Early Voices: The Leap to Language

Early Voices: The Leap to Language
By NICHOLAS WADE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/science/15LANG.html

Bower birds are artists, leaf-cutting ants practice agriculture, crows use tools, chimpanzees form coalitions against rivals. The only major talent unique to humans is language, the ability to transmit encoded thoughts from the mind of one individual to another.

Because of language's central role in human nature and sociality, its evolutionary origins have long been of interest to almost everyone, with the curious exception of linguists.

As far back as 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris famously declared that it wanted no more speculative articles about the origin of language.

More recently, many linguists have avoided the subject because of the influence of Noam Chomsky, a founder of modern linguistics and still its best-known practitioner, who has been largely silent on the question.

Dr. Chomsky's position has "only served to discourage interest in the topic among theoretical linguists," writes Dr. Frederick J. Newmeyer, last year's president of the Linguistic Society of America, in "Language Evolution," a book of essays being published this month by Oxford University Press in England.

In defense of the linguists' tepid interest, there have until recently been few firm facts to go on. Experts offered conflicting views on whether Neanderthals could speak. Sustained attempts to teach apes language generated more controversy than illumination.

But new research is eroding the idea that the origins of language are hopelessly lost in the mists of time. New clues have started to emerge from archaeology, genetics and human behavioral ecology, and even linguists have grudgingly begun to join in the discussion before other specialists eat their lunch.

"It is important for linguists to participate in the conversation, if only to maintain a position in this intellectual niche that is of such commanding interest to the larger scientific public," writes Dr. Ray Jackendoff, Dr. Newmeyer's successor at the linguistic society, in his book "Foundations of Language."

Geneticists reported in March that the earliest known split between any two human populations occurred between the !Kung of southern Africa and the Hadza of Tanzania. Since both of these very ancient populations speak click languages, clicks may have been used in the language of the ancestral human population. The clicks, made by sucking the tongue down from the roof of the mouth (and denoted by an exclamation point), serve the same role as consonants.

That possible hint of the first human tongue may be echoed in the archaeological record. Humans whose skeletons look just like those of today were widespread in Africa by 100,000 years ago. But they still used the same set of crude stone tools as their forebears and their archaic human contemporaries, the Neanderthals of Europe.

Then, some 50,000 years ago, some profound change took place. Settlements in Africa sprang to life with sophisticated tools made from stone and bone, art objects and signs of long distance trade.

Though some archaeologists dispute the suddenness of the transition, Dr. Richard Klein of Stanford argues that the suite of innovations reflects some specific neural change that occurred around that time and, because of the advantage it conferred, spread rapidly through the population.

That genetic change, he suggests, was of such a magnitude that most likely it had to do with language, and was perhaps the final step in its evolution. If some neural change explains the appearance of fully modern human behavior some 50,000 years ago, "it is surely reasonable to suppose that the change promoted the fully modern capacity for rapidly spoken phonemic speech," Dr. Klein has written.

Listening to Primates
Apes' Signals Fall Short of Language

At first glance, language seems to have appeared from nowhere, since no other species speaks. But other animals do communicate. Vervet monkeys have specific alarm calls for their principal predators, like eagles, leopards, snakes and baboons.

Researchers have played back recordings of these calls when no predators were around and found that the vervets would scan the sky in response to the eagle call, leap into trees at the leopard call and look for snakes in the ground cover at the snake call.

Vervets can't be said to have words for these predators because the calls are used only as alarms; a vervet can't use its baboon call to ask if anyone noticed a baboon around yesterday. Still, their communication system shows that they can both utter and perceive specific sounds.

Dr. Marc Hauser, a psychologist at Harvard who studies animal communication, believes that basic systems for both the perception and generation of sounds are present in other animals. "That suggests those systems were used way before language and therefore did not evolve for language, even though they are used in language," he said.

Language, as linguists see it, is more than input and output, the heard word and the spoken. It's not even dependent on speech, since its output can be entirely in gestures, as in American Sign Language. The essence of language is words and syntax, each generated by a combinatorial system in the brain.

If there were a single sound for each word, vocabulary would be limited to the number of sounds, probably fewer than 1,000, that could be distinguished from one another. But by generating combinations of arbitrary sound units, a copious number of distinguishable sounds becomes available. Even the average high school student has a vocabulary of 60,000 words.

The other combinatorial system is syntax, the hierarchical ordering of words in a sentence to govern their meaning.

Chimpanzees do not seem to possess either of these systems. They can learn a certain number of symbols, up to 400 or so, and will string them together, but rarely in a way that suggests any notion of syntax. This is not because of any poverty of thought. Their conceptual world seems to overlap to some extent with that of people: they can recognize other individuals in their community and keep track of who is dominant to whom. But they lack the system for encoding these thoughts in language.

How then did the encoding system evolve in the human descendants of the common ancestor of chimps and people?

Language Precursors
Babbling and Pidgins Hint at First Tongue

One of the first linguists to tackle this question was Dr. Derek Bickerton of the University of Hawaii. His specialty is the study of pidgins, which are simple phrase languages made up from scratch by children or adults who have no language in common, and of creoles, the successor languages that acquire inflection and syntax.

Dr. Bickerton developed the idea that a proto-language must have preceded the full-fledged syntax of today's discourse. Echoes of this proto-language can be seen, he argued, in pidgins, in the first words of infants, in the symbols used by trained chimpanzees and in the syntax-free utterances of children who do not learn to speak at the normal age.

In a series of articles, Dr. Bickerton has argued that humans may have been speaking proto-language, essentially the use of words without syntax, as long as two million years ago. Modern language developed more recently, he suggests, perhaps with appearance of anatomically modern humans some 120,000 years ago.

The impetus for the evolution of language, he believes, occurred when human ancestors left the security of the forest and started foraging on the savanna. "The need to pass on information was the driving force," he said in an interview.

Foragers would have had to report back to others what they had found. Once they had developed symbols that could be used free of context — a general word for elephant, not a vervet-style alarm call of "An elephant is attacking!" — early people would have taken the first step toward proto-language. "Once you got it going, there is no way of stopping it," Dr. Bickerton said.

But was the first communicated symbol a word or a gesture? Though language and speech are sometimes thought of as the same thing, language is a coding system and speech just its main channel.

Dr. Michael Corballis, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, believes the gesture came first, in fact as soon as our ancestors started to walk on two legs and freed the hands for making signs.

Chimpanzees have at least 30 different gestures, mostly used to refer to other individuals.

Hand gestures are still an expressive part of human communication, Dr. Corballis notes, so much so that people even gesticulate while on the telephone.

He believes that spoken words did not predominate over signed ones until the last 100,000 years or so, when a genetic change may have perfected human speech and led to its becoming a separate system, not just a grunted accompaniment for gestures.

Critics of Dr. Corballis's idea say gestures are too limited; they don't work in the dark, for one thing. But many concede the two systems may both have played some role in the emergence of language.

Search for Incentives
As Societies Grew the Glue Was Gossip

Dr. Bickerton's idea that language must have had an evolutionary history prompted other specialists to wonder about the selective pressure, or evolutionary driving force, behind the rapid emergence of language.

In the mere six million years since chimps and humans shared a common ancestor, this highly complex faculty has suddenly emerged in the hominid line alone, along with all the brain circuits necessary to map an extremely rapid stream of sound into meaning, meaning into words and syntax, and intended sentence into expressed utterance.

It is easy to see in a general way that each genetic innovation, whether in understanding or in expressing language, might create such an advantage for its owners as to spread rapidly through a small population.

"No one will take any notice of the guy who says `Gu-gu-gu'; the one with the quick tongue will get the mates," Dr. Bickerton said. But what initiated this self-sustaining process?

Besides Dr. Bickerton's suggestion of the transition to a foraging lifestyle, another idea is that of social grooming, which has been carefully worked out by Dr. Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Liverpool in England.

Dr. Dunbar notes that social animals like monkeys spend an inordinate amount of time grooming one another. The purpose is not just to remove fleas but also to cement social relationships. But as the size of a group increases, there is not time for an individual to groom everyone.

Language evolved, Dr. Dunbar believes, as a better way of gluing a larger community together.

Some 63 percent of human conversation, according to his measurements, is indeed devoted to matters of social interaction, largely gossip, not to the exchange of technical information, Dr. Bickerton's proposed incentive for language.

Dr. Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the first linguists to acknowledge that language may be subject to natural selection, disputes Dr. Dunbar's emphasis on social bonding; a fixed set of greetings would suffice, in his view.

Dr. Pinker said it was just as likely that language drove sociality: it was because people could exchange information that it became more worthwhile to hang out together.

"Three key features of the distinctively human lifestyle — know-how, sociality and language — co-evolved, each constituting a selection pressure for the others," Dr. Pinker writes in "Language Evolution," the new book of essays.

But sociality, from Dr. Dunbar's perspective, helps explain another feature of language: its extreme corruptibility. To convey information, a stable system might seem most efficient, and surely not beyond nature's ability to devise. But dialects change from one village to another, and languages shift each generation.

The reason, Dr. Dunbar suggests, is that language also operates as a badge to differentiate the in group from outsiders; thus the Gileadites could pick out and slaughter any Ephraimite asked to say "shibboleth" because, so the writer of Judges reports, "He said sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right."

Language in the Genome
From Family Failing First Gene Emerges

A new approach to the evolution of language seems to have been opened with studies of a three-generation London family known as KE. Of its 29 members old enough to be tested, 14 have a distinctive difficulty with communication. They have trouble pronouncing words properly, speaking grammatically and making certain fine movements of the lips and tongue.

Asked to repeat a nonsense phrase like "pataca pataca pataca," they trip over each component as if there were three different words.

Some linguists have argued that the KE family's disorder has nothing specific to do with language and is some problem that affects the whole brain. But the I.Q. scores of affected and unaffected members overlap, suggesting the language systems are specifically at fault. Other linguists have said the problem is just to do with control of speech. But affected members have problems writing as well as speaking.

The pattern of inheritance suggested that a single defective gene was at work, even though it seemed strange that a single gene could have such a broad effect. Two years ago, Dr. Simon Fisher and Prof. Tony Monaco, geneticists at the University of Oxford in England, discovered the specific gene that is changed in the KE family. Called FOXP2, its role is to switch on other genes, explaining at once how it may have a range of effects. FOXP2 is active in specific regions of the brain during fetal development.

The gene's importance in human evolution was underlined by Dr. Svante Paabo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. In a study last year they reported that FOXP2 is highly conserved in evolution — in other words, that the precise sequence of units in FOXP2's protein product is so important that any change is likely to lead to its owner's death.

In the 70 million years since people and mice shared a common ancestor, there have been just three changes in the FOXP2 protein's 715 units, Dr. Paabo reported. But two of those changes occurred in the last six million years, the time since humans and chimps parted company, suggesting that changes in FOXP2 have played some important role in human evolution.

Sampling the DNA of people around the world, Dr. Paabo found signs of what geneticists call a selective sweep, meaning that the changed version of FOXP2 had spread through the human population, presumably because of some enormous advantage it conferred.

That advantage may have been the perfection of speech and language, from a barely comprehensible form like that spoken by the affected KE family members to the rapid articulation of ordinary discourse. It seems to have taken place about 100,000 years ago, Dr. Paabo wrote, before modern humans spread out of Africa, and is "compatible with a model in which the expansion of modern humans was driven by the appearance of a more proficient spoken language."

FOXP2 gives geneticists what seems to be a powerful entry point into the genetic and neural basis for language. By working out what other genes it interacts with, and the neural systems that these genes control, researchers hope to map much of the circuitry involved in language systems.

Ending the Silence
Linguists Return to Ideas of Origins

The crescendo of work by other specialists on language evolution has at last provoked linguists' attention, including that of Dr. Chomsky. Having posited in the early 1970's that the ability to learn the rules of grammar is innate, a proposition fiercely contested by other linguists, Dr. Chomsky might be expected to have shown keen interest in how that innateness evolved. But he has said very little on the subject, a silence that others have interpreted as disdain.

As Dr. Jackendoff, the president of the Linguistic Society of America, writes: "Opponents of Universal Grammar argue that there couldn't be such a thing as Universal Grammar because there is no evolutionary route to arrive at it. Chomsky, in reply, has tended to deny the value of evolutionary argumentation."

But Dr. Chomsky has recently taken a keen interest in the work by Dr. Hauser and his colleague Dr. W. Tecumseh Fitch on communication in animals. Last year the three wrote an article in Science putting forward a set of propositions about the way that language evolved. Based on experimental work by Dr. Hauser and Dr. Fitch, they argue that sound perception and production can be seen in other animals, though they may have been tweaked a little in hominids.

A central element in language is what linguists call recursion, the mind's ability to bud one phrase off another into the syntax of an elaborate sentence. Though recursion is not seen in animals, it could have developed, the authors say, from some other brain system, like the one animals use for navigation.

Constructing a sentence, and going from A to Z through a series of landmarks, could involve a similar series of neural computations. If by some mutation a spare navigation module developed in the brain, it would have been free to take on other functions, like the generation of syntax. "If that piece got integrated with the rest of the cognitive machinery, you are done, you get music, morality, language," Dr. Hauser said.

The researchers contend that many components of the language faculty exist in other animals and evolved for other reasons, and that it was only in humans that they all were linked. This idea suggests that animals may have more to teach about language than many researchers believe, but it also sounds like a criticism of evolutionary psychologists like Dr. Pinker and Dr. Dunbar, who seek to explain language as a faculty forced into being by specifics of the human lifestyle.

Dr. Chomsky rejects the notion that he has discouraged study of the evolution of language, saying his views on the subject have been widely misinterpreted.

"I have never expressed the slightest objection to work on the evolution of language," he said in an e-mail message. He outlined his views briefly in lectures 25 years ago but left the subject hanging, he said, because not enough was understood. He still believes that it is easy to make up all sorts of situations to explain the evolution of language but hard to determine which ones, if any, make sense.

But because of the importance he attaches to the subject, he returned to it recently in the article with Dr. Hauser and Dr. Fitch. By combining work on speech perception and speech production with a study of the recursive procedure that links them, "the speculations can be turned into a substantive research program," Dr. Chomsky said.

Others see Dr. Chomsky's long silence on evolution as more consequential than he does. "The fact is that Chomsky has had, and continues to have, an outsize influence in linguistics," Dr. Pinker said in an e-mail message. Calling Dr. Chomsky both "undeniably, a brilliant thinker" and "a brilliant debating tactician, who can twist anything to his advantage," Dr. Pinker noted that Dr. Chomsky "has rabid devotees, who hang on his every footnote, and sworn enemies, who say black whenever he says white."

"That doesn't leave much space," Dr. Pinker went on, "for linguists who accept some of his ideas (language as a mental, combinatorial, complex, partly innate system) but not others, like his hostility to evolution or any other explanation of language in terms of its function."

Biologists and linguists have long inhabited different worlds, with linguists taking little interest in evolution, the guiding theory of all biology. But the faculty for language, along with the evidence of how it evolved, is written somewhere in the now decoded human genome, waiting for biologists and linguists to identify the genetic program that generates words and syntax.

After 25 Years, New Ideas in the Prenatal Test Tube

After 25 Years, New Ideas in the Prenatal Test Tube
By MARY DUENWALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/health/15IVF.html

Twenty-five years ago this month, Louise Brown became famous just by being born — the first human conceived outside the body. Doctors removed a single egg from her mother's ovary, combined it with her father's sperm in a laboratory dish and, two and a half days later, placed the resulting eight-cell embryo into her mother's womb.

By today's standards, Louise Brown's conception seems rather conventional. Consider, by comparison, Lily and Max Karlin of Florham Park, N.J., who were conceived by in vitro fertilization, or I.V.F., two years ago.

Fertility drugs prompted their mother, Jamie Karlin, to grow, in a single cycle, 20 eggs large enough for her doctors to harvest. After being fertilized, 12 of them grew in culture for five full days to reach the embroyonic blastocyst stage — still microscopic, but ready to hatch from its outer membrane with more than 100 cells.

Dr. Alan Copperman, director of reproductive endocrinology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, transferred the two most promising blastocysts into Ms. Karlin's uterus. The remaining 10 were frozen, to await the time when Ms. Karlin and her husband, Jason, might want more children. Max and Lily were born in May 2002.

Blastocyst technology is hardly the only innovation. In the last 25 years, doctors have improved every aspect of in vitro fertilization, from their techniques for drawing eggs out of the ovary to the cultures they use to grow embryos in the lab.

Some of these advances have drastically improved the likelihood of success. In vitro fertilization performed with a woman's own eggs leads to a live birth more than 25 percent of the time, according to nationwide averages from 2000, the most recent data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1988, success rates averaged only about 12 percent. Nearly 100,000 attempts in 2000 led to more than 35,000 babies, nearly 1 percent of the total number of babies born in the United States.

"If you'd told me 20 years ago that 1 percent of American babies would be born as a result of I.V.F., I would have laughed," said Dr. Mark Sauer, chief of reproductive endocrinology at Columbia University. "Back then, we weren't even sure if it was worth learning I.V.F. because we weren't sure if it would ever really work."

The technique remains an inexact science. Costs remain high — an estimated $10,000 to $15,000 per attempt — and are rarely covered by insurance in America, keeping the technology out of reach for many middle- and low-income families.

Twins, triplets and even higher-order multiple pregnancies are persistent problems, leading to premature deliveries, low birth weights and resulting health problems. Certain techniques appear to raise, at least slightly, the risk of congenital problems in children. And some innovations have turned out to be less useful than hoped.

Still, as conversations with a dozen leading practitioners of in vitro fertilization reveal, efforts to expand the technology and increase success rates continue.

Fertility Drugs Bypassed

One of the newest techniques is in vitro maturation, or I.V.M., which makes fertilization possible without the hormone injections that have been used to make several eggs mature in a single cycle. Doctors have found that a few days before ovulation, as many as 30 to 50 egg follicles have begun to mature. Normally, only one will fully ripen for ovulation, and the rest are lost. But if the eggs are removed before ovulation, many of them can be matured in the laboratory.

"We may be able to get about 15 of them out, and about 7 or 8 of those may mature," said Dr. Barry Behr, an embryologist who directs the in vitro fertilization laboratories at Stanford. "Five or six of them may fertilize, and two or three of the embryos may be healthy."

The maturation method may also provide a key to perfecting egg freezing, said Dr. Richard P. Marrs, medical director for California Fertility Partners in Los Angeles. In vitro practitioners have long been able to freeze embryos and achieve pregnancies by thawing and implanting them. Sperm are also relatively easy to freeze. But success in freezing eggs has been limited.

The difficulty is that in fully mature eggs the structures containing genes are spread out and ready to divide, and even a slight drop in temperature tends to shatter the chromosomes, Dr. Marrs said. Freezing follicles is easier, and theoretically, Dr. Marrs said, doctors may one day be able to use the techniques of I.V.M. to mature follicles after they are thawed.

Doctors are also working to improve the freezing of mature eggs, Dr. Marrs said, by bringing them to minus-60 degrees Celsius from room temperature in a few seconds.

Checking the Genes

Another technique designed to help more women become pregnant has been preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or P.G.D. Doctors remove a single cell from an eight-celled embryo and examine the genes it contains for any abnormalities that may lead to an unsuccessful pregnancy.

This kind of testing can be used to check for inherited conditions like Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis or inherited blood disorders. It can also be used to check for chromosomal abnormalities associated with early miscarriage. Some clinics use the procedure to look for X and Y chromosomes, to help couples determine the sex of their child.

Dr. Behr consults with a Southern California clinic that is one of the few that allows sex selection by the testing. "The rule is, you have to have a child of the other gender before you are eligible to do it," he said.

But the technique is somewhat risky. Removing a cell from an embryo can, in some cases, cause its demise. "You could kill 10 to 20 percent of embryos looking for the right ones," said Dr. Sauer of Columbia.

A Boost for Fathers

One of the most effective additions to in vitro fertilization has been intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or ICSI, which has been in use since 1992. A single sperm is injected into the center of an egg, making it possible for men with few sperm to become fathers.

"ICSI is the most important innovation that has revolutionized I.V.F.," said Dr. Zev Rosenwaks, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. "As much as 50 percent of infertility is due to the male."

There are some questions about the new technique, however. Studies suggest that ICSI and in vitro fertilization are safe technologies. The world's largest such study covered nearly 1,000 children conceived through these methods in five European countries and found that the children, measured from birth to age 5, were as healthy as children conceived naturally.

But the study found that children conceived via ICSI had a somewhat higher rate of minor genital malformations. Earlier studies had found slightly increased risks of problems with imprinting of genes, a process that determines which of a pair of genes — one from the mother or the father — will be expressed.

Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, which causes babies to be somewhat large and to have enlarged organs and an increased risk of developing certain cancers, is one of the disorders slightly more prevalent among ICSI babies.

Early Growth in the Lab

Blastocyst transfer, which requires keeping embryos in culture an extra couple of days, does not appear to confer any such risks. But it has been linked to an increase in births of identical twins.

Dr. Behr, who was one of the first to develop cultures that allowed embryos to grow to the blastocyst stage in the lab, has found that the incidence of identical twins, which is only 2 percent among regular in vitro fertilization pregnancies, is 5.6 percent among pregnancies resulting from blastocyst transfer. Dr. Marrs has observed an even higher incidence, up to 10 percent.

Dr. Marrs said he was considering transferring the blastocysts at a slightly earlier point to see if that might reduce the birth rates of identical twins.

The phenomenon is acceptable to many parents who have struggled with infertility and are relieved to find that they will have two babies at once. But for doctors, the increase in identical twins is frustrating because a major reason for doing blastocyst transfer is using fewer embryos and thus reducing multiple births.

"I'm not sure that irony is the right word," Dr. Copperman said, "but you go to this procedure to eliminate the chance of triplets, and there goes one of the embryos splitting into identical twins."

Some in vitro fertilization clinics have backed away from the practice of blastocyst transfer, because for some women, especially older ones, embryos that might lead to a successful pregnancy in the womb are unable to make it to the blast stage in a lab dish. Doctors would like to find other ways to identify the most promising embryos — what Dr. Howard W. Jones Jr. calls "the embryos with the white hats" — without growing them to the blastocyst stage. Dr. Jones, founder of the Jones Institute, was the first successful practitioner of in vitro fertilization in the United States.

One labor-intensive strategy is to examine embryos repeatedly during the first three days in culture.

Those that appear to be growing most normally turn out to have the greatest chance of leading to a successful pregnancy.

By transferring no more than two of these embryos, doctors can also reduce the chance of a multiple pregnancy.

"We really have to get control over multiple pregnancies, and we are trying," Dr. Marrs said. "With twins and triplets, the risk of prematurity and abnormalities is just too high. And multiple pregnancies are harder on the mom."

In Europe, many doctors transfer only one embryo per fertilization cycle. This strategy has been shown to be as effective as transferring more than one, as long as the couple goes through at least two cycles. American doctors say that practice is unrealistic in this country, where most insurance companies do not pay for in vitro fertilization.

A Method for Older Women

One avenue of research has all but come to a halt in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration has stepped in to regulate a new type of research involving the transfer of genetic material from one cell to another. This technology, known as nuclear transfer, is envisioned as a strategy to help women 40 and older have their own children.

The idea is to take a cell from an older woman — a skin cell, for example — and place it inside a younger woman's egg, which has had the original DNA removed. Theoretically, the new cell will divide to become an egg cell, genetically the same as an egg from the older woman's ovary, but encased in a more youthful package, perhaps more capable of leading to a successful pregnancy.

The technique has been used to generate eggs in animals, but it has not yet led to a successful pregnancy.

In 2001, the Food and Drug Administration sent letters to several American researchers informing them that they would have to file an Investigational New Drug, or I.N.D., application and demonstrate the safety of the technique.

Although the agency would not disclose whether any researchers had made such an application, many in vitro practitioners say they believe the effort and cost will be prohibitive.

"To file an I.N.D. for nuclear transfer would cost maybe $20 to $40 million and take 10 to 12 years," Dr. Marrs said.

Dr. Jacques Cohen, scientific director of assisted reproduction at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J., said he was preparing to apply to the Food and Drug Administration to investigate a somewhat different strategy for helping women with persistent fertility problems.

His strategy, called cytoplasmic transfer, is to inject such a woman's egg with cytoplasm from another woman's egg. Presumably the shot of cytoplasm will confer healthful and youthful properties to help make the egg more fertile.

Dr. Cohen has already used his technique to achieve 17 pregnancies. He stopped his work in 2001, however, when the drug agency notified him that he would need its approval.

Research on the nuclear technique continues in other countries, mainly in South Korea and China.

Bill Keller, Columnist, Is Selected as The Times's Executive Editor

Bill Keller, Columnist, Is Selected as The Times's Executive Editor
By JACQUES STEINBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/business/media/15PAPE.html

Bill Keller, a columnist for The New York Times who previously served as its managing editor and foreign editor and as a foreign correspondent, has been chosen as its executive editor.

Mr. Keller's appointment to the highest-ranking position in the newsroom, effective July 30, was announced yesterday by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The Times and chairman of The New York Times Company.

Mr. Keller, 54, succeeds Joseph Lelyveld, who retired as executive editor in September 2001 but who agreed to step back into that role temporarily beginning on June 5. Mr. Lelyveld returned on the day that Howell Raines, 60, stepped down after 21 months in the position.

Mr. Raines's departure, along with that of the paper's managing editor, Gerald Boyd, capped five tumultuous weeks at The Times. After the disclosure of extensive journalistic fraud and plagiarism by a reporter, Jayson Blair, other reporters and editors came forward to describe to Mr. Sulzberger (and to other publications) their discontent with Mr. Raines's management style. That style was so pressure-driven, they said, that it had helped foster the atmosphere that allowed Mr. Blair to flourish.

For a 151-year-old newspaper that has won 89 Pulitzer Prizes, the appointment of Mr. Keller was portrayed by the company's management yesterday as a reaffirmation of The Times's core journalistic values. It also provided an antidote to weeks of criticism and speculation about The Times in competing publications, on the Internet and on the cable news networks.

Wearing a necktie and rolled-up shirt sleeves and standing in the same spot in the newsroom where Mr. Raines had announced he was leaving, Mr. Keller yesterday invoked a stated aim of one of the paper's first publishers, Adolph Ochs — to report the news "without fear or favor" — applying it not just to the paper's journalism but to the mood of the staff itself.

Alluding to Mr. Raines's repeated admonitions to staff members to raise their "competitive metabolism," Mr. Keller, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his coverage of the Soviet Union, said yesterday that he did not view journalism as "an endless combat mission." While saying it was not his intention to "play defense," he nonetheless encouraged reporters and editors to do "a little more savoring" of life, whether with their families or viewing art, and suggested, "That will enrich you and your work, as much as a competitive pulse rate will."

Mr. Raines, in a television interview with Charlie Rose on PBS on Friday, said he had been dispatched to the newsroom by Mr. Sulzberger to rally a staff that had "settled into a kind of lethargic culture of complacency." But yesterday, as Mr. Keller stood nearby, Mr. Sulzberger challenged that characterization, saying: "There's no complacency here. Never has been. Never will be."

Mr. Keller announced no immediate successor to Mr. Boyd as managing editor. But he said that in the next few weeks he would evaluate the organization of the newsroom's top management and name additional members of his team.

In a statement released earlier yesterday, Mr. Keller, said: "This news organization is a national treasure. I will do everything in my power to uphold its high standards, preserve its integrity and build on its achievements."

Mr. Sulzberger described Mr. Keller as "a talented journalist, an accomplished manager and a trusted leader."

He also recalled that Mr. Keller "was a close contender for this job last time around." Indeed, in announcing Mr. Raines's appointment as executive editor on May 21, 2001, Mr. Sulzberger singled out Mr. Keller, who for four years was managing editor, the No. 2 executive on the paper's 1,200-member newsroom staff. Mr. Keller joined the newspaper as a correspondent in its Washington bureau in 1984, and was a correspondent in Moscow from 1986 to 1991. During those last two years, he was the newspaper's Moscow bureau chief. He then worked as bureau chief in South Africa from 1992 to 1995, the year Mr. Lelyveld appointed him foreign editor.

After Mr. Raines was selected for the top position, Mr. Keller took an office in the fall of 2001 on the 10th floor of the paper's headquarters on West 43rd Street — seven floors above the main newsroom — and assumed a dual role, as a columnist whose work appeared on alternate Saturdays on the Op-Ed page and as a senior writer for The Times Magazine. In his column, which Mr. Keller will now give up, he wrote widely about disparate subjects like workplace smoking bans (he was generally for them), the build-up to the Iraq war ("an ugly display of American opportunism and bullying") and, in his final column on June 28, affirmative action (The Times, for example, can better explain the world "if our reporting and editing staff does not consist entirely of Ivy League white guys").

Mr. Sulzberger said yesterday, "We've all gotten to know Bill in a more personal way during the past two years, through his writing."

Before joining The Times, Mr. Keller worked as a reporter for The Dallas Times Herald, The Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report and The Oregonian in Portland. He received a bachelor's degree in 1970 from Pomona College (he is a trustee of the college) and completed the advanced management program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2000.

In winning the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1989 — a prize he shared with reporters from The Washington Post and The Philadelphia Inquirer — Mr. Keller was honored for his "resourceful and detailed coverage of events in the U.S.S.R.," which included his extensive reporting on an earthquake in Armenia that killed tens of thousands.

Philip Taubman, Mr. Keller's predecessor as Moscow bureau chief, later wrote in the paper's in-house magazine, Times Talk, that "Bill's journey across a devastated Armenia" had resulted in "some of the finest reportage The Times has ever published."

In that same article, Mr. Taubman sought to give a sense of Mr. Keller's management style. He told of how Mr. Keller had turned over the bureau's bookkeeping "to Oleg, the bureau's Russian driver," in part so he could have more time for reporting and writing but also because "while Oleg hated to change the oil, he had a knack for finances."

"The idea was quintessential Keller," Mr. Taubman wrote, "unconventional, even a bit reckless, but inspired."

As managing editor, Mr. Keller played a prominent role in several areas, including the expansion of the news delivered by The Times through its Web site, its coverage of the media and the creation of a cluster of reporters that works with beat reporters on investigative articles.

The new investigative focus led to one of the paper's triumphs: a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1998 for coverage of Mexican drug corruption. But another investigative effort resulted in a controversial episode: a public re-examination of its coverage of the scientist Wen Ho Lee, whom federal investigators accused of giving nuclear secrets to the Chinese, but who ultimately pleaded guilty only to one felony count of illegally gathering and retaining national security data.

The paper published a lengthy note "from the editors" in September 2000, saying that despite "careful reporting that included extensive cross-checking," there were "some things we wish we had done differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt."

Later, in a memo to the staff on the paper's reporting on Dr. Lee, Mr. Keller wrote that he and Mr. Lelyveld "laid our hands on these articles, and we overlooked some opportunities in our own direction of the coverage."

Mr. Keller's soft-spoken public bearing — he sought at one point in yesterday morning's ceremony to quiet the sustained applause for him, and later said, "this job is not about me" — stood in contrast to the public style of Mr. Raines.

At a "town hall" meeting with several hundred members of The Times's staff on May 14, three days after The Times published a front-page report that detailed Mr. Blair's deceptions, Mr. Raines acknowledged that many at the paper "view me as inaccessible and arrogant."

In the wake of the Blair affair, a committee of staff members of The Times and three prominent outside journalists is investigating newsroom practices and policies and is expected to report its findings to the publisher later this month.

Mr. Keller said in an interview that his "main audience" yesterday was the newsroom, and his remarks were widely praised there.

Gretchen Morgenson, a financial news columnist who has worked at The Times since 1998, said she was struck by Mr. Keller's admonition that people not neglect their home lives for sake of the newspaper.

"When was the last time someone said spend more time with your family around here?" said Ms. Morgenson, who is married and has an 8-year-old son.

David W. Chen, a reporter on the paper's metropolitan staff since 1995, said he saw evidence in Mr. Keller of "a sense of purpose, but also decency."

"It was pretty evident in the town hall meeting," Mr. Chen said of the May 14 staff meeting, at which several reporters openly criticized Mr. Raines's management of the newsroom, "that a sense of decency was either taken for granted or lost in the rush to pursue news with that high competitive metabolism rate."

After Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd left The Times last month, Mr. Sulzberger said in an interview that although he and the two editors had a "meeting of the minds" on the night before they tendered their resignations, the decision to leave was theirs. But last Friday night, in the Charlie Rose interview, Mr. Raines said that he had left because Mr. Sulzberger "asked" that he "step aside."

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Sulzberger declined to comment further, other than to say, "It was an amicable parting under trying and sad circumstances."

Neither Mr. Raines nor Mr. Boyd returned telephone calls seeking comment.

For London, a Summer of Photographic Memory

For London, a Summer of Photographic Memory
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/arts/design/15LOND.html

LONDON — This city is immersed in photography exhibitions, a coincidence of scheduling, perhaps, that the museums here decided made a catchy marketing scheme. Posters and flyers advertise the "Summer of Photography."

Why not? I stopped here on the way home from the Venice Biennale, after which any exhibition that did not involve watching hours of videos in plywood sweatboxes seemed like a joy. The London shows leave you with no specific definition of what photography is now, except that it is, fruitfully, many things at once, which is a functionally vague description of the medium. You can nevertheless get a fairly clear idea of the differences between a good photograph and a bad one.

In the first category are two unlike Americans: Philip-Lorca diCorcia, with a show at Whitechapel, and Cindy Sherman, at Serpentine. Into the second category falls Wolfgang Tillmans, the chic German-born, London-based photographer, who has an exhibition at Tate Britain that cheerfully disregards the idea that there might even be a difference between Categories 1 and 2.

There is also the posthumous retrospective, long overdue, of Guy Bourdin, the high-concept soft-core-pornography fashion photographer for French Vogue and Charles Jourdan shoes in the 1970's and 80's, at the Victoria and Albert.

And as the unofficial anchor for it all Tate Modern, which until now had apparently never organized a major photography show, has tried in one fell swoop to make up for lost time with "Cruel and Tender: The Real in the 20th Century Photograph." The title is from Lincoln Kirstein's apt description of Walker Evans's work as "tender cruelty." Like Tate Modern in general, "Cruel and Tender" is vast, not particularly logical and blithely skewed.

It consists of two dozen or so solo shows strung together in what the museum hopefully calls "sympathetic clusters," beginning and ending with contemporary work, lest anyone leave Tate thinking that the art of the past might ever be as memorable as the art of the moment. The exhibition, helter-skelter, runs the chronological gamut from Evans and August Sander through Andreas Gursky, Rineke Dijkstra and other present art luminaries — with big gaps. We get Albert Renger-Patzsch, Fazal Sheikh, Paul Graham, Michael Schmidt and Boris Mikhailov. We do not get Atget, Brassai, Cartier-Bresson, Paul Strand, Sebastião Salgado, Avedon, Berenice Abbott, James Nachtwey or Robert Capa.

The given explanation for who's in and who's out has to do with tender cruelty: a philosophy of balancing "engagement and estrangement," as the show's catalog puts it. The philosophy is ostensibly shared among the photographers in the show. We're told they eschew sentimentality for "cold-eyed" observation.

If you know the huge, extravagantly grotesque and exploitative color photographs that Mr. Mikhailov takes of starving, homeless, drunken Ukrainians, whom he pays to take off their clothes and reveal their sagging flesh and scars — an antic parody on Soviet Socialist Realism that ends up making a mockery of the people in the pictures — you will know how slender is the thread of "cold-eyed" observation that binds these sort of pictures to the work of someone like Sander.

Did I mention that I enjoyed the show anyway? This is notwithstanding Mr. Mikhailov or some of the work of Mr. Schmidt, whose brutally stark pictures, hung erratically up and down walls as narratives enigmatically exploring German identity, establish him as an intellectual photographer. That said, his selfless insistence on exposing himself naked to the camera, while admirably frank, didn't happen to be what I was in the mood for after lunch.

So I reacquainted myself with the works of Evans, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus (whose photographs look humane next to Mr. Mikhailov's), Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth, Robert Adams, Garry Winogrand, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston and on and on.

As for Lee Friedlander's photographs of office workers staring at their computer screens, a documentary project from the mid-1980's, I was put in mind of Mr. diCorcia's photographs of passers-by on the street, on view both at Whitechapel and also in "Cruel and Tender." Each photographer, although in very different ways, makes actors of people doing mundane things, the subjects' expressions given a baroque weight simply by virtue of being caught when the shutter clicked. They look struck by some shocking revelation that is unavailable to us.

We are each our own little universe of portent and mystery, these photographs remind us, which is also, from another perspective, a message in Fazal Sheikh's black-and-white portraits of refugees: beautifully plainspoken pictures that bear witness to people the world disgracefully tries hard to forget.

Who knows exactly what Mr. Sheikh is doing in "Cruel and Tender." His work is the opposite of cold-eyed, but I was glad to have found it there. It's an example of what concerned documentary photography, the tradition of Cartier-Bresson and Capa, who are not here, can still provide to humanity, of which the people in these pictures have seen precious little.

I won't linger over Ms. Sherman's photographs at Serpentine or over Mr. Tillmans's at Tate Britain. His cool, Warholian style, derived partly from his background in avant-garde fashion magazines, entails photographing anything: clouds; a man with a mohawk holding his penis; Kate Moss in a red dress; fruit; the Concord overhead; someone's armpit; an aerial cityscape; semiabstractions; two women kissing.

Call it weary sophistication. Mixing insouciance and abject indifference clearly impresses many people, including the jurors who gave him the Turner Prize a few years ago, but I left Tate Britain feeling a little weary myself.

On the other hand Ms. Sherman's show at Serpentine is engaging: a tendentious retrospective recognizing heroic talent that now stands maturely outside fashion. It includes a new series of works, digitally enhanced with psychedelic backdrops, in which she poses as a clown. Somehow, just barely, she manages to reanimate even this cliché.

Over the years Ms. Sherman has circulated an encyclopedia of female types. They're here. The works are not abstract social statements. They come from the gut. That has become clearer over time. Notwithstanding their artifice, they are intimate and honest dramas about the psychological burdens of life, borne by the women she plays in her pictures, who are weighed down by their absurd makeup and adopted roles, trying to put on the best face and usually failing.

They seem much more authentic and human than the people in Mr. Tillmans's photographs. Authenticity is an artistic matter, after all, not the automatic outcome of snapping whatever's in the viewfinder. In another way, Bourdin's photographs look authentic, too, despite being staged, like Ms. Sherman's work.

Bourdin was by various accounts a strange little man with a whiny voice and demanding temperament, who, I read in an article about him by Tim Blanks in The New York Times Magazine, forced his models to balance on rocks in the ocean during electrical storms, glued pearls to their bodies until their skin couldn't breathe and they blacked out, and handcuffed them to beds. Everyone seemed to love to work with him.

He was, at least as much as Helmut Newton, responsible for bringing a feverish new brand of sex and violence to fashion magazines and advertising in the 1970's, capturing the marketably seedy spirit of that era in lurid colors, influencing multifaceted visual culture since. He became a cult figure.

All this evidently gave little satisfaction to Bourdin, who was abandoned by his mother as a boy and aspired unsuccessfully to be a painter after Balthus or Bacon. Unlike Mr. Newton, he couldn't have cared less about money or fame; he turned down prizes and refused to show his work in galleries or publish books of his pictures. So when he died of cancer in 1991, at 62, he had more or less orchestrated his own neglect. He seems to have had a contempt for his work that gives it its black-humored heat and true perversity.

The retrospective at Victoria and Albert, like a peep show, is laid out in two darkened rooms, with a short Bourdin film at the entrance showing a woman in lingerie spinning on a stool. The first to arrive one morning, I slunk past the earnest young woman reading a book and taking tickets. I didn't want to seem too eager. In the front room a few photographs were visible only through peepholes. The second room included Bourdin's early work: lean, geometrically abstracted landscapes and still lifes harking back to the work of photographers like Weston. The connections with the later commercial pictures entail both formal rigor and a pervasive loneliness.

Bourdin uncovered beauty in unlikely places and ugliness in the world of beauty. The taboos he flirted with were actually broken before he came on the scene. They are not what sticks in the mind about his work. Fashion is about masks and make believe. Bourdin injected into it a degree of self-honesty, or self-loathing, the effect of which creeps up on you.

Talk about tender cruelty.