August 4th, 2010

Meet Carol Greider



Carol Greider, Professor and Director of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the John Hopkins University,  co-discovered the enzyme telomerase in 1984 when she was a graduate student of Elizabeth Blackburn at the University of California, Berkeley. Their research on the mechanism through which telomeres (DNA sequences repeated at the end of chromosomes which allow genetic information to be copied integrally every time the cell divides, formed by telomerase) protect chromosomes from degradation has been awarded last year with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The two women shared it with Jack W. Szostak. Greider leads a “curiosity driven” lab of ten people (3 men and 7 women including her) researching the role of telomeres and telomerase in chromosome maintenance and stability.

Is it true that you went to the first press conference after being announced the winner of the Nobel Prize wearing big glasses and fake moustache?

Yes, it was part of the fun.

Why did you do that?

There’s a famous picture of Barbara Mc Clintock after it had been announced that she had won the Nobel Prize (1983, for her discovery that the genetic material is not fixed but fluid) wearing Groucho Marx’s glasses so, as a joke, I wore them.

It was the same press  conference where you brought your children. Why did you bring them?

They were just so excited I had won the Nobel Prize that they wanted to come with me, and they thought the day was wonderful. Everyone wanted to share everything with them, so they got to be with me the whole day, do everything they liked and got to miss one day of school.

Before you and Blackburn, only 8 women had won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, and with you, for the first time two women won it at the same time. What does this mean to you, if something?

I’m hoping there will be more women coming up in the future, I think they have contributed a lot to science and now that there’s a good number of women running research labs I would hope that means that this is going to be a trend in the future, and that more will be winning prizes as well.

Do you see the trend going toward there?

I think the numbers are too small to say there’s already a trend but there’s usually a delay of 20 or 30 years between a discovery and the awarding of a Nobel Prize.  Thirty years ago there were fewer women that were the heads of labs and a lot of changes happened in the intervening period. So I hope that that will be reflected in things like recognitions and awards.

They say winning the Nobel Prize means somehow the end of one’s career. What do you think about it?

I certainly don’t intend that to be true in my case (ha, ha, ha). I have a number of examples of scientists who have continued their career and have done many other important things for the public service, so I don’t see any link between the two things…

…Well, it’s a lot of money, maybe someone can say “Ok, I made it”, no?

Yes, but we don’t do science in order to get awards. I do science because it’s interesting, because I really love finding out new things, so in this sense that changes nothing because what I really love to do is to find. You might think I made it only if the goal was to get a prize, but that was never the goal, the goal was to understand biology.

And how do you think you made it, as a woman, to get where you are and not to be gotten rid of on the way?

I think it’s just a certain amount of focus and that I was very excited about what I was doing, so I didn’t let the potential obstacles stand in my way. I had a number of people that were supportive of me and I just moved forward and didn’t worry about the people saying there were few women and this sort of things. Persevering and focusing on the thing I enjoy, which is finding out something new, that was unexpected. It’s kind of like solving a puzzle and it’s a lot of fun.

Are there moments in your life when you feel you’re not taken into account as much as if you were a man?

I think that I’m fairly well respected. Of course there still issues about the under-representation of women in higher positions in science that need to be solved but I don’t think that I have personally been treated differently because I was a woman.

Talking about the dominant male chauvinism I’ve heard you saying that you consider that it’s not that men have something against women, it’s just that they don’t think about us and tend –like sociology and psicology studies have shown human beings tend to do- to support those who are of the same sex. Now that you have a high position, Do you feel you do the same with women?

I definitely have in the back of my mind that women tend to be promoted later and I consider myself an advocate for women in terms of trying to change the devices that have been built up, but on a personal level on the science to science everyday I don’t treat people differently.

How do you manage to combine your career and your being a mother of two teenage children?

That, again, is the focus. When I am with my kids, I am with my kids spending time with them and people at work know that unless it’s really important they don’t usually call me and when I am at work, then I focus on what I am doing there.

From your personal experience, what do you think is the greatest issue concerning gender in science that has an urgent need to be resolved?

Under-representation of the 50% of the brain power of this world. A part of how to overcome it is by making people aware everyday of what choices we make. When you are putting a committee together, for instance, what representation of women do you have taking important decisions? And it has to happen from a real base level in addition to at the institutional level  where people in power  are wanting to make changes.

Where is your research heading you to?

We are trying to understand at basic level the role of telomeres shortening in different kinds of cancer and age-related degenerative diseases and we’re very interested in potential therapeutic treatments for them. We would like to approach questions about how to do it, whether it be with drugs activating telomeres, gene therapy or other options. There are a variety of different ideas and we are now doing experiments in mice (both females and males, looked at separately and across ages, since telomeres shorten with age) to see what would work.

Who is your research funded by?

All of my research has been supported by the National Institute of Health, which is very competitive. I spend probably more than 50% of my time writing research grants.

What’s your main ambition now?

Right now I’m looking forward to talking to the people in my lab, I have been out. I would like to take some time to look at the different projects we have and to think about them.

Is there one project you want to talk to me about?

Although most cancers express telomeres, around 10% of tumors don’t. We are very interested in why and how these tumors are growing without them because it might be a potential problem for the usage of telomeres inhibitors. We are trying to anticipate this problem.

Drawing: Valentina Meli

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July 23rd, 2010

Time of wool

A special waste deposited in a special bank. A couple of musicians and building products distributors, Daniela and Oscar, worried about the future they were leaving to their kids.

The importance of exchanging knowledge and help they could see by only looking outside their house window and seeing the building rows grounded thanks to  “s’aggiudu torrau” (the returned favour), an ancient practice still well working in Sardinia.  All of this in a town in the south of the island, Guspini, where sheep quintuple inhabitants and where time, the soundtrack of this story, flows with no hurry.

When, more than 10 years ago, Daniela Ducato first heard of the Bank of Time she thought it was the most suitable project for the 12,000 inhabitants community where she had moved following her husband, Oscar, who she met at the conservatory, where they both studied.  “Le città invisibili” (the invisible towns), an entity through which people of every age deposit their time and knowledge and receive the same invaluable coin in return, soon became one of the first Banks of Time running in Italy (today there exist 132), allowing among others the changeover of 22 degraded areas into “feeling gardens”. It’s in the bank where Tonina, a neighbour client, one day deposited quintals of wool saying she was tired of spending a lot of money to burn it –it’s considered a special waste- but didn’t know how to use it.

“I didn’t know anything about wool but at once I was astonished to find out only one part of it was being used and that, besides, a lot of money was being spent and an environmental impact was being produced by getting rid of it. So I started investigating the issue”, Daniela Ducato says. She found out that special machines were being used to take off the longest and thickest piles so that Sardinian wool could look more like merinos one, which was considered finer.

“Since in our bank there are a lot of children, we gave them some and they  started to knead it and use it as plasticine”, Ducato recalls. The elderly, instead, came with suggestions.  “They told me that if put in the land less water would then be needed to farm, so we started using it to grow flowers, strawberries or tomatoes”, she says. “Besides, since wool is rich in cheratine, it is also nourishing”.

Around 2006, thanks to the European energy parameters and the acoustic licencing laws, the insulating products Essedi, the building products distribution company Oscar, Daniela’s husband, owns, were being sold as never before.

“More than 80% of the products covering our houses walls are oil by-products”, she explains. “I started wondering where all that money was really coming from and what kind of inheritance we were leaving to our kids”.

From there to build in her own house and with community help the first prototype of insulating mattress was almost immediate. The lab results testing it were more astonishing that she would have never hoped for. Sardinian wool, the one having the thickest pile in the world once producing the biggest amount of milk, turned out to be excellent from many other points of view. Thermo-insulating, phono-absorbent, bactericide, it contrasts mould formation, fights electromagnetic pollution, purifies air and has a high fire-retardant effect. But there was a problem. “We tried to use a regular textile machine but since this wool is so thick it got broken”, Ducato recalls.

Once again the help came from the Bank.

“The day the town-hall cut the trees we had planted thanks to the Bank of Time, all the adults were upset. The children, instead, came to us showing how beautiful were the nests birds had made using the woolballs we had hung up for them”, she explains. “The perfection of the birds job gave us the idea how to build a suitable machine for our wool, which we created with a special needle punching and special hooks that resemble peckers”.

In 2008 Daniela created Edilana without using any public money. In less than two years this company producing insulating building products, interior decorations (from bookcases to lamps), jewels and accessories, packaging, solutions to improve degraded land and to create vertical gardens using Sardinian wool, has already become one of the 10 best Italian companies in the energy efficiency sector. In 2009 it was awarded with the Ecomondo prize.  All the profits of its income (561 thousand euros in 2009) are invested in the experimental research of the field. The Bank of Time, not an institution but a way of looking at life based on “showing one’s own value when giving and one’s own limits when receiving, so at the same time acknowledging the other’s value, which is something you can’t achieve with money” keeps being the root of everything Daniela does. Edilana’s products get to the main land using the local producers vans going to take bio products provisions and which once used to leave empty.

“We could do it first of all because my husband and I share the same views and dreams”, Ducato says. “And then, of course, thanks to the knowledge and the time of our community which allowed us to realize them while also saving the big community’s money thanks to the small one”.

Drawing: Valentina Meli

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July 12th, 2010

When sex matters

 

“Women have to know that many of the medications they are taking were identified and the dosages defined based on studies on male animals or men. And it’s well known that women metabolize some drugs differently, their size is different and even the underlying causes of the diseases might be different. Does that mean the medication is bad? No, it means that we need to define the population for which the medication provides the most benefit with the least risk at a reasonable cost”, says Virginia Miller, professor of physiology and surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, USA  and president of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences (OSSD), an international society for basic and clinical scientists.

The first time I have ever heard about sex-gender bias in biomedical research and gender medicine, some months ago while reading the Science magazine, my first thought was how come I had never wondered how it was possible that drug prescription have the same dosages for me, not even 1,60 meters tall, and let’ say for my Dutch 1,90 meters tall male friend if it’s so obvious we are different. And, as I do every time I find out something new and interesting to me, I started guessing that maybe I wasn’t the only one ignoring the issue and its causes. So I started researching the topic.

“The stereotype getting sex and gender bias in biomedical research off the ground is that we are all Caucasian, 1,75 meters tall males”, Flavia Franconi, founder of the Gender Pharmacology Group of the Italian Society of Pharmacology and coordinator of the first European Gender Pharmacology’s Ph.D. says.

Recently behavioral neuroscientist Irving Zucker, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and postdoctoral researcher Annaliese Beery, as the Science Magazine quoted, conducted a survey of journal articles reporting results of almost 2,000 animal studies that used mammals, published in 2009. “We found a male bias in 8 out of 10 biological disciplines, most pronounced in neuroscience (5.5 males to 1 female), pharmacology (5 males to 1 female) and physiology (3.7 males to 1 female). Although we identified a female bias in studies on reproduction and in the few immunology reports that indicated the animals’ sex, 75% of studies in three highly cited immunology journals did not specify whether the animals used were male or female”, they themselves write in the article “Males still dominate animal studies” published in Nature last June.

Using female animals in basic research is more expensive than using males. Female rodents, the default animal model for many diseases, have a 4-day ovarian cycle, so researchers who use them must take daily vaginal swabs in experiments where hormones might play a role and need to use many more animals. “The reality is that women do have menstrual cycles and fluctuations in hormones”, Virginia Miller points out. “This variability may increase ranges in some data parameters but it represents a type of “steady state” for women within reproductive age and anyways it cannot be a valid scientific rationale to eliminate women or female animals from scientific experiments”.

It wasn’t indeed a good reason at least for Deborah Clegg, obesity researcher of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. She has recently published a microarray study in the International Journal of Obesity that shows major sex-based differences in the gene-expression profiles of fat tissue from mice on a high-fat diet. The study was funded by the Society for Women’s Health Research, an American non-profit organization working in partnership with the OSSD.  “We know that when women go through menopause they change where their body fat is distributed and they also change the type of fat cells they have”, Clegg explains. “We wanted to ask whether this was also true in mice and have found out that the main difference in obesity depends on where women and men deposit fat and that this is directly related to sex hormones”. How it is related is still the unknown she is now trying to investigate. “I believe that in the future we’ll have personalized medicine so if you are a woman you’ll get different kind of drugs and different doses than if you are a man”, she says. “But we are just now appreciating how different males and females are”.  

Gender medicine as a field started at the end of the last century thanks to Bernardine Healy, the first woman heading the National Institute of Health (NIH) who, in 1991, published in the New England Journal of Medicine a study called “The Yentl syndrome” which reported that women were not given the same treatment for heart disease as men.

Things have changed since then. In 1993, the same National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act mandated that women and minorities be included in clinical research and since then more women than men have been enrolled in NIH-sponsored phase III trials –those intended for complete assessment of safety and effectiveness in the prevention of diseases-. Unfortunately most of these have been single-sex studies such as breast and uterine cancer or research into menopausal women.  A survey of clinical studies published in 2004 in nine influential medical journals found that only 37% of participants were women (24% when restricted to drug trials), and only 13% of studies analysed data by sex.

What has undoubtedly changed is the awareness of the biological differences between genders, mainly attributable to organizations such as the OSSD, the International Society for Gender Medicine, the numerous Centers for Gender Medicine across European and American universities, the single efforts of interested researchers throughout the world but, most of all, as three of the four sources quoted in this article confirm, “to the fact that before all the researchers were men and now things are changing”.

 We now know that the underlying differences between the two genders are determined by our chromosomes, by effects of the sex hormones on expression of genes and by epigenetics (influence of the environment on genes). “One of the challenges of the future for biologists and sociologists is to come together and work in an interdisciplinary way to understand how environmental factors interact with the biological ones”, Miller points out.

 Sex differences in the incidence, prevalence, symptoms and severity of diseases have already been shown in many cases. Diagnosis for anxiety and depression are twice as commons in women than men but, according to datas obtained from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science 2009, quoted in Zucker and Beery’s article, only 45% of animal studies into these disorder use females. Women have more strokes than male but only 38% of the studies use female. Some thyroid diseases are 7 to 10 times more common in women than men but only 52% of the studies use females, always according to the same source. At the moment no guide-line on basic research taking into account sex differences exists nor in the States nor in Europe.

Differences are particularly acute in cardiovascular diseases, the leading cause of death for both women and men. “Women have smaller vessels, a smaller heart, develop heart thickening in a much faster and sever way while also display particular types of diseases”, Maria Grazia Modena, past-president of the Italian Society of Cardiology (first woman heading it), Chief of Cardiology, University of Modena and Director of the Women’s Well-being Center, which she founded in 1996 and has already examined 4,000 women. She mentions the Takotsubo disease, also called the “broken heart syndrome” for being caused by a deep sorrow such as the loss of a child. “It prevails in elderly women with a short-lived, very strong pain, often in the back, sometimes with flu-like symptoms and it is reversible”, Modena explains. Differences in how symptoms present have also been underlined with women also presenting nausea and vomit while men only pain in the chest.

The majority of the studies she leads are funded by her university. At the moment there are no European funds for specific sex-based studies.

 “We need them”, Modena claims. “I think we should start from researching with both sexes and genders in those areas where there is evidence of relevant differences”.

“It is not only a matter of using female animals”, Franconi points out. “We also have to find the right animal model for each disease. For thrombosis, type 2 diabetes and ischemic heart disease, for instance, we are using around 30 rat models of which only one gets sick, but women do die much more than men because of them”. Besides, “We always need to include whether the women we are studying are taking birth control pills or whether they’re cycling normal or going through menopause”, Deborah Clegg says. “Heart, pancreas, liver, brain, bones, muscles, every single tissue in the body is influenced by sex hormones”.

“The whole idea is to do basic research to understand where sex-based differences exist and then translate that information into medications and other treatments”, Virginia Miller says.

 A 2005 study of 300 new drug applications between 1995 and 2000 found that even those drugs that showed substantial differences in how they were absorbed, metabolized and excreted by men and women had no sex-specific dosage recommendations on their labels. This may be part of the reason why women are 1.5 times more likely to develop an adverse reaction to prescription drugs than men. “Around the 70% of all the drugs we know are metabolized by CYP3A, an enzyme that women metabolize and so remove faster than men do, having less chance to undergo therapeutic effectiveness”, Franconi explains. “Besides there are physiological variations, such as less water and more fat in women’s body, which cause different drug distribution”. The answer to my first question, how it is possible that drugs keep having the same dosages for all of us in spite of all this evidence, comes from her. “Once there haven’t been enough trials either at basic or clinical level, our evidences are considered to be level C ones (meaning that the balance between benefits and risks are considered too close for making general recommendations)”, she explains. “And we still have to deal with ironic smiles from many men researchers and the pharmaceutical industry”.

But if what I wrote in the first post of this blog is true most of the researchers who have gotten here have already cut their teeth enough not to be easy to scare. Flavia Franconi, Maria Grazia Modena and other researchers together with the Italian National Agency for Regional Health Services  are meeting later this month to write new guide-lines on Cardiovascular Clinical Research while they will all meet from November the 30tn until December the 3rd in Tel Aviv, where the 5th International Congress on Gender Medicine will take place. We will definitely hear more about them.

Drawing: Valentina Meli

CategoryGender issues | Comment18 Comments »

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July 4th, 2010

Meet Raewyn Connell

Raewyn Connell (1944), born Robert William Connell, is the most influential Australian sociologist. Her research fields go from large-scale class dynamics, poverty and education, sociology of knowledge, sexuality and AIDS prevention to social change and gender relations. Her book “Masculinities” (1995) was one of the founders of this research field. She is currently university professor at the University of Sydney.

 

In the ILGA Trans Secretariat’s web page it’s written that it’s a paradox that the most important intellectual of masculinity is now a woman. First of all do you feel you are a woman?

No, I don’t feel I’m a woman.  I know it.  I don’t think that’s very different from the kind of knowledge other women have (and men too, about being men).  For transsexual women, of course, the knowledge has definite complexities; yet there are gender complexities at some level in almost everyone’s life.

Do you feel you are a man?

For large parts of my life I tried to live as a man, but always with the underlying contradiction. That is the situation many transsexual women find themselves in. There is no simple resolution of that contradiction, and no outcome without serious costs – including costs to other people in our lives.  It’s not a glamorous situation and should not be romanticised.

Do you think it is necessary to belong either to one gender or the other?

No, it is not necessary for everyone to be subjectively either a man or a woman.  There are some people who try consistently to live without gender commitments.  For instance, they live in de-gendered households, have emotional or sexual relations not determined by gender, present themselves with a mixture of gender symbolism, and demand that the state not classify them in gender terms.  This is a brave project and these people have my admiration.  But their project is incredibly difficult, because gender is a massive social reality, embedded in institutions as well as personal life.   For the great majority of people, having a definite place in the gender order is a routine condition of life, a ground of everyday action.

What do you think about the Trans Secretariat’s statement?

I don’t think there is any paradox here. In my writing about masculinity I put forward concepts and evidence, based on research, and these ideas have circulated because other people, both women and men, have found them accurate or useful.  That does not depend on who I am but on the force of the argument and the relevance of the evidence.  If one is interested in the biographical roots of ideas, then doubtless the fact of being a transsexual woman is one reason I became interested in gender problems all those years ago – but only one of the reasons!

However the Trans Secretariat (lovely word!) is right in saying there are political issues here.  For instance, some right-wing men in the USA have used my transition as a way of discrediting research about men and masculinity.  That is strictly illogical, but logic is not to be expected from the defenders of an irrational order.

 

Do you think you were born transsexual, you became one or both things?

I cannot resist the quotation: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”.  I think that what Simone de Beauvoir said is equally true for transsexual women. This does not mean that transsexuality is a lifestyle or a “choice”, any more than gender is a “choice” for other women.  Gender is a hard reality for all of us.  To say that something is a social reality is not to say that it is light or easy to modify!  I should add that many transsexual women hold a different view, and believe that transsexuality is genetically determined; there is some biomedical literature that makes the same assumption.

Why have you decided to focus on masculinities as a gender issue?

I began to focus on masculinities because I was trying to understand the working of the gender order as a whole.  That is the project of my book Gender and Power, published in 1987.  If we want to understand a patriarchal gender order, then as well as understanding the lives of the groups oppressed by it, we need to understand the groups privileged by it.  We need to understand how gender works for them, and the way they “do gender” all the way from education and friendship through to gender-based violence and war.  This was the research strategy that used to be called “studying up”, in contrast to “studying down”, i.e. researching the disadvantaged, the marginalized, the exploited.  I had already some experience of “studying up”, for instance my book Ruling Class, Ruling Culture, published in 1977.  Between those years, I was involved in a fascinating research project on social relations in high schools.  It was in that project that I began to think about the relationships between different forms of masculinity, and so developed the idea of hegemonic masculinity in relation to subordinated and marginalized masculinities.

In which way does neoliberal globalization play an important role in contemporary construction of masculinities as you suggest in you book “Masculinities”?

Neoliberal globalization may affect the construction of masculinities in several ways.  First is the creation of new arenas for gender relations, such as transnational corporations.  Second is the economic re-structuring that has accompanied neoliberal power everywhere.  A main effect is to create more insecurity in the workforce, to break down workers’ rights and the unions that defend them. This has made it much more difficult for working-class men to sustain a masculinity centered on being a breadwinner, a fact now being observed by researchers in Latin America especially.  Third is the circulation of gender ideologies through transnational media that are controlled by profit-driven men and are usually quite hostile to feminism; this is one of the factors in the “backlash” against gender equality.

But there are also contradictions here.  Neoliberalism promotes an individualism that has been used by many middle-class women to break down masculine monopolies in professions and lower or middle management.  And the smarter men in management have now come to terms with this, and present themselves as supporters of gender-equal, inclusive policies.  I read an article in the business section of my local newspaper today, that claimed male managers are scared of women, and advocated treating everyone “as an individual”…

You say that in order to overcome gender discrimination “part of the task is to establish among men the hegemony of a non-violent masculinity, which requires a widespread understanding that strength doesn’t mean force”. Where could this understanding proceed from?

I think a better understanding can come from many sources.  There are nonviolent traditions among men in many cultures: Quakers in England and the USA, the Gandhians in India, Buddhist traditions in Vietnam, etc.  There is a broad nonviolent tradition of women’s politics in many parts of the world.  One of the truly hopeful signs is the tendency which one sees in many places for men to become more involved with small children, as fathers.  In Mexico this has been called paternidad afectiva, emotionally engaged fatherhood.  Being deeply involved in nurturing a new person is (I think) likely to make people – men or women – less likely to want to kill and maim others.

Do you believe in general that in order to overcome gender discrimination toward women, homosexuals and transsexuals, men and women as a group need to undergo different processes that might at one point get together or we can do it together starting from now?

I have long argued that major reform in the gender order must involve coalitions of social forces. I still think that is correct.  Such coalitions have already existed.  Examples are the anti-discrimination and equal opportunity legislation of the 1970s in Australia, Sweden and other countries, which involved coalitions between feminist women and supportive men, in state bureaucracies and labour parties.  The “international feminism” seen today in United Nations agencies also works through coalitions with men in governments and NGOs around the world.

Coalition politics is never simple and often doesn’t achieve what we initially hope for.  But we have to think this way, because in practical terms no other politics will produce large-scale change.

Which are the goals that you still would want to achieve both at a personal and professional level?

I have research projects about “southern theory“, about intellectuals, about the social dimension of neoliberalism, as well as about masculinities.  I have graduate students I hope to guide and maybe even inspire.  I have some political engagements and I want to be a useful member of my union, my solidarity group, my professional associations. I would like to broaden my international engagement and political involvement, within the limits of energy that I now have to acknowledge.  Personally?  Well, I have a family and friends, and I want to see them flourish.  The gender transition still has plenty of work to be done.  I want to grow a garden full of grevilleas and attract more colourful parrots.  And I would like to write one really good poem, before I put down the pen (or switch off the word processor) for the last time.

Drawing: Valentina Meli

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June 22nd, 2010

“Engineous” encounters

Control sensors that know every house’s real energy expenses, high security systems, home cinema, wireless band width communications inside the houses, led usage in new contexts such as streets and car headlights and software solutions for the reconstruction of faces from bone remains.

These are only some of the examples of what can be achieved from getting together professionals coming from all the different areas of telecommunication technologies and computing focusing on domotics engineering, optical engineering and virtual reality applications with the aim to facilitate the life of building users, optimize energy consumption and offer new services through the exploitation of virtual reality.

This is what they do at CeDInt, the R&D centre of the Universidad Politécnica of Madrid of Madrid directed since its beginning, in 2004, by telecommunications engineer Asunción Santamaría.

“The idea of creating an institute of this kind comes from the will of converging the knowledges of different experts into a transversal structure so that they can collaborate in a wider project aiming to offer solutions to sectors that until now haven’t experienced IT penetration in their businesses”, Santamaría says.

Since its official inauguration last month, CeDInt’s goals seem even closer. Its new building, located in the Science and Technology Park of the Universidad Politécnica of Madrid, just outside the city, hosts in fact the first Virtual Reality Cave of Five Faces in Southern Europe.

The cave, boosted by the UPM (Universidad Politécnica of Madrid) and T-Systems (services subsidiary for Deutsche Telekom’s companies) is where medicine, psychology, engineering, architecture, heritage reconstruction, videogames, entertainment and all the areas of simulation meet . The virtual cave is a sort of room with five glass walls having a camera settled in each of its four corners. The technique is the one used in 3D movies.  Two computer-based images are  constantly shown through different cameras which are tuned with the sensored glasses users need to wear. Each eye can see one image, which gives users the feeling of depth. A remote control allowing to surf in real time inside the applications and an audio system are also part of the environment.

The images shown go from heritage building reconstruction, air landscapes, medical reconstruction images showing surgical transformations in advance (prosthesis and jaw’s reconstruction among others) to training applications for phobias such as vertigo. All in a cheaper and safer environment than it would result from setting up the experiment.

“What distinguishes CeDInt from other research centres is that what we do here is a really applied research that wants to achieve commercial impact in the short  and middle term so that our country can have an industry standing out in some field of technology”, Santamaría points out.

Around 50 researchers (10 of them are women) work at CeDInt.

“One of my biggest lucks here is that I am surrounded by people who are much cleverer than I am and who totally trust me”, Santamaría says. “When I have to take tough decisions I can always rely on them”.

As mother of two teenage sons and as a “downright supporter of teleworking” Santamaría takes advantages of the short compulsory daily presence at CeDInt (four hours in the morning) to be able to do both of her jobs without big difficulties.

The ones she does have while carrying out her job can be resumed with the latin expression “nemo propheta in patria sua” (no one is a prophet in his or her own country) and the feeling that without recongition from outside it is very hard to be appreciated in one’s country.  But she and her team have been clear since the beginning about what they were doing. Now, also thanks to the virtual cave where to experiment with new practical applications many Spanish companies the public opinion too are starting to realize that great potentials are sometimes closer than one might think.

Drawing: Valentina Meli

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June 13th, 2010

Meet Amelia Valcárcel

Amelia Valcárcel (Madrid, 1950) is professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the UNED (National University of Distance Education), Member of the State Council and Vice-president of the Real Patronato of Prado Museum. She is also a consultant in Gender Policies for the United Nations and one of the most prestigious Spanish feminist thinkers.

What did feminism mean 40 years ago in Europe and what does it mean today?

It didn’t have a good reputation then nor it has it now but this is fine, because it means it’s alive.

Really?

Obviously, because otherwise it would be in a museum and wouldn’t scare anyone.

Is it possible to say the same thing about global feminism?

Yes, of course. There are many societies where feminism, I guess, has a horrible reputation. Just think about all those places where women are not considered as human beings.

So which would be the main difference between 40 years ago and today?

Freedoms, at least here, were much less than now and I think the consideration toward the word feminism hasn’t changed as much as our freedoms have.

You mean the meaning of the word has stayed behind?

No, the word is alive and, once it is so, it can keep making things but people end up being content with what has already happened and most of the times don’t like what might come.

What does feminism mean to you?

I don’t think it can have a meaning which might be for me only, once it is a political movement with a political theory and 300 years of history.

As a philosopher and an historian of moral ideas and politics, I see feminism not only as an object of study. I’m committed to it because throughout my whole life I had to study and push significant advances toward freedom, dignity and acknowledgement of the importance of “possessing themselves” of women.

Why do you think feminism, at least in Europe, keeps being considered (also among many women) more as a cause some take than as something concerning all women?

It is because of the poor awareness women have as a group. Up to the extent that we gain freedoms we tend to consider ourselves as free individuals with no ascriptions and thus to become part of causes of free individuals with no ascriptions. We only see ourselves as a group when facing situations we have already overcome. For instance, western women clearly see the unbearable life women in other places of the world live and they do feel supportive as who owns a different kind of life.  But it is much more complicated to set this in someone’s present. Only toward really hard situations women become aware as a group.

Do you believe feminism is ontologically destined to belong to a minority or we simple are in a certain stage of the process and it is okay the way it is?

It’s undoubtedly less associated to a minority than it was before. During the Nineteenth Century up to the extent that it gains educational and political rights, feminism starts to be followed by many more people. With regard to nowadays we have to consider that in any political movement the avant-garde is always small and feminism is an avant-garde. The matter is how many people do follow it.

As women which are the advantages and the limits of leading a process voluntarily separated from men in order to overcome differences in rights and duties among the genders?

I surely don’t belong to this way of seeing things. When I was 20 year old I did think that unless we had a radical and separated group of political action we couldn’t keep neither the expectations neither the feminist agenda.  It was right then but afterwards it has also been right to join global political causes with the idea that only getting inside the power feminist transformation agenda can be carried on.

But today it still happens that when treating gender issues whose focus are women (such as sexist violence with in the couple) it’s very common to have men saying they’re being stereotyped or not taken into account. How do you think we should deal with this?

I have ascertained this hundreds of times and I still do. For instance if I say “Men generally tend to feel superior to women” there’s always a man who raises his hand saying he doesn’t belong to this kind of man and he does it with astonishing airs of superiority. The matter is that women at the end of the day have to endure the fact that tons of generalizations are said about them and they can’t take the hint. Men generally think that any kind of generalization refers to them.

Why is it?

Perhaps because it is true. They mostly aren’t renouncing to what they do nor are they blaming as a subgroups those who do it.

Referring to my previous question, during the short life of this blog, for instance, I have already received oral comments of male friends saying generalizations and exclusion toward them does take place here…

Stop worrying about them because here you’re acting so that women have their own voice and it is very important because it barely exists one. Go and see the big literary awards or there where power is managed and you’ll see that there are only men. That one is an exclusion process. In my opinion you shouldn’t see it as a symmetric issue and think that if they exclude you and you do exclude some dear male friend from your blog you are doing the same thing.

Why isn’t it the same thing?

Because your blog is a poor thing which is springing up now while banks, for instance, have a terrible power.

How do you think you made it, as a woman, to get where you are and not to be gotten rid of on the way?

It took me a lot and I wear its traces. We are forced to have a double curriculum.

It even happened to me to get paid the double from the same institution when talking about philosophy than when doing it about feminism.

Are there still moments when you feel you’re not taken into account in the same way you would be if you were a man?

Every day all the women are discriminated against a little. Being women means belonging to a group that comes after and when you belong to a group like this you are only granted respect inside small groups where you belong but in any communication between unknown what works is stereotype because there are no marks to help assessing the situation.

In your book “Feminism in the global world” (ed. Cátedra, Madrid, 2008) you state that the so called clash of civilizations is mostly a conflict on which is the role of women. Could you explain it better?

Civilizations are, among other things, contexts of commonly accepted values and the idea that all the women of the world should have the same rights and chances that some people see we have in the western cultures, although we see they are much less than it seems, brings many people to go straight to fundamentalism, because it’s unbearable for them. Our freedom plays in a global world where communication is immediate.
Could you give me an example of what you are saying?

All the muslim countries are now debating on which freedoms women should have. A hundred years ago they weren’t talking about it. Why are they doing it now?

Because they see it here?

Of course. What women achieve also provokes reactive movements, even in our society. Just think about the images of Villa Certosa. Things like that didn’t even happen with the emperor Tiberio.

How do you interpret it?

I think it has a lot to do with male-chauvinism and with the fact that Italian feminism hasn’t been very lucky. In general I think that what happens in a country has to do with the moral state of it.

Going back to your last book, you also talk about the “Ley del agrado” (the pleasing law). What is it?

It is a non written law thanks to which women always feel out of obligation to be “available to” and don’t refuse to have this as their way of staying in the world. It is very hard to change this in order for us to choose to raise our heads instead of lowering our eyes.

How can this be achieved?

Without fear of our own will, with courage and through the teaching of its appreciation.

Drawing: Valentina Meli

CategoryInterviews | Comment3 Comments »

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June 2nd, 2010

Your view

“Whenever I tell how I started working in Twision no one believes it”, Marta Simonet says.

Theater actress, tv presenter, blogger, model, since last March, when it began airing, she’s also one of the three hosts of Twision, the first world-wide Twitter television iniciative originated from a digital TV channel in Spain, Veo7, a part of Unidad Editorial. Already this year Twision was one of this year’s most innovative format at the MIP Tv in Cannes.

“It happened by chance”, she explains. “While surfing in twitter I found out there was a show of this kind airing in my own country, so I sent a message to the channel’s director, Melchor Miralles, saying I found it fascinating and that I was there for whatever was needed. He called me inviting my as a guest, made me a good offer and I accepted it right away”.

Twision (pronounced tu visión, your view) is an hour and a half long program airing every Saturday that lets viewers send in tweets live that three hosts then interact with. The show takes place in a studio with two guys and Marta on laptops and a huge screen behind them to showcase tweets. The site features a stream of tweets coming in next to the video player. The viewers are able to use the #veo7 hashtag to speak directly to presenters and influence where the program’s discussion goes — branded “twittertulia”. Every show receives around 2500 tweets live.

But this is only a small part of the audience participation. Throughout the whole week preceding the show Twision receives thousands of twits suggesting issues and sending videos which are then the bulk of the content of every show together with the issues mentioned that week in the social networks. Facebook group lists, Youtube video, people’s pictures, the best sentences of the week are also usual. Moreover every show hosts twitt-guests (users) while all the interviews are carried out live through the same social network.

“The show started as an entertainment for tweeters having their messages on the screen and then became a late night show mixing social networks with Tv. This happened thanks to the introduction of new contents, such as topical reports and sports which are indeed treated on social networks but do interest everyone”.

Twision’s team work is made up of around twenty people –mostly men- coming from the different Veo7 programs. “Everyone tries to get involved dedicating one’s spare time to it once it’s a really fun job to do”.

In Twision Marta also holds a section called “140 seconds with Marta Simonet” which consists of streets reports on meeting and events promoted in the social networks.

“Everywhere there’s a party, good music and fun, there you find me”, she promises.

Fun and “chispa” (wit) is in fact something she seeks in everything she does. In Twision she found it with no big effort especially because “even if we do have a script with marked guidelines on the content we are totally free of leaving out most of it and can perfectly improvise, which I love to do”.

Marta considers social networks to be like a casting room where “you can contact with people you would never have the chance to meet in the streets”. Thanks to that first tweet to Miralles Marta is also working now in a daily Veo7 sports program where she covers issues related to the Spanish national team. Her busy life, though, doesn’t stop her from being always connected to the social networks “which are a very important part of my job and which allow me to be always in touch with the people who really do the program”. The Twitter-users, of course.

Drawing: Valentina Meli



CategoryInnovative projects | Comment8 Comments »

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May 26th, 2010

Meet Luisa Morgantini

Vice President of both the European Parliament, the High-Level Group on Gender Equality and of the Parliament’s Bureau (2007-2009). Chair of the Committee on Development (2004-2007) and of the Delegation for relations with the Palestinian Legislative Council (1999-2004), and member, among others, of the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (1999-2009), she is also one of the founders of the international network Women in Black against war and violence (WIB).

Luisa Morgantini (Villadossola, Italia, 1940) is always the first to marvel at the titles she has received.  Citizen of the world, as she defines herself, Morgantini has made it to the highest levels without this being her goal. The one goal she’s always had instead, fighting injustice from below, is something that she continues to struggle with every day to achieve.

What does Women in Black represent to you?

It is my total support. I don’t believe that all the women are automatically for peace and justice just because they have a female body, but there’s no doubt that stating, as women, that war has to be out of history is what unites us the most, once women were excluded from military conflicts and only lived them as victims. Being a Woman in Black means struggling for a culture able to demilitarize not only the states, but also our minds; refusing to be enemies but wanting, instead, to understand the reasons of one another and, most of all, to see the asymmetries.

WIB strongly believes in the importance of “diplomacy from below”. Regarding gender discrimination, do you personally consider that the first big step toward a change should come from there?

I firmly believe in the institution, that’s why I have been an European Parliamentarian, but I also think relations between women from below are basic. As WIB, we set up an International Women Policy and what we said was something that in reality went against the policies of the governments who made the wars.  Getting connected from below shows, also to the United Nations, that from there relations can be built and the image of the enemy can be destroyed, and is one thing we want institutions to make their own.

Can you tell me one scene or story with the WIB you think you won’t forget?

The story of an Israeli woman in black who had her daughter killed by a Palestinian kamikaze  and of a Palestinian one who lost her own because of Israeli soldiers who meet every time they have to pass checkpoints.  They are fighting together for the end of the military occupation. Thus the sorrow, but also the hope, that no child will ever have to be killed.

From your experience as a member of the Committee on Women’s Rights what  are the main obstacles stopping women from achieving equal rights and duties in the actual Europe?

There are very many. The traditional ones; those of a society, which in spite of being modern and progressive, still has a culture more based on the affirmation and success of men in the public space. In the last years, really, women have taken steps forward in order to reach public spaces and recognition, but they’re more at a civil society level and very few are at the top ones. When, if I think of political life, in Italy for instance, a decline in women’s presence can be perfectly seen.

In your opinion, what is the cause of this decline?

The social system is backwards in regards to the presence of services which, for instance, could protect women when becoming mothers. Even if at a legislative level there are equal rights, the reality is that it is not so.

In the 10 years during which you had been working on these issues at the European Parliament, what goals have been achieved?

On one hand we carried on projects aiming to strengthen a female entrepreneurship. From the other, a lot was done against women trafficking, domestic violence and also for women in conflict, looking to find strategies which might help to make women play a role in peace promotion.

Talking about your personal experience, how do you think you made it, as a woman, to get where you are and not to be gotten rid of on the way?

I was able to stay away from the power manias and from “political jargon”. I don’t know, I would say my love for the world and the people helped me a lot. And this is something I learned as a child. The place where I come from is where the first partisan resistance took place, a world of workers where fatigue, distress, injustice were very present. I have always cared for everyone’s well being and I could never stand abuses of power nor arrogance. Maybe that’s why I made it.

But, tons of women who might have intentions as noble as yours are, bit by bit, knocked out in their rise in the hierarchic scale. You succeeded in avoiding it…

You know what? Perhaps I never thought about coming up a hierarchic scale. It has always happened and, every time, I was surprised to be nominated to become parliamentarian or to be elected as the Parliament vice-president. Every time I am startled and I feel I’m not up to it. Therefore I don’t know, maybe it’s a temperamental fact, but also a precise choice. I have decided to stay, even when I was inside the institutions, with those who had elected me, those I had worked with a whole life, the workers, the youngsters, the women, the poor ones.

In “The Picture of Dorian Gray” Oscar Wilde says that not getting married is the only way to keep having hope…

I didn’t get married because I’ve never had time, I haven’t noticed the passing of time

…and do you think there’s a relation between you not having started a family and being able to keep the independence, freedom and optimism which define you?

Possibly yes. I mean, I certainly couldn’t have lived all the experiences if I had had family’s duties –and joys-. Maybe I could be this way because my relationships weren’t forcing me to cook, feed a child, having to come back home and have a second job -even if I know there are obviously women and men who have chosen to start a family and are still free and independent.  It depends on what you decide to do. I have opted to be citizen of the world but deep-seated to the earth, in my identity, with people.

Do you feel you somehow had to convert to the dominant male model to get where you got?

When I was very young, once I was for freedom, my independence and autonomy, yes, I think I did have moments when I wanted to be like a man. From one hand I wanted to be as intelligent as they (and more than they) and, from the other, I always wanted to be their friend. When I was a young woman I didn’t have friends, they just had boyfriends and husbands. Later on, instead, I matured and always formed more relationships of solidarity with the women, all of them.

Are there still concrete moments when you feel you’re not taken into account in the same way you would be if you were a man?

Yes, very many, but it’s more a feeling. I can’t think of a concrete example because, honestly I’ve always never minded too much.

This might partly answer the question of how you made it, but it appears that certain things don’t dishearten you too much…

Yes, certainly. I try not to overburden the others for the things that happen to me. The first thing I think is “What have I done?” “Where have I done wrong?” instead of what the others might have done. I believe this also might have granted me to continue on this way and to be able to keep going with my 70 years through the roads of the world looking for some peace and some justice.

In your opinion is a male emancipation also needed in order to overcome gender discrimination?

Yes, absolutely. I consider that men also need to free themselves from the chauvinism chains and that they necessitate work on themselves in order to change their own image and way of doing. I think there’s common work between women and men to change and influence each other. This is an established society but single people can change and, with them, their role also changes.

Now that you don’t have institutional charges anymore, what are you committed to?

I’ve just gotten back from Palestine, where we participated in a conference of the Palestinian Popular Nonviolent Resistance and we launched an International Network, which I co-ordinate, to support them. Then Africa, debt cancellation, immigrants, and try and have a little of humanity in this world.

Drawing: Valentina Meli

CategoryInterviews | Comment44 Comments »

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May 19th, 2010

The missing criteria in Research Funding

Ten years after the publication of “Minerva’s daughters” the situation of women researchers -not only in Italy but also across Europe- hasn’t changed much. At least that’s what the latest report promoted by the European Commission The Gender Challenge in Research Funding reveals.

“When being a man or a woman should really count, that is exactly when considering the difference is taken as an insult to the neutrality of science” Rossella Palomba says.

The famous socio-demographic and sociologist Rossella Palomba, one of the most outstanding European figures on gender studies, was one of the 16 experts forming the “Gender and Excellence” group set up by the European Commission to provide recommendations on the improvement of transparency in the procedures used in selection committees for the award of grants and in access to research funding in general.

National data on the Research Funding system –mostly from a gender perspective- have been gathered for all the 27 member states plus 6 associated countries (Croatia,Israel, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey).

The focus of the expert group included national grant awarding procedures and accessibility of gendered data on success rates, amounts awarded and peers taking part in the decision-making and evaluation processes. It centered on the funding of academic and basic research, on key public funding organisations in each country, on competitive projects funding and on individual grants.

Even if measures of excellence vary widely across Europe and across disciplines there’s one common trait. Gender is very rarely considered among the criteria.

“In order to prepare this report we had many auditions, among others to the European Research Council’s person responsible of research funds”, Palomba recalls. “Once we saw gender wasn’t among the evaluation criteria we asked why and the answer we’ve got was that what they fund was excellence, not gender”.

Although the expert group has not found a large and systematic gender imbalance in terms of success rates in research funding in the funding systems studied (the under-representation of women among the researchers in the EU-27 being well known), a clear difference in application behaviour was identified. Women are less likely to apply for funding than men and they request smaller amounts of money.

The reasons beyond this imbalance, according to the report, need further research in order to be found out. Still, Palomba has her own ideas on the issue. “I think this thriftiness depends on the fact that women feel they deserve less, while men are much more aware of their own possibilities”.

Common to all the 33 countries is that women are particularly under-represented among academic gatekeepers and leading positions. The report shows that where a legislation on gender quota in committees is working (such as in Norway, Finland and Iceland) women participate much more than where this measure doesn’t exist.

“The auto-exclusion phenomenon is well working”, Palomba points out. “Besides, when competition lacks of transparency, as it happens in science research, where competitors don’t know the criteria chosen by the gatekeepers, women tend to be less determined than men, who feel more resolute, probably also because they know they’ll be judged by equals”.

If percentages on women researchers in Europe haven’t changed much in the last ten years, the perception of gender as an important issue has undoubtedly arose among the majority of the countries. Most of the 33 countries considered in this report have passed an Act on Gender Equality or Equal Opportunities, and all have some kind of gender equality agency within the national government.

“Unfortunately the investment on equal opportunities hasn’t tried to achieve any real goal”, Palomba underlines. “It’s a surface kind of investment, like if they were telling us: emancipate but don’t expect anything from us”.

The expert group recommendations go from monitoring gender data, publishing the results and increasing funding application from women researchers to improving gender balance among gate keepers and generally improving transparency in research funding.

Palomba considers that all the words on equal opportunities have already been said. That’s why she has lately chosen to explore the use of sensorial experiences as a new way of communicating. The three main metaphors to explain women lack of success in science (the crystal ceiling, the sticky floor and the leaky pipeline) turned into installations might help both men and women to understand empirically that “the obstacles women researchers are forced to overcome not only damage them but also global scientific excellence”.

More about Rossella Palomba www.ingenere.it

Drawing: Valentina Meli

CategoryGender issues | Comment9 Comments »

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