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, January 27, 2023
USCCB official: The church must admit its role in destroying Native American culture
‘The truth does not hurt anyone. We have to get the truth out there,’ said the Rev. Mike Carson, chair of the bishops’ Subcommittee of Native American Affairs. ‘The avoidance of truth is very destructive to everyone, including the Catholic Church.’
A makeshift memorial for the dozens of Indigenous children who died more than a century ago while attending a boarding school that was once located nearby is displayed under a tree July 1, 2021, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan, File)
(Global Sisters Report) — The sin of the Catholic Church’s role in the federal government’s attempt to destroy Native American culture through boarding schools must be examined, acknowledged and dealt with, a church official says.
The fact that the schools operated mainly in the late 1800s, when times were different, makes it no less a sin, said the Rev. Mike Carson, assistant director for the Subcommittee of Native American Affairs at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Carson spoke Monday (Jan. 23) to a webinar of dozens of members of the Catholic Native Boarding School Accountability and Healing Project, known as the AHP. The group, made up of religious orders, church officials and laypeople, works to address the role the church played in the government’s attempted cultural genocide.
“This is the sin of racism, and it was as much a sin 150 years ago as it is today,” Carson said. “The racist ideology is central to this because racial divisions do not exist in the eyes of Christ.”
Hundreds of government-funded boarding schools operated across the country from 1819 to the 1960s; many of those were run by Catholic dioceses or religious orders. In May 2022, the U.S. Department of the Interior released its initial report on the schools, showing they were rife with corporal punishment, including solitary confinement, withholding of food, and whipping and other physical abuse. There are also reports of sexual abuse and the trauma of children being forcibly taken from their homes, having their hair cut and being prohibited from speaking their native languages.
More than 500 children died at 19 of the schools, according to the government report, and burial sites have been found at 53 schools — numbers that are expected to rise.
Research by Global Sisters Report found that Catholic sisters ran or staffed at least 56 schools.
The Rev. Mike Carson, assistant director for the Subcommittee of Native American Affairs at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, speaks to the Catholic Native Boarding School Accountability and Healing Project in a Jan. 23, 2023, webinar. (GSR video screen grab)
Carson, whose presentation was titled “Native Boarding Schools: Learn from History to Promote Healing,” said it doesn’t matter whether intentions were good.
“Once we saw children being abducted from their homes, we should have said no,” Carson said. “Once [reports of abuse] surfaced, schools should have been closed and investigated. But they were not. Back then, as today, we see Christ as beyond cultures. So once the federal government said only English should be spoken, we should have said no.”
Carson, who is the U.S. bishops’ conference’s liaison to the AHP, said much of the focus for church entities right now is working to find archival records and make them usable and accessible.
“Unfortunately, most of the information we have is class sizes, applications, student names and building construction — things that are less important in terms of healing,” he said. “Most of the records are just not there that we really need.”
Government records make it clear, Carson said, that the point of the schools was not to educate children, but to “civilize” them. It was a way, he said, to pacify tribal nations with books and teachers instead of bullets, to destroy Native culture and impose European culture.
Now, Carson said, the church is obligated to address these facts.
“The truth does not hurt anyone. We have to get the truth out there,” he said. “The avoidance of truth is very destructive to everyone, including the Catholic Church.”
The AHP grew out of a grassroots effort that began in 2020; it still does not have a website and is just starting to work on getting nonprofit status.
Sister Sue Torgersen of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph, a member of the AHP steering committee, said she hopes more church officials will get involved.
“We realize the wider church has very little knowledge and information about the church’s role in this boarding school history and the harm that has come because of it,” Torgersen said. “If we can reach people who serve in parishes and dioceses, we can get some of this information out.”
Carson said that is critical if there is to ever be any healing.
“We’re doing this because we’re Christ-centered,” he said. “And that means we come to grips with the evil things we’ve done and move forward.”
The WWI propaganda mosque: A new exhibit showcases a Muslim POW camp
A new online exhibit from the National WWI Museum and Memorial presents the overlooked story of the Halbmondlager, a WWI Muslim prisoner of war camp.
Halbmondlager, or “Half Moon Camp,” a Muslim prisoner of war camp located in Wünsdorf, Germany, with mosque at right and prisoners drilled in military exercises in front. From the book, "In the Prison Camps of Germany" by Conrad Hoffman, 1920. (Print, Photograph from book. 1920. Open Library.)
(RNS) — In 1915, Germany’s first mosque was constructed from wood in a WWI Muslim prisoner of war camp. Likely built by the prisoners themselves, the mosque was a mishmash of Islamic architecture, with its dome, façade and minaret each representing different regions of the Islamic world.
The patchwork approach wasn’t accidental. It embodied a German/Ottoman propaganda campaign that sought to “woo” Muslim prisoners from around the globe to overthrow the Russian, French and British empires. Though the mosque and its story are unfamiliar to many students of the first World War, Patricia Cecil, specialist curator of faith, religion and WWI at the National WWI Museum and Memorial, argues that they are a testament to the war’s scale and impact.
“We conceive of it as this very European war. But it wasn’t. It was a global war,” Cecil told Religion News Service. “And this camp is evidence of that, and the photographs we have are evidence of that.”
Photograph of North African French colonial prisoners of war at Halbmondlager, “Half Moon Camp,” in Wünsdorf, Germany, in 1915. (Print, Photograph from periodical “Der Grosse Krieg in Bildern,” No. 4. 1915. Germany. 2007.68.4. National WWI Museum and Memorial.)
A new online exhibit launched Thursday (Jan. 26) by the National WWI Museum and Memorial presents the overlooked story of the Halbmondlager, or “Half Moon Camp,” a Muslim prisoner of war camp located in Wünsdorf, Germany. Featuring propaganda newspapers, photographs of the prisoners and audio clips of them playing instruments and reading poems, the “Fighting with Faith” exhibit captures a moment in history whose reverberations are still felt throughout the modern world.
At the camp, prisoners from as far away as West Africa and South and Central Asia were provided with halal foods, permitted to worship, allowed to observe religious rituals and holidays and visited by lecturers and foreign dignitaries who urged global Islamic solidarity. They were also given extra rations and larger sanitary facilities than prisoners at other German camps and were provided with extra leisure time for activities like attending concerts and playing cards. But though these perks might have appeared generous, Germany and the Ottoman Empire had ulterior motives, according to Cecil.
Illustration of the mosque at Halbmondlager, “Half Moon Camp.” (Illustration from Die Kriegsgefangenen in Deutschland, Siegen, 1915. Germany.)
“From the outset, using religion as a tool of propaganda was the goal,” said Cecil. “They wanted to have the benefit of millions of Muslim soldiers. If you can get all these people currently under the rule of the British, French and Russian empires, and can get them to side with a religious ideology that also aligns with your military ideology, you have a recipe for revolution across the world.”
The exhibit explains that in 1914, German actors and Ottoman leaders influenced the sultan of the Ottoman Empire — who was also caliph, or head of the worldwide Islamic community — to declare a jihad, framing the war against the allied powers as a sacred obligation for all Muslims. By giving Muslim prisoners special treatment at the camp, Germany and the Ottoman Empire hoped to entice prisoners to join the politically motivated jihad.
The ploy, by most measures, failed, said Cecil. Those who did opt in to the Ottoman military were mistreated and often ended up deserting — letters show that some wrote back to the camp to warn about being abused by Ottoman officers. But more significantly, the prisoners were largely unconvinced by the German and Ottoman tactics.
“Their own national ties, ethnic ties and understanding of Islam and what it teaches about jihad were stronger than propaganda,” said Cecil. “This failed because Germany and the Ottoman Empire couldn’t get this group of Muslim prisoners of war to align with what their idea of jihad is.”
“Fighting with Faith” online exhibit logo. Image courtesy National WWI Museum and Memorial
But though the propaganda campaign itself was a failure, it left its mark. “This alliance, this propaganda campaign, and this camp, if we want to drill it down, is the birth of the Western notion of jihad for the 20th and now the 21st century,” Cecil told RNS. Jihad has several meanings, including an internal struggle to honor the divine or external struggle against the enemies of Islam. But Cecil argues that this was the first time jihad was linked to a geopolitical military ideal: to overthrow the British, French and Russian empires.
Photograph of a Saphi prisoner of war at Halbmondlager in 1915. (Print, Photograph from periodical “Der Grosse Krieg in Bildern,” No. 4. 1915. Germany. 2007.68.4. National WWI Museum and Memorial.)
Cecil added that the failed campaign also had lasting effects on the Middle East. Prompted by the perceived threat of a holy war, Great Britain diverted soldiers and resources to the Middle East and deepened its involvement in the region both during and after the war. The propaganda campaign also led to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the exhibit argues, which fractured and redrew the Middle East, laying the groundwork for discord in the region for decades to come.
“The whole 20th century is affected by World War I,” Leila Fawaz, chair of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean studies at Tufts University, told RNS. “The fact that this museum took the challenge to study this incredible subject, which much more experienced experts on the region have never gone near, is extraordinary.”
Fawaz, who previewed the exhibit, appreciated the museum’s attention to the prisoners, rather than just to global actors.
“I’ve always liked the story of the little people, not the powerful people. It’s really easy to write about the great powers … but it’s the common people that I’m interested in.”
The exhibit, which will be online indefinitely, complements an onsite exhibit on WWI prisoners of war at the museum in Kansas City, Missouri. “Fighting with Faith” is free online and is funded by the Lilly Endowment, which is also a key supporter of Religion News Service.
WASHINGTON (RNS) — The National Prayer Breakfast is under new management, distancing the decades-old event from the secretive organization that founded it after years of controversy and a scandal that showed the yearly gathering in the nation’s capital is vulnerable to espionage.
According to a statement sent to reporters by former Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor, the prayer breakfast, whose highlight is typically a speech from the sitting U.S. president, is no longer run by The International Foundation, a Christian group more familiarly referred to as “The Family.” Instead, the 2023 breakfast, to be held this year on Feb. 2, has been coordinated by the newly created National Prayer Breakfast Foundation, which emerged “following numerous meetings in 2022,” according to Pryor’s statement.
“As with many other things in our country, the COVID years allowed the Members to hit the reset button and organize a working group to fulfill this longtime vision,” the statement read.
Unlike past versions of the breakfast, which were hosted in a sprawling hotel ballroom with hundreds of attendees from all over the world, the new version of the gathering will only include members of Congress “plus one’s spouse, family member, or constituent guest,” wrote Pryor.
In a Wednesday (Jan. 25) interview with Religion News Service, Pryor, board president of the National Prayer Breakfast Foundation, said the breakfast is the new organization’s sole event. He anticipates the expected 200 to 300 participants will bring a spouse, significant other or “their pastor or priest from home.” He added that the breakfast will not be a sit-down affair as it has been in the past. Attendees will be offered bagels, coffee and tea before they take their seats in an auditorium at the Capitol Visitor Center in the U.S. Capitol.
“That’s what Congress wants, they want to take it back to its origins and in the early days it really was just the Congress and the president,” said Pryor, who expects President Joe Biden to attend and called the plans “a little bit of a back-to-basics movement.”
The International Foundation plans to hold a separate assembly at the same time as the prayer breakfast called “The Gathering.” The event appears to resemble older versions of the prayer breakfast, with attendees observing the National Prayer Breakfast via video as part of a two-day convention with what organizers expect will feature “significant international participation.”
A. Larry Ross, media representative for The International Foundation, confirmed that its event “will be interrupted to carry the President’s message into the ballroom via livestream in real time,” he told RNS via email.
“The planned NPB Gathering at The Washington Hilton currently has well over 1400 attendees registered for the two-day event, including 2/3 domestic and 1/3 international Fellowship friends from around the world.”
The Young Turks were the first to reveal the changes to the event on Tuesday.
Representatives for Delaware Democrat Sen. Chris Coons, who helped coordinate previous iterations of the prayer breakfast, confirmed the leadership change to RNS on Tuesday. Last year, Coons similarly cast the 2022 prayer breakfast, which was also scaled down and took place at the Capitol, as a kind of “reset” for the event.
The changes follow years of controversy surrounding the prayer breakfast, whose origins date back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration.
The breakfast first came under widespread scrutiny in 2009 after journalist Jeff Sharlet published the book “The Family,” detailing his experience with the organization that runs the event. The event was hit with scandal in 2018, when the Department of Justice charged Russian national Maria Butina with attempting to exploit the National Prayer Breakfast as part of a larger “conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation.”
Since then, many groups have criticized the event, particularly secular organizations such as the Freedom From Religion Foundation, whose leader challenged President Biden’s participation in 2021. The group organized a sign-on letter opposing the Prayer Breakfast this year as well, featuring support from secular as well as religious organizations.
Some Democrats have signaled misgivings about the event as well. Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat who previously co-chaired the National Prayer Breakfast, told The Young Turks in December 2021 he had “no intention” of returning to the event.
FFRF President Annie Laurie Gaylor told RNS in an email that her organization welcomes the changes, but said, “it does look as though the creation of a new entity to sponsor the prayer breakfast is essentially a subterfuge, because the folks running the NPB Foundation are all connected with the Fellowship.”
Other critics also are raising questions as to whether the newly announced changes constitute a genuine leadership overhaul or are “largely cosmetic.”
In a statement to RNS, Sharlet pointed to reporting showing how, among other things, the board of the new foundation includes many people with ties to the International Foundation.
“Any step toward reducing this mostly off-the-books weeklong lobbying festival is good news,” Sharlet said. “On the other hand, the change appears largely cosmetic.”
Pryor said that his organization is “completely different and totally separate” from The Family.
He hopes the skeptics will understand that as the event takes place.
“Let us show that it is going to be different and just give us a little time here,” he said. “We haven’t even had the breakfast yet.”
This story has been updated to correct Pryor’s title.
'Love hormone'? Not so fast, new study suggests
A new study has raised questions about the role played by the so-called 'love horomone' oxytocin in mating behavior
Issued on: 27/01/2023
Tokyo (AFP) – The "love hormone" oxytocin has long been thought key to behaviours including pairing up with a partner and nurturing offspring, but a new study in prairie voles is raising doubts.
The research found that voles bred to lack functioning receptors for oxytocin were still able to form strong pairs, produce young and nurse -- all behaviours previously believed to depend on the hormone.
Prairie voles are one of the few mammals that mate for life, and are often used to study social behaviours like pair-forming in animals.
In past studies, voles given drugs that stopped oxytocin being processed no longer formed pairs, and mothers failed to produce milk for their young.
Psychiatrist Devanand Manoli and neurobiologist Nirao Shah produced genetically altered prairie voles without working oxytocin receptors, and then observed how the mutant male and female voles behaved.
To their shock, the mutant voles appeared to have no difficulty pairing up with non-genetically altered partners, and mutant females could still deliver and nurse young, unlike those in the drug-driven studies.
"We were certainly surprised," said Manoli, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
The results suggest that oxytocin is not the main, or only, driver of activities like partnering or nursing, he said.
"What the genetics reveals is that there isn't a 'single point of failure' for behaviours that are so critical to the survival of the species," he told AFP. 'Very complex behaviours'
That didn't mean there were no differences, however.
Some male mutant voles that paired with ordinary female partners didn't show the aggression towards interloping females that would normally be expected.
And while mutant females produced and nursed litters, some had fewer pups per litter than their counterparts, and fewer of their offspring survived to weaning, the paper published Friday in the journal Neuron explains.
Pups born to mutant mothers also tended to weigh less, suggesting that they were not able to nurse as effectively.
The study only involved pairing of mutant voles with "wild-type" partners, and the researchers said pairings with two mutant partners could produce different results.
Still, as a whole, the findings suggest a different picture of oxytocin's role in several important behaviours.
That could be because animals bred without the receptors developed "other compensatory pathways" that helped them pair up and nurse, said Shah, a professor at Stanford University.
But the researchers suggest it likely means oxytocin is only part of a set of genetic factors that control social behaviour.
"What I think our studies reveal is that there are multiple pathways that regulate these very complex behaviours," said Manoli.
Oxytocin has sometimes been suggested as a way to treat attachment disorders and other neuropsychiatric issues, but there is little settled science on how effective it is.
Now the researchers hope to investigate what other hormones and receptors may be involved in behaviours like pairing and nursing.
"These other pathways might serve as new therapeutic targets," Manoli said.
Fresh questions about oxytocin as the ‘love hormone’ behind pair bonding
Removing the Oxytocin Receptor Does Not Interfere with Monogamy or Giving Birth
Turning a decades-old dogma on its head, new research from scientists at UC San Francisco and Stanford Medicine shows that the receptor for oxytocin, a hormone considered essential to forming social bonds, may not play the critical role that scientists have assigned to it for the past 30 years.
In the study, appearing Jan. 27, 2023 in Neuron, the team found that prairie voles bred without receptors for oxytocin and showed the same monogamous mating, attachment, and parenting behaviors as regular voles. In addition, females without oxytocin receptors gave birth and produced milk, though in smaller quantities, than ordinary female voles.
The results indicate that the biology underlying pair bonding and parenting isn't purely dictated by the receptors for oxytocin, sometimes referred to as the “love hormone.”
“While oxytocin has been considered ‘Love Potion #9,’ it seems that potions 1 through 8 might be sufficient,” said psychiatrist Devanand Manoli, MD, PhD, a senior author of the paper and member of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “This study tells us that oxytocin is likely just one part of a much more complex genetic program.”
CRISPR Voles Pack a Surprise
Because prairie voles are one of the few mammalian species known to form lifelong monogamous relationships, researchers study them to better understand the biology of social bonding.
Studies in the 1990s using drugs that prevent oxytocin from binding to its receptor found that voles were unable to pair bond, giving rise to the idea that the hormone is essential to forming such attachments.
The current project emerged from shared interests between Manoli and co-senior author and neurobiologist Nirao Shah, MD, PhD, then at UCSF and now at Stanford Medicine. Shah had been interested in the biology of oxytocin and social attachment in prairie voles since teaching about the oxytocin studies decades earlier. Manoli, who wanted to investigate the neurobiology of social bonding, joined Shah’s lab in 2007 as a postdoctoral scholar.
For this study, 15 years in the making, the two applied new genetic technologies to confirm if oxytocin binding to its receptor was indeed the factor behind pair bonding. They used CRISPR to generate prairie voles that lack functional oxytocin receptors. Then, they tested the mutant voles to see whether they could form enduring partnerships with other voles.
To the researchers’ surprise, the mutant voles formed pair bonds just as readily as normal voles.
“The patterns were indistinguishable,” said Manoli. “The major behavioral traits that were thought to be dependent on oxytocin – sexual partners huddling together and rejecting other potential partners as well as parenting by mothers and fathers – appear to be completely intact in the absence of its receptor.”
Labor and Lactation
Even more surprising for Manoli and Shah than the pair bonding was the fact that a significant percentage of the female voles were able to give birth and provide milk for their pups.
Oxytocin is likely to have a role in both birth and lactation, but one that is more nuanced than previously thought, Manoli said. Female voles without receptors proved perfectly capable of giving birth, on the same timeframe and in the same way as the regular animals, even though labor has been thought to rely on oxytocin.
The results help to clear up some of the mystery surrounding the hormone’s role in childbirth: Oxytocin is commonly used to induce labor but blocking its activity in mothers who experience premature labor isn’t better than other approaches for halting contractions.
When it came to producing milk and feeding pups, however, the researchers were taken aback. Oxytocin binding to its receptor has been considered essential for milk ejection and parental care for many decades, but half of the mutant females were able to nurse and wean their pups successfully, indicating that oxytocin signaling plays a role, but it is less vital than previously thought.
“This overturns conventional wisdom about lactation and oxytocin that’s existed for a much longer time than the pair bonding association,” said Shah. “It’s a standard in medical textbooks that the milk letdown reflex is mediated by the hormone, and here we are saying, ‘Wait a second, there’s more to it than that.’”
Hope for Social Connection
Manoli and Shah focused on understanding the neurobiology and molecular mechanisms of pair bonding because it is thought to hold the key to unlocking better treatments for psychiatric conditions, such as autism and schizophrenia, that interfere with a person’s ability to form or maintain social bonds.
Over the past decade, much hope was pinned on clinical trials using oxytocin to address those conditions. But those results were mixed, and none has illuminated a clear path to improvement.
The researchers said their study strongly suggests that the current model – a single pathway or molecule being responsible for social attachment –is oversimplified. This conclusion makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, they said, given the importance of attachment to the perpetuation of many social species.
“These behaviors are too important to survival to hinge on this single point of potential failure,” said Manoli. “There are likely other pathways or other genetic wiring to allow for that behavior. Oxytocin receptor signaling could be one part of that program, but it’s not the be-all end-all.”
The discovery points the researchers down new paths to improving the lives of people struggling to find social connection.
“If we can find the key pathway that mediates attachment and bonding behavior,” Shah said, “We’ll have an eminently druggable target for alleviating symptoms in autism, schizophrenia, many other psychiatric disorders.”
Authors: Additional authors include: Ruchira Sharma, Rose Larios, Nastacia Goodwin, Michael Sherman and Isidero Espineda of UCSF, Maricruz Alvarado Mandujano, YiChao Wei, Srinivas Parthasarthy and Joseph Knoedler of Stanford, and Forrest Rogers, Trenton Simmons, Adele Seelke, Jessica Bond, and Karen Bales of UC Davis, and Annaliese Beery of UC Berkeley.
Funding: This work was supported by NIH grants R01MH123513, R01MH108319, DP1MH099900 and R25MH060482, NSF grant, 1556974, and philanthropy. For details, see the study.
About UCSF: The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF's primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area. UCSF School of Medicine also has a regional campus in Fresno. Learn more at https://ucsf.edu, or see our Fact Sheet.
IMAGE: THIS IS A PHOTOGRAPH OF TWO PRAIRIE VOLES.view more
CREDIT: NASTACIA GOODWIN
The vital role of oxytocin—the “love hormone”—for social attachments is being called into question. More than forty years of pharmacological and behavioral research has pointed to oxytocin receptor signaling as an essential pathway for the development of social behaviors in prairie voles, humans, and other species, but a genetic study publishing in the journal Neuron on January 27 shows that voles can form enduring attachments with mates and provide parental care without oxytocin receptor signaling.
Prairie voles are one of only a few monogamous mammalian species. After mating, they form lifelong partnerships known as “pair-bonds.” Pair-bonded voles share parental responsibilities, prefer the company of their partner over unknown members of the opposite sex, and actively reject potential new partners. Previous studies that used drugs to block oxytocin from binding to its receptor found that voles were unable to pair-bond when oxytocin signaling was blocked.
Neuroscientists Devanand Manoli (@LabManoli) of UCSF and Nirao Shah (@Shah_Laboratory) of Stanford University wanted to know whether pair-bonding was really controlled by oxytocin receptor signaling. To test this, they used CRISPR to generate prairie voles that lack functional oxytocin receptors. Then, they tested these mutant oxytocin-receptor-less voles to see whether they could form enduring partnerships with other voles. To their surprise, the mutant voles formed pair-bonds just as readily as normal voles.
“We were all shocked that no matter how many different ways we tried to test this, the voles demonstrated a very robust social attachment with their sexual partner, as strong as their normal counterparts,” says Manoli.
Next, the researchers wondered whether oxytocin receptor signaling is similarly dispensable for its other functions—parturition, parenting (which, in prairie voles, is a shared responsibility between the two parents), and milk release during lactation.
“We found that mutant voles are not only able to give birth, but actually nurse,” says Shah. Both male and female mutants engaged in the usual parental behaviors of huddling, licking, and grooming, and were able to rear pups to weaning age.
However, the mutant prairie voles did have limited milk release compared to normal voles. As a result, fewer of their pups survived to weaning age, and those that did survive were smaller compared to the pups of normal prairie voles. The fact that the voles could nurse at all is in contrast to equivalent studies in oxytocin receptor-deficient mice, who completely failed to lactate or nurse, and whose pups consequently died within a day or so of being born. The authors hypothesize that this species difference could be due to the inbred nature of laboratory mouse strains in contrast to the genetically heterogenous voles. “It could be that inbreeding in mice has selected for a large dependence on oxytocin signaling, or this may represent a species-specific role of oxytocin receptor signaling,” says Shah.
When asked why their results differ from previously published studies that used drugs to block oxytocin receptor signaling, the authors point to the key difference between genetic and pharmacological studies: precision. “Drugs can be dirty,” says Manoli, “in the sense that they can bind to multiple receptors, and you don’t know which binding action is causing the effect. From a genetics perspective, we now know that the precision of deleting this one receptor, and subsequently eliminating its signaling pathways, does not interfere with these behaviors.”
“For at least the last ten years people have been hoping for the possibility of oxytocin as a powerful therapeutic for helping people with social cognitive impairments due to conditions ranging from autism to schizophrenia,” Manoli says. “This research shows that there likely isn't a magic bullet for something as complex and nuanced as social behavior.”
Another key difference is that, whereas most pharmacological studies suppress oxytocin receptor signaling in adult animals, this study switched it off when the voles were embryos. “We've made a mutation that starts from before birth,” says Shah. “It could be that there are compensatory or redundant pathways that kick-in in these mutant animals and mask the deficits in attachment, parental behaviors, and milk let-down.”
Working with prairie voles presented an obstacle, but one worth overcoming. Because prairie voles are not commonly used in genetic studies like laboratory mice, the team needed to develop all of their molecular tools and protocols from scratch. Now that they have these vole-specific pipelines and tools, the authors are excited about the doorways this opens, both for them and for other researchers.
“We're very happy to be part of a community and to have this technology that we can share,” says Manoli. “Now we have this trove that we can start to mine. There are so many other questions that prairie voles could be interesting and useful for answering, both in terms of potential clinical implications for models of anxiety or attachment and also for basic comparative biology.”
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This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Whitehall Foundation, AP Giannini Foundation Fellowship, Larry L. Hillblom Foundation Fellowship, and the Human Frontiers Science Program
Neuron (@NeuroCellPress), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that has established itself as one of the most influential and relied upon journals in the field of neuroscience and one of the premier intellectual forums of the neuroscience community. It publishes interdisciplinary articles that integrate biophysical, cellular, developmental, and molecular approaches with a systems approach to sensory, motor, and higher-order cognitive functions. Visit: http://www.cell.com/neuron. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
Jenin (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) – Before carrying out one of the deadliest West Bank raids in recent memory, Israeli soldiers reportedly snuck into Jenin refugee camp hiding in the back of a milk truck.
The operation, which Israel said targeted Islamists planning an attack, killed nine people and for Palestinians recalled the bloodshed of the second intifada or uprising between 2000 and 2005, when Jenin was plagued by fighting.
Analysts have warned of more violence to come, after the deadliest year in the West Bank since the UN started tracking the death toll in the occupied territory in 2005.
According to Jihad Abu Kamal, a Jenin resident and self-described member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades armed group, a dairy truck enters Jenin refugee camp at the same time every morning to deliver milk.
"They tried to surprise us with it," the 35-year-old told AFP, referring to multiple accounts from witnesses who said Israeli forces entered undercover in the back of the vehicle.
A local armed group released video purportedly showing the truck used by the Israelis.
Israel has said the target of the raid was a group of Islamic Jihad fighters hiding in a house near a hospital, some of whom shot at troops during the raid.
Among those killed, according to Palestinian officials, was a 61-year-woman named Majeda Obeid.
Her daughter, Kefiyat Obeid, told AFP that after morning prayers her mother looked out her window as gunfire rang through the street when she was shot in the neck.
The Israeli army has said it was looking into reports of additional casualties beyond "armed suspects."
'Bodies on fire'
Israeli forces withdrew from the camp before midday.
When the fighting ended, 23-year-old Fadi Sabbarini said he ran into the targeted house to see if he could help.
"There were two bodies on fire, I put out the first one, but they both were badly charred," he told AFP.
"A third man's brains were spread across the wall," he added, pointing to bloody smears inside the front entrance.
Such scenes are not new to residents of Jenin. The camp has long been home to Palestinian fighters from various armed groups, and a frequent target of Israeli raids.
Following a series of deadly attacks inside Israel last year, Israeli forces raided Jenin before dawn on a near daily basis. 'Broader strategy'
Fighters are increasingly trying to draw Israelis into combat inside the camp, said Tahani Mustafa, West Bank analyst at the International Crisis Group think-tank.
"It's part of a broader strategy we are seeing with these armed groups," she told AFP.
"They are luring Israel into these sorts of battle grounds. Now you're actually seeing Israel having to confront these groups on their own turf."
She forecast that the violence would continue to escalate, as Palestinian anger over the repeated Israeli raids deepens and frustrations mounts with the Palestinian Authority, seen by many as an Israeli pawn.
Supporters of Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian militant group targeted in Thursday's deadly Israeli raid on Jenin camp, demonstrate their support in Gaza City
The raid "is going to fuel the frustration and anger they are already feeling towards the PA and the Israelis."
The PA announced late Thursday that it was severing security coordination with Israel for the first time since 2020, a move condemned by Washington days before Secretary of State Antony Blinken is due in the region.
Abu Kamal told AFP Jenin felt like a community under siege.
"The atmosphere is very tense, there is resentment against the occupation, and the crimes it has committed," he said.
"It is as if every household in the camp has been targeted."
Israeli security officials have said the army's incursions into West Bank towns and cities are essential to averting attacks on Israeli civilians.
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said the group targeted in Thursday's raid "planned to conduct a terror attack in Israel".
Palestinians hurl rocks at an Israeli army bulldozer during clashes on Thursday in the flashpoint West Bank city of Jenin © Zain Jaafar / AFP
