxicity studies overloaded the prisoners with primaquine and then documented what happened to their physical health. The Stateville researchers discovered up to 10% of the African American subjects experienced an acute hemolytic reaction.
“This is where the drug is essentially destroying the body’s red blood cells at a faster rate than they are being produced,” Allen said. “This occurs due to an enzymatic deficiency that makes metabolizing the drug difficult. It's incredibly painful. You have a decrease in oxygenation to your limbs and organs, so it causes cyanosis, nausea, fatigue. Some people's spleens failed, or kidneys started to fail, the urine becomes really dark.”
The Stateville researchers shifted their focus to unearthing the basis for this primaquine sensitivity.
“That was the genuine mystery,” said Tabery, a member of University of Utah’s Center for Health Ethics, Arts & Humanities. “Why is it the case that certain people have this really awful reaction to these drugs and nobody else does? Trying to answer that question is what sets the stage for modern pharmacogenetics.”
In 1956, Alving’s team discovered the genetic basis of primaquine sensitivity boiled down to an inability to sufficiently produce an enzyme, known as glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD), leaving the patient unable to combat oxidative stress triggered by exposure to the drug. The discovery was important because it told a clear genetic story behind a vexing health phenomenon and helped set the stage for avoiding dangerous drug reactions by testing people first to determine who might be sensitive.
Doctors now routinely administer genetic tests to their patients before prescribing certain drugs to decrease the risks of adverse reaction—a cardiologist who checks her patient’s genetic profile before prescribing a blood thinner, or an infectious disease specialist who ensures their patient with HIV will tolerate abacavir. These preventive measures are direct pharmacogenetic descendants of what was learned from Black research participants at Stateville.
A proper acknowledgment of the prisoners
Setting up that pharmacogenetic revolution came at a cost to the Black prisoners involved, according to Allen and Tabery’s research. In addition to the debilitating experience of the hemolytic anemia, the inmates’ identifiable information was regularly reported in publications, family members were even recruited into the controversial studies, and they were paid less than the white prisoners.
“There was a clear difference between what the white prisoners and Black prisoners experienced in the research conducted at Stateville,” they said.
Medical research involving prisoners—at Stateville and across the nation—was suspended in 1974 over ethical concerns centered on informed consent and coercion. The Stateville Penitentiary itself has been shuttered; the last inmates were moved out this year, and old cellblocks are planned for demolition.
Stateville was built in 1925 as a maximum-security prison with state-of-the-art panopticon structures where every cell could be observed from a central guard station. Its iconic roundhouse cellblocks became famous as sets in TV shows and major films, such as “Natural Born Killers” and “Bad Boys,” and the prison was the subject of the 1961 documentary, “Life at Stateville: The Wasted Years.”
Because prisoner records are sealed for 75 years under Illinois state law, historians today are not able to identify the participants after 1950 except through contemporaneous press accounts, Tabery said. Those accounts focused largely on the white prisoners who were tested for drug effectiveness. Accordingly, the Black participants’ identities remain obscured.
Still, Allen and Tabery are exploring other ways to properly acknowledge the role played by Black men in this transformational medical research—spotlighting the role of Black prisoners in museum exhibits about the history, and with science educators to develop lessons about pharmacogenetics oriented around the prisoner participants. As the JAMA publication concludes, “The medical community still has much to learn from what occurred at Stateville, and it is essential to recognize the participants—the people—who were at the center of it.”
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The study was published in JAMA on June 11 under title “The Black Prisoners of Stateville: Race, Research, and Reckoning at the Dawn of Precision Medicine.” The research formed part of Hannah Allen’s dissertation. The research was supported by a grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute (RM1HG009037). Content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Interior of the Stateville F Block as it appears today.
Credit
James Tabery, University of Utah
Journal
JAMA
Method of Research
Literature review
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
The Black Prisoners of Stateville: Race, Research, and Reckoning at the Dawn of Precision Medicine
The oceans are full of living things, with microscopic algae (phytoplankton) at the base of the marine food chain. These organisms make a living in the same way as land plants, using the sunlight that penetrates the upper 100 meters or so of the ocean as the energy source by which they synthesise organic matter for their cells. Every year, these tiny algae make about as much organic carbon as land plants. Like land plants, they obtain the building blocks of their cells from the surrounding environment – not a soil in this case but the seawater solution they live in.
But unlike the land ecosystem, when these algae die, they fall into the dark deep ocean, where their dead cells decay due to the action of bacteria. Therefore, the elements they need to grow are lost from the part of the ocean in which they live, and go back into seawater solution in the deep ocean. Somehow these elements must be returned from the deep ocean again to the surface where the whole cycle can begin again. The elements these organisms need are the same as on land – carbon of course, nitrogen and phosphorous - the elements that are applied to agricultural land in fertilisers - and the many metals that all life requires, like iron, zinc and others.
Phytoplankton are important for our climate because the carbon they remove from the surface ocean is removed from contact with the atmosphere into the deep ocean, keeping atmospheric carbon dioxide lower than it would otherwise be. In the discussion of strategies to mitigate current and future CO2rise, one option is to massively increase the rate at which oceanic algae do all this.
But, in fact, the rate at which they do it depends on the availability in the seawater solution of “nutrient” elements – the nitrogen, phosphorous and trace metals that are very scarce in the upper sunlit ocean. So, how these elements are removed from the upper ocean and recycled back there from the deep is crucial for how the past, current and future climate of the Earth operates.
In the new paper, ETH Zurich researchers lead by geochemist Derek Vance have used tracers of ocean chemistry to discover that a substantial proportion of many of the metals are, in fact, removed quickly and permanently from the seawater solution by a process other than biology: by incorporation into solid manganese-oxide particles that precipitate from seawater and which fall all the way through the ocean into the sediment at the bottom.
But they have also discovered that the metals are returned to the deepest seawater by chemical reactions that take place in the sediment and that release the metals from the solid manganese oxide, back into solution. Finally, we have used a numerical model of the transport physics in the ocean to show that the metals released to solution within the sediment, and that leak across the interface between the sediment and the deep ocean, are mixed back up through the ocean.
“Our study changes how we view ocean chemistry, and its impact on ocean biology and climate”, Derek Vance says. For the first time, it shows that leakage of material that was once thought to be permanently lost from the oceans to the solid sediment at the bottom is crucial to how researchers think about the seawater solution and the many elements it contains that are crucial to how ocean biology works.
Reference
Du J, Haley BA, McManus J, Blaser P, Rickli J, Vance D: Abyssal seafloor as a key driver of ocean trace-metal biogeochemical cycles, Nature (2025), doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-09038-3
Scans of the painting during various stages in its restoration. At left is the damaged piece, with the middle panel showing a map of the different kinds of damage present; green lines show full splits in the underlying panel support, thin red lines depict major paint craquelure, blue areas correspond to large paint losses, while pink regions show smaller defects like scratches. At right is the restored painting with the applied laminate mask.
Art restoration takes steady hands and a discerning eye. For centuries, conservators have restored paintings by identifying areas needing repair, then mixing an exact shade to fill in one area at a time. Often, a painting can have thousands of tiny regions requiring individual attention. Restoring a single painting can take anywhere from a few weeks to over a decade.
In recent years, digital restoration tools have opened a route to creating virtual representations of original, restored works. These tools apply techniques of computer vision, image recognition, and color matching, to generate a “digitally restored” version of a painting relatively quickly.
Still, there has been no way to translate digital restorations directly onto an original work, until now. In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature, Alex Kachkine, a mechanical engineering graduate student at MIT, presents a new method he’s developed to physically apply a digital restoration directly onto an original painting.
The restoration is printed on a very thin polymer film, in the form of a mask that can be aligned and adhered to an original painting. It can also be easily removed. Kachkine says that a digital file of the mask can be stored and referred to by future conservators, to see exactly what changes were made to restore the original painting.
“Because there’s a digital record of what mask was used, in 100 years, the next time someone is working with this, they’ll have an extremely clear understanding of what was done to the painting,” Kachkine says. “And that’s never really been possible in conservation before.”
As a demonstration, he applied the method to a highly damaged 15th century oil painting. The method automatically identified 5,612 separate regions in need of repair, and filled in these regions using 57,314 different colors. The entire process, from start to finish, took 3.5 hours, which he estimates is about 66 times faster than traditional restoration methods.
Kachkine acknowledges that, as with any restoration project, there are ethical issues to consider, in terms of whether a restored version is an appropriate representation of an artist’s original style and intent. Any application of his new method, he says, should be done in consultation with conservators with knowledge of a painting’s history and origins.
“There is a lot of damaged art in storage that might never be seen,” Kachkine says. “Hopefully with this new method, there’s a chance we’ll see more art, which I would be delighted by.”
Digital connections
The new restoration process started as a side project. In 2021, as Kachkine made his way to MIT to start his PhD program in mechanical engineering, he drove up the East Coast and made a point to visit as many art galleries as he could along the way.
“I’ve been into art for a very long time now, since I was a kid,” says Kachkine, who restores paintings as a hobby, using traditional hand-painting techniques. As he toured galleries, he came to realize that the art on the walls is only a fraction of the works that galleries hold. Much of the art that galleries acquire is stored away because the works are aged or damaged, and take time to properly restore.
“Restoring a painting is fun, and it’s great to sit down and infill things and have a nice evening,” Kachkine says. “But that’s a very slow process.”
As he has learned, digital tools can significantly speed up the restoration process. Researchers have developed artificial intelligence algorithms that quickly comb through huge amounts of data. The algorithms learn connections within this visual data, which they apply to generate a digitally restored version of a particular painting, in a way that closely resembles the style of an artist or time period. However, such digital restorations are usually displayed virtually or printed as stand-alone works and cannot be directly applied to retouch original art.
“All this made me think: If we could just restore a painting digitally, and effect the results physically, that would resolve a lot of pain points and drawbacks of a conventional manual process,” Kachkine says.
“Align and restore”
For the new study, Kachkine developed a method to physically apply a digital restoration onto an original painting, using a 15th-century painting that he acquired when he first came to MIT. His new method involves first using traditional techniques to clean a painting and remove any past restoration efforts.
“This painting is almost 600 years old and has gone through conservation many times,” he says. “In this case there was a fair amount of overpainting, all of which has to be cleaned off to see what’s actually there to begin with.”
He scanned the cleaned painting, including the many regions where paint had faded or cracked. He then used existing artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze the scan and create a virtual version of what the painting likely looked like in its original state.
Then, Kachkine developed software that creates a map of regions on the original painting that require infilling, along with the exact colors needed to match the digitally restored version. This map is then translated into a physical, two-layer mask that is printed onto thin polymer-based films. The first layer is printed in color, while the second layer is printed in the exact same pattern, but in white.
“In order to fully reproduce color, you need both white and color ink to get the full spectrum,” Kachkine explains. “If those two layers are misaligned, that’s very easy to see. So I also developed a few computational tools, based on what we know of human color perception, to determine how small of a region we can practically align and restore.”
Kachkine used high-fidelity commercial inkjets to print the mask’s two layers, which he carefully aligned and overlaid by hand onto the original painting and adhered with a thin spray of conventional varnish. The printed films are made from materials that can be easily dissolved with conservation-grade solutions, in case conservators need to reveal the original, damaged work. The digital file of the mask can also be saved as a detailed record of what was restored.
For the painting that Kachkine used, the method was able to fill in thousands of losses in just a few hours. “A few years ago, I was restoring this baroque Italian painting with probably the same order magnitude of losses, and it took me nine months of part-time work,” he recalls. “The more losses there are, the better this method is.”
He estimates that the new method can be orders of magnitude faster than traditional, hand-painted approaches. If the method is adopted widely, he emphasizes that conservators should be involved at every step in the process, to ensure that the final work is in keeping with an artist’s style and intent.
“It will take a lot of deliberation about the ethical challenges involved at every stage in this process to see how can this be applied in a way that’s most consistent with conservation principles,” he says. “We’re setting up a framework for developing further methods. As others work on this, we’ll end up with methods that are more precise.”
This work was supported, in part, by the John O. and Katherine A. Lutz Memorial Fund. The research was carried out, in part, through the use of equipment and facilities at MIT. Nano, with additional support from the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories, the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the MIT Libraries.
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Written by Jennifer Chu, MIT News
Journal
Nature
Article Title
“Physical restoration of a painting with a digitally-constructed mask”
