Forest Bathing

Posted on December 9, 2016 by Roger Gosden

If we can bathe in sunshine or in glory or in misery, why not in a forest? I didn’t invent the expression: it’s from the Japanese (shinrin-yoku) who believe time spent in nature boosts health. Most people agree that gulping fresh air on a forest walk or on a mountain or beside the sea is beneficial, although there is little scientific evidence to support the belief. Perhaps that disconnect shouldn’t surprise us in an era when beliefs often trump facts in national debates and people still turn to quackery and naturopathy to cure their ills. But the idea seduces me. Breathing pine-scented air and inhaling the “sighs” of vegetation along a trail is more than engaging; it resonates with a belief in “biophilia,” that despite our retreat to urban living we have not lost an inborn sympathy with mother nature and need to spend time with her.

West Virginia Pocahontas County

The Elk Valley, Monongahela Forest, WV

Our remote ancestors regarded the outdoors otherwise. They crouched in caves and huts to shelter from the elements and large predators, and the Brothers Grimm played on primitive fears by inventing menaces prowling in the Black Forest. We may be alienated from nature by modern living, but it is now regarded more as a kind mother than a cruel step-father, even while it still harbors dangers. Forests are called lungs of the world, and even if we never visited the tropics we know they throb with biodiversity we need to survive. We are told that bathing in the bosom of the plant kingdom, where our ancestors spent their days, restores health and well-being, but it doesn’t need to be a forest. It can be a garden, woodlot or urban park will do, and immersion should start in childhood (Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv).

We now live mostly indoors which is a novelty in human history, but no English word describes it. The closest I can find is the Japanese hikikomori for people whose lives are spent indoors mostly around movies and the Internet, although this word often refers to recluses rather than the general habit I have in mind.

After musing about these words I wondered if my belief in the healthy outdoors was mere wishful thinking, based on quasi-science. Hocus pocus. Of course, walking is an exercise proven to promote health, but that wasn’t the evidence I was seeking because an ardent hikikomori can take exercise in a gym with barely any exposure to outdoors, and even then to a polluted street. I wanted more evidence of forest bathing to justify what my gut told me, although I knew that a negative result would not diminish my pleasure. I found a trio of factors: Bugs, Ions and Oils. I remember them by the acronym BIO, although I found that lends far more biological authority than warranted by the data. This is what I learned.

Bugs. We are more likely to be caught indoors by a bug like staph, strep, tubercle bacteria or by one of the host of viruses and allergenic molds, and other hazards exist there too, including carbon monoxide, radon, toxic vapors and smoke from fires and tobacco. Since Ms. Nightingale started throwing hospital windows open we accept the virtues of fresh air, but outdoor air isn’t empty ether even deep in the countryside where it still swarms with microbes and spores, exposing us to 2,000 types a day according to one estimate. Most of them are benign, but are they good like the country folk who offer a friendly handshake and refreshment to hikers? I read that inhaling bugs in country air can boost our microbiome, the vast community of commensals in our bodies that is now touted as a touchstone of health. I wish it were true, but the claim stretches credibility as much as homeopathic medicine. The evidence is as microscopic as the microbes.

Ions.  I also read that woodland air and sea air zap microbes in the way that air ionizers and ozone generators are claimed to cleanse homes, offices and hospitals, but it’s a false parallel. These devices are not necessarily safe because ozone can be hazardous to breathing, and so fresh air is safer because the concentrations are far lower, and below the threshold for killing bugs. Besides, the old story about the smell of ozone at the beach is a myth, and a meta-analysis in BMC Psychiatry (2013) failed to trawl from multiple studies any hint of association between charged ion concentration and mood, sleep or anxiety.

I was losing hope in BIO when I reviewed the last factor in the trio.

Oils. Air is wonderfully scented by terpenes and other odoriferous oils in groves of pines, firs or cypress. These oils are called phytoncides because they are plant vapors with antimicrobial activity. They serve plants by inhibiting molds that would otherwise cause rot, and they make fruit and foliage less appetizing to herbivores. Garlic and tea tree oil are familiar domestic examples of phytoncides. Unfortunately for the hypothesis, the concentrations of phytoncides likely to be encountered on forest walks are far too low to eliminate bacteria and spores, unless you spray the air with a bottle of Pine-Sol.

This quick survey of the literature confirmed the doubts I began with, so I cast around for another explanation before abandoning the notion of forest bathing.

I wondered if the sight of green vegetation was the key. Green is close to blue in the spectrum, beloved by artists and interior decorators for pacifying our emotions, and just might account for some of the benefits of light therapy for the winter blues (Seasonally Affective Disorder). If green is naturopathic, does it follow that people who can’t see the color (deuteranopia) have poorer health? I found evidence for this wild hypothesis in old clinical studies where patients lacking the retinal pigment for green were more likely to have bipolar disorder. But this connection with mental health was weak, and it can be explained not only by the inability to see green fields and luxuriant foliage but more likely by another gene that is closely linked to the pigment gene on the same X-chromosome. Another dead end!

Perhaps there is no physical basis for forest bathing, leaving the explanation all in the mind. Maybe the uplifting feelings we get from gazing at nature affect the endocrine and autonomic nervous systems to reduce stress and anxiety, and the beauty of nature distracts us from worries carried from home and work. Dr. Roger S. Ullrich published a study over thirty years ago that lends some support for a psychosomatic explanation. He monitored two groups of surgical patients who were comparable in every respect except one: they were either recovering in rooms with windows overlooking a blank wall or had a view of trees and other vegetation. Those who could see a more natural landscape were released earlier from hospital, needed less analgesia and had fewer post-operative complications. The windows were closed and the indoor environment was controlled so the difference outcomes were not explained by outdoor air. His research, which has influenced hospital design in many countries, began inauspiciously when he was bed-ridden as a teenager and often looked out at the lone pine tree outside his window.

Anne Frank was also confined to home as a young person, but for a very different reason. She often gazed out her window at the large chestnut tree in her street in Amsterdam. She couldn’t go for a forest walk but the tree connected her to nature and raised her spirits.

annefrank

Perhaps forest bathing is no more, and no less, than a soulful experience, and we don’t need bugs, ions and molecules to account for it. It’s not a new explanation, and John Muir wrote about it long ago: “Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”

Next Post: British Dentists created Heavy Metal Generation

 

 

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The Berkeley Thanksgiving

Posted on November 22, 2016 by Roger Gosden

It will be missed by no one on this side of the North Atlantic that Thanksgiving Day 2016 falls on Thursday. Yet, some Virginians mindful of another tradition already had their Thanksgiving a fortnight ago. They resent the hegemony of Massachusetts for the celebrated day because historical records prove they have precedence.

Thanksgiving memorial plaque

Thanksgiving memorial plaque

The claim originated in a 1619 voyage of 36 men onboard the Good Ship Margaret out of Bristol, England. It was a tub of only 35 feet, somewhat shorter than twice the length of my office at home, and yet it sailed across a stormy ocean for ten weeks to the Chesapeake Bay. After the last storm had flung itself on the vessel, the exhausted mariners steered it into the King James River to anchor off the appointed land, which became known as the Berkeley Hundred and is today the Berkeley Plantation.

The ship’s master, John Woodlief, had returned to England after surviving the Starving Times of 1609-10 at Jamestown Fort, some 25 miles downriver. It says something about him that he left home comforts to go back to the Virginia wilderness, and when he

Berkeley Plantation House

Berkeley Plantation

returned he was wiser than on the 1607 voyage which conveyed a mixture of idle gentlemen and press-ganged paupers, neither of whom were well-prepared for the rigors ahead. He recruited craftsmen with skills needed in the fragile colony they would help to build. His ship was filled to the gunwales with clothes, kitchen utensils, tools, weapons, Bibles and beads to trade with Indians, and a great many groceries—8,000 biscuits and loaves, 160 lb butter, 127 lb bacon and horsemeat, 60 bushels of peas, 20 bushels of wheat, 6 tons of cider and 5 ½ tons of beer (healthier than water).

The sponsors in London instructed Woodlief to hold a solemn service of thanksgiving as soon as they arrived at their destination. The prepared formula read: “We ordain that this day of our ships arrival, at the place assigned for plantation, in the land of Virginia, shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

Another Good Ship Margaret arrives November 6, 2016

Another Good Ship Margaret arrives November 6, 2016

A manuscript recording their voyage and first thanksgiving was lost until Dr. Lyon Tyler of the College of William & Mary rediscovered it in an old archive called the Nibley Papers in the New York Public Library. Virginians like to point out not only their claim for primacy, but that Thanksgiving Day was first instituted as an annual religious observance, unlike the one-off feast enjoyed by the Pilgrims at Plymouth, MA, with their new buddies from a local Indian tribe. Unfortunately, the Berkeley rite stopped after an Indian Uprising in 1622 until 1958 when the current owners of the property reinstated it.

The Berkeley Thanksgiving was celebrated this year on Sunday November 6. Large numbers of families spent most of the day at the estate under blue skies because the Indian summer was pushing back the advance of fall. Below the old plantation house in a

Re-enactors who struggled to sound English

Re-enactors

meadow that rolls down to the waterside, there were games for families, food and craft stalls, replica encampments, a corn maze, candle dipping and doll making, parading and dancing, music and magic. We watched a re-enactment of Captain Woodlief and his men landing from a replica of the good ship and giving thanks for a safe passage. Nearby, Indians cheerfully stomped a Friendship Dance to the rhythm of drums, although I wondered if their ancestors were horrified to see Englishmen on their turf. The crowd joined in the Pledge of Allegiance (hand on heart), sang the National Anthem and, finally, the history of Berkeley was retold by the present owner and one of Woodlief’s descendants.

Even a cynical observer of seasonal festivals would agree this was a happy scene of people united in pride for their country and history. Who could imagine under that blue sky there were dark thoughts lurking behind smiles? But soon after we went home we cast votes in the General Election, which beat down memories from two days before and replaced beautiful unity with ugly partisanship. Something to think about when I say:

happy-thanksgiving-typography-black-no-background-2400px

 

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Carving for the Ages (Petroglyphs)

Posted on November 6, 2016 by Roger Gosden

A slab of yellow sandstone larger than a dinner plate lay at the foot of an old maple tree close to a woodland trail in the Allegheny Mountains. The shadow of an inscription on its flat face made me pause for a closer look. It read:

billymemorial

There are several hundred cemeteries dotted across the county, but few of them are “official.” The county resists zoning laws, so private landowners can bury the dead in their own backyards. Casualties of war, especially the fallen enemy, were not always honored with ceremony or laid in consecrated ground but rolled into a hastily dug grave where they moldered from anonymity to invisibility. But if the memorial stone marked Billy’s grave, he had not been buried carelessly.

Federal troops were known to be stationed there during the Civil War. Probably they were involved in the fierce engagement with the Confederate Army at Droop Mountain in November of that year that swung in their favor. Perhaps Billy was mortally injured in the fight, or maybe he died of measles, which was claiming victims in both armies.

soldiers-gravestoneTo examine the lettering on the hard stone, which was probably made with a knife point, is to realize this was a tenderly made memorial amidst so much suffering and misery. Billy has long gone out of memory, and would have disappeared from notice if his platoon merely tied two sticks to make a wooden cross, but carving a rock gave the young man a greater longevity, at least in name. Had the inscriber chosen a softer rock, like my father’s first headstone, it would not be legible for long, but deep gouges in the stone preserved Billy’s biosketch for 150 years.

On an ancient route across a rocky plain in Anatolia, and near the town of İmamkullu, a Hittite paused to carve a boulder over 3,000 years ago. The images are worn but you can see a princely soldier and a god, as well as incomprehensible hieroglyphs. Petroglyphs are found the world over from prehistoric times, and if you want to leave a memorial to posterity never leave it in ink or paint, but carve it on rock. Hard rock!

I mused about Billy’s gravestone while I chipped away at a boulder on our property, some twenty miles across the county. It’s hard to explain the impulse for my first rock carving, although the boulder offered a flat, vertical surface decorated with several species of lichens with a mossy seat on top. It is beautiful, and it was irresistible even for a virgin of the rocks.rockwoodcarving72dpi

If I was an accomplished rocksmith with time on my hands I might have carved a noble, sphinx-like head of a Shawnee brave, because this was the tribe’s hunting ground. My ambition was far more modest, the mere cutting of eight letters under the eye of James Alexander Thom, a family member who carves wood when taking time out from writing historical novels. I won’t add my signature or even my initials, preferring the carver to remain anonymous and somewhat mysterious like Billy’s inscriber.

When the cerebral effort of design is finished and the repetitive work of execution begins, a different part of the brain seems to kick in. As the rational region relaxes, the imagination can take over for dreaming to the noisy accompaniment of chipping. I wonder if anyone will stop to ponder the inscription in future centuries and millennia? I guess they might need a translator to read the word, “ROCKWOOD.” And I try to imagine what will those people will look like and how much the environment will have changed. The struggle to look forward probably stretches the imagination as much as when they try to look back at me, or I try to picture the Hittite.

When I returned to Billy’s gravestone I met the landowner Tom, whose family has lived on the mountain since they came as pioneers in 1830. He restores old log cabins transplanted on the back of a big flat-bed truck from across the Alleghenies, even as far away as Pennsylvania. Billy may have known one of the cabins because it used to stand on Droop Mountain. They are far more comfortable after renovation with a new tin roof and stone chimney than for the families who built them, and make attractive rental properties for visitors. Few cabins survive on their original sites because wood quickly rots when they are no longer cared for and the roof falls in, whereas castles and cathedrals quarried out of rock in the mother country of Tom’s ancestors will endure for eons. Without conservationists like him there would be fewer testaments to the lives of struggling pioneers.

After chatting about how the logs were cut and chinked, I asked him about the memorial stone on his land. I could tell from his changed demeanor that he had news. “It’s not the original! After lying there so long, someone stole it fifteen years ago.” He found a stone to replace it and carved the tribute to Billy from memory. “It’s a pretty good replica,” he told me.

The memorial says something about the carver again, the second time around, but I blush at the notions expressed sometimes about Appalachian mountain men by ignorant outlanders. As an afterthought Tom said, “It’s a pity it wasn’t too big to be carried away,” which brought my boulder to mind.

Next Post: Thanksgiving at Berkeley Plantation

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A Third Parent contributes her Mighty Mites (Mitochondria)

Posted on October 29, 2016 by Roger Gosden

Two biological parents are enough for any baby, aren’t they? Maybe not: sometimes it’s better to have two mamas.

The media have hyped a story that broke in September about a boy who was conceived by “mitochondrial replacement therapy.” His parents had lost two previous children to Leigh syndrome, a rare but severe condition affecting the brain, nerves and muscles caused by mutations in mitochondria, the mites that energize every cell inherited from our mothers’ egg (never from our fathers’ sperm). Less than 2% of the boy’s mitochondria were damaged, which was well below the 18% threshold for disease. An anonymous egg donor has given him the prospect of a full and healthy life.

Mitochondrial transfer

Thousands of tiny mitochondria fluorescing brightly in a human egg and its moon-like polar body

John Zhang, whom I knew when I worked in NYC, led the clinical team and is director of a fertility service that is popular there among Asian Americans. But he carried out the procedure in Mexico where, according to reports of his words, there are “no rules (for assisted reproduction).” That statement was as responsible for the media furor as the procedure itself, and he may regret playing into the polemics of conservatives at a time when Mexico is considering legislation for assisted reproduction. Ahem!

His “breakthough” probably put noses out of joint in a Newcastle team in my mother country because they have done the painstaking research work. The UK has often been at the forefront of reproductive technology (clinical IVF, Dolly the cloned sheep, etc.), and has a well-respected system for ethical review (HFEA) which, admittedly, delays the launch of new treatments such as this projected to help 10-20 British families annually. The Geordies should have been first, but were scooped.

Two methods exist for switching mitochondria when a prospective mother carries a harmful load of mutations in her mitochondria. Zhang chose the spindle method in which maternal DNA is transferred to replace the nuclear DNA removed from a healthy donor egg before it is fertilized with her husband’s sperm. Only one of the five embryos thrived in vitro, but after placing in the uterus it conceived a healthy pregnancy.

In the 1990s, a New Jersey clinic transferred small fractions of cytoplasm from donor eggs to improve the quality of eggs for patients who repeatedly failed with IVF treatment. None of the women were carrying mitochondrial mutations, but the clinical team had a hunch that eggs often fail to develop if they are under-energized, but can be boosted with an infusion of fresh mitochondria. After treatment resulting in 17 viable pregnancies with two of the girls missing an X chromosome (Turner’s syndrome), the FDA set a bar too high for the program to continue.

There are now reports from other countries of imminent births after mitochondrial transfer, and these too are said to aim at improving embryo quality instead of correcting a genetic fault. And in Boston a company is offering an expensive treatment (‘Augment’) for improving fertility by transferring mitochondria from a type of ovarian stem cell that some of us doubt exists (my recent critique is available on request).

These therapies have been called ‘eugenic,’ which is a word that makes us shiver, but if they are safe and effective and purely aim to restore a healthy population of mitochondria, need we worry? Some commentators have called the boy in Mexico a GMO baby, but that’s strictly inaccurate, because the mitochondrial genome containing a mere 37 genes and 0.0005% of the nuclear DNA was switched, not chemically altered. Moreover, there is no basis for concern about transmitting his new mixture of mitochondria to future children, although a girl treated likewise could and that possibility requires deeper study. We can’t be sure how her mitochondria would segregate in the bottleneck when eggs inherit tiny numbers of them, possibly creating a very different mix compared to her grandmother and donor, even the remote possibility of bringing back the former disease to her descendants.

Robert Hughes coined the expression Shock of the New for a TV documentary about modern art, but it is an apt expression for public responses to the ongoing revolution in fertility treatment. I imagine hands lifted in horror after every new development is announced, but it would be a hard person who condemns joyful parents by saying their healthy children “should never have been born!” The arrival of healthy babies quenched most opposition to IVF in the 1980s, and I predict the same for the next generation of therapies provided they meet the same standard of ethics and safety.

Human fertility has been said to be the prerogative of God or the gods. The Ancient Greeks had a hoard of myths, and woe betide gods or mortals who broke the reproductive code! Hera was the patron of marriage and childbirth, yet she covered the shame of being raped by Zeus by marrying him. She ate lettuce to improve her fertility, probably because its white sap resembles semen, which is something to think about next time you are served a salad.

One of her sons was Hephaestus. The virgin goddess Athena fled when he lusted after her (he was ugly), but spilled his seed on the ground, which caused Gaia, the Mother of the Earth, to conceive Erichthonius (“Eric” for shorthand). Athena made no biological contribution to Eric, but she was the object of desire and necessary for his conception, and afterwards she helped to bring him up. She was the third parent, and no less for that.

Eric looked so monstrous that he alarmed people and they tried to conceal him (depicted by Peter Paul Rubens). The Greeks were pondering extraordinary conceptions long before we added a third parent by  surrogate pregnancies with IVF or mitochondrial transfer. They posed the question whether a parent is defined by nature or nurture, but the answer is, of course, nature and nurture, and three parents can be better than two.

Next Post: Rock Carving for the Ages

 

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Feast of the Animals

Posted on October 4, 2016 by Roger Gosden

The Feast is held today, October 4. I don’t mean a feast of animals like a medieval banquet crammed with meaty dishes, but an ecclesiastical “feast” offered for animals, for blessing them and wishing them health and longevity. It commemorates Francis of Assisi.

Ah, there’s a saint worth the name! Even non-Roman Catholics like me will bow reverently to that Voice of the Poor and Patron Saint of Animals.

saintfrancis_openclipartAlthough today is the official saint’s day, it was celebrated by congregations last Sunday. Brave clergymen (or clergywomen in some denominations) allowed pets to be paraded along the naves of their churches or cathedrals to a station for blessing, praying silently there will be no dog fights or “accidents.” The scene we imagine is rather droll but has a serious intent. Whatever our religious beliefs and observances, if any, it’s a ritual worthy of the calendar to remember the services animals render to us, and be thankful for the ineffable beauty of nature that inspired Francis:

canticle

Pet parades are as much for the children as for their animals. Children open their hearts more to animals than we adults, or at least until we reach out to them again for companionship in our graying years. Parents give pets to kids for many reasons, but rarely for the life lessons that animals can teach them.

The first lesson they taught me was to leave wild animals be. As we didn’t have a dog or cat, I created a “zoo” with rodents, reptiles and beetles captured in local woods and fields, and threw in some exotic insects to impress my friends. It was a far less ambitious collection than the menagerie Gerald Durrell kept on the Island of Confu when he was growing up in the 1930s (My Family and Other Animals). But the baby tortoise I brought home from Greece (when it was still legal) died soon afterwards, and we buried it in the pet graveyard at the bottom of the garden. I felt guilty for shortening a life that might have continued for many years, even to this day, but its death was sacrificial for others because I never kept a wild animal again. A tortoise was one of Gerry’s first casualties too, and although he launched a famous zoo it was founded on the principle of conserving endangered animals rather than for entertaining humans.

The next lesson was far more subtle and is seldom taught at home or in school because words for the hardest fact come thick and slow. A child’s dilated sense of time gives her or him a false scale on which to gauge life’s arrow: Grandpa and other elders seem to have existed forever, or from the remotest dot beyond the ken of the very young. Measuring the arc of time for growing up and growing old is impossible without experience, but a pet’s lifespan can be observed from beginning to end (unless it is a donkey).  A puppy or kitten given to a child in infancy has traveled its entire existence before the end of grade school, and a hamster races through life in barely two years. Knowledge of the compressed lives of animals offers a scale for comparing with human histories, and gathering the uncomfortable realization that we too have an expiration date. When the natural lifespan of other species is apprehended, a death “full of years” is understood as the way of nature, and neither a tragedy nor a cause to Rage, rage against the dying of the light (Dylan Thomas).

The last lesson was about that final passage, which of course we dread anyone should confront prematurely like my little tortoise. Our anticipation of reaching the end of life’s arc is a price we pay for a rich cognitive life, and, although some people have faith that the rainbow reaches down to gold in the earth, it is mostly regarded otherwise. Animals are spared that anxiety, except perhaps at the final moment.

My favorite saint passed away after completing his life’s work at a ripe age for his era and, I like to think, without pangs of anger and regret. There is a story that the closing words of his famous canticle praising “Sister Death” were added on his deathbed while singing with two of his closest brother friars. I wonder if he chose the feminine adjective as a comfort word to convey the peace of a tender sister instead of fighting the passage from life, as if it were an adversary. As far as we know, he yielded to nature like the animals he loved, and went gentle into that good night.

New Post: Two Biological Mums but One Dad

 

 

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