A global map showed infant mortality rates, with the highest rates in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. “There is almost no reason for death at this scale except for poverty,” said John Mutter, a professor and deputy director/associate vice provost of The Earth Institute at Columbia University.

In the past 30 years, there have been 26 international conferences on poverty and hunger, said Pinstrup-Anderson. While all ended with goals and targets for improvement, none have been achieved.

"Even though 186 countries agreed with the Millennium Development Goals to reduce the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day by half, no one's doing anything about it," said Pinstrup-Anderson, former director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute. "It's disgraceful - it’s immoral and appalling. We could achieve the goals, but won't."

Population growth and the increasing rate at which we’re using available resources makes the prospects for improving the world situation “extraordinarily difficult,” said panelist Peter Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden and a former president of AAAS.

He pointed to the growing use of cars in China and the importance of such transportation to the economy of both the country and world automakers. But the negative impact of cars on the environment is already well-known, Raven said. “What we need to do in science and technology is to innovate in ways that are sustainable.”

Claude Fauquet, an expert on the cassava plant at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, said the starchy tropical root crop is one of the top calories sources in poor countries. While productivity averages 10 tons per acre, it could be raised to 80 tons per acre with improved cultivation techniques and better pest and disease control.

Other panelists urged support for genetically modified crops, saying that Western political opposition results in hunger and death in the developing world.

A woman who has just lost her child because of drought and crop failure “couldn’t care less” if food was genetically modified, Pinstrup-Anderson said. “She wants a solution.”

“Genetically modified crops need to be developed according to the needs of different places in the world,” said Raven. “But insisting on the idea that they are the solution, or that they should be proscribed - it doesn’t make sense in either direction.”

The panelists said that much could be done immediately to relieve world poverty, and that the effort would bring benefits not only to poor nations, but to affluent nations as well.

Panelist Roger Beachy, president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, said scientists and technological experts must go into poor countries as equal partners with local researchers and officials, sharing their knowledge and acknowledging their ignorance. “There is a lot for all of us to do, in all disciplines,” he said.

Rising Tide of Ocean Plagues

A group of epidemiologists, veterinarians and ecologists report in a panel session today that humans are affecting the oceans in ways that are changing the dynamics of disease. Previously harmless pathogens are becoming killers when combined with contaminants; parasites that invisibly control the balance of species in an ecosystem are disappearing; and changes in sea surface temperature can trigger cholera outbreaks thousands of miles away.

"Human activities are knocking things out of balance," says Andrew Dobson of Princeton University. "For some pathogens, we're seeing nasty synergistic effects with contaminants, such as PCBs."

"Paradoxically, diseases also play an important role in healthy ecosystem functioning," said Dobson. "These changes tend to slip under the radar screen until they show up in ecological cascades that lead to wildlife and human health problems."

A marine mammal rescue crew attends to a sea lion found with domoic acid poisoning. (Photo courtesy Marine Mammal Center)

In the 1970s there were only a few diseases documented on coral reefs. Today there are over 30, and the numbers are increasing exponentially. "The scary thing is that even in the Great Barrier Reef, one of the most protected reefs in the world, researchers are seeing more diseases every time they look," says David Kline of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

High abundance of parasites in coastal environments can be a positive indicator of ecosystem health, and reductions in parasite populations may be an important indicator of ecosystem malfunction. If habitat loss, fishing, hunting, or pollution degrades a coastal ecosystem, scientists will see a decline in parasite populations.

"Often, we don't realize we miss infectious diseases until we have invasive species that become pests without their natural enemies," explains Kevin Lafferty of the U.S. Geological Survey. "Parasites act like thermostats – when a species becomes abundant it is more susceptible to infectious diseases. The disease acts like a safety valve, keeping populations in check."

Researchers have discovered how changes in sea surface temperature in the Pacific Ocean are linked to cholera epidemics across the globe in Bangladesh.

Cholera expert Mercedes Pascual and her colleagues studying cholera outbreaks in Bangladesh found that transmission of the waterborne disease is highest during high rain and flooding, when sanitary conditions break down and people are forced into tight quarters.

They say these high rain events are linked to warmer ocean conditions in the Pacific during El Nino periods. This connection to remote sea surface temperatures via increased local rainfall points to the possibility of using ocean temperatures as an early warning system to predict and prevent disease outbreaks.

"We can think of changes to the oceans locally, but in terms of human health we have to look globally," says Pascual. "This is a global connection. As we change ocean properties through climate change, remote consequences are likely to arise – we may not even know what they are yet."

"As children, if we cut ourselves at the beach, our mothers told us to wash it in the ocean - seawater was always perceived to be clean and healthy. We are seeing ominous signs that this is changing - surfers in California are now advised to have regular hepatitis inoculations and you really don't want to expose an open wound to near shore water," says Dobson. "We should begin to worry deeply about the health of the oceans."

Nantechnology as a Cancer Fighter

To help get the most potent anti-cancer drugs off the shelf and into the clinic, University of Michigan researchers are using two nanotechnology approaches to precisely deliver drugs and visualize individual cells.

One system is a synthetic molecule called a dendrimer, and the other is a tiny plastic bead called a PEBBLE.

A dendrimer is a star-shaped synthetic molecule that can be as small as three or four nanometers in diameter, about the size of a single molecule of hemoglobin in a red blood cell. That means it is fine enough to slip through the walls of blood vessels and get inside cells.

Dendrimers are the first working biologically active nanodevices. (Photo courtesy Michigan Nanotechnology Institute for Medicine and Biological Sciences)

The ends of a dendrimer's many branching arms can be studded with molecules that bind to specific receptors on the surface of cancer cells. Other arms of the molecule can carry chemicals to mark or kill the target cells.

Injected into the bloodstream, dendrimers converge on cancer cells, then enter the cells. There, they deliver the drugs that kill cancer cells. In preliminary animal studies, drugs appear to be 50 to 100 times more effective with this sort of direct delivery, Baker said.

A group led by toxicologist Martin Philbert and biophysicist Raoul Kopelman is working with tiny plastic beads called PEBBLES - probes encapsulated by biologically localized embedding.

Sized at 20 to 600 nanometers, PEBBLES can be coated with targeting molecules and used as a precise contrast agent for imaging and drug delivery. Once they reach their goal, sound or light can trigger them to carry out their mission.

In some cases, the killer agent can be something as simple as reactive oxygen, says Philbert, a professor of toxicology and senior associate dean for research in U-M's School of Public Health.

Adaptive Resource Management

"Adaptive environmental management means there is a commitment to have on-going local community involvement in making and assessing environmental policy," said Daniel Bronstein, professor of community, agriculture, recreation and resource studies at Michigan State University. "It's a hot topic right now, but the question has always been whether the government can implement the monitoring that is needed to make it work."

Bronstein moderates a symposium entitled "Adaptive Environmental Management: The Valles Caldera Experience" today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. The participants are examining the adaptive environmental management strategies in place at the Valles Caldera National Preserve, an 89,000-acre federal property in northern New Mexico, as a case study.

The Valles Caldera Trust was created by the Valles Caldera Preservation Act of 2000 to preserve and protect the historic Baca Ranch of New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains. (Photo courtesy Los Alamos National Lab)

"There's a need for a new paradigm of science in land management," said Thomas Swetnam, a forest ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and director of UA's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. "The Valles Caldera has set up this paradigm as an experiment and it's underway."

One of the challenges of public lands management is managing the land for many uses. Like many other federal lands, the Valles Caldera National Preserve is managed for multiple use, which includes hunting, outdoor recreation such as hiking, and livestock grazing. Unlike other federal lands, the preserve was established with a mandate to become economically self-sufficient by the year 2015.

Adopting adaptive management is one of the keys to meeting those goals, Swetnam said in a presentation to delegates today.

"We need a new approach to integrating science with management. A key way to do this is to build scientists directly into the management structure - to have scientist/managers," he said.

At the Valles Caldera, the chief scientist has equal status with the preserve manager in the organizational chart in contrast to scientists' positions in other federal land management organizations.

Another innovation at Valles Caldera is the integration of community members into management of the preserve. Seven of the nine seats on the board of the Valles Caldera Trust must be held by New Mexico residents.

Adaptive management encourages the conduct of ongoing experiments on-site to determine how environmental conditions or management activities affect natural resources, incorporating the scientific findings into management activities.

Greenhouse Emissions and Ancient Climates

Human activities are releasing greenhouse gases more than 30 times faster than the rate of emissions that triggered a period of extreme global warming in the Earth's past, according to an expert on ancient climates.

"The emissions that caused this past episode of global warming probably lasted 10,000 years. By burning fossil fuels, we are likely to emit the same amount over the next three centuries," said James Zachos, professor of Earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Zachos is a leading expert on the episode of global warming known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when global temperatures shot up by five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit). This abrupt shift in the Earth's climate took place 55 million years ago at the end of the Paleocene epoch as the result of a massive release of carbon into the atmosphere in the form of two greenhouse gases - methane and carbon dioxide.

Previous estimates put the amount of released carbon at two trillion tons, but in research published last June, Zachos showed that more than twice that amount entered the atmosphere over a period of 10,000 years. If present trends continue, this is the same amount of carbon that industries and automobiles will emit during the next 300 years, Zachos said.

Once the carbon is released into the atmosphere, it takes a long time for natural mechanisms, such as ocean absorption and rock weathering, to remove excess carbon from the air and store it in the soil and marine sediments.

"It will take tens of thousands of years before atmospheric carbon dioxide comes down to preindustrial levels. Even after humans stop burning fossil fuels, the effects will be long lasting."

Coming Up

Presentations scheduled for the next three days include, among many others, environmental reporting in the United States, worldwide sustainable fisheries, transmission of animal diseases to humans, marine mammals, zoos, genomics, energy solutions, biosecurity, environmental terrorism, and reducing human environmental health risks.