Noreen and Marilyn about 1995 |
Marilyn and Noreen about 1993 |
Although
I’d upped my wardrobe at the Geophysical Laboratory from K-Mart specials to
L.L. Bean clothing, I was certainly not fashionable. In 1978, I met visiting
student Noreen Tuross who had been working with my colleague Ed Hare on amino
acids in ancient bones. Noreen was getting her Masters degree from Bryn Mawr
College, a fancy women’s school on the Philadelphia Mainline. We met just prior
to her around-the-world trip funded by a fellowship from the Watson Foundation.
Watson, one of the founders of IBM, created a foundation that recognized
students from smaller schools who had big ideas for changing their science
discipline. Noreen was, and still is, a visionary with respect to weaving an
understanding of medical science with the study of ancient humans.
The day we met Noreen, a
natural platinum blonde, is as far away from a “dumb blonde” as you can get.
She wore tall leather boots, a mid-calf skirt, and a long woolen coat, probably
from a swanky department store like Bloomingdales or Garfinkels. She spent the
following year climbing into caves with her new husband, Dick Waldbauer,
finding saber tooth tiger and other extinct animal bones that she brought back
for analysis at the Geophysical Lab.
In 1985, Noreen had
finished up a Ph.D. in medicine from Brown University and was moving with her
family, including her precocious 5-year old, Jacob Waldbauer, now a Professor
of Biogeochemistry at the University of Chicago, to the start a postdoc at the National Institutes of Health working
on the chemistry of bone formation. I offered them a place to stay at my small
house in Wheaton, MD, until they could find a somewhere to live. They moved in
for a month finally buying a house a couple of miles away in Rockville. We
became good friends. When Chris and I married a year later, Noreen, a trained
opera singer, sang at our wedding.
Noreen started a second
postdoc at the Geophysical Lab in 1987, specializing in both modern and fossil
protein studies, having training in immunology and ancient DNA methodology, as
well as protein biochemistry. She wanted to investigate the nitrogen isotope
fractionation between a mother and her nursing infant. This idea was important
for understanding why the human population rose dramatically after the origin
of agriculture. Theoretically, infants should have a nitrogen isotope
composition that is slightly greater than their mothers, because “you are what
you eat” plus a little bit more.
Our hypothesis was the
following: prior to a secure source of food for raising children, mothers (i.e.
hunter gathers) needed to nurse their children for longer periods of time. Once
food could be grown and cached, mothers (e.g. agriculturalists) could wean
their children earlier, get pregnant and have more children, thus leading to a
rise in population. At the time of this study, I was pregnant with my daughter
Dana. We eagerly anticipated her birth. In fact, Noreen came to the hospital
with a bucket of dry ice to save my placenta for “further study”, when we got
old and had nothing better to do. She also came when Evan was born, so we have
a replicate placenta. The placentas were kept at the Smithsonian Institution
for years, and small pieces now remain in her lab at Harvard University! Dana
and Evan at first were embarrassed by this fact, but now they’re proud.
I began sampling Dana’s fingernails and mine right after she
was born. The first set of fingernails was “in the bag” so to speak, but they
then seemed to be growing very slowly. I would examine them every day when I
returned from work. Our day care “mother” Susan Agugua was watching Dana full
time. Finally, I mentioned to Susan that I was puzzled as to why Dana’s
fingernails were not growing. Turns out, Susan was trimming them! Thereafter,
she saved them and the study continued.
In addition, samples were obtained from more than a dozen
other mothers and their infants who were exclusively breastfed. As we
predicted, we found an enrichment in nitrogen isotopes between mothers and
infant pairs as we had hypothesized. As
the babies were weaned onto solid diets comparable to what their mothers were
eating, the nitrogen isotope differences between mothers and babies decreased
over time (Fogel et al., 1989). After babies were fully weaned, their nitrogen
isotope values were the same as their mother’s.
We then recruited
Douglas Owsley, a forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, to
analyze human bones from two populations: hunter gathers from Tennessee and
corn-growing Indians from South Dakota. We found that even though these two
populations depended on very different sources of food, children were weaned
about at the same age, roughly a year old, and their nitrogen isotope values in
bones matched the adults in the population by the time they were two to three
years old. The nursing effect has been measured in populations of other
mammals---seals (Newsome et al., 2010), cave bears, killer whales (Newsome et
al., 2009), as well as being a keystone work for anthropological investigations
of ancient civilizations (Katzenburg and Waters-Rist, 2018; Xia et al., 2017).
The study was published in the
Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Yearbook, but was never accepted at a
peer-reviewed journal. Although Science magazine
published a photograph of Noreen and me and wrote about our work in their news
column, the paper was rejected without review because it was deemed to not be
of “general interest”. The Journal of
Physical Anthropology rejected the paper because a reviewer wasn’t sure the
study was widely applicable to different populations. We were disappointed and
frustrated that this important work was not recognized appropriately. Today,
people accept our findings as important, but not everyone has read that
original paper with Dana’s and my fingernail data prominently displayed in a
figure. This study is yet another example of how scientists need to stick to their ideas.
If the data is good, then let time and follow up research decide if it is
relevant.
This one is good. keep up the good work!..
ReplyDeleteFennel