UAB Magazine Online Features
Safety Patrol
Inside the Danger Zone with UAB's Child Safety Expert
By Matt Windsor
UAB child safety expert David Schwebel has helped call attention to the everyday dangers of crosswalks, swimming pools, and dog bites through a series of intriguing, headline-grabbing experiments.
David Schwebel’s quest to keep children out of harm’s way began with a big purple dinosaur. When the UAB psychology professor was an undergraduate at Yale University, he knew he wanted to work with kids even though he was "naive" about how to go about doing that. So he approached a professor doing research in the field, and it just so happened the professor needed help studying a new TV show— Barney & Friends.
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As an undergraduate, Schwebel "It was just so exciting to influence millions of kids," he says. "So when |
Schwebel’s mentor wanted to see if children were actually learning something when they watched Barney, a purple T. rex, cavort around the studio. “We discovered that it was actually fantastically successful,” says Schwebel. The Yale researchers gave Barney’s producers some ideas on ways to increase kids’ learning even more, and the show was tweaked based on that feedback. “It was just so exciting to influence millions of kids,” Schwebel says. “So when I went to graduate school, I decided to do something that would make a difference in people’s lives.”
Since coming to UAB in 2001, Schwebel has done just that. In a series of intriguing, headline-grabbing experiments, he has highlighted the dangers in a range of childhood activities, from crossing the street to playing on a playground and taking a swim at the local pool.
Schwebel’s fieldwork has taken him to local hockey rinks, Iowa cornfields, and communities in Africa and China. As often as not, though, his experiments are based in the Youth Safety Lab in UAB’s Campbell Hall, where danger lurks behind every door. Open one and you’ll find a virtual-reality crosswalk designed to test kids’ decision-making as pedestrians. Down the hall is a contraption, topped by a toy frog, that seeks to determine a teen’s grasp of what is and is not physically possible. Another room contains a scale model of a busy intersection, complete with lights, crosswalks, and a giant mechanical centipede that crosses streets.
These unusual pieces of scientific equipment have helped Schwebel learn some important lessons about child safety—and translate his findings into action that has helped thousands of children around the world.
The Truth Behind Anti-Inflammatory Diets
Inflammation is a necessary component of the immune system’s fight
against infections and the repair of damaged tissues—but problems can arise if the fire won’t subside.
Asthma, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and even depression have been linked to a constant activation of the inflammatory response. It’s not an easy condition to treat, either, because its causes include obesity, stress, and pollution, among others. As a result, Wendy Demark-Wahnefried, Ph.D., the Webb Endowed Chair of Nutrition Sciences, and many other UAB researchers are investigating ways to control inflammation on an individual basis.
They’re not the only ones searching for a solution. Several high-profile celebrities have been touting “anti-inflammatory” diets as a cure. These diets call for eating lots of fruits and vegetables, decreasing consumption of processed carbohydrates, replacing fats and proteins containing omega-6 with their omega-3 counterparts such as fish, and using olive oil instead of other oils.
Neverending Stories
What Dickens Tells Us at 200
By Matt Windsor
It has been exactly 200 years since the birth of Charles Dickens, the Victorian novelist who wrote a bookshelf of classics, including Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol. For the past 100 years, Dickens has been terrifying schoolchildren across the United States—at least as much for the sheer girth of his books as for the hair-raising adventures of Pip and his other hardscrabble characters.
Few Americans graduate from high school without some exposure to Dickens. Count Danny Siegel, Ph.D., UAB associate professor of English, among them, however. “I never read Dickens in high school,” he says. After he graduated, however, Siegel picked up a copy of Great Expectations, and he hasn’t been able to put Dickens down since.
“What sets Dickens apart for me is his love for idiosyncrasy, for oddness,” Siegel says. “A lot of writers try to create some kind of universal story with characters and incidents everyone can relate to. With Dickens, it’s often the opposite; he loves quirks, gestures, voices—the things that make people different from one another.
“When you’re reading a Dickens novel, the world starts to seem much less predictable and more interesting than it did before. Everything is very strange in a Dickens novel: People are strange, families are strange, cities are strange, evil is strange, even goodness is strange, which is hard to pull off. Ebenezer Scrooge is a weird guy, but Bob Cratchit is much weirder.”
Power Source
By Erin Thacker
There is, at this very moment, a time capsule within your body that holds the secrets to the great deeds of your ancestors. Make that a great many time capsules, which also have some very important day jobs—namely, keeping you alive, and possibly killing you as well.
These are the mitochondria, the “powerhouses of the cell” that get their 15 minutes of fame during elementary school lessons on basic biology. Mitochondria provide the majority of the energy in most aerobic cells by using oxygen to extract the energy in food and produce adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, our body’s main energy source. But the mitochondria are much more than cellular power stations. These ubiquitous organelles are also involved in many other critical cellular processes, including growth, replication, movement, aging, and programmed cell death.
The process of producing ATP has the side effect of generating “reactive oxygen species,” or oxidants, the most infamous of which are the free radicals. These are molecules that, lacking a full complement of electrons, steal them from other molecules. This turns the victimized molecules into free radicals themselves, perpetuating a vicious cycle that can cause cellular damage or even cell death. As mitochondria age, they seem to produce more free radicals and less ATP, which some scientists argue contributes to the winding-down process that leads to our deaths.
Mitochondria (red and green) surrounding the nucleus of a cell (blue). Image courtesy of
Xuejun Sun, Ph.D. Mitochondrial dysfunction also plays a role in many diseases, including cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, dementia, and stroke, explains Keshav Singh, Ph.D., Joy and Bill Harbert Endowed Chair in Cancer Genetics and director of the Cancer Genetics Program in the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center. Singh also is the founder of the national Mitochondria Research and Medicine Society, the first organization of its kind, as well as the research journal Mitochondrion.
Singh is one of a growing number of UAB scientists exploring the boundaries of mitochondrial medicine. Victor Darley-Usmar, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Pathology and director of the Center for Free Radical Biology at UAB, says that mitochondrial research has “been a playground to develop some of the hottest ideas” in biology. In the past few decades, “we learned more about the evolution of the human race from mitochondrial genetics than we did in a couple of hundred years of archaeology.”
