Today’s post is a bit outside the normal orbit of Thinking Meat, but it touches on a couple of themes that are dear to my heart: the immense value of humankind’s pursuit of scientific knowledge, and the urgent need to encourage any human who is so inclined to pursue a scientific career (and conversely, the folly of discouraging or ignoring half of our brain pool on the basis of gender). In particular, in honor of Ada Lovelace Day, I’m focusing on the brilliant contributions of cosmologist Beatrice Hill Tinsley. In her regrettably short life, she accomplished pioneering work that opened up a new field in astronomy.
Beatrice Hill was born in England in 1941 and grew up mostly in New Zealand, where her family moved after World War II. She excelled at not only mathematics and languages but also music; of the possibilities open to her, she chose to focus on astrophysics. In 1961, she completed a master’s program in physics at Canterbury University and married fellow student Brian Tinsley. In 1963, she moved with him to Dallas, where he had a job at the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies.
She got her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, 200 miles from Dallas. Despite the demands of the long commute, complicated toward the end of her degree program by the adoption of a baby boy, her PhD thesis was, according to fellow astronomer Robert C. Kennicutt, Jr., “one of the most interdisciplinary works of its day, and certainly one of the boldest graduate thesis projects ever undertaken.” (Not only that, she completed it in only a few years, beginning her PhD studies in 1964 and finishing her dissertation in 1966.) She was the first to model the ways that galaxies change over time, using mathematical calculations and computer simulations to examine changes in their chemical composition, luminosity, and color. This ambitious project wove together many strands of both observational and theoretical astronomy. This and her later work had ramifications for our understanding of the size and age of the universe, in addition to helping establish the field of galactic evolution within astronomy.
Her academic career in cosmology was semi-stalled for a while by the difficulty of finding a position at the University of Texas at Dallas and by the need to care for the two children she and her husband had adopted. (UTD treated her particularly shabbily; although she designed its new astronomy department at the university’s request, her letter applying for the job of heading the department received no reply.) After what was by all accounts a difficult internal struggle between her commitment to her family and her realization that it was impossible to fulfill her scientific promise in Dallas, she divorced her husband, leaving the children in his custody, and took a position at Yale, eventually becoming the first female professor of astronomy there.
Tinsley’s life was tragically cut short by melanoma. Diagnosed in 1978, she kept working through her illness, making the best use of the time she had left to her. She died on March 23, 1981. She managed to pack an incredible amount of valuable work into her lifetime, including authoring or co-authoring around 100 papers in her 14-year academic career, mentoring young scientists, and co-organizing a pivotal conference on galactic evolution.
Her story is particularly moving to me because of the extremely difficult choices she faced regarding her children. My own children (born when I was 19 and 20) lived with their father during a significant portion of their childhood, and although logically the choice made perfect sense, as he could provide a better home for them than I could at the time, and I stayed in the same town as they were and saw them every week, emotionally it was deeply stressful. (Tinsley’s father reported that she wondered if the separation from the children triggered the cancer; the very fact that she wondered this indicates how painful the decision must have been for her.)
As a species, we have got to keep on finding better ways of encouraging young women to focus on their own life’s work, whatever it is, with the same seriousness and commitment that young men are expected to bring to theirs, and of combining meaningful work with parenthood (for those who choose it—and it should definitely be a choice, not an unthinking default).
This story from Science Daily describes an interesting bit of body/mind research. In a group of 229 people between the ages of 50 and 68, those who perceived themselves as lonely showed an increase in blood pressure over the course of the study compared to those who did not. Other physical and demographic factors were controlled for, and depression and stress alone couldn’t account for the increase. The researchers used a questionnaire to determine whether the participants perceived themselves as lonely, but it’s not clear from this article whether they answered the questions only at the beginning of the study or at different points throughout. (It evidently took at least a year for the increase to appear, and it would be interesting to know if feeling less lonely later in the study might have had any effect on blood pressure.)
It will be interesting to see if anyone follows up to see how general this finding is and what’s behind it. This article suggests that the increase in blood pressure might be linked to anxiety about relationships, in particular an unpleasant stew of feelings involving simultaneous desire to connect and fear of connecting.
I liked the reminder that people who have only a small circle of friends are not necessarily lonely; for some people, a few deep relationships are all they need. However much companionship people need to keep from feeling lonely, maybe it pays to cultivate those connections as much as possible for physiological as well as psychological reasons.
SSRIs (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) have been one of the most high-profile antidepressants in the past 15 or 20 years. The role of various neurotransmitters, including serotonin, in depression is still far from clear, which makes it hard to say exactly how SSRIs work (and why they sometimes don’t). A story from late last year adds another interesting complication: It appears that SSRIs might be capable of causing personality change, distinct from the effect they have on depression.
A study examined 240 depressed adults, some of whom received an SSRI (paroxetine); the others were given either a placebo or cognitive therapy. Their depressive symptoms and their personality traits were compared before, during, and after one year of treatment. All of the people in the study experienced relief from their depression. In addition to these changes, the people who took paroxetine also showed significant changes in two of the Big FIve personality traits: neuroticism and extraversion (a decrease in the former and an increase in the latter). Both of these traits have been linked with depression risk, extraversion more tentatively than neuroticism. (A high score for neuroticism appears to be a risk factor linked with genetic vulnerability to depression, and low levels of extraversion might also be a risk factor.)
This is a very interesting finding. The whole question of personality change seems complicated to me; my best take on it at the moment is that we probably do have some inborn tendencies and preferences that are hard to change, but that we can change how we express those traits. I’m not sure what to think about the idea of personality change through pharmaceuticals (assuming this finding is supported by future work). It’s also kind of interesting to think about the link between personality and emotion, in addition to that between personality and behavior. I also wonder what happens when the people in the study stop taking the SSRI.
The link in the first paragraph goes to a Science Daily article about the research. Here’s the reference for the paper itself:
I don’t know how I first ran across the original version of this time-lapse video taken on Mauna Kea in Hawaii (home of many telescopes). At any rate, I found it an unexpectedly poignant look at humankind’s place in the cosmos. The majestic night sky wheels overhead impervious to all the little human movements going on below, and the magnificent telescopes face skyward in silent pursuit of photons. Here’s a slightly newer expanded version:
Several perennially fascinating questions arise in the study of humankind: What makes us so different from other animals? Was there some turning point or specific development that marks the emergence of uniquely human behavior? In other words, how did we become human? A recent workshop at Arizona State University, “Origins of Human Uniqueness and Behavioral Modernity,” addressed these questions. This article from Scientific American describes the conference, briefly describing how three core abilities (cognition, culture, and cooperation) together shaped the emergence of the human.
The other night I watched the women’s free skating in the Olympics. As always, I thought I wouldn’t mind seeing a few more of the skaters a little further down the ranks; even if they aren’t in the running for a medal, the fact that they made it to the Olympics means they are amazingly skilled. This sentiment was reinforced when a friend sent me a link to this interactive feature at the New York Times site, which illustrates aurally how very short the difference in time can be between a medalist and a non-medalist in various speed-based Olympic sports. Everyone who goes to the Olympics should be proud of having made it, regardless of how well they did, but I can see how that might be cold comfort if you lost out on a medal, or got a silver instead of a gold, by the merest sliver of a second, or made a small but costly mistake.
Then I heard this story on NPR about the emotions of silver and bronze medalists. Images of the faces of Olympic athletes immediately after an event were shown to volunteers who did not know how the athletes placed in the event, and the volunteers evaluated how happy the athletes looked. Bronze medal winners looked significantly happier than silver medal winners. They also looked happier when they were on the medal stand.
The difference could be the way they frame it. A silver medalist might be focusing on the gold that got away (the dreaded “if only,” one of the most painful thoughts that can torment the human mind). The bronze medalist, on the other hand, might well be thinking of the alternative of not getting a medal at all, compared to which a bronze looks pretty good. This is borne out by analysis of things the medalists said in interviews; bronze medalists used more statements expressing the idea of “at least I,” and silver medalists said “if only” much more often. I can’t say it’s all in how you frame it, but certainly the stories you tell yourself about the things that happen make a difference. Might as well tell yourself good ones.
