A Personal Encounter with a Global Crisis

Global Health, Health and Medicine, Infectious Disease, The Library Channel, UC San Diego, Women in Science, , , , ,

Epidemiologist Steffanie Strathdee and her husband, psychologist Tom Patterson, were vacationing in Egypt when Tom came down with what appeared to be a routine (if severe) case of food poisoning. Tom’s condition quickly deteriorated, and upon transfer to a hospital in Germany blood work revealed that he had contracted one of the most dangerous superbugs in the world, a condition that rendered modern standards of treatment useless. Following an emergency medevac to the medical center at UC San Diego, where both Steffanie and Tom worked, Tom suffered several episodes of septic shock and spent months in a coma.

An increasingly frantic Steffanie used her scientific training to research alternative solutions and stumbled upon “the perfect predator” in an all-but-forgotten treatment: bacteriophage therapy. Bacteriophage, or phage, treatment had fallen out of favor almost 100 years ago, largely due to the invention of antibiotics. Phages are naturally-occurring viruses capable of destroying even the most lethal bacteria, but in order to be effective they must be precisely matched to their prey. With the clock running down on Tom, Steffanie appealed to phage researchers worldwide. Working with allies that included the FDA, top university researchers, and a clandestine Navy biomedical center, a match was found; Tom was treated and made a remarkable recovery. Since then others have also been saved by this resurrected treatment.

The hard-won knowledge gained during Steffanie and Tom’s trial, and the alliances formed, helped to establish the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH) at UC San Diego, the first phage therapy center in North America.

Steffanie and Tom’s memoir of their ordeal, The Perfect Predator, is a love story as well as a propulsive medical thriller. Though often near despair as Tom’s condition progressively worsened, Steffanie refused to concede defeat. The book also serves as a warning and a call to action, as Steffanie points to the rise of multidrug-resistant bacteria as a direct result of our overuse of antibiotics, particularly in livestock. The superbug crisis has assumed global proportions, and Steffanie argues that while phage therapy has tremendous promise, we must also focus our collective attention on the source of the crisis in order to prevent more cases like her husband’s.

Watch The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug with Steffanie Strathdee and Thomas Patterson

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The Social Media Bubble

Communication and Media Studies, Ethics, Helen Edison Lecture Series, Humanities, Popular Culture, UC San Diego, , , , ,

Social media has become such a ubiquitous part of our lives that it’s difficult to remember a time before Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, etc. So ingrained are these platforms in our daily routines that we seldom stop to ponder their effect on ourselves, other users, and/or the larger society.

As an early financial advisor to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, venture capitalist Roger McNamee is uniquely positioned to consider those effects. In conversation with San Diego Union-Tribune’s Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Jeff Light, McNamee discusses the concerns that led to the publication of his recent book, Zucked. He starts by describing Facebook’s business model, which is predicated on enticing users to spend ever-more time on the site to maximize advertising exposure and on selling members’ data to those advertisers.

McNamee outlines the use (or misuse) of algorithms to tailor the “Facebook experience” to each user. “Likes,” targeted News Feeds, comments, online games and other features are designed to reinforce the user’s sense of belonging to a larger community, which of course serves a basic human need. This seems harmless enough on the surface, but McNamee argues that the net effect is to create a “Facebook bubble” around the user, in which already-held theories and beliefs are constantly reinforced while opinions that may challenge those beliefs are discouraged or hidden altogether. In that light it should come as no surprise that roughly 40% of adult Americans believe things that are demonstrably untrue.

More pernicious, and potentially more damaging to society, is the outsized influence wielded by social media platforms on civil discourse and the democratic process itself. A society that cannot agree on basic facts is a society that cannot function effectively. McNamee cites two momentous events, the Brexit vote in the UK and the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, as instances where Facebook and other social media were manipulated by Cambridge Analytica, the Russian and Chinese governments, and other disruptive agents in such a way as to influence the vote’s outcome. As the evidence for this manipulation steadily mounted McNamee confronted the Facebook leadership, who at that time refused to acknowledge the severity of the problem or change their practices. Thus, began McNamee’s disillusionment with social media and growing sense of alarm over what he perceived to be a threat to democracy.

Though McNamee believes this threat is very real, he is nevertheless optimistic. He points out that there is still strength in numbers, and voters can pressure legislators to protect consumer privacy by ending the unchecked (and in McNamee’s view, wholly unnecessary) “data mining” employed by the tech sector. They can also require social media platforms to make efforts to verify information before posting, at the very least by identifying the information’s true source.

McNamee also insists that we social media consumers can and must do a better job of educating ourselves. Determining which news and commentary sites are trustworthy is a good start, and McNamee notes that there are tools available to help.

Watch “Zucked” with Roger McNamee – Helen Edison

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Buddhism and Sexuality

Burke Lectureship on Religion and Society, Humanities, Public Lectures, Religion, UC San Diego, , , , , ,

José Cabezón is Professor of Religious Studies and the XIVth Dalai Lama Professor of Tibetan Buddhism and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Cabezón edited a collection of essays entitled Buddhism, Sexuality and Gender (1992), one of the first scholarly works in the field. His participation in a 1999 conference hosted by the Institute for Religion in the Age of Science (IRAS) led to further intensive research and another book, Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism (2017).

In 2007 a group of gay and lesbian Buddhists from the Bay Area wrote a letter to the Dalai Lama, asking to meet with him for clarification of what the group regarded as some of the homophobic tenets of Buddhism. His Holiness agreed to the meeting, during which he expressed sympathy with the group’s concerns but argued that he could not adjudicate the matter by himself, since the tenets are codified in ancient texts. Rather, a consensus among the worldwide Buddhist community was needed.

In his presentation for the Burke Lectureship, Cabezón examines those texts for what they may tell us about fundamental Buddhist views of gender and sexuality. The texts were written largely in Sanskrit between the 1st and 9th centuries C.E. and present a surprisingly complex view of the topic, with some aspects familiar to the modern Western mind and others decidedly foreign. As Cabezón notes, they are often “not what we want to hear.” He traces a woman’s sexual life journey from sexual (biological) embodiment at conception to old age, in the process outlining the belief in four biological sexes (2 normal, 2 abnormal or “queer”) and their determining factors, karma as always being foremost. Determinism – a foundational tenet of Tibetan Buddhism – is key in establishing causal links between sexual biology, gender, sexual desire, and sexual pleasure.

Cabezón also discusses the treatment of male sexuality in the texts, noting that sexual ethics for men are described in exhaustive detail while none are listed for women (other than fidelity to their husbands). Men are allowed access to prostitutes, and prostitution is considered neither a crime nor a moral failing. In fact, prostitutes are uniformly portrayed in a positive light, whereas wives frequently are not. Regarding marriage, the texts maintain that the goal is not expression of love but the creation of strong bonds between families.

By contrast we know little about the lives of “queer” people in early Buddhist societies, since there is little mention of them beyond acknowledging their existence as one of the four genders. It is the classification of genders other than biological male and female as abnormal, along with a strongly patriarchal bent, that troubles many modern Buddhists in the West.

According to José Cabezón the study of ancient Buddhist writings on gender and sexuality may be thought of as the study of a cultural construct, one that remains relevant to Asian Buddhist and Western convert communities today.

Watch What is a Woman? What is a Man? Exploring The Buddhist Sources – Jose Cabezon – Burke Lectureship on Religion and Society

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Lakes Beneath Antarctic Ice: Deep, Dark and Mysterious

Earth Sciences, Geophysics, Jeffrey B. Graham Perspectives on Ocean Science Lecture Series, Science, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, , , ,

Where is one of the last places on earth you would expect to find a never-before known lake? Certainly, any of earth’s best-known deserts…the Sahara, Gobi, or Kalahari right?

Technically fitting the definition of a desert by standards of precipitation, Antarctica could also be on that well-known list of dry places.

But Antarctica has been imaged constantly for years across the entire visible and invisible spectrum and alas an unknown lake never popped up in any pictures until….who would think it…

In 2006, Helen Amanda Fricker was sitting at her desk studying new satellite data when she made a starting discovery – a set of active lakes that exist underneath the ice in Antarctica. Join Helen, a 25-year veteran of Antarctic ice sheet research, and learn about the discovery, exploration and drilling of these mysterious phenomena at the southern reaches of our planet.

Watch Lakes Beneath Antarctic Ice: Deep, Dark and Mysterious

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In Search of Unique Sounds

Arts and Music, Concerts and Performances, Jazz and Popular Music, UC San Diego, , ,

“For myself, tone color, texture and ‘unique sounds’ (growls, double buzzes etc.) …can be every bit as musical as harmonic expression can be, and ultimately I hope to meld [them] together hand and hand.” – Stephanie Richards

Trumpeter Stephanie Richards has performed and/or recorded with such luminaries as Henry Threadgill, John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Butch Morris, and the Pixies. With her acclaimed debut solo album in 2018 Fullmoon, Richards announced her intention to expand the boundaries of contemporary jazz, and demonstrated the skills to do so. For her 2019 release Take the Neon Lights, New York City-inspired poems from cultural icons including Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou and Allen Ginsberg provide the backdrop for a sonic portrait of NYC that is equal parts dazzle and grit, like the fabled city itself.

Richards is a UC San Diego Music Department faculty member and co-director with trumpeter Dave Douglas of New York’s Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT), and has inaugurated a West Coast version of FONT in collaboration with Fresh Sound, UC San Diego Extension, the San Diego Symphony, and others. In the FONT West concert, also entitled Take the Neon Lights, she performs at San Diego’s intimate White Box space with some heavyweight collaborators: bassist Mark Dresser, keyboardist Joshua White, bass clarinetist Brian Walsh, and drummer Andrew Munsey.

Richards’ interest in “tone color, texture and ‘unique sounds'” is on full display as the music ebbs and surges; at times lyrical, almost plaintive, while at others times it growls and roars. Underpinning these shifting sonorities is a sense of restless exploration; each band member probes the boundaries of conventional structure and their defined roles in a jazz ensemble while maintaining a three-way dialogue with fellow musicians and the listener. This is adventurous, challenging music that resists easy categorization, but the audience’s engagement is amply rewarded.

Take the Neon Lights marks Stephanie Richards as a talent to be reckoned with.

Watch Stephanie Richards: New Trumpet Music

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