Read Online The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 by Deborah Blum - Free Book Online

then in social psychology, epidemiology, virology, cancer, and genetics at UCLA. Even as an undergrad, Cole had “this astute, fine-grained approach,” says Susan Andersen, a professor of psychology now at NYU who was one of his teachers at UC Santa Barbara in the late 1980s. “He thinks about things in very precise detail.”
    In his postdoctoral work at UCLA, Cole focused on the genetics of immunology and cancer because those fields had pioneered hard-nosed gene-expression research. After that he became one of the earliest researchers to bring the study of whole-genome gene expression to social psychology. The gene’s ongoing, real-time response to incoming information, he realized, is where life works many of its changes on us. The idea is both reductive and expansive. We are but cells. At each cell’s center, a tight tangle of DNA writes and hands out the cell’s marching orders. Between that center and the world stands only a series of membranes.
    â€œPorous membranes,” notes Cole.
    â€œWe think of our bodies as stable biological structures that live in the world but are fundamentally separate from it. That we are unitary organisms in the world but passing through it. But what we’re learning from the molecular processes that actually keep our bodies running is that we’re far more fluid than we realize, and the world passes through us.”
    Cole told me this over dinner. We had met on the UCLA campus and walked south a few blocks, through bright April sun, to an almost empty sushi restaurant. Now, waving his chopsticks over a platter of urchin, squid, and amberjack, he said, “Every day, as our cells die off, we have to replace 1 to 2 percent of our molecular being. We’re constantly building and reengineering new cells. And that regeneration is driven by the contingent nature of gene expression.
    â€œThis is what a cell is about. A cell,” he said, clasping some amberjack, “is a machine for turning experience into biology.”
    When Cole started his social psychology research in the early 1990s, the microarray technology that spots changes in gene expression was still in its expensive infancy and saw use primarily in immunology and cancer. So he began by using the tools of epidemiology—essentially the study of how people live their lives. Some of his early papers looked at how social experience affected men with HIV. In a 1996 study of eighty gay men, all of whom had been HIV-positive but healthy nine years earlier, Cole and his colleagues found that closeted men succumbed to the virus much more readily.
    He then found that HIV-positive men who were lonely also got sicker sooner, regardless of whether they were closeted. Then he showed that closeted men
without
HIV got cancer and various infectious diseases at higher rates than openly gay men did. At about the same time, psychologists at Carnegie Mellon finished a well-controlled study showing that people with richer social ties got fewer common colds.
    Something about feeling stressed or alone was gumming up the immune system—sometimes fatally.
    â€œYou’re besieged by a virus that’s going to kill you,” says Cole, “but the fact that you’re socially stressed and isolated seems to shut down your viral defenses. What’s going on there?”
    He was determined to find out. But the research methods on hand at the time could take him only so far: “Epidemiology won’t exactly lie to you. But it’s hard to get it to tell you the whole story.” For a while he tried to figure things out at the bench, with pipettes and slides and assays. “I’d take norepinephrine [a key stress hormone] and squirt it on some infected T-cells and watch the virus grow faster. The norepinephrine was knocking down the antiviral response. That’s great. Virologists love that. But it’s not satisfying as a complete answer, because it doesn’t fully explain