The Man Who Voled the World

Last Monday, Dr.Hasse Walum gave a talk titled "Genetic and Hormonal Influences on Pair Bonding Related Behavior in Humans" at the Center for Translational Social Neuroscience at Emory. I hadn't heard of Walum's work before I saw the e-mail announcement for his talk, but a little googling got me interested. Here's the most titillating version of his findings: Walum found the gene that makes men cheat.

Okay, that is most definitely not what he found, and I got the sense from talking with him briefly that he would be the first one to tell you that. So why am I misrepresenting his results?

Dr. Hasse Walum: hard-hitting Wired reporter  David Ewing Duncan compares him to Kurt Cobain, but my science and rock star senses detect a David Bowie influence

I want to make some points about how science interacts with the media. Like I said, it was reading news reports that made me want to go hear Walum talk. As a graduate student, in his first published study, Walum reported that different forms of a certain gene are associated with the strength of relationships that men form. As he told me after his talk, he spent the week after the study was published just answering phone calls from the press. On Wired’s site I found an article about the paper that struck me as fairly cautious, even if the author did point out that "Walum did not report if he carries the tell-tale gene". Then again, on the BBC website I found a piece that opened up with a pic of actor George Clooney, pointing confidently at someone off camera, along with a caption that asks if he's "afraid of commitment?" Clearly, the press sensationalized this story. In a recent post on this blog, Emory neuroscience grad student Jordan Kohn put a lot of blame on journalists for the sensationalizing of research results. Unfortunately, there's plenty of blame to go around for the way that science gets represented in the media, and I think some of it should fall squarely on the shoulders of the science establishment.

Let's face it; Dr. Walum's study wouldn't have been published if the title was: "We can't find any evidence that this gene has anything to do with dudes that suck at monogamy". He told me as much after his talk. I don't mean to use Walum's words against him--in fact, I think anyone who's studying anything remotely interesting about the brain faces the same ethical dilemma. I'll say more about that after I sum up the seminar.

Ratty (actually a water vole)

What I didn't realize when I got the e-mail announcement was that Dr. Walum was here giving a job talk. The reason for Dr.Walum's visit became obvious when he got to the slide in his Powerpoint presentation featuring a picture of Ratty from Wind in the Willows. Ratty, for the uninformed, is a water vole, and Dr.Walum's childhood love of Ratty establishes that he's wanted to work with voles ever since he was a kid. If that didn't convince us, he also informed us that he wrote a literature review of filial mate bonding for his degree project as an undergrad, and that the inspiration for his work was Larry Young's studies of the vasopressin receptor gene in voles.

As you are no doubt aware if you have spent more than five minutes on Emory's campus doing something besides playing beer pong, a significant component of Emory's neuroscience research revolves around voles. Voles provide a convenient model for understanding how monogamy works in the brain. Species like montane and meadow voles are promiscuous, but the prairie vole is monogamous. Young's group has shown that this difference is due in large part to a 482 base-pair long snippet of DNA which the prairie voles carry. This length of DNA lies in the regulatory region of the vasopressin receptor gene—that is, the DNA near the gene itself that affects how the cell’s machinery churns out vasopressin receptors. As the name implies, these receptors bind vasopressin, a hormone known to play a role in bonding (and in other more mundane physiological tasks, like water retention). By inserting the same length of DNA in the regulatory region of the vasopressin receptor gene in mice, which are easier to manipulate genetically, you can increase affiliative behaviors in males. Male mice carrying the insert show increased levels of olfactory exploration and grooming of females. Now all we have to do is figure out how that change in regulatory regions translates into a change in behavior, and...viola! We've figured out monogamy. And cured autism. Maybe.

Not everyone feels the love for the Young lab's research agenda. Last week this blog also featured an interview with feminist science studies scholar Angela Willey. While at Emory, Dr. Willey problematized the heck out of the Young lab's research on monogamy. I'm still processing that post. The neuroscientist in me wants to defend the Young group's work with adjectives like "elegant". On the other hand, I'm sympathetic to feminist and queer critiques of neuroscience research, and I think it's important for neuroscientists to engage with those critiques. To their credit, the Young lab did just that. I could echo Willey's points about how their definition of monogamy seems to reduce a very complex human behavior to a single number which they assign to vole behavior--a simplification I'm sure the lab is aware of--but let me stay focused on the seminar.

Walum’s began his with that first paper on the human vasopressin receptor gene that got him all the press. I'll state what he and his colleagues reported in scientific terms. Then I'll explain those terms, just in case anyone finds them as opaque as I once did, before undergoing years of training that allow me to speak complete gibberish to strangers. Their results show a correlation in humans between scores on a Partner Bonding Scale and variations in a microsatellite upstream of the human gene for the vasopressin receptor. Dr. Walum created the Partner Bonding Scale, as he proudly told us, basing it on the behaviors that are measured to put a number to the strength of pair bonds between great apes and other nonhuman primates. By sequencing microsatellites in roughly two thousand Swedes, Walum et al. were able to show an association between scores on his scale and the version of the microsatellite that men carried. Microsatellites are short regions of repeats in DNA. When they occur in the regulatory regions outside of a gene, these microsatellites can affect gene transcription, and by extension the protein that the gene encodes. Case in point: the vasopressin receptor has a different distribution in the brains of the monogamous prairie voles and the promiscuous montane voles. As outlined above, the Young lab has shown that a 428 base pair insert in the genome of the prairie vole, right next to one of the vasopressin receptor genes, causes this change in receptor distribution. Similarly, Walum et al found that men who carried the so-called "334 allele" were significantly more likely to receive lower scores on the Partner Bonding Scale. You might know that alleles are different versions of a gene, or in this case microsatellite. There’s not 334 versions—the number refers to the length of the repeat. The effect they found was “dose-dependent”: men that carried one or two copies of the 334 allele were much more likely to have lower Partner Bonding Scale scores. It’s worth emphasizing, though, that the 334 allele does not show any sequence similarity to the 428 base pairs of prairie vole DNA that supposedly make that species more monogamous, and neither does any other part of the regulatory region flanking any of our vasopressin receptor genes. Different microsatellites, related effects. At least that’s what Walum et al. argue.

Cyberball: image taken from a study

of "social exclusion" (Bolling et al. 2010)

Dr.Walum went on to talk about the other studies he carried out as a grad student. One set of experiments looked at the effects of oxytocin, another hormone that some argue increases trust. To try and measure the bond that female subjects formed with males they were partnered with during the experiments, Walum and company used a videogame of sorts they called “cyberball”. In cyberball, the female subjects could choose to “throw” a ball to either an icon of their partner’s face or to an icon of an unfamiliar male. If female subjects that recevied intranasal oxytocin more readily trusted the male partners, it should show up in the cyberball score. After the talk was over, I went up talk with Dr. Walum. I had to know, did the data from cyberball tell them anything? At first he said he couldn’t remember. Then he said something about “trending in the same direction”, only to interrupt himself and say that the scores had only been significant when lumped together with other metrics they’d used. I replied sympathetically. “It’s hard to find a way to measure human behavior.” Then I told him that the Cyberball game reminded me of the Partner Preference Test, a behavioral assay designed by the Young lab to measure monogamy. In the test, voles are put in a three-part cage, with their partner on one side and a stranger on the other. Prairie voles tend to spend more time with their partner. I asked Dr. Walum if he was trying to find a way to do the Partner Preference Test with humans. “Yes, exactly,” he said, “but you can't do that with humans. You can't do the experiments you would like to do." I agreed. "I don't think that an experiment proposing that you put humans in a large plastic tank would make it past the Institutional Review Board." He went on: “With human subjects, it's all about variation. You can do some pharmacological manipulations, like with the intranasal oxytocin, but with our first study [on the vasopressin receptor allele] we had to think more about our story than about our results”, he said. “In a way we published the story that everybody wanted to hear.”

Again, I’m not trying to use Dr. Walum’s words against him. While I might not have the expertise to critique his study’s use of Generalized Linear Mixed Effect Models, I also don’t have any reason to doubt his results. As Dr.Walum made perfectly clear in the Karolinksa Institute press release that the Wired and BBC alike were so quick to quote, “There are, of course, many reasons why a person might have relationship problems.” What am I trying to say is that we should keep the economic realities of science in mind when we talk about how research filters through to the media. Every neuroscientist who complains about how the only things the press can do is cut and paste pretty pictures from fMRI studies should remember that, right now, those are the studies that get published, and by extension, the studies that get media attention. Like it or not, the axiom of “publish or perish” still applies. All these papers that only trot out sexy results “provide strong evidence”, as us science types like to say,  that studies should be registered and accepted by journals before the experiments are carried out. Scientists already write their grants this way—they sell the research they’re going to do—so why shouldn’t that be what journals are buying? This is the system that Neuroskeptic has advocated on his blog (here’s a hyperlink by way of citation). If the experiments don’t provide any evidence, then publish that lack of evidence, and save everyone else the effort of pointlessly repeating the same study.

Under this system, if neuroscientists find themselves angry about how the media represents their results, at least they can tell themselves it’s not because they're only publishing what gets them funding. I don't think that system would put an end to press releases that tout tantalizing findings, though. After all, someone has to sell the science so more science can get done. I'm guessing that's the explanation I'd get if I talked with the Man who Voled the World.

Want to cite this post?


Nicholson, D. (2012). The Man Who Voled the World. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/07/man-who-voled-world.html

The [insert adjective] Brain: Implications for Neuroscience in Popular Media

Via amazon.com

The Addicted Brain. The Female Brain. The Male Brain. Chemobrain. Buddha’s Brain. The Winner’s Brain. The Republican Brain. These days, it seems that everybody’s brain is being scanned and their behavior analyzed. In fact, these are all titles of books published in the past decade that communicate the latest findings in neuroscience and psychology research to lay audiences. As a budding neuroscientist, I am excited that science, and neuroscience in particular, has now flooded into popular American culture. Evidence of its expanding domain is everywhere: in magazines (Scientific American’s “MIND”), blogs (Neuroskeptic), radio programs (NPR’s “Radiolab”), podcasts (Nature’s “Neuropod”) and books. For further examination of the reasons for this cultural shift, see the discussion of the phenomenon in the new book “Brain Culture: Neuroscience and Popular Media,” by Davi Johnson Thorton, Southwestern University's Assistant Professor of Communication Studies.



I’m hopeful that this increase in neuroscience reporting will precipitate more public support for neuroscience research (as well as for other fields, of course), funding for and enrollment in STEM education, and improvements in scientific literacy among the American public (whose children currently rank 23rd out of 30 in science achievement scores among OECD nations [PISA 2009]); however, after sampling and digesting a smorgasbord of popular neuroscience reporting, my idealism is tempered with concern. While independent book authors and magazine editors have often received formal scientific training, many others lack the expertise required to accurately interpret science. In addition, media pundits are typically affiliated with corporate news agencies or non-profit groups that carry sociopolitical agendas, resulting in consistently biased reporting. With the advent of neuroimaging technologies, scientists are addressing highly evocative questions in neuroscience and psychology, such as the neurological underpinnings of political or sexual orientation, which the popular press is quick to pick up and spin for shock value. I will argue that the media’s frequent misrepresentation of neuroscience research poses serious threats to the public’s accurate understanding of the brain and human behavior, as well as to the neuroscientific community at large. Neuroscientists have an ethical responsibility to the public to promote fair and balanced reporting of their findings. I propose a first-step solution to this growing problem, wherein academic institutions support neuroscientists in developing an independent system of media fact-checking. Within this framework, neuroscientists can comment on the veracity of brain science reporting by the popular press.



Typically, more information is a good thing. In economics, having complete information about a product empowers the consumer to make more informed purchasing decisions and ultimately select the most suitable one. Science follows the same general principle: more data points equal more statistical power, allowing us to draw conclusions and generate theories. Once extensive data are compiled, conclusions reached, and theories refined, scientists are subjected to rigorous peer-review. Experts in each respective field meticulously verify a researcher’s claims and then either accept or reject her findings. Finally, theories are validated by other researchers’ attempts to reproduce the results or collect data that affirm or refute said theory. This empirical process forms the backbone of the modern scientific method. On this foundation, neuroscience can advance its theoretical framework explaining the brain’s structure and function.



In its truest form, journalism adheres to the same process. According to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, “journalism’s first obligation is to the truth,” and is in essence a “discipline of verification.” More extensively, the PEJ’s Statement of Shared Purpose calls for:



“A consistent method of testing information—a transparent approach to evidence—precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work…Seeking out multiple witnesses, disclosing as much as possible about sources, or asking various sides for comment, all signal such standards. The discipline of verification is what separates journalism from other modes of communication, such as propaganda, fiction, or entertainment.”



These principles clearly fall in step with good science. Accuracy (rigorous data collection), transparency (comprehensive detail of materials and methods), objectivism (allowing data to speak for itself), and validation (inviting other experts to comment) form the basis of sound science and sound reporting. While this scientist believes that the scientific community has done well in adhering to these values and policing those who fall short (largely through the process of peer review), many in the journalistic community who report on neuroscience have repeatedly failed to hold themselves accountable to their self-proclaimed empirical ideals.



Neuroscience reporting has the potential to inspire and stimulate dialogue, often managing to do just that. Part of my decision to undertake a PhD in neuroscience hinged upon the intriguing pieces I picked up on through radio and print, such as NPR’s “Radiolab,” or specialty magazines, like Scientific American MIND. Quality neuroscience reporting is typically written or edited by academics (Emory’s own Scott O. Lilienfeld edits SciAm MIND, for example) and is unencumbered by sociopolitical bias. Unfortunately, less informed or politically motivated approaches to neuroscience reporting seriously compromise the public and the research community in several ways.



Recent advances in neuroimaging technologies like fMRI and PET have enabled neuroscientists and psychologists to probe with ever-increasing accuracy the neurobiological underpinnings of human behavior. Often the most interesting research in the public eye is the most evocative. In the scientific literature, topics include the neural correlates of behavioral differences based on political affiliation, sexuality, morality, socioeconomic status, and race. For this reason, some media outlets are quick to pick up on and spin the results of such research to conform to the mores of their organizations and audiences. Poor neuroscience reporting tends to fall into one of two categories, depending on the degree to which the research aligns or misaligns with their ideologies. The “aligners” tend to hyperbolize scientific findings, overgeneralizing the scope and impact of the research, while the “maligners” discredit the findings or simply don’t report them. In extreme cases, maligners spew vitriol, exclaiming that neuroscientists are motivated by “eugenics” or “phrenology.”



A great example of this is the recent outrage expressed by the authors of “Science Left Behind,” Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell, in response to a Huffington Post article entitled “Why Republicans Deny Science,” written by author and podcaster, Chris Mooney. In his article, Mooney cites recent findings from a handful of studies illustrating, among other things, that self-identified “conservatives” exhibit stronger physiological responses to aversive stimuli and have larger amygdala volumes (a part of the brain involved in fear-processing). While Mooney accurately reports the findings and believes that this sort of science “ought to prompt more tolerance and understanding across our political divides,” a seemingly noble cause, he ventures into overgeneralization by claiming that such research may help explain “the conservative denial of science.” Berezow and Campbell angrily counter by claiming that Mooney is a eugenicist who “distorts science in order to fit a preconceived narrative.” Libel among journalists is one thing, but when they target the scientific community, things get personal for this neuroscientist. USA Today’s Jonah Goldberg, in response to Mooney, asserts that this type of “fad” neuroscience research is really “the new science of conservative phrenology.” While Goldberg keenly points out the limitations of such studies, such as sampling bias and their lack of ecological validity, he erroneously implies that no valid conclusions can be drawn from them. Obviously, misreporting and mud slinging do not constitute “excellence in journalism.” If journalists want to engage in such unprofessionalism, can they please just leave neuroscience and the public out of it?

For non-scientists who rely on news media to communicate new science, overgeneralization by the press can mislead people to draw conclusions that may incorrectly or even dangerously influence their thinking and behavior. For instance, by contending that studies in social neuroscience demonstrate how personality traits and behaviors, such as political affiliation, are “hard-wired,” reporters (such as Goldberg) misrepresent science and promote public misconceptions about the brain. It is well accepted that the brain is highly organized in advance of experience, but I challenge you to find a psychologist who will concede that behavior is “hard-wired.” In fact, quite the opposite is true; the brain is plastic, continually reorganizing itself in response to the internal and external milieu. An overwhelming body of research supports the notion that our behavioral outputs are similarly malleable. I take issue with any popular news article, book title, or headline containing the hackneyed phrase, “the [insert adjective] brain,” on similar grounds. The nuance contained within the original research can never be distilled into a single compelling phrase about a group of people. Learning about the plight of another group, also known as "perspective-taking," can increase one’s empathy for and understanding of that group, and this type of research has the power to do just that; however, do pithy headlines and brief reports like these lead people to further stereotype and distance themselves from those who are portrayed as categorically and neurologically different?



Discrediting neuroscientific findings is similarly detrimental and promotes public distrust of neuroscience and the importance of such research in elucidating the neurological mechanisms underlying human thought and experience. Take Roger Scruton's recent article in The Spectator, which introduces terms like "neurobabble" and "neurononsense," in reference to studies that link social behaviors to their neurochemical correlates (think oxytocin and pair-bonding). Scruton voices skepticism about the extent to which neuroscience can uncover the seat of human consciousness. Don't get me wrong: dissenting opinions like these are important scientific debate. I agree with Scruton that the whole of human experience cannot be distilled into a "brain in a box" theory. Nevertheless, debasing cognitive science research as pseudoscientific nonsense fosters public distrust in the pursuit of scientific explanations of human behavior. The public rightly expects neuroscientists to pursue avenues of research with the potential to enhance their understanding of themselves and others, but reading Scruton's commentary may lead a non-scientist to ask himself, "why does the public fund this kind of research if it has no value whatsoever?"



Scientists have a lot to lose here. Most research in this country is publicly funded and relies on governmental support for its advancement. Distrust of the scientific community may lead policymakers and their constituents to further restrict our meager science budget and slash discretionary spending for science education. If we are to prevent ourselves from falling even further behind other nations in science achievement, neuroscientists must step in and advocate on behalf of their own research to assure that it is communicated accurately to the American public. As scientists, we strive to better our understanding of the human condition through our research with the end goal of improving health and well-being. It’s our responsibility to make sure that our findings are presented to the public in meaningful, accurate ways that clearly illustrate the implications of our work for their individual and collective lives. I believe that scientists are falling behind in this area. However, there is hope.



Such hope may exist in the new wave of dedicated neuroscience journalists, some of whom have received formal scientific training in academia and/or industry (consider Jonah Lehrer, for example, who formerly worked in the lab of Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel). This group of reporters can act as unofficial go-betweens, translating neuroscientific findings into widely accessible dialogue unencumbered by sociopolitical bias, just as the PEJ’s Statement of Purpose suggests. The hope also lies with neuroscientists themselves. Nowadays, researchers are burdened by budget constraints that have created more and more competition for grants (less than 20% of NIH grants are funded) and publications in order to secure tenure. Coupled with advising grad students, managing a lab, teaching undergraduate courses, and attending conferences, neuroscientists are extremely busy people. This leaves very little time to engage with the public, although many rock-star neuroscientists still make time to do this public service. Given the present economic and political climate, it is of utmost importance that neuroscientists are accurately portrayed as the beneficent agents of change and discovery that they actually are.



I propose two changes that neuroscientists and their institutions can enact to begin rectifying these problems in neuroscience reporting. The first is on a neuroscientific community-wide level, the second on an institutional level. With respect to the neuroscience community, I believe that an organization could be established to “fact-check” the media’s reporting of research findings. Specialists in a given field could comment openly and publicly on the veracity of journalistic reports, in similar fashion to Politifact.org’s fact-checking of political candidates’ public statements. Alternatively, websites like Scholarpedia.org could be utilized more widely by researchers to make their ideas and findings readily accessible. Recent interest in open-access publishing for academic journals (see commentary in Science Magazine news) may be part of the solution; however, the esoteric language of research science may limit public gains from this strategy. Some neuroscientists directly engage with the public already, and are active on social networking sites like Twitter (see “Neuroscientists Who Tweet”), and I think this is a step in the right direction. On an institutional level, service and community outreach are encouraged for research faculty, and basically required for junior faculty seeking tenure. However, this could be better organized to encompass participation in fact-checking organizations or informational curation sites like Scholarpedia.



In summary, as lay interest in popular neuroscience continues to proliferate, journalists eschewing their obligation for fair and balanced reporting jeopardize both the public and the neuroscientific community. It is imperative that journalists recognize the importance of their position and act in accordance with their self-defined governing principles of ethics, as many already do. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that dissenting opinions are uncalled for. Rather they ought to avoid overgeneralization and discrediting. It is also incumbent upon scientists and the academy to engage the public in accurate, thoughtful, yet accessible dialogue about their research, and to find effective ways of doing so. Failure to do this has profound implications for the future of neuroscience research and science education in this country, and it is our ethical obligation to ensure that neuroscientists are portrayed as the good guys and gals they actually are.






Want to cite this post?


Kohn, J. (2012). The [insert adjective] Brain: Implications for Neuroscience in Popular Media. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/06/insert-adjective-brain-implications-for.html