June 18, 2008
New Treatment Saves Man With Deadly Skin Cancer
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:13 p.m. ET
ATLANTA (AP) -- An Oregon man, given less than a year to live, had a complete remission of advanced deadly skin cancer after an experimental treatment that revved up his immune system to fight the tumors.
The 52-year-old patient's dramatic turnaround was the only success in a small study, leading doctors to be cautious in their enthusiasm. However, the treatment reported in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine is being counted as the latest in a small series of successes involving immune-priming treatments against deadly skin cancers.
''Immunotherapy has become the most promising approach'' to late-stage, death-sentence skin cancers, said Dr. Darrell Rigel, a dermatology researcher at the New York University Cancer Institute in New York who had no role in the research.
Still, the immune-priming experiments have yet to yield a consistent therapy. Even researchers who worked on the experiment involving nine patients and just one success are quick to couch the result. ''This is only one patient,'' said study co-author Dr. Cassian Yee of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
And two years after his remarkable recovery, the patient fell out of contact with researchers and scientists do not know his current condition. The man, who lives in a small town in Oregon, has declined media interviews, Yee said.
Melanoma is a cancer in the skin cells that make pigments and cause skin to tan, as part of the body's attempt to protect itself from ultraviolet radiation in sunlight. Cancer begins when radiation overloads and damages the cells, causing mutations.
About 62,000 news cases are diagnosed in the United States each year, and there are about 8,000 melanoma deaths.
When caught early, melanomas can be easily treated by surgically removing the cancerous patch of skin. But ''once it has spread, basically nothing works,'' Rigel said.
Recently, however, scientists began thinking they might have another option -- helping the body's immune system.
Doctors had long thought that immune system cells, which so effectively attack foreign threats like viruses, were giving a pass to cancer cells. The theory was that because cancers cells are generated by the body, the immune system perceived them as part of the body.
But about 20 years ago, some scientists discovered that immune cells could latch onto and attack skin cancers.
''There's a long history behind all of this,'' said Dr. Steven Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute, a pioneer in that research.
In recent experiments, Rosenberg and other researchers have focused on souping up a certain kind of immune system cell -- the ''killer T cells'' that envelop and kill foreign agents. Experiments have also involved giving patients chemotherapy or other drugs that are toxic to patients but can help the immune system's ability to fight cancer.
The new research took a different approach. The Hutchinson center scientists focused instead on specific helper T cells that are adept at locking onto a cancer cell and guiding the killer cells to their target.
The researchers drew blood from patients, located the special helper cells and then grew more of them in the laboratory. They then infused roughly 5 billion of the cells back into the patients -- without chemotherapy or the other harsh drugs.
''It's a simpler and less toxic approach to melanoma than had been previously employed,'' said Dr. Louis Weiner, director of the cancer center at Georgetown University.
The fourth patient they treated was the Oregon man, who had a melanoma on his back before it had spread to his groin and right lung. He was treated in July 2005. Two months after the treatment, advanced scans of his body revealed no tumors. Two years after the treatment, he had no symptoms.
More good news: There were no harmful side effects. What's more, an analysis showed that his immune system had targeted not only one type of protein target on cancer cells, but two others as well.
It's possible the treatment spurred his immune system to expand its cancer-fighting ability in new ways, Yee said.
However, the case raised many unanswered questions. The man had been treated earlier with other drugs. It's possible those treatments had already weakened or altered the cancer.
Also, none of the eight other patients in the study did as well. It's not clear why.
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On The Net:
New England Journal: http://nejm.org
Friday, June 20, 2008
June 20, 2008
Spike in School’s Pregnancies Leads to Report That Some Resulted From Girls’ Pact
By KATIE ZEZIMA
BOSTON — At least 17 girls at the public high school in the seaside town of Gloucester, Mass., are expecting babies, and a Time magazine report says nearly half became pregnant after making a pact to do so and raise the children together.
Local officials reached Thursday would not confirm the existence of such a pact but acknowledged that many of the 17 pregnancies — a total four times as many as last school year at the 1,200-student school — had been intentional.
“I’ve heard some of them were not accidents; some of them were pleased when they got the results,” said Greg Verga, a member of the Gloucester School Committee. “I did hear that there were cases where a teen went in several times for pregnancy tests and seemed depressed when it was negative.”
Joseph Sullivan, the principal of the school, Gloucester High, could not be reached for comment. But Time quoted him as saying that of the pregnant students, almost half, none older than 16, had engaged in the pact.
Reached on Thursday, Mayor Carolyn Kirk said the existence of such an agreement was “believable, in the sense that it would explain this spike” in teenage pregnancies.
Ms. Kirk, a member of the school committee, also said that some of those who impregnated the students were men in their mid-20s.
Gloucester is a fishing town of 30,000 that is encountering hardships with the decline of the fishing industry.
“This is a city in transition going through a hard economic time,” Ms. Kirk said. “There are cuts in economic programs, cuts in services, cuts in after-school programs, and they’re all impacting the social climate. We really let these kids down.”
“It’s the social environment these girls are coming from,” she added. “They think that a baby can give them love or give them status or fill an empty space in their life, and these girls are very, very young. And I think if you talk to any teenage mother who is caring for an infant, the road is not easy.”
The surge in teenage pregnancy has brought a heated debate over contraception and education in Gloucester, which is heavily Roman Catholic. The school clinic’s medical director and its chief nurse practitioner both resigned in May after the hospital that administers grants for the clinic opposed making contraceptives available to students.
The clinic does not distribute contraceptives, and Gloucester High School’s health curriculum has been cut for budget reasons, meaning there is no sex education, Ms. Kirk said.
Meanwhile, in addition to the 17 girls known to be pregnant, others continue to arrive at the clinic asking for pregnancy tests.
The school committee is now considering educational programs on teenage pregnancy and weighing whether the clinic should distribute contraceptives. Mayor Kirk has instructed her health director to compile information about the issue from the state, other agencies and independent experts. She said the committee hoped to have a policy regarding education, contraception and related services in place by the start of the next school year.
“It’s very complicated,” she said. “There are many layers, and I am insisting on a process where the school committee can explore all of the layers, get good information, find out what works in other communities and come to a good decision on behalf of our children.”
Spike in School’s Pregnancies Leads to Report That Some Resulted From Girls’ Pact
By KATIE ZEZIMA
BOSTON — At least 17 girls at the public high school in the seaside town of Gloucester, Mass., are expecting babies, and a Time magazine report says nearly half became pregnant after making a pact to do so and raise the children together.
Local officials reached Thursday would not confirm the existence of such a pact but acknowledged that many of the 17 pregnancies — a total four times as many as last school year at the 1,200-student school — had been intentional.
“I’ve heard some of them were not accidents; some of them were pleased when they got the results,” said Greg Verga, a member of the Gloucester School Committee. “I did hear that there were cases where a teen went in several times for pregnancy tests and seemed depressed when it was negative.”
Joseph Sullivan, the principal of the school, Gloucester High, could not be reached for comment. But Time quoted him as saying that of the pregnant students, almost half, none older than 16, had engaged in the pact.
Reached on Thursday, Mayor Carolyn Kirk said the existence of such an agreement was “believable, in the sense that it would explain this spike” in teenage pregnancies.
Ms. Kirk, a member of the school committee, also said that some of those who impregnated the students were men in their mid-20s.
Gloucester is a fishing town of 30,000 that is encountering hardships with the decline of the fishing industry.
“This is a city in transition going through a hard economic time,” Ms. Kirk said. “There are cuts in economic programs, cuts in services, cuts in after-school programs, and they’re all impacting the social climate. We really let these kids down.”
“It’s the social environment these girls are coming from,” she added. “They think that a baby can give them love or give them status or fill an empty space in their life, and these girls are very, very young. And I think if you talk to any teenage mother who is caring for an infant, the road is not easy.”
The surge in teenage pregnancy has brought a heated debate over contraception and education in Gloucester, which is heavily Roman Catholic. The school clinic’s medical director and its chief nurse practitioner both resigned in May after the hospital that administers grants for the clinic opposed making contraceptives available to students.
The clinic does not distribute contraceptives, and Gloucester High School’s health curriculum has been cut for budget reasons, meaning there is no sex education, Ms. Kirk said.
Meanwhile, in addition to the 17 girls known to be pregnant, others continue to arrive at the clinic asking for pregnancy tests.
The school committee is now considering educational programs on teenage pregnancy and weighing whether the clinic should distribute contraceptives. Mayor Kirk has instructed her health director to compile information about the issue from the state, other agencies and independent experts. She said the committee hoped to have a policy regarding education, contraception and related services in place by the start of the next school year.
“It’s very complicated,” she said. “There are many layers, and I am insisting on a process where the school committee can explore all of the layers, get good information, find out what works in other communities and come to a good decision on behalf of our children.”
June 20, 2008
China Presses Injured Athletes in Quest for Gold
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
SHANGHAI — When China’s champion 10-meter platform diver suffered a detached retina while training, a year after winning a gold medal in the 2004 Athens Olympics, family members and fans speculated about the imminent end of a great career.
The parents of the diver, Hu Jia, had surrendered him to trainers from the Chinese sports establishment at the age of 10, and had seen little of him since then. In an interview with a Chinese newspaper after the diver’s injury, his father suggested that this was sacrifice enough. Had he known his son risked blindness, the father said, “I would never have sent him off to dive.”
But less than two months before China hosts the Olympics for the first time, Mr. Hu is training and competing fiercely again, aiming to bolster a national diving squad that China hopes will dominate the sport this summer.
“The Beijing Olympics is an enormous glory to our generation,” Mr. Hu, whose other retina was also injured, was quoted in the Chinese media as saying last year. Speaking of another gold medal, he added, “I will do my utmost to grab one, unless my eyes are really blind.”
Pressured by the national athletic system and tempted by the commercial riches awaiting star performers in the 2008 Games, China’s athletes are pushing themselves to their limits and beyond, causing some to risk their health in pursuit of nationalist glory.
“An astonishing amount of manpower, money and goods have been poured in, so much so that it’s inappropriate to be revealed publicly,” said Lu Yuanzhen, a professor of sports sociology at the Academy of Sports Sciences at South China Normal University. If the country’s athletes do not perform up to expectations, he added, “the entire nation and its people will lose face.”
Since surpassing Russia to win the second most gold medals in the 2004 Olympics, its highest ranking ever, China has held an unofficial but undeniable ambition to cap the hosting of the Games by surpassing the United States and finishing atop the medal board.
The resulting pressure is felt by nearly all of China’s Olympic aspirants, from still largely unheralded performers in relatively unglamorous sports to the country’s brightest marquee names, like Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets center who sat out the final two months of the N.B.A. season with a stress fracture in his left foot but is still expected to play for China’s national team.
Athletes regarded as potential gold medalists have been urged out of retirement, and some female stars have been urged to resume training and competing soon after giving birth. Previous gold medal winners, meanwhile, have heard for four years that failure to pull off a repeat victory will let the whole nation down. Many have trained for the Games despite serious injuries. A female weight lifter, Tang Gonghong, persevered until early this year despite having such high blood pressure that her chief coach said it “threatens her life at any moment.”
‘Don’t Retreat’
These pressures can perhaps be seen most clearly in the recent experience of Liu Xiang, a Chinese track athlete who became a national hero and the country’s most popular sports star in Athens when he won the 110-meter men’s hurdles, a sport in which China had never excelled. Mr. Liu’s coach was recently quoted in China Daily, the official English-language newspaper, as saying, “Officials from the State General Administration of Sport once told us that if Liu cannot win another gold medal in Beijing, all of his previous achievements will become meaningless.”
So far, Mr. Liu has not had to contend with a serious injury. But last August, after winning the track world championships in Japan, he spoke of the agony of high expectations. “I’ve been tortured these days,” Mr. Liu said. “I was afraid of speaking too much. I’ve never been so nervous; more nervous than in the Olympics, because there’s too much attention on me.”
For many athletes, playing through injuries is standard practice. Most of China’s Olympic-caliber competitors are tightly controlled by a system that manages almost every aspect of their lives, often from early childhood. This includes housing, education, medical care and interactions with the public and the news media. In this system, decisions about training regimens and the risks of injuries do not get much of a public airing. The case of Zheng Jie, a top female doubles tennis player, however, provides a glimpse of how the obligation to perform often operates.
Despite a painful ankle injury, Ms. Zheng played a punishing schedule last year to gain tour points required to compete in the Olympics. In a news conference after she lost in the first round of the French Open, she broke down in tears. “The pain in my foot was so strong I could hardly concentrate,” she said.
Ms. Zheng said her doctor had told her that she risked permanent injury if she kept playing without treatment and rest. But in an interview, she said her coach denied her request to concede the French Open match. In a television interview after her defeat, the coach, Jiang Hongwei, said Ms. Zheng and her teammate, Yan Zi, “had too much concern for their injuries, which was an important factor in their performance.”
“The philosophy of our sports system has several bad points,” said Chen Peide, former director of the Zhejiang Province Sports Bureau. “Urging people to tenaciously strive to succeed, to be faster, to jump higher, to be stronger and to win more gold medals usually comes at the expense of athletes’ health.
“When they’re having a 100- or 102-degree fever, we tell them not to give up so easily,” he said.
Mr. Chen said that a Communist war slogan, “Don’t retreat from the front lines with light injuries,” was a pet phrase of Chinese athletes and coaches.
While Ms. Zheng invoked her doctor’s advice in appealing to her coach, for many other Olympics hopefuls, medical decisions are made without consulting medical professionals.
“The athletes themselves basically have no idea of their injuries and they usually don’t have a say” in how they are treated, said Dr. Wang Yubin, the medical director for the sports injury department at Shanghai East International Medical Center. Decisions about how to handle injuries of important athletes, he said, are made by officials of the sporting establishment.
Sacrificing for a Payoff
If it is true that the system pushes athletes hard, many athletes are just as demanding of themselves. Since the 1980s, when the commercialization of sports began in China, money has become a powerful incentive alongside the drive for glory. “I once treated a national weight-lifting champion and warned him not to carry on in the sport anymore,” Dr. Wang said. “I told both him and his parents that in the worst case, he could be paralyzed for life. The parents replied that there was nothing for their child to do but persevere.
“They said, ‘What else can he do if he doesn’t lift weights?’ ”
Li Zhuo, a retired silver medalist in the women’s weight-lifting 48-kilogram category in 2004, put it another way. “Once you win gold, your status is changed and you become another person,” she said, referring to the monetary awards and business opportunities showered on victors. “One Olympics can change an athlete’s life, and that’s pressure.”
Hu Jia, the gold medal diver, for example, was born to laid-off workers in Hubei Province in central China. When he was 6 years old, his parents piled quilts on the ground, then let him jump from a bed to practice diving. Three years later, he was spotted by a former diver and sent to train with a coach in Guangdong, where he made the provincial team. He was considered relatively untalented by coaches and mocked by the public as a perpetual also-ran before the 2004 Games. But he distinguished himself through unrelenting hard work, eventually beating out the favorite, Tian Liang, for a gold.
Although a spot on this year’s squad is no sure thing, he has shown the same determination in working his way back from injury, forgoing anesthesia during eye surgery because he hoped it would speed recovery. “There are so many difficulties, surgery and injuries on the road, but I have to keep up to the last,” he told a newspaper in Wuhan.
According to a study published in 2000, 24 percent of Chinese divers have had retina injuries. Yu Fen, a former national coach, said the high rate was because of poor screening of young athletes for congenital eye problems and antiquated, high-intensity training methods. Divers wear no goggles, and repeated impact with the water can damage eyes, Chinese medical experts say, especially if divers fail to close their eyes just before hitting the water.
Dr. Wang Yongli, a sports medicine expert at Beijing Sports Hospital who discovered a high incidence of retina damage when he conducted a survey at the end of 1990s, said there had been minor changes in training techniques since then. But he said he did not expect them to have much effect on the rate of injury.
“I don’t have any solid numbers to show what it’s like in other countries, but the rate should be lower compared to what I’ve found in the Chinese team,” Dr. Wang said.
“The training regimen of foreign athletes by no means compares to ours, meaning the hours devoted to training, and the number of dives into the water. Chinese divers are professionals, which means they practice all day long, while Australians and Canadians might be a bank clerk or a dentist, who only spend two hours practicing after work.”
As suggested by the injunction to athletes against retreating from the front lines, China’s national sports system does indeed borrow heavily from wartime, albeit largely from the cold war. Within five years of taking power in 1949, Mao Zedong adopted many of the features of the heavily centralized sports system of China’s then-Communist ally, the Soviet Union.
As in the Soviet Union, China’s new sports establishment was deliberately conceived as an instrument of nation-building, a tool of mass mobilization and even of foreign policy, aimed both at increasing the country’s prestige and promoting feelings of integration among the people.
Experts say, however, that the two systems quickly diverged as ties between Moscow and Beijing soured.
“The Soviet system was centered on industry, with factory sponsors for each team, while the Chinese system was centered on government and military units,” said Susan Brownell, professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and author of “Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China.” “This created an aspect in the Chinese system of intense rivalries between the provinces, as well as between provinces and the central government.”
Selection of athletes at the provincial level may begin when they are as young as 6, experts say, with as many as 2 percent of grade school students flagged as promising. These children are placed in all-expenses-paid sports schools and “filtered” through increasingly intensive competitions that weed out all but an elite 80,000 who find homes on provincial teams. Of those, only a tiny fraction will make the next big step, earning a place on China’s national team.
The Strategy of Success
“Pressure doesn’t just come from the central government, but from each province, and even from the cities the athletes come from,” said Mr. Chen, the former Zhejiang Province Sports Bureau director. “Quotas are assigned to each province, and if a province won several gold medals last time, it should perform at least as well this time. The promotion of sports officials in each province depends on how many medals their province has won.”
In many sports, parents can go years without seeing their children, and may speak to them only once or twice a year. But local and provincial officials are unstintingly attentive, showering gifts on the families during Spring Festival, China’s most important holiday, to make up for the children’s absence.
Major changes to China’s sports policy were instituted at the start of the era of economic reform in the early 1980s. Deng Xiaoping, then China’s top leader, announced the “Ten Year Sports Guidelines” and China returned to Olympic competition after a 32-year absence.
This led to greatly increased spending on sports and new training methods, pioneered in the 1980s by Ma Junren, a legendary coach from Liaoning Province who insisted on multiple, grueling training sessions per day for track athletes rather than the two sessions that were customary in the West. Mr. Ma and many of his runners, known as “Ma’s army,” fell into disrepute and were withdrawn from Olympics competition in the late 1990s when many tested positive for steroids.
A pillar of China’s recent strong rise in the Olympics-medal tallies has been the astute targeting of sports where medal opportunities seem greatest. In some categories, competition is relatively thin.
“The Chinese have been very strategic in where they have put their energies,” said Ms. Brownell, a visiting professor at Beijing Sport University. “They have put major efforts into training for new events, so that they can set records as soon as the events come into effect. This has been the case with the triple jump, the pole vault and with women’s weight lifting.”
Speaking of women’s weight lifting, Dai Guangyu, former vice chairman of the China Weight Lifting Association, said China’s national system had allowed it to invest in developing female weight lifters beginning in the 1980s. “Other countries didn’t have that many people involved,” Mr. Dai said.
Since the 2000 Olympics, when women’s weight lifting was introduced, China has won half of the 14 gold medals awarded, and on the eve of the Beijing Games, pressure is as high in this sport as in any to at least hold the line on gold medals. Mr. Dai acknowledged that a successful push in this sport — widely seen as dangerous and unglamorous, making it hard for muscle-bound women to find work or spouses when their careers end — depends on recruiting among the rural poor. With its heavy training, it also depends on being able to closely control an athlete’s life.
Wang Mingjuan, one of three aspirants to represent China in the 48-kilogram category, was asked to try out recently in a higher weight category to give China an even better shot at winning medals. But she injured her lower back and has returned to her normal weight class. Her parents, who say they see her once every three or four years, said she had told them in their last phone call not to worry.
“We don’t have much money, and the life was hard,” her mother, Wang Meiyu, said, explaining the decision to send her to a sports school at the age of 9. “She was so little and we couldn’t see her often, but when we visited, my heart felt bitter and sour. It was so tough.”
Unless Ms. Wang and her teammates win gold, Chen Xiaomin, a women’s weight-lifting champion in the 2000 Olympics, said the bitterness was likely to continue. “It takes at least 10 years’ practice before you can become a world champion,” Ms. Chen said. “Once you win a world championship, you can go to college for free, or work, or become an official. If you don’t, you get nothing but injuries all over your body. No diploma, no job, no skill.”
China Presses Injured Athletes in Quest for Gold
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
SHANGHAI — When China’s champion 10-meter platform diver suffered a detached retina while training, a year after winning a gold medal in the 2004 Athens Olympics, family members and fans speculated about the imminent end of a great career.
The parents of the diver, Hu Jia, had surrendered him to trainers from the Chinese sports establishment at the age of 10, and had seen little of him since then. In an interview with a Chinese newspaper after the diver’s injury, his father suggested that this was sacrifice enough. Had he known his son risked blindness, the father said, “I would never have sent him off to dive.”
But less than two months before China hosts the Olympics for the first time, Mr. Hu is training and competing fiercely again, aiming to bolster a national diving squad that China hopes will dominate the sport this summer.
“The Beijing Olympics is an enormous glory to our generation,” Mr. Hu, whose other retina was also injured, was quoted in the Chinese media as saying last year. Speaking of another gold medal, he added, “I will do my utmost to grab one, unless my eyes are really blind.”
Pressured by the national athletic system and tempted by the commercial riches awaiting star performers in the 2008 Games, China’s athletes are pushing themselves to their limits and beyond, causing some to risk their health in pursuit of nationalist glory.
“An astonishing amount of manpower, money and goods have been poured in, so much so that it’s inappropriate to be revealed publicly,” said Lu Yuanzhen, a professor of sports sociology at the Academy of Sports Sciences at South China Normal University. If the country’s athletes do not perform up to expectations, he added, “the entire nation and its people will lose face.”
Since surpassing Russia to win the second most gold medals in the 2004 Olympics, its highest ranking ever, China has held an unofficial but undeniable ambition to cap the hosting of the Games by surpassing the United States and finishing atop the medal board.
The resulting pressure is felt by nearly all of China’s Olympic aspirants, from still largely unheralded performers in relatively unglamorous sports to the country’s brightest marquee names, like Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets center who sat out the final two months of the N.B.A. season with a stress fracture in his left foot but is still expected to play for China’s national team.
Athletes regarded as potential gold medalists have been urged out of retirement, and some female stars have been urged to resume training and competing soon after giving birth. Previous gold medal winners, meanwhile, have heard for four years that failure to pull off a repeat victory will let the whole nation down. Many have trained for the Games despite serious injuries. A female weight lifter, Tang Gonghong, persevered until early this year despite having such high blood pressure that her chief coach said it “threatens her life at any moment.”
‘Don’t Retreat’
These pressures can perhaps be seen most clearly in the recent experience of Liu Xiang, a Chinese track athlete who became a national hero and the country’s most popular sports star in Athens when he won the 110-meter men’s hurdles, a sport in which China had never excelled. Mr. Liu’s coach was recently quoted in China Daily, the official English-language newspaper, as saying, “Officials from the State General Administration of Sport once told us that if Liu cannot win another gold medal in Beijing, all of his previous achievements will become meaningless.”
So far, Mr. Liu has not had to contend with a serious injury. But last August, after winning the track world championships in Japan, he spoke of the agony of high expectations. “I’ve been tortured these days,” Mr. Liu said. “I was afraid of speaking too much. I’ve never been so nervous; more nervous than in the Olympics, because there’s too much attention on me.”
For many athletes, playing through injuries is standard practice. Most of China’s Olympic-caliber competitors are tightly controlled by a system that manages almost every aspect of their lives, often from early childhood. This includes housing, education, medical care and interactions with the public and the news media. In this system, decisions about training regimens and the risks of injuries do not get much of a public airing. The case of Zheng Jie, a top female doubles tennis player, however, provides a glimpse of how the obligation to perform often operates.
Despite a painful ankle injury, Ms. Zheng played a punishing schedule last year to gain tour points required to compete in the Olympics. In a news conference after she lost in the first round of the French Open, she broke down in tears. “The pain in my foot was so strong I could hardly concentrate,” she said.
Ms. Zheng said her doctor had told her that she risked permanent injury if she kept playing without treatment and rest. But in an interview, she said her coach denied her request to concede the French Open match. In a television interview after her defeat, the coach, Jiang Hongwei, said Ms. Zheng and her teammate, Yan Zi, “had too much concern for their injuries, which was an important factor in their performance.”
“The philosophy of our sports system has several bad points,” said Chen Peide, former director of the Zhejiang Province Sports Bureau. “Urging people to tenaciously strive to succeed, to be faster, to jump higher, to be stronger and to win more gold medals usually comes at the expense of athletes’ health.
“When they’re having a 100- or 102-degree fever, we tell them not to give up so easily,” he said.
Mr. Chen said that a Communist war slogan, “Don’t retreat from the front lines with light injuries,” was a pet phrase of Chinese athletes and coaches.
While Ms. Zheng invoked her doctor’s advice in appealing to her coach, for many other Olympics hopefuls, medical decisions are made without consulting medical professionals.
“The athletes themselves basically have no idea of their injuries and they usually don’t have a say” in how they are treated, said Dr. Wang Yubin, the medical director for the sports injury department at Shanghai East International Medical Center. Decisions about how to handle injuries of important athletes, he said, are made by officials of the sporting establishment.
Sacrificing for a Payoff
If it is true that the system pushes athletes hard, many athletes are just as demanding of themselves. Since the 1980s, when the commercialization of sports began in China, money has become a powerful incentive alongside the drive for glory. “I once treated a national weight-lifting champion and warned him not to carry on in the sport anymore,” Dr. Wang said. “I told both him and his parents that in the worst case, he could be paralyzed for life. The parents replied that there was nothing for their child to do but persevere.
“They said, ‘What else can he do if he doesn’t lift weights?’ ”
Li Zhuo, a retired silver medalist in the women’s weight-lifting 48-kilogram category in 2004, put it another way. “Once you win gold, your status is changed and you become another person,” she said, referring to the monetary awards and business opportunities showered on victors. “One Olympics can change an athlete’s life, and that’s pressure.”
Hu Jia, the gold medal diver, for example, was born to laid-off workers in Hubei Province in central China. When he was 6 years old, his parents piled quilts on the ground, then let him jump from a bed to practice diving. Three years later, he was spotted by a former diver and sent to train with a coach in Guangdong, where he made the provincial team. He was considered relatively untalented by coaches and mocked by the public as a perpetual also-ran before the 2004 Games. But he distinguished himself through unrelenting hard work, eventually beating out the favorite, Tian Liang, for a gold.
Although a spot on this year’s squad is no sure thing, he has shown the same determination in working his way back from injury, forgoing anesthesia during eye surgery because he hoped it would speed recovery. “There are so many difficulties, surgery and injuries on the road, but I have to keep up to the last,” he told a newspaper in Wuhan.
According to a study published in 2000, 24 percent of Chinese divers have had retina injuries. Yu Fen, a former national coach, said the high rate was because of poor screening of young athletes for congenital eye problems and antiquated, high-intensity training methods. Divers wear no goggles, and repeated impact with the water can damage eyes, Chinese medical experts say, especially if divers fail to close their eyes just before hitting the water.
Dr. Wang Yongli, a sports medicine expert at Beijing Sports Hospital who discovered a high incidence of retina damage when he conducted a survey at the end of 1990s, said there had been minor changes in training techniques since then. But he said he did not expect them to have much effect on the rate of injury.
“I don’t have any solid numbers to show what it’s like in other countries, but the rate should be lower compared to what I’ve found in the Chinese team,” Dr. Wang said.
“The training regimen of foreign athletes by no means compares to ours, meaning the hours devoted to training, and the number of dives into the water. Chinese divers are professionals, which means they practice all day long, while Australians and Canadians might be a bank clerk or a dentist, who only spend two hours practicing after work.”
As suggested by the injunction to athletes against retreating from the front lines, China’s national sports system does indeed borrow heavily from wartime, albeit largely from the cold war. Within five years of taking power in 1949, Mao Zedong adopted many of the features of the heavily centralized sports system of China’s then-Communist ally, the Soviet Union.
As in the Soviet Union, China’s new sports establishment was deliberately conceived as an instrument of nation-building, a tool of mass mobilization and even of foreign policy, aimed both at increasing the country’s prestige and promoting feelings of integration among the people.
Experts say, however, that the two systems quickly diverged as ties between Moscow and Beijing soured.
“The Soviet system was centered on industry, with factory sponsors for each team, while the Chinese system was centered on government and military units,” said Susan Brownell, professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and author of “Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China.” “This created an aspect in the Chinese system of intense rivalries between the provinces, as well as between provinces and the central government.”
Selection of athletes at the provincial level may begin when they are as young as 6, experts say, with as many as 2 percent of grade school students flagged as promising. These children are placed in all-expenses-paid sports schools and “filtered” through increasingly intensive competitions that weed out all but an elite 80,000 who find homes on provincial teams. Of those, only a tiny fraction will make the next big step, earning a place on China’s national team.
The Strategy of Success
“Pressure doesn’t just come from the central government, but from each province, and even from the cities the athletes come from,” said Mr. Chen, the former Zhejiang Province Sports Bureau director. “Quotas are assigned to each province, and if a province won several gold medals last time, it should perform at least as well this time. The promotion of sports officials in each province depends on how many medals their province has won.”
In many sports, parents can go years without seeing their children, and may speak to them only once or twice a year. But local and provincial officials are unstintingly attentive, showering gifts on the families during Spring Festival, China’s most important holiday, to make up for the children’s absence.
Major changes to China’s sports policy were instituted at the start of the era of economic reform in the early 1980s. Deng Xiaoping, then China’s top leader, announced the “Ten Year Sports Guidelines” and China returned to Olympic competition after a 32-year absence.
This led to greatly increased spending on sports and new training methods, pioneered in the 1980s by Ma Junren, a legendary coach from Liaoning Province who insisted on multiple, grueling training sessions per day for track athletes rather than the two sessions that were customary in the West. Mr. Ma and many of his runners, known as “Ma’s army,” fell into disrepute and were withdrawn from Olympics competition in the late 1990s when many tested positive for steroids.
A pillar of China’s recent strong rise in the Olympics-medal tallies has been the astute targeting of sports where medal opportunities seem greatest. In some categories, competition is relatively thin.
“The Chinese have been very strategic in where they have put their energies,” said Ms. Brownell, a visiting professor at Beijing Sport University. “They have put major efforts into training for new events, so that they can set records as soon as the events come into effect. This has been the case with the triple jump, the pole vault and with women’s weight lifting.”
Speaking of women’s weight lifting, Dai Guangyu, former vice chairman of the China Weight Lifting Association, said China’s national system had allowed it to invest in developing female weight lifters beginning in the 1980s. “Other countries didn’t have that many people involved,” Mr. Dai said.
Since the 2000 Olympics, when women’s weight lifting was introduced, China has won half of the 14 gold medals awarded, and on the eve of the Beijing Games, pressure is as high in this sport as in any to at least hold the line on gold medals. Mr. Dai acknowledged that a successful push in this sport — widely seen as dangerous and unglamorous, making it hard for muscle-bound women to find work or spouses when their careers end — depends on recruiting among the rural poor. With its heavy training, it also depends on being able to closely control an athlete’s life.
Wang Mingjuan, one of three aspirants to represent China in the 48-kilogram category, was asked to try out recently in a higher weight category to give China an even better shot at winning medals. But she injured her lower back and has returned to her normal weight class. Her parents, who say they see her once every three or four years, said she had told them in their last phone call not to worry.
“We don’t have much money, and the life was hard,” her mother, Wang Meiyu, said, explaining the decision to send her to a sports school at the age of 9. “She was so little and we couldn’t see her often, but when we visited, my heart felt bitter and sour. It was so tough.”
Unless Ms. Wang and her teammates win gold, Chen Xiaomin, a women’s weight-lifting champion in the 2000 Olympics, said the bitterness was likely to continue. “It takes at least 10 years’ practice before you can become a world champion,” Ms. Chen said. “Once you win a world championship, you can go to college for free, or work, or become an official. If you don’t, you get nothing but injuries all over your body. No diploma, no job, no skill.”
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
April 29, 2008
Ronaldo goes into hiding in Brazil
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:26 p.m. ET
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- Ronaldo went into hiding Tuesday after a run-in with cross-dressing prostitutes that prompted police to investigate whether to charge one with trying to extort money from the soccer star.
The AC Milan player, in Brazil recovering from a knee surgery, canceled two TV appearances, and local media said he will continue physiotherapy at his home.
Police said Ronaldo committed no crime, but he was accused by one prostitute of using drugs and not wanting to pay.
Prostitution is legal in Brazil.
''It is necessary to clarify that no formal accusations were made against Ronaldo,'' read a statement on the player's Web site. ''An advocate of social causes, Ronaldo has never used drugs and has always been admired by children in Brazil and around the world. There are indications of an extortion attempt in which the Milan striker is the only victim.''
Ronaldo, a three-time FIFA player of the year, acknowledged to police he knew they were prostitutes but did not realize they were cross-dressers until getting to a motel early Monday morning, according to police.
Police released more details Tuesday, and the AP reviewed witnesses' accounts to authorities.
The motel manager -- identified only as Luisa -- said Ronaldo, who was dressed and appeared to be sober, tried to get rid of the prostitutes after realizing they were men.
She told police Ronaldo offered the prostitutes $600 to end the incident but they would not accept dollars. The manager then converted the money into reals for Ronaldo, but before he made the payment one prostitute asked for 50,000 reals ($30,000) to keep the story from the media, according to the police document.
A motel waiter, who was not identified in the police documents, told police the prostitute went to the street and yelled ''the Phenomenon didn't want to pay.''
Witnesses also told police the prostitute who asked for 50,000 reals ripped out the phone wires to keep Ronaldo from calling for help, and broke into his car to steal his belongings, according to police documents. That prostitute later showed local media a car document belonging to Ronaldo.
Police inspector Carlos Augusto Nogueira said there was no evidence drugs were involved in the incident.
But he said Ronaldo and the prostitutes must return to the police station for further questioning next week. Nogueira added the one prostitute might be charged with extortion. Ronaldo will not be charged, Nogueira said, unless he threatened to physically assault the prostitutes, as one hinted.
The case made front-page headlines in several Brazilian newspapers Tuesday. And a brief video clip of Ronaldo at the motel, apparently taped by one of the prostitutes, became a big hit in Brazil after being uploaded on YouTube.
''It's really a soap opera,'' said 48-year-old Luiz Mendes, a private chauffeur. ''Ronaldo has money to fill mattresses. He can afford the best and most beautiful women in the world. Why would he want to go out with these (prostitutes).''
Some Brazilians defended the star.
''It's no surprise they are on the front page of all newspapers,'' said 27-year-old Catia Lopes, a bakery-shop worker. ''But I don't think Ronaldo's image was hurt. For me he is still the same person.''
Ronaldo's spokesman did not immediately return an e-mail from The Associated Press.
Ronaldo went out Sunday night reportedly to celebrate Flamengo's 1-0 victory over rival Botafogo in the first leg of the Rio de Janeiro state final. Ronaldo is a fan of Flamengo and has said he wants to play for the Brazilian club before retiring. He was at Maracana stadium to watch Sunday's match.
The player told reporters during the match that he could be back in action in six months if his recovery continues to go as planned.
Ronaldo has won two World Cups with Brazil, including in 2002 when he scored eight goals, including two in the final against Germany.
------
Associated Press Writer Tales Azzoni in Sao Paulo, Brazil, contributed to this report.
(This version CORRECTS Ronaldo was at motel early Monday instead of Sunday night and that he went out Sunday night.)
Ronaldo goes into hiding in Brazil
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:26 p.m. ET
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- Ronaldo went into hiding Tuesday after a run-in with cross-dressing prostitutes that prompted police to investigate whether to charge one with trying to extort money from the soccer star.
The AC Milan player, in Brazil recovering from a knee surgery, canceled two TV appearances, and local media said he will continue physiotherapy at his home.
Police said Ronaldo committed no crime, but he was accused by one prostitute of using drugs and not wanting to pay.
Prostitution is legal in Brazil.
''It is necessary to clarify that no formal accusations were made against Ronaldo,'' read a statement on the player's Web site. ''An advocate of social causes, Ronaldo has never used drugs and has always been admired by children in Brazil and around the world. There are indications of an extortion attempt in which the Milan striker is the only victim.''
Ronaldo, a three-time FIFA player of the year, acknowledged to police he knew they were prostitutes but did not realize they were cross-dressers until getting to a motel early Monday morning, according to police.
Police released more details Tuesday, and the AP reviewed witnesses' accounts to authorities.
The motel manager -- identified only as Luisa -- said Ronaldo, who was dressed and appeared to be sober, tried to get rid of the prostitutes after realizing they were men.
She told police Ronaldo offered the prostitutes $600 to end the incident but they would not accept dollars. The manager then converted the money into reals for Ronaldo, but before he made the payment one prostitute asked for 50,000 reals ($30,000) to keep the story from the media, according to the police document.
A motel waiter, who was not identified in the police documents, told police the prostitute went to the street and yelled ''the Phenomenon didn't want to pay.''
Witnesses also told police the prostitute who asked for 50,000 reals ripped out the phone wires to keep Ronaldo from calling for help, and broke into his car to steal his belongings, according to police documents. That prostitute later showed local media a car document belonging to Ronaldo.
Police inspector Carlos Augusto Nogueira said there was no evidence drugs were involved in the incident.
But he said Ronaldo and the prostitutes must return to the police station for further questioning next week. Nogueira added the one prostitute might be charged with extortion. Ronaldo will not be charged, Nogueira said, unless he threatened to physically assault the prostitutes, as one hinted.
The case made front-page headlines in several Brazilian newspapers Tuesday. And a brief video clip of Ronaldo at the motel, apparently taped by one of the prostitutes, became a big hit in Brazil after being uploaded on YouTube.
''It's really a soap opera,'' said 48-year-old Luiz Mendes, a private chauffeur. ''Ronaldo has money to fill mattresses. He can afford the best and most beautiful women in the world. Why would he want to go out with these (prostitutes).''
Some Brazilians defended the star.
''It's no surprise they are on the front page of all newspapers,'' said 27-year-old Catia Lopes, a bakery-shop worker. ''But I don't think Ronaldo's image was hurt. For me he is still the same person.''
Ronaldo's spokesman did not immediately return an e-mail from The Associated Press.
Ronaldo went out Sunday night reportedly to celebrate Flamengo's 1-0 victory over rival Botafogo in the first leg of the Rio de Janeiro state final. Ronaldo is a fan of Flamengo and has said he wants to play for the Brazilian club before retiring. He was at Maracana stadium to watch Sunday's match.
The player told reporters during the match that he could be back in action in six months if his recovery continues to go as planned.
Ronaldo has won two World Cups with Brazil, including in 2002 when he scored eight goals, including two in the final against Germany.
------
Associated Press Writer Tales Azzoni in Sao Paulo, Brazil, contributed to this report.
(This version CORRECTS Ronaldo was at motel early Monday instead of Sunday night and that he went out Sunday night.)
Thursday, March 27, 2008
March 27, 2008
Front Row
A Bad Reaction to a Diet
By ERIC WILSON
VOGUE made the proposal, but was it indecent?
Last September, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the sibling designers of Rodarte, received a phone call from a Vogue editor who suggested that they see a trainer and go on a diet. The sisters, who said they wanted to be healthier and balance their stress levels, agreed, accepted four months of personal training and a meal delivery service paid for by the magazine, lost a combined 50 pounds and kept a journal of their experiences, which appears in the April issue.
“Kate and I have decided we have to do this program in a realistic way,” Laura Mulleavy wrote in an Oct. 22 entry. “We’ll have wine when we feel like it and cheat on holidays.”
Reactions to the issue have been blistering. Dozens of objections were posted to an entry about the diet on the blog Jezebel.
Nonetheless, Cynthia M. Bulik, a professor of eating disorders at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, defended the offer as it was presented in the magazine, noting that the designers had written that a doctor had also told them to get in shape. She said she was surprised by the controversy, given that Anna Wintour, in her editor’s letter, had challenged designers to use healthier looking models.
“I saw more of an emphasis on healthy eating and healthy fitness than an order, ‘You’ve got to lose weight,’ ” Dr. Bulik said.
The magazine has a track record of chronicling the diets of its staff, and in 1998, Oprah Winfrey acknowledged that she had agreed to lose 20 pounds in order to appear on its cover.
On top of this, Vogue has also been accused of racial stereotyping in its April cover choice: a black male athlete posing ferociously with his arm around a skipping-to-my-lou supermodel. Some media critics compared the pose unfavorably to images of King Kong and Fay Wray.
“We thought it was a strong and beautiful photo shoot,” said Abigail Walch, a senior editor at Vogue, who said the pose happened naturally. The Rodarte article, she said, was intended to inspire women who have trouble incorporating fitness into their hectic schedules. On subjects like weight and shape, she added, dissension is to be expected.
“It’s a hot topic that people love to talk about,” Ms. Walch said
Front Row
A Bad Reaction to a Diet
By ERIC WILSON
VOGUE made the proposal, but was it indecent?
Last September, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the sibling designers of Rodarte, received a phone call from a Vogue editor who suggested that they see a trainer and go on a diet. The sisters, who said they wanted to be healthier and balance their stress levels, agreed, accepted four months of personal training and a meal delivery service paid for by the magazine, lost a combined 50 pounds and kept a journal of their experiences, which appears in the April issue.
“Kate and I have decided we have to do this program in a realistic way,” Laura Mulleavy wrote in an Oct. 22 entry. “We’ll have wine when we feel like it and cheat on holidays.”
Reactions to the issue have been blistering. Dozens of objections were posted to an entry about the diet on the blog Jezebel.
Nonetheless, Cynthia M. Bulik, a professor of eating disorders at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, defended the offer as it was presented in the magazine, noting that the designers had written that a doctor had also told them to get in shape. She said she was surprised by the controversy, given that Anna Wintour, in her editor’s letter, had challenged designers to use healthier looking models.
“I saw more of an emphasis on healthy eating and healthy fitness than an order, ‘You’ve got to lose weight,’ ” Dr. Bulik said.
The magazine has a track record of chronicling the diets of its staff, and in 1998, Oprah Winfrey acknowledged that she had agreed to lose 20 pounds in order to appear on its cover.
On top of this, Vogue has also been accused of racial stereotyping in its April cover choice: a black male athlete posing ferociously with his arm around a skipping-to-my-lou supermodel. Some media critics compared the pose unfavorably to images of King Kong and Fay Wray.
“We thought it was a strong and beautiful photo shoot,” said Abigail Walch, a senior editor at Vogue, who said the pose happened naturally. The Rodarte article, she said, was intended to inspire women who have trouble incorporating fitness into their hectic schedules. On subjects like weight and shape, she added, dissension is to be expected.
“It’s a hot topic that people love to talk about,” Ms. Walch said
March 27, 2008
Personal Best
Yes, Running Can Make You High
By GINA KOLATA
THE runner’s high: Every athlete has heard of it, most seem to believe in it and many say they have experienced it. But for years scientists have reserved judgment because no rigorous test confirmed its existence.
Yes, some people reported that they felt so good when they exercised that it was as if they had taken mood-altering drugs. But was that feeling real or just a delusion? And even if it was real, what was the feeling supposed to be, and what caused it?
Some who said they had experienced a runner’s high said it was uncommon. They might feel relaxed or at peace after exercising, but only occasionally did they feel euphoric. Was the calmness itself a runner’s high?
Often, those who said they experienced an intense euphoria reported that it came after an endurance event.
My friend Marian Westley said her runner’s high came at the end of a marathon, and it was paired with such volatile emotions that the sight of a puppy had the power to make her weep.
Others said they experienced a high when pushing themselves almost to the point of collapse in a short, intense effort, such as running a five-kilometer race.
But then there are those like my friend Annie Hiniker, who says that when she finishes a 5-k race, the last thing she feels is euphoric. “I feel like I want to throw up,” she said.
The runner’s-high hypothesis proposed that there were real biochemical effects of exercise on the brain. Chemicals were released that could change an athlete’s mood, and those chemicals were endorphins, the brain’s naturally occurring opiates. Running was not the only way to get the feeling; it could also occur with most intense or endurance exercise.
The problem with the hypothesis was that it was not feasible to do a spinal tap before and after someone exercised to look for a flood of endorphins in the brain. Researchers could detect endorphins in people’s blood after a run, but those endorphins were part of the body’s stress response and could not travel from the blood to the brain. They were not responsible for elevating one’s mood. So for more than 30 years, the runner’s high remained an unproved hypothesis.
But now medical technology has caught up with exercise lore. Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner’s body pumps out, the greater the effect.
Leading endorphin researchers not associated with the study said they accepted its findings.
“Impressive,” said Dr. Solomon Snyder, a neuroscience professor at Johns Hopkins and a discoverer of endorphins in the 1970’s.
“I like it,” said Huda Akil, a professor of neurosciences at the University of Michigan. “This is the first time someone took this head on. It wasn’t that the idea was not the right idea. It was that the evidence was not there.”
For athletes, the study offers a sort of vindication that runner’s high is not just a New Agey excuse for their claims of feeling good after a hard workout.
For athletes and nonathletes alike, the results are opening a new chapter in exercise science. They show that it is possible to define and measure the runner’s high and that it should be possible to figure out what brings it on. They even offer hope for those who do not enjoy exercise but do it anyway. These exercisers might learn techniques to elicit a feeling that makes working out positively addictive.
The lead researcher for the new study, Dr. Henning Boecker of the University of Bonn, said he got the idea of testing the endorphin hypothesis when he realized that methods he and others were using to study pain were directly applicable.
The idea was to use PET scans combined with recently available chemicals that reveal endorphins in the brain, to compare runners’ brains before and after a long run. If the scans showed that endorphins were being produced and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain involved with mood, that would be direct evidence for the endorphin hypothesis. And if the runners, who were not told what the study was looking for, also reported mood changes whose intensity correlated with the amount of endorphins produced, that would be another clincher for the argument.
Dr. Boecker and colleagues recruited 10 distance runners and told them they were studying opioid receptors in the brain. But the runners did not realize that the investigators were studying the release of endorphins and the runner’s high. The athletes had a PET scan before and after a two-hour run. They also took a standard psychological test that indicated their mood before and after running.
The data showed that, indeed, endorphins were produced during running and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain associated with emotions, in particular the limbic and prefrontal areas.
The limbic and prefrontal areas, Dr. Boecker said, are activated when people are involved in romantic love affairs or, he said, “when you hear music that gives you a chill of euphoria, like Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.” The greater the euphoria the runners reported, the more endorphins in their brain.
“Some people have these really extreme experiences with very long or intensive training,” said Dr. Boecker, a casual runner and cyclist, who said he feels completely relaxed and his head is clearer after a run.
That was also what happened to the study subjects, he said: “You could really see the difference after two hours of running. You could see it in their faces.”
In a follow-up study, Dr. Boecker is investigating if running affects pain perception. “There are studies that showed enhanced pain tolerance in runners,” he said. “You have to give higher pain stimuli before they say, ‘O.K., this hurts.’ ”
And, he said, there are stories of runners who had stress fractures, even heart attacks, and kept on running.
Dr. Boecker and his colleagues have recruited 20 marathon runners and a similar number of nonathletes and are studying the perception of pain after a run, and whether there are related changes in brain scans. He is also having the subjects walk to see whether the effects, if any, are because of the intensity of the exercise.
The nonathletes can help investigators assess whether untrained people experience the same effects. Maybe one reason some people love intense exercise and others do not is that some respond with a runner’s high or changed pain perception.
Annie might question that. She loves to run, but wonders why. But her husband tells her that the look on her face when she is running is just blissful. So maybe even she gets a runner’s high.
Personal Best
Yes, Running Can Make You High
By GINA KOLATA
THE runner’s high: Every athlete has heard of it, most seem to believe in it and many say they have experienced it. But for years scientists have reserved judgment because no rigorous test confirmed its existence.
Yes, some people reported that they felt so good when they exercised that it was as if they had taken mood-altering drugs. But was that feeling real or just a delusion? And even if it was real, what was the feeling supposed to be, and what caused it?
Some who said they had experienced a runner’s high said it was uncommon. They might feel relaxed or at peace after exercising, but only occasionally did they feel euphoric. Was the calmness itself a runner’s high?
Often, those who said they experienced an intense euphoria reported that it came after an endurance event.
My friend Marian Westley said her runner’s high came at the end of a marathon, and it was paired with such volatile emotions that the sight of a puppy had the power to make her weep.
Others said they experienced a high when pushing themselves almost to the point of collapse in a short, intense effort, such as running a five-kilometer race.
But then there are those like my friend Annie Hiniker, who says that when she finishes a 5-k race, the last thing she feels is euphoric. “I feel like I want to throw up,” she said.
The runner’s-high hypothesis proposed that there were real biochemical effects of exercise on the brain. Chemicals were released that could change an athlete’s mood, and those chemicals were endorphins, the brain’s naturally occurring opiates. Running was not the only way to get the feeling; it could also occur with most intense or endurance exercise.
The problem with the hypothesis was that it was not feasible to do a spinal tap before and after someone exercised to look for a flood of endorphins in the brain. Researchers could detect endorphins in people’s blood after a run, but those endorphins were part of the body’s stress response and could not travel from the blood to the brain. They were not responsible for elevating one’s mood. So for more than 30 years, the runner’s high remained an unproved hypothesis.
But now medical technology has caught up with exercise lore. Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner’s body pumps out, the greater the effect.
Leading endorphin researchers not associated with the study said they accepted its findings.
“Impressive,” said Dr. Solomon Snyder, a neuroscience professor at Johns Hopkins and a discoverer of endorphins in the 1970’s.
“I like it,” said Huda Akil, a professor of neurosciences at the University of Michigan. “This is the first time someone took this head on. It wasn’t that the idea was not the right idea. It was that the evidence was not there.”
For athletes, the study offers a sort of vindication that runner’s high is not just a New Agey excuse for their claims of feeling good after a hard workout.
For athletes and nonathletes alike, the results are opening a new chapter in exercise science. They show that it is possible to define and measure the runner’s high and that it should be possible to figure out what brings it on. They even offer hope for those who do not enjoy exercise but do it anyway. These exercisers might learn techniques to elicit a feeling that makes working out positively addictive.
The lead researcher for the new study, Dr. Henning Boecker of the University of Bonn, said he got the idea of testing the endorphin hypothesis when he realized that methods he and others were using to study pain were directly applicable.
The idea was to use PET scans combined with recently available chemicals that reveal endorphins in the brain, to compare runners’ brains before and after a long run. If the scans showed that endorphins were being produced and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain involved with mood, that would be direct evidence for the endorphin hypothesis. And if the runners, who were not told what the study was looking for, also reported mood changes whose intensity correlated with the amount of endorphins produced, that would be another clincher for the argument.
Dr. Boecker and colleagues recruited 10 distance runners and told them they were studying opioid receptors in the brain. But the runners did not realize that the investigators were studying the release of endorphins and the runner’s high. The athletes had a PET scan before and after a two-hour run. They also took a standard psychological test that indicated their mood before and after running.
The data showed that, indeed, endorphins were produced during running and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain associated with emotions, in particular the limbic and prefrontal areas.
The limbic and prefrontal areas, Dr. Boecker said, are activated when people are involved in romantic love affairs or, he said, “when you hear music that gives you a chill of euphoria, like Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.” The greater the euphoria the runners reported, the more endorphins in their brain.
“Some people have these really extreme experiences with very long or intensive training,” said Dr. Boecker, a casual runner and cyclist, who said he feels completely relaxed and his head is clearer after a run.
That was also what happened to the study subjects, he said: “You could really see the difference after two hours of running. You could see it in their faces.”
In a follow-up study, Dr. Boecker is investigating if running affects pain perception. “There are studies that showed enhanced pain tolerance in runners,” he said. “You have to give higher pain stimuli before they say, ‘O.K., this hurts.’ ”
And, he said, there are stories of runners who had stress fractures, even heart attacks, and kept on running.
Dr. Boecker and his colleagues have recruited 20 marathon runners and a similar number of nonathletes and are studying the perception of pain after a run, and whether there are related changes in brain scans. He is also having the subjects walk to see whether the effects, if any, are because of the intensity of the exercise.
The nonathletes can help investigators assess whether untrained people experience the same effects. Maybe one reason some people love intense exercise and others do not is that some respond with a runner’s high or changed pain perception.
Annie might question that. She loves to run, but wonders why. But her husband tells her that the look on her face when she is running is just blissful. So maybe even she gets a runner’s high.
March 27, 2008
Pressured, Motorola Splits in Two
By LAURA M. HOLSON
After a two-month strategic review of its businesses, Motorola said on Wednesday that it would split itself into two separate publicly traded companies, spinning off its unprofitable mobile phone unit to investors.
The activist investor Carl C. Icahn, who has pressured Motorola to make such a move, said in a letter to its board that the announcement was “clearly a step in the right direction.” But he questioned Motorola’s commitment to moving quickly to solve its problems.
Gregory Q. Brown, Motorola’s chief executive, conceded that the main problem facing the company was its inability to come up with new products to replace the highly successful Razr, which was once a must-have phone but has faded from the scene.
He said he hoped that by turning the mobile devices business into its own unit, the company would have better luck attracting a new chief executive to run it and revive Motorola’s reputation.
“I think the challenges around Motorola have been about consistent execution,” Mr. Brown said. “That is why it is so important for us to expand and improve our product portfolio.”
Motorola’s influence and stock price have declined as rivals have taken the lead in creating interesting devices. Apple and its popular iPhone, for example, have captured the attention of buyers in the high-end market.
Executives of Motorola, which is based in Schaumburg, Ill., declined to talk about what new handsets it planned to offer consumers in the coming months.
Next week is a big one for the mobile business, as all of the top handset makers and wireless companies are gathering in Las Vegas for the industry’s largest American trade show, CTIA Wireless 2008. Many will take the opportunity to unveil flashy new phones that consumers will be snapping up over the next year.
But when it comes to Motorola, expectations are low.
“It will be interesting to see if they announce anything at CTIA,” said Roger Entner, a senior vice president at IAG Research.
Rivals aside, Motorola is also facing pressure from investors — in particular Mr. Icahn — who are dissatisfied with Motorola’s weak stock performance; the shares have dropped 44 percent in the last year. Cellphone production is the largest division of the company, with $18.99 billion in net sales in 2007, a 33 percent decline from a year earlier. Last year, the division lost $1.2 billion. Motorola’s other two units are smaller but profitable.
Analysts have questioned what effect a split would have on operations and on attracting solid executives to the troubled company. Already there has been an exodus of executives from Motorola, among them Stu Reed, the former chief of the mobile devices division.
“The danger is they are getting rid of the underperforming part of the business just to get rid of it,” Mr. Entner of IAG said. “The fear is in a year or two the operations will cease to exist.”
The profitable side of Motorola is decidedly less well known than the mobile devices division. It makes set-top boxes and products used by businesses and law enforcement officials for scanning and fingerprinting, as well as data and video communications systems for public agencies like fire departments.
Motorola expects to have the spinoff, which will be a tax-free distribution to shareholders, completed by 2009.
The move to split the company has long been advocated by Mr. Icahn, who led a fight last year for a seat on Motorola’s board. That effort failed, but it helped lead to the departure of the chief executive, Edward J. Zander, who was succeeded by Mr. Brown.
This week, Mr. Icahn sued Motorola, demanding internal board documents that he believed would show that it was lax in its oversight of management. Mr. Icahn is now leading a proxy fight for four Motorola board seats ahead of the company’s annual meeting in May.
In his letter to the board, Mr. Icahn also questioned why it would take so long to complete the split, and why it took “the threat of a proxy fight for you to make promises we all want to hear.” He did not return calls seeking comment.
There is still the chance that Mr. Brown and his board could decide to sell the mobile phone division if they do not find a suitable chief executive to run it. Selling it to a competitor was one option that Motorola pursued, according to a person involved in those discussions, but there were no takers.
Mr. Brown declined to discuss whether the division could be sold. “We’ve never had a ‘For Sale’ sign on it,” he said. “After our review, we believe this is the appropriate action.”
Pressured, Motorola Splits in Two
By LAURA M. HOLSON
After a two-month strategic review of its businesses, Motorola said on Wednesday that it would split itself into two separate publicly traded companies, spinning off its unprofitable mobile phone unit to investors.
The activist investor Carl C. Icahn, who has pressured Motorola to make such a move, said in a letter to its board that the announcement was “clearly a step in the right direction.” But he questioned Motorola’s commitment to moving quickly to solve its problems.
Gregory Q. Brown, Motorola’s chief executive, conceded that the main problem facing the company was its inability to come up with new products to replace the highly successful Razr, which was once a must-have phone but has faded from the scene.
He said he hoped that by turning the mobile devices business into its own unit, the company would have better luck attracting a new chief executive to run it and revive Motorola’s reputation.
“I think the challenges around Motorola have been about consistent execution,” Mr. Brown said. “That is why it is so important for us to expand and improve our product portfolio.”
Motorola’s influence and stock price have declined as rivals have taken the lead in creating interesting devices. Apple and its popular iPhone, for example, have captured the attention of buyers in the high-end market.
Executives of Motorola, which is based in Schaumburg, Ill., declined to talk about what new handsets it planned to offer consumers in the coming months.
Next week is a big one for the mobile business, as all of the top handset makers and wireless companies are gathering in Las Vegas for the industry’s largest American trade show, CTIA Wireless 2008. Many will take the opportunity to unveil flashy new phones that consumers will be snapping up over the next year.
But when it comes to Motorola, expectations are low.
“It will be interesting to see if they announce anything at CTIA,” said Roger Entner, a senior vice president at IAG Research.
Rivals aside, Motorola is also facing pressure from investors — in particular Mr. Icahn — who are dissatisfied with Motorola’s weak stock performance; the shares have dropped 44 percent in the last year. Cellphone production is the largest division of the company, with $18.99 billion in net sales in 2007, a 33 percent decline from a year earlier. Last year, the division lost $1.2 billion. Motorola’s other two units are smaller but profitable.
Analysts have questioned what effect a split would have on operations and on attracting solid executives to the troubled company. Already there has been an exodus of executives from Motorola, among them Stu Reed, the former chief of the mobile devices division.
“The danger is they are getting rid of the underperforming part of the business just to get rid of it,” Mr. Entner of IAG said. “The fear is in a year or two the operations will cease to exist.”
The profitable side of Motorola is decidedly less well known than the mobile devices division. It makes set-top boxes and products used by businesses and law enforcement officials for scanning and fingerprinting, as well as data and video communications systems for public agencies like fire departments.
Motorola expects to have the spinoff, which will be a tax-free distribution to shareholders, completed by 2009.
The move to split the company has long been advocated by Mr. Icahn, who led a fight last year for a seat on Motorola’s board. That effort failed, but it helped lead to the departure of the chief executive, Edward J. Zander, who was succeeded by Mr. Brown.
This week, Mr. Icahn sued Motorola, demanding internal board documents that he believed would show that it was lax in its oversight of management. Mr. Icahn is now leading a proxy fight for four Motorola board seats ahead of the company’s annual meeting in May.
In his letter to the board, Mr. Icahn also questioned why it would take so long to complete the split, and why it took “the threat of a proxy fight for you to make promises we all want to hear.” He did not return calls seeking comment.
There is still the chance that Mr. Brown and his board could decide to sell the mobile phone division if they do not find a suitable chief executive to run it. Selling it to a competitor was one option that Motorola pursued, according to a person involved in those discussions, but there were no takers.
Mr. Brown declined to discuss whether the division could be sold. “We’ve never had a ‘For Sale’ sign on it,” he said. “After our review, we believe this is the appropriate action.”
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
March 5, 2008
Yes, MSG, the Secret Behind the Savor
By JULIA MOSKIN
IN 1968 a Chinese-American physician wrote a rather lighthearted letter to The New England Journal of Medicine. He had experienced numbness, palpitations and weakness after eating in Chinese restaurants in the United States, and wondered whether the monosodium glutamate used by cooks here (and then rarely used by cooks in China) might be to blame.
The consequences for the restaurant business, the food industry and American consumers were immediate and enormous. MSG, a common flavor enhancer and preservative used since the 1950s, was tagged as a toxin, removed from commercial baby food and generally driven underground by a new movement toward natural, whole foods.
“It was a nightmare for my family,” said Jennifer Hsu, a graphic designer whose parents owned several Chinese restaurants in New York City in the 1970s. “Not because we used that much MSG — although of course we used some — but because it meant that Americans came into the restaurant with these suspicious, hostile feelings.”
Even now, after “Chinese restaurant syndrome” has been thoroughly debunked (virtually all studies since then confirm that monosodium glutamate in normal concentrations has no effect on the overwhelming majority of people), the ingredient has a stigma that will not go away.
But then, neither will MSG.
Cooks around the world have remained dedicated to MSG, even though they may not know it by that name. As hydrolyzed soy protein or autolyzed yeast, it adds flavor to the canned chicken broth and to the packs of onion soup mix used by American home cooks, and to the cheese Goldfish crackers and the low-fat yogurts in many lunchboxes.
It is the taste of Marmite in the United Kingdom, of Golden Mountain sauce in Thailand, of Goya Sazón on the Latin islands of the Caribbean, of Salsa Lizano in Costa Rica and of Kewpie mayonnaise in Japan.
“It’s all the same thing: glutamate,” said Dr. Nuripa Chaudhari of the University of Miami, who was part of the first research team to identify human glutamate receptors.
In September Dr. Chaudhari will take part in the University of Tokyo’s centenary celebrations honoring Prof. Kikunae Ikeda’s 1908 discovery of glutamate flavor. The Japanese company Ajinomoto turned that discovery into crystalline powder form, MSG, and patented it in 1909.
“Just like salt and sugar, it exists in nature, it tastes good at normal levels, but large amounts at high concentrations taste strange and aren’t that good for you,” Dr. Chaudhari said.
If you live in the United States and like spicy tuna rolls, Puerto Rican roast pork or Thai noodles, there is a good chance you are eating, and enjoying, MSG. And if you are the kind of cook who likes to keep a globe-trotting kitchen, well, then, some of these MSG-laden ingredients may deserve a place in your cupboard.
“I don’t cook with MSG because that’s not my training, but it definitely has its place,” said Zak Pelaccio, a New York chef whose ride to fame has been greased with Kewpie mayonnaise. One of the dishes that put him on the map was a sandwich of roasted salmon on pumpernickel bread slathered with wasabi aioli: wasabi from a tube and the mayonnaise.
In regions where meat and meaty flavors have been out of reach for most cooks, MSG has long filled the gap.
“My father called Maggi sauce la segunda venida, the second coming, because he was not a very good cook and it saved him,” said Irma Cecilia Sanchez, a home health aide from Puebla, Mexico, who was waiting in line at a taco truck on the Upper West Side. Maggi sauce is a 19th-century Swiss creation, a general flavor enhancer now made with MSG, sweeteners and extracts.
Her mother died when she was young, she said, and her father was a reluctant cook, making scrambled eggs most nights. “Huevos revueltos with Maggi sauce is still one of my favorite things, with tortillas and pico de gallo,” she added.
Maggi sauce (there are various other Maggi products, not all of which contain MSG) is extremely popular in regions as far-flung as India, Mexico, the Philippines and the Ivory Coast. One of Thailand’s favorite late-night street foods, pad kee mao, or drunkard’s noodles, relies on its sweet-salty-meaty taste; the Malaysian version is called Maggi goreng.
“It’s the kind of thing people crave late at night,” said Bee Yinn Low, who is from Penang but lives in Irvine, Calif., and writes a blog about Malaysian food at rasamalaysia.com. Maggi has a faintly similar flavor to Indonesian kecap manis, a salty-sweet-savory condiment that is one ancestor of modern tomato ketchup.
“Asia wouldn’t survive without MSG,” said Mike Crewe-Brown, a cooking teacher who recently spent three months producing a food documentary in Southeast Asia.
Even after “No MSG” signs began appearing across the United States, “most Chinese restaurants, honestly, kept right on using it,” Ms. Hsu said. “And at home most Chinese cooks will sprinkle in a little bit at the end, especially if the ingredients they had to cook with were not that great.”
Meat and MSG work beautifully together. Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, the fallback rub for pork shoulder or flank steak is Goya Sazón: MSG and salt, cut with garlic, cumin and annatto. Accent, which is mostly MSG, was introduced in 1947 and quickly became a staple for American home cooks.
But it is in Japan that MSG has been most thoroughly integrated into popular food, through two main delivery systems: instant ramen noodle soup and mayonnaise, now popular on pizza, omelets and sushi. (Mayonnaise Kitchen, a food stall in Tokyo, serves only mayonnaise-friendly foods and lets patrons store their own bottles of Kewpie, the most popular brand.)
Japanese mayonnaise is flavored with MSG and rice vinegar, giving it an addictive roundness and tang. It is the main ingredient in dynamite sauce, a mix of mayonnaise and chili sauce that has become a staple of sushi bars here and in Japan. At Ginza in Boston, a dish called hotate hokkaiyaki — baked shellfish with dynamite sauce — has had a passionate following for more than 10 years.
If you have ever wondered what makes spicy tuna rolls so much tastier than plain tekka maki, dynamite sauce, or perhaps the MSG in it, is the answer.
In upscale restaurants, whether by tradition or by inclination, chefs are unlikely to use monosodium glutamate. “We don’t need to use Ajinomoto because we can get the ingredients that have natural umami: shiitake mushrooms, egg yolks, shellfish, masago,” said Sotohiro Kosugi, the chef of Soto in New York.
Although umami is only a bit player in Japanese cuisine, reams of breathless prose have been produced here on this elusive fifth taste, which is supposedly linked to the profoundly pure, deep-sea flavors of kelp and dried tuna.
Umami “is delicious,” Katsuhiro Utada told The New York Times in 1983, and a food-lovers’ swoon began. Mr. Utada, not coincidentally, was the president of the Ajinomoto Company — then, and now, the world’s largest producer of monosodium glutamate.
Whether umami is the fifth taste or the 50th — there is little agreement among neuroscientists — it has been positively identified as the flavor of glutamic acid, an amino acid naturally present in many savory foods, from seaweed to soppressata. Food writers lost no time adding umami to their mental glossaries. But this same crowd rarely mentions MSG, a cheap, synthetic route to the flavor of glutamate.
I keep kecap and (umami-rich) ketchup on hand, but MSG is not normally present in my kitchen. The spice drawer has never seen Accent, the canned chicken broth has a big “No MSG” stamp on the label and the hoisin, soy and fish sauces on hand are the food-writer-approved brands. Again, no MSG.
So the food I produced at home using Maggi sauce, MSG-laden bouillon cubes and Japanese mayonnaise tasted ... different.
I made two versions of pad kee mao, with and without Maggi, and while both were good, the one with MSG had the kind of round flavor I’d normally associate with homemade chicken stock or some form of professional expertise.
Tasted straight, though, the sauces had the chemical, tangy aftertaste common to many processed foods.
“Too much MSG and you get that harsh, acrid taste,” said Mr. Pelaccio, who uses an empty barrel of Ajinomoto-brand MSG he found on the street as a plant stand in his Chinatown apartment. “But get it just right and that dish will sing.”
The role of MSG in food, and its effects on health, remain controversial. Linda Bartoshuk, a director of the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste, who has studied the sensory effects of MSG for years, believes not only that MSG is harmful to health, but also that it has virtually no effect on the taste of food. “All this umami stuff is just marketing,” she said.
In 1995 the Food and Drug Administration issued a large-scale review by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, clearing glutamates as a health risk for the vast majority of consumers.
An international research review in 1987 by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations had come to the same conclusion.
“There was simply no clinical evidence for any of it,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University.
She did not even mention MSG in her recent book “What to Eat,” much of which is devoted to health concerns over food additives. “I thought the issue was settled, though I know a lot of people will never believe that,” she said.
MSG is blamed by some groups for a range of serious neurological and physiological disorders. Some studies have identified both MSG and aspartame (another Ajinomoto product) as excitotoxins, substances that overstimulate the neurotransmitters to the point of cell damage. But no large-scale clinical research has been done since the F.D.A.’s 1995 review.
Since the 1970s, MSG has sidled back onto American supermarket shelves, under assumed names: hydrolyzed proteins, yeast extracts, protein concentrates and other additives that are not labeled as MSG but, according to nutritionists and the United States Department of Agriculture, are essentially the same thing: synthetically produced glutamates.
The whey protein concentrate and liquid aminos that many Americans buy at health food stores are also, essentially, pure glutamate, Dr. Chaudhari said.
According to U.S.D.A. guidelines, “labeling is required when MSG is added as a direct ingredient.” But other glutamates — the hydrolyzed proteins, the autolyzed yeasts and the protein concentrates, which the U.S.D.A. acknowledges are related to MSG — must be identified under their own names.
Alternatively, they may also be included under certain terms, like vegetable broth or chicken broth. Thus, these ingredients are now routinely found in products like canned tuna (vegetable broth is listed as an ingredient; it contains hydrolyzed soy protein), canned soup, low-fat yogurts and ice creams, chips and virtually everything ranch-flavored or cheese-flavored.
Thus, the richest source of umami remains your local convenience store. Grab a tube of Pringles or a bologna sandwich, and glutamic acid is most likely lurking there somewhere.
Nacho-cheese-flavor Doritos, which contain five separate forms of glutamate, may be even richer in umami than the finest kombu dashi (kelp stock) in Japan.
No wonder they taste so good.
Yes, MSG, the Secret Behind the Savor
By JULIA MOSKIN
IN 1968 a Chinese-American physician wrote a rather lighthearted letter to The New England Journal of Medicine. He had experienced numbness, palpitations and weakness after eating in Chinese restaurants in the United States, and wondered whether the monosodium glutamate used by cooks here (and then rarely used by cooks in China) might be to blame.
The consequences for the restaurant business, the food industry and American consumers were immediate and enormous. MSG, a common flavor enhancer and preservative used since the 1950s, was tagged as a toxin, removed from commercial baby food and generally driven underground by a new movement toward natural, whole foods.
“It was a nightmare for my family,” said Jennifer Hsu, a graphic designer whose parents owned several Chinese restaurants in New York City in the 1970s. “Not because we used that much MSG — although of course we used some — but because it meant that Americans came into the restaurant with these suspicious, hostile feelings.”
Even now, after “Chinese restaurant syndrome” has been thoroughly debunked (virtually all studies since then confirm that monosodium glutamate in normal concentrations has no effect on the overwhelming majority of people), the ingredient has a stigma that will not go away.
But then, neither will MSG.
Cooks around the world have remained dedicated to MSG, even though they may not know it by that name. As hydrolyzed soy protein or autolyzed yeast, it adds flavor to the canned chicken broth and to the packs of onion soup mix used by American home cooks, and to the cheese Goldfish crackers and the low-fat yogurts in many lunchboxes.
It is the taste of Marmite in the United Kingdom, of Golden Mountain sauce in Thailand, of Goya Sazón on the Latin islands of the Caribbean, of Salsa Lizano in Costa Rica and of Kewpie mayonnaise in Japan.
“It’s all the same thing: glutamate,” said Dr. Nuripa Chaudhari of the University of Miami, who was part of the first research team to identify human glutamate receptors.
In September Dr. Chaudhari will take part in the University of Tokyo’s centenary celebrations honoring Prof. Kikunae Ikeda’s 1908 discovery of glutamate flavor. The Japanese company Ajinomoto turned that discovery into crystalline powder form, MSG, and patented it in 1909.
“Just like salt and sugar, it exists in nature, it tastes good at normal levels, but large amounts at high concentrations taste strange and aren’t that good for you,” Dr. Chaudhari said.
If you live in the United States and like spicy tuna rolls, Puerto Rican roast pork or Thai noodles, there is a good chance you are eating, and enjoying, MSG. And if you are the kind of cook who likes to keep a globe-trotting kitchen, well, then, some of these MSG-laden ingredients may deserve a place in your cupboard.
“I don’t cook with MSG because that’s not my training, but it definitely has its place,” said Zak Pelaccio, a New York chef whose ride to fame has been greased with Kewpie mayonnaise. One of the dishes that put him on the map was a sandwich of roasted salmon on pumpernickel bread slathered with wasabi aioli: wasabi from a tube and the mayonnaise.
In regions where meat and meaty flavors have been out of reach for most cooks, MSG has long filled the gap.
“My father called Maggi sauce la segunda venida, the second coming, because he was not a very good cook and it saved him,” said Irma Cecilia Sanchez, a home health aide from Puebla, Mexico, who was waiting in line at a taco truck on the Upper West Side. Maggi sauce is a 19th-century Swiss creation, a general flavor enhancer now made with MSG, sweeteners and extracts.
Her mother died when she was young, she said, and her father was a reluctant cook, making scrambled eggs most nights. “Huevos revueltos with Maggi sauce is still one of my favorite things, with tortillas and pico de gallo,” she added.
Maggi sauce (there are various other Maggi products, not all of which contain MSG) is extremely popular in regions as far-flung as India, Mexico, the Philippines and the Ivory Coast. One of Thailand’s favorite late-night street foods, pad kee mao, or drunkard’s noodles, relies on its sweet-salty-meaty taste; the Malaysian version is called Maggi goreng.
“It’s the kind of thing people crave late at night,” said Bee Yinn Low, who is from Penang but lives in Irvine, Calif., and writes a blog about Malaysian food at rasamalaysia.com. Maggi has a faintly similar flavor to Indonesian kecap manis, a salty-sweet-savory condiment that is one ancestor of modern tomato ketchup.
“Asia wouldn’t survive without MSG,” said Mike Crewe-Brown, a cooking teacher who recently spent three months producing a food documentary in Southeast Asia.
Even after “No MSG” signs began appearing across the United States, “most Chinese restaurants, honestly, kept right on using it,” Ms. Hsu said. “And at home most Chinese cooks will sprinkle in a little bit at the end, especially if the ingredients they had to cook with were not that great.”
Meat and MSG work beautifully together. Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, the fallback rub for pork shoulder or flank steak is Goya Sazón: MSG and salt, cut with garlic, cumin and annatto. Accent, which is mostly MSG, was introduced in 1947 and quickly became a staple for American home cooks.
But it is in Japan that MSG has been most thoroughly integrated into popular food, through two main delivery systems: instant ramen noodle soup and mayonnaise, now popular on pizza, omelets and sushi. (Mayonnaise Kitchen, a food stall in Tokyo, serves only mayonnaise-friendly foods and lets patrons store their own bottles of Kewpie, the most popular brand.)
Japanese mayonnaise is flavored with MSG and rice vinegar, giving it an addictive roundness and tang. It is the main ingredient in dynamite sauce, a mix of mayonnaise and chili sauce that has become a staple of sushi bars here and in Japan. At Ginza in Boston, a dish called hotate hokkaiyaki — baked shellfish with dynamite sauce — has had a passionate following for more than 10 years.
If you have ever wondered what makes spicy tuna rolls so much tastier than plain tekka maki, dynamite sauce, or perhaps the MSG in it, is the answer.
In upscale restaurants, whether by tradition or by inclination, chefs are unlikely to use monosodium glutamate. “We don’t need to use Ajinomoto because we can get the ingredients that have natural umami: shiitake mushrooms, egg yolks, shellfish, masago,” said Sotohiro Kosugi, the chef of Soto in New York.
Although umami is only a bit player in Japanese cuisine, reams of breathless prose have been produced here on this elusive fifth taste, which is supposedly linked to the profoundly pure, deep-sea flavors of kelp and dried tuna.
Umami “is delicious,” Katsuhiro Utada told The New York Times in 1983, and a food-lovers’ swoon began. Mr. Utada, not coincidentally, was the president of the Ajinomoto Company — then, and now, the world’s largest producer of monosodium glutamate.
Whether umami is the fifth taste or the 50th — there is little agreement among neuroscientists — it has been positively identified as the flavor of glutamic acid, an amino acid naturally present in many savory foods, from seaweed to soppressata. Food writers lost no time adding umami to their mental glossaries. But this same crowd rarely mentions MSG, a cheap, synthetic route to the flavor of glutamate.
I keep kecap and (umami-rich) ketchup on hand, but MSG is not normally present in my kitchen. The spice drawer has never seen Accent, the canned chicken broth has a big “No MSG” stamp on the label and the hoisin, soy and fish sauces on hand are the food-writer-approved brands. Again, no MSG.
So the food I produced at home using Maggi sauce, MSG-laden bouillon cubes and Japanese mayonnaise tasted ... different.
I made two versions of pad kee mao, with and without Maggi, and while both were good, the one with MSG had the kind of round flavor I’d normally associate with homemade chicken stock or some form of professional expertise.
Tasted straight, though, the sauces had the chemical, tangy aftertaste common to many processed foods.
“Too much MSG and you get that harsh, acrid taste,” said Mr. Pelaccio, who uses an empty barrel of Ajinomoto-brand MSG he found on the street as a plant stand in his Chinatown apartment. “But get it just right and that dish will sing.”
The role of MSG in food, and its effects on health, remain controversial. Linda Bartoshuk, a director of the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste, who has studied the sensory effects of MSG for years, believes not only that MSG is harmful to health, but also that it has virtually no effect on the taste of food. “All this umami stuff is just marketing,” she said.
In 1995 the Food and Drug Administration issued a large-scale review by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, clearing glutamates as a health risk for the vast majority of consumers.
An international research review in 1987 by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations had come to the same conclusion.
“There was simply no clinical evidence for any of it,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University.
She did not even mention MSG in her recent book “What to Eat,” much of which is devoted to health concerns over food additives. “I thought the issue was settled, though I know a lot of people will never believe that,” she said.
MSG is blamed by some groups for a range of serious neurological and physiological disorders. Some studies have identified both MSG and aspartame (another Ajinomoto product) as excitotoxins, substances that overstimulate the neurotransmitters to the point of cell damage. But no large-scale clinical research has been done since the F.D.A.’s 1995 review.
Since the 1970s, MSG has sidled back onto American supermarket shelves, under assumed names: hydrolyzed proteins, yeast extracts, protein concentrates and other additives that are not labeled as MSG but, according to nutritionists and the United States Department of Agriculture, are essentially the same thing: synthetically produced glutamates.
The whey protein concentrate and liquid aminos that many Americans buy at health food stores are also, essentially, pure glutamate, Dr. Chaudhari said.
According to U.S.D.A. guidelines, “labeling is required when MSG is added as a direct ingredient.” But other glutamates — the hydrolyzed proteins, the autolyzed yeasts and the protein concentrates, which the U.S.D.A. acknowledges are related to MSG — must be identified under their own names.
Alternatively, they may also be included under certain terms, like vegetable broth or chicken broth. Thus, these ingredients are now routinely found in products like canned tuna (vegetable broth is listed as an ingredient; it contains hydrolyzed soy protein), canned soup, low-fat yogurts and ice creams, chips and virtually everything ranch-flavored or cheese-flavored.
Thus, the richest source of umami remains your local convenience store. Grab a tube of Pringles or a bologna sandwich, and glutamic acid is most likely lurking there somewhere.
Nacho-cheese-flavor Doritos, which contain five separate forms of glutamate, may be even richer in umami than the finest kombu dashi (kelp stock) in Japan.
No wonder they taste so good.
March 5, 2008
Easily Overlooked Lesions Tied to Colon Cancer, Study Finds
By DENISE GRADY
An easily overlooked type of abnormality in the colon is the most likely type to turn cancerous, and is more common in this country than previously thought, researchers are reporting.
The findings come from a study of colonoscopy, in which a camera-tipped tube is used to examine the lining of the intestine. Generally, doctors search for polyps, abnormal growths that stick out from the lining and can turn into cancer. But another type of growth is much more dangerous, and harder to see because it is flat or depressed and similar in color to healthy tissue.
Japanese researchers became concerned about these flat lesions in the 1980s and ’90s, but studies here had mixed results and American doctors tended to think that flat growths were less common and less dangerous in the United States.
The new study, to be published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests otherwise.
Some doctors in this country were already alert to flat lesions, but the findings will pose a challenge to others, because it takes a trained and vigilant eye to see the growths and special techniques to remove them. The results also mean it is especially important that patients take the harsh laxatives that many dread in advance of the test. The flat lesions, hard to find even under the best conditions, will be impossible to see if any waste is left in the bowel.
Colon cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in the United States, after lung cancer, with about 154,000 new cases detected and 52,000 deaths a year. It is one of the few cancers that is totally preventable if precancerous growths are found and removed; it can also be cured with surgery alone if found early enough.
People who have just had a colonoscopy should not rush to schedule another one just to look for the flat growths, doctors said.
“I don’t think people have to panic that they’ve somehow been neglected and had poor care,” said Dr. David A. Rothenberger, deputy chairman of surgery at the University of Minnesota.
But he and other experts emphasized that people should see a doctor any time they have persisting symptoms that could indicate colon cancer, like rectal bleeding or a change in bowel habits — no matter how recently they had a colonoscopy. The test is highly reliable, but not perfect, doctors say.
Some doctors who perform colonoscopy just are not good at seeing flat lesions, but may improve with training and practice, said Dr. Douglas K. Rex, a gastroenterologist and professor of medicine at Indiana University.
“I think there are people who expect everything in there to be shaped like a golf ball,” he said. “It’s not.”
Dr. David Lieberman, chief of gastroenterology at Oregon Health and Science University, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said: “I think there will be some surprise. There has been in general some skepticism in the United States about how common flat and depressed lesions are and how important they are. So I think this study, coming from the United States and from a good group of investigators, will be a wake-up call to a lot of physicians and will prompt people to be looking for these lesions.”
The study, of 1,819 military veterans, mostly men, found that 9.35 percent had flat lesions, and those lesions were five times as likely as polyps to contain cancerous or precancerous tissue. Depressed or indented lesions were the least common but the most risky. Together, the flat or depressed lesions accounted for only 15 percent of the potentially cancerous growths found in the study, but were involved in half of the cancers. Once the doctors spotted the flat lesions, they sprayed a bluish dye on them to see their outlines better and remove them completely.
The first author of the study, Dr. Roy M. Soetikno of the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System said, “The message for doctors is, Here is a large amount of data showing that these precursors of cancer, always believed to be a Japanese disease, are actually a disease here, and are important, because they are much more likely to be cancerous, and doctors need to spend the time to provide quality colonoscopy.”
The message to patients, Dr. Soetikno said, is that when preparing for colonoscopy, they must follow instructions to the letter and take the hated laxatives to make sure their bowels are empty so that doctors can see the lining.
If any waste remains, flat lesions will be buried by it. Studies have shown that in about a quarter of all colonoscopies, the bowel preparation is inadequate.
Dr. Rex said that male veterans tended to have more precancerous colon growths than other groups, so the rate of flat lesions in women or the general population might not be quite as high as those in the study.
Dr. Soetikno and his colleagues started an exchange program with doctors in Japan to learn their techniques for recognizing and removing the flat lesions.
American doctors should learn from overseas colleagues more often, Dr. Rothenberger said, adding, “We tend to get very smug about our abilities.”
The quality of colonoscopy has become a delicate issue, because an article in The New England Journal of Medicine in December 2006 found that some doctors were 10 times better than others at finding precancerous polyps. A major factor in their success was taking enough time to examine the colon thoroughly, as opposed to rushing through the procedure. Doctors who miss polyps would almost certainly miss flat lesions as well because they are harder to see. The new study underscores the need for careful examinations, because the flat lesions are more dangerous.
The study also raises doubts about whether “virtual colonoscopy,” performed by a CT scanner, will ever be able to take the place of the colonoscope inserted into the rectum, as many patients had hoped. The problem is that CT scans use X-rays to reveal shapes, and find polyps because they stick out. Flat lesions are unlikely to show up in such scans.
Studies show that from 0.3 percent to 0.9 percent of patients develop colon cancers within just a few years of having a colonoscopy and polyp removal — exactly what the procedure is supposed to prevent. Some doctors think that flat lesions, missed entirely during the colonoscopy or not fully removed, may account for some of these apparent failures.
Dr. Robert Smith, the director of screening for the American Cancer Society, said flat lesions were “a vexing issue” that had provoked a lot of arguments among doctors.
“This paper shows they’re more prevalent than we believed, and also quite serious with regard to the presence of features associated with an elevated risk of cancer,” Dr. Smith said.
The difficulty facing patients is how to be sure their doctors are doing a good job. Professional groups have issued guidelines about the best way to perform a colonoscopy, but they are recommendations, not rules. The groups also urge doctors to track their own success rates at finding precancerous growths to see how they measure up to standards, but even if they do keep track, the doctors do not have to share the data with anyone. And many people are loath to ask about it. The doctor wielding the scope is the last person most patients would want to offend.
“The patient really has no way to act as an informed consumer,” Dr. Smith said. “You can’t call up a facility and say, ‘By the way, is my doctor any good?’ or, ‘Tell me who the best one is.’ ”
He added: “For some physicians there is an expectation of trust, and it is offputting to have a patient request documentation of competence. However, some physicians know patients are hearing about these issues and are not offended by questions about performance and errors.”
Easily Overlooked Lesions Tied to Colon Cancer, Study Finds
By DENISE GRADY
An easily overlooked type of abnormality in the colon is the most likely type to turn cancerous, and is more common in this country than previously thought, researchers are reporting.
The findings come from a study of colonoscopy, in which a camera-tipped tube is used to examine the lining of the intestine. Generally, doctors search for polyps, abnormal growths that stick out from the lining and can turn into cancer. But another type of growth is much more dangerous, and harder to see because it is flat or depressed and similar in color to healthy tissue.
Japanese researchers became concerned about these flat lesions in the 1980s and ’90s, but studies here had mixed results and American doctors tended to think that flat growths were less common and less dangerous in the United States.
The new study, to be published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests otherwise.
Some doctors in this country were already alert to flat lesions, but the findings will pose a challenge to others, because it takes a trained and vigilant eye to see the growths and special techniques to remove them. The results also mean it is especially important that patients take the harsh laxatives that many dread in advance of the test. The flat lesions, hard to find even under the best conditions, will be impossible to see if any waste is left in the bowel.
Colon cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in the United States, after lung cancer, with about 154,000 new cases detected and 52,000 deaths a year. It is one of the few cancers that is totally preventable if precancerous growths are found and removed; it can also be cured with surgery alone if found early enough.
People who have just had a colonoscopy should not rush to schedule another one just to look for the flat growths, doctors said.
“I don’t think people have to panic that they’ve somehow been neglected and had poor care,” said Dr. David A. Rothenberger, deputy chairman of surgery at the University of Minnesota.
But he and other experts emphasized that people should see a doctor any time they have persisting symptoms that could indicate colon cancer, like rectal bleeding or a change in bowel habits — no matter how recently they had a colonoscopy. The test is highly reliable, but not perfect, doctors say.
Some doctors who perform colonoscopy just are not good at seeing flat lesions, but may improve with training and practice, said Dr. Douglas K. Rex, a gastroenterologist and professor of medicine at Indiana University.
“I think there are people who expect everything in there to be shaped like a golf ball,” he said. “It’s not.”
Dr. David Lieberman, chief of gastroenterology at Oregon Health and Science University, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said: “I think there will be some surprise. There has been in general some skepticism in the United States about how common flat and depressed lesions are and how important they are. So I think this study, coming from the United States and from a good group of investigators, will be a wake-up call to a lot of physicians and will prompt people to be looking for these lesions.”
The study, of 1,819 military veterans, mostly men, found that 9.35 percent had flat lesions, and those lesions were five times as likely as polyps to contain cancerous or precancerous tissue. Depressed or indented lesions were the least common but the most risky. Together, the flat or depressed lesions accounted for only 15 percent of the potentially cancerous growths found in the study, but were involved in half of the cancers. Once the doctors spotted the flat lesions, they sprayed a bluish dye on them to see their outlines better and remove them completely.
The first author of the study, Dr. Roy M. Soetikno of the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System said, “The message for doctors is, Here is a large amount of data showing that these precursors of cancer, always believed to be a Japanese disease, are actually a disease here, and are important, because they are much more likely to be cancerous, and doctors need to spend the time to provide quality colonoscopy.”
The message to patients, Dr. Soetikno said, is that when preparing for colonoscopy, they must follow instructions to the letter and take the hated laxatives to make sure their bowels are empty so that doctors can see the lining.
If any waste remains, flat lesions will be buried by it. Studies have shown that in about a quarter of all colonoscopies, the bowel preparation is inadequate.
Dr. Rex said that male veterans tended to have more precancerous colon growths than other groups, so the rate of flat lesions in women or the general population might not be quite as high as those in the study.
Dr. Soetikno and his colleagues started an exchange program with doctors in Japan to learn their techniques for recognizing and removing the flat lesions.
American doctors should learn from overseas colleagues more often, Dr. Rothenberger said, adding, “We tend to get very smug about our abilities.”
The quality of colonoscopy has become a delicate issue, because an article in The New England Journal of Medicine in December 2006 found that some doctors were 10 times better than others at finding precancerous polyps. A major factor in their success was taking enough time to examine the colon thoroughly, as opposed to rushing through the procedure. Doctors who miss polyps would almost certainly miss flat lesions as well because they are harder to see. The new study underscores the need for careful examinations, because the flat lesions are more dangerous.
The study also raises doubts about whether “virtual colonoscopy,” performed by a CT scanner, will ever be able to take the place of the colonoscope inserted into the rectum, as many patients had hoped. The problem is that CT scans use X-rays to reveal shapes, and find polyps because they stick out. Flat lesions are unlikely to show up in such scans.
Studies show that from 0.3 percent to 0.9 percent of patients develop colon cancers within just a few years of having a colonoscopy and polyp removal — exactly what the procedure is supposed to prevent. Some doctors think that flat lesions, missed entirely during the colonoscopy or not fully removed, may account for some of these apparent failures.
Dr. Robert Smith, the director of screening for the American Cancer Society, said flat lesions were “a vexing issue” that had provoked a lot of arguments among doctors.
“This paper shows they’re more prevalent than we believed, and also quite serious with regard to the presence of features associated with an elevated risk of cancer,” Dr. Smith said.
The difficulty facing patients is how to be sure their doctors are doing a good job. Professional groups have issued guidelines about the best way to perform a colonoscopy, but they are recommendations, not rules. The groups also urge doctors to track their own success rates at finding precancerous growths to see how they measure up to standards, but even if they do keep track, the doctors do not have to share the data with anyone. And many people are loath to ask about it. The doctor wielding the scope is the last person most patients would want to offend.
“The patient really has no way to act as an informed consumer,” Dr. Smith said. “You can’t call up a facility and say, ‘By the way, is my doctor any good?’ or, ‘Tell me who the best one is.’ ”
He added: “For some physicians there is an expectation of trust, and it is offputting to have a patient request documentation of competence. However, some physicians know patients are hearing about these issues and are not offended by questions about performance and errors.”
Thursday, February 14, 2008
February 14, 2008
At Home in the World
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
As soon as Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric’s chairman, became chief executive in 2001, his foreign-based managers began pressing him to move some major operations overseas.
“They’d say, ‘G.E. will never be really global until you do,’ ” Mr. Immelt recalled. For years, his reaction was, “That’s really stupid; no need to do that.”
But his managers kept up the pressure, and Mr. Immelt figured that “with so much smoke, there must be a fire.”
So in 2004, he moved G.E. Healthcare from Wisconsin to outside London, the home of Amersham, a company G.E. had just bought.
Clearly, he liked the results. G.E. now has research centers in Munich, Shanghai and Bangalore, India. The unit that sells equipment and services to oil and gas companies is based in Florence, Italy.
And this month, G.E. promoted an American executive, William H. Cary, to lead G.E. Money. The company also said that it would move the group’s headquarters to London from Stamford, Conn., to be closer to customers in Europe and Asia.
The European operations are helping G.E. rebuild its image in Europe, where hard feelings still linger from G.E.’s aborted effort to acquire Honeywell in 2001. The centers in Asia help build new relationships with governments of developing countries, both as showcases for technology and as sources for jobs.
Sales of engines, turbines and other so-called infrastructure items are not only the biggest contributors to G.E.’s profits these days, but also the greatest source of its growth.
“Everyone talks about outsourcing manufacturing, but it is the high-level R.& D. jobs that are the great marketing tools,” Mr. Immelt said. “And I’m a salesman, remember. I know that you don’t get to sell things for long unless you are part of the culture into which you are selling.”
Much is at stake. Last year, for the first time, G.E.’s overseas revenue surpassed domestic sales. But more important, overseas sales are growing even though the slowing American economy is damping sales back home.
That is true of many companies, of course. But for G.E., the result has been more than a shifting of revenue. The company’s once-rigid hierarchy and vaunted training programs are going through a huge overhaul, as American executives learn to treat foreign-born colleagues as equals, not subordinates. “They are managing their worldwide organization as a network, not a centralized hub with foreign appendages,” said Christopher A. Bartlett, a professor at the Harvard Business School who has written a case study on G.E.
This year, in a highly symbolic gesture, G.E. Transportation, which is based in Erie, Pa., moved its annual sales meeting to Sorrento, Italy, from Florida. “It was time the Americans learned what it’s like to deal with jet lag,” said John Dineen, who leads the unit.
In a sense, G.E. is returning to its past. When John F. Welch Jr. became its chief in 1981, G.E. was organized geographically, with powerful country heads — usually American-born — running different regions. He reorganized the company around businesses. Now, Mr. Immelt is creating a hybrid of the two approaches.
“Jeff recognizes that the center of gravity is shifting,” said Noel M. Tichy, a management professor at the University of Michigan who has written about G.E.
That is true outside G.E. as well.
International Business Machines, which now derives 65 percent of its revenue from overseas, operates most of its software and services business from India. It has moved its global procurement center, as well as most of its voice recognition technology work, to China.
Last year, for the first time, I.B.M. brought 23 Chinese employees to its headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., for nearly two weeks to learn about I.B.M.’s ethics and culture. In September, the same 23 workers went through training in Shanghai, to learn how to apply those principles. I.B.M. also has begun to send American executives to training sessions in Asia, both to teach and to learn.
“The people in Armonk can’t just say, ‘grow earnings 30 percent,’ ” said Denis Fred Simon, provost of the Neil D. Levin Graduate Institute of International Relations and Commerce, which helped I.B.M. devise the new training program. “They have to understand what it means to operate on the ground in China.”
But G.E.’s size — $173 billion in revenue last year — and product diversity make the task of imparting such understanding especially formidable.
So G.E.’s American managers now travel overseas for management training almost as often as European executives come to G.E.’s management center in Crotonville, N.Y.
Today, G.E. researchers in Shanghai or Bangalore have the kind of autonomy that used to exist only in Niskayuna, N.Y., where the G.E. Global Research Center long reigned supreme.
Mr. Immelt is thinking about replicating Crotonville in China, and building a residential lodge at the Munich research center, similar to the one in Niskayuna.
And foreign accents are heard at higher rungs of the management ladder. G.E.’s country managers, who act as liaisons between G.E. businesses and customers in their territories, increasingly hail from the regions they manage and are growing in internal stature as G.E.’s overseas sales continue to soar.
“In places like China, governments are big customers, and it’s the country heads who have the relationships with the governments,” said Deane M. Dray, the G.E. analyst at Goldman Sachs.
Most business heads are still based in the United States. And because they control the bottom lines of their respective units, they still have the most clout.
But foreign-born nationals are rising through the businesses. The executive roster at G.E. Transportation includes Pierre Comte, a Frenchman who runs Global Signaling from Paris, and Rafael Santana, a Brazilian who manages G.E. Transportation-Americas from Brazil.
Evren Eryurek, manager of global rail operations, works from Florida, but he is Turkish. Mr. Dineen is American, as is Tim Schweikert, president of G.E. Transportation China. But their successors, Mr. Dineen suggested, “might well be foreign-born.”
Mr. Immelt, who never did a foreign stint himself, can easily picture that. He would not name them, but he said he could think of at least three foreign-born nationals who could succeed him when he retires in a decade or so.
“The business C.E.O.’s have to be socially and politically astute and able to anticipate political risk,” Mr. Immelt said. “There are more people competing for these top jobs, but a lot fewer who qualify for them.”
Management experts say that may soon change. “Students coming out of the Indian Institute of Technology are every bit as talented as those who study in London or New York,” said Robert N. Bontempo, a professor of executive education at the Columbia Business School. “And the globalization of big companies has enabled them to get meaningful work experience without leaving their countries.”
The transition has been bumpy for American employees. They no longer have first crack at plum assignments and promotions. And they no longer get to lord it over foreign colleagues.
“Sometimes you need dogmatic leadership,” Mr. Immelt said. “You need to say, ‘I don’t care if you like this, it’s happening.’ ”
Recalcitrant executives are coming around. “It is easy to fly anywhere from London, and I’m not out of phase with anyone’s time zone,” said Joseph M. Hogan, chief executive of G.E. Healthcare. “I call China in the morning, Europe midafternoon, then the U.S. last.”
There are more tangible results as well. Mark Little, who runs the Niskayuna research center, noted that the Shanghai lab came up with a new desalination method, and researchers in India devised a less-expensive electrocardiogram.
Mr. Hogan points to a low-cost CT scanner developed in China. American versions use a hydraulic pedal to move the table up and down; in China, the table is stationary, and patients simply use a step stool. “American engineers would have tried to somehow dumb down the tables we were already using,” he said.
Mr. Comte pushed G.E. Transportation to make electric locomotives and signaling devices, while executives in China persuaded the company to put cabs at both ends so the locomotive can switch directions without turning around.
“As outsiders, they can focus on what we weren’t doing, not on what we’d done well for 100 years,” Mr. Dineen said.
G.E.’s goal is to create a generation of foreign-born insiders. It has been holding what Susan P. Peters, who leads executive development at G.E., calls “talent forums” at G.E. businesses in the Middle East, Asia and Europe, at which corporate human resources people evaluate high-potential people in their 30s, and suggest development plans.
John F. Lynch, G.E.’s senior vice president for human resources — and a Scotsman by birth — said that the number of G.E. managers on foreign assignments has long hovered around 1,800 a year. But until a few years ago, probably 80 percent were Americans doing overseas stints.
Today, a similarly disproportionate number are foreign nationals working outside their home countries, many of whom are en route to becoming country managers. “Someday, country manager jobs will be culture-blind, and an American can again run Japan or a Scotsman can run India,” he said. “But it will be 25 years before that happens.”
At Home in the World
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
As soon as Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric’s chairman, became chief executive in 2001, his foreign-based managers began pressing him to move some major operations overseas.
“They’d say, ‘G.E. will never be really global until you do,’ ” Mr. Immelt recalled. For years, his reaction was, “That’s really stupid; no need to do that.”
But his managers kept up the pressure, and Mr. Immelt figured that “with so much smoke, there must be a fire.”
So in 2004, he moved G.E. Healthcare from Wisconsin to outside London, the home of Amersham, a company G.E. had just bought.
Clearly, he liked the results. G.E. now has research centers in Munich, Shanghai and Bangalore, India. The unit that sells equipment and services to oil and gas companies is based in Florence, Italy.
And this month, G.E. promoted an American executive, William H. Cary, to lead G.E. Money. The company also said that it would move the group’s headquarters to London from Stamford, Conn., to be closer to customers in Europe and Asia.
The European operations are helping G.E. rebuild its image in Europe, where hard feelings still linger from G.E.’s aborted effort to acquire Honeywell in 2001. The centers in Asia help build new relationships with governments of developing countries, both as showcases for technology and as sources for jobs.
Sales of engines, turbines and other so-called infrastructure items are not only the biggest contributors to G.E.’s profits these days, but also the greatest source of its growth.
“Everyone talks about outsourcing manufacturing, but it is the high-level R.& D. jobs that are the great marketing tools,” Mr. Immelt said. “And I’m a salesman, remember. I know that you don’t get to sell things for long unless you are part of the culture into which you are selling.”
Much is at stake. Last year, for the first time, G.E.’s overseas revenue surpassed domestic sales. But more important, overseas sales are growing even though the slowing American economy is damping sales back home.
That is true of many companies, of course. But for G.E., the result has been more than a shifting of revenue. The company’s once-rigid hierarchy and vaunted training programs are going through a huge overhaul, as American executives learn to treat foreign-born colleagues as equals, not subordinates. “They are managing their worldwide organization as a network, not a centralized hub with foreign appendages,” said Christopher A. Bartlett, a professor at the Harvard Business School who has written a case study on G.E.
This year, in a highly symbolic gesture, G.E. Transportation, which is based in Erie, Pa., moved its annual sales meeting to Sorrento, Italy, from Florida. “It was time the Americans learned what it’s like to deal with jet lag,” said John Dineen, who leads the unit.
In a sense, G.E. is returning to its past. When John F. Welch Jr. became its chief in 1981, G.E. was organized geographically, with powerful country heads — usually American-born — running different regions. He reorganized the company around businesses. Now, Mr. Immelt is creating a hybrid of the two approaches.
“Jeff recognizes that the center of gravity is shifting,” said Noel M. Tichy, a management professor at the University of Michigan who has written about G.E.
That is true outside G.E. as well.
International Business Machines, which now derives 65 percent of its revenue from overseas, operates most of its software and services business from India. It has moved its global procurement center, as well as most of its voice recognition technology work, to China.
Last year, for the first time, I.B.M. brought 23 Chinese employees to its headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., for nearly two weeks to learn about I.B.M.’s ethics and culture. In September, the same 23 workers went through training in Shanghai, to learn how to apply those principles. I.B.M. also has begun to send American executives to training sessions in Asia, both to teach and to learn.
“The people in Armonk can’t just say, ‘grow earnings 30 percent,’ ” said Denis Fred Simon, provost of the Neil D. Levin Graduate Institute of International Relations and Commerce, which helped I.B.M. devise the new training program. “They have to understand what it means to operate on the ground in China.”
But G.E.’s size — $173 billion in revenue last year — and product diversity make the task of imparting such understanding especially formidable.
So G.E.’s American managers now travel overseas for management training almost as often as European executives come to G.E.’s management center in Crotonville, N.Y.
Today, G.E. researchers in Shanghai or Bangalore have the kind of autonomy that used to exist only in Niskayuna, N.Y., where the G.E. Global Research Center long reigned supreme.
Mr. Immelt is thinking about replicating Crotonville in China, and building a residential lodge at the Munich research center, similar to the one in Niskayuna.
And foreign accents are heard at higher rungs of the management ladder. G.E.’s country managers, who act as liaisons between G.E. businesses and customers in their territories, increasingly hail from the regions they manage and are growing in internal stature as G.E.’s overseas sales continue to soar.
“In places like China, governments are big customers, and it’s the country heads who have the relationships with the governments,” said Deane M. Dray, the G.E. analyst at Goldman Sachs.
Most business heads are still based in the United States. And because they control the bottom lines of their respective units, they still have the most clout.
But foreign-born nationals are rising through the businesses. The executive roster at G.E. Transportation includes Pierre Comte, a Frenchman who runs Global Signaling from Paris, and Rafael Santana, a Brazilian who manages G.E. Transportation-Americas from Brazil.
Evren Eryurek, manager of global rail operations, works from Florida, but he is Turkish. Mr. Dineen is American, as is Tim Schweikert, president of G.E. Transportation China. But their successors, Mr. Dineen suggested, “might well be foreign-born.”
Mr. Immelt, who never did a foreign stint himself, can easily picture that. He would not name them, but he said he could think of at least three foreign-born nationals who could succeed him when he retires in a decade or so.
“The business C.E.O.’s have to be socially and politically astute and able to anticipate political risk,” Mr. Immelt said. “There are more people competing for these top jobs, but a lot fewer who qualify for them.”
Management experts say that may soon change. “Students coming out of the Indian Institute of Technology are every bit as talented as those who study in London or New York,” said Robert N. Bontempo, a professor of executive education at the Columbia Business School. “And the globalization of big companies has enabled them to get meaningful work experience without leaving their countries.”
The transition has been bumpy for American employees. They no longer have first crack at plum assignments and promotions. And they no longer get to lord it over foreign colleagues.
“Sometimes you need dogmatic leadership,” Mr. Immelt said. “You need to say, ‘I don’t care if you like this, it’s happening.’ ”
Recalcitrant executives are coming around. “It is easy to fly anywhere from London, and I’m not out of phase with anyone’s time zone,” said Joseph M. Hogan, chief executive of G.E. Healthcare. “I call China in the morning, Europe midafternoon, then the U.S. last.”
There are more tangible results as well. Mark Little, who runs the Niskayuna research center, noted that the Shanghai lab came up with a new desalination method, and researchers in India devised a less-expensive electrocardiogram.
Mr. Hogan points to a low-cost CT scanner developed in China. American versions use a hydraulic pedal to move the table up and down; in China, the table is stationary, and patients simply use a step stool. “American engineers would have tried to somehow dumb down the tables we were already using,” he said.
Mr. Comte pushed G.E. Transportation to make electric locomotives and signaling devices, while executives in China persuaded the company to put cabs at both ends so the locomotive can switch directions without turning around.
“As outsiders, they can focus on what we weren’t doing, not on what we’d done well for 100 years,” Mr. Dineen said.
G.E.’s goal is to create a generation of foreign-born insiders. It has been holding what Susan P. Peters, who leads executive development at G.E., calls “talent forums” at G.E. businesses in the Middle East, Asia and Europe, at which corporate human resources people evaluate high-potential people in their 30s, and suggest development plans.
John F. Lynch, G.E.’s senior vice president for human resources — and a Scotsman by birth — said that the number of G.E. managers on foreign assignments has long hovered around 1,800 a year. But until a few years ago, probably 80 percent were Americans doing overseas stints.
Today, a similarly disproportionate number are foreign nationals working outside their home countries, many of whom are en route to becoming country managers. “Someday, country manager jobs will be culture-blind, and an American can again run Japan or a Scotsman can run India,” he said. “But it will be 25 years before that happens.”
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
February 13, 2008
I Love You, but You Love Meat
By KATE MURPHY
SOME relationships run aground on the perilous shoals of money, sex or religion. When Shauna James’s new romance hit the rocks, the culprit was wheat.
“I went out with one guy who said I seemed really great but he liked bread too much to date me,” said Ms. James, 41, a writer in Seattle who cannot eat gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye.
Sharing meals has always been an important courtship ritual and a metaphor for love. But in an age when many people define themselves by what they will eat and what they won’t, dietary differences can put a strain on a romantic relationship. The culinary camps have become so balkanized that some factions consider interdietary dating taboo.
No-holds-barred carnivores, for example, may share the view of Anthony Bourdain, who wrote in his book “Kitchen Confidential” that “vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”
Returning the compliment, many vegetarians say they cannot date anyone who eats meat. Vegans, who avoid eating not just animals but animal-derived products, take it further, shivering at the thought of kissing someone who has even sipped honey-sweetened tea.
Ben Abdalla, 42, a real estate agent in Boca Raton, Fla., said he preferred to date fellow vegetarians because meat eaters smell bad and have low energy.
Lisa Romano, 31, a vegan and school psychologist in Belleville, N.Y., said she recently ended a relationship with a man who enjoyed backyard grilling. He had no problem searing her vegan burgers alongside his beef patties, but she found the practice unenlightened and disturbing.
Her disapproval “would have become an issue later even if it wasn’t in the beginning,” Ms. Romano said. “I need someone who is ethically on the same page.”
While some eaters may elevate morality above hedonism, others are suspicious of anyone who does not give in to the pleasure principle.
June Deadrick, 40, a lobbyist in Houston, said she would have a hard time loving a man who did not share her fondness for multicourse meals including wild game and artisanal cheeses. “And I’m talking cheese from a cow, not that awful soy stuff,” she said.
Judging from postings at food Web sites like chowhound.com and slashfood.com, people seem more willing to date those who restrict their diet for health or religion rather than mere dislike.
Typical sentiments included: “Medical and religious issues I can work around as long as the person is sincere and consistent, but flaky, picky cheaters — no way” and “picky eaters are remarkably unsexy.”
Jennifer Esposito, 28, an image consultant who lives in Rye Brook, N.Y., lived for four years with a man who ate only pizza, noodles with butter and the occasional baked potato.
“It was really frustrating because he refused to try anything I made,” she said. They broke up. “Food is a huge part of life,” she said. “It’s something I want to be able to share.”
A year ago Ms. Esposito met and married Michael Esposito, 51, who, like her, is an adventurous and omnivorous eater. Now, she said, she could not be happier. “A relationship is about giving and receiving, and he loves what I cook, and I love to cook for him,” she said.
Food has a strong subconscious link to love, said Kathryn Zerbe, a psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. That is why refusing a partner’s food “can feel like rejection,” she said.
As with other differences couples face, tolerance and compromise are essential at the dinner table, marital therapists said. “If you can’t allow your partner to have latitude in what he or she eats, then maybe your problem isn’t about food,” said Susan Jaffe, a psychiatrist in Manhattan.
Dynise Balcavage, 42, an associate creative director at an advertising agency and vegan who lives in Philadelphia, said she has been happily married to her omnivorous husband, John Gatti, 53, for seven years.
“We have this little dance we’ve choreographed in the kitchen,” she said. She prepares vegan meals and averts her eyes when he adds anchovies or cheese. And she does not show disapproval when he orders meat in a restaurant.
“I’m not a vegangelical,” she said. “He’s an adult and I respect his choices just as he respects mine.”
In deference to his wife, Mr. Gatti has cut back substantially on his meat consumption and no longer eats veal. For her part, Ms. Balcavage cooks more Italian dishes, her husband’s favorite.
In New York City, Yoshie Fruchter and his girlfriend, Leah Koenig, still wrestle with their dietary differences after almost two years together. He is kosher and she is vegetarian. They eat vegetarian meals at her apartment, where he keeps his own set of dishes and utensils. When eating out they mostly go to kosher restaurants, although they “aren’t known for inspired cuisine,” said Ms. Koenig, 25, who works for a nonprofit environmental group.
Though the couple occasionally visit nonkosher restaurants, Mr. Fruchter, 26, a musician, said he has to order carefully to avoid violating kosher rules. “We’re still figuring out how this is going to work,” he said. “We’re both making sacrifices, which is what you do when you’re in love.”
Even couples who have been eating together happily for years can be thrown into disarray when one partner suddenly takes up a new diet. After 19 years of marriage, Steve Benson unsettled his wife, Jean, when he announced three years ago that he would no longer eat meat, for ethical reasons.
“It had been in my head a long time, but I could have done a better job of talking about it,” said Mr. Benson, 46, a math professor at Lesley University, in Cambridge, Mass. Ms. Benson, who is also 46, and devises grade school curriculums, said she worried her husband would judge her if she continued to eat meat, “but we talked it out and he is not proselytizing.”
Another concern was whether she would be able to cook vegetarian meals that would meet the nutritional needs of everyone in the family, including their teenage daughter. “I wanted us all to eat the same thing for pragmatic, household economy reasons, but also because that’s part of being a family,” Ms. Benson said.
So, she cooks vegetarian dinners and makes lunches for herself and her daughter that include meat. She and her daughter have “meat parties” when Mr. Benson goes out of town, she said.
“There’s this feeling that if we eat the same thing then we are the same thing, and if we don’t, we’re no longer unified,” Dr. Zerbe said. She and Dr. Jaffe said sharing food is an important ritual that enhances relationships. They advise interdietary couples to find meals they can both enjoy. “Or at least a side dish,” Dr. Zerbe said.
For people who like to cook, learning to bridge the dietary divide can be an enjoyable puzzle. Ms. James, the gluten-averse writer, eventually found a man who did not love by bread alone. On her first date with Daniel Ahern, in 2006, she told him that she was gluten-free; he saw it as a professional challenge.
“As a chef, it has given me the opportunity to experiment with new ingredients to create things she can eat,” said Mr. Ahern, 39, who works at Impromptu Wine Bar Cafe in Seattle. Ms. James said she fell in love with him after he made her a gluten-free salad of frisée, poached egg and bacon. They married in September.
Since then, Mr. Ahern has given up eating bread at home, though he still eats it when he goes out. For her part, Ms. James has begun eating offal and foie gras, which were once anathema. “We’ve changed each other,” she said.
I Love You, but You Love Meat
By KATE MURPHY
SOME relationships run aground on the perilous shoals of money, sex or religion. When Shauna James’s new romance hit the rocks, the culprit was wheat.
“I went out with one guy who said I seemed really great but he liked bread too much to date me,” said Ms. James, 41, a writer in Seattle who cannot eat gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye.
Sharing meals has always been an important courtship ritual and a metaphor for love. But in an age when many people define themselves by what they will eat and what they won’t, dietary differences can put a strain on a romantic relationship. The culinary camps have become so balkanized that some factions consider interdietary dating taboo.
No-holds-barred carnivores, for example, may share the view of Anthony Bourdain, who wrote in his book “Kitchen Confidential” that “vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”
Returning the compliment, many vegetarians say they cannot date anyone who eats meat. Vegans, who avoid eating not just animals but animal-derived products, take it further, shivering at the thought of kissing someone who has even sipped honey-sweetened tea.
Ben Abdalla, 42, a real estate agent in Boca Raton, Fla., said he preferred to date fellow vegetarians because meat eaters smell bad and have low energy.
Lisa Romano, 31, a vegan and school psychologist in Belleville, N.Y., said she recently ended a relationship with a man who enjoyed backyard grilling. He had no problem searing her vegan burgers alongside his beef patties, but she found the practice unenlightened and disturbing.
Her disapproval “would have become an issue later even if it wasn’t in the beginning,” Ms. Romano said. “I need someone who is ethically on the same page.”
While some eaters may elevate morality above hedonism, others are suspicious of anyone who does not give in to the pleasure principle.
June Deadrick, 40, a lobbyist in Houston, said she would have a hard time loving a man who did not share her fondness for multicourse meals including wild game and artisanal cheeses. “And I’m talking cheese from a cow, not that awful soy stuff,” she said.
Judging from postings at food Web sites like chowhound.com and slashfood.com, people seem more willing to date those who restrict their diet for health or religion rather than mere dislike.
Typical sentiments included: “Medical and religious issues I can work around as long as the person is sincere and consistent, but flaky, picky cheaters — no way” and “picky eaters are remarkably unsexy.”
Jennifer Esposito, 28, an image consultant who lives in Rye Brook, N.Y., lived for four years with a man who ate only pizza, noodles with butter and the occasional baked potato.
“It was really frustrating because he refused to try anything I made,” she said. They broke up. “Food is a huge part of life,” she said. “It’s something I want to be able to share.”
A year ago Ms. Esposito met and married Michael Esposito, 51, who, like her, is an adventurous and omnivorous eater. Now, she said, she could not be happier. “A relationship is about giving and receiving, and he loves what I cook, and I love to cook for him,” she said.
Food has a strong subconscious link to love, said Kathryn Zerbe, a psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. That is why refusing a partner’s food “can feel like rejection,” she said.
As with other differences couples face, tolerance and compromise are essential at the dinner table, marital therapists said. “If you can’t allow your partner to have latitude in what he or she eats, then maybe your problem isn’t about food,” said Susan Jaffe, a psychiatrist in Manhattan.
Dynise Balcavage, 42, an associate creative director at an advertising agency and vegan who lives in Philadelphia, said she has been happily married to her omnivorous husband, John Gatti, 53, for seven years.
“We have this little dance we’ve choreographed in the kitchen,” she said. She prepares vegan meals and averts her eyes when he adds anchovies or cheese. And she does not show disapproval when he orders meat in a restaurant.
“I’m not a vegangelical,” she said. “He’s an adult and I respect his choices just as he respects mine.”
In deference to his wife, Mr. Gatti has cut back substantially on his meat consumption and no longer eats veal. For her part, Ms. Balcavage cooks more Italian dishes, her husband’s favorite.
In New York City, Yoshie Fruchter and his girlfriend, Leah Koenig, still wrestle with their dietary differences after almost two years together. He is kosher and she is vegetarian. They eat vegetarian meals at her apartment, where he keeps his own set of dishes and utensils. When eating out they mostly go to kosher restaurants, although they “aren’t known for inspired cuisine,” said Ms. Koenig, 25, who works for a nonprofit environmental group.
Though the couple occasionally visit nonkosher restaurants, Mr. Fruchter, 26, a musician, said he has to order carefully to avoid violating kosher rules. “We’re still figuring out how this is going to work,” he said. “We’re both making sacrifices, which is what you do when you’re in love.”
Even couples who have been eating together happily for years can be thrown into disarray when one partner suddenly takes up a new diet. After 19 years of marriage, Steve Benson unsettled his wife, Jean, when he announced three years ago that he would no longer eat meat, for ethical reasons.
“It had been in my head a long time, but I could have done a better job of talking about it,” said Mr. Benson, 46, a math professor at Lesley University, in Cambridge, Mass. Ms. Benson, who is also 46, and devises grade school curriculums, said she worried her husband would judge her if she continued to eat meat, “but we talked it out and he is not proselytizing.”
Another concern was whether she would be able to cook vegetarian meals that would meet the nutritional needs of everyone in the family, including their teenage daughter. “I wanted us all to eat the same thing for pragmatic, household economy reasons, but also because that’s part of being a family,” Ms. Benson said.
So, she cooks vegetarian dinners and makes lunches for herself and her daughter that include meat. She and her daughter have “meat parties” when Mr. Benson goes out of town, she said.
“There’s this feeling that if we eat the same thing then we are the same thing, and if we don’t, we’re no longer unified,” Dr. Zerbe said. She and Dr. Jaffe said sharing food is an important ritual that enhances relationships. They advise interdietary couples to find meals they can both enjoy. “Or at least a side dish,” Dr. Zerbe said.
For people who like to cook, learning to bridge the dietary divide can be an enjoyable puzzle. Ms. James, the gluten-averse writer, eventually found a man who did not love by bread alone. On her first date with Daniel Ahern, in 2006, she told him that she was gluten-free; he saw it as a professional challenge.
“As a chef, it has given me the opportunity to experiment with new ingredients to create things she can eat,” said Mr. Ahern, 39, who works at Impromptu Wine Bar Cafe in Seattle. Ms. James said she fell in love with him after he made her a gluten-free salad of frisée, poached egg and bacon. They married in September.
Since then, Mr. Ahern has given up eating bread at home, though he still eats it when he goes out. For her part, Ms. James has begun eating offal and foie gras, which were once anathema. “We’ve changed each other,” she said.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
January 27, 2008
Officials Make Deals to Learn Who Made Drug Deals
By MICHAEL BRICK
PLANO, Tex. — A black Hummer pulled into the Hooters parking lot as dusk fell. Arthur Dale Atwood, a professional bodybuilder with a 61-inch chest, opened the tailgate for a police informant to deliver more than 100 bottles of fake drugs made from vegetable oil.
For months, city detectives had been watching as Atwood, 34, amassed steroids, human growth hormone, Ecstasy and exotic thyroid stimulators. Last May, the police made their move. Outside the Hooters lot, officers pulled over the Hummer. But instead of filing drug charges, they turned Atwood over to federal prosecutors running a more ambitious investigation.
Three days later, federal agents began arresting seven other bodybuilders across the state. One of them, David C. Jacobs, 35, known to friends as Bulletproof, publicly boasted of having evidence to link players for the Dallas Cowboys and the Atlanta Falcons to steroids. No such evidence has been revealed, and those teams have strongly denied his statements.
Prosecutors could have tried Atwood and Jacobs on multiple counts of drug conspiracy, seeking to make an example of two bodybuilders suspected of distributing steroids. But instead, they made deals that could keep both men from serving any prison time. Law enforcement officials would not disclose the final targets of their investigation or say whether the names of steroid customers would ever be revealed.
The deals struck with Atwood and Jacobs , indicate a shift in steroid prosecution methods and goals. As the use of performance-enhancing substances draws concern from the halls of Congress to the offices of high school coaches, prosecutors have turned their onetime prime targets into partners in a broader endeavor.
Atwood and Jacobs were enlisted to cooperate in Operation Raw Deal, the federal government’s most aggressive drive yet to interrupt the importation and traffic of performance-enhancing drugs through nutrition stores, gyms and Web sites. In September, authorities in 10 countries coordinated the arrests of more than 120 people, seized more than $6 million and collected 11 million steroid doses, 3 boats and dozens of weapons.
Since then, prosecutors from San Diego to Rhode Island have been making deals with distributors to build their cases. The distribution networks for steroids are amorphous, unlike the traditional narcotics cartels led by strongmen. They thrive on the anonymity of the Internet, the discreet camaraderie of the locker room, and the reckless entrepreneurship of home laboratories and pharmacies.
“Our goal is to go after the bigger fish,” said Steve Robertson, a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. “You start looking at other dealers, customers, things like that.”
Although customers were rarely prosecuted in the past, the names of police officers, prominent athletes and entertainers have appeared in news accounts of several cases around the country. Customer lists have not been revealed.
“It runs the gamut,” said Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the D.E.A. “Lots of different kinds of athletes, weekend warriors, gym rats, girls, dealers/remailers, a lot of traffickers, people who have never taken steroids in their life but make a lot of money selling them.” From 2001 through 2005, when prosecutors focused their efforts on sophisticated, high-end laboratories, only 46 people were sentenced under the federal guidelines for steroid trafficking, according to the United States Sentencing Commission. In the past four months, however, at least 10 people have pleaded guilty to federal steroid-distribution charges, court records show.
Drug policy experts said the prosecutors of Operation Raw Deal could seek, at best, to disrupt the steady flow of performance-enhancing drugs.
“Use goes down when price goes up or availability is reduced,” said Jonathan P. Caulkins, a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. “We also know that ongoing enforcement pressure forces dealers to operate in inefficient ways, greatly increasing their costs of operation and, hence, increase the final retail price. So even if an operation doesn’t create a price spike, if it’s part of the background level of enforcement that forces the dealers to keep their heads down, then it may be doing some good.”
Definition and Diversifying
The police here began investigating a tip on Atwood early last year, soon after his arrival on the bodybuilding scene from Wisconsin. By traditional measures, he was a prime target: a ranked professional star in his sport whose downfall could serve as an example.
Atwood, who declined a request for an interview, was reared in Milwaukee, lifting weights to build strength for high school football. In gyms there, he was regarded as friendly and passionate about the sport.
“The guy trained like a monster,” said Tony Frontier, an amateur weight lifter in the 1990s who now works in education. “Didn’t have a chip on his shoulder, didn’t have a sense that he would use his strength to intimidate anybody or to his own advantage.”
Through the 1990s, Atwood refined his exercise routine, studied kinesiology and managed fitness clubs. In publicity materials and magazine interviews, he described a regimen of 13 workouts a week to train each muscle. In a typical day, he ate three protein shakes, cereal, oatmeal, three pounds of chicken, a potato, rice, steak, more chicken, then an egg-white omelet with protein powder.
In 2002, he won in his professional debut in Toronto at 5 feet 11 inches and 255 pounds, 70 pounds below his off-season weight.
“He came with just an incredible combination of size, symmetry and proportion, so he was one to watch,” said Milos Sarcev, a competitive bodybuilder and gym owner in Fullerton, Calif.
That victory became Atwood’s calling card as he traveled to competitions in the Netherlands, Russia, Hungary and San Francisco, with middling results over the next four years.
“After that, the criteria was more toward the smaller, symmetrical, so his physique was really rewarded no longer,” Sarcev said.
To supplement his income, Atwood sold health foods, vitamins and supplements through his retail storefront, Mass Results in Greenfield, Wis., before moving to this north Dallas suburb a few years ago.
In May, as Atwood drove away with the fake steroids, officers arrested him on a traffic violation. Searching his red brick town house, they confiscated $6,986 in cash, 2 computers, scales, tablets and capsules, a hollowed-out book, a 2007 Lexus and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Court records show he was not charged with any drug violation “due to the fact that this is still an ongoing federal investigation.” Prosecutors would not say whether he would be charged with a crime.
A Plea to Name Players
Meanwhile, federal agents were investigating Jacobs, a less-successful bodybuilder with deeper local roots. He was listed as a senior in the 1991 yearbook for Plano Senior High School without a photograph.
In promotional materials and social networking sites, Jacobs appeared as a great pile of muscle, tattoos and intensity, topped by a buzz cut. Posing beside strapping women with glowing tans, he described himself as a Bible reader, a teetotaler and a “movie fiend.”
Jacobs operated the Supplement Outlet from a storefront on President Bush Highway. The shopping center adjoined an LA Fitness gym, where he sought customers among the staff. He made an imposing first impression.
“Tatted-up and just huge as anything and looks mean,” Colby Lee, a gym employee, said of Jacobs. “But when I actually started talking to him, he was just a super-nice guy.”
Lee began visiting the Supplement Outlet daily for energy drinks and workout advice but rarely saw any other customers.
“At that point, I was suspicious,” he said. “I was like, How is he paying for this?”
When federal agents arrested Jacobs on charges of conspiring to distribute steroids, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, they confiscated cash, laptop computers, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, a Hummer, a Mustang, a noise filter, semiautomatic pistols, rifles and a double-barrel shotgun.
Through the summer, six other people connected to Atwood and Jacobs were arrested and charged with conspiracy to distribute steroids. Most have pleaded guilty to the federal distribution charge. In interviews, investigators and defense lawyers described the six as bodybuilders who were supplied by Atwood and Jacobs and who were familiar with one another partly through competitions and mostly through online sales.
Jacobs pleaded guilty and could serve only probation for his cooperation. One law enforcement official said the case now spanned “Texas and beyond.”
On the eve of his plea in November, Jacobs told a local television program that he intended to name steroid users who play for the Cowboys and the Falcons.
“Obviously, that’s one of the reasons I am here and pleading guilty,” he told the station, without offering proof or names. The teams denied that their organizations had any connection to Jacobs. One investigator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case was not finished, said Jacobs “likes the limelight, I guess.”
The investigator added: “But I think a lot of what he says is true. He’s been able to back up a lot of the stuff he claims.”
Jacobs could not be reached through telephone calls and a knock at his door. His lawyer, Henry E. Hockeimer, said: “It’s an ongoing investigation. He’s cooperating.”
The assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of Texas handling the case, Samuel W. Cantrell, did not return calls.
But another law enforcement official, who insisted on anonymity because the case was active, said people who bought steroids from Jacobs, Atwood and the others could face prosecution.
“We typically only prosecute distributors, not users,” the official said. “There are exceptions.”
Officials Make Deals to Learn Who Made Drug Deals
By MICHAEL BRICK
PLANO, Tex. — A black Hummer pulled into the Hooters parking lot as dusk fell. Arthur Dale Atwood, a professional bodybuilder with a 61-inch chest, opened the tailgate for a police informant to deliver more than 100 bottles of fake drugs made from vegetable oil.
For months, city detectives had been watching as Atwood, 34, amassed steroids, human growth hormone, Ecstasy and exotic thyroid stimulators. Last May, the police made their move. Outside the Hooters lot, officers pulled over the Hummer. But instead of filing drug charges, they turned Atwood over to federal prosecutors running a more ambitious investigation.
Three days later, federal agents began arresting seven other bodybuilders across the state. One of them, David C. Jacobs, 35, known to friends as Bulletproof, publicly boasted of having evidence to link players for the Dallas Cowboys and the Atlanta Falcons to steroids. No such evidence has been revealed, and those teams have strongly denied his statements.
Prosecutors could have tried Atwood and Jacobs on multiple counts of drug conspiracy, seeking to make an example of two bodybuilders suspected of distributing steroids. But instead, they made deals that could keep both men from serving any prison time. Law enforcement officials would not disclose the final targets of their investigation or say whether the names of steroid customers would ever be revealed.
The deals struck with Atwood and Jacobs , indicate a shift in steroid prosecution methods and goals. As the use of performance-enhancing substances draws concern from the halls of Congress to the offices of high school coaches, prosecutors have turned their onetime prime targets into partners in a broader endeavor.
Atwood and Jacobs were enlisted to cooperate in Operation Raw Deal, the federal government’s most aggressive drive yet to interrupt the importation and traffic of performance-enhancing drugs through nutrition stores, gyms and Web sites. In September, authorities in 10 countries coordinated the arrests of more than 120 people, seized more than $6 million and collected 11 million steroid doses, 3 boats and dozens of weapons.
Since then, prosecutors from San Diego to Rhode Island have been making deals with distributors to build their cases. The distribution networks for steroids are amorphous, unlike the traditional narcotics cartels led by strongmen. They thrive on the anonymity of the Internet, the discreet camaraderie of the locker room, and the reckless entrepreneurship of home laboratories and pharmacies.
“Our goal is to go after the bigger fish,” said Steve Robertson, a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. “You start looking at other dealers, customers, things like that.”
Although customers were rarely prosecuted in the past, the names of police officers, prominent athletes and entertainers have appeared in news accounts of several cases around the country. Customer lists have not been revealed.
“It runs the gamut,” said Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the D.E.A. “Lots of different kinds of athletes, weekend warriors, gym rats, girls, dealers/remailers, a lot of traffickers, people who have never taken steroids in their life but make a lot of money selling them.” From 2001 through 2005, when prosecutors focused their efforts on sophisticated, high-end laboratories, only 46 people were sentenced under the federal guidelines for steroid trafficking, according to the United States Sentencing Commission. In the past four months, however, at least 10 people have pleaded guilty to federal steroid-distribution charges, court records show.
Drug policy experts said the prosecutors of Operation Raw Deal could seek, at best, to disrupt the steady flow of performance-enhancing drugs.
“Use goes down when price goes up or availability is reduced,” said Jonathan P. Caulkins, a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. “We also know that ongoing enforcement pressure forces dealers to operate in inefficient ways, greatly increasing their costs of operation and, hence, increase the final retail price. So even if an operation doesn’t create a price spike, if it’s part of the background level of enforcement that forces the dealers to keep their heads down, then it may be doing some good.”
Definition and Diversifying
The police here began investigating a tip on Atwood early last year, soon after his arrival on the bodybuilding scene from Wisconsin. By traditional measures, he was a prime target: a ranked professional star in his sport whose downfall could serve as an example.
Atwood, who declined a request for an interview, was reared in Milwaukee, lifting weights to build strength for high school football. In gyms there, he was regarded as friendly and passionate about the sport.
“The guy trained like a monster,” said Tony Frontier, an amateur weight lifter in the 1990s who now works in education. “Didn’t have a chip on his shoulder, didn’t have a sense that he would use his strength to intimidate anybody or to his own advantage.”
Through the 1990s, Atwood refined his exercise routine, studied kinesiology and managed fitness clubs. In publicity materials and magazine interviews, he described a regimen of 13 workouts a week to train each muscle. In a typical day, he ate three protein shakes, cereal, oatmeal, three pounds of chicken, a potato, rice, steak, more chicken, then an egg-white omelet with protein powder.
In 2002, he won in his professional debut in Toronto at 5 feet 11 inches and 255 pounds, 70 pounds below his off-season weight.
“He came with just an incredible combination of size, symmetry and proportion, so he was one to watch,” said Milos Sarcev, a competitive bodybuilder and gym owner in Fullerton, Calif.
That victory became Atwood’s calling card as he traveled to competitions in the Netherlands, Russia, Hungary and San Francisco, with middling results over the next four years.
“After that, the criteria was more toward the smaller, symmetrical, so his physique was really rewarded no longer,” Sarcev said.
To supplement his income, Atwood sold health foods, vitamins and supplements through his retail storefront, Mass Results in Greenfield, Wis., before moving to this north Dallas suburb a few years ago.
In May, as Atwood drove away with the fake steroids, officers arrested him on a traffic violation. Searching his red brick town house, they confiscated $6,986 in cash, 2 computers, scales, tablets and capsules, a hollowed-out book, a 2007 Lexus and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Court records show he was not charged with any drug violation “due to the fact that this is still an ongoing federal investigation.” Prosecutors would not say whether he would be charged with a crime.
A Plea to Name Players
Meanwhile, federal agents were investigating Jacobs, a less-successful bodybuilder with deeper local roots. He was listed as a senior in the 1991 yearbook for Plano Senior High School without a photograph.
In promotional materials and social networking sites, Jacobs appeared as a great pile of muscle, tattoos and intensity, topped by a buzz cut. Posing beside strapping women with glowing tans, he described himself as a Bible reader, a teetotaler and a “movie fiend.”
Jacobs operated the Supplement Outlet from a storefront on President Bush Highway. The shopping center adjoined an LA Fitness gym, where he sought customers among the staff. He made an imposing first impression.
“Tatted-up and just huge as anything and looks mean,” Colby Lee, a gym employee, said of Jacobs. “But when I actually started talking to him, he was just a super-nice guy.”
Lee began visiting the Supplement Outlet daily for energy drinks and workout advice but rarely saw any other customers.
“At that point, I was suspicious,” he said. “I was like, How is he paying for this?”
When federal agents arrested Jacobs on charges of conspiring to distribute steroids, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, they confiscated cash, laptop computers, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, a Hummer, a Mustang, a noise filter, semiautomatic pistols, rifles and a double-barrel shotgun.
Through the summer, six other people connected to Atwood and Jacobs were arrested and charged with conspiracy to distribute steroids. Most have pleaded guilty to the federal distribution charge. In interviews, investigators and defense lawyers described the six as bodybuilders who were supplied by Atwood and Jacobs and who were familiar with one another partly through competitions and mostly through online sales.
Jacobs pleaded guilty and could serve only probation for his cooperation. One law enforcement official said the case now spanned “Texas and beyond.”
On the eve of his plea in November, Jacobs told a local television program that he intended to name steroid users who play for the Cowboys and the Falcons.
“Obviously, that’s one of the reasons I am here and pleading guilty,” he told the station, without offering proof or names. The teams denied that their organizations had any connection to Jacobs. One investigator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case was not finished, said Jacobs “likes the limelight, I guess.”
The investigator added: “But I think a lot of what he says is true. He’s been able to back up a lot of the stuff he claims.”
Jacobs could not be reached through telephone calls and a knock at his door. His lawyer, Henry E. Hockeimer, said: “It’s an ongoing investigation. He’s cooperating.”
The assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of Texas handling the case, Samuel W. Cantrell, did not return calls.
But another law enforcement official, who insisted on anonymity because the case was active, said people who bought steroids from Jacobs, Atwood and the others could face prosecution.
“We typically only prosecute distributors, not users,” the official said. “There are exceptions.”
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