Humans

Discoveries of mass graves of Indigenous children in Canada have prompted new scrutiny of the residential school system – including the role physicians played in unethical experiments, says paediatrician Samir Shaheen-Hussain

Humans

4 August 2021

By Roxanne Khamsi

Unmarked graves were found in this cemetery near a former residential school outside Cranbrook, CanadaDave Chidley/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
IN RECENT months, more than 1300 unmarked graves of Indigenous children have been discovered in Canada. They were found at the sites of former residential schools, facilities authorised and funded by the Canadian government to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. Between the 1880s and 1990s, 150,000 children were taken from their families and placed in these schools, which were largely run by the Catholic church.
The recent discovery of these graves has sent shock waves around the world and confirmed what many Indigenous communities have long maintained – that children sent to these schools lived in dangerous and traumatic conditions, and many of them entered never to be seen again.
The legacy of prejudice that led to separating children from their parents continues to affect Indigenous communities in Canada today. Until recently, for example, when Indigenous children living in remote areas of Quebec needed emergency evacuation for medical care, their parents were barred from accompanying them. Samir Shaheen-Hussain, a paediatric emergency physician, was part of a successful campaign in 2018 to change that.
His participation in activism for Indigenous rights inspired him to look more closely at the residential school system. In his new book, Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting medical colonialism against Indigenous children in Canada, Shaheen-Hussain examines the role that doctors and scientists working at the schools played in perpetuating the system and endangering children’s lives. He writes that not only did they let deadly diseases such as tuberculosis run … More

By Layal Liverpool

Systemic inequalities mean Black people often face worse health outcomesER Productions Limited/Getty Images
Inflamed: Deep medicine and the anatomy of injustice
Rupa Marya and Raj Patel
Allen LaneAdvertisement

THE covid-19 pandemic exposed stark inequalities globally, with socially and economically disadvantaged groups facing higher than average risks of becoming seriously ill and dying.
“Not all patients were equal,” write Rupa Marya and Raj Patel in their new book, Inflamed. The authors, both academics and activists, write: “[In the US,] Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) were over-represented, their bodies subject to inflammation of all kinds, long before the SARS-CoV-2 virus ever settled into their lungs. Not only lack of access to health care, but systemic social and economic disenfranchisement rendered their bodies most susceptible to Covid when it hit.”
Inflammation is the body’s response to infection or damage. Immune cells spring into action and a flurry of chemicals are released to promote repair and recovery – for instance, by destroying invading microbes or healing a wound. Once healing is complete and balance restored, inflammation should subside.
But sometimes it persists, transforming the body’s healing mechanism into what the authors describe as “a smoldering fire that creates ongoing harm”. For doctors to truly identify and treat the underlying causes of ill health, the two argue, they must begin by understanding how systemic racism and inequality contribute to this type of persistent, harmful inflammation in people’s bodies.
Inflamed delves into a growing body of research examining how inequality drives health disparities. For instance, Black people in the US are more likely to earn less and have more debt compared with white people, contributing to chronic stress. They are also more likely to be exposed to environmental health hazards, such as lead in drinking water, and to live in areas with limited access to affordable, healthy food options, making it difficult to maintain a healthy diet.
“High mortality rates in Black infants are halved when they are cared for by Black physicians”
All these factors, driven by systemic racism, combine “to create a potent pro-inflammatory threat”, write Marya and Patel. They add that the unequal distribution of these triggers of inflammation may explain why Black people have the highest rates of cardiovascular disease in the US.
Daily discrimination damages people’s health too, argue Marya and Patel. For instance, a 2018 US study found that Black men who reported directly experiencing unfair treatment by police, or hearing stories about it, had on average shorter telomeres – caps of DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes, and that shorten each time a cell divides – compared with Black and white men who didn’t report experiencing this trauma. “Racism is a cognitive load that is experienced throughout the body,” write the authors.
Doctors also contribute, they argue. In the US, Black newborn babies die at more than twice the rate of white newborns. Research suggests this mortality rate is halved when Black infants are cared for by Black physicians. Meanwhile, race-based medical practices, such as the use of an adjustment for Black race in equations used in many countries to estimate people’s kidney function, also contribute to health disparities.
Doctors need to be more aware of how someone’s environment and life experiences contribute to disease, say the authors. Even something as simple as air quality differs significantly depending on the environment, they say, with disparities within countries and between them. Most deaths linked to air pollution occur in low and middle-income countries.
Inflamed takes the reader on a journey deep inside the human body, travelling through the immune, circulatory, digestive, respiratory, reproductive, endocrine and nervous systems. In doing so, it reveals how external inequalities affect these systems and cause serious harm.

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By Annalee Newitz

noEnde/Shutterstock
PICK up a pack of cigarettes and you will probably see a terrifying picture of cancer lesions with a stern warning about how smoking can kill. For decades in the US, this was called the surgeon general’s warning, and it was a reminder that cigarettes are so bad that the government’s top doctor was against them. Now, the current surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, has recommended that we apply similar warnings to social media misinformation.
Speaking in mid-July to CNN, Murthy said that social media networks played a “major role” in circulating misinformation about covid-19. He said that this “harms … More

By Michael Marshall

The Plimpton 322 tabletAndrew Kelly/Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University
The ancient Babylonians understood key concepts in geometry, including how to make precise right-angled triangles. They used this mathematical know-how to divide up farmland – more than 1000 years before the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, with whom these ideas are associated.
“They’re using a theoretical understanding of objects to do practical things,” says Daniel Mansfield at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “It’s very strange to see these objects almost 4000 years ago.”
Babylonia was one of several overlapping ancient societies in Mesopotamia, a region of southwest Asia that was situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Babylonia existed in the period between 2500 and 500 BC, and the First Babylonian Empire controlled a large area between about 1900 and 1600 BC.Advertisement
Mansfield has been studying a broken clay tablet from this period, known as Plimpton 322. It is covered with cuneiform markings that make up a mathematical table listing “Pythagorean triples”. Each triple is the lengths of the three sides of a right-angled triangle, where each side is a whole number. The simplest example is (3, 4, 5); others include (5, 12, 13) and (8, 15, 17).
The triangles’ sides are these lengths because they obey Pythagoras’s theorem: the square of the longest side is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. This classic bit of mathematics is named for the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who lived between about 570 and 495 BC – long after the Plimpton 322 tablet was made.
“They [the early Babylonians] knew Pythagoras’ theorem,” says Mansfield. “The question is why?”

Mansfield thinks he has found the answer. The key clue was a second clay tablet, dubbed Si.427, excavated in Iraq in 1894. Mansfield tracked it down to the Istanbul Archaeology Museums.
Si.427 was a surveyor’s tablet, used to make the calculations necessary to fairly share out a plot of land by dividing it into rectangles. “The rectangles are always a bit wonky because they’re just approximate,” says Mansfield. But Si.427 is different. “The rectangles are perfect,” he says. The surveyor achieved this by using Pythagorean triples.
“Even the shapes of these tablets tell a story,” says Mansfield. “Si.427 is a hand tablet… Someone’s picked up a piece of clay, stuck it in their hand and wrote on it while surveying a field.” In contrast, Plimpton 322 seems to be more of an academic text: a systematic investigation of Pythagorean triples, perhaps inspired by the difficulties surveyors had. “Someone’s got a huge slab of clay… [and] squashed it flat” while sitting at a desk, he says.
Journal reference: Foundations of Science, DOI: 10.1007/s10699-021-09806-0
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By Francesca Steele

Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) in OldUniversal Pictures
Time is definitely not a healer in Old, the latest film from writer, director and producer M. Night Shyamalan, where the bodies of stranded tourists hurtle towards old age at an accelerated rate due to a local geological quirk.
This fascinating (and, typically for Shyamalan, high-concept) premise raises all sorts of thorny questions. What is important to us when time is short? What can time teach us –  and what can it steal from us? Can ageing prosthetics ever be applied convincingly?
Shyamalan, the film-maker behind supernatural thrillers including The Sixth Sense and The Village, has become as famous for the disappointing execution of excellent premises as he is for dreaming them up in the first place.Advertisement
Old, based loosely on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, starts out as one of Shyamalan’s best efforts in years. It begins with such creepy camera angles and creepy casting that the slow pacing for which he is sometimes lambasted works perfectly.
Dread rises from the outset. Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) have brought their children, 6-year-old Trent (Nolan River) and 11-year-old Maddox (Alexa Swinton), to an idyllic resort that Prisca pointedly reminds us she found randomly on the internet.

The dialogue is a little excessive. “You’re always thinking about the future. It makes me feel not seen!” yells Prisca. “You’re always thinking about the past. You work in a goddamn museum,” retorts Guy.
But if the script feels clunky, the production doesn’t. The family swan around their lush hotel room, as the camera spies them menacingly from outside like a predator. Trent has a habit of asking random hotel guests what they do for a living, but the way the camera pans across his subjects’ faces makes the exchange feel unsettling rather than adorable, as if we’re being introduced to an ensemble soon to be picked off.
A special day at an idyllic, private beach is arranged by the over-eager hotel manager. At the cove, hemmed in by rocks and swiftly abandoned by their shifty driver (Shyamalan himself, in the kind of cameo role beloved of Alfred Hitchcock), they find themselves stranded with a cast of characters worthy of an Agatha Christie murder mystery.
There is a doctor (Rufus Sewell, on fabulously sinister form), his trophy wife (Abbey Lee), their young daughter (Mikaya Fisher) and his mother (Kathleen Chalfant). Then there is psychologist Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird), who has epilepsy, her nurse-husband (Ken Leung) and a rapper (Aaron Pierre) whose partner washes up dead (and naked) the moment they arrive, heralding an onset of strange and increasingly grotesque symptoms.

Swimsuits become too tight. Patricia’s seizures disappear. A tumour balloons in minutes and must be cut out right there on the beach. A pregnancy is delivered moments after it begins.
There is no doubting Shyamalan’s talent for suspense. In the film’s first half, he labours lovingly over one shot where characters age years as the camera pans across the beach. In other scenes, it perches just behind children’s heads so we can observe their parents’ alarmed expressions without knowing precisely what is so shocking. Like a Stephen King novel, the horror here is not in the revelation but the build-up.
Sadly, Old is a stylistic triumph but a narrative dud. The second half of the film is severely hampered by too many undercooked ideas and a plot too intent on explaining itself. All those questions about what value we put on time – or ought to – are skirted over too fast. Philosophical enquiry makes way for a signature Shyamalan plot twist, which, in the end, feels perfunctory and unsurprising.
The film quickly loses its grip when it asks us to emotionally invest in characters even as it dispatches them one by one, collapsing in the process from a sinister body horror into a confused (sand)castle in the air.
Old is in UK and US cinemas now

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By Krista Charles

Artist’s impression of a pack of Eurasian hunting dogs chasing preyMauricio Antón with scientific supervision by D. Lordkipanidze and B. Martínez-Navarro
The earliest humans known to have lived outside Africa shared their environment with hunting dogs – and may even have stolen food from them.
For many years, archaeologists have been excavating at a site near Dmanisi in Georgia, where they have found evidence that ancient humans – sometimes put in the species Homo erectus – were present about 1.8 million years ago. The Dmanisi humans provide the earliest fossil evidence yet found of hominins outside Africa.
But as ancient humans moved out of Africa, it looks like they encountered prehistoric hunting dogs that were moving into Africa, because the remains of one such dog has now been unearthed at Dmanisi.Advertisement
Saverio Bartolini-Lucenti at the University of Florence, Italy, and his colleagues analysed the remains, which came from a young adult Eurasian hunting dog (Canis (Xenocyon) lycaonoides), an extinct species of hunting dog related to modern African hunting dogs (Lycaon pictus).
“Picture an African hunting dog, but stouter with long limbs like an Irish wolfhound, but not so thin,” says Bartolini-Lucenti.

This particular animal would have lived about 1.8 million years ago, making it the earliest ever found in Europe.
These wild dogs are believed to have originated in Asia, spreading into and across Europe and Africa between about 1.8 and 0.8 million years ago.
“Finding it in Dmanisi – which is an important site at the verge, the border of three continents (Asia, Africa and Europe) – is interesting because it is at a timeframe where we didn’t have any occurrences of this form,” says Bartolini-Lucenti.
Modern African hunting dogs have adapted to consume their prey very quickly before it can be stolen by larger, stronger predators, such as lions and hyenas. The Eurasian hunting dogs may have interacted with early humans in a similar way, says Bartolini-Lucenti, with the humans scaring off the dogs to steal their prey.
Working out how two ancient species interacted is difficult, “especially when the fossil record is poor”, says Marco Cherin at the University of Perugia in Italy. “But I am confident that the record from Dmanisi may offer new surprises in the future, and this paper represents a good beginning.”
Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-92818-4
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By Clare Wilson

Would you share or steal?PURPLE MARBLES/Alamy
Most people play fair in lab tests where they can share or steal small sums of money – yet in real life, unfairness and cheating is common.
Now, the apparent contradiction has a new explanation. In lab experiments where people are able to take money from groups of people, they nearly always do, but the same individuals tend to be fair when dealing with just one other person.
Economists have long investigated people’s behaviour through simple tests in the lab, such as the two-person “dictator game” in which one person is given a small sum of money and they choose whether to give some of it to their playing partner, who they haven’t met before. Typically, most people give some away, although they get nothing in return, suggesting we have an intrinsic sense of fairness.Advertisement
In real life, though, unfairness is common, ranging from office workers failing to contribute their share of communal snacks through to large-scale financial fraud. We often assume that people who cheat in such ways are a minority, or even that antisocial people are drawn to careers where they can exploit others, says Carlos Alós-Ferrer at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
To investigate, Alós-Ferrer’s team designed a new monetary test called the Big Robber game, where any unfair actions affect larger numbers of people.

The researchers asked groups of 32 people to play the dictator game and two other similar games in pairs, and the results were the same as those usually seen, in that most people acted generously.
Half the group were also asked if they would like to rob some of the earnings of the other half, which totalled €200, on average. They could take half the amount, a third, a tenth or none of it. The team repeated this process with 640 people in total.
Of the 320 individuals given the robbery option, 98 per cent took at least some of the money and 56 per cent took half. To save on costs, the researchers didn’t let everyone actually go home with their chosen amount, but one of the 16 robbers in each group was randomly selected to receive this sum.
The findings suggest that people can be fair to individuals and selfish to larger groups, says Alós-Ferrer. “Human beings are perfectly capable of displaying both kinds of behaviour.”
People may act differently in real life to how they do in lab games, but the findings suggest economists should investigate group interactions as well as two-person ones, he says.
Journal reference: Nature Human Behaviour, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01170-0

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By Graham Lawton

Matthew Horwood/Getty Images
A COUPLE of weeks ago, I had an experience that was new to me, and which proved both infuriating and enlightening: I was harangued on Twitter for not being green enough. Last month, I wrote about driving my sick cat to and from the vet, and how the gridlocked traffic looked like a depressing taste of our post-pandemic future. “Shocked by yr column blaming traffic,” my chastiser tweeted at me. “You ARE the traffic; have you tried cycling?”
Deeply unfair. But it gave me a glimpse of what many people must feel when their behaviour falls short of the standards … More