Scans Show Different Growth for Intelligent Brains - New York Times

Scans Show Different Growth for Intelligent Brains - New York Times

March 30, 2006

Scans Show Different Growth for Intelligent Brains

By NICHOLAS WADE

The brains of highly intelligent children develop in a different pattern from those with more average abilities, researchers have found after analyzing a series of imaging scans collected over 17 years.

The discovery, some experts expect, will help scientists understand intelligence in terms of the genes that foster it and the childhood experiences that can promote it.

"This is the first time that anyone has shown that the brain grows differently in extremely intelligent children," said Paul M. Thompson, a brain-imaging expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The finding is based on 307 children in Bethesda, Md., an affluent suburb of Washington. Starting in 1989, they were given regular brain scans using magnetic resonance imaging, a project initiated by Dr. Judith Rapoport of the National Institute of Mental Health.

This set of scans has been analyzed by Philip Shaw, Dr. Jay Giedd and others at the institute and at McGill University in Montreal. They looked at changes in the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the thin sheet of neurons that clads the outer surface of the brain and is the seat of many higher mental processes.

The general pattern of maturation, they report in Nature today, is that the cortex grows thicker as the child ages and then thins out. The cause of the changes is unknown, because the imaging process cannot see down to the level of individual neurons.

But basically the brain seems to be rewiring itself as it matures, with the thinning of the cortex reflecting a pruning of redundant connections.

The analysis was started to check out a finding by Dr. Thompson: that parts of the frontal lobe of the cortex are larger in people with high I.Q.'s. Looking at highly intelligent 7-year-olds, the researchers said they were surprised to find that the cortex was thinner than in a comparison group of children of average intelligence.

It was only in following the scans as the children grew older that the dynamism of the developing brain became evident. The researchers found that average children (I.Q. scores 83 to 108) reached a peak of cortical thickness at age 7 or 8. Highly intelligent children (121 to 149 in I.Q.) reached a peak thickness much later, at 13, followed by a more dynamic pruning process.

One interpretation, Dr. Rapoport said, is that the brains of highly intelligent children are more plastic or changeable, swinging through a higher trajectory of cortical thickening and thinning than occurs in average children. The scans show the "sculpturing or fine tuning of parts of the cortex which support higher level thought, and maybe this is happening more efficiently in the most intelligent children," Dr. Shaw said.

The I.Q. was tested when the children entered the program. Further tests were not needed because I.Q.'s are so stable, Dr. Rapoport said.

Dr. Thompson said the new study opened huge possibilities because researchers should be able to identify the factors that influence the brain by looking at the scan patterns identified by the researchers.

The Bethesda children have had genetic samples taken from their cells, so genes that have even the mildest influence on the brain should be detectable, Dr. Thompson said. The pattern of development may also be affected by factors like diet, hours spent in school or the number of siblings, and these may come to light by asking parents how they raised their children.

"There are many enigmas of intelligence that they can now solve," he said.

I.Q. scores and measuring intelligence have long been controversial. Brain-imaging studies by Dr. Thompson and the study group have advanced the field by identifying physical features of the brain that correlate with I.Q.

In 2001, Dr. Thompson reported that based on imaging twins' brains the volume of gray matter in the frontal lobes and other areas correlated with I.Q. and was heavily influenced by genetics. Despite the great importance of genes in brain function, Dr. Thompson said experience could also change the brain.

"Unless you have strong natural potential, you won't become a world-class marathon runner," he said. "But that disillusionment is rapidly replaced by the notion that you can improve your own performance."

The institute's team has many genetic studies in progress. The analysis reported today was not intended to look at the relationship between genes and intelligence.

"A lot of research in intelligence has not been that great," Dr. Shaw said. "I would hope by this modest descriptive study to put things on an empirical footing."

One goal of the study was to establish normal development patterns, to diagnose what goes awry in children with schizophrenia or attention deficits. Dr. Shaw said his team did not have the full answers as to how the brain differed in those cases.

[+/-] show/hide this post

Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer - New York Times

Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer - New York Times

March 31, 2006

Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer

By BENEDICT CAREY

Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.

And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.

Because it is the most scientifically rigorous investigation of whether prayer can heal illness, the study, begun almost a decade ago and involving more than 1,800 patients, has for years been the subject of speculation.

The question has been a contentious one among researchers. Proponents have argued that prayer is perhaps the most deeply human response to disease, and that it may relieve suffering by some mechanism that is not yet understood. Skeptics have contended that studying prayer is a waste of money and that it presupposes supernatural intervention, putting it by definition beyond the reach of science.

At least 10 studies of the effects of prayer have been carried out in the last six years, with mixed results. The new study was intended to overcome flaws in the earlier investigations. The report was scheduled to appear in The American Heart Journal next week, but the journal's publisher released it online yesterday.

In a hurriedly convened news conference, the study's authors, led by Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston, said that the findings were not the last word on the effects of so-called intercessory prayer. But the results, they said, raised questions about how and whether patients should be told that prayers were being offered for them.

"One conclusion from this is that the role of awareness of prayer should be studied further," said Dr. Charles Bethea, a cardiologist at Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City and a co-author of the study.

Other experts said the study underscored the question of whether prayer was an appropriate subject for scientific study.

"The problem with studying religion scientifically is that you do violence to the phenomenon by reducing it to basic elements that can be quantified, and that makes for bad science and bad religion," said Dr. Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia and author of a forthcoming book, "Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine."

The study cost $2.4 million, and most of the money came from the John Templeton Foundation, which supports research into spirituality. The government has spent more than $2.3 million on prayer research since 2000.

Dean Marek, a chaplain at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a co-author of the report, said the study said nothing about the power of personal prayer or about prayers for family members and friends.

Working in a large medical center like Mayo, Mr. Marek said, "You hear tons of stories about the power of prayer, and I don't doubt them."

In the study, the researchers monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals who received coronary bypass surgery, in which doctors reroute circulation around a clogged vein or artery.

The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers.

The researchers asked the members of three congregations — St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City — to deliver the prayers, using the patients' first names and the first initials of their last names.

The congregations were told that they could pray in their own ways, but they were instructed to include the phrase, "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications."

Analyzing complications in the 30 days after the operations, the researchers found no differences between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not.

In another of the study's findings, a significantly higher number of the patients who knew that they were being prayed for — 59 percent — suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain. The authors left open the possibility that this was a chance finding. But they said that being aware of the strangers' prayers also may have caused some of the patients a kind of performance anxiety.

"It may have made them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?" Dr. Bethea said.

The study also found that more patients in the uninformed prayer group — 18 percent — suffered major complications, like heart attack or stroke, compared with 13 percent in the group that did not receive prayers. In their report, the researchers suggested that this finding might also be a result of chance.

One reason the study was so widely anticipated was that it was led by Dr. Benson, who in his work has emphasized the soothing power of personal prayer and meditation.

At least one earlier study found lower complication rates in patients who received intercessory prayers; others found no difference. A 1997 study at the University of New Mexico, involving 40 alcoholics in rehabilitation, found that the men and women who knew they were being prayed for actually fared worse.

The new study was rigorously designed to avoid problems like the ones that came up in the earlier studies. But experts said the study could not overcome perhaps the largest obstacle to prayer study: the unknown amount of prayer each person received from friends, families, and congregations around the world who pray daily for the sick and dying.

Bob Barth, the spiritual director of Silent Unity, the Missouri prayer ministry, said the findings would not affect the ministry's mission.

"A person of faith would say that this study is interesting," Mr. Barth said, "but we've been praying a long time and we've seen prayer work, we know it works, and the research on prayer and spirituality is just getting started."

[+/-] show/hide this post

Gladwell vs. Freakonomics

Gladwell debates Freaknomics Levitt and Dubner authors of Freaknomics on the drop in crime rate.

[+/-] show/hide this post

Spence Review on Mao: The Unknown Story

Volume 52, Number 17 · November 3, 2005
Review
Portrait of a Monster
By Jonathan D. Spence
Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

1.
It is close to seventy years since Edgar Snow, an ambitious, radical, and eager young American journalist, received word from contacts in the Chinese Communist Party that he would be welcome in the Communists' northwest base area of Bao-an. Traveling there by train, bytruck, on foot, and finally on horseback accompanied by a twenty-man escort of Chinese Red Army troops, Edgar Snow reached Bao-an, and was granted several long evening interviews by Mao in his lamp-lit cave. Mao’s secretary served as Snow's interpreter, and Snow's 20,000-wordEnglish draft of the interview was then translated back into Chinese and transcribed by a young student named Huang Hua, for submission to Mao. Mao made corrections and cuts, and Huang thereupon translated that approved version back into English for Snow.[1] With Snow's extended commentaries and additions to supply historical context, the resulting book, Red Star Over China, was published in the United States and in Britain in 1938; an underground and abbreviated edition had already appeared in Chinese shortly after Snow returned to Beijing, and circulated widely in the Communist base area. Snow later reflected on his book with these words:
I had gone to the Northwest before any Westerner and at a dark moment in history for the Chinese Communists as well as for all China. I had found hope for the nation in that small band of survivors of the Long March, and formed a favorable impression of them...and their policies.... I admired their courage, their selflessness, their single-minded determination to save China (under their leadership) and the outstanding ability, the practical political sense, and personal honesty of their high Commanders.[2]
Snow's book was, indeed, highly flattering to both the Chinese Communist leaders and their followers: the forty-three-year-old Mao, wrote Snow in Red Star, was "a gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure," and his rank and file, whether at work or on the march, seemed to be always singing. Snow noted in his diary that the Chinese Communists he met "go about remaking the world like college boys to football match," and the Mao he portrayed was earthy, earnest, informal, jocular, and visionary.
Though sales of Red Star in the United States were disappointing—at 23,500 they were less than a quarter of the sales in Britain, where the book was published in Victor Gollancz's Left Book Club—the book had a profound influence on American thinking about China. Snow's detailed account of Mao's early life, education, first experiences as a revolutionary and on the Long March became staples of later biographical writings about Mao, and parts of them remain accepted to this day. In the period since Red Star first saw the light of day, this laudatory tradition was carried on by various writers who either traveled to the base area of Yenan during World War II or watched with awe as the Communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek in the civil war between 1945 and 1949, and then struggled to establish anew state on the wreckage. This sympathy died hard. But since his death in 1976, praise for the later Mao has pretty much dried up as irrefutable evidence has appeared on the tragedies of the Great Leap Forward, the ensuing famine between 1959 and 1962, and the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976. Mao's youthful legacy, however, has not been totally erased.
-----------------
In Mao: The Unknown Story, the co-authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday launch a protracted assault on the entire concept of a favorable assessment of Mao's role in the rise and success of the Chinese Communist movement, both before and after 1949. They come to their venture buoyed by the international best-seller status of Jung Chang's Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, an absorbing account of her experiences growing up in the People's Republic, first published in 1991, and by Jon Halliday's knowledge of Russian and Eastern European languages and materials. The two authors provide readers with eighty-five pages of notes, an elaborately classified and extensive bibliography of the Chinese archival collections and other Chinese works they have consulted (twenty-six pages), twenty-three pages of Western- language materials (including Russian, Albanian, and Bulgarian) and English translations of Chinese sources, and fourteen pages containing the names of those they have interviewed in China, Russia, and the rest of the world. Their notes show that they conducted the first of these interviews in 1993, so we can assume they have worked for a decade on their book. And from this mountain they have constructed their Mao.
Their Mao has these main attributes: though "born into a peasant family," he never spent much time seriously farming; at most, when still young, the authors argue, "Mao did a little light farm work, gathering fodder for pigs and taking the buffaloes out for a stroll.” Later he gave up farm work for study at a local school (his teachers found him troublesome), and in 1911, the year of the revolution that toppled China's last dynasty, "he said good-bye for ever to the life of a peasant." Nor did he draw any social lessons from such rural experience as he had: "There is no sign that Mao derived from his peasant roots any social concerns, much less that he was motivated by a sense of injustice." The sight of famine victims left him unmoved. He had not even absorbed the farmers' basic need for careful planning and calculation, so that "all his life, he was vague about figures, and hopeless at economics."
In the later Teens of the twentieth century, Mao entered a teacher-training college; here, the authors tell us, Mao first mentioned "one theme that was to typify his rule—the destruction of Chinese culture." Here, too, he read in class a Chinese translation of the German philosopher Friedrich Paulsen's A System of Ethics published in 1899, from which he absorbed a personal feeling that the self dominated all, that destruction reigned supreme, and that “morality does not have to be defined in relation to others." Such thoughts were far from being just passages gleaned from an obscure volume, marking a phase in the awakening of a fledgling consciousness, as many readers today might assume. For the writers, these sentiments were the "central elements" in Mao's character, which "stayed consistent for the remaining six decades of his life and defined his rule."
Out in the world, as in farming or in studying, another formative aspect of Mao's character lay in his laziness. The reason that Mao joined the Communist Party, which he did in either late 1920 or early1921, the authors tell us, had nothing to do with his social conscience, for he felt no more sympathy for workers than he did for peasants. Being no good at languages, he could not go to Russia or France to study at the radical fonts, as many of his friends from Hunan chose to do at that time. So the simplest way Mao could find to survive—even at teaching he was inept—was to take the Comintern's proffered money and accept "a comfortable berth as a subsidized professional revolutionary." And being both an opportunist and "ideologically woolly," Mao had little trouble adjusting to the tortuous world of the Comintern-ordered United Front, which brought the Communists into alliance with the bourgeois centrists—or even right-wing militarists— in the name of the protection of the Soviet Union and the future world revolution: "Mao shifted with the prevailing wind."
-----------------
All that was now required was a setting in which Mao’s latent sadistic side could develop to the full, and that chance, we are told, came in the bitter fighting that erupted in China in themid-1920s, as the United Front disintegrated from its own fatal internal contradictions and political feuding. In the authors' reading, during the last months of 1926 and the first two of 1927 Mao followed the orders of his superiors to study (and/or foment) rural revolution through the peasant associations that had formed in various parts of China. Mao loved what he saw—the humiliations of the landlords, the pains of the prosperous, and the rough vengeance of the masses. Mao’s celebrated report on these upheavals in his native province of Hunan, taken by many analysts to be a sign of his deepening awareness of the terrible problems that haunted the Chinese countryside, suggests something different to the authors:
What really happened was that Mao discovered in himself a love for bloodthirsty thuggery. This gut enjoyment, which verged on sadism, meshed with, but preceded, his affinity for Leninist violence. Mao did not come to violence via theory. The propensity sprang from his character, and was to have a profound impact on his future methods of rule.
This new blood lust accompanied Mao to his fugitive revolutionary base in the Jinggang mountains in 1928. Mao, to the authors, now “demonstrated a penchant for slow killing." The authors add a gloss:
Mao did not invent public execution, but he added to this ghastly tradition a modern dimension, organised rallies, and in this way made killing compulsory viewing for a large part of the population. To be dragooned into a crowd, powerless to walk away, forced to watch people put to death in this bloody and agonising way, hearing their screams, struck fear deep into those present.
-----------------
With all this bleak analysis presented in the first fifty-four pages, the reader is attuned to the major themes of Mao’s life that the authors unfold as they follow his activities during the Chinese Communist domination of the Jiangxi region in the early 1930s,the subsequent establishment of the Yenan base for anti-Japanese resistance, the civil war period when the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek were finally defeated, and the long painful years of the People’s Republic, when millions of Chinese died from famine and the violence of the Cultural Revolution.
But the litany is by no means exhausted: among the themes introduced by the authors early in the work, which come to full blossoming only in their account of Mao's later years, one should include at least these: Mao’s callousness to his wives (four in all) and to his children; his growing love of luxury, especially for large mansions with scenic views, but also for swimming pools and private trains; his paranoia and mania for security; his unclean personal habits; his lechery, deepening with each passing year; his personal avoidance of combat and his deep fear of violence directed at his person; his gluttony; his pandering to the sexual proclivities of chosen subordinates or foreign dignitaries; his dependence (from early in the revolution) on ever-increasing amounts of sleeping pills; his joy in humiliating others and in causing pain, often to leaders who had been close associates. During the Cultural Revolution, the authors write,
Mao made sure that much violence and humiliation was carried out in public, and he vastly increased the number of persecutors by getting his victims torment ed and tortured by their own direct subordinates.
All of this culminated in his ambition, after conquering every corner of his own country, to dominate the world itself through the acquisition of nuclear bombs.
2.
There are many passages in which the authors elaborate on the convergence of all these negative traits into one knowing and self-conscious whole, and this one, on the world of Mao in 1964, can stand both as their description of Mao at that time and for pretty much any period until his death in 1976:
What Mao had in mind was a completely arid society, devoid of civilisation, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility, which would automatically obey his orders. He wanted the nation to be brain-dead in order to carry out his big purge—and to live in this state permanently. In this he was more extreme than Hitler or Stalin, as Hitler allowed apolitical entertainment, and Stalin preserved the classics.
Around this portrait of a repulsive man, the authors construct a complexly patterned grid of national history, in which Mao seeks to turn every major confrontation to his own advantage, to fit in with his endless quest for dominance within the Communist Party of China, within the international Communist movement, and in the world at large. There are, by my count, around twenty-two or more such crucial moments in the631 pages of this book. Each one of them is designed by the authors to challenge some aspect of what they see as false received wisdom in the depictions of Mao's march to power that various historians and analysts have tried to develop over the last sixty years or so.
Their book is subdivided into fifty-eight bite-sized chapters, each of ten pages or so, and many of those chapters focus just on a single scheme or action that Mao, they claim, was able cannily to exploit to his own advantage. Thus we find Mao using the Nationalist Party leader Wang Ching-wei to bolster his own role in the United Front; playing lackey to the Comintern; betraying his comrades' trust at Wuhan in1927; tearing apart the guerrilla base in the Jinggang mountains; sabotaging the military achievements of his fellow revolutionaries Peng Dehuai and Zhu De; instituting a wave of torture and murder in the Jiangxi Soviet; using the Long March to destroy his main Party rival Chang Kuo-t'ao; reducing Chou En-lai to "slavish" dependence; conniving with Stalin to push the Japanese into a war in Shanghai while refusing to fight them near his own base region in the northwest; mentally tormenting and trying to poison Wang Ming, his main intellectual rival in the Party; setting up a police state in the same base region; betraying his Communist colleagues in central China so they could be wiped out by Chiang Kai-shek; developing a monolithic cult of Mao in the base; insisting on a murderous military policy in civil-war Manchuria, so that the casualties in some cities there exceeded the entire total of those killed by the Japanese in the rape of Nanjing; betraying China by letting Stalin keep vast areas of formerly Chinese territory in the north and west; duplicitously forcing his senior colleagues to enter the Korean War even without Soviet air support; tricking the intellectuals of China with his fake "Hundred Flowers” promises; needlessly raising grain requisitions from his people during the terrible famines that followed the Great Leap; destroying Chinese resources in order to pay for his mad global ambitions; deliberately destroying his own most talented colleagues in the Cultural Revolution purges, in some cases after treating them with great brutality, while also succeeding in "wiping out culture from Chinese homes" as “frightened citizens burned their own books"; and, near the end, ordering that Chou En-lai be refused treatment for his bladder cancer, lest Chou outlive him and try to reverse his policies.
-----------------
All of the above episodes are elaborated versions of situations that did exist in some form or other, though not necessarily in a form at all like that presented by the authors. Take for example their eye-catching title to Chapter Nineteen: "Red Mole Triggers China–Japan War." This chapter offers the argument that the Nationalist General Zhang Zhi-zhong, commander of the Shanghai-Nanjing region, was in fact a "long-term Communist agent," "activated" by Stalin in August 1937 in order to broaden the war with Japan. The authors argue that General Zhang's success in forcing the Japanese into all-out war in the Shanghai theater "in effect, legitimised" the CCP as an ally of the Nationalists fighting the Japanese, and means not only that "this was probably one of Stalin's greatest coups" but also that Zhang "can arguably be considered the most important agent of all time." These are huge claims, and are worth some reflection.
Certainly no historian working on twentieth-century China can deny that there were "moles" at work in many sections of the Nationalist Chinese army and intelligence agencies, moles placed either by the Nationalist Party, the Communists, or pro-Japanese sympathizers, and at times they influenced events in a decisive way. There were also double agents, on all three sides. All three sides had their own assassination squads.
This situation arose, in part, be-cause the nature of the United Front was such that both Communists and Nationalists attended the same military training academy at Whampoa near Canton in the early 1920s,where Comintern agents were intensely active. Chiang Kai-shek served as commandant of the Whampoa academy, and Chou En-lai was political director. Chiang Kai-shek had visited the Soviet Union to study their military training methods, while Chou En-lai was from an educated family and had lived for some time in France. Chou and Chiang, like thousands of other ambitious young Chinese, had also studied in Japan. General Zhang Zhi-zhong did rise rapidly in the Nationalist army and was clearly a favorite of Chiang Kai-shek, as the authors write; he also much later, in 1949, did surrender to the Communists rather than retreat to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek.
But there are many aspects of the authors' dramatic claims that still need much clarification: How, for example, did Stalin "activate” General Zhang in order to broaden the war with Japan? Were there Shanghai-based Comintern agents still in touch with Moscow by secret radio channels and in a position to give instructions to General Zhang? And what exactly was General Zhang's job before he was "activated"?
In his own memoir, published in Beijing in 1985, General Zhang writes that as early as February 1936 Chiang Kai-shek had authorized him to undertake confidential planning with senior officers in the National Military Academy (of which Zhang was dean) to defend the Suzhou-Shanghai region against the Japanese. This work continued into1937, when Zhang went for medical treatment in the northern city of Qingdao. But on July 9, 1937, after hearing news of the Japanese assaults in north China, Zhang hurried back to Nanjing and Shanghai, to coordinate the defenses there.[3]This does not sound like a mole surreptitiously working away; in fact, as General Zhang also writes in his memoirs, he had been active in the fighting against the Japanese in Shanghai in early 1932, and Chiang had greeted him with an honor guard when he returned to Nanjing airport from the front. Chiang seems to have known Zhang's views, and to have consistently trusted him.
One other linked point merits attention. The authors say that because of his aggressive position against Japan, General Zhang was “forced to resign, in September [1937], by an angry, frustrated and undoubtedly suspicious Chiang." Zhang, however, states—and other sources confirm—that after the initial Japanese victory in the Shanghai region, he was transferred to be the governor of Hunan province. This does not seem to have been a disgrace, since Chiang Kai-shek's plan for a general retreat suggested that the inland province of Hunan, south of the Yangtze with major river links to the southwest, would be a key region in China's future. Zhang adds in his memoirs that it was in Hunan, in November 1937, that he finally met up again—after a ten-year gap—with some of the Communists (including Chou En-lai) he had known from the old days in Whampoa. The authors cite General Zhang's memoirs as one of their sources, and there is of course no reason why they should agree with General Zhang on all these details. In this, as in many of the other bold scenarios in Mao: The Unknown Story, a tighter historical context would have been helpful to the reader.
3.
Any historical approach naturally reflects the times and locations where it was constructed, and Edgar Snow's benign vision of Mao’s revolutionary goals and methods was never uncontested. Criticism of his position mushroomed after Chiang Kai-shek's retreat to Taiwan in 1949;in the following year, the grim realities of the Korean War, and the mounting horror and the hellish evidence then emerging of Stalin’s Soviet Union, sharpened the critical commentaries on Snow's version of Mao. The domestic American arguments concerning the "loss of China" and the victimization of the Americans believed to be responsible for it were only part of the story. As Hong Kong under British rule became a haven for refugees fleeing from Mao's China, social scientists flocked to interview them, and to develop the analyses that would delineate the nature of "brain-washing," and the institutional and emotional underpinnings of the Chinese state and society.
In Taiwan, as the Nationalists dug in and tried to maintain the belief that they would soon be returning to the Mainland, evidence of Communist excesses and atrocities was collected and codified, and made available to researchers. In the People's Republic, each purge or mass movement was accompanied by the compilation of dossiers on those who were charged or implicated, and this "proof" of their crimes became part of a secret but permanent record. In Japan, though in-depth research into the nature of the Japanese occupation was hesitant, there was extensive collation and reprinting of the field studies undertaken by the Japanese researchers who had lived and worked in Manchuria and north China. The dawning of the Sino-Soviet rift after 1956 also led researchers to explore anew the differences between Soviet and Chinese revolutionary tactics and ideology.
As new materials have become available, the historiography has shifted and deepened. The largest new body of materials related to Mao—on which the authors of Mao: The Unknown Story draw liberally—are the floods of memoirs and reminiscences that have recently poured from Chinese presses —originally in Taiwan and Hong Kong, but now on an immense scale from publishers within China itself. General Zhang's memoirs can be taken as an example of this trend, but the first of these really to catch major Western attention was the memoir by one of Mao's doctors, Li Zhisui, published in Taiwan in 1994and in English translation by Random House the same year, under the title The Private Life of Chairman Mao.[4]
This book sharply highlighted the biggest difficulty of evaluating the memoir literature on Mao: Was it true or not? That it ought to be true was not the key factor—when the bits all seemed to fit in a certain way, could we be sure that some alternative pattern of events might not be equally valid? Li's memoir was coherent and forceful, and with time his depictions of Mao have come to be widely accepted. Dr. Li presented a Mao who was totally self-absorbed: erratic and dictatorial, full of opinions and slogans, not especially talented intellectually, fleshly by inclination, innately luxury-loving. Mao's cruelties were shown to have sprung sometimes from random whims, at other times to have been the results of cold calculation. The comparatively measured tone of Li's book encouraged acceptance of its main claims.
-----------------
I do not feel that the same is true of the unstintingly hostile accounts in Mao: The Unknown Story, even though many of its materials are also drawn from Chinese memoir literature, and from interviews with a wide and richly varied cast of characters—among them Mao's former girlfriends, his private secretaries, his bodyguards, his daughter, and the spouses of some senior colleagues who have miraculously survived. Particularly hard to evaluate are materials that appeared in China in conjunction with the purging and kangaroo trials of senior political figures such as the former president Liu Shaoqi and his wife, Wang Guangmei, or Lin Biao and his wife, Ye Qun, who allegedly tried to assassinate Mao in 1971and died in a plane crash as they fled to the Soviet Union shortly after their coup failed.
During the period between 1973 and 1975 Mao to criticize the former army marshal Lin Biao and his family mobilized the entire country, and as had been true so often in the past with other fallen leaders, people hastened to create condemnatory documentation that would brand each new victim with his or her due level of infamy. Here, for instance, is part of an allegedly bugged telephone conversation between Lin Biao's wife, Ye Qun, and the army's chief of staff, Huang Yong-sheng, a man Lin Biao himself appointed in 1968 when he and Mao were in close partnership. As the authors explain, Huang was "a well-known womaniser" and "soon became Mrs. Lin's lover." Mrs. Lin herself was then a powerful figure who soon became a member of the Politburo. The authors write:
Ye Qun was a woman of voracious sexual appetite, for which she had little outlet with the clearly impotent marshal, whom she described as "a frozen corpse." The relationship between her and her lover is revealed in a three-hour telephone conversation that was bugged.
YE QUN [YQ]: I am so worried you might get into trouble for pursuing physical satisfaction. I can tell you, this life of mine is linked with you, political life and personal life.... Don't you know what 101 [Lin Biao's code name] is like at home? I live with his abuse.... I can sense you value feelings.... The country is big. Our children can each take up one key position! Am I not right?
HUANG: Yes, you are absolutely right.
YQ:...Our children put together, there must be five of them. They will be like five generals and will get on. Each will take one key position, and they can all be your assistants.
HUANG: Oh? I am so grateful to you!
YQ: ...I took that measure [implying contraceptive]. Justin case I have it and have to get rid of it [implying baby], I hope you will come and visit me once. [Sound of sobbing]
HUANG: I will come! I will come! Don't be like this. This makes me very sad.
YQ: Another thing: you mustn't be restricted by me. You can fool around.... I'm not narrow-minded. You can have other women, and be hot with them. Don't worry about me....
This transcript is quoted by the authors from a Chinese volume published in 1993, the title of which the authors translate as Super Trial (Chaoji Shenpan).But that volume, a slamming indictment of the Gang of Four led by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, and of all members of Lin Biao's family who conspired with them, gives no sources at all. The transcript is simply printed there with no attribution save for the vague remark that it was” listened to clandestinely" by Lin Biao and Ye Qun's own son, so that he would have a hold over his mother.[5]
Since all three of these people were allegedly involved together in a plan to assassinate Mao in 1971, and were all killed in a getaway plane that crashed in Mongolia later that year, little verification is possible. Even if this passage is cited in Super Trial as a genuine transcript, it still seems to me much closer to the bawdy Chinese popular storytelling tradition than to an actual bugged conversation between two of China's top political figures: this, after all, was during the Cultural Revolution, in a society rife with spies and informers of every stripe, where discretion was essential to survival. Though we are comparatively used to sexual vagaries in our own society, the situation in China was surely incomparably different. We can imagine such an account being used, at some point, to discredit Ye Qun and her husband, but we should know more about its provenance before accepting it on its face.
Mao: The Unknown Story contains many other examples of” secret" conversations between the top leaders of China which somehow have made their way into the memoir literature and thus become “sources." It is rare that the authors show the candor that they do on one occasion, where, citing some remarks about foreigners' sexual habits made by the wife of the guerrilla leader Zhu De, they comment that her "information reflected the gossip of the day."
-----------------
Despite its length, Mao: The Unknown Story avoids seriously grappling with other factors that made the twentieth century such a terrible one for tens of millions of Chinese, irrespective of what Mao may have done: these would include the depth and savagery of the Japanese assault on China, the nature of the Chinese labor movement, the realities of peasant deprivation in republican China, the collapse of local order and the spread of banditry, the strength of organized criminal gangs, the significance of Chiang Kai-shek's lack of political and military skills, the social, regional, and class differences that separated the Communists from one another, and the technical aid, including police training methods, spycraft, and military communications, furnished by the United States to the Nationalists.
By focusing so tightly on Mao's vileness—to the exclusion of other factors—the authors undermine much of the power their story might have had. By seeking to demonstrate that Mao started out as a vile person and stayed vile throughout his life, the authors deny any room for change, whether growth or degeneration, for subtlety or the possibilities of redemption. The countless Chinese who did struggle for change are denied any role in their own story, and become mere ciphers, their lives and deaths without purpose. With few exceptions, particularly General Peng Dehuai, who stood up to Mao on several key occasions and was eventually tortured and killed, Mao's senior colleagues and would-be comrades are presented here as pathetic figures, easily manipulated, unable—apparently —to fathom even Mao’s grossest and most far-fetched power plays and deceptions. Locked into their misery by the force of one man's personality, the Chinese people as a whole are denied all agency. And Mao himself ceases to be absorbing. How far can Mao have to fall, when he is at the bottom already?
As I was reading this book, I kept asking myself why historians should feel that they ought to be fair even to pathological monsters, if that is truly what Mao was. The most salient answer is perhaps structural as much as conceptual. Without some attempt at fairness there is no nuance, no sense of light and dark. The monster, acute and deadly, just shambles on down some monstrous path of his own devising. If he has no conscience, no meaningful vision of a different world except one where he is supreme, while his enemies are constantly humiliated and his people starve, then there is nothing we can learn from such a man. And that is a conclusion that, across the ages, historians have always tried to resist.
Notes
[1] See S. Bernard Thomas, Season of High Adventure: Edgar Snow in China (University of California Press, 1996), pp. 132–139.
[2] Thomas, Season of High Adventure, p. 147.
[3] Zhang Zhi-zhong, Huiyilu (Beijing: Literary and Historical Source Publishing House, 1985), in two volumes, especially pp. 109, 111, 116–117, 123, 139.
[4] See Jonathan Mirsky's review, The New York Review, November 17, 1994.
[5] Xiao Sike, Chaoji Shenpan (Jinan Publishing House, 1992), two volumes, "three-hour transcript," pp. 87–91.

[+/-] show/hide this post

Stealing Babies for Adoption

With U.S. Couples Eager to Adopt, Some Infants Are Abducted and Sold in China

By Peter S. Goodman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 12, 2006; A01

DONGGUAN, China On a muggy evening in July 2004, on a concrete lane reeking of raw sewage and chemicals from surrounding factories, a stranger leapt from a white van. He yanked 16-month-old Fei Mei from the arms of her 8-year-old cousin and sped away.

All night, her parents searched this industrial city in southern China for their round-faced baby girl.

"We looked everywhere, on every street corner," said her father, Xu Mohu. "We thought maybe the guy wouldn't like a girl and he would abandon her."

That was once a reasonable assumption. For generations, girls in rural China have been left to die in the cold or abandoned on doorsteps while families devote their scant resources to nourishing boys. But over the past decade, a wave of foreigners, mostly Americans, has poured into China with dollars in hand to adopt Chinese babies, 95 percent of them girls.

Last year, the United States issued nearly 8,000 visas to Chinese-born children adopted by American parents. More than 50,000 children have left China for the United States since 1992. And more than 10,000 children have landed in other countries, according to Chinese reports.

The foreign adoption program has matched Chinese babies with foreign families eager for them, while delivering crucial funding to orphanages in this country. But it has also spawned a tragic irony, transforming once-unwanted Chinese girls into valuable commodities worth stealing.

The morning after Fei Mei was taken, her parents made a report at the local police station, where they learned that on the same night, another baby girl had been taken in Dongguan.

The prevalence of the problem has become clearer in recent weeks with the prosecution of a child-trafficking ring in the neighboring province of Hunan. Last November, police arrested 27 members of a ring that since 2002 had abducted or purchased as many as 1,000 children here in Guangdong province and sold them to orphanages in Hunan for $400 to $538, according to reports in Chinese state media and interviews with sources familiar with the case, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because provincial officials have ordered a media blackout. The orphanages placed most of those children in homes with unwitting foreign families, many of them Americans, in exchange for mandatory contributions of $3,000 per baby -- a sum nearly twice the average annual Chinese income -- according to sources familiar with the prosecution.

Last month, a court in Hunan sentenced three of those baby traffickers to 15 years in prison and imposed terms of three to 13 years on six others, the official New China News Agency reported. Twenty-three local government officials in Hengyang, the city at the center of the case, have been fired. Attorneys for those sentenced said the babies involved were abandoned and then sold to orphanages, but not abducted. They plan appeals.

On the lane where Fei Mei vanished, her parents still wonder what happened to their daughter.

"We think of her all the time," Xu said. "But chances are, we'll never see her again."

On the other side of the world, in Jenison, Mich., Susan and Gordon Toering tuck their daughter in to bed and wonder where she really came from. They adopted Stacie in August 2005 from an orphanage in Hengyang. The paperwork from the adoption agency said she had been found abandoned. But the sources familiar with the prosecution and two defense attorneys said orphanage directors faked reports to make it seem that the babies they bought had been abandoned, allowing them to gain government clearance for foreign adoptions.

The Toerings already had three older children. Evangelical Christians, they adopted in China out of a sense that they were doing something generous for a child in need.

"If there's some mother out there grieving because her baby just was taken from her, that's just so bad," Susan Toering said. "Am I feeding into this? Am I causing others to say, 'There's a market for babies?' "

Those who have studied the foreign adoption program in China say its exploitation by traffickers is not a surprising outcome in this country still transitioning from communism to capitalism, where anything profitable is quickly commercialized.

"It's a corrupt system," said Brian Stuy, a Salt Lake City resident who has adopted three Chinese girls and operates Research-China.org, which traces the origins of such children. "It's just so driven by money, and there's no check and balance to the greed."

A state agency in Beijing, the China Center of Adoption Affairs, pairs prospective adoptive families with available Chinese children. Foreigners who want to adopt must work through a foreign agency certified by the CCAA. The process entails many fees, the largest paid as parents depart the province in which they adopt: They surrender $3,000 in cash, typically in $100 bills, and usually into the hands of the orphanage director.

The CCAA declined requests for an interview. According to its guidelines, the money is given to orphanages as reimbursement for the care of adopted children. But like many government-run services in China, orphanages are prone to financial abuse.

"Perhaps 5 to 10 percent of what's given by central, provincial and local governments actually benefits the kids," said a Western aid worker who has worked in Chinese orphanages for a decade and who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing his organization's relationship with the Chinese government.

A former worker at an orphanage in central China said she routinely witnessed local staff members carting off goods donated by aid groups -- medical equipment, blankets, formula. "The adults basically steal out of the mouths of the babies," she said.

Such is the system absorbing the proceeds from foreign adoptions. Whole industries have sprouted to service the people involved. Travel agencies ferry adopting foreign families to sightseeing spots in Beijing, then on to the provinces handling the adoptions. Playrooms occupy space at five-star hotels in cities that have become hubs for adoptions, their lobbies often packed with foreigners carrying Chinese babies. Around the White Swan hotel in Guangzhou, the city through which every family must pass to receive a U.S. visa for a child, streets are thick with stroller-rental shops and silk baby outfits embossed with traditional Chinese logos. The hotel gives each adopting family a special doll manufactured by Mattel -- "Going Home Barbie," the iconic plastic figure carrying a Chinese baby.

Assuming that each family that has adopted a Chinese baby has handed over at least $3,000, Americans last year injected about $24 million into Chinese orphanages. In many instances, the money appears to be put to good use.

"In the past, the living standards were very low," said Marcia Ma, a coordinator for Project Hope, which provides medical help to orphanages throughout China. "You would go to orphanages and there was a bad smell; the children were not clean. But now there is newer equipment for medical treatment and better hygiene."

But some orphanage directors have used proceeds from foreign adoptions to build profit-making homes for senior citizens, according to aid workers and orphanage officials. And a director for an orphanage in central China used foreign contributions to send her daughter to college in Switzerland, according to a former colleague.

Little of that is evident to foreigners, who are allowed to visit only the better orphanages. When the Toerings went to Hunan to pick up Stacie last August, they wanted to visit the Hengyang City orphanage but were denied permission.

"As a mother, I needed to see where she had been for 10 months," Toering said. "The guide said it wasn't up to the standard and we weren't allowed to go."

Many families adopting in China cite a record of transparent dealings with the CCAA and the ready availability of healthy infants.

"Many come from rural areas where birth mothers don't have money to buy cigarettes and alcohol," said Lindsay Yeakley, public affairs director at Great Wall China Adoption in Austin, a nonprofit organization that has placed about 5,000 Chinese children in American homes over the past decade.

Adopting families take pride in providing needed homes. But the growth of the foreign adoption program has prevented some Chinese orphans from finding homes in China. With each healthy infant now potentially worth $3,000 to an orphanage director through a foreign adoption, many institutions have put up barriers to domestic adoptions, according to sources familiar with the process.

Last year in the city of Kunming, He Fen and her husband decided to adopt a baby girl. But when they approached the director of a local orphanage, he told them they would need an endorsement from a major state-owned company or government institution, she said, making her husband -- a private merchant -- ineligible. They would have to pay about $750.

"Foreigners from the United States and Europe adopt so many babies from China, and all they have to do is pay some money," she said. "Why has it become so difficult for Chinese people?"

Long before the advent of foreign adoption, baby trafficking was a problem in China. Some children are sold into prostitution. Others -- mostly boys -- have been purchased or abducted, then sold to childless couples. But the recent revelations of trafficking in Guangdong and Hunan show how an underground industry has tapped into the most lucrative pipeline, connecting traffickers in China with families overseas.

Located in central Hunan, the birthplace of Mao Zedong, Hengyang is a desolate city. Abandoned factories sit lifeless. Soot stains the walls of decrepit housing.

Local officials declined requests for interviews. But sources familiar with the prosecution confirmed accounts in the state press that the center of trafficking was the Hengyang County orphanage, a white-tiled, three-story building set behind a brick wall.

The first sign that something was amiss was the wealth that began to emerge, according to a lawyer involved in the prosecution and people living near the orphanage. Staffers began erecting new houses. The director navigated the area's muddy roads in a chauffeured sedan. They were purchasing infants from traffickers, then selling them to other orphanages for foreign adoption, according to the prosecution source. Traffickers based in Guangdong were abducting and buying infants, then carrying them to Hengyang by bus and train, the lawyer said. They were targeting the children of migrant workers, figuring that such families were less likely to be taken seriously by the police.

Last November, a stranger carried off Li Meilan's 7-month-old daughter as she played in a garden in Dongguan, a factory town in Guangdong. Li came from a village in Jiangxi province, one of China's poorest. The police treated her with disdain, she said. "They acted as if I had lost a dog."

Yuan Baishun, a lawyer for one of those sentenced in the case -- Chen Ming, director of the Hengdong County orphanage in Hengyang -- said none of the 70-plus baby girls whose cases were presented by prosecutors was abducted. Rather, Yuan said, they were abandoned and then sold in transactions brokered by a woman named Liang Guihong, who lived in southwestern Guangdong.

"Old Lady Liang was quite well known locally for being warm-hearted and taking care of abandoned babies," Yuan said.

According to Yuan, in 2001, another of those sentenced, Duan Meilin, brought some of the babies to the Changning County Social Welfare Institute, an orphanage in Hengyang eligible to conduct foreign adoptions. Over subsequent years, Liang and Duan together transferred as many as 1,000 babies to orphanages in Hengyang, Yuan said.

Duan's attorney, Zhu Xiaoyun, confirmed that his client participated in the sales but said none of the children had been abducted. Duan's mother, Chen Zhiding, said her son received about $36 for each baby. An attorney for Liang, who was also sentenced, declined to comment.

But sources familiar with the investigation said many children were abducted. The court ruled that the director of the Hengdong County orphanage "was cognizant of the fact that he had purchased babies that had been abducted," according to the verdict, which was read to The Washington Post. The directors of the six Hengyang county orphanages conspired with local Civil Affairs bureaus to concoct police reports asserting that the babies had been abandoned, according to the prosecution source and defense attorneys.

Before 2004, the Hengyang County orphanage was not eligible for the foreign adoption program, so it sold as many as 30 healthy babies a month to participating local orphanages for about $1,000 each, according to a prosecution source and defense attorneys. Neighbors said they were awakened at night by the sounds of crying babies, as groups of six to 12 were loaded into a van and taken away.

The Hengdong County orphanage placed 288 babies for foreign adoption from October 2002 to November 2005, according to a log book described by defense attorneys. The Changning County orphanage placed about 250 babies for foreign adoption over the same period, the sources said.

In the fall of 2004, the Hengyang County orphanage gained the right to participate in foreign adoptions. U.S. officials refused to disclose the number of visas issued to children adopted by American families through that institution. According to Stuy, the researcher, listings of abandoned children in the provincial newspaper suggest that foreign adoptions from that orphanage ranged between zero and 10 a month for most of 2005, then spiked to 29 in October.

Under whose roofs those children now sleep remains a mystery.

In a written statement, officials at the U.S. Embassy said they immediately sought a report from the CCAA in November, after the arrests. The CCAA assured them that "the matter was being properly handled," but rebuffed requests for details while the case was being prosecuted. U.S. officials said they would seek further meetings.

Great Wall, the Texas-based adoption agency, has placed many children from Hengyang orphanages in American homes. It declined to say whether it has found evidence of trafficker involvement in any of its adoptions.

As Stacie Toering grows up in Michigan, she and her parents may never know whether she was really abandoned on Fengao Street in Hengyang County early on an October morning when she was 2 months old, as the police report states, or whether she was sold or was pried from the arms of her mother.

"This is just a horrible thing, just sickening," Gordon Toering said. "If we can't bring closure to it, we're just going to have to live with it."

Special correspondent Eva Woo contributed to this report.

[+/-] show/hide this post

Adopted in China, Seeking Identity in America

March 23, 2006

By LYNETTE CLEMETSON

Molly Feazel desperately wants to quit the Chinese dance group that her mother enrolled her in at age 5, because it sets her apart from friends in her Virginia suburb. Her mother, though, insists that Molly, now 15, will one day appreciate the connection to her culture.

Qiu Meng Fogarty, 13, prefers her Chinese name (pronounced cho mung) to Cecilia, her English name. She volunteers in workshops for children in New York adopted from China "so that they know it can all work out fine," she said.

Since 1991, when China loosened its adoption laws to address a growing number of children abandoned because of a national one-child policy, American families have adopted more than 55,000 Chinese children, almost all girls. Most of the children are younger than 10, and an organized subculture has developed around them, complete with play groups, tours of China and online support groups.

Molly and Qiu Meng represent the leading edge of this coming-of-age population, adopted just after the laws changed and long before such placements became popular, even fashionable.

Molly was among 61 Chinese children adopted by Americans in 1991, and Qiu Meng was one of 206 adopted the next year, when the law was fully put into effect. Last year, more than 7,900 children were adopted from China.

As the oldest of the adopted children move through their teenage years, they are beginning — independently and with a mix of enthusiasm and trepidation — to explore their identities. Their experiences offer hints at journeys yet to come for thousands of Chinese children who are now becoming part of American families each year.

Those experiences are influenced by factors like the level of diversity in their neighborhoods and schools, and how their parents expose them to their heritage.

"We're unique," Qiu Meng said.

A view that Molly does not share. "I don't see myself as different at all," said Molly, whose friends, her mother said, all seem to be "tall, thin and blond."

The different outlooks are normal say experts on transracial adoption.

Most Americans who bring Chinese children to the United States are white and in the upper middle class.

Jane Brown, a social worker and adoptive parent who conducts workshops for adopted children and their families, says the families should directly confront issues of loss and rejection, which the children often face when they begin to understand the social and gender politics that caused their families in China to abandon them.

Ms. Brown also recommends that transracial adoptive families address American attitudes on race early, consistently and head on.

"Sometimes parents want to celebrate, even exoticize, their child's culture, without really dealing with race," said Ms. Brown, 52, who is white and who has adopted children from Korea and China.

"It is one thing to dress children up in cute Chinese dresses, but the children need real contact with Asian-Americans, not just waiters in restaurants on Chinese New Year. And they need real validation about the racial issues they experience."

The growing population is drawing the attention of researchers. The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a research group based in New York, is surveying adopted children from Asia who are now adults to try to find ways to help the younger children form healthy identities.

Nancy Kim Parsons, a filmmaker who was adopted from Korea, is making a documentary comparing the experiences of adults who had been adopted a generation ago from Korea with the young children adopted from China.

South Korea was the first country from which Americans adopted in significant numbers, and it is still among the leaders in international adoptions, along with Russia, Guatemala, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, India and Ethiopia. The experiences of those adopted from Korea have provided useful lessons for families adopting from China.

Hollee McGinnis, 34, the policy director at the Donaldson institute, was adopted from South Korea by white parents and was raised in Westchester County. Ten years ago, she started an adult support group, called Also Known As, which now also mentors children adopted from China.

"College was when I really began trying to understand what other people saw in my face," she said. "Before then I didn't really understand what it meant to be Asian."

It is a process McKenzie Forbes, 17, who was adopted from China and raised in towns in Virginia and West Virginia where there are few other Asians, is just starting to absorb. For her, college holds the promise of something new.

"I am feeling ready to break out a little bit," McKenzie said. "When I am around other Asians, I feel a connection that I don't feel around other people. I can't explain it exactly. But I think it will be fun to meet other people and hear their stories."

McKenzie, who was accepted by Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, applied only to universities with Asian student groups. Confident and pensive, she likes classical music and punk rock. She is wild about Japanese anime, a hobby she hopes to turn into a career, and to travel to Japan. Exploring China, she said, "is what everyone would expect."

Adopted at 2, McKenzie is among the oldest of the current wave of children adopted from China. Like many Americans adopting from overseas at the time, McKenzie's family turned to China because of a movement started in 1972 by the National Association of Black Social Workers discouraging the placement of African-American children with white adoptive families.

"With an African-American child we had no guarantee that the mother or a social worker wouldn't come and take the child away," McKenzie's mother, Maree Forbes, said. "With the children from China, we felt safe that there wouldn't be anyone to come back to get them."

McKenzie has a younger sister, Meredyth, 15, also adopted from China, and brothers Robert and John, 11-year-old twins, adopted from Vietnam. The family left Culpepper, Va., when McKenzie was 5, after children at school ostracized her because she is Chinese.

More frequent than outright racism though, McKenzie and Meredyth said, are offenses of ignorance. They were called out of class at their current school, for example, because a counselor wanted them to take an English language test for immigrant students. "We probably spoke better English than the instructor," Meredyth said.

The experience has been different for Qiu Meng Fogarty. As she recovered from a fit of giggles about something having to do with a boy, Qiu Meng looked at her friends Celena Kopinski and Hope Goodrich, who were also adopted from China, and breathed a cheery sigh.

"It's like we're related," she said, sitting on her bed in her home on Manhattan's Upper West side. "It's nice because we're all on the same page. We don't have to be like, 'Oh, you're adopted?' or 'Oh, yeah, I'm Chinese,' It's just easy."

The three girls have been friends for as long as they can remember. Their parents helped form Families With Children From China, a support group started in 1993 that now has chapters worldwide.

Some teenagers lose interest in the group because many of its activities focus on younger children. But Qiu Meng, a perky wisp of a girl with an infectious laugh, is still enthusiastically involved. She sold "Year of the Dog" T-shirts at a Chinese New Year event in January, and is a mentor at group workshops.

She said she remembers how hard it was to talk about painful things when she was younger and children at school would stretch their eyes upward and tease her. "There aren't a lot of children who can talk openly and easily about things like that," she said. "So it feels good to be able to help them."

Last summer, Qiu Meng, Celena and Hope attended a camp for children adopted from around the world. When it ended, counselors gathered the campers in a circle and connected them with a string. The campers all went home with a section of the string tied to their wrists, as a reminder their shared experience.

When a volleyball coach later told Qiu Meng to cut off the string for a game, she carefully tucked it away, took it home and hung it on her bedroom wall among numerous Chinese prints and paintings.

The teenagers all acknowledge that they are just beginning a long process of self-definition, and even though Molly is still trying to persuade her parents to allow her to quit the Chinese dance class, she admits privately that she benefits from the struggle.

"If my parents didn't push, I know I would just drop it all completely," she said. "And then I wouldn't have anything to fall back on later."

Molly, Qiu Meng and McKenzie said they would not have wanted to grow up any other way, and they all said they would one day like to adopt from China. "It's a good thing to do," Qiu Meng said. "And since I'm Asian, they wouldn't look different."

[+/-] show/hide this post

Beijing's Unwanted Best Seller

A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING

By Jürgen Kremb in Beijing

People across China are trying to uncover the name of the mystery author behind the much-discussed best seller "Wolf Totem," which has sold millions of copies. The tome's author is a known Chinese dissident who is writing under the nom de plume Jiang Rong. If he had used his real name, the book never would have been published.

The cover of the best-seller "Wolf's Totem," which depicts the Chinese as will-less lambs.

Are we wolves or just sheep? That is the subject of fiery discussions among China's history-obsessed readers, its critical intellectuals and growth-drunk industrial moguls.

The country's Han Chinese, who make up a majority of the population of the People's Republic, are a compliant herd of sheep that had to learn from the tyranny of Mongolian wolves -- at least according to the main theory of the 650-page tome "Wolf Totem." The book is currently breaking all sales records and, except for the Mao Bible, no publication has attracted more readers in China. Since first appearing in 2004, the book's author, who hides behind the pseudonym Jiang Rong, has pulled in 10 literature prizes for his crude combination of autobiography, animal stories and ethnological observations of the Mongolian plains. The best voices of Radio Beijing have read the 12-part audio book during the broadcaster's "Gold Time," its best time slots. Some 4 million volumes are now in circulation.

It's the kind of success story the Communist Party loves to hear about. Foreign publishers are engaging in bidding wars for the translation rights to the novel. One Tokyo publisher forked out $300,000 for the comic rights alone. Penguin Books, which plans to publish the English translation, set a Chinese record when it paid an advance of $100,000 for the world-wide English rights to the book. And Bertelsmann's Random House division ponied up €20,000 for the German rights.

Yet despite all the success, there's a hitch -- Jiang Rong refuses to take part in the marketing of the book, regardless of whether it's the Communist Party's propaganda machine or a foreign publishing house. The aging author may have scored a best seller his first time up to bat, but he's no wolf. The 60-year-old sits on a rattan stool in a bamboo garden in Western Beijing -- as shy and reserved as the Panda bears for which his country is famous.

From dissident to author

"Photos?" -- No, not for publication, just for memories, he says. "I hate all the hype. I almost had a heart attack just writing the thing." He gave away the theatrical rights -- an appearance at the premiere would have been a nightmare for him. Only five people -- including his wife -- know who is behind the pseudonym. The political scientist, who works at a major university in the capital city, invited SPIEGEL ONLINE to his house for an interview. The author has not yet revealed his true identity to Chinese journalists, and he spoke on the condition that this publication also agree not to do so. Under his real name, the Chinese censors would have never approved the book's publication. Following the student uprising and massacre at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, Jiang was placed in jail for two years. Today, he is still prohibited from teaching. Nor is he allowed to hold a passport or leave the country.

The Communist Party accused him of belonging to the circle of dissidents that sought to persuade the country's Communists to introduced democratic reforms during the spring of 1989. His intellectuals offense? Attempting to peacefully transform the Communist Party into one that adhered to the principles of social democracy.

Understandably, he exercised great caution when he sat down to write his book. Almost six years ago, his wife, a major fixture on the Chinese cultural scene, began noticing odd changes in her husband's behavior. At first, she chalked it up to his age. "Suddenly he began locking himself in his office every day and refused to tell me what he was doing."

Inside the six square-meter room, and hemmed in by towering bookshelves, the political scientist began soul searching, helped along by behavioral studies, ecology and the history of the Mongolian plains. The result is a kind of Chinese wolf dance, an autobiography of a young Chinese man who tries to live with the wolves.

The life of the wolves

After growing up in Mao Zedong's communist Beijing, Jiang Rong fled the madness of the Cultural Revolution by volunteering for work in the Mongolian grasslands, where he lived with a nomadic family.

One day he decided to ignore the advice of the clan chief and set off mindlessly into the wilderness on his own. Without realilzing it, he stumbled onto the hunting grounds of a pack of wolves. Through a mixture of terror and fascination, a young Jiang watched as the predators cleverly chased a herd of sheep over a cliff to their death. The corpses were dragged into a cave to be saved like frozen food to provide winter nourishment for the wolves.

He was fascinated, and from then on he began studying the wolves' lives. His tragic and melancholic attempt to domesticate one of the wild animals is perfect for the Hollywood screen -- especially the moment when he realizes that taming one of the clever beasts is akin to killing it.

The book's damning societal critique doesn't begin until he describes how soldiers arrived on the steppe from the capital city and forced the Mongolian nomads to abandon their nature-based lifestyle. Jiang has to accompany the uniformed men during a wolf hunt and watch as it transforms into a gory attempt at extermination.

As more soldiers arrive, the number of wolves killed increases. Just as in Tibet, the colonization by the Chinese causes an ecological disaster for the intact natural landscape of Inner Mongolia. Chinese settlers transform the steppe into fields, but without the wolves, rats quickly become a plague. Wild sheep graze until the meadows are dust. Mongolian sand storms glide over Beijing to Seoul. Once a mere parable, the story is now reality every spring, an example of the serious impact China's uncontrolled explosive economic growth is having on its neighbors.

Ideological misunderstandings

But the gifted storyteller doesn't just leave readers with a bleak outlook. A 60-page call to action attached to the end of his book reminds local literary critics of the book "Huang Shan." "Huang Shang" is the anthology of cultural criticism penned by leading Chinese intellectuals that provided the ideological kindling for what would become the fires of the student revolt in 1989.

Jiang's theory: the Han Chinese have become patient lambs, willing to accept any leadership rather than seize the reins and sculpt their own future, as wolves would.

But this can also be misinterpreted. Kai Strittmater of the Süddeutsche Zeitung felt the book laid the groundwork for the Latin Americanization of China -- a transformation from a communist dictatorship to a fascist government. Nonsense, counters the author, pointing to his history as a critical left-wing thinker.

But since the publication of "Wolf Totem," at least four books aimed at China's management elite have asked the same question: "How can we use the wolves' strategy to make China even more successful?" The government has used the propaganda apparatus of the Central Committee to disclose the fact that members of the powerful Politburo have studied the book and deemed it a "significant work."

All of this happened, of course, before the country's security agency sent a highly classified dossier to the country's political chiefs, divulging just who had written about his dances with wolves. Once Jiang's identity had been revealed, publishers were told they could no longer publish books under pseudonyms unless the central censors had been made aware of an author's true identity -- and political leanings. The directive came too late to stop Jiang Rong's success.

Translated from the German by Andrew Bulkeley

[+/-] show/hide this post

Experts Reveal the Secret Powers of Grapefruit Juice

March 21, 2006

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

In 1989, a group of Canadian researchers studying a blood pressure drug were astonished to discover that drinking a glass of grapefruit juice dangerously increased the drug's potency.

They were testing the effects of drinking alcohol on a medicine called Plendil. The scientists needed something that would hide the taste of alcohol so that subjects would know only that they were taking the drug and not know whether they were drinking alcohol with it.

"One Saturday night, my wife and I tested everything in the refrigerator," said David G. Bailey, a research scientist at the London Health Sciences Center in London, Ontario, and the lead author on the study. "The only thing that covered the taste was grapefruit juice."

So they used it in their experiment, expecting the grapefruit juice to be irrelevant to their results. But blood levels of the drug went up significantly in the control group that drank just grapefruit juice, without alcohol.

"People didn't believe us," Dr. Bailey said. "They thought it was a joke. We had trouble getting it published in a major medical journal."

Eventually the paper was accepted and published by Lancet, in February 1991.

Finding why juice had that effect was the next question.

The answer, it turned out, lay in a family of enzymes called the cytochrome P-450 system, in particular one known as CYP 3A4. This enzyme metabolizes many drugs, and toxins as well, into substances that are less potent or more easily excreted or both.

Grapefruit juice interferes with the ability of CYP 3A4 to do that, increasing the potency of a drug by letting more of it enter the bloodstream, in effect producing an excessive dose.

Grapefruit interacts with this enzyme only in the intestines, not in the liver or other places where it is found. As a result, the effect is seen only with medicines taken orally, not with injected drugs.

Numerous studies now show the interaction of grapefruit juice with many widely used medicines. Most interactions have no serious consequences, but a few do. For example, drugs used to lower cholesterol, like Lipitor, Mevacor and Zocor, have increased potency when taken with grapefruit juice. Excessive levels of those drugs can lead to a serious and sometimes fatal muscle disorder called rhabdomyolysis.

Does this mean a person could reduce the amount of medicine required simply by drinking grapefruit juice? No, according to Dr. Bailey.

"The problem is the unpredictability of the effect," he said. "You can't just lower your dose of Lipitor and increase your consumption of grapefruit juice. There's no uniformity from one individual to another or from one bottle of grapefruit juice to the next.

"There's huge variation in the amount of enzyme people have in their guts. Fooling around with grapefruit juice is not a good idea."

Grapefruit juice can also interfere with the metabolism of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.'s, like Prozac, which are used to treat depression.

Dr. Marshall Forstein, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard, said he told patients to switch from grapefruit juice to something else because most oranges and other citrus fruits do not have the same effect.

"If they insist," Dr. Forstein said, "I try to prescribe the S.S.R.I. or other medication to be taken at a time when the grapefruit juice would have mostly been metabolized."

Among fruit juices, grapefruit has the strongest effect, but lime juice and orange juice made from Seville oranges similarly inhibit the CYP 3A4 enzyme. With some drugs, apple juice may interact in the same way.

While Dr. Bailey suggests avoiding grapefruit juice entirely when taking medicine, some experts say the effect of the juice should not be exaggerated.

"The circumstances under which an interaction will occur are relatively unusual," said Dr. David J. Greenblatt, a professor of pharmacology at Tufts. First, he said, the drug has to be metabolized significantly by intestinal CYP 3A4, and relatively few are. "When you look at the actual data for each drug, the scientific conclusions are that the interactions are unusual, sometimes quite small and not of clinical importance. But there are some cases in which it's significant."

Dr. Greenblatt and his co-investigators at Tufts have conducted research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health in this field for years, and he has been a paid consultant to the Florida Citrus Commission.

Dr. Richard B. Kim, a professor of medicine and pharmacology at Vanderbilt University, agreed that the interaction was a serious health concern in some patients.

"Grapefruit consumption is a clinically relevant issue, especially for the elderly, who are most likely to be taking the drugs affected by it," Dr. Kim said. "If you're taking multiple medications, or have recently switched to a different type of medication, you should be particularly careful. The easiest thing to do under those circumstances is to take the medicine with water and avoid the juice completely."

[+/-] show/hide this post

Hand Sanitizers, Good or Bad?

March 21, 2006

The Consumer

By DEBORAH FRANKLIN

What started out as an informal classroom experiment at East Tennessee State University has turned up disturbing evidence about some alcohol-based instant hand sanitizers — the antiseptic gels and foams that have become popular as a quick way to disinfect hands when soap and water aren't available.

Many such sanitizers — whether a brand name or a generic version — work well, and are increasingly found in hallway dispensers in hospitals, schools, day care centers and even atop the gangways of cruise ships as one more safeguard against the hand-to-mouth spread of disease. Several studies from such settings have shown that use of the alcohol-based rubs on hands that aren't visibly soiled seems particularly helpful in curbing the spread of bad stomach and intestinal bugs.

But a study published in this month's issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases found that at least one brand of sanitizer found on store shelves, as well as some recipes for homemade versions circulating on Web sites about crafts or directed at parents, contain significantly less than the 60 percent minimum alcohol concentration that health officials deem necessary to kill most harmful bacteria and viruses.

"What this should say to the consumer is that they need to look carefully at the label before they buy any of these products," said Elaine Larson, professor of pharmaceutical and therapeutic research at Columbia's nursing school. "Check the bottle for active ingredients. It might say ethyl alcohol, ethanol, isopropanol or some other variation, and those are all fine. But make sure that whichever of those alcohols is listed, its concentration is between 60 and 95 percent. Less than that isn't enough."

Scott Reynolds, a specialist in infection control at the James H. Quillen Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Mountain Home, Tenn., discovered the problem inadvertently, in the course of giving a simple demonstration on the merits of hand washing to a friend's class of biology students at nearby East Tennessee State.

Mr. Reynolds had the students place their hands on agar plates of growth medium before and after one of several experimental conditions: rubbing their hands briskly under tap water; sudsing with hospital-grade soap and then rinsing with water; or rubbing their hands with a dollop of one of two types of alcohol-based hand sanitizer. The sanitizers used were a foam version from the hospital that contained 62 percent ethanol, and a gel version Mr. Reynolds's wife bought at a local discount store.

The next day, much to Mr. Reynolds's surprise, the culture plates from hands doused and rubbed with the store-bought gel were covered with clumps of bacteria that had, in some cases, formed a visible outline of the student's handprint on the plate.

Only when he flipped the bottle around to read the label on the back did Mr. Reynolds see that the gel's active ingredient was "40 percent ethyl alcohol."

"Otherwise, it looked like all the rest you see in the store," he said. "Same price. Same claims. Same pump bottle."

In a more formal follow-up study, Mr. Reynolds and two colleagues replicated the results, and confirmed that the lack of sufficient alcohol was to blame. If anything, he said, the faulty gel seemed to mobilize the bacteria, spreading them around the hand instead of killing them.

Allison Aiello, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has studied the use and relative effectiveness of alcohol-based gels and antibacterial soaps by consumers as well as hospital workers, said she wasn't surprised by Mr. Reynolds's results from the low-alcohol sanitizer, but she was concerned to read that such a product was on the market.

"I used to work in a virology lab," Dr. Aiello said, "and we knew — it has been known for decades — that an alcohol concentration under 60 percent won't kill the microbes. It's really frightening to think that there are products out there that contain levels lower than that."

Sometimes much lower. One recipe Mr. Reynolds and his colleagues discovered on the Internet for a bubble gum-scented sanitizer aimed at children called for half a -cup of aloe vera gel and a quarter cup of 99 percent rubbing alcohol, with a bit of fragrance. That translates to a concentration of roughly 33 percent alcohol, Dr. Aiello said.

Since 2002, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended that health care workers routinely use high quality alcohol-based gels instead of soap and water on their hands when moving from patient to patient — as long the worker's hands aren't visibly soiled.

Alcohol doesn't cut through grime well, so dirt, blood, feces or other body fluids or soil must be wiped or washed away first, if the alcohol in the sanitizer is to be effective. In such cases, hand washing with soap and water is advised.

In October 2005, a committee appointed by the Food and Drug Administration met to discuss, among other things, whether consumers should also be encouraged to use the alcohol-based hand sanitizers.

Dr. Tammy Lundstrom, representing the nonprofit Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, argued that they should. The committee's decision is expected this month.

"About 60 percent of surgery these days is outpatient," Dr. Lundstrom said last week in a phone interview. "We have so many people caring for ill family members at home. Maybe you're without running water because of a hurricane or blackout, or you've got a bad hip and can't move easily to get to the sink as often as you should to wash your hands. What about after you sneeze in the car, or stop to put in contact lenses?"

In all those cases, she said, alcohol-based hand sanitizers — of the correct formulation — could be a godsend, not to replace soap and water, but as an important supplement.

Dr. Aiello sees even more potential uses in the office. "Studies show that the computer keyboard, the phone receiver, and the desk are worse than the bathroom in terms of micro-organisms," she said. "Washing with plain old soap and water should be your first choice. But if you're stuck between meetings and about to grab lunch at your desk, or just use somebody else's keyboard, using a hand sanitizer before and after could be a really good idea."

How much goop should you use? Vigorously rub all sides of your hands with enough gel or foam to get them wet, and rub them together until they are dry. If your hands are dry within 10 or 15 seconds, according to the C.D.C. guidelines for health care workers, you haven't used enough.

[+/-] show/hide this post

What I Got Wrong About the War

As conservatives pour out their regrets, I have a few of my own to confess
By ANDREW SULLIVAN

Sunday, Mar. 05, 2006

Was I wrong to support the war in Iraq? Several conservatives and neoconservatives have begun to renounce the decision to topple Saddam Hussein three years ago. William F. Buckley Jr., as close to a conservative icon as America has, recently wrote that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed." George F. Will has been a moderate skeptic throughout. Neoconservative scholar Francis Fukuyama has just produced a book renouncing his previous support. The specter of Iraq teetering closer to civil war and disintegration has forced a reckoning.

In retrospect, neoconservatives (and I fully include myself) made three huge errors. The first was to overestimate the competence of government, especially in very tricky areas like WMD intelligence. The shock of 9/11 provoked an overestimation of the risks we faced. And our fear forced errors into a deeply fallible system. When doubts were raised, they were far too swiftly dismissed. The result was the WMD intelligence debacle, something that did far more damage to the war's legitimacy and fate than many have yet absorbed.

Fukuyama's sharpest insight here is how the miraculously peaceful end of the cold war lulled many of us into overconfidence about the inevitability of democratic change, and its ease. We got cocky. We should have known better. The second error was narcissism. America's power blinded many of us to the resentments that hegemony always provokes. Those resentments are often as deep among our global friends as among our enemies--and make alliances as hard as they are important. That is not to say we should never act unilaterally. Sometimes the right thing to do will spawn backlash, and we should do it anyway. But that makes it all the more imperative that when we do go out on a limb, we get things right. In those instances, we need to make our margin of error as small as humanly possible. Too many in the Bush Administration, alas, did the opposite. They sent far too few troops, were reckless in postinvasion planning and turned a deaf ear to constructive criticism, even from within their own ranks. Their abdication of the moral high ground, by allowing the abuse and torture of military detainees, is repellent. Their incompetence and misjudgments might be forgiven. Their arrogance and obstinacy remain inexcusable.

The final error was not taking culture seriously enough. There is a large discrepancy between neoconservatism's skepticism of government's ability to change culture at home and its naiveté when it comes to complex, tribal, sectarian cultures abroad.

We have learned a tough lesson, and it has been a lot tougher for those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis and several thousand killed and injured American soldiers than for a few humiliated pundits. The correct response to that is not more spin but a real sense of shame and sorrow that so many have died because of errors made by their superiors, and by writers like me. All this is true, and it needs to be faced. But it is also true that we are where we are. And true that there was no easy alternative three years ago. You'd like Saddam still in power, with our sanctions starving millions while U.N. funds lined the pockets of crooks and criminals? At some point the wreckage that is and was Iraq would have had to be dealt with. If we hadn't invaded, at some point in the death spiral of Saddam's disintegrating Iraq, others would. It is also true that it is far too soon to know the ultimate outcome of our gamble.

What we do know is that for all our mistakes, free elections have been held in a largely Arab Muslim country. We know that the Kurds in the north enjoy freedoms and a nascent civil society that is a huge improvement on the past. We know that the culture of the marsh Arabs in the south is beginning to revive. We know that we have given Iraqis a chance to decide their own destiny through politics rather than murder and that civil war is still avoidable. We know that the enemies of democracy in Iraq will not stop there if they succeed. And we know that no perfect war has ever been fought, and no victory ever won, without the risk of defeat. Despair, in other words, is too easy now. And it too is a form of irresponsibility.

Regrets? Yes. But the certainty of some today that we have failed is as dubious as the callow triumphalism of yesterday. War is always, in the end, a matter of flexibility and will. And sometimes the darkest days are inevitable--even necessary--before the sky ultimately clears. Visit Andrew Sullivan's blog, the Daily Dish, at time.com

[+/-] show/hide this post

Our leaps of faith

REVIEWED BY JOHN CAREY
SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief
by Lewis Wolpert

Faber £14.99 pp256

In Through the Looking Glass, when Alice declares that she cannot believe impossible things, the White Queen advises her to practise. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” As Lewis Wolpert sees it, the White Queen’s formidable credulity merely marks her out as a human being. We exceed all other animals in our capacity to believe things for which there is no rational evidence — a category that, in Wolpert’s reckoning, includes all the world’s religions, and every species of paranormal and supernatural belief, from aromatherapy to zen. It needs a big brain to hold so much nonsense, and why and how our brains got so big is a key part of Wolpert’s argument. Some researchers trace it to the development of social relationships and the invention of language. He contends, however, that the driving force behind the brain’s evolution was the making and use of tools.

Although some other creatures, notably chimpanzees and crows, use primitive tools, no animal except us has ever joined separate components to make a tool — as in the haft and blade of an axe — and only humans have learnt to use containers such as pots and bags. These achievements set us on a dizzying technological trajectory that led, in a mere 20,000 years, from flint arrowheads to the International Space Station. To make tools, Wolpert argues, you have to believe in cause and effect — not, of course, in an advanced scientific way, but just through rapid, everyday assumptions about the mechanics of the physical world. “Causal” beliefs of this kind distinguish humans from other animals and, Wolpert argues, they had a decisive impact on brain development. For once our tool-inventing ancestors had got used to the idea that effects had causes, they started to wonder what caused distressing and seemingly inexplicable events such as illness, death and natural disasters, and to answer these questions they invented religious belief.

Gutting Wolpert’s argument in this way does no justice to the brilliance and persuasiveness of his exposition. But it has the advantage of exposing some seeming blips in his reasoning. It is not clear whether he thinks that causal beliefs led to tool-making, or that tool-making led to causal beliefs. He can be found saying both things in different places, and it is a rather important contradiction, because if causal beliefs were necessary before tool-making could happen, then tool-making cannot have produced them. Perhaps, though, this objection can be set aside if we imagine tool-making and causal beliefs developing in tandem over millions of years, while the human brain expanded to cope with more and more complex mechanical tasks, as well as with the increasingly daunting credulousness required by theology.

A more serious difficulty seems to be Wolpert’s assumption that the kind of causal belief needed for making tools could lead to a belief in the supernatural. They appear, at first glance, quite different things. For tool-making is precise and reliable, while supernatural beliefs are, in Wolpert’s view, mere imagination. However, this objection underestimates the strength of human belief, which can, for the believer, be just as precise and reliable as tool-making. The human brain is, it seems, powered by a “belief engine” that makes us eager to seize on causal explanations for events, irrespective of whether they have any basis in truth. Wolpert gives many examples of this, both from history and from contemporary life. Around half of all Americans believe in astrology, and 72% believe in angels. Belief in “good luck”, and ways of ensuring it, extend to the superintelligent. The Nobel prizewinning physicist Niels Bohr kept a horseshoe nailed to the wall above his desk and, when asked whether he believed it would bring him luck, replied: “Not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you luck whether you believe in it or not.”

Neuroscience reveals that belief and logic activate different parts of the brain, and where belief and logic clash, humans will almost always opt for belief, sticking to it obstinately despite adverse evidence. Students offered alternative sets of statistics will choose the one that confirms their prejudices, and a dogged reliance on existing beliefs shows up emphatically in matters affecting health. The belief that vitamin supplements provide a defence against illness, and that “natural” products are not harmful, is widespread even among educated people. Wolpert does not condemn such superstitions, for beliefs, it seems, can keep you healthy, whether they are valid or not. Experiment shows that all sorts of pain can be relieved with a sugar-pill placebo, provided the patient believes in its curative powers. Credulity may ensure survival better than logic.

The same applies with religious beliefs. Surveys suggest that religious people are happier, more optimistic, less prone to strokes and high blood pressure, more able to cope with life’s problems and less fearful of death than the irreligious. It follows that belief in the supernatural is an evolutionary advantage, and our ability to have such beliefs must, Wolpert deduces, have been partly determined by our genes. Religious people might rejoice at that, concluding that God has wired us up to believe in him. But for Wolpert, the wiring is no more divine than our guts or toenails, or any other part of our evolved anatomy. Mystical raptures, similar to those reported by the devout, can be produced, he points out, by mental illness or hallucinogenic drugs and this, too, indicates that religion depends on neural circuits in our brain that accident or malfunction can activate. Some neuroscientists now link spiritual experiences with specific brain areas. Stimulating the brain of subjects with electromagnets causes tiny seizures in the temporal lobes that induce the subjects to believe they have spiritual experiences. The visions of St Teresa, it is suggested, may have been symptoms of temporal-lobe epilepsy.

Reductionism of this type can infuriate religionists. Yet Wolpert, though an atheist, is no foe to religion — at any rate in its benign aspects. A predisposition to religious beliefs is probably, he thinks, an essential part of human nature, and he tells how his youngest son, who had a difficult late adolescence, joined a fundamentalist Christian church and was undoubtedly helped by it. The book’s argument is conducted modestly and without heat. It has a beautiful and sometimes breathtaking clarity, as when he writes of the protein molecules that made early multicellular organisms mobile, and evolved, over millions of years, into the nerves controlling movement in creatures such as molluscs and flatworms. These were the precursors of human brains, and their purpose was simply to make muscles move, so as to find food or avoid predators. “No muscles, no brain . . . And that is why plants do not have brains.” The same neatness and brevity vitalise many passages in this radiantly intelligent book. They make a refreshing change from the hot air, vanity and bald assertion that characterise so much contemporary discussion of art and literature.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £13.49 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

THE OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL

Lewis Wolpert appears at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Tuesday, March 28, at 10.30am. Telephone 0870 343 1001 for tickets

[+/-] show/hide this post