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New Knowledge Findings from Rutgers faculty Archived article from May 12, 2003
A better body image Adolescence is considered a time when health problems emerge, but Charlotte Markey, an assistant professor of psychology on the Camden campus, has found rising concerns about weight and body image in children as young as 5. For nearly a decade, Markey has been studying the development of health beliefs in adolescent and preadolescent girls, primarily focusing on their attitudes about eating. Her earlier findings indicated a correlation between mothers' and daughters' concerns about weight. "It's important for parents to model healthy behaviors about food and attitudes about weight. Saying ‘I look so fat' or ‘I can't wear this' may be what we've been conditioned to say, but we should try to make sure our kids don't grow up hearing those things," says Markey. She recently investigated data from the Healthy Families Project, an ongoing longitudinal study at the University of California–Riverside, and found that preadolescent boys are also concerned about their physical images. The research, to be published in Eating Behaviors, suggests that boys are negatively impacted by their fathers' dissatisfaction with their own bodies. Markey recommends parents expose their children to healthy foods, focus on health rather than appearances, encourage athletic participation and combat pervasive media images with meaningful conversations about health. She is currently recruiting participants for a study that will examine how childless couples' relationships affect health. For more information, visit Markey's faculty Web site. —Cathy Karmilowicz Associate Professor Suzie Chen has discovered a gene responsible for melanoma, the most aggressive form of malignant skin cancer. A paper describing the research by Chen and her colleagues at the National Human Genome Research Institute was published online by Nature Genetics April 21 and will appear subsequently in a print issue of the journal. Melanoma may appear in places that never see sun, spread to other parts of the body and become lethal. This type of cancer is not generally responsive to chemotherapy. According to a report from the National Cancer Institute, in the United States the incidence rate of melanoma has more than doubled in the past 20 years. Working in the Susan Lehman Cullman Laboratory for Cancer Research at the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, Chen has been on the track of this gene since 1995. "I did not set out to do a melanoma study," said Chen. "All my life I have been interested in cell transformation and differentiation. In this case, I was investigating how a fat cell becomes a fat cell when I observed that one of the mice in my experiment developed pigmented tumors. Upon further characterization, these tumors were confirmed to be melanoma. "After many years of work, we identified a gene that was involved in these skin abnormalities and went on to prove that it indeed causes melanoma in the mouse system," said Chen. Chen and her collaborators then took the next step in this scientific investigation using human biopsy tissues exhibiting various stages of melanoma. In more than one third of these human samples, the researchers detected signs of the same aberrant gene expression seen in the laboratory animals that had melanoma. This confirmed that the gene involved in melanoma development in the mice is also implicated in some human melanomas. While there are typically many paths leading to cancer development, this is a breakthrough in pinpointing one of them that occurs in both animals and humans. "We hope to use this knowledge we've gained to investigate better ways of treating the disease," said Chen. "With our understanding of at least one genetic factor in melanoma, we may now have the ability to design a new, more specific drug to target that gene or the protein it expresses." — Joseph Blumberg There are billions and billions of bacteria in every gallon of coastal seawater, and James Ammerman is building a tool to help us better understand the role of these microscopic creatures. With a $1.3 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation, Ammerman and his colleagues have begun to develop an underwater instrument to collect information on marine bacterial growth and the chemical transformations these microbes perform. Ammerman, an associate research professor at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences (IMCS), will use the new instrument to reveal the rates at which marine bacteria digest organic matter. This digestion releases carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, essential nutrients for ocean life that fuel the growth of microorganisms fundamental to the food chain. Excessive nutrients, however, can create conditions that result in fish kills and other disruptions in the marine ecosystem. The instrument — a specially engineered fiber optic spectrometer — will actually measure the activities of enzymes the bacteria produce to break down organic compounds. The changes in enzyme activities, in turn, will provide an accurate assessment of bacterial processes and productivity. "With this grant we will develop an instrument to make continuous, real-time measurements of microbial enzyme activities at ocean observatories such as the Rutgers LEO-15 at Tuckerton," said Ammerman. "These measurements will tell us a lot about the role of marine microbes in the cycling of nutrients in the ocean. This type of information is currently unavailable and will add an important biological component to the extensive, continuous chemical and physical measurements that can be made at ocean observatories." Gary Klinkhammer of Oregon State University is managing the instrument engineering over the first 18 months. Physical oceanographer Robert Chant of IMCS will perform the complex mathematical modeling necessary for interpreting the data collected. "Once we have the instrument constructed and in the water, the enzymes will really be pretty easy to measure. If the measurement is easy, the interpretation is inevitably difficult," Ammerman commented. In support of the project, IMCS education coordinator Eric Simms is developing a marine microbiology component that will be added to the C.O.O.L. (Coastal Ocean Observation Laboratory) Classroom, a series of Internet-based instructional modules for K-12 teachers and their students. — Joseph Blumberg
The politics of "Generation DotNet" A two-year study of the civic and political behavior of the American public, with a special emphasis on youth ages 15 to 25, dubbed "Generation DotNet," has found that while these young people pay less attention than older groups to public affairs and voting, they "hold their own" in community-related and volunteer activities, and in activities that give voice to their concerns. "Their relatively high level of participation in the civic realm holds hope for the future," said Professor of Public Policy Cliff Zukin, who, nonetheless, called their lack of an electoral presence "troubling." "This survey revealed two distinct modes of engagement — the civic and the political," said Zukin, a lead researcher on "The Civic and Political Health of the Nation: A Generational Portrait," a study for The Pew Charitable Trusts. "While both are positive pathways leading to a robust citizen life, many choose to walk only one road, and there is clearly a wide generational schism. "While the country has succeeded in transmitting the value of civic engagement to successive generations," he said, "there is strong evidence that it has failed in keeping the chain of political engagement unbroken." Scott Keeter of George Mason University and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Molly Andolina of DePaul University and Krista Jenkins, a Rutgers doctoral candidate, were Zukin's fellow researchers. The study was funded by a $1.1 million grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts and used an extensive national telephone survey of 3,246 respondents, about two-thirds of whom were members of Generation DotNet (born between 1977 and 1987) and their immediate predecessors, Generation Xers (born 1964 to 1976). The remainder were virtually evenly split between baby boomers (1946 to 1964) and matures (1945 and before). The study also employed an Internet survey of 1,166 members of Generation DotNet. The research looked at a "panorama" of 19 core activities, ranging from voting to volunteering to signing petitions, Zukin said. One surprising finding was the amount of consumer activism practiced by all age groups. "This is a largely unstudied phenomenon," Zukin said. "More than half report boycotting a company or product at some time in their lives, and almost as many say they have bought something — ‘buycotted' — to reward a company for its practices." Age mattered when it came to participating in the electoral arena, however. While almost three-quarters (72 percent) of the matures said they always vote, just over half (53 percent) of the boomers did, compared to one-third of the Xers. Although they've had fewer opportunities to vote than their elders, only one-quarter (24 percent) of eligible DotNets said they always vote. In contrast, the DotNets are holding their own in the civic world of volunteering, organizational activity and fund-raising. "One-quarter of boomers said they worked in their communities in the last year, as have 22 percent of Xers and 21 percent of DotNets. This is an impressive hallmark and one that portends continuity in the tradition of involvement," Zukin said. To see the survey, visit the Web at www.civicyouth.org/research/products/youth_index.htm. — Steve Manas The fossilized jaw of a 1.8 million-year-old human ancestor (hominid) from Tanzania may just be one of the five best specimens out of about 50 known to represent the earliest members of the genus Homo (H) — the genus to which the human species belongs. In the Feb. 21 issue of the journal Science, Rutgers anthropology Professor Robert Blumenschine and his colleagues describe and discuss the specimen they found at Olduvai Gorge in 1995, a fossil-rich locale that gained prominence through the discoveries of Louis and Mary Leakey in the early 1960s. "This is an important ancestor that comes from a crucial time range in prehistory — a time when we first began to see stone tools, when hominids had just begun to exploit larger animals as a food source, and when brain size was just beginning to expand significantly," said Blumenschine. The newly described fossil, designated OH 65, consists of a maxilla (upper jaw) complete with all its teeth and the lower face. "Any time you make a find like this, complete enough to show so many important diagnostic features, we get very excited," he said. The Science article reports that the fossil provides a key anatomical link between two other known specimens, H. rudolfensis — a cranium with most of its face (but no teeth) from northern Kenya — and the original H. habilis type specimen — a mandible (lower jaw) found previously at Olduvai. "OH 65 allows us to reshuffle the specimens that belong in the ancestral genus and tie together rudolfensis and habilis," said Blumenschine. "It shows that all three specimens are likely to be members of the same species — Homo habilis." OH 65 was found with stone tools and with bones from larger animals that clearly show cut marks made by stone knives and hammer-stone impact marks. Blumenschine said that this associated evidence further corroborates the work of other scientists in demonstrating the capacity both to make tools and to use them in butchering meat for food, even at this early time horizon. Geological evidence in combination with the animal remains offered the investigators an opportunity to develop additional information about early man's land use and his relationship with his environment. "As we learn more about the paleoecology, we may begin to understand what environmental conditions were selecting for adaptive traits in early Homo, traits like an increasingly large brain, that eventually gave rise to what we are today," said Blumenschine.
— Joseph Blumberg In a scientific first, researchers, including Newark Professor Paula Tallal, have shown that the brains of dyslexic children can be "rewired" through intensive remedial training to function more like those of normal readers. The researchers' findings were published Feb. 24 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition. The other authors include faculty from Stanford and Cornell universities, the University of California's Los Angeles and San Francisco campuses, and one of the co-founders of Oakland-based Scientific Learning Corporation. Dyslexia, sometimes called "word blindness," is a disorder that affects 5 to 10 percent of Americans, and is characterized by difficulties in processing language. Using brain-imaging scans, Tallal, Board of Governors Professor of Neuroscience, and other members of the research team studied which parts of the brain become active during reading. For instance, one portion of the study involved asking children if two letters of the alphabet rhymed, while their brains were imaged with fMRI scans. Initially, the scans of the 20 dyslexic children in the experiment contrasted sharply with those of the 12 normal readers in the experiment's control group. The dyslexics' scans showed a lack of activity in the language-critical temporal regions of the brain. The dyslexic children then used the Fast ForWord computer program, designed by Tallal and colleagues to help them learn to process and interpret rapid sequences of sound. Training lasted 100 minutes a day, five days a week for eight weeks as part of the regular school day. "Each child worked at his or her own level," Tallal said. The goal was to have the children process sounds correctly in words and sentences of increasing length and grammatical complexity, she added. The result, she said, was a change in which areas of the brain were activated when reading, making the brain patterns of dyslexics more closely resemble those of nondyslexic children. In addition, the researchers found that in dyslexic children other regions of the brain were activated in a compensatory process that these youngsters may have used as they learned to read more fluently.
— Michael Sutton Thirteen years after passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, adults with disabilities face misunderstanding and confusion that can prevent them from being hired, according to a Work Trends survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. "Restricted Access: A Survey of Employers About People With Disabilities and Lowering Barriers to Work" questioned the nation's employers about their views on people with disabilities in the workplace. It also sought their views on the economy, unemployment and job security, said Carl E. Van Horn, director of the center. Among key findings:
"History demonstrates that the cost to employers of lowering barriers to employment for disadvantaged or minority groups is not as high as people fear it to be," said Van Horn. — Steve Manas
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For questions or comments about this site, contact Greg Trevor Last Updated: May 30, 2006 © 2012 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. All rights reserved. 
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Only 25 percent of employers say their firm employs at least one worker with a physical disability or mental illness.