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 24, 2022
It is not transformation if nothing changes
A Frontiers white paper on the impact of transformative agreements in the transition to open access publishing
IMAGE: DR. FREDERICK FENTER CHIEF EXECUTIVE EDITOR, FRONTIERSview more
CREDIT: FRONTIERS
Executive summary
The substantial benefits of open access (OA) publishing are within our reach, but legacy publishers are employing commercial tactics to delay the necessary transition.
This paper exposes several of the negative, often unintended, consequences of “transformative agreements” (TAs). It argues that these agreements, sold as a pathway to open science, in fact reinforce the status quo. TAs maintain paywalled access as the standard financial model in publishing. They are negotiated in the absence of basic competition and procurement rules. And by concentrating resources into silos for a few incumbents only, they pose a threat to the diversity of the publishing ecosystem, locking out innovators, including the very players who demonstrate the benefits of OA publishing. Deployed as a commercial tactic, these agreements will stall the establishment of a transparent and competitive marketplace for professional editorial services.
In 2018, an influential group of research funders, recognizing the superior value proposition of OA publishing, came together under the banner of cOAlition S. With their Plan S, they declared they would mandate immediate and universal access to all the articles that resulted from the research they funded. Pressure from legacy subscription publishers subsequently led to concessions that have weakened that founding mission. The most damaging of these concessions was the acceptance of the “hybrid” model. This option granted “transformative” status to paywalled access as long as it was accompanied by the publication of some open access content.
This hybrid concession is a loophole that large traditional publishers are exploiting to prolong and validate their current business model and practices. The TA thus represents the offspring of the existing “Big Deal” of bundled services, but now with a costly additional channel for OA publication.
As the COVID pandemic has so powerfully shown, the effective dissemination of validated scientific knowledge is at a critical stage in the research-innovation cycle – and vital if we are to overcome the challenges we face as a society. Plan S intended to “shock” the system into a logical state of affairs with the backing of research funders. However, for as long as the “Big Deal” approach is maintained, legacy publishers will continue to negotiate conditions that guarantee their market share, with consortia paying high prices to a small number of publishers (and offering, in effect, a massive subsidy).
To tackle climate change, technologies such as solar panels, fuel cells and electric vehicles have benefited from a policy of subsidies, pushing society away from the dangerous status quo of fossil fuel consumption. By contrast, and analogy, we see that TAs are incentivizing pernicious behavior, supporting the paywalled status quo, hindering positive change and suppressing the innovative models that offer true fully open solutions.
If initiatives such as Plan S are to make full OA a reality, then funders, institutions and libraries must tackle monopoly legacy models which hinder innovation. We believe the signatories of Plan S, institutions and libraries should:
Ensure their funding allocations meet the needs and requirements of authors and the academic community.
Negotiate conditions such that all published research is truly, immediately and fully open according to a binding timeline; with a minimum schedule in which at least 75% of content is OA across a publisher’s full portfolio by the end of 2024.
Insist on agreements that are transparent and visible to all stakeholders, with a clear attribution of costs to products and services, allowing a credible assessment of value and unbundling.
Establish a truly fair competitive landscape by applying the principles of common commercial conditions and basic rules of public procurement.
Fully OA publishers already offer quality and innovation at scale, with better value for money and greater impact than legacy publishers. They are driving efforts to meet the political and societal need for truly open science. At Frontiers, we stand ready to work with all stakeholders to meet this call to action, to share our knowledge and data in doing so, and to see Plan S delivered.
Dr. Frederick Fenter Chief Executive Editor, Frontiers
Population bottlenecks that reduced genetic diversity were common throughout human history
Analysis shows that more than half of historical groups experienced founder events
IMAGE: FROM CONTEMPORARY AND ANCIENT DNA, UC BERKELEY RESEARCHERS ESTIMATED WHEN POPULATION BOTTLENECKS OCCURRED FOR SEVERAL HUNDRED GROUPS AROUND THE WORLD AND THROUGHOUT RECENT HUMAN HISTORY. THE COLORS INDICATE THE NUMBER OF GENERATIONS THE BOTTLENECK OR FOUNDER EVENT PRECEDED THE INDIVIDUALS WHOSE DNA WAS SEQUENCED.view more
CREDIT: RÉMI TOURNEBIZE, UC BERKELEY
Human populations have waxed and waned over the millennia, with some cultures exploding and migrating to new areas or new continents, others dropping to such low numbers that their genetic diversity plummeted. In some small populations, inbreeding causes once rare genetic diseases to become common, despite their deleterious effects.
A new analysis of more than 4,000 ancient and contemporary human genomes shows how common such “founder events” were in our history. A founder event is when a small number of ancestral individuals gives rise to a large fraction of the population, often because war, famine or disease drastically reduced the population, but also because of geographic isolation — on islands, for example — or cultural practices, as among Ashkenazi Jews or the Amish.
More than half of the 460 groups represented by these individuals had experienced a population bottleneck somewhere in their past that decreased their genetic diversity and likely increased the incidence of recessive hereditary diseases.
The analysis by population geneticists at the University of California, Berkeley, is the first comprehensive look at founder events across a broad swath of human populations over the past 10,000 years or so of human history and pinpoints when these events occurred.
According to the authors, the findings will be useful not only to archeologists and historians tracking the movement and mixing of populations around the world, but also to scientists and doctors studying human genetic variation. The genetic diseases of inbred populations have helped scientists find many disease-causing mutations in the human genome and discover the causes of numerous genetic and inherited diseases.
“Genomic data is really powerful because it not only tells us about where we come from, it tells us about our history at various different time scales, and you can look at how closely related different individuals are to each other,” said senior author Priya Moorjani, an assistant professor of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley. “But also, it tells us about bits of DNA that are functionally important and can cause diseases. So, they become quite important to study from a biomedical perspective.”
Many of the populations represented by individuals in the sample were or are much more inbred than ethnic Ashkenazi Jews, who some scientists have estimated once dwindled to a population of less than a couple of thousand individuals about 1,000 years ago. The Onge, a group in the Andaman Islands of the Indian Ocean, underwent a population bottleneck 10 times more extreme than that of Ashkenazi Jews, and today it numbers only about 100 individuals.
The researchers found that many Native American populations and groups from Oceania and South Asia also suffered severe population bottlenecks. Some coincide with known historical events — for instance, the residents of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) underwent a founder event about 260 years ago, coincident with the migration of Europeans to the island.
Others correlate well with the known movement of peoples into an area and with changing cultural artifacts and practices. For example, Anatolian farmers and Eurasian steppe pastoralists moved into Europe between about 4,000 and 10,000 years ago, and the groups intermingled with existing European hunter-gatherers.
“The first surprise was that over half the groups we surveyed had evidence for founder events,” Moorjani said. “So, it's not just Ashkenazi Jews or Finns that have a unique history, but many populations living today have had strong founder events — in fact, stronger founder events than these two groups, like several contemporary South Asian groups, hunter-gatherers or populations living on islands. And many of these groups would be really important for prioritizing functional studies. We have learned so much about genetic variation from groups like Ashkenazi Jews and Finns that the potential for discovery is really high if we can expand these studies to other worldwide populations.”
Moorjani, former UC Berkeley undergraduate Gillian Chu and first author Rémi Tournebize, now a postdoctoral fellow at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Oeiras, Portugal, published their findings today (June 23) in the journal PLOS Genetics.
Population bottlenecks reduce genetic diversity (IMAGE)
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - BERKELEY
CAPTION
A founder event impacts the genetic diversity of a population. In this graphic, individuals in a population have genomes containing various genomic segments (colored bars at top) that are inherited ‘identical-by-descent’ from a common ancestor. A bottleneck, however, reduces the diversity of segments. Because of recombination events over time, the lengths of these segments gradually shorten (moving clockwise around clock). Together, these tell researchers about the founder strength and age, respectively.
CREDIT
Rémi Tournebize, UC Berkeley
Working with incomplete ancient DNA
The analysis was made possible by a genomics analysis program called ASCEND (Allele Sharing Correlation for the Estimation of Non-equilibrium Demography), which was created by Tournebize and Moorjani specifically to analyze partial genome sequences — in particular, ancient DNA. This DNA is generally sequenced from bones or teeth that are hundreds to thousands of years old and represent not only our Homo sapiens ancestors, but other human groups, like Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Such DNA is typically damaged so that only a portion of the individual’s genome can be sequenced. But since human genomes contain about 3 billion base pairs of DNA, even a mere 100,000 base pairs can provide information about that person’s heritage, Moorjani said. Many genome analysis programs today work only with nearly complete genome sequences, primarily from contemporaneous peoples.
“While ancient DNA is really powerful, one of the challenges is that it has much lower quality compared to data from living people, because once an individual dies, the DNA starts degrading, and it's very hard to recover very high quality data compared to present-day individuals,” Moorjani said. “But the majority of the demographic inference methods are built thinking that you can get large numbers of samples from populations and high-quality data across the genome. Our methods were developed to leverage this low-coverage, highly degraded DNA to really understand our evolutionary history.”
ASCEND measures the sharing of DNA between individuals within and across populations. When a population undergoes a founder event, its size dwindles to a few individuals. The offspring of these founder individuals, in turn, share long blocks in their genome that are inherited “identical by descent” from these few ancestors. As time passes, these blocks will become smaller due to crossover events that occur during meiosis, when chromosomes duplicate and mix before segregating to egg and sperm cells. The rate of crossovers is well characterized and provides a kind of molecular clock. The ASCEND program compares how large the shared blocks are within individuals in a population to infer when the individuals might have shared a common ancestor, i.e., when a founder event occurred in the population’s history. A large-scale, pair-wise statistical comparison of genomic DNA allows an estimation of when and how intense the bottleneck was.
The genome data came from the Allen Ancient DNA Resource, a database created by David Reich and collaborators at Harvard University, with whom Moorjani earned her Ph.D. The public database currently includes available present-day and ancient genomes from more than 14,000 individuals and more than a million common mutations or variants — single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs — within those DNA sequences. At the time Moorjani started her study, the database held fewer ancient and modern genomes. She and Tournebize focused on the genomes of 2,310 present-day individuals from 184 groups, then expanded their study to look at an additional 1,947 individuals representing 164 worldwide ancient populations.
“Applying this method, we uncovered founder events that had not been identified previously, for instance, in populations from ancient Morocco or Siberia,” Tournebize said. “As a French guy, I was really surprised to discover a founder event in Basque people, dated around the 1st century BCE and possibly related to Roman colonization of this region. We'll need more genetic data, especially from ancient samples, and collaboration with social scientists to understand the detailed historical events that might be associated with this bottleneck.”
To test the ASCEND program in other species, Moorjani and Tournebize turned to dogs. The genome sequences of about 40 modern dog breeds are available, so the researchers ran them through the program to determine how long ago founder events occurred in breeds ranging from African village dogs — the least inbred — to breeds like boxers, dobermans and rottweilers, the most inbred. Consistent with the establishment of many dog breeds during Victorian times, they confirmed extreme founder events in most breeds within the last 25 generations, that is, 75 to 125 years.
“Dogs are so interesting that it was exciting to expand the analysis to another species, but it was really sad to see how strong the founder events are,” she said. “Most dogs these days have so many more problems than village dogs. Their rates of cancers and congenital diseases are pretty high. And that's largely because of these very severe founder events in their history during breed formation.”
CAPTION
Using ASCEND, UC Berkeley researchers determined the intensity and timing of founder events in 40 breeds of dogs. The most intense, with the greatest inbreeding, are labeled purple at upper right, with less intense founder events moving clockwise. African village dogs are the least inbred. The inner (gray) rim represents the founder age (in generations before present), with the bar height proportional to the founder age. The width of the bars is inversely proportional to the number of breeds within each role category.
CREDIT
Rémi Tournebize, UC Berkeley
Population mixing
In another recent paper, Moorjani and her colleagues described a different genomics analysis program that analyzes a single individual’s genome, whether complete or partial, and estimates the amount of admixture of other populations over time. The researchers used this program, called DATES (Distribution of Ancestry Tracts of Evolutionary Signals), to analyze about 1,100 ancient genomes and reconstruct major gene flow events in Europe since about 10,000 BCE.
One surprising finding was that the genomes of Anatolian farmers, who lived in what is today Turkey, show admixture of genes from Iranian Neolithic farmers long before the advent of agriculture in Anatolia. This suggests that farming did not originate in Anatolia, as many archeologists have suggested.
“We had samples of Anatolian hunter-gatherers who don't have Iranian ancestry and samples of Anatolian early farmers who have Iranian ancestry, but we didn't know when this mixture occurred,” she said. “In our case, we were able to actually figure out the key time point when this group formed, which predates agriculture in the region. And based on that, we are able to tell that farming must have spread through cultural diffusion, rather than having originated in Anatolia.”
Another discovery was the timing for the formation of Bronze Age steppe pastoralists. These groups made a large impact, both genetically and demographically, in Eurasia during the Bronze Age and, according to some studies, are responsible for the spread of Indo-European languages. Archeological studies suggest these groups inhabited regions of the steppe in present day Russia and Ukraine from 3,300 to 2,600 BCE. Using the genetic dating method, the researchers found these groups were genetically formed between 4,400 and 4,000 BCE, predating previous findings by over a half a millennium.
“Our study emphasizes the power of dating population mixtures and formation, rather than just using temporal sampling and tracking the presence or absence of a particular ancestry in ancient samples, which is highly dependent on sampling choice and density,” said UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Manjusha Chintalapati, first author of the paper.
Moorjani plans to use ASCEND and DATES to take a closer look at many ancient populations, in particular those in India, that have strong founder events that suggest the possibility of many unrecognized recessive diseases that could help to reduce disease burden in the group and shed light on the basic functions of human genes.
“In our analysis, we find that 64% of South Asian populations have very strong founder events, so we are trying to do targeted sample collection in these groups to characterize some of the deleterious variants due to the founder events,” she said.
DATES, for example, suggests that each isolated population in South Asia has admixtures of local indigenous hunter-gatherers, Near Eastern farmers and Steppe pastoralists or herders, but in different proportions that remained the same for many hundreds of generations. Strikingly, most European populations also derive ancestry from similar three groups, though the groups have continued to freely mix with each other after the initial mixture.
“It's really exciting to do this work at Berkeley, where Allan Wilson's lab came up with the idea of a molecular clock, and to continue on his path to use genomic data for learning about the timing of different evolutionary events,” Moorjani said, referring to the late biochemist and pioneer of molecular evolution, who died in 1991.
The two studies were funded by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a Sloan Research Fellowship and the National Institutes of Health (R35GM142978).
CHICAGO – New guidance published today in Anaesthesia provides actionable steps to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from inhaled anesthetics, particularly desflurane, which is commonly used in general anesthesia, and nitrous oxide (laughing gas).
Over the past two decades, substantial evidence has emerged on the environmental footprint inhaled anesthetics have, but there has been insufficient progress to translate this information into actionable steps to mitigate the problem. While some hospitals and providers have made environmental improvements, more are considering it and require direction, the authors report.
“Inhaled anesthetics are a significant contributor to health care-related greenhouse gas emissions. However, it is very achievable for the health care community to minimize their impact on the climate through intervention,” said Jodi Sherman, M.D., co-author, chair of the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Committee on Environmental Health, and associate professor of anesthesiology at Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut. “The guidance summarizes the latest actions health care professionals involved in the administration of inhaled anesthetics can take to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, while maintaining quality outcomes and patient safety, and potentially saving costs.”
Anesthesiology is a carbon-intensive specialty, involving the routine use of inhaled agents that are potent greenhouse gases. These gases are exhausted directly to the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. Inhaled anesthetic agents have been estimated to be responsible for 0.01-0.10% of the total global carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions contributing to global warming. Based on atmospheric sampling of volatile anesthetics, their accumulation is increasing. Inhaled anesthetics account for 5% of acute hospital CO2e emissions and 50% of perioperative department emissions in high-income countries.
Relevant inhaled volatile anesthetics include desflurane, sevoflurane, isoflurane, and halothane, which are used in general anesthesia, as well as nitrous oxide. While the environmental impacts of all these agents should be mitigated, desflurane and nitrous oxide are several times greater in clinically relevant quantities, making them an even greater priority for intervention. In fact, the global warming potential of desflurane, scaled by clinical potency, is approximately 40-50 times that of sevoflurane and isoflurane over a 100-year period, the authors note. Desflurane is also significantly more expensive than other volatile anesthetics, with little evidence of clinical benefit justifying its use, and avoiding its use may have a cost savings benefit. Nitrous oxide is less potent than other inhaled anesthetics and must be used in high concentrations. It has a very long atmospheric life and its global warming impacts are similar to desflurane in clinically relevant doses.
The authors used a clinical action template to develop the guidance document. The template was obtained from Coda, a medical education and health promotion charity that seeks to provide achievable and sustainable actions to reduce health care’s carbon footprint, and provides individual action templates, authored by small groups of clinical experts, to distill mitigation actions supported by scientific evidence.
The evidence-based recommendations provided in the guidance document include:
Providers should avoid inhaled anesthetics with disproportionately high climate impacts, such as desflurane and nitrous oxide.
The lowest possible fresh gas flow should be selected when using inhaled anesthetics.
Regional anesthesia and intravenous anesthesia should be prioritized and used when appropriate, since they have less of a negative environmental impact.
The majority of nitrous oxide is lost, pre-use, and released into the air though leaks in central piping systems that should no longer be used. Portable canisters should be substituted and closed between uses to avoid continuous leaks.
More research is needed before recommending investment in the use of technological solutions for capturing or destroying inhaled anesthetic waste, and they should not be considered high mitigation priorities.
The document also includes guidance on how to measure and review progress, along with a means to share successes.
“Considering the impact that inhaled anesthetics have on the climate and with the practical, evidence-based interventions we have relayed, we are hopeful our guidance document contributes to the much-needed global transition toward environmentally sustainable anesthesia,” said Jessica Devlin-Hegedus, M.D., lead author and consultant, Department of Anesthesia, Wollongong Hospital, NSW, Australia. “Nitrous oxide is commonly used by non-anesthesia providers as well, such as in the labor suite, dental offices and emergency care. We are working to educate diverse groups of health professionals on the deleterious impact inhaled anesthetics have on the environment and to consider safe, environmentally preferable alternatives.”
THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF ANESTHESIOLOGISTS Founded in 1905, the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) is an educational, research and scientific society with more than 55,000 members organized to raise and maintain the standards of the medical practice of anesthesiology. ASA is committed to ensuring physician anesthesiologists evaluate and supervise the medical care of patients before, during and after surgery to provide the highest quality and safest care every patient deserves.
For more information on the field of anesthesiology, visit the American Society of Anesthesiologists online at asahq.org. To learn more about the role physician anesthesiologists play in ensuring patient safety, visit asahq.org/madeforthismoment. Like ASA on Facebook and follow ASALifeline on Twitter.
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JOURNAL
Anaesthesia
ARTICLE TITLE
Action guidance for addressing pollution from inhalational anaesthetics
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
21-Jun-2022
Mount Sinai researchers learn that ALS may be linked to both the immune and central nervous systems
THE MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL / MOUNT SINAI SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
IMAGE: IVAN MARAZZI, PHD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MICROBIOLOGY, ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAIview more
CREDIT: MOUNT SINAI HEALTH SYSTEM
The immune system may play a fundamental role along with the central nervous system in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease,” Mount Sinai researchers report. Their study, published on June 22 in Nature, could have significant implications for diagnosing and treating the devastating neurodegenerative disease.
Until now, studies of ALS have focused on the central nervous system. But the Mount Sinai team reported both immune and nervous system dysfunctions in animal models and patients with ALS4, a juvenile and slowly progressive form of ALS, which is caused by mutations in the gene SETX.
“We learned that mutations in SETX need to be expressed in both the nervous and immune systems to generate motor impairment in mice, and that dysfunction in the adaptive immune system characterizes ALS4 in mice as well as humans,” says Laura Campisi, PhD, Assistant Professor of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and co-lead author of the study with Ivan Marazzi, PhD, Associate Professor of Microbiology at Icahn Mount Sinai.
Further evidence of immune system involvement, she adds, was detected in the high concentration of CD8 T cells—which are usually involved in the destruction of tumors and cells in the body that harbor pathogens—in the spinal cord and peripheral blood of ALS4 mice and patients. Those increased CD8 T cell populations, known as TEMRA (terminally differentiated effector memory), correlate with ALS4 disease progression.
ALS is characterized by the progressive death of motor neurons, which severely impacts the functional ability of patients in a host of ways, including preventing the movement of arms and legs, speech, swallowing, and, eventually, breathing. There is no treatment or cure for ALS. Researchers have focused their efforts over the years on neurons, though more recent studies have shown evidence of interaction between the central nervous and immune systems, long considered separate compartments.
The Mount Sinai study, in collaboration with neurobiologist Albert La Spada, MD, PhD, from the University of California, Irvine, is one of the first to address whether the adaptive immune system, which builds up the body’s protection as it is exposed to foreign pathogens, could be linked to some forms of ALS.
“There is a great need to understand if neurodegeneration is caused or aggravated by immune dysfunction,” explains Dr. Campisi.
For their study, researchers analyzed mice and human samples with state-of-the-art technologies like mass and spectral cytometry and single-cell sequencing. “Our finding that peculiar immune signatures distinguish different forms of ALS could be significant for designing ‘personalized’ treatments tailored to specific subgroups of patients,” she notes.
An added advantage is that dysfunctional CD8 T cells linked to ALS4 can be detected in the peripheral blood, which is easily accessible compared to cerebrospinal fluid, which requires an invasive procedure for collection. Another observation by the Mount Sinai team—that TEMRA CD8 T cells associated with ALS4 protect mice against glioma, a type of cancer that occurs in the brain—opens the door to further therapeutic research in this area.
“Our discovery of a link between the immune and central nervous systems in ALS4 disease has immediate implications for other types of ALS, other neurodegenerative disorders, and for cancer,” said Dr. Marazzi. “In addition to making important inroads into the pathogenesis of ALS, our work underscores the pioneering work of Mount Sinai researchers in the fields of neuroscience and immunology.”
About the Mount Sinai Health System The Mount Sinai Health System is one of the largest academic medical systems in the New York metro area, with more than 43,000 employees working across eight hospitals, over 400 outpatient practices, nearly 300 labs, a school of nursing, and a leading school of medicine and graduate education. Mount Sinai advances health for all people, everywhere, by taking on the most complex health care challenges of our time — discovering and applying new scientific learning and knowledge; developing safer, more effective treatments; educating the next generation of medical leaders and innovators; and supporting local communities by delivering high-quality care to all who need it. Through the integration of its hospitals, labs, and schools, Mount Sinai offers comprehensive health care solutions from birth through geriatrics, leveraging innovative approaches such as artificial intelligence and informatics while keeping patients’ medical and emotional needs at the center of all treatment.
###
JOURNAL
Nature
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Experimental study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Clonally expanded CD8 T cells characterize amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-4
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
22-Jun-2022
Attitudes around older motherhood too often emphasize risk and pregnancy timing, Concordia researcher says
Francesca Scala’s analysis of Canadian policy texts suggests that women who give birth later in life are unfairly stigmatized by societal expectations
IMAGE: FRANCESCA SCALA: “OLDER MOTHERS CHALLENGE OUR IDEA ABOUT THE ‘GOOD MOTHER’ — SOMEONE WHO IS YOUTHFUL, ENERGETIC AND HAS THE TIME AND RESOURCES TO FULLY DEDICATE THEMSELVES TO RAISING CHILDREN.”view more
CREDIT: CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY
Cdn policy papers consistently treat older #mothers as problems, highlighting (real) health risks but also presenting them as unnatural and irresponsible reproductive citizensIn current policy texts, medical guidelines and educational materials, the dominant discourse surrounding women who give birth later in life largely focuses on the negatives: the health risks to mother and child, for instance, or the difficulties of being a new parent at an older than optimal age.
That’s the topic of an article published in the journal Health, Risk and Societyby Francesca Scala, a professor of political science in the Faculty of Arts and Science. In it, she argues that much of the official language around older motherhood is rooted in both ageism and ableism, as well as being out of step with current childbirth trends. According to Statistics Canada, the average age of childbirth has been rising steadily since the mid-1960s, and more women are giving birth between the ages of 35 to 39 than between 20 and 24. But societal expectations of mothers remain largely unchanged.
Emphasizing the negatives
Scala and her co-author Michael Orsini at the University of Ottawa analysed two dozen English-language policy documents, government reports and professional statements and guidelines containing terms such as “advanced maternal age,” “delayed childbearing,” “older mothers” and “infertility.” Documents dated between 1993 and 2020.
They identified three principal themes in their research: older mothers were considered risky maternal subjects, were unnatural or were irresponsible reproductive citizens.
The researchers don’t deny the biomedical risks that are present in later-in-life pregnancy such as preeclampsia and gestational diabetes. Older women are designated a risk group, and their children are at increased risk of chromosomal abnormalities (though until recently risks associated with advanced paternal age, such as schizophrenia or autism, were rarely mentioned).
More problematic is the idea of older mothers as unnatural. “There is this model of intensive mothering ideology that is pervasive in our society, where motherhood is an all-encompassing role for women,” Scala explains. “It rests on the idea that women are the primary caregivers and are solely responsible for the health and well-being of their children. Older mothers challenge our idea about the ‘good mother’ — someone who is youthful, energetic and has the time and resources to fully dedicate themselves to raising children.”
There is also mention in the texts of the possible negative psychological effects a child may experience in having a mother old enough to be their grandmother. This concern appears in the Canadian Medical Association’s White Paper on Reproductive Technologies. There is little said about the repercussions of advanced paternal age.
“We see a lot of information on government websites about the ideal time for childbearing, from a fertility standpoint, even though studies show that older women are often better prepared to have children,” Scala argues. “They have the financial resources to take care of their offspring and they have relationship stability.”
This presumption of delayed childbearing being problematic or a financial burden on the state can impact access to in-vitro fertilization as well, she says. Certain provinces in Canada will not extend insurance coverage if a woman uses IVF past the age of 42, for example, due to increased risks associated with pregnancy and birth and low success rate of treatment.
“Our goal as social scientists was not to challenge statistics around biomedical risks, but to see if older mothers themselves were being problematized in these discussions,” Scala states.
“Instead of putting the onus on women to adhere to their ‘biological clock,’ I would like to see more discussion about how broader social and economic forces shape women’s path to motherhood. How can we, as a society, support women having children at their ideal time, for example, with accessible daycare, so they are not penalized for having children too early or too late?”
IMAGE: ANCIENT POTTERY HOLDS CLUES TO THE PAST LIVES, TRADITIONS, AND MOVEMENTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE FROM THE CARIBBEAN ISLANDS.view more
CREDIT: FLORIDA MUSEUM PHOTO BY KRISTEN GRACE
With some 7,000 islands and cays and a 7,000-year history of human habitation, the Caribbean Sea is practically synonymous with maritime travel. The very word “canoe” is derived from the term “kana:wa,” used by the Indigenous Arawakans of the Caribbean to describe their dugout vessels.
Without clear road signs to indicate where native islanders were traveling, however, the task of reconstructing ancient trade routes relies on subtle clues locked away in the archaeological record. Researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History recently turned to pottery to tease apart the navigational history of the Caribbean, analyzing the composition of 96 fired clay fragments across 11 islands.
The study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, is the broadest of its kind yet conducted in the Greater Antilles and marks the first time that pottery artifacts from the Lucayan Islands — The Bahamas plus the Turks and Caicos Islands — have been analyzed to determine their elemental composition and origin.
“Our methods mark a big improvement over other studies that mostly look at a single site or single island, where you might see differences but not know what it means because you’re looking at the results in isolation,” said co-author Lindsay Bloch, a courtesy faculty member with the Florida Museum’s Ceramic Technology Lab.
People have lived on the Caribbean islands on and off for more than 7,000 years, migrating in waves from Central and South America. As early as 800 B.C., new groups arrived from Venezuela and established a trading network among islands, which they used to exchange food, tools and jewelry. But the most common artifacts that survived to the present are the pottery vessels these objects were carried in.
“Most materials don’t preserve well in the Caribbean because of the warm, humid environment, but pottery is durable, so it ends up being one of the most common things we find,” said lead author Emily Kracht, a collections assistant in the Ceramic Technology Lab.
Over the ensuing millennia, different Caribbean cultures developed unique styles and techniques for constructing their pottery. Some artifacts are simple and unadorned, while others are highly decorated, with a lattice of incised lines, punctations, raised ridges and flared rims.
Many studies have relied almost entirely on similarities in style to distinguish between different cultures and infer their movements. But, as Bloch explains, this method has often left more questions than answers and excludes material with potentially valuable information.
“The vast majority of pottery that we find anywhere in the world is going to be undecorated. It’s going to be things used for cooking or storage, which are typically plain and often get ignored because they’re seen as generic,” she said.
Rather than studying the minutiae of varying styles, the researchers focused instead on what the pottery was made of. Using a laser to etch microscopic lines into their samples, the researchers determined the exact amounts and identities of each element in the clay used to make the pottery. Their final analysis included more than seven decades’ worth of archaeological collections that span over 1,000 years of Indigenous Caribbean history.
CAPTION
Indigenous Caribbean islanders developed elaborate and ornate pottery styles that varied across time and between cultures.
CREDIT
Photo by Lindsay Bloch
CAPTION
Pottery from the Caribbean are relatively durable and are often the most common artifacts unearthed from archaeological sites.
CREDIT
Florida Museum photo by Kristen Grace
“One of the advantages of elemental analysis is that we’re explicitly looking for differences, which allows us to see where a pot was made and compare that to where it ended up,” Bloch said.
Such detailed comparisons are possible due to the complexity of the Caribbean’s underlying geology. The largest islands in the archipelago likely got their start as an ancient underwater plateau in the Pacific Ocean. After the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea, the Caribbean plate drifted east in a flurry of volcanic eruptions that elevated the plateau above sea level before ultimately reaching its current position in the Atlantic.
Millions of years of weathering reduced these volcanic outcrops into fine-grained clays with differing concentrations of elements like copper, nickel, chromium and antimony. These differences mean that even the smallest Caribbean pottery sherd bears the elemental signature of the region it was made in.
The results of researchers’ comparative analysis aren’t what might be expected by simply looking at a map. The Lucayan Islands were initially used only temporarily for harvesting resources, and the people who traveled to them would have set sail from the larger islands to the south that supported permanent population centers.
Cuba might initially seem like it’s the perfect staging ground for these operations, being by far the largest Caribbean island and the closest to The Bahamas. While people did make the trek across open water from Cuba, the results of the study indicate the Caribbean’s cultural hub was instead centered on the northwest coast of Hispaniola, from which people imported and exported goods for hundreds of years.
“At least some of the pottery would have been used to ferry goods out to these islands, and people would potentially carry back a variety of marine resources,” Bloch said.
People eventually struck up permanent settlements in The Bahamas and Turks and Caicos, becoming collectively known as the Lucayans, or the People of the Islands. They began making their own pottery from claylike soils deposited by African dust plumes blown in from the Saharan Desert, but the results didn’t quite hold up to the pottery from Hispaniola — literally. Lucayan pottery, called Palmetto Ware, is most often thick and soft and crumbles over time due to the poor quality of the grainy Saharan soil.
Thus, up until the arrival of the Spanish, Hispaniola remained the main trading partner and exporter of pottery to the Lucayan Islands.
“We knew that the Lucayans were related to people in Hispaniola, and this study shows their enduring relationship over hundreds of years through pottery,” Kracht said.
William Keegan of the Florida Museum of Natural History is also a co-author on the study.
