Building a Future On Science

Building a Future On Science

Brazilian neuroscientist Miguel A. L. Nicolelis taps into the chatter of neural populations to drive robotic prosthetics. Now he hopes to tap the potential of his country's population by building them a network of science cities

In a tiny, darkened room on the Duke University campus, Miguel Nicolelis looks on approvingly while a pair of students monitors data streaming across computer screens. The brightly colored dashes and spikes reflect the real-time brain activity of a rhesus macaque named Clementine, who is walking at a leisurely pace on a little treadmill in the next room. Staticky pops coming from a speaker on a back wall are the amplified sound of one of her neurons firing.

“This is the most beautiful music you can hear from the brain,” Nicolelis declares with a smile.

The run-through is preparation for the next big demonstration of work toward mind-controlled human prosthetics that first garnered worldwide headlines for Nicolelis and his team in 2003. Back then, the group showed that they could listen in on brain signals generated by a monkey using a joystick to play a video game and translate that biological code into commands for a mechanical arm to perform the same motions. Now the group intends to make robotic legs walk under commands from the motor cortex of a monkey strolling along like Clementine. This time the scientists also want to feed sensor data from the robot feet into the monkey’s brain, so she can “feel” the mechanical legs’ strides as though they were her own. To raise the stakes still further, the monkey will be at Duke in North Carolina, but the robotic legs will be half a world away at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan.

The complexity of the experiment presents potential obstacles, Nicolelis admits, but satellite transmission delay of the signals traveling to and from Japan is no longer among them. One of the young men in the room, Ian Peikon, found a way to reduce the delay to a negligible 120 milliseconds. “And he’s an undergraduate,” Nicolelis adds, delighting in the opportunity to illustrate a favorite point—that you don’t need a Ph.D. to participate meaningfully in science. The allusion is to a larger personal philosophy that has been driving the 46-year-old neuroscientist’s pursuit over the past five years of a very different kind of ambition, perhaps on a par with uploading sensations to the human brain.

Convinced that science is a key capable of unlocking human potential well beyond the rigid hierarchies of academia—and outside the traditional scientific bastions of North America and Europe—his other big project has been nothing less than a quest to transform the way research is carried out in his native Brazil. In the process, he believes, science can also leverage economic and social transformation throughout the country.

The heart of Nicolelis’s vision is a string of “science cities” built across Brazil’s poorest regions, each centered on a world-class research institute specializing in a different area of science or technology. A web of education and social programs would intimately involve surrounding communities with each institution while improving local infrastructure and quality of life. And the presence of these knowledge-based oases would spark a Silicon Valley–style clustering of commercial scientific enterprise around them, jump-starting regional development.

Nicolelis is used to initial skepticism, even from peers, elicited by the grandeur of the scenario. “Up until a few months ago Brazilian scientists were the biggest doubters of all,” he says. Now many observers in Brazil and abroad acknowledge that the momentum his plan has attained in a short time suggests Nicolelis may be on to something.

An Idea Becomes Concrete
By last August the nonprofit foundation that Nicolelis and his partners formed in 2003 to build a proof-of-concept neuroscience institute in northeastern Brazil had raised $25 million, much of it in a large endowment from the widow of billionaire Edmond Safra. On a hilly 100-hectare site in the coastal farming town of Macaíba, three core elements of a “campus of the brain” were also complete. The bright white structures include a 25-lab research building, a free clinic specializing in maternal and child health, and a school that will offer twice-weekly science and art classes to 400 local children, aged 11 to 15, in the first quarter of 2008.

In the larger port city of Natal, 20 kilometers away, another science school has been up and running since last February with about 600 students, along with a suite of labs equipped for Nico­lelis’s Parkinson’s disease research using transgenic mice. A third neuroscience lab run by Nicolelis’s group, established at the Sírio-Libanês Hospital in the southern city of São Paulo in exchange for the hospital’s sponsorship of the Macaíba clinic, is focused on clinical application of the prosthetics research.

The Macaíba site itself was donated by the state government of Rio Grande do Norte and still lacks a paved access road, but the foundation already has plans for a 5,000-student school, additional lab space, a larger health center, a sports facility and an ecological park to complete what will be the main campus of the International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal (IINN). The Brazilian federal government pledged $25 million toward finishing the complex after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited the campus in August with his chief of staff and minister of education in tow. Nicolelis had given what he calls “the most important PowerPoint talk of my career” to the president, who is universally known as “Lula,” a few weeks earlier.

Back in his spacious office overlooking the leafy Duke campus, Nicolelis recalls that first encounter as feeling slightly surreal. “You know I give lectures all over, but all of a sudden you’re talking to the guy who can actually change a lot of stuff. And the cool thing is we were talking about science—not talking about building a bridge or a road, we were talking about how to massively educate kids in a country like ours using science as a driving force.” After Lula’s visit, Nicolelis’s group began discussions with Brazil’s minister of education about creating a science curriculum for 354 new national technical high schools. “If this works, we’ll be up to one million students in two years,” Nicolelis says excitedly.

The social components of Nicolelis’s plans that are taking shape alongside the scientific facilities are absolutely integral to the institute’s purpose in his view. “What we took [to Natal] is not only the idea of doing science at an international level, as we do here [at Duke], but the idea that we let that become part of a school, of a women’s clinic, that we merge a scientific enterprise with society.” He is keen for scientific research at the IINN to focus on how the brain learns, for example, so that new insights can be incorporated into teaching methods in the schools. Given the importance of early brain development, the clinic will also offer a human milk bank for new mothers who cannot produce their own and will fill an unmet need in the region for neuropediatric treatment. “So it’s a huge experiment that links neuroscience with education and health services,” he explains.

The plan has continued to evolve ever since it was conceived with two other Brazilian scientists at Duke as a way of raising the caliber of science in Brazil. “It was about repatriating people and reversing the brain drain,” Nicolelis says of the idea that he and his postdoctoral fellows Cláudio Mello* and Sidarta Ribeiro had in 2002 to establish a world-class neuroscience institute in Brazil.

“But we also knew that it had to be a driving force for social change, to demonstrate that, with opportunity, talent anywhere will have a shot.” They named the nonprofit they founded to execute their plan the Alberto Santos-Dumont Association for the Support of Research (AASDAP), after the Brazilian who went to Paris in the 1890s to pursue his dream of flying and succeeded.

Meeting Global Standards
In 1989, when Nicolelis and his wife, Laura de Oliveira, left Brazil so that Nicolelis could pursue a neuroscience career, both had medical degrees from the University of São Paulo in Brazil’s largest city, and Nicolelis had completed his Ph.D. at the same institution under the guidance of a prominent Lou Gehrig’s disease researcher, César Timo-Iaria. But the country had just emerged from two decades of rule by a bureaucratic military regime, research funding was minuscule, and young scientists had few prospects for work. Once in the U.S., Nicolelis also encountered doubts that a Brazilian-trained scientist could amount to much. “What or who of any significance has ever come out of the University of São Paulo?” he says he was asked repeatedly in job interviews.

Starting out at Philadelphia’s Hahnemann University, Nicolelis soon became a pioneer in techniques for eavesdropping on hundreds of neurons at once in attempts to decode the fundamental language of the brain. Widely recognized today as one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, he credits his own professional success with fueling his conviction that promising young scientists should not have to leave Brazil to realize their full potential.

In the time that he has been away, conditions for Brazilian scientists have improved, although the nation’s 2006 public and industry spending on research and development of $14.5 billion is still considerably less than the amount invested by many of the other emerging economies with which Brazil is often compared [see sidebar on next page]. Lula has endorsed science and technology as avenues for Brazil’s development and recently announced a $23-billion boost to the research budget over the next three years.

The president’s embrace of science is undoubtedly encouraged by some recent high-profile demonstrations of the fruits of research spending, notes physicist Sergio Mascarenhas de Oliveira, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies of São Carlos, part of the University of São Paulo. Mascarenhas praises the national agricultural research corporation, Embrapa, in particular for its leadership in developing ethanol and other biofuels as well as staking out tropical agricultural biotechnology as an area where the country can establish expertise. In 2000 a consortium of some 30 Brazilian laboratories produced a genome sequence of Xylella fastidiosa, an important citrus crop parasite, and several other projects to sequence crop plants, such as sugarcane, are under way. “Embrapa is in the process of changing our [nation’s] export commodity from raw materials to applied science,” Mascarenhas says. “What Brazil still doesn’t know how to do is to transform research from the university into products and venture capital,” he adds, blaming the weakness in part on an ivory-tower culture in Brazil’s largely university-based research community.

Not surprisingly, some of those scientists were dubious of the Natal project, Mascarenhas recalls. Nicolelis’s concept of a network of independent research centers, inspired by Germany’s prestigious Max Planck institutes, is unusual for Brazil. The AASDAP motto, “The Future of Science in Brazil Starts Here,” definitely did not help, Mascarenhas notes. And if the approach alienated some Brazilian scientists, the decision to locate the first institute in the impoverished hinterland of Natal also mystified many of them. Nicolelis thinks that the institute’s social and economic influence will be most visible in the communities around Natal and Macaíba, and that the region is exactly where such transformation is most needed.

Moreover, the seaport and an airport that receives nonstop flights from Europe should make the location a promising one for commercial science, he says. The federal government has declared the area a free-enterprise zone, and AASDAP staff is now negotiating the creation of a 1,000- to 2,000-hectare biotech park, which Nicolelis hopes will attract businesses focused on products for export, such as pharmaceuticals and biofuels. Meanwhile he is in talks with several other states interested in hosting the next three institutes, whose specialty areas will likely be bioenergy, microelectronics and environmental science.

The New Science City
As a means to promote regional economic development, the strategy of clustering high-tech businesses around major research institutions in the hope of spurring innovation has never been more popular. Local and national governments, especially across Asia, are spending billions to build such science parks and “cities” as they peg their development goals to science.

In 2006 China declared its plan to construct 30 new science cities and to raise its annual research spending to more than $100 billion by 2020. At that point, the government expects 60 percent of the country’s economic growth to be based on science and technology. India, where a small number of elite universities have become hubs for technology clusters, as in Bangalore, is also betting on a continued tech boom. Although their approaches differ, what many of these nations have in common is an overt goal of luring a diaspora of scientists trained in the West to bring their expertise back home, notes Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a think tank in Palo Alto, Calif. “The example most often cited is Tai­wan,” she says, “where the whole semiconductor industry is based on expats who stayed here in the Silicon Valley for 20 years, then went back. We’re seeing it happen in China, too: professors going back and establishing their labs, and they’re bringing their students and contacts and becoming magnets.” Nicolelis is probably one of a handful of Brazilian scientists with the stature to play the same role in his country, Gorbis adds.

She and IFTF research director Alex Soojung-Kim Pang led a yearlong project to produce the “Delta Scan,” a broad analysis and forecast of science and technology trends commissioned by the British government. In it, they flagged Brazil as a possible world scientific leader by 2025 and the Natal initiative as an example of the direction the country will need to take to get there. The potential for transdisciplinary research within and among AASDAP institutes is an important advantage in Gorbis’s view. And Nicolelis’s own emphasis on collaboration between his Duke lab, the IINN sites and international partners embodies a globally networked style of working that Delta Scan authors considered essential to Brazil’s ability to produce world-class research. Pang also sees the IINN’s launch, enabled primarily by international donations at first, as the shape of things to come elsewhere. “The other interesting story,” he notes, “is the rise of private capital in supporting these kinds of centers and supporting what we would normally think of as big science projects.” The next evolution in science-based development, Pang observes, is a less structured and less government-driven “innovation zone” arising from the joint efforts of entrepreneurs, philanthropists and researchers.

Harvesting Human Potential
Whether the Natal model can help Brazil catch up to the countries pouring many times more resources into science and technology remains to be seen. As the world’s fifth largest nation in land area and one exceptionally rich in diverse natural resources, Brazil has long been described as “the country of the future,” possessing nearly all the ingredients needed to become an economic powerhouse. Most analysts cite the country’s own legal system as being one of the biggest obstacles to Brazil’s reaching its full potential.

Bureaucracy, burdensome taxes, and weak enforcement of antitrust and intellectual-property laws are blamed for stifling the population’s natural entrepreneurial dynamism. A poor school system and high illiteracy rates are the other major barriers to progress most often named.

In that light, the most unorthodox aspect of the Natal project could be its greatest strength. Nothing like the educational effort on the scale envisioned by Nicolelis has ever been tied to a science-city initiative. “A few give it lip service,” Pang says, “but even then they’re mainly talking about university-level education.”

In Nicolelis’s view, reaching children well before college age is crucial. He believes that science education strengthens critical thinking skills in general, and he plans to use improvements in the children’s regular school performance as a benchmark for the effectiveness of the supplementary classes at institute science schools. If some of the kids become interested in pursuing science and technology careers, they will find plenty of opportunities in the knowledge economy. “Ninety-nine percent of scientific work doesn’t require a Ph.D.,” he insists.

But he is careful to clarify that he is not trying to create a nation of scientists. “We are trying to create a generation of citizens capable of leading Brazil,” Nicolelis explains. “These kids already have the hopes—now what they need is the tools.” Whether they want to be doctors, architects, pilots or president, he is confident that the experience of hands-on scientific inquiry can instill a feeling of empowerment that the children will carry into adulthood and use to carry their country into its long-awaited future.

Building the Knowledge Archipelago

Building the Knowledge Archipelago

Globalization of a development model

Key Concepts
In the 21st century, innovative knowledge and technology creation, arguably the most unique by-products of the human brain, are likely to become the most valuable commodities fueling the global economy. As countries and multinational companies diversify their strategies in response to a new wave of globalization, a competitive edge will be held by those who are capable of more efficiently utilizing geographically distributed technological assets and skilled labor forces. It seems plausible, therefore, to envision that widely diverse communities worldwide will start linking their efforts to form virtual partnerships capable of competing more efficiently for the economic, social and political benefits generated by the growth of the knowledge-based industry. A project underway to build one such knowledge-based enclave of activity in northeastern Brazil is an example of this paradigm, and potentially the first of many such knowledge islands that will link to form a true knowledge archipelago worldwide.

Sitting on a comfortable chair at the leftmost corner of a stage set in the spacious west hall of the Presidential Palace, I could hardly believe that the ceremony unfolding in front of me was actually taking place. Flanked by the Brazilian minister of education, Dr. Fernando Haddad, and facing a crowd which had stoically endured a two-hour delay, I found myself next to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva while he calmly went about the business of signing a series of important presidential decrees.

It was an unusually breezy and politically charged early spring afternoon in Brasília. Despite his already busy day, the president seemed genuinely happy to be there—particularly since each of his signatures was saluted by a salvo of applause and exuberant celebration by different constituents, invited from all over the country to witness the event.

The ceremony had been delayed because President Lula had to participate in a series of last-minute meetings with congressional leaders involved in a highly disputed vote to extend a tax on financial transactions that would raise an estimated 40 billion reals a year ($23 billion) to fund a variety of federal social programs.

It turns out that there was plenty of justification for the crowd's patient wait and for cheering each presidential signature. The decrees signed on December 12th created a series of complementary programs to support the backbone of a new Brazilian Plan for Education Development. Announced last April, this strategic educational project was spearheaded by Minister Haddad and his team as the ministry's flagship initiative to revamp Brazilian public education in the next few years.

Lost in my thoughts—most of which revolved around my amazement at how a five year roller coaster ride that started in front of a TV set in my home office in Chapel Hill, N.C., could have landed me in the Presidential Palace that afternoon—I almost missed the call to join President Lula, Minister Haddad and the provost of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Professor Ivonildo do Rego, at the front of the stage. The time had come for signing the decree that allocated 42 million reals ($25 million) toward construction of the "Campus of the Brain" of the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal (ELS-IINN; www.natalneuro.org.br). The campus will be built in the bucolic little town of Macaíba, 25 kilometers from Natal, the capital of one of the smallest, neediest and most beautiful states of Brazil, Rio Grande do Norte.

Science as an agent of social transformation
After spending most of my life as a Paulista (a native of São Paulo State), I had been "reborn" five years earlier as a Potiguar, as citizens of Rio Grande do Norte are proudly known, in honor of one of the few Brazilian Indian tribes that never surrendered to the Portuguese colonists. I vividly recall the date and the precise moment of this rebirth, in which not one but two Potiguars were delivered at the same time. This twin delivery occurred late on the night of October 27, 2002. Standing in front of a 60-inch TV set that was specially purchased to follow Brazilian soccer matches, Sidarta Ribeiro, my longtime collaborator (and at that time a postdoctoral fellow in my laboratory at Duke University) and I spent most of the night following the news of the Brazilian presidential elections.

Around midnight in North Carolina, and just a couple of hours after all 86,129,335million votes had been digitally cast and counted, Brazilians all over the world learned that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the metalworker who gained national and international renown for his stand against the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, had been elected president of Brazil with more than 61 percent of the ballots. Minutes later, Mr. Lula da Silva celebrated both his birthday and his unprecedented election by addressing a huge crowd that had gathered on the Avenida Paulista, in the financial heart of São Paulo, to greet their new president.

During that victory speech, President Lula said that it was time to start building a new and fairer country where all Brazilians would have the opportunity to fulfill their individual potential and become true participants in the decisions and challenges required to allow Brazil to awaken from its long slumber and reach out, at long last, toward a future of prosperity, justice and happiness. As most Brazilians would say, such a bright future had been heralded by many, for a long time, but it had never quite materialized.

Although the idea had been floating in our minds for some time, the decision to build the "Natal project," as it was originally named, came to life that unforgettable night when President Lula's call to arms hit us head-on in Chapel Hill.

There has been no looking back since then.

But how could a bunch of scientists living abroad do anything at all that would help in any meaningful way a country as huge and diverse as Brazil to move ahead? The answer to this question, which became the motto of our entire effort, surprised many in Brazil: We would use science as an agent of social transformation.

A few months after that night, we landed in Brasília to meet with President Lula and announce our intent to create a private project whose main goal would be to use science to transform the Brazilian northeast. Covering 71 million hectares of land (roughly twice the area of California), most of which is occupied by a semiarid ecosystem unique to Brazil known as caatinga, the northeast is home to 51 million people and some of the worst human development indexes found in the country.

As Brazilian scientists, we felt that high-quality science could do something to start reversing this sad reality. Instead of working solely within the limits of the traditional public university system, our plan called for the creation of a network of stand-alone private research institutes, loosely inspired by the Max Planck Institutes in Germany, that would spread across different northeast states and promote world class basic and applied scientific inquiry in 12 key strategic areas of research considered vital for Brazil's future development. Different from the Max Planck network, however, the key mission of each of these new institutes would not be limited to the production of academic research, but would also include the establishment of new paradigms through which scientific enterprise could become the main driving force behind a series of educational, social and economic initiatives aimed at empowering impoverished communities throughout the region.

Given our professional backgrounds, the scientific focus chosen for the first of these institutes was brain research. That is how, in 2003, the project to build the International Institute of Neurosciences of Natal (IINN) was launched simultaneously in Brazil and abroad. To handle all aspects of the IINN project and the future network of institutes, a private, nonprofit organization, Associação Alberto Santos Dumont para Apoio à Pesquisa (AASDAP), was created on April 17, 2004. Its name honors the greatest of all Brazilian scientists, the inventor and aviator Alberto Santos Dumont.

Seeding a knowledge island
The IINN project was conceived as a three-layer structure. A modern brain research facility defined the core layer. A series of social programs, built around the research institute, formed the middle layer. It included a science education program for children, a women's and children's clinic, an ecological park and a sports complex. The final layer would be formed by a series of private spin-offs, start-ups and established biotech companies located in an International Neurotechnology Industrial Park to be built in a special free enterprise zone created by the federal government. Altogether, this structure became known as the "Campus of the Brain."

Almost at once, the IINN initiative introduced a series of key innovations to the scenery of Brazilian science. First, the project was built essentially as a private enterprise, supported primarily by private funds and philanthropic donations raised within Brazil and abroad. Although strategic joint ventures were signed with the federal government, AASDAP has remained in charge of the management of the entire project since its conception, which includes fund-raising, recruiting and operating multiple research facilities and social initiatives, such as two schools and the women's health clinic.

A couple of years were enough to demonstrate that the proposal of using science as an agent for social transformation could attract private investment of real significance. In July of 2005 the São Paulo-based Sírio-Lebanese Hospital, one of the most prestigious private hospitals in Brazil, became the first Brazilian private institution to sign a broad scientific-social partnership with AASDAP. Later on, in February of 2007, history was made when Ms. Lily Safra kindly granted AASDAP one of the largest private donations ever made to a Brazilian scientific project. In recognition of her generosity, AASDAP renamed its first institute as the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neurosciences of Natal (ELS-IINN).

In addition to recruiting talent throughout Brazil, AASDAP invested considerable effort to repatriate young Brazilian neuroscientists who had been working abroad without any concrete hope of returning home, due to a lack of available positions, infrastructure and funding at the public university system.

By taking a major research project to the northeast of Brazil, AASDAP also gave support to the notion that it is possible to decentralize the production of science throughout Brazil and still maintain high standards of academic performance outside the main public university-based model. Despite its private orientation, since its first days the ELS-IINN has worked in close collaboration with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (U.F.R.N.), which in 2004 donated to AASDAP 100 hectares of land for the construction of the Campus of the Brain.

The ELS-IINN project was also innovative in establishing, since its conception, long-term links with leading brain research institutes in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Asia. Built through multisite research collaboration projects, and supported by a new U.S.-based nonprofit entity, the International Neuroscience Network Foundation (INNF), this global network currently fosters research and educational initiatives worldwide.

Currently, the ELS-IINN is implementing the next phase of its paradigm to produce and disseminate innovative knowledge. By linking the activities of its state-of-the-art brain research institute to the creation of the first International Neurotechnology Industrial Park and a biofuel plant for producing biodiesel—a renewable fuel derived from a variety of tropical oilseeds cultivated in the Brazilian semiarid highlands by family farming cooperatives—AASDAP is aiming to create a self-sustainable business model to support the growth of the ELS-IINN Campus of the Brain and the community around it. The long-term goal of this massive scientific-social experiment is to create a model that can be replicated not only within many other locations in Brazil, but also in other developing nations in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Having started to build a "knowledge island," we now intend to link it to a distributed knowledge archipelago. But how far can one take an idea, born in a little town in the Brazilian northeast? As the discussion below shows the answer is: far, very far indeed!

Driving forces for building a Knowledge Archipelago
The most recent wave of economic globalization—triggered by the mutually reinforcing cascade of events resulting from the opening of sizeable emergent markets along with the strategic decision made by multinational companies to outsource, primarily for cost-reducing purposes, not only their production facilities, but some of their operational and service-based activities to developing countries—has acquired revolutionary status, thanks to the unprecedented breakthroughs achieved by the information technology industry during the same period.

As a result of the widespread, seamless and virtually instantaneous means for information to be disseminated today, many developing nations have enhanced and diversified their economies by incorporating a range of innovative production technologies and good practice processes, while accumulating substantial revenues originating from service-based businesses at a pace that was simply unimaginable just a few years ago. Thus, by taking advantage of the coupling between massive business outsourcing and rapid information technology deployment, developing countries, such as India, China and Brazil have started to realize that this new economic model could, at long last, generate some of the significant wealth required to finance their massive social development needs.

Yet, according to prominent economists, such as Joseph Stiglitz, this last wave of globalization has failed to produce significant economic and social benefits for the vast majority of people living in the developing world. The world happens not to be flat after all. At least, not for the vast majority of those who live in its poorest and underdeveloped regions.

If exploited to its fullest capacity, however, it is conceivable that a radical and empowering combination of widespread knowledge dissemination—through massive education programs and strategic investments in scientific initiatives, and aimed at transforming the economies and social realities of developing nations—could lead to astounding outcomes. Indeed, this process could establish the basic initial conditions required for emergent nations to become, for the first time in history, key players in the assembly of a new global economic and political order; one in which significant worldwide economic growth would be attained without the classical colonial paradigm of domination, exploitation and environmental devastation that characterized previous incarnations of globalization pushes.

In its newest version, therefore, economic globalization could cease to be a simple, but very efficient, one-way highway for multinational corporations to reduce production costs and achieve higher profits. Instead, it could become a powerful global political tool for achieving a significant improvement in the life conditions of hundreds of millions of people through the massive distribution of the means to generate and consume knowledge. It could also lead the way for the emergence of a consensual model of cooperative global democratic governance; a system in which the pursuit of happiness becomes the undeniable right of all members of our species.

As this new globalization paradigm takes off, its limiting rate will likely be determined by the speed and efficiency with which developing nations embrace the profound structural transformations and policies needed to move their societies from pure consumers and beneficiaries of innovation produced by others, to a stage in which they too can become true contributors in the process of generating cutting-edge knowledge and technologies.

Membership in such a radical new knowledge-based global society, however, will require profound changes in cultural and social traditions. This process will entail a deep rethinking of public policies and priorities, ranging from a massive investment in high-quality education and public health, efficient new technologies to produce renewable and clean energy to fuel rapidly expanding economies without further compromising the planet's health, and unorthodox urban development planning to accommodate the new lifestyle of knowledge-driven societies. Thus, if current societies accept the proposition that the mining, sculpting, validation and dissemination of innovative knowledge are likely to become the major economic driving forces in future leading economies, governments have to start enacting these new policies now. For once, developing countries will have to start increasing their current investments in science education, basic research and technological infrastructure, because the deployment of centers of R&D excellence and a large qualified workforce will be pivotal in the establishment of geographically distributed, domestic or international networks of collaboration that can help local communities become active players in the global knowledge economy.

As these policies take effect, some of the revenue generated by the translation of innovative research, produced in local centers of R&D excellence, into new products and services will have to be reinvested into further education initiatives and the development of strategic R&D infrastructure. This latter step will be vital for enhancing the ability of developing nations to generate abundant supplies of food, clean water, renewable sources of energy and to build general information technology resources to further promote the digital inclusion of their people and institutions in the global market. In this context, it should be stressed that new income from knowledge-based activities will also help developing nations provide for widespread basic educational programs, universal health care coverage, job retraining and overall improvement in the life and labor conditions of their societies.

In summary, what we envision is the replacement of the current "sweatshop" model of globalization with a paradigm in which developing nations become full protagonists in the process of international knowledge trade and economic growth and use the proceeds of this new source of revenue to finance the largest period of concurrent global education and social development ever seen in world history.

Building virtual bridges
Once this process starts unfolding, individual communities that opt to morph into true knowledge islands, like the one currently being built in the northeast of Brazil, will naturally seek the comfort and uplifting synergy of becoming associated with similar communities worldwide. Likely, the unleashing of such a self-organizing, distributed scientific-social transformation process will quickly grow far beyond current country borders and lead to the emergence of true global communities; virtual knowledge archipelagoes, in which multilateral, multidisciplinary collaborations among citizens without boundaries determine the creation of a distributed, knowledge-based economic system built, regulated and nurtured by the archipelagoes' own democratically chosen systems of governance.

If such a model of large-scale virtual scientific interaction and economic production succeeds in the long run, it could provide the structure upon which communities interacting through worldwide interdependent social and economic partnerships begin to shape a complete new political order, one that diminishes the role of traditional political boundaries and differences, while encouraging and strengthening synergistic relationships across diverse cultures around the globe.

Because such concepts are currently only theoretical exercises, the key question at this juncture is: What is the roadmap for promoting knowledge archipelagoes capable of generating significant wealth and prosperity to the global society? Although this is a difficult question to answer at this moment, the first step should focus on the definition of comprehensive frameworks to design and build knowledge islands in developing nations.

One attractive idea is to build such islands around centers of research excellence, which are themselves surrounded by comprehensive educational and social projects, such as the Campus of the Brain project in Brazil. By building multiple outlets with which to communicate with society at large, the innovative nature of such knowledge islands can spill over its borders to reach out to impoverished neighboring communities. Self-sustainability of these research and social projects could be attained, at least in part, by the establishment of industrial research parks, tailored to suit the scientific vocation and aspirations of each of these communities, as the outermost layer of the knowledge island.

Such parks could house a broad spectrum of knowledge-driven business units, ranging from large, well established companies to small spin-offs and start-ups. This mixture would nurture a highly collaborative research and technology transfer environment in which companies share the infrastructure offered by the park to conduct large-scale industrial research services, promote technology development and the creation of new knowledge-based products. The central goal of this approach would be to create a highly diversified portfolio of economic activities that generate the wealth required to maintain the research and social-inclusion missions of the knowledge island. Once a few such enclaves become established, one could move to the next phase of the process: the integration of geographically distributed knowledge islands into global knowledge archipelagoes.

The investment required for such projects is considerable, though. Certainly, such efforts require the involvement of large multidisciplinary consortiums, lengthy negotiations with countries and significant fundraising. There is, however, a much faster, cheaper and potentially disruptive way to introduce the concept of knowledge archipelagoes worldwide and to prove its worthiness. That is, to create internet-based tools that allow communities worldwide to establish their own "domain-based knowledge archipelagoes." The emergence of thousands of such virtual knowledge archipelagoes, built around a particular theme or interest (for example, brain research, biofuels, environmental science) could provide the empirical social support, not to mention considerable revenue, for the development of true "four-dimensional knowledge archipelagoes"—those that involve networking real physical cities (with their 3-D spatial dimensions) through cyberspace (the new fourth-dimension frontier of urban development).

Whether knowledge archipelagoes will ever be established in the future as an economically feasible new scientific-social paradigm remains to be seen. Right now, the hope is that starting the discussion of such a concept can, at the very least, remind us that never before in the history of our species have the future prospects of individual and collective happiness, widespread human prosperity and the health of our environment been so obviously intertwined. Moreover, never before have we had the necessary accumulated knowledge and technological tools to support the design and implementation of a global model of self-sustainable economic growth that promotes widespread social inclusion worldwide.

Thus, by freeing science and knowledge from the isolated walls of our universities and taking it to the most remote corners of the world, we have the chance of triggering the greatest wave of social transformation ever witnessed.

By uniting the many Macaíbas that exist out there, a new breed of mighty Potiguars shall rise.

Is it a midlife crisis or a 'jerk with a meltdown'?

Is it a midlife crisis or a 'jerk with a meltdown'?

With the possible exception of "the dog ate my homework," there is no handier excuse for human misbehavior than the midlife crisis.

Popularly viewed as a unique developmental birthright of the human species, it supposedly strikes when most of us have finally figured ourselves out — only to discover that we have lost our youth and mortality is on the horizon.

No doubt about it, life in the middle ages can be challenging. What with the first signs of physical decline and the questions and doubts about one's personal and professional accomplishments, it is a wonder that most of us survive.

Not everyone is so lucky; some find themselves seized by a seemingly irresistible impulse to do something dramatic, even foolish. Everything, it appears, is fair game for a midlife crisis: one's job, spouse, lover — you name it.

I recently heard about a severe case from a patient whose husband of nearly 30 years abruptly told her that he "felt stalled and not self-actualized" and began his search for self-knowledge in the arms of another woman.

It was not that her husband no longer loved her, she said he told her; he just did not find the relationship exciting anymore.

"Maybe it's a midlife crisis," she said, then added derisively, "Whatever that is."

Outraged and curious, she followed him one afternoon and was shocked to discover that her husband's girlfriend was essentially a younger clone of herself, right down to her haircut and her taste in clothes.

It doesn't take a psychoanalyst to see that her husband wanted to turn back the clock and start over. But this hardly deserves the dignity of a label like "midlife crisis." It sounds more like a search for novelty and thrill than for self-knowledge.

In fact, the more I learned about her husband, it became clear that he had always been a self-centered guy who fretted about his lost vigor and was acutely sensitive to disappointment. This was a garden-variety case of a middle-aged narcissist grappling with the biggest insult he had ever faced: getting older.

But you have to admit that "I'm having a midlife crisis" sounds a lot better than "I'm a narcissistic jerk having a meltdown."

Another patient, a 49-year-old man at the pinnacle of his legal career, started an affair with an office colleague. "I love my wife," he said, "and I don't know what possessed me."

It didn't take long to find out. The first five years of his marriage were exciting. "It was like we were dating all the time," he recalled wistfully. But once they had a child, he felt an unwelcome sense of drudgery and responsibility creep into his life.

Being middle-aged had nothing to do with his predicament; it was just that it took him 49 years to reach a situation where he had to seriously take account of someone else's needs, namely those of his baby son. In all likelihood, the same thing would have happened if he had become a father at 25.

Why do we have to label a common reaction of the male species to one of life's challenges — the boredom of the routine — as a crisis? True, men are generally more novelty-seeking than women, but they certainly can decide what they do with their impulses.

But surely someone has had a genuine midlife crisis. After all, don't people routinely struggle with questions like "What can I expect from the rest of my life?" or "Is this all there is?"

Of course. But it turns out that only a distinct minority think it constitutes a crisis. In 1999, the MacArthur Foundation study on midlife development surveyed 8,000 Americans ages 25 to 74. While everyone recognized the term "midlife crisis," only 23 percent of subjects reported having one. And only 8 percent viewed their crisis as something tied to the realization that they were aging; the remaining 15 percent felt the crisis resulted from specific life events. Strikingly, most people also reported an increased sense of well-being and contentment in middle age.

So what keeps the myth of the midlife crisis alive?

The main culprit, I think, is our youth-obsessed culture, which makes a virtue of the relentless pursuit of self-renewal. The news media abound with stories of people who seek to recapture their youth simply by shedding their spouses, quitting their jobs or leaving their families. Who can resist?

Most middle-aged people, it turns out, if we are to believe the definitive survey.

Except, of course, for the few — mainly men, it seems — who find the midlife crisis a socially acceptable shorthand for what you do when you suddenly wake up and discover that you're not 20 anymore.

Why Stress Is Deadly

Why Stress Is Deadly

If you're worried about your health, stop. You're only making it worse. Stress takes its toll on your body, and new research reveals it is even more dangerous than thought.

Stress causes deterioration in everything from your gums to your heart and can make you more susceptible to illnesses ranging from the common cold to cancer, according to a review essay in the Dec. 2007 issue of the Association for Psychological Science's magazine Observer. Thanks to new research crossing the disciplines of psychology, medicine, neuroscience and genetics, the mechanisms underlying the connection are rapidly becoming understood.

When an animal perceives danger, a system kicks into gear: A chain reaction of signals releases various hormones — most notably epinephrine (“adrenaline”), norepinephrine and cortisol — from the adrenal glands above each kidney. Norepinephrine has been shown to strengthen neuron connections in a way that seals in memories of emotionally-charged events, perhaps encouraging us to dwell, and stress, over traumatic incidents.

These hormones boost heart rate, increase respiration and increase the availability of glucose (cellular fuel) in the blood, thereby enabling the well-known “fight or flight” reaction.

Because these responses take a lot of energy, stress simultaneously tells other costly physical processes — including digestion, reproduction, physical growth and some aspects of the immune system — to shut or slow down.

When occasions to fight or flee are infrequent and threats pass quickly, the body’s stress thermostat adjusts accordingly: The intestines resume digesting food, the sex organs kick back into gear and the immune system resumes fighting infections.

Growing evidence shows that our sensitivity to stress as adults is already “tuned,” so to speak, in infancy, according to the review article. Specifically, the amount of stress encountered in early life sensitizes an organism to a certain level of adversity; high levels of early life stress may result in hypersensitivity to stress later, as well as to adult depression. This is likely because animals raised in chronically adverse conditions (e.g., high conflict, material deprivation) may expect more of the same in the near future, and their bodies must quickly adjust.

Some people, and animals, are more prone to stress, research shows. A 2007 study found that mice who tended to stress out produced too much of a certain protein, which apparently caused them to overreact.

Besides heart disease, posttraumatic stress disorder and depression, chronic stress has been linked to ailments as diverse as intestinal problems, gum disease, erectile dysfunction, growth problems and even cancer. One study found that people who experience high amounts of stress at work are more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes. Recent research also showed that a stress hormone could cause skin disorders like psoriasis and eczema. Chronic rises in stress hormones have been shown to accelerate the growth of precancerous cells and tumors; they also lower the body’s resistance to HIV and cancer-causing viruses like human papilloma virus (the precursor to cervical cancer in women).

According to Stanford neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky, who has studied stress in baboon troops, it is the relative safety from predators and high amounts of leisure time enjoyed by some primates — including humans — that has transformed these useful biological coping mechanisms into a source of pointless suffering and illness. 

Genetic Study Bolsters Columbus Link to Syphilis

Genetic Study Bolsters Columbus Link to Syphilis

HISTORY A woodcut from the late 1490s, left, depicts a man infected with syphilis, and an engraving from 1689 shows people being treated for the disease.

Columbus, it seems, made another discovery of something that he was not looking for.

In a comprehensive genetic study, scientists have found what they say is the strongest evidence yet linking the first European explorers of the New World to the origin of sexually transmitted syphilis.

The research, they say, supports the hypothesis that returning explorers introduced organisms leading, in probably modified forms, to the first recorded syphilis epidemic, beginning in Europe in 1493.

The so-called Columbus hypothesis had previously rested on circumstantial evidence, mainly the timing of the epidemic. It was further noted that earlier traces of syphilis or related diseases had been few and inconclusive in Europe. Yet nonvenereal forms of the diseases were widespread in the American tropics.

Leaders of the new study said the most telling results were that the bacterium causing sexually transmitted syphilis arose relatively recently in humans and was closely related to a strain responsible for the nonvenereal infection known as yaws. The similarity was especially evident, the researchers said, in a variation of the yaws pathogen isolated recently among afflicted children in a remote region of Guyana in South America.

Researchers who conducted the study and others familiar with it said the findings suggested Columbus and his men could have carried the nonvenereal tropical bacteria home, where the organisms may have mutated into a more deadly form in the different conditions of Europe.

In the New World, the infecting organisms for nonvenereal syphilis, known as bejel, and yaws were transmitted by skin-to-skin and oral contact, more often in children. The symptoms are lesions primarily on the legs, not on or near the genitals.

Kristin N. Harper, a researcher in molecular genetics at Emory University who was the principal investigator in the study, said the findings supported “the hypothesis that syphilis, or some progenitor, came from the New World.”

The examination of the evolutionary relatedness of organisms associated with syphilis was reported on Monday in the online journal Public Library of Science/Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Ms. Harper, a doctoral student in the Emory department of population biology, ecology and evolution, was the lead author. Her co-authors included George J. Armelagos, an Emory anthropologist who has studied the origins of syphilis for more than 30 years, and Dr. Michael S. Silverman, a Canadian infectious diseases physician who collected and tested specimens from yaws lesions in Guyana, the only known site today of yaws infections in the Western Hemisphere.

The researchers said their study “represents the first attempt to address the problem of the origin of syphilis using molecular genetics, as well as the first source of information regarding the genetic makeup of nonvenereal strains from the Western Hemisphere.”

They applied phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary relationships between organisms, in examining 26 geographically disparate strains in the family of Treponema bacteria. Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum is the agent for the scourge of venereal syphilis. The subspecies endemicum causes bejel, usually in hot, arid climates, and pertenue spreads yaws in hot, humid places.

Della Collins Cook, a paleopathologist at Indiana University who did not participate in the study but specializes in treponemal diseases, praised the research as a “very, very interesting step” advancing understanding of syphilis. “They have looked at a wider range of the genome” of these bacteria, Dr. Cook said, “and have scared up some new samples from parts of the world and the group of related diseases that hadn’t been available to researchers before.”

But she recommended an even broader investigation of the natural history of these diseases, making an effort to find more people with active treponemal cases where they probably still exist in parts of South America. Cases of yaws in Africa and Asia are periodically reported.

John W. Verano, an anthropologist at Tulane, said the findings would “probably not settle the debate” over the origins of venereal syphilis, though most scientists had become convinced that the disease was not transmitted sexually before Europeans made contact with the New World.

Donald J. Ortner, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, questioned whether the organisms causing the first European epidemic were actually distinct from others in the treponemal family. “What we are seeing is an organism with a long history, and it is very adaptable to different modes of transmission that produce different manifestations,” Dr. Ortner said.

Three medical scientists, responding to the new study, pointed out what they considered shortcomings in its methods and interpretations.

In a critique also published by the online journal, Connie J. Mulligan of the University of Florida, Steven J. Norris of the University of Texas at Houston and Sheila A. Lukehart of the University of Washington wrote that caution “must be used in drawing conclusions about the evolution of ‘subspecies’ that may represent a biological continuum, rather than discrete agents.”

“Firm conclusions should not be based,” for example, on the two samples from one location in Guyana, they added.

But scientists generally agreed that the molecular approach would overcome some limitations of other investigations.

Paleopathologists like Dr. Cook have for years analyzed skeletons for the bone scars from lesions produced by treponemal diseases, except for the mild form called pinta. In this way, they traced the existence of these infections in the New World back at least 7,000 years. But it has often been difficult to determine the age of the bones and distinguish the different diseases that share symptoms but have different modes of transmission.

Dr. Cook said the skeletal evidence for treponemal disease in pre-Columbian Europe and Africa was sketchy and even more ambiguous than in the New World. In the 1990s, scientists reported finding bones in Italy and England, from before Columbus’s return, that bore lesion scars that they said appeared to have been caused by venereal syphilis.

Scientists remain skeptical of this interpretation. If highly contagious venereal syphilis had existed in Europe in antiquity, said Dr. Armelagos, the Emory anthropologist, there should be more supporting epidemiological evidence than two or three skeletons bearing suggestive scars.

In her investigation, Ms. Harper studied 22 human Treponemal pallidum strains. The DNA in their genes was sequenced in nearly all cases, examined for changes and eventually used in constructing phylogenetic trees incorporating all variations in the strains.

An Old World yaws subspecies was found to occupy the base of the tree, indicating its ancestral position in the treponemal family, she said. The terminal position of the venereal syphilis subspecies on the tree showed it had diverged most recently from the rest of the bacterial family.

Specimens from two Guyana yaws cases were included in the study, after they were collected and processed by Dr. Silverman. Genetic analysis showed that this yaws strain was the closest known relative to venereal syphilis.

Ms. Harper’s team concluded that New World yaws belonged to a group distinct from Old World strains, thus occupying the place on the tree more likely to be intermediate between the nonvenereal strains previously existing in Europe and the one for modern syphilis.

If this seemed to solidify the Columbus hypothesis, the researchers cautioned that a “transfer agent between humans and nonhuman primates cannot be ruled out using the available genetic data.”

Dr. Armelagos said research into the origins of syphilis would continue, because “understanding its evolution is important not just for biology, but for understanding social and political history.”

Noting that the disease was a major killer in Renaissance Europe, he said, “It could be argued that syphilis is one of the important early examples of globalization and disease, and globalization remains an important factor in emerging diseases.”