Uppity Women #3

The Face of Courage

Dr. Aung San Suu Kyi

Freely Elected Prime Minister of the Republic of Burma

1990 Nobel Laureate

From her famous speech, Freedom from Fear:

"It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it."

Aung San Suu Kyi is extremely uppity. She has reason to be so.

Elected Prime Minister of Burma in 1990 (her party, the National League for Democracy won 59% of the vote and 394 of  of 492 seats in Parliament), Suu Kyi was under house arrest at the time and has been pretty much since then. The election results, which seemed to really annoy the military junta leadership (Gen. Saw Maung) that had staged a coup d'état against the previous military junta leadership (Gen. Ne Win) which had staged a coup d'état against the democratic leadership that ran post-colonial Burma, were nullified.

As the focal point for peaceful and non-violent demonstrations that asked for change Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, much to the dismay of her captors. It has made her much harder to silence, torture or murder.

The daughter of Aung San, founder of modern Burma (who was assassinated after brokering Burmese independence from the UK in 1947, the same year that India and Pakistan won independence and partitioned) Aung San Suu Kyi is Oxford educated and has a PhD in Economics from the University of London. She worked at the United Nations for three years. After living abroad for more than twenty years, first with her mother, an official of the Burmese government, in Bhutan, then in the UK, Suu Kyi returned to Burma in 1988 to care for her ailing mother. She became a lightning rod for the pro-Democracy movement in August of 1988. She has not left the country since that time, since the military junta that stole the elections and the country that was Burma, have held her under house arrest for much of the past twenty years. They have denied her access to her sons, who live in the UK and are not permitted to visit her in Burma, and most tragically, they would not allow her husband to visit her, when he was dying of cancer in 1999 (In spite of pleas from the UN, the US, the Vatican and a number of human rights organizations). They had not seen one another since Christmas of 1995.

Aung San Suu Kyi has pretty much a standing offer from the military regime to leave Burma and the Burmese people and basically accept exile, since there is not a chance in the world that they would let her come back if she left to visit her sons or seek healthcare, since she has reportedly been seriously ill over the past few years. 

She has refused to leave the people, and the country, that elected her.

Suu Kyi has won a slew of awards for her work for peaceful change in addition to the 1990 Nobel. In 2006 New Statesman ranked her number one in a reader-voted list of "50 Heroes of Our Time", where she even outranked Nelson Mandela.

Bono of U2 wrote the song "Walk On" about her in 2000, a year after she lost the husband she had not seen prior to his death. It has become a rally cry to freedom after a more than twenty year fight for the Burmese people. 

Seeming to bow to international pressures, in 2009 the military junta that currently runs Burma agreed to allow for new elections in 2010.

While they may permit candidates from the National League for Democracy to run, they refuse to allow Aung San Suu Kyi to run for parliament again.

It doesn't take much to figure out why...

© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Hurricane Creek Keeper's Video & Blog

John Wathan, Hurricane Creek Keeper was on Olbermann the other day. His blog can be found at 

bpoilslick.blogspot.com

His videos are very moving. This video details the oil "burn boxes" and shows footage of many, many dolphins, birds and a sperm whale.

© John Wathan, 2010

(please attribute if you repost this)

From hccreekkeeper: 

"This was the most emotionally disturbing video I have ever done!

A flight over the BP Slick Source where I saw at least 100 Dolphins in the oil, some dying. I also photographed a Sperm Whale covered in oil all around it's blow hole.
Please spread this around the world. Send me any links to places it gets posted so I can follow.
I want to piss off the world. Who will answer for these gentle creatures?"

© text only, unless attributed, Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Palate Cleanser #54

Hyacinth Bean ~ Dolichos Lablab

(Image Credit: Cold Comfort Farm)

concept only, © Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Uppity Women #2

Rosalind Franklin 1920 - 1958

(attribution unknown)

"Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated."

Rosalind Franklin has long been a scientific hero to me. She was the x-ray crystallographer whose exquisite crystallographs of the B-form of DNA revealed its helical structure. She wasn't a brainstormer, she was a scientist, working in a field that without question was almost entirely dominated by men. James Watson, of whom I've never had a particularly good opinion, made fun of her in his obnoxious memoir, The Double Helix, but used her work, without permission, to resolve the helical structure of DNA. Much of the structural information Watson and Crick used for their solution was actually Rosalind Franklin's according to Francis Crick's own statements. She was not given co-authorship on their landmark 1953 Nature paper. Her work, with the co-authorship of her graduate student, Raymond Gosling, was published in the same issue. She said her crystallographic results were "not inconsistent" with the structure proposed by Watson and Crick. Hardly surprising since their proposed structure was based on her work.

On the 50th anniversary of the publication of Watson and Crick's paper, Nature published a brief article by Brenda Maddox on Franklin's role in Watson and Crick's discovery. You can read it here. In typically laconic British fashion they don't belabor the point that Watson and Crick committed de facto scientific misconduct. Franklin, who was a great believer in collaborative science, never remarked publicly on the fact that Watson had been shown not just her crystallographs, but her actual notebooks, by her estranged colleague Maurice Wilkins, a fellow crystallographer who was studying the (as it turned out) more difficult A-form of DNA. It's not even clear that this breach of scientific ethics troubled her. Her focus was primarily on research itself, rather than who got credit for what. She truly believed that knowledge was paramount.

Franklin continued to work for the next five years elsewhere (she left her position at King's College) but even vacationed with Crick and his wife in Spain in 1957. She and Francis Crick became quite friendly. In addition to traveling with Crick and his wife Odile, she spent the summer of her last remission in their home.

Many texts still display Franklin's and her student, Gosling's, crystallographs of DNA. Sixty years later they are still considered to be that detailed and remarkable. 

Franklin's Crystallograph 

of the B-form of DNA

Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer, at age 37, in 1958.


Desmond Bernal, in his obituary in Nature, wrote of her ‘extreme clarity and perception in everything she undertook. In her own field, she could hardly have been more distinguished.'


In a 1970 interview with author Anne Sayre, a personal friend of Franklin's, Maurice Wilkins admitted "They could not have gone on to their model, their correct model, without the data [Rosalind] developed here. They had that—I blame myself, I was naïve—and they moved ahead."

Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize in 1962, in part for the determination of the structure of DNA, along with Maurice Wilkins. 

The Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.

Brenda Maddox's biography, The Dark Lady of DNA is a marvelous account of Rosalind Franklin's life and work.

Note added: 'Uppity Women' is a direct reaction to information contained here.


© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Lawsuit Finally Filed to Stop BP from Burning Sea Turtles Alive

I simply could not even bear to blog about this until now. At least now a federal lawsuit has been filed as of today, jointly by the Animal Welfare Institute, Center for Biological Diversity, Turtle Island Restoration Fund, and the Animal Legal Defense Fund in New Orleans at the U.S. District Court for Eastern District of Louisiana, seeking an injunction against British Petroleum and its agents in the Gulf.

COPYRIGHT by Catherine Craig. Used with permission.

LA Times Reports of Burn Fields (June 17, 2010)

MyFox TampaBay (June 22, 2010)

The turtles are largely Kemps Ridley, Leatherback, Hawksbill and Green turtles, which are critically endangered. Loggerhead turtles are also impacted.

Below are some of the ones that got away or haven't been in the region of BP's burn boxes. The carcasses of the ones burned are long gone. It's a $50,000 fine per turtle, btw.

Just remember if you look away or skip this post, that you're doing exactly what Tony Hayward and BP are hoping you'll do.

There's really little more to say. The images speak for themselves, really.... 

(Image Credit: Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times)

(Image Credit: Lee Celano / Reuters)

A sea turtle covered in oil swims off Grand Terre Island, Louisiana, on June 8.

Photo: Reuters

(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times / June 14, 2010)

Update from the Oiled Wildlife Care Network:

© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Palate Cleanser #53

Lilac ladies......

....on a cold winter morning......!

(Image Credit: Astrid Photography)

© text only Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Uppity Women #1

Note added: Uppity Women is a direct reaction to information contained here.

The first uppity woman to earn hero worship from me, at the age of 8.5 years, after seeing the film Anne of a Thousand Days.

Elizabeth I, Queen of England 1558-1603

Coronation, Age 25

Artist Unknown, National Portrait Gallery, London

Uppity quote selection:


If I were turned out of my realm in my petticoat, I would prosper anywhere in Christendom. 
 

© text only Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Brave New World: Curing Lesbianism- Treat Your Fetus and Have a Girly Girl

What is wrong with this woman?

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Johanna Sigurdardottir is the Prime Minister of Iceland, a lesbian, married to a same-sex partner and any way you look at it, a success story. Unless, perhaps, you're a pediatric endocrinologist at Mount Sinai in New York and Associate Dean of Clinical Research of the School of Medicine at Florida International University.

A reader, who asked not to be named, sent me this little jewel of a column by Dan Savage (the well-known sex columnist) this afternoon. I have to admit, when I read the headline, I thought it was a joke. Like I thought when I clicked on the link I'd end up at The Onion or on some supreme Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart link. But I was wrong. About more than one thing actually.

Warning: If you are offended by proper names for female genitalia, go back. Look at a palate cleanser. Stay away.  Sissy.

The Dan Savage headline blazoned: 

Doctor Treating Pregnant Women With Experimental Drug To Prevent Lesbianism

I have to confess my utter ignorance. I really, actually (and  I know it's naïve) didn't think that lesbianism was something that we needed to prevent. Cancer, I could see. Malaria, HIV, Diabetes (especially Type 1), Multiple Sclerosis, a slew of autoimmune diseases (including my two, please), mental retardation, congenital liver disease and short gut syndrome, scoliosis, kyphosis, osteoporosis, heartbreak, rape, genocide, war, discrimination, injustice and world hunger.... yeah. I want them all to go away. But lesbianism?

When I think of things to prevent, I think of things really awful, morbid, painful, depressing, unfair. Call me crazy, but I don't think of sexual orientation different from my own as any of those things. When I think of gay men and women, I think of my friends. I think, perhaps stereotypically, of powerful women and creative men. I think of the world being richer for its diversity. And I think of that diversity as being Darwinian and that maybe in an overcrowded world, humans that are less likely to reproduce with their chosen partner are doing us, and the planet a favor. And if you read the post below, they might even help take care of some of the children who really need taking care of, to boot.

Yeah, I know I'm crazy.

But, to the point... Dr. Maria New, studies Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia. She has this cool foundation, The Maria New Children's Hormone Foundation. Dr. New wants to make your daughter not just straight, but to make her clitoris downright average, to make her like babies and want to make some of her own, to be married to a boy and to be... just a "normal" girl.

The good news is that just like me, Dr. New believes that homosexuality (in women at least) is biological and not psychological or philosophical or spiritual. That is probably the very last point on which I feel any sense of kindred spirit with Dr. New. Dr. New has reported hormonal norms and demonstrated the genetic basis for the principal form of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH or 21-hydroxylase deficiency) which she believes, if you read her literature on her website and various publications, leads to lesbianism.

From Dr. New's Foundation website:

"Prenatal treatment of affected females avoids development of ambiguous genitalia, a hallmark of the disorder. Prenatal diagnosis of affected children of both sexes enables families at risk to ensure optimal care of classically affected newborns.

Dr. New’s team is currently developing gene therapy for CAH. Gene therapy offers the possibility of moving beyond palliative treatment to cure of the disorder."

Disorder? Families at risk? Wowza. Sounds serious. What's Dr. New talking about?

Well, you can see a hint here: “Sexual Orientation in Women with Classical or Non-Classical Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia as a Function of Degree of Prenatal Androgen Excess” published in 2008 in Archives of Sexual Behavior.  An article which correlates excessive androgen exposure in utero to CAH and, [deep breath] lesbianism. Because females exposed to too much androgen in utero are prone to some very, very bad things. They are, according to Alice Dreger, Ellen Feder and Anne Tamar-Mattis, at the highly regarded Hastings Center on Bioethics: 

"(CAH women) as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”

And further (from the same source):

“Dr. New and her colleague, pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Saroj Nimkarn of Weill Cornell Medical College, go further, constructing low interest in babies and men – and even interest in what they consider to be men’s occupations and games – as ‘abnormal.’”

Part of the purported concern is that some of these female infants have what are termed ambiguous genitals. Which means their clitoris is larger than usual. But they are genetically XX (female) and indeed have female genitalia like ovaries and uteri. But a nice pair of panties will cover that evidence. I don't mean to minimize it, but really, in a younger child genitals are not commonly on display as they would be in a locker room for an adolescent. And as any parent of a very young child can tell you, things.... change, shrink, grow, shift, as your child matures. There's been a lot of press lately on Cornell allowing Dr. Dix Poppas to carve up baby girls whose clitoris just doesn't look aesthetically pleasing (too large) without taking into consideration what it may do to damage the children in the long term sexually and even hygenically. Risks of nerve damage, incontinence, loss of sensation and other issues are not mentioned in Dr. Poppas' literature. He just wants baby girls to have better looking clitorises and vaginas. (Don't even go there....)  Dreger, a professor at Northwestern University and Feder, a professor in philosophy and religion at American University take Dr. Poppas to task in a Hastings Center paper as well. My much beloved Cynical Nymph blogged on the horrors of Dr. Poppas's work and questioned Cornell just last week, as did Feministing.

But "fixing" tomboyish and ambiguously endowed women isn't just a matter of cutting off pieces of their clitoris. It's much deeper than that. It deals with what hormones did (or didn't) do to their brain in utero. And that's where Dr. New comes in. 

She wants to fix your daughter before she's even born. 

Dr. New wants to use Dexamethasone, off-label, during a pregnancy, on a female fetus, to make the chances of her being girly, in spite of genes that might make her tomboyish or androgenized, or uppity. Dreger and Feder note that, 

"The use of prenatal dexamethasone treatments for CAH represents, to our knowledge, the first systematic medical effort attached to a 'paradigm' of attempting in utero to reduce rates of homosexuality, bisexuality, and 'low maternal interest.'"  

Dexamethasone is not without risks and Dr. New is recommending a treatment that is not only off-label but which has seen no clinical trials for CAH, no Internal Review Board at the institutions at which she works, and most controversially is used as soon as a woman knows she's pregnant, before she even knows if the fetus is male or female, just because there is a suspicion that the fetus will have CAH. Time magazine has just published a brief article about the controversy, noting that some women have had daughters that not only still have CAH, but who also have, following dexamethasone treatment throughout their pregnancy, mysterious health issues. Some of these parents claim they were not informed of risks and that they further mistakenly thought that Dr. New's "dex" cure, in one case prescribed by another doctor, was a studied and proven treatment.  Dexamethasone is an extremely potent steroid and Dr. New is using this drug, off-label, throughout pregnancy in her patients and there is scant peer-reviewed evidence that the treatment works well nor is there evidence that it is needed? And this is medicine? I may not think the fetus is sacred but I sure don't advocate treating she/he like a petri dish experiment, either.

Most disturbingly, the bioethicists at Hastings Center further, and rather ominously, note:

"...We think Nimkarn and New’s “paradigm for prenatal diagnosis and treatment” suggests a reason why activists for gay and lesbian rights should be wary of believing that claims for the innateness of homosexuality will lead to liberation. Evidence that homosexual orientation is inborn could, instead, very well lead to new means of pathologization and prevention, as it seems to be in the case we’ve been tracking."  (Alice Dreger and Ellen K. Feder for the Hastings Center)

So here's what I was naïve about. I was thinking that if you could say that homosexuality was genetic that it would be better, not worse. Plus, I guess I was really naïve thinking that my parents were just fine with me being a tomboy. And my being interested in math and science and history. And for thinking Barbie was stupid, even back in the 1960's. For thinking it was okay to know how to use all the tools in my grandfather's shop (he worked for NASA and IBM building all kinds of electronic stuff), that climbing trees and rocks and sides of mountains was awesome and that it was better to know how to rewire a light switch or to know how to check the oil in my car than it was to be sure my fingernail polish didn't clash with my toenail polish. And in spite of the fact that I LOVE high heels and earrings and purses in unusual colors and silly PJs, that it was probably way more important to know how to handle a stick shift, check my circuit breaker box or know how to use a Makita drill.

And I look around at all the uppity women I know. Some straight, married, with kids, some straight, married and wouldn't want a baby in their arms if it was that or the coal mines. Some lesbian, with kids, some lesbian without. Some I'll never know from one year to the next who they'll bring to a party. But I have to say that I think they're a pretty magnificent bunch of humans and many have done great, great things. I wouldn't trade them for all the world. Frankly, when I look at the uppity women that make waves in the world, a few judges I know, some MDs or DVMs or attorneys or Hillary Clinton or Julia Gillard or Johanna Sigurdardottir, I really just don't think the world is better off without them. Or without its  Madame Curies and Lise Meitners and Rosalind Franklins... or even women who have gotten to be the head of Pediatrics at Cornell and Chief of Pediatric Endocrinology for 38 years and members of the National Academy of Sciences? 

Dr. New has had an extraordinary career if you look at her bio at the NIH. Born in 1928, she reports that her greatest career obstacle was being a woman.

How ironic is that?

Sadly, I'm kind of wishing that, if the capstone of her career is trying to eliminate lesbianism, it was little Maria who had stayed at home, enjoyed making babies and had followed the nice "traditional child-care/housewife role".

And I'm really hoping that someone informs the pediatricians doing all this horrible stuff, and the hospitals letting them get away with it, that a person's value to society is NOT defined by the appearance of their genitals and the gender of their sex partners. And that feeding a fetus hormones to make their minds more "gender normal" is just plain wrong.

---

In honor of the uppity women I know and the many that I don't know but admire or have admired from history, I'm going to be offering up palate cleansers of UPPITY WOMEN throughout the month of July. If y'all want to suggest any, post a comment or email me: marzie.blogs@gmail.com