Discovery

This week Chris Bruce, the director for Washington State University’s museum of art, travels to Seattle to help sort out the disposition of the one of the most significant art donations in Washington State history – that of Safeco Insurance’s gift of more than 800 artworks. The donation of work by Northwest artists to the Washington Art Consortium, a non-profit museum cooperative, is valued at about $3.5 million.

While the donation is a done deal, Bruce, as WSU’s representative, has some work ahead in helping to decide where each work of art will go.

WSU became one of the four founding members of the Washington Art Consortium in 1975.  Because of logistics of maintenance and storage, the WAC has always been a shared collection of works on paper including pieces from the New York School from the 1950s and 60s, says Bruce, dropping names like de Kooning, Motherwell, and Pollock. The WAC brought the masterworks to this region and then expanded the collection to include photography and works from the Pacific Northwest.

So this week, Bruce and six other members of the WAC board – also museum directors – are meeting in Seattle to carefully review the Safeco donation piece by piece with a Northwest art expert. They will choose about 150 key works on paper for the WACs permanent collection. Then later this spring the remainder of the donation, along with money from Safeco for its care and transportation, will be divided among the WAC member museums, including WSU.

“By the end of March each one of us should have a wish list of pieces we would like to have,” says Bruce. He expects there will be some overlap. “Three museums might like the same Chihuly, for example.” Then it will come down to whether the specific piece fits in with the existing work at the museum, or if it fits a regional subject matter. There’s a beautiful painting by Gaylen Hansen (an Eastern Washington-based artist and former WSU Art Department faculty) that could fit well into WSU’s collection.  As well, says Bruce, some of the glass pieces from Safeco might fit well with the art on permanent display in the atrium of the Smith Center for Undergraduate Education.

Other pieces, like serigraphs by Jacob Lawrence, would be wonderful additions to WSU’s museum, but since Lawrence was a professor at the University of Washington, they’re more likely to go to the Henry Art Gallery there, says Bruce. He doesn’t anticipate tension over dividing up the remaining pieces. “We’re a very collegial group,” says Bruce.

By April, the WAC board should have done its job and the disposition of most of the works will be clear. At that time, the public will be able to see the “best of Safeco” at an exhibition scheduled to open April 21st at the Wright Exhibition Space in Seattle. And later this year the pieces coming to WSU will be shown on campus in Pullman.

Links

Safeco donating $3.5 million art collection to consortium of museums (Seattle Times, Feb. 11, 2010)

Washington Art Consortium

Safeco Insurance Art Collection

Some detective stories move forward, one lead taking an investigator to the next, right up to when the case is solved.

Then there are times when the detective looks back, picking through a thick file, returning to witnesses for another round of interviews, poring over old evidence with new eyes.

That’s what Tom Besser, professor of veterinary microbiology at Washington State University, hopes to do with the enigma of 0157:H7. Besser this month received $1 million from the federal Agriculture and Food Research Initiative to see if previous research into stopping the bacteria at its source—cattle—may be more effective once different strains of the disease are considered.

The E. coli bacterium infects an estimated 70,000 Americans a year, but researchers have yet to get a sure grip on preventing its spread. Health experts have worked on reducing the infection rate through a suite of improvements in meat handling and food preparation. But when only ten E. coli cells can make a person sick, vigilance can only go so far.

Besser hopes to stop the bacteria by focusing specifically on beef and dairy cattle and the different types of E. coli they harbor.

“Cattle don’t get sick from this,” he said. “It doesn’t bother them. But that still doesn’t mean we can’t go into cattle and maybe do something to reduce their infection rate with 0157. And we think if we do, then depending on how important cattle are as a source for humans, the human rate should go down too.”

So far, he has seen promising work in reducing the rate with which cattle get infected. Vaccines, beneficial bacteria or “probiotics,” and certain feeds have had some good results in reducing the numbers of infected cattle. Researchers have also been struck by how much the bacteria seem to die off in the winter but march back with great force in the summer months

Now Besser thinks researchers might see even more striking results if they take different E. coli strains into account.

Two strains tend to be particularly infectious, being found in 95 percent of the human illnesses. These are called clinical genotypes.

Another group of three strains, the “bovine-biased” genotypes, is found in only five percent of human illnesses.

But as researchers have tested the effectiveness of different vaccines, feeds and treatments, they didn’t determine which of the strains were involved, since the strain types had not been discovered when most of the work had been done.

“We’ve got 15 or 20 years of research on 0157:H7 in cattle and we don’t have a clue in any of those research projects whether we were measuring bovine-biased genotypes or clinical genotypes,” said Besser.  “And those interventions that we studied—the vaccines and the probiotics and the seasonal variation and everything else—it would be really helpful to know whether the bovine-biased genotypes behaved differently than the clinical genotypes for those things.”

A vaccine, for example, could cut incidence of 0157 in half. “That could be really good if the half that it’s cutting it by is mostly clinical genotypes,” said Besser.

But if the half being reduced is mostly bovine-biased genotypes, it is only affecting the cause of a small percentage of illnesses. “Then you’re probably not affecting the human risk at all,” he said.

“We’ve spent a lot of money over the years trying to investigate feeds and management systems and manure handling systems,” he said. “Now that we know about these genotype differences, I want to go back and say, ‘Well, maybe some of those interventions that looked effective really aren’t very effective and we should write them off. Or maybe some of them that didn’t look very effective actually were much more effective than we thought.’ And I don’t think this is a far-fetched possibility. I think it’s quite possible.”

The three-year USDA grant will cover work in finding genetic markers that clearly define differences in the five strains. Researchers will then use the markers to take a new look at the effectiveness of different treatments and strategies. The grant will also involve an outreach program aimed at improving the accuracy of 0157 information going to industry, health professionals, the media and policy makers.

How does your brain work with too little sleep? As police officers, firefighters, nurses, grad students…and most parents…all know, sleep deprivation can cause your mind to react in odd ways. New research by Washington State University scientists has found that the sleep-deprived mind works differently than previously thought.

Hans Van Dongen and his colleagues at WSU Spokane’s Sleep and Performance Research Center have found that some executive functions of the mind, such as working memory, are essentially unaffected by as much as 51 hours of sleep deprivation. Other functions are highly affected, including information intake, where information becomes distorted before it’s processed in the mind.

Van Dongen’s work appears in the January 2010 journal SLEEP. You can read more about the sleep deprivation research at WSU Today.

To read about WSU’s sleep research, visit Washington State Magazine‘s Spring 2006 feature, “The Secrets of Sweet Oblivion.” 

In the Winter 2009 feature “How We Eat is Who We Are,” you can read about WSU researcher Jim Krueger’s analysis of weight gain and sleep deprivation. (See the sidebar of the article.)

Links

Impact of sleep deprivation different than once thought (WSU Today, Feb. 10, 2010)

WSU Sleep and Performance Research Center 

In 1972, Bill Lipe spent several days digging through ancient trash in an archaeological dig in southeastern Utah. Among the junk were coprolites, very old, very dry turkey droppings.

Lipe took the trove back to his job at the Museum of Northern Arizona, then to Washington State University, where he is now a professor of anthropology. In 2008, molecular biologist Brian Kemp came to the Pullman campus to set up a specialized lab capable of analyzing ancient DNA. It turns out that Lipe’s ancient poop contained DNA of one of North America’s earliest examples of domesticated birds.

The WSU anthropologists, who worked with colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, say the turkeys raised by people in the Southwest were genetically distinct from previously known domesticated turkeys in Mexico.

“We can now say this is the first bird domesticated in what is now the United States,” says Kemp, who helped analyze the mitochondrial DNA of the earliest examples—some dating to 100 BC.

“It highlights the importance of curation,” he says. “We can say, ‘Why do we have this old crap lying around?’ and somebody might say, ‘Why do we spend so much money curating a bag of crap?’ Well, because we have no idea what we’re going to be able to learn from that.”

The research shows that many early Native American groups across the Southwest raised turkeys with genetic signatures distinct from turkeys domesticated in pre-historic Mexico.

The fact that the Southwest domesticated turkeys go back at least 2,000 years is testimony to the persistent innovation of Homo sapiens, says Kemp.

“It speaks to the resourcefulness of prehistoric peoples, our species,” he said. “We are really, really good at taming nature. We see it independently done by different people all over the world at different times.”

For more on Kemp and Lipe’s research, visit Washington State Magazine.

For more on the PNAS paper, visit Discovery News.

And the Los Angeles Times has a nice take on the work.