Philip Bethge

Category: Features

  • The Wizard of Stem Cell Science: Robert Lanza and the Dawning of a New Era of Hope

    Ethical worries have slowed medical research into applications for stem cells. But scientists like Robert Lanza have developed less controversial ways to derive stem cells from normal body cells rather than embryos and are already launching the first clinical trials.

    By Philip Bethge

    Stem cell researcher Robert Lanza hopes to save thousands of lives — and for a long time this caused him to fear for his own.

    “They bused these crazy people up from Kansas, and then they picnicked right outside our front door,” he says as he gazes out of his window at the gray winter landscape of Marlborough, Massachusetts. “The public thought we had these little buggy-eyed embryos here and were ripping apart their limbs to get these cells.”

    The physician always feared “somebody hiding in the bushes,” waiting to attack him. At the time, a doctor was threatened at a nearby fertility clinic, and a pipe bomb exploded at a bio lab in Boston.

    “Back then I thought that there was probably a 50-50 chance that I was going to get knocked off because I was so visible,” says the doctor. Then he leans back in his chair and laughs. Lanza likes to flirt with danger: “I said, okay, try to kill me — I’m still going to do what I think is right.”

    In Lanza’s case, doing what is “right” involves working with therapies based on human stem cells. The blind shall see again; the paralyzed shall walk again; the hemophiliac shall not bleed anymore. That may sound like something out of the Bible, but Lanza is no faith healer. In fact, the US business magazine Fortune called him “the standard-bearer for stem cell research.” The 57-year-old is the chief scientific officer at the US company Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) and one of the most flamboyant and controversial figures in this field of research.

    Militant anti-abortionists tried to hunt Lanza down because embryos had to die for his research. Just last year, the scientific journal Nature wrote that ACT has “a history of public blunders” and a reputation for “overhyping results.”

    At the same time, however, Lanza is writing medical history. For over one year now, eye patients in the US and the UK have been treated with cells from ACT laboratories — the first clinical stem cell trial worldwide.

    And there is a world premiere in the making: Lanza’s team has cultivated blood platelets that could be tested in hospitals as early as this year. The researcher and his team didn’t harvest the cells from embryonic stem cells, but rather from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells derived from normal body cells.

    “It took a decade,” says Lanza, “but now we are finally ready to move into the clinic with our stem cell therapies.”

    The Making of a Rebel Scientist

    Lanza is a slender man with short hair that stands on end, and he speaks so quickly that his sentences tend to be cut off. His laboratory is located in an ugly commercial building on the outskirts of Marlborough. It’s hard to imagine that a medical revolution is brewing in this dreary setting. The petri dishes, test tubes and steel containers filled with liquid nitrogen are teeming with human cells. The ACT “Master Cell Bank” cost $1 million (€770,000), says Lanza, “but these things grow like weeds once a stem cell line has been established.”

    The cell factory is currently producing batches of iPS blood platelets. Emergency wards have a huge demand for these helpers in the body’s natural clotting mechanism. Lanza explains that a lack of these elements can have dramatic consequences: His sister was seriously injured during an accident. The hospital didn’t have enough blood platelet concentrate. “She bled to death,” he says.

    Lanza wants to prevent something like that from ever happening again. His team has found ways to cultivate an “unlimited supply” of the cells. When frozen, he says, they can be kept for months. He is currently negotiating the final details of the planned study with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). “We don’t need any embryos to make iPS,” Lanza says with pride. “If this type of stem cell works,” he adds, “the whole ethical controversy will be eliminated.”

    Venturing to start clinical trials now is seen as a bold step. But Lanza is used to falling out of line. Even back when he was a schoolboy — just after the genetic code had been deciphered — he decided to alter the genetic makeup of a white chicken to make it black. “So I went to my teacher and told him that I was going to change the genetic makeup of the birds,” Lanza recounts. “He said: ‘Lanza, you’re going to go to hell.’”

    This merely encouraged the 13-year-old. He cobbled together some laboratory equipment. To gain support for his experiment, the youngster boarded a bus in his hometown of Stoughton, close to Boston, and went “looking for a Harvard professor,” as he explains with a grin. At first, his journey appeared to end at the closed gates of Harvard Medical School. But Lanza soon saw “a short, balding guy” coming across the parking lot. “He was wearing khaki pants and had a bunch of keys,” he says. “I thought he was the janitor.” The boy had no idea that this was Stephen Kuffler, one of the most famous neurophysiologists of his time.

    Kuffler played along: He opened the door for Lanza, allowed the boy to explain to him how genetics worked, and pushed him up the stairs. This opened up a new universe for the up-and-coming scientist. He repeated his chicken experiment and landed his first publication in Nature.

    The Dawning of a New Medical Era

    Lanza likes to tell this story to visitors. It shows how zeal can overcome all obstacles. He is often compared to the main character played by Matt Damon in the film “Good Will Hunting,” a highly talented outsider who, like Lanza, comes from a humble background.

    “Right from the beginning, I probably didn’t follow the rules,” says Lanza with a certain amount of pride. He studied medicine at Harvard. In South Africa, he worked with Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon who performed the world’s first human heart transplant in 1967, and with Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine in the 1950s. Then, in 1996, the world’s first cloned sheep, Dolly, was born in Britain — and Lanza sensed that his hour had arrived.

    “I knew right away that cloning could revolutionize medicine,” he says. With the help of cloned stem cells, the young researcher was convinced that a wide range of top-notch replacement parts could be created for the human body.

    The physician signed up with the biotech startup ACT. Working for the company in 2000, he cloned a gaur, an endangered wild bovine native to Southeast Asia. Later, his team managed to transform the frozen skin cells of a banteng into a living sample of this Asian wild cattle. The skin cells came from an animal that had died a quarter of a century earlier in the San Diego Zoo.

    For Lanza, these were just practice exercises. The ultimate goal for him was always people — and he was at just the right place for that: In 2001, then-ACT CEO Michael West went before the press and announced that his company had cloned a human embryo for the first time. West spoke of the beginning of “a new era of medicine.” Then all hell broke loose.

    —> Read original article at SPIEGEL Online International

    Obstacles Along the Way

    When Lanza harkens back to those days, he becomes more serious. Although the ACT embryos had only grown to tiny balls consisting of six cells, for anti-abortion activists and pro-lifers the researcher was now the Antichrist incarnate.

    “I remember that I went down to Tennessee, to the Bible country, and I went to one of those churches to explain what we were really doing. As I went through the door with the minister, a guy got up and shouted “Murderer! Murderer!” Lanza hired a bodyguard.

    In the wake of the media coup, ACT started to founder. Investors withdrew from the company, and with George W. Bush in the White House, public funding for stem cell research dried up. “We went through multiple times where we lost the whole team,” says Lanza, who notes that they even had their phone disconnected for a while. “Rather than curing diseases, we were trying to resolve theological problems,” Lanza says bitterly. “And that’s not what I studied medicine for.”

    Talking about the issue has slowly made the doctor furious and, almost imperceptibly, his tone of voice is becoming shriller. Another story has to be told, that of a policeman standing in front of the door one day. Lanza was afraid that he would be arrested. But no: “He came into my office and said that he had a child who was slowly going blind,” the physician recalls. “He said that he had heard of these cells that could supposedly help, and I said: ‘Yes, I have these cells in a freezer, but I don’t have the $20,000 to test them on mice.’”

    Lanza had to turn the man away. It pains him to this day. “I don’t want to know how many people went blind because we lost our public funding,” he says angrily. “Nobody gets it; they say everything is fine; no, it’s not fine!”

    Changes in the Political Environment and Scientific Advances

    Attention shifted away from ACT. Instead, everyone started talking about Geron, another biotech company on the West Coast. Researchers there had succeeded in cultivating nerve cells from embryonic stem cells. With support from Christopher Reeve, the paralyzed “Superman,” there was renewed hope that spinal cord injuries could be healed. Three patients were treated using the therapy developed by Geron. But in November 2011, the company put the brakes on the research due to a lack of funds.

    That was the moment when Lanza realized that he once again had to play the role of stem-cell-research poster boy. But this time he had something to show for his efforts. Benefiting from progress that Geron had made, ACT had also managed to gain FDA approval for a clinical trial.

    Researchers had cultivated so-called retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells, which form a thin layer over the retina and keep the photoreceptor cells nourished and healthy.

    In July 2011, doctors at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) injected the first two patients directly behind the retina, each with some 50,000 RPE cells from Lanza’s cell factory. There are now 36 patients in the US and the UK taking part in the trials. They either suffer from the hereditary Stargardt disease or age-related macular degeneration (AMD), both of which are conditions in which RPE cells slowly die, resulting in a loss of vision.

    Initial Success and Tempered Optimism

    One of the Stargardt patients is David Lee, from the northern English town of Leigh, just outside of Manchester. Following a routine eye checkup 25 years ago, Lee was told that he suffers from the disease. Over the ensuing years, he has had to idly stand by while he progressively loses his eyesight. “Watching television has become very hard, and reading is impossible without magnification,” the 47-year-old says.

    Then Lee heard about the stem cell trials and submitted an application to become a subject in the study. In late July 2012, he was operated on by a team working under surgeon James Bainbridge at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. The doctors injected RPE cells in Lee’s left eye. “I was exceptionally happy about it,” he says.

    Lee regularly travels to London to have his eyes examined. His physicians are satisfied. The RPE cells from the bio lab are thriving in Lee’s retina. “I see definitely brighter on the eye that was operated on,” he says.

    He runs a bakery out of a small brick house in the center of Leigh, and he can still see just well enough to be able to sell cakes, pastries and bread. “I know that I won’t get my sight back”, Lee says. “But, for me, it would already be a big success not to lose any more of my sight.”

    Many of the patients report that the therapy is effective. “We have some surprisingly good visual outcome,” says Steven Schwartz, an eye surgeon at UCLA. He says that one of his patients can read a clock again and go shopping, while another can recognize colors again. In addition to AMD and Stargardt patients, Schwartz plans to integrate extremely nearsighted individuals into the test program soon. The FDA has already approved the clinical trials.

    Lanza is a “genius” and his work is “stellar,” Schwartz says. “The patients seem to tolerate the cells well,” he says. But the researcher warns against overly optimistic expectations, adding that it remains completely uncertain whether the innovative eye therapy will actually heal these ailments. He notes that the trials are mainly meant to test the safety of the procedure.

    Stem cells can transform into virtually any type of body cell. Once they have become differentiated, they tend not to cause any problems. But what happens if they continue to develop, and one of the RPE cells from the lab mutates in the eye and becomes malignant?

    “I worry that a single case of cancer in a stem cell model like this could set the field back enormously,” says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. He is concerned that ACT may be pursuing its clinical trials far too aggressively. After all, the company has to placate its investors and outdo the competition.

    Competitors and Risks

    Indeed, Lanza will have to hurry up if he wants to be the first to come up with a clinically tested application for iPS cells. His greatest rival is located in Kobe, Japan, at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology. There, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka is working on groundbreaking stem cell therapies.

    And the Japanese researcher is a very capable contender. After all, he received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine last October for his method of producing iPS cells. Like Lanza, Yamanaka is striving to use stem cells to cure blindness from macular degeneration (AMD). But, unlike Lanza, he plans to use iPS cells.

    “Lanza is under tremendous pressure to show some positive results,” Caplan warns, adding that he is without a doubt a serious researcher. “But ACT has a history of overselling. They made a lot of promises in the past that just haven’t delivered.”

    Lanza is aware of the bad press. “Mistakes have been made,” he admits. But he remains feisty. For instance, he accuses Yamanaka, his Japanese counterpart, of venturing an experiment that is particularly risky. “We still don’t entirely understand how safe iPS cells are and how they work,” says Lanza. Using them to cultivate RPE cells to treat eye diseases is dangerous, he adds, because the cells could possibly become cancerous in patients’ eyes.

    “By contrast, we picked platelets for our first clinical trial with iPS because they have no nuclei,” he says. There is no chance of them growing out of control.

    Enthusiastic about the Future

    “Come have a look, I’m going to show you something else,” Lanza says at the end of the interview, as he opens a binder and pulls out a diagram that charts age relative to degree of paralysis. It has to do with multiple sclerosis. Lanza has studied mice that suffer from this crippling neurological disorder. The curve documents the sad fate of untreated animals: At the age of two, they drag their hind legs behind them. At the age of three, they are completely paralyzed.

    But it’s a completely different story among the mice that were treated with stem cells: The curve of this group can hardly be differentiated from that of healthy animals. “One shot of these cells and they are jumping around completely normal,” Lanza says with enthusiasm. The researcher treats the animals with so-called mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), which are cultivated from embryonic stem cells or iPS cells. They resemble bone marrow cells and secrete substances in the body that work like a fountain of youth.

    “That’s the future,” Lanza says. He points to an entire list of diseases that could potentially be treated with MSC cells, including chronic pain, arthritis and Parkinson’s. “The biological potency of these cells is just incredible! And we can make them by the millions,” he exclaims.

    This is what Lanza is like when he’s in the grips of enthusiasm. His eyes sparkle and his gestures underscore each word. At moments like these, one senses how far his enthusiasm can take him.

    “Before ACT hired me, they gave me a task,” he explains. “I was asked to get all the Nobel laureates in the country to sign a letter to support embryonic stem cell research.”

    Lanza put his fax machine to work. Ever since then, he has had a stack of letters in his desk drawer — with the signatures of 70 Nobel Prize laureates.

    Translated from the German by Paul Cohen

    —> Read original article at SPIEGEL Online International

  • Feeding the Dream Business: Inside the World of the Hollywood Paparazzi

    Paparazzi have a bad reputation for bending the rules to satisfy the world’s insatiable demand for celebrity photos. But the business is also incredibly lucrative, something that prompted Bill Gates’ Corbis photo agency to buy the world’s top paparazzi shop. Some in the industry are trying to free it from its sleazy image, but upstart agencies have few moral qualms.

    By Philip Bethge

    The place feels like a temple to photography. A giant image of Marilyn Monroe, taken by star photographer Paul Rice in 1956, hangs in the lobby of the Corbis Corporation. Andy Warhol’s portrait of John Lennon dominates the company’s open-plan office in Seattle’s historic Dexter Horton Building.

    Printed on fine gauze, it adorns a staircase leading up to the executive floor, where we meet with Gary Shenk. He is wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The dark rings under his eyes suggest he is not getting enough sleep.

    Shenk is the CEO of Corbis, one of the world’s most renowned high-quality stock photography agencies. The company, owned by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, holds the rights to more than 100 million images. They include the photos of the legendary French agency Sygma, as well as photos from the historic Bettmann Archive, whose inventory dates back as far as the American Civil War.

    The agency sells icons of photography: a nude of Brigitte Bardot in the bathtub; Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue; the black-and-white photos of Vietnamese children fleeing from America napalm bombs.

    Recently, however, this traditional citadel of quality photography has been selling more trivial fare: There’s “Her Royal Hotness” Pippa Middleton wearing pink jeans in London, model Kate Moss drinking and smoking on the beach and French President Nicolas Sarkozy jogging in a blue T-shirt on the Côte d’Azur.

    The change results from Corbis’ acquisition of Splash News, the global market leader for paparazzi photos. It is a breakthrough for a business that, until recently, was still viewed as the street urchin of the industry.

    The thugs of the telephoto lens are becoming presentable — and mainly because the pictures they take can be worth a lot of money. In fact, Shenk estimates “that anywhere from 50 to 60 percent of images that are sold into media these days are entertainment images,” most of them taken by paparazzi.

    Shenk refers to the celebrity snapshots as “candid celebrity photography” — “candid” in the sense that they are “taken from real life.” They revolve around themes of love, sex and tears — and the satisfying feeling that even the rich and beautiful can occasionally have their embarrassing moments and failures in life.

    In the Lair of the Paparazzi

    It takes a trip south from Seattle to Los Angeles to discover how the paparazzi industry works. The small editorial office of Splash News is located at the top of a narrow staircase in a building in the city’s western Venice district. The covers of celebrity magazines hang on the walls like trophies. A large photo shows a group of paparazzi at work, bunched together like students posing for a class portrait.

    The people at Splash News are proud of their work — and of their successes. Company revenues grew by more than 20 percent in the last year alone, says Kevin Smith, one of its founders.

    These days, the British native and former London-based journalist heads a paparazzi empire. The company has supplied the photography for 500 magazine covers over the last five years, he says, adding that Splash News sells photos in close to 70 countries. “I was amazed when we hit the million dollar (mark) in revenues,” says Smith, who drives a Bentley. “Now I am laughing about it.”

    Celebrity news from the company’s field offices around the world have trickled in overnight. As he does every morning, news editor Paul Tetley delivers a brief status report: Jennifer Lopez is in Chile and allegedly sleeping with someone from her team of dancers. Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor plans to get married, for the fourth time, in Las Vegas. A rumor from England says that Prince William’s wife, Kate, is pregnant.

    And, of course, there’s always Alec Baldwin. “He refused to shut off his mobile on a flight yesterday,” Tetley reports. The actor allegedly became verbally abusive and was ordered off the plane. It’s a mini scandal — and a hit for Splash News.

    A Vast Intelligence Operation

    Indeed, the celebrity news agency thrives on the missteps of the stars. “We always used to say ‘Your misfortune is our fortune,’” Smith readily admits. Being in the right place at the wrong time — for the celebrities at least — is the art of the paparazzi, who ply their trade with the virtuosity of skilled investigators.

    The agency employs roughly 1,000 photographers across the world and operates an extensive network of paid informants. Smith has his “tipsters” in hotels, restaurants, theaters, hospitals and airports, including about 100 doormen, bartenders and chauffeurs in Los Angeles alone. Among other things, Splash News uses this network of tipsters to keep track of who is flying when and where, and it closely monitors publicly accessible police reports.

    “Hardly anything happens in this city without our finding out about it,” says Smith, who claims he could find almost anyone within a day. For this knowledge, he depends primarily on his photo reporters, a close-knit group that refers to itself as the CIA, or “Celebrity Intelligence Agency.”

    “The job is a bit like bird-watching,” Smith says. “You have to have a certain tenacity, and you have to be able to blend in.”

    And be fast, he could add. Indeed, Smith’s photographers can transmit their photos directly to the editorial office via a high-speed cell-phone network, thereby giving customers access to the images within seconds.

    “People pay for speed,” Smith explains. “The first picture runs; the second just doesn’t.”

    —> read original story at SPIEGEL ONLINE International edition

    Out on the Hunt

    Owing to this pressing need for speed, Splash photographer Darren Banks always has his Canon EOS 1D Mark IV within reach. The compact 36-year-old is wearing white sneakers and jeans. He was once a marksman with the British Army. “It’s the same training, exactly the same business: Have a recon, shoot the prey,” he says in a strong British accent, maneuvering his large SUV out of a parking spot.

    We drive toward Hollywood, the 20-square-mile (50-square-kilometer) zone surrounding Sunset Boulevard that is the hunting grounds of the paparazzi. Banks always drives up and down the same 12 blocks, along Melrose Avenue, Rodeo Drive and Robertson Boulevard, past “Ivy,” a restaurant popular with celebrities, the “Boa” steakhouse and the Fred Segal boutique. Eventually, he heads toward Beverly Hills, where the stars live.

    In Benedict Canyon, Banks monitors the situation in front of David and Victoria Beckham’s $22-million (€17-million) mansion. A few blocks later, he drives past Tom Cruise’s former house.

    Banks knows the area like the back of his hand. Three months before Cruise’s daughter Suri was born, Banks practically lived in front of the estate’s gate, sitting in his car from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day while taking only short breaks. He calls the practice of waiting for weeks on end for just the right opportunity “doorstepping.”

    At times, he says, there were eight paparazzi lurking in front of the house, but “in the end, I got the largest number of exclusive photographs.” The haul consisted of eight “sets” of photos, little vignettes from the life of the Cruise family that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

    Voyeurism and Pride

    This form of journalism is profitable because the Internet has created a huge new market for the big-game hunters of photojournalism. Magazines like Us Weekly and People, as well as newspapers like the British tabloid Daily Mirror and the German tabloid Bild, are still important customers. But, these days, Smith primarily sells his photos to celebrity websites, such as tmz.com, eonline.com and perezhilton.com, which have something to say about every shopping trip of a given celebrity. Splash News assembles about 200 photo sets of small episodes from the lives of the stars. With these photos and archive images, the company sells about 10,000 photos a day, making it the world’s largest dealer of voyeuristic content.

    With success, however, comes the pressure to liberate the company from its shady image. Indeed, Smith expends a lot of effort touting his company as a “legitimate news agency” and insisting that Splash News’ reporters are well-trained journalists and photographers. “We consider ourselves the gentleman on the block,” he says. “There are a lot of rogues out there,” he adds, referring to photographers only out there to make a quick buck. “They are all rubbish.”

    Allegedly Less Scrupulous Upstarts

    Francois Regis Navarre is one these “rogues” — and someone Smith would prefer to see banished to the deserts of California. After serving as a war reporter in Iraq and Cambodia for the French newspaper Le Monde, Navarre founded the X17 photo agency in 1996. Since then, the 49-year-old Frenchman has scored some of the biggest coups in the paparazzi world.

    For example, the world has Navarre to thank for photos of Britney Spears shaving her head. Navarre also claims to have been the first to know about Michael Jackson’s death because, as he says, one of his men managed to take a few shots of the inside of the ambulance carrying the singer.

    Navarre lives on Amalfi Drive, an exclusive street in Pacific Palisades, and he also owns a beach house in Malibu. Paparazzi photos have made him a rich man, with his company reportedly generating roughly $10 million in annual revenues.

    Others in the paparazzi world despise him because he doesn’t employ professional photographers. Instead, his team is primarily composed of immigrants from countries like Brazil, whom he pays a low flat fee every month for the rights to their photos. He instructs his photographers not to take pictures of stars from far away but, rather, to “flash” them at close range, as he calls it. “I want to have eye contact with the stars,” Navarre says.

    In fact, Navarre has a reputation for occasionally playing fast and loose with the law. For example, California law holds that a person cannot be photographed if a “reasonable expectation of privacy” exists. But, as Navarre sees it, the precise meaning of the words “reasonable expectation” is a subjective matter. For example, he just published photos of Bradley Cooper, one of the lead actors in the recent hit comedy “The Hangover,” with his new girlfriend on the balcony of his house.

    “We go as far as we can without breaking the laws,” Navarre says. “There is a little anarchist in every good paparazzi.”

    The Intensity of the Moment

    Navarre’s cell phone rings. “Kim Kardashian just left her place,” he reports. Even if, by Hollywood standards, the reality-TV star (with an estimated annual income of $6 million) is merely a B-list celebrity, photos of her will probably still be worth a few thousand dollars for X17.

    Navarre hurries to his silver Porsche Cayenne. “She is going down Benedict?” he shouts into the phone, which will not leave his hands anytime soon. “In a white Rolls-Royce?” On Canon Drive, Navarre pulls up just behind the car carrying the star, while one of his photographers pulls up in the next lane, shooting all the while. “Any competitors around?” Navarre shouts through his car’s open window. Within seconds, four other paparazzi speed by, running the next red light.

    The convoy comes to a stop in front of a small hair salon on South Doheny Drive. Navarre grabs his camera and takes pictures of the shop through its glass front door while his men take up positions outside the back entrance. There are only 10 steps between the door and the car as it is being parked. The photographers have to be quick.

    “How do we do this? Stay close to the door or at the car?” Jack Arshamian shouts to his fellow photographers. For months, the Armenian-American has been following Kardashian wherever she goes. “She knows me; she respects my job,” says the former chauffeur, who has been working for Navarre for five months. Eventually, when the star steps out of the salon with her hair freshly done, the clicking of camera shutters sounds like machine-gun fire.

    Questionable Justifications

    What is still permitted, and what isn’t? Which methods are justified by the growing demand for celebrity photos? Though they pride themselves on their professionalism, even the Splash News photographers will admit to taking part in “gang bangs,” the term they use for when a group of photographers launches a surprise attack on a star.

    Likewise, all of the “paps,” as they call themselves, like to show off by telling somewhat far-fetched stories about their own celebrity-hunting experiences. For example, Banks, the former marksman, speaks of his awe for the driving skills of actress Cameron Diaz, who he claims has routinely managed to outrun the powerful SUVs of the photographers in her Toyota Prius.

    However, some of his other stories bring to mind the horrifying accident in Paris that took the life of Princess Diana. To this day, many people consider celebrity photographers to be responsible for her death.

    For example, Banks says, up to 40 paparazzi chased singer Britney Spears around when she was embroiled in her divorce battle with Kevin Federline. “If you are following a celebrity,” he explains, “you build up a box system, and you tend to drive in a convoy. You don’t want members of the public to be at risk.”

    In saying this, Banks is trying to be reassuring. But the paparazzi have no sympathy for the stars. “This is a working town, and fame is something you have to maintain,” says Smith, the Splash News chief. “It’s like fitness: You have to do it everyday to keep it going; we are part of that.”

    In 2007, Smith landed the most lucrative deal in company history when Anna Nicole Smith died. The Splash paparazzi took footage of the model-turned-actress en route to the hospital, when she was presumably already dead. His agency raked in more than $1 million from the coup, Smith says. When asked if his work might be considered irreverent, he says: “The marketplace is the greatest democracy in the world. There is a demand for this kind of pictures.”

    Selling Dreams

    Serving this market is now up to Shenk, the Corbis CEO in Seattle. With the help of Splash News, he hopes to finally turn Corbis into a money-making machine. Twelve Corbis offices and more than 1,000 employees worldwide are now ready to work in the paparazzi-photo business.

    “There is a global appetite for celebrity pictures that is insatiable; consumers will never get tired of looking at beautiful people,” Shenk says.

    As recently as 2008, Shenk said that the celebrity-snapshot business was bad for the industry’s overall image. But now he raves about photos that, as he says, tell “stories about humanity.”

    “I don’t think that this market will ever go down,” he says. “This is about dreams and people’s connections to dreams, and that’s a perpetual human feeling and instinct that will continue forever.”

    Shenk recently discussed the acquisition with Corbis founder Bill Gates. “I could assure him that we have incredibly high standards about making sure that ethical lines are not crossed,” Shenk says.

    Besides, he adds, Gates knows perfectly well that he is also part of the celebrity world: “I fully expect that Splash will cover him.”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    —> read original story at SPIEGEL ONLINE International edition

  • Mushroom Clouds and Everpresent Danger: Surviving Cameramen Recall Nuclear Test Shots

    By 1963, the United States had detonated more than 200 nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. Cameramen and photographers working for a secret special unit recorded the acts of destruction. Some of their sensational images have been declassified, and the last remaining eyewitnesses are now sharing their experiences.

    (-> VIDEO at SPIEGEL ONLINE)

    The atomic missile with the explosive power of 1.5 kilotons of TNT detonated precisely above the heads of the five United States Air Force scientists. At first the men felt only the heat from the explosion. But then the blast wave forced them to their knees.

    George Yoshitake’s camera was clicking the entire time.

    At 7 a.m. on July 19, 1957, the cameraman was standing with a small group of nuclear scientists on the Yucca Flat test site in the state of Nevada. A fighter jet had fired the missile at an altitude of five kilometers (3.1 miles), which was considered a safe distance from the ground. “I was busy behind the cameras,” Yoshitake recalls. “Then I could see the flash go off out of the corner of my eye.” He looked up. “There was this huge, doughnut-shaped cloud up in the sky where the blast when off.”

    The only thing protecting him from the bomb’s fallout was his baseball cap.

    Yoshitake is one of the few people who have stood directly underneath an exploding atom bomb and survived. The American was one of about 40 photographers and cameramen in the 1352nd Photographic Group of the US Air Force. Their mission was top secret. Today Yoshitake, now 82, can finally talk openly about his experiences.

    The special unit’s job was as fascinating as it was dangerous. To film and photograph the American nuclear tests in the Nevada desert and in the South Pacific, the foolhardy men had to place themselves within only a few kilometers of the centers of the explosions.

    Images the Public Never Saw

    Between 1947 and 1969, the material was edited to make more than 6,500 motion pictures in a secret film studio in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, just a few kilometers from the bright lights of Sunset Boulevard. The studio on Wonderland Avenue was called the Lookout Mountain Air Force Station. Using special film and high-speed cameras, cameramen and photographers used the film and photographic footage to artfully produce motion pictures and still photographs.

    “Those men are great guys; they documented a period of time that was both unique and hopefully will never be repeated,” says US documentary filmmaker Peter Kuran, 54, who is working on the story of the “atomic filmmakers.” Kuran wants to preserve the historic film material for posterity. “The photos are the icons of an era,” he says.

    At the height of the Cold War, the superpowers embarked on a spectacular race to develop nuclear weapons. It was accompanied by an unparalleled propaganda war that involved large numbers of tests. By the time the international Treaty banning Nuclear Weapon Tests In The Atmosphere, In Outer Space And Under Water, or Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (NTBT), was signed in 1963, the Americans alone had already detonated more than 200 atomic and hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere. The goal, from the very beginning, was to create impressive images to convince politicians to approve ever-growing military budgets.

    But the public never saw most of the images. “The work these people did was so secretive that nobody even knew who they were for a long time,” says Kuran. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the first photographs and films were declassified, thanks to the documentary filmmaker’s relentless efforts. Kuran traveled throughout the United States, searched through archives and urged the US Department of Energy to release the films and photographs.

    Copies of the material are now stored in gray cardboard boxes in the basement of Kuran’s house in Vancouver, Washington. Nuclear weapons have become a central focus of his life. “When I was 15, I visited Japan with a YMCA (youth) group,” he says. “We happened to be in Hiroshima on the anniversary of the bombing and I saw a film about the destruction of the city. I was the only American in a crowded room full of Japanese. Everyone was looking at me.”

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international

    Kuran felt horrified and ashamed. Initially, he embarked on a career as a developer of special effects for productions like director George Lucas’s “Star Wars” movies. But he couldn’t forget his experience in Japan. More than three decades later, he coincidentally came into contact with those chroniclers of the nuclear tests who were still alive. The nuclear filmmakers were grateful for the attention. “We’re finally getting recognized for some of the work we did,” says Yoshitake. “It was liberating to be able to talk about it.”

    The cameraman now lives in Lompoc, California, about a three-hour drive north of Los Angeles. He is one of the last surviving members of the photographers’ unit. Most of the others died long ago, many of cancer. Yoshitake says he is “more in contact with the widows.”

    From 1955 to 1963, Yoshitake worked for the nuclear weapons test program. “I filmed about 30 explosions,” he reports. “The amazing ones, the most spectacular ones were the hydrogen bombs in the Pacific.” The bombs were usually detonated early in the morning, before dawn, says Yoshitake. “They told us to look away at the initial blast,” he recalls. “For several minutes after the blast, you could see this eerie ultraviolet glow high up in the sky. And I thought that was so spectacular, so meaningful.”

    The images from the Pacific seem almost magical, including the photos of the seven-kilometer fireball created by “Shrimp,” the most powerful bomb the United States ever detonated. On March 1, 1954, a 15-megaton bomb, part of an operation called Castle Bravo, exploded over the Bikini atoll. The destructive power unleashed by the explosion was more than twice as high as the experts had predicted and tore a crater two kilometers in diameter into the island. Within a few minutes, a mushroom cloud rose 40 kilometers into the sky. The entire archipelago was contaminated with radiation and remains uninhabited to this day.

    The cameramen came within about 30 kilometers of the artificial suns in the South Pacific. In the Nevada desert, Yoshitake and his colleagues even came within about eight kilometers of the fireballs. “We could see how the shockwave came rolling across the valley floor,” says Yoshitake. “We hung onto our cameras so we wouldn’t fall over.”

    A few seconds after the explosions, the men also felt the heat from the bombs. The cameraman took it all in stride. “We were young. For me it was a just a job at the time. Only now do I realize how dangerous the work was,” he says.

    For Yoshitake, the work only became unpleasant when it was time to document the effects of the bombs. He shudders when he remembers a test performed in June 1957 under the code name “Priscilla.” Only 30 minutes after the detonation, he had to photograph monkeys, sheep and pigs that had been placed in close proximity to the blast site. “A few of the animals were still alive,” says Yoshitake. The skin on the pigs was charred black, he says, while the eyes of the monkeys had been taped open so that scientists could study the effect of the flash of light on the retina. “The animals were squealing, crying. It smelled of burned flesh. It was just terrible.”

    At least the cameramen wore protective suits on those missions into the center of destruction. But when they confronted the nuclear blasts from afar, they were wearing nothing but shorts and T-shirts. “We had dosimeters that measured our radiation load. That was it,” says Yoshitake’s former colleague, Ken Hackman, 72, who spent months in the Pacific to photograph the tests. He remembers how reckless the military’s behavior was at the time: “After the detonation, B-57 bombers would always fly directly through the mushroom cloud to collect samples. After the planes had landed again, they were decontaminated by men who were only wearing rubber boots as protection.”

    To this day, Hackman sees the bomb tests through the eyes of a photographer. The flash from a nuclear weapon is 10 times as bright as the sun, he says. The photographers had to wear heavily tinted special glasses to prevent burning of the retina. “Everything turns a bright white, and there’s no color at all anymore,” says Hackman. “Once the initial brightness is away, it really is very beautiful to look at.” He has vivid memories of a working trip to Hawaii, where he stood on a volcano and photographed the colorful aurora of an exploding hydrogen bomb. The play of lights in the sky was caused by the strong magnetic field generated by the detonation.

    Capturing the Blast

    The photographers tried out almost every camera model available at the time and tested completely new photographic techniques. Automatic cameras were placed a few hundred meters from the point of explosion, with thick lead shields protecting the film material from gamma radiation. The most advanced film cameras of the day were capable of recording 15 million images per second. The filmmakers even experimented with 3-D photography.

    The US company EG&G was the main source of the inventions. One of the founders of EG&G was Harold Edgerton, who later became world-famous for his photographs of bursting drops of milk. For the nuclear weapons test program, the engineers at EG&G developed a special film with three coatings, each with a different level of sensitivity. The so-called XR film made it possible to photograph the detonations with a single high-speed camera, despite tremendous fluctuations in light intensity.

    The XR film enabled the photographers to capture the power of the weapons in brilliant orange, yellow and red tones, creating highly alienating images of “psychedelic quality,” says Kuran. The US space agency, NASA, later used the technology to photograph its moon missions.

    Eventually the EG&G engineers even managed to capture the first microseconds of atomic explosions on film, using the “Rapatronic,” a camera developed specifically for this purpose. Because a mechanical shutter would have been much too slow, the device had an electronic “light valve” made of polarized special glass, which could be rendered translucent by means of an electric pulse.

    The engineers placed up to 16 of these high-tech cameras near the point of explosion, which allowed them to capture the birth of the atomic hellfire, so to speak. The bubble-like nuclear blast images almost look like living creatures in the photos. The billowing formations of heat and radiation, at temperatures of up to 10 million degrees Celsius, resemble oddly shaped amoeba.

    The Dichotemy Between Destruction and Beauty

    Most of these images are still under lock and key today. Only military physicists are permitted to analyze the images for the purpose of improving the designs of bombs. The US government is still hesitant to release the photos and films completely. But it is critical, says Kuran, that the material be processed and digitized, “before it turns to dust.”

    He has already assembled five documentaries from the film and photographic footage, which he distributes through his website. A sixth film, about the neutron bomb, is in the works. “My goal is to present as realistic an impression as possible of the power of these weapons, but I’m also fascinated by this bizarre dichotemy, how destructive they were and how beautiful they were,” says Kuran.

    The filmmaker hopes that his work will serve as a warning against nuclear testing. But the work has also taught him a surprising lesson. “Personally, I have less fear of nuclear weapons than I used to have,” says the documentary filmmaker. “Now I know that if somebody exploded a big hydrogen bomb 30 kilometers away from me, chances are I will probably survive.”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging

    Brooke Greenberg is almost 18, but she has remained mentally and physically at the level of a toddler. An American physician is trying to uncover the child’s secret. He wants to give mankind the gift of eternal life.

    By Philip Bethge

    It is possible that the key to immortality is hidden in this delicate girl, who is only about 76 centimeters (2 feet, 6 inches) tall and weighs seven kilograms (15.4 pounds). Her arms and legs are as fragile as the branches of a young tree. Her laugh sounds like the whimper of a puppy; she has hazel eyes. And when Brooke Greenberg wants her mother she stretches out her tiny arms, shakes her head slowly, and twists her face into a lopsided moue.

    “Come here, Brooke, yes, you are a pretty girl.” Melanie Greenberg, 49, picks up the fragile looking child and gently strokes her back. “She loves being held,” says Greenberg, a mother of four. Brooke’s sisters are named Emily, Caitlin and Carly. Brooke is the second youngest. She will be 18 in January.

    Other girls her age are driving, going out dancing and sleeping with their first boyfriends. But for Brooke it’s as if time had stood still. Mentally and physically, the girl remains at the level of an 11-month-old baby.

    “Brooke is a miracle,” says her father, Howard Greenberg. “Brooke is a mystery,” says Lawrence Pakula, her pediatrician. “Brooke is an opportunity,” says Richard Walker, a geneticist with the University of South Florida College of Medicine. They all mean the girl from Reisterstown, a small town in the US state of Maryland, who may hold the answer to a human mystery. At issue is nothing less than immortality: Brooke Greenberg apparently isn’t aging.

    She has no hormonal problems, and her chromosomes seem normal. But her development is proceeding “extremely slowly,” says Walker. If scientists can figure out what is causing the disorder, it might be possible to unlock the mysteries of aging itself. “Then we’ve got the golden ring,” says Walker.

    He hopes to simply eliminate age-related diseases like cancer, dementia and diabetes. People who no longer age will no longer get sick, he reasons. But he also thinks eternal life is conceivable. “Biological immortality is possible,” says Walker. “If you don’t get hit by a car or by lightning, you could live at least 1,000 years.”

    An Unprecedented Case

    Brooke Greenberg was born prematurely on Jan. 8, 1993 at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. She weighed only 1,800 grams (about four pounds) at birth. It soon became clear that she wasn’t normal. Almost all of her organ systems were altered. Her hips were dislocated, so that her legs pointed awkwardly toward her shoulders. She’d hardly been born before she was placed in a cast.

    The first six years were torture for Brooke and her parents. On one occasion, seven holes in the child’s abdominal wall had to be repaired. Because food kept entering her windpipe instead of her stomach, a gastric feeding tube had to be inserted. She fell into a 14-day coma when she was four. Then doctors diagnosed a brain tumor (the diagnosis later proved to be incorrect). “The Greenbergs had gone out already and made the preparations, buying a coffin and talking to the rabbi,” pediatrician Pakula recalls.

    Pakula practices in a medical building near the Greenbergs’ house. He wears a tie adorned with cartoonish hippopotamuses. A tall stack of paper — Brooke’s file — sits on his desk. “This can’t be lost,” says the doctor, placing his hand on the documents. He knows what a treasure the file represents.

    The most surprising thing about Brooke is that she hardly ages at all. Her body stopped growing when she was two years old. She hasn’t grown a centimeter or gained a pound. Pakula injected the girl with growth hormones, but nothing happened. He studied the medical literature and consulted specialists worldwide. “She was presented to everybody who was anybody in the medical world at the time,” says the 77-year-old pediatrician, “but she didn’t match anything any physician had seen before.”

    The Greenbergs waited and hoped — one year, two years, 10 years — but nothing happened. Their daughter’s facial features have remained unchanged. There are no signs of puberty. “Brooke’s nurses, her teachers, even her father can’t consistently sort photos of her chronologically,” says Pakula. Only the girl’s hair and fingernails are growing normally.

    ‘She’s a Miracle’

    At the family’s house in Reisterstown, Howard Greenberg points to photos on the walls: Brooke at three, next to her one-year-old sister Carly, who was already bigger than she was at the time; Brooke in a playsuit on her 12th birthday; Brooke at 14, at her Bat Mitzvah, the Jewish rite of initiation.

    Greenberg hurries from picture to picture. Brooke looks the same in all the photos. Her mouth is always slightly lopsided and her eyes just a tough too far apart. “She’s a miracle.” It’s something that has to be said, again and again. “What’s she missing in life? Nothing. She hasn’t got a worry in the world. She isn’t broken. We’re the ones who are broken.” This is the father’s way of explaining away his daughter’s condition. “If you look at it that way, it makes it much more bearable,” he says later on.

    At first Melanie Greenberg took care of Brooke on her own, but now she has help. Feeding Brooke through the tube takes 10 hours a day. She goes to a school for disabled children from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Much of the rest of the time she spends in her room, sitting in her bed and watching television, or bobbing back and forth in her light-blue baby swing.

    “She can do this all day,” says Melanie Greenberg, lifting her daughter into the air and carefully placing her on her thin little legs, with her feet twisted inward. “It was not easy, it was very hard,” she says, “but I’m sure there is a reason for Brooke to be here. Something is in her, something that could help millions of people.The Disassociated Body

    Richard Walker, a retired professor of medicine and specialist in the biology of aging, lives in a house on a lagoon in the coastal town of Indian Rocks, Florida. He became aware of Brooke Greenberg in 2005. “I thought right away that she had a unique mutation in key genes that control development and aging,” he says. Walker contacted the Greenbergs and convinced the father to let him take a sample of Brooke’s blood so that he could study her genetic makeup. He examined the number and condition of the chromosomes. He analyzed the so-called telomeres at the ends of chromosomes, the length of which provides information about the age of cells. He filled tiny reagent reservoirs made of biochips with pieces of genetic material, and tested the activity of a wide range of genes.

    The results are as sobering as they are fascinating. “We haven’t found anything unusual so far,” says Walker, “but that wasn’t a disappointment; it was actually an incentive to keep on searching.”

    The girl’s uniqueness lies precisely in the fact that her genetic material seems normal, whereas she is obviously not normal, says the professor. Despite the surprisingly unremarkable genetic analysis, complete chaos prevails inside the girl’s body.

    Her brain is hardly more developed than an infant’s, but her bones have a biological age of about 10 years. Her teeth, including her baby teeth, are like those of an eight-year-old. The length of the telomeres, on the other hand, corresponds to her actual age. In addition, the development of various organ systems, like the digestive tract, is what the professor calls “disassociated.”

    “Different parts of her body are developing at different rates, as if they were not a unit but parts of separate organisms,” Walker explains. He believes that there is only one explanation — a failure of central control genes.

    Normally, a carefully orchestrated genetic program allows a tiny egg cell to grow into an adult body. But if this master plan is impaired, the marvel of growth goes awry. Walker believes that this is precisely what has happened with Brooke. Genes that play an important role in physical development are either inactive or defective. “If we identify those genes, we might be able to understand the development and subsequently the aging of the body,” says the scientist.

    An Eccentric Theory

    Walker believes that aging is merely the continuation of the body’s development. He uses the image of a house to illustrate his point. First the house is built. When it’s finished — or, in the case of the body, when sexual maturity is reached — the construction crew would normally leave the site. But in normal people the construction workers stay and keep building, according to a plan that’s been fulfilled and a construction supervisor who says nothing but nonsense. Soon the crew builds things like contorted bay windows and shaky dormers. Supporting beams are suddenly sawed off, and then walls start falling. Finally the building collapses completely — and death catches up with the body.

    “Aging happens when developmental genes merely run out of meaningful information and subsequently cause chaos,” Walker says. His idea is to simply shut off the master genes of development. This, he hopes, will put a stop to the aging process. If Walker is right, the consequences will be dramatic. A body manipulated in this fashion would no longer change, but would only perform repair work. Eternal life would be within reach.

    All this talk has exhausted the professor. He sits in his heavy armchair and gazes out at the glittering water. A dinghy and a motorboat are tied to his private jetty directly in front of the deck, and a surfboard is lying nearby. The doctor sails, surfs and skis. He is 71. He loves his life.

    Does he want to be immortal?

    “Of course I want to live forever,” he says. “I could study mathematics; I could learn so many more things. It would be the greatest gift in the world.” Many people, says Walker, imagine that eternal life would be nothing but hardship and senescence. “But that’s not how it would be,” says Walker. Ideally development would be arrested just after a person reaches sexual maturity.

    And the social consequences? Who would be allowed to live forever, and who wouldn’t? Who would be allowed to have children?

    Walker hesitates. “These are ethical questions, not scientific questions,” he says. “These would be arguments made by philosophers and priests.”

    ‘Highly Unlikely’

    Walker’s theories are controversial. The British biologist Aubrey de Grey, for example, holds his American colleague in high esteem, but believes that aging and development are not related. The Brooke Greenberg case, says de Grey, has “absolutely nothing to do with aging.” He points to the phase of life between the ages of 20 and 40, in which the body hardly changes at all. “Is it likely that the developmental gene expression suddenly stops during this time and then starts up again? No, this is highly unlikely,” he says.

    De Grey favors the standard theory that the body’s cells simply wear out over the years, and that they accumulate toxins and lose their ability to regenerate. He has identified seven causes of death, like cell loss or changes in genetic material, which he hopes to combat with stem-cell therapy or special injections.

    But Walker doesn’t challenge the criticism. “The deterioration of the body’s cells is precisely a consequence of the unregulated activity of development genes,” he argues. His theory is seductive in a sense. While biologists like de Grey tamper with the countless symptoms of growing old, Walker simply wants to do away with aging altogether.

    “Imagine we could stop the degenerative changes of the body,” he says enthusiastically. “The onset of age-related diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer’s, dementia and many forms of cancer could be prevented.”

    To prove his theory, Walker needs people like Brooke Greenberg, in whom the developmental master genes fail. He’s already discovered two similar cases. Six-year-old Gabrielle K., from Billings, Montana, born Oct. 15, 2004, also doesn’t seem to be aging much at all. At the same time her chromosomes, just like Brooke Greenberg’s, seem completely normal.

    Nicky Freeman, a 40-year-man who seems to be trapped in a boy’s body, lives in Esperance in Western Australia. His biological age is estimated at 10 years.

    All in the Genes

    Can Gabrielle or Nicky point the way to the fountain of youth? Walker doesn’t know yet. He is focusing his attention on Brooke at the moment. He wants to sequence the girl’s entire DNA, together with experts from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. If they find mutations in Brooke’s genetic makeup, Walker plans to identify the corresponding genes in laboratory rats and then block them. He reasons that if the genetically manipulated remain young, researchers will in fact have put a stop to their development.

    “Brooke holds the key to everything,” says Walker. He’s anxious to press on with his work, because he feels that his time is running out. But Howard Greenberg is stalling. He has long felt that he is protecting a valuable treasure in his red brick house. He’s even hired lawyers to examine the issue of the rights to Brooke’s genome. The father knows time is on his side. Doctors tell him that with good medical care his daughter can live a long time.

    In the Greenberg home, Melanie has now attached a bag containing a complete nutritional formula to her daughter’s feeding tube. The brownish flood runs through a tube into Brooke’s small body.

    Howard Greenberg looks down at his daughter. Wearing a red-and-white striped T-shirt and white pants, the girl rocks back and forth in his baby swing, as monotonously as a pendulum.

    “I always thought she would die way before me, but I don’t think that anymore,” says the 53-year-old after a pause. “Brooke can live forever. She’ll always be here.”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    (—> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)

  • Oil Disaster in the Gulf Coast: ‘I Have to Keep My Good Spirits’

    For as long as he can remember Floyd Lasseigne has been a fisherman on Grand Isle, off the coast of Louisiana. Now he has to stand by and watch as the BP oil spill destroys his life.

    The oysters lie in the water like silent harbingers of the disaster. A shiny film of oil washes over the shells. The broth swashes over the flat oyster bed that belongs to Floyd Lasseigne.

    Using a small axe the fisherman extracts a few oysters from the ground and carefully pries them open. Slippery white oyster flesh slides out. Lasseigne bends down and holds his nose closely to the sea creature. “You can smell the oil in them,” the sturdy man says and hands the oyster over. Then he looks away, his eyes red from many sleepless nights, and looks over to the marsh grass, the stalks smudged with oil up to the tideline. “It makes me sick,” Lasseigne says. “This is my livelihood and now I see it going down the drain.” (more…)

  • Saving Moon Trash: Urine Containers, ‘Space Boots’ and Artifacts Aren’t Just Junk, Argue Archaeologists

    California has named the remains of the Apollo 11 mission a state historical resource — to the delight of the young profession of space archaeologists. They fear that the trash and equipment left behind by the United States’ journeys to the moon could someday wind up for sale on eBay if they aren’t protected.

    There is an unwritten law in America’s national parks: Carry out what you bring in.

    When they visited the moon, though, the Americans weren’t nearly as considerate or in touch with nature. Astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong left behind more than 100 items when they left the moon on July 21, 1969, at 5:54 p.m., Earth Time. The items included four urine containers, several airsickness bags, a Hasselblad camera, lunar overshoes and a complete moon-landing step.

    The mission was historically significant. But are the urine containers? (more…)

  • Modern Day Flintstones: A Stone Age Subculture Takes Shape

    A modern-day Stone Age subculture is developing in the United States, where wannabe cavemen mimic their distant ancestors. They eat lots of meat, bathe in icy water and run around barefoot. Some researchers say people led healthier lives in pre-historic times.

    By Philip Bethge

    John Durant greets the hunter-gatherers of New York once a month in his apartment on the Upper East Side. They eat homemade beef jerky, huddle around the hearth and swap recipes for carpaccio with vegetables or roasted wild boar.

    Often enough, the host will deliberately skip a few meals the next day. After all, didn’t his earliest ancestors starve a little between hunts? Instead of eating, Durant prefers to run barefoot across Brooklyn Bridge. In the winter, he takes part in the Coney Island Polar Bear swim in the icy Atlantic.

    (more…)

  • Who Needs Berlitz? British Savant Learns German in a Week

    Is it possible to learn German in just days? Linguistic savant Daniel Tammet managed to do so in the course of a week. Using his own special technique, the 30-year-old, who has a mild form of autism, has learned to speak more than 10 languages.

    Daniel Tammet likes the German language. It’s “like a clean room with good sharp corners, tidy and straightforward,” he says, yet at the same time it’s “poetic, transparent and elegant.”

    “Take, for example, words like bisschen (a little bit) or Löffelchen (a small spoon),” he adds. “I like this diminutive chen ending.”

    Or the word Gras, for grass: “I like that the first letter fits — for me words with ‘G’ are green,” says the young British man, before offering his signature thin smile. It’s a Thursday in Hamburg’s Hotel Wedina, and 30-year-old Tammet has four more days. By Monday, he plans to have learned enough German — after only a week’s training — to appear on the German television talk show “Beckmann” and speak fluently about brain research, autism and his new book.

    Tammet is a savant. As a child he had epileptic seizures. Doctors later diagnosed him with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism. He mastered the world of emotions only through hard training.

    Numbers and foreign words, on the other hand, come to him naturally. He sees colors and shapes where most people see only plain words and numbers. He’s memorized the number pi to 22,514 digits. He knows instantly that January 10, 2017, will be a Tuesday. And he’s a fleet-footed traveler in the rocky terrain of languages.

    (—> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)

    Tammet can speak Romanian, Gaelic, Welsh and seven other languages. He learned Icelandic in a week for a TV documentary, at the end of which he gave a live interview on television. He felt somewhat nervous, but was able to speak quite fluently with the show’s host. He even dared to make a joke in Icelandic, which is generally dreaded for its complexity. He still speaks the language today.

    And last week, Tammet took a linguistic stroll through German’s convoluted sentences, had picnics in the genitive case and roamed through the language’s myriad plural forms. He did bring some rudimentary school German along for the journey. Nonetheless, his coaches were stunned.

    “It’s fascinating how he learns, especially because it’s almost impossible to comprehend,” said language coach Christiane Spies, who assisted Tammet the entire week. “I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

    Tammet first begins learning a language by reading for hours, especially children’s books. He murmurs the words quietly to himself, appearing calm and highly concentrated. At 1 p.m. on the dot he gets edgy — that’s lunchtime.

    In the afternoon, Tammet and Spies stroll through Hamburg, chatting about the history of the Hanseatic League, visiting museums and galleries. “He needs an incredible amount of fodder,” says Spies, “otherwise he gets bored quickly.” Tammet immediately links new words with ones he already knows: What is that called in other languages? Which expressions are similar?

    “Wolle” (wool), “Baumwolle” (cotton) and “Wolle spinnen” (to spin wool), he notes them all down in his small handwriting. That’s how it goes the whole time. Occasionally he pauses, apparently listening to his thoughts. “It doesn’t seem as though the learning process is an effort for him,” Spies says. But how is that possible?

    Tammet tries to explain it himself: “I learn new languages intuitively, like a child.” Grammar doesn’t interest him. Instead, he lets himself be carried along by the language, looking for patterns in the mess of sentences he hears, tying words together into related groups. “Small, round things often start with ‘Kn’ in German,” he says, pointing out Knoblauch (garlic), Knopf (button) and Knospe (bud). Then there are the long, thin things that often begin with “Str,” like Strand (beach), Strasse (street) and Strahlen (rays).

    “I try to develop a feeling of how each particular language works,” he says, adding that he’s helped in this pursuit by the fact that regions in his brain are connected in unusual ways. Most humans think in isolated categories, but for Tammet everything is networked. “When I think about words,” he says, “I take information from everywhere in my brain.” Emotions, colors and shapes all connect themselves with the words, allowing him to learn with incredible speed.

    Do his talents make Tammet unapproachably eccentric? His shyness is noticeable. And yet, in an almost uncanny way, he’s very likeable. He speaks in a soft, warm voice and, unexpectedly, maintains constant eye contact.

    Tammet wants to explain and make understandable to others the way that he sees the world. He wants to impart fun in learning, joy in numbers, words and thoughts. “I hope my experiences can help people to discover and develop their own talents,” he says. He adds, “Love is an accurate description of what I feel for languages.”

    “His nature is really touching,” says Spies, the language coach, “both his way of learning and the person as a whole.”

    “How small does a spoon have to be in order to be a ‘Löffelchen‘,” Tammet wants to know. How small must it be to receive that German diminutive “-chen“? A teaspoon isn’t small enough. Instead his eye lights on a tiny spoon in a salt shaker.

    So small. It’s certainly worth a -chen.

    (—> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)