THU AM News: UW initiative aims to bring together social sciences and genetics; Pesticides for cicadas linked to lower life expectancy, study shows

June 6, 2024

— Integrating the fields of genetics and social science is “putting us on the right track” for understanding the world better, a UW-Madison expert says.

The university’s La Follette School of Public Affairs yesterday held a panel discussion on its Initiative in Social Genomics, which aims to bring together these disciplines to explore how genetics are connected to behavior, socio-economic outcomes and other factors.

Jason Fletcher, a professor of public affairs with the school, underlined the complexity involved with combining two nuanced areas of study into one discipline. Still, conducting research focused on just one while excluding the other fails to recognize that both genetics and social factors interact with one another, he said.

“By focusing on your one domain, you’re not including all of the relevant factors,” he said, noting that only in the past two decades or so has information from both fields been combined into the same data structures.

He said the university is making major investments into training more people to “wrangle this firehose of data” to conduct meaningful social genomics research.

“Because it is so complicated, the solutions so far have not been obvious, they’ve required a lot of work,” he said. “And we’re not there. We don’t have the solutions yet, but I think that’s the enterprise here, is that we need collaborations to build this bridge where both sides are building at the same time, and coming together.”

Lauren Schmitz, an assistant professor of public affairs with the school, said that ever since the human genome was first fully mapped in 2003, “we have many more questions than answers about what makes us tick.” She noted rapid advancements in computing and genome sequencing have led to a flood of new genetic data that scientists are still working to understand.

“In part, sequencing the human genome wasn’t the silver bullet humanity hoped for, because we realized that we can’t study the human genome in isolation,” she said yesterday. “If we want to gain a better understanding of how genetic diversity shapes who we are, we need to understand and get outside the lab, to study genetic diversity and our genes in the wild.”

Conditions of work, environmental factors and even economic trends “also powerfully shape our life outcomes,” she noted.

Her own research, focused on aging and longevity, explores how social conditions and disadvantages affect biological age. She said scientists can now calculate biological age “quite accurately” based on analysis of epigenetics, or how various factors affect gene expression. With just a blood sample, they can calculate how life circumstances are accelerating or slowing down the aging process.

“This scientific explosion of data is really allowing us to see the impacts of public policy on the cellular level,” she said.

In a 2022 study focused on the Great Depression, Schmitz sought to understand how this period of economic hardship affected biological aging.

“What we found is that individuals who were in utero, who were in the womb during the Great Depression, were aging faster decades later,” she said. “And so here we see this really important connection between early life conditions and late-life aging.”

Watch the video.

— Pesticides used against cicadas have been linked to reduced life expectancy for men born in the early 1900s, according to a recent UW-Madison study.

The research was authored by Prof. Jason Fletcher of the university’s La Follette School of Public Affairs and published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.

It found men born in years when cicadas emerged and in areas where pesticides were used had shorter lives — by about 2.2 months. For men whose fathers were farmers, leading to greater exposure to these pesticides, life expectancy was about a year shorter.

“Two months doesn’t seem like much on an individual level, but when you aggregate these small effects for a whole group, you see how large of an impact something like pesticide use can have on public health,” Fletcher said in a statement.

Study authors focused on men born between 1925 and 1940, and used Social Security Administration death records from 1975 to 2005 combined with agricultural data for their analysis. They found about 300,000 men who fit the study criteria for in-utero exposure to the pesticides used against cicadas, and estimated these chemicals led to 55,000 years of life lost due to premature death.

Based on that calculation, the researchers estimate 1.2 million years of life were lost for all U.S. men born between 1925 and 1940, taking into account all croplands and pesticides. Across the entire generation, this early mortality effect has “resulted in a cumulative loss of about $1.1 trillion” the university notes in the release.

See the release and the full study.

— The chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin told members of a U.S. Senate committee that her patients and colleagues have been “existing in a state of chaos, confusion and fear” since the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

Dr. Allison Linton this week addressed the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee during a hearing focused on the impact of abortion bans across the country.

“Since June 24th, 2022, pregnancy in the United States is far more dangerous,” she said. “For patients with medical complexities, yes, but also for people with abusive partners. For people who may not understand what has happened to their bodies. For Black women, who die from pregnancy and childbirth three times as often as white women. And it will only get more dangerous.”

After the federal protections for abortion went away, doctors in Wisconsin initially stopped providing this care under threat of an 1849 law banning the procedure, she noted. PPWI resumed providing abortions last year following a Dane County judge’s ruling in a lawsuit challenging the 174-year-old law, rejecting a motion to dismiss the suit.

Still, Linton said the fear of being unable to care for their patients is leading health care providers to move away from states with abortion bans and restrictions, or to stop treating pregnant patients. She said it’s now more difficult to recruit providers, and students have requested to be transferred to other states to complete their training.

“This means that there is less sexual and reproductive health care where it is most desperately needed … We still work under medically unnecessary restrictions,” she said. “These restrictions include a 24-hour waiting period, a sane provider requirement and a ban on telemedicine abortion. They do nothing but make it harder for patients to get the care they need, especially those that live in rural areas of the state.”

See the release.

Top headlines from the Health Care Report…

— State health officials have announced five “crisis stabilization” facilities are now open across Wisconsin, offering help for people going through mental health or drug abuse emergencies.

For more of the most relevant health care news, reports on groundbreaking research in Wisconsin, links to top stories and more, sign up today for the free daily Health Care Report from WisPolitics and WisBusiness.com.

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— The Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce is now taking applications for its 11th annual Pressure Chamber startup pitch competition.

This year’s program culminates Aug. 20 during Madison’s Forward Festival event series, when selected entrepreneurs will pitch to a live audience, competing for a spot on the chamber’s fall trip to Silicon Valley.

To participate, companies need to be a member of the chamber or support local entrepreneurial partner organizations, and must be located in the region or plan to move there by August. They must also have raised at least $25,000, not including personal investments from founders.

Applications are due by July 7.

“Pressure Chamber offers a unique platform for early-stage companies to connect with investors and potential customers across the country,” Chamber Vice President Kevin Little said in a release. “This initiative has proven to be an excellent predictor of what’s next in Greater Madison’s economy.”

Find the application here.

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