Amy Ellis Nutt, The Star-Ledger, Newark, N.J.
Posted 7/31/2003 12:00:00 AM

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The Mind's 'I': What is it that makes you think you're you?

Dec. 1, 2002

By Amy Ellis Nutt
The Star Ledger
Newark, N.J.

NEW YORK -- Maps are thetools of dreamers. A map gives substance to possibility, truth to discovery.In the16th and 17th centuries, cartographers were called "world describers." Inthe 21st century, it is neuroscientists who are pushing back the boundaries,attempting to describe that final terra incognita, the human mind.

In 1637 the mind was frontand center when Descartes announced, "I think, therefore I am." Having proven his own existence, the French philosopher then asked himself the mother of all follow-up questions: "Whatis this 'I' that I know?"

Nearly four centuries after Descartes essentially threw in the philosophical towel, Todd Feinberg, a neurologist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, and Julian Keenan, an experimental psychologist at Montclair State University, believe they are close to mapping the place in the brain where the sense of self is formed.

Feinberg, author of "Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self," treatspatients who have neurological damage, studying how their injuries have robbedthem of the key ingredients of their identity.

For many of his patients, stroke, disease and physical trauma -- especially in the right hemisphere of their brains -- have resulted in a kind of self-alienation. They are people whose brains have lost their way.

Keenan, author of the soon-to-be-released "The Face in the Mirror," isresearching those same ingredients through experiments that involve magneticstimulationof the brains of healthy subjects, testing for the thing that he believesmakes us uniquely human: self-recognition.

Among all the species on the face of the earth, human beings alone inquire about who they are. Feinberg and Keenan are among a small band of scientists reaching through the mists of memory and emotion to explain how this could be.

THE ALIEN HAND

Todd Feinberg hunches in his chair as his theory of the fractured self is played out in front of him in a simple game of cards. An elderly couple sitting across from him are playing war, in which two players simultaneously pick up cards from their own halves of the deck and place the cards next to one another. Whoever has the card with the higher face value wins the round.

Sylvia is moving the game along at a clip, and it's clear why. Every time she picks up a card from her own pile with her left hand, she is compelled to pick up a card from her husband's pile with her right hand.

Feinberg, a psychiatrist as well as a neurologist, is fascinated. Quite literally, Sylvia's right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Only occasionally, and seemingly unconsciously, does Sylvia (not her real name) realize that her right hand is meddling with the game, and when she does, she places the hand between her knees and squeezes it to try to keep it from misbehaving.

The 72-year-old woman, who owns an antique store in New Jersey with her husband, suffers from alien hand syndrome, a rare neurological condition. A stroke several months ago damaged Sylvia's corpus callosum, a broad band of 200 million fibers that bind together the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Signals from the left hemisphere, which would normally inhibit the actions of Sylvia's right hand, are not getting through to the other side of the brain. The result is that her right hand seems to have a life of its own.

When she speaks to her husband on the phone from her room in the Center for Head Injuries at JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, she cradles the receiver with her left hand, but her right hand frequently reaches out and disconnects the call.

When she eats with her left hand, her right hand will wipe the table with an imaginary cloth.

And when she plays checkers, she moves her own piece with her left hand, and then her opponent's with her right.

Sylvia, for all intents and purposes, is a woman of two minds. Which is why, says Feinberg, she not only has a damaged brain, she has a fractured self.

"Alien hand syndrome tells us a lot about brain unity," says the 51-year-old doctor. "Ittells us that there is no consciousness or mind that does not require cerebralintegration. If you destroy or damage the corpus callosum, there are timesat which the brain can act as though it was possessed of two minds, two consciousnesses,two independent entities."

Only in the 20th century did the brain become the primary focus in the search for the self. The ancient Egyptians thought the self, or the mind, was located in the bowels. The Sumerians and Assyrians thought it was in the liver, Aristotle the heart.

Descartes thought they were all wrong. The mind and the body, he wrote, were two separate entities. The body was a physical organ, a complex machine that walks, eats and sleeps, and the mind was a disembodied spirit, intangible and unobservable but altogether real.

In 1949, British philosopherGilbert Ryle said Descartes' dualism was preposterous. An independent, invisiblesecret agent inhabiting the body? That would meanthere was a "ghost in the machine." Ryle rejected the idea of two separate entities. There was, he contended, no intangible self, no "homunculus," orminiature man, directing a person's thoughts and actions from the inside.Instead, a person simply was his thoughts and actions, and the world wasprocessed entirelyby the gelatinous gray and white matter inside our skulls.

The mystical mind was out, the hard-wired brain was in.

SHIFTING LANDSCAPE

Mapping the brain, of course, has not been an easy task. A dense tapestry threaded by archipelagoes of nerve cells, the brain consists of billions of neurons and trillions of synapses. It is the most complex object on the planet. The heart pumps blood, the lungs ingest oxygen, the stomach absorbs nutrients, but the functions of the brain are manifold. It monitors the body's basic processes, coordinates physical movement, perceives, thinks, acts and feels. It is an executive branch of government that ceaselessly plans, reacts and interacts with the organic world around it.

It takes millions of neurons firing in sequence to create the simplest thought, and in the same way the Greek philosopher Heraclitus believed one never steps into the same river twice, we cannot have the same thought twice. Every sensation, every idea, every action creates a unique firing pattern, and each firing pattern creates a wave of neuronal activity that reacts to the one that came before it. At every moment, the landscape of the brain is being redrawn.

The idea that this puzzleof brain activity could be assembled into a single, subjective consciousnesshas perplexedFeinberg for most of his life. How doesa 3-pound lump of matter become a "me"?

"The first thing that I remember discovering in life was that I had a brain," says Feinberg, founder and chief of the Yarmon Neurobehavior & Alzheimer's Disease Center at New York City's Beth Israel Medical Center. "Icouldn't have been more than 6 years old, and one day I said to myself: 'Ihave thoughts and I have experiences. I have consciousness. But where arethey? Where are they located? How come I can't see them? How come they can'tbe touchedand measured and weighed?' And I just could not believe that. Ever since,I've been obsessed with the mind."

In truth, the life of anyone mind is irremediably closed, colored by experiences and bounded by theuniquenessof individual perspective. "The mind is its own place," wrote Ryle, "andin his inner life each of us lives the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe... blind and deaf to the workings of one another's minds and inoperativeuponthem."

"There is no way to find out if your experience of the color red, for instance, is like my experience of the color red," says Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. "Butif you define consciousness as mental content -- the information containedin thoughts that is reportable by the person, and which they can reflecton and talk about -- then, in that sense, consciousness is a valid subjectofscientific study."

It is the content of consciousness that particularly interests Feinberg. The son of two psychologists, he was reading Freud in the second grade and by high school had steeped himself in abnormal psychology. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania summa cum laude and receiving his medical degree from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, Feinberg took on a dual residency in psychiatry and neurology, becoming an expert on both sides of the Cartesian coin -- the mind and the body.

Like the best scientists, Feinberg is a tightrope walker, searching for purchase on the subtlest threads of evidence, trusting only his sense of imbalance to tell him how much farther he has to go. Every day, he tests the wire.

"When I got out of the shower this morning, I stubbed my toe and it hurt and it hurt," says Feinberg, who lives with his wife and teenage son in Tenafly. (A daughter studies psychology at Syracuse University.) "AndI said to myself: 'Boy, if that isn't mysterious. Why and how am I in painif those neurons that are telling me I'm in pain aren't themselves throbbingin pain?'

"Where is that pain? WhenI stubbed my toe I didn't grab my head in pain. I grabbed my toe. If I hadan 'autocerebroscope'and I could look through itand observe my own brain, I might see neurons firing in patterns, but I'llnever find that pain. I can't touch it. I can't see it. I can only experienceit.

"And that, in a nutshell,is what is so mysterious about consciousness."

BILLION-PIECE PUZZLE

Subjective experience can'tbe seen or heard or touched. It simply is. Feinberg calls this the "transparencyproblem."

There is a second aspectto self-awareness that deepens the mystery, the "binding problem," whichis: How do billions of different neurons come together to form a single unifiedself, and if we know where the neurons are located, why can't we find theself?

It's a bit like lookingfor Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in the sheet music. The score includes allthe notes playedby the violins, the cellos, the timpaniand so on. But where is the music, this thing called "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony"?

For Feinberg, solving theproblem of the unity of consciousness is like building a cathedral from abillionblades of grass. "If you're a really obsessional person like I am," he says, "thenyou can't give up. You don't ever say it can't be understood. So you justdon't stop."

Feinberg's office at BethIsrael is a testament to the neurologist's professional and personal fixation.Framedbrain scans adorn his wall like family photographs.Feinberg points to each of them in turn: "This is an interesting one because it's abnormal. That's a normal one. That's an abnormal one." Ever the teacher, he asks his visitor about the picture just over his right shoulder: "Can you tell what's wrong with this one?" The entire corpus callosum is missing. "Amazing," he says, "isn'tit?"

The secrets of the self, Feinberg believes, lie in the brains of his patients.

"As slicing an apple reveals its core, the neurological lesion or damage opens a door into the inner self," he writes in his book. "Itprovides an opportunity to examine the physical structure of the self andto see how the self changes and adapts in response to the damaged brain."

There are many ways to define consciousness, including the act of simple perception. Self-awareness and the ability to recognize that other people have self-awareness represent the highest order of consciousness.

"Everything, in the last analysis -- every feeling, every thought, every memory, every state of mind -- has to be represented by a brain state," says Gordon Gallup, psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany and one of the first to study self-recognition in primates. "Thesethings aren't generated in a vacuum."

Many of Feinberg's patients are stroke victims, and many, if not most, have suffered damage to the right side of their brains. Because the right hemisphere affects the left side of the body (and vice versa), these patients have problems with their left limbs, as well as vision and general movement on the left side.

Sylvia is an unusual case. She was examined by Feinberg at the JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute's Center for Head Injuries in late September as a guest of Joseph Giacino, the center's associate director of neuropsychology, who is a frequent collaborator with Feinberg. Sylvia is Giacino's patient. Both doctors agree Sylvia has suffered an anterior cerebral artery stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain, which has led to damage on the left side of the corpus callosum, as well as in supplementary motor areas.

Basically, Sylvia's brain was deprived of oxygen and a small bundle of cells between the two hemispheres liquefied, then hardened into a scar the size of a half-dollar.

In many of the alien hand cases Feinberg has seen, the limbs act in violent opposition. (Unlike Sylvia's case, patients who have damage only to the corpus callosum will always have left-hand alien hand syndrome.) When one of Feinberg's patients tried to button his shirt with his right hand, his left hand unbuttoned it. When he picked up a forkful of food with his right hand, the left hand knocked it away. Another patient reported that her left hand tried to strangle her while she slept.

"The thing that grabs one's attention here," says Feinberg excitedly, "isthe fact that you have two hemispheres in one person with competing and conflictingattentions, and that highlights the incredible unification in normal intactindividuals. ... The sense of the self is the sense of a unified self, of personhood."

Some cognitive scientists believe this fact makes it impossible to localize consciousness to one area, or even several areas, of the brain.

"The frontal poles of the brain separate humans from all other living things," says neuropsychologist Mark Wheeler of Temple University. "Butthat is not going to be the whole story. You don't lose consciousness bylosing a bit of brain tissue. ... There are physical correlates to everything.Questionslike 'How does a brain state become a mental state' I don't know how to answer.Neuroscience has done an incredible job in the last few years; the philosophyof mind hasn't moved much in 300."

DETACHMENT

In his filing cabinets, Feinberg has hundreds of scans of patients whose sense of personhood was shattered by stroke or disease. Atop the cabinet are scores of videos of many of those patients going back 18 years. In one, an elderly, hearing-impaired woman who knew sign language and could read lips looked at her reflection in a mirror. Feinberg asked her what she was doing, and she said she was communicating in the mirror with someone else, someone who was very much like her and attended the same grade school but was nonetheless a stranger.

Talking about this personin the mirror, the woman said: "She's not a verygood lip reader. I had to talk mostly in sign language for her, to make herunderstand. ... She's not that bright. I hate to say that. ...

"She's a nice person. Butone thing about her ... I see her every day through a mirror, and that'sthe only placeI can see her. When she sees me throughthe mirror, she looks a little, then she comes over and talks to me, andthat's how we began becoming friends."

Feinberg's diagnosis wasa delusional misidentification problem known as "Capgras syndrome for her mirror image," causedby atrophy in the right temperoparietal region of the brain. Except for misidentifyingher own reflection, the woman was perfectly normal.

Some of Feinberg's patients suffer from asomatognosia, in which they deny or misidentify a part of their own body after it has been paralyzed by stroke. In all of the cases Feinberg has seen, the damage was to the patients' right hemisphere, causing them to attribute ownership of their left arm to another person -- a relative, a stranger -- or even a pet.

Some patients try to throwthe disowned arm out of bed. Others, trying to acclimate, create storiesabout the arm,give it nicknames such as "Toby" or "Silly Billy," or simply refer to it as "a canary claw," "a sack of coal" or "deadwood."

Feinberg's research has shown a peculiarly gender-specific phenomenon associated with asomatognosia. Women frequently will mistake their left arms for their husbands' arms. Men will frequently mistake their left arms for the arms of their mothers-in-law.

There is no cure for most of these patients, but over weeks and sometimes years, their symptoms often diminish and even disappear -- a testament to the resourcefulness, as well as recuperative ability, of the damaged brain.

Sylvia, after just a few months, already has begun to recognize and gain more control over the actions of her right hand.

Feinberg believes thatthe sense of identity is probably a mixture -- what he calls a "nested hierarchy" --of coordinated functions arising out of several areas of the brain, but hebelieves, too, that the right hemisphere is dominantas the source of the self.

Julian Keenan's belief is stronger, and more specific. The right hemisphere isn't simply dominant in the formation of self-awareness, he says, it is essential.

"I think there actually is a center" of the self, says Keenan as he leans back in a chair in his office at Montclair State University. "Thereare definite neural correlates of higher-order consciousness that, if youmark them out, the person is no longer conscious, no longer capable of self-awareness."

Just a tenth of an inch beneath the furrowed ridges of gray matter that cover the right front side of the brain, he contends, is a layer of tangled cell tissue that makes us uniquely human.

While acknowledging there may be other similarly minuscule areas of the brain that contribute to consciousness, the 32-year-old experimental cognitive psychologist has come to the conclusion that the right prefrontal cortex -- located just above the right eye -- is the primary source of self-awareness.

A TOUCH OF PRINCESS DI

Two years ago, while conductingpostdoctoral research in behavioral neurology at Harvard Medical School,Keenan created an unusual experiment to test for "self-face recognition," whichhe regards as the hallmark of higher consciousness.

"What we know, as far as self-face recognition is concerned, is that it's reserved for a very few species," says Keenan, who lives with his wife, Ilene, in Jersey City. "Onlychimpanzees, orangutans and humans have the ability to recognize an imageas their own. So what we wanted to do was see where in the brain that takesplace."

Volunteering as test subjects were five people about to undergo brain surgery at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for severe epilepsy. During the presurgical evaluation of each patient, the two hemispheres of the brain were anesthetized, one at a time, while the patient stayed conscious and alert. After each hemisphere was numbed, Keenan and his colleagues showed the person a photograph with a morphed image blending the patient's face with that of a famous person's -- Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana for the women, Bill Clinton or Albert Einstein for the men. After the testing, each patient was presented with two conventional photos, one of himself or herself and one of the famous person. They were asked which was the one they remembered seeing under anesthesia.

The results were startling. When the right hemisphere was anesthetized, four of the five recollected seeing only the famous person. With the left hemisphere numbed, all five patients remembered the morphed picture as a photo of themselves alone.

"We really saw that the right hemisphere was the big player in self-recognition," says Keenan, "and in particular the right prefrontal cortex." Hisconclusion: That is where the self resides.

For Keenan, thinking about thinking is a deeply personal preoccupation. It's easy to imagine what a scan of the young psychologist's brain would have looked like: storm clouds of electrical activity roiling through the right hemisphere, firing up neurons as if they were lights on the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.

"It started when I was 15 when I read 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' by Douglas Hofstadter," says Keenan, referring to the 1979 best seller about mathematics, art and music, "andthat book has just always stayed with me -- all those self-referential systems.We all think about our own thoughts. We all think about, 'Am I the only personon this planet and everyone else is just a robot?' We all have these sortsof ideas about our own thinking, about the little voice in our head. ...I guess I've always thought that everyone thinks like that."

Keenan is an abstract painter and a musician and likes to speak in visual terms. In considering the brain, he cites an article by John Updike about baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams on the eve of Williams' retirement.

"Updike described Williams,who at that point was old and injured, as looking like a Calder mobile withoneof its threads cut. I thought that was the mostbeautiful description. Everything went off balance just a little bit. Andas I read that, I thought: What a great description for the brain. Thereare theseseparate sorts of units and they're all in balance, and even though theymay look independent, damage to one area will affect other, far-reachingareas."

Every year Keenan asks students in his Introduction to Physiological Psychology course to create a mobile with the brain as the governing theme, and he hangs the best ones in his office. As he speaks, a mobile of a neuron, made out of multicolored pipe cleaners, dangles delicately overhead.

PEEKING AT THE DARK

While Keenan and Feinbergare traditional materialists, believing that the mind is nothing more thanbrain functions,others, like Daniel Dennett, a cognitivescientist at Tufts University, believe the mind is nothing at all -- thatmental states don't arise from neural states, they are neural states. Dennettoncedeclared about consciousness: "It's like fame. It doesn't exist except inthe eye of the beholder."

Colin McGinn, philosopherof mind at Rutgers University, also believes the self is elusive, but notbecauseit is nonexistent; because it is fundamentallyunknowable. "We're trapped inside ourselves, inside our own language," says McGinn. "Forthat reason, trying to describe the contents of our consciousness with thesame tools, the same words is inadequate."

William James, the pioneering19th-century philosopher and psychologist (and brother of novelist HenryJames), saidthat trying to describe introspectionwas like "trying to turn up the gas (light) quickly enough to see how thedarkness looks."

Keenan, however, believes the science of consciousness can transcend linguistic limitations.

In a new series of experiments at Montclair State, he is using a device called a transcranial magnetic stimulator to measure how active each hemisphere of the brain is in tasks involving self-recognition. When gently placed against the skull, the stimulator -- which looks oddly like a thick, metal Mardi Gras mask -- creates a magnetic field that painlessly deactivates a specific area of the brain for a moment as brief as a hundred-thousandth of a second. When the device is held over the area of the right prefrontal cortex -- the area Keenan believes is the source of self-recognition -- subjects routinely take a fraction of a second longer than normal to recognize their face on the computer screen. When the stimulator is held over the left frontal region, nothing happens.

"Again and again, what we're seeing is that the processes of self-evaluation are preferentially engaged in the right hemisphere," says Keenan. "Andit is that ability to recognize one's own face that appears to be a hallmarkof consciousness. To know that our own face is ours inevitably requires knowledgeof the self. Without self-knowledge, it would be seemingly impossible torecognize who we are."

Farah, the Penn neuroscientist,whose primary research is in the neural correlates of cognition, believesself-recognition studies are helping to advance thescientific study of the mind. "A lot of the work on sense of self and the brain is pretty flaky," she says, "butKeenan's and Feinberg's work is credible. Keenan has found distinctive patternsof brain activity that correlate with processing one's own face comparedto other people's, and Feinberg finds that certain brain lesions disrupta person'sability to recognize their own face or arms as belonging to them. This tellsus that one's sense of physical self is the result of specific brain systems."

Keenan claims to be obsessedby his work, and a sleeping bag wedged atop the bookcase in his office atteststo that. "There's always so much more to know," he says. "There'salways just another level of understanding. You think you have a clue, andthen you find out you have no clue, and it goes on and on and on. It's never-ending.You can never know enough."

Still, Keenan believes that in the next 10 years he will know enough to have a new map of the brain with more precise coordinates of the self. Describing subjective experience may forever be elusive; describing what it is that makes us most human, he says, is not.

That's all Feinberg islooking to do, too, and he believes the search is profoundly important: "Youcould argue that aside from intelligence, the sense of the self is probablythe greatesthuman achievement. Without that sense of beinga being, where would we be?"

Defying the years

Dec. 2, 2002

By Amy Ellis Nutt
The Star Ledger
Newark, N.J.

OAKLAND, Calif. -- Time unravels us. Day by day, it peels away the layersof our lives until nothing is left but the nub of our own mortality.

Human beings are the onlyanimals on the planet capable of contemplating their own demise. We mourn,we memorialize,we philosophize and we pray. And when it happens on that rare occasion thatwe "cheat" death or "escape" our fate, we believe, just for a moment, inthe myth of immortality.

Today scientists are temptingfate in ways never before imagined as they demystify the secrets of longevity.Biochemist Bruce Ames believes that vitamins can repair damaged cells andmake them "young" again. Molecular biologist Judith Campisi is studying howto keep cells from aging.

Both believe that while there may be no actual Fountain of Youth, no scientific Dorian Gray in a Bottle, reversal of aging and an extended life span are now on the horizon.

Bruce Ames is a chain-reaction thinker -- one thought always leads to another -- which may explain why the senior scientist at Children's Hospital of Oakland Research Institute is so restless. Ames, 73 and wiry, often starts a conversation sitting down but invariably finishes it standing up, practically sprinting across his office to a blackboard to illustrate something about unattached free radicals or mitochondrial decay.

Chain-reaction thinking leads to big ideas, and Ames is a big idea man. Genes. Cancer. Nutrition. Aging. He has tackled them all, publishing more than 450 articles and becoming one of the most frequently cited scientists on the planet.

"I told a colleague recently that I was doing the best work in my career," says Ames, who is also a professor of biochemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, "andhe looked at me and said, 'Bruce, you've been telling me that for 30 years.'I guess that means my enthusiasm genes are undamaged."

Ames should know. Damaged genes have been his business for half a century. Ames grew up in Manhattan as the son of a high school chemistry teacher and a mother who wanted him to be a doctor. Instead he became a researcher, graduating from the Bronx High School of Science before getting his undergraduate degree at Cornell and his Ph.D. in biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology.

In the 1950s Ames was aresearcher in a lab at the National Institutes of Health, investigating waysto testfor genetic mutation. His petri dish protocol ultimately proved that genesdamaged by certain chemical substances often gave rise to cancer. By the1970s, the "Ames test" was the world's most widely used method for identifyingpotential carcinogens in everything from clothing to hair dye to pharmaceuticals.

"It's just problem-solving," says Ames about his research methods. "Ifyou have two odd facts in your head and suddenly they fit together, you seesome new way of explaining something."

That's what happened nearly a decade ago, when Ames turned his focus from cancer to aging.

How and why we age has been a mystery since humans first contemplated their own mortality. It is one of the most complex of biological processes: The human body contains more than 250 types of cells, and each type has its own peculiar aging characteristics.

There are scores of differenttheories about aging, but all of them can be broken down into two broad camps:theoriesthat regard aging as the result of normal wear and tear from environmentalinsults and metabolic processes; and theories that regard aging as the resultof a pre-programmed genetic plan, a process that begins at birth, or evenat conception, and continues until our "biological clock" runs down.

As a scientist who loves studying process almost as much as its results, Ames falls in the wear-and- tear camp. His years of watching the cellular chaos created by cancer has given him perspective on the degradation of cells that comes with aging.

"In 6 million years of evolution, we've gone from a short-life creature to a long-life creature," says Ames, "andage-specific cancers have gone up. Thinking about that said to me: A lotof cancer is just about getting old. And that got me interested in aging."

Two odd events kept jangling about in Ames' head: the rise in cancer and the increase in free radicals with age. Free radicals are molecular miscreants, compound substances that create havoc inside cells by stripping other molecules of their electrons. Was there a direct link between free radicals and aging? Was it possible that free radicals actually contributed to aging?

THE TINY FURNACES

Ames began by looking at mitochondria, where free radicals are produced. Mitochondria are tiny structures inside every cell that act like furnaces, manufacturing most of the energy that is used by the body. Some cells with high metabolic rates, such as those in the heart muscle, contain many thousands of mitochondria. Other types of cells may contain as few as a dozen.

As energy-producing machines go, mitochondria are spectacularly efficient. Of the oxygen consumed by an average cell, the mitochondria convert 95 percent of it to help turn food -- fats and carbohydrates -- into a chemical fuel known as adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. Every time we breathe, in other words, we're giving an energy boost to our cells.

During that process, mitochondriasteal electrons from oxygen molecules in order to function more smoothly.But therein lies the problem. During those acts of larceny, a mitochondrionsometimes "misplaces" the electrons it is stealing. Like money flying outthe back of a Brink's truck careening around a corner, these misplaced electrons-- now called free radicals -- scatter around the insides of cells, bondingindiscriminately with other molecules.

This mischief is called oxidation, and it allows free radicals to become chromosomal rototillers, breaking and mangling DNA at will.

Too many free radicals create a kind of cellular pollution that stiffens cell membranes and wears down enzymes. Too much damaged DNA results in cell mutations (which can cause cancer). Both are signs of aging.

If not for these free radicals, Ames realized, mitochondria could be a cellular Fountain of Youth.

In 1990 he and his colleaguesat Berkeley announced the findings of their study. They'd discovered twiceasmuch free radical damage in tissues of 2-year-old rats as in those of 2-month-oldrats. Ames had found a crucial link among oxidation, DNA mutation and age:Free radical oxidation doesn't just rise with aging, it causes it. The morethat mitochondria "leak" free radicals, the more those radicals end up damagingthe mitochondria, which in turn leak even more free radicals.

This vicious cycle gets only worse with age. It is the ultimate biological irony: The thing we most need to live -- oxygen -- is the very thing killing us.

Ames estimates that theDNA in each cell of the human body experiences at least 100,000 "hits," orinstances, of free radical damage per day.

"Living is like getting irradiated," says Ames. He admits it's a slight oversimplification, but free radicals created by radiation do the same thing as free radicals created by breathing. "Withage, despite the mitochondria trying to keep it all in check, the level offree radicals goes up, which means the level of oxidized protein goes up,which means the level of DNA damage goes up."

Most scientists believe that mitochondrial health is only one cog in the aging wheel.

"Aging is complex and will not be explained by one gene or mechanism," says Jerry Shay, who holds the Distinguished Chair in Geriatric Research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Shay believes Ames' research is promising but that other biological processes affecting longevity must be taken into account, since "differenttissues may have fundamentally different mechanisms underlying their maintenanceand repair."

To prove that mitochondrial dysfunction actually causes us to age, Ames decided to work backward. If he could find a way to restore mitochondrial health by lowering free radical damage, he could improve cellular function. In essence, he could turn back the cells' biological clocks.

(Ames is in no hurry toturn back his own biological clock. He likes to joke that he gets his exerciseby "running" experiments, "skipping" the controls and "jumping" to conclusions. His wife of 40 years, biochemist Giovanna Ferro- Luzzi, heard the joke for the 50th time recently and exacted her revenge: "Shegot me a personal trainer."

Ames says he has time for only about an hour a week with the trainer, but his wife insists they walk the two miles to their favorite Italian restaurant, Oliveto, for lunch at least three times a week.)

REINVIGORATED RATS

It was while visiting his wife's native country in the mid-1990s -- they have a house in Tuscany and an apartment in Rome -- that Ames got the idea for how to improve mitochondrial health and perhaps slow, or even reverse, the aging process.

A dietary supplement known as acetyl-L-carnitine, or Alcar, was sweeping Italy. The latest nutritional fad was being marketed as a pick-me-up, and Ames understood why: Alcar is a naturally occurring biochemical involved in the transport of fatty acids into the cell's mitochondria. In other words, Alcar helps cells produce energy.

When Ames got back to his lab, he started feeding Alcar to his old rats.

And the old rats loved the stuff. Within weeks, they appeared re-energized, and their biochemistry was running more smoothly. There was a problem, however. As the Alcar improved mitochondrial health, it also appeared to increase the level of free radicals. Ames decided to add another nutritional supplement to his rats' diets, the anti-oxidant alpha lipoic acid. Another naturally occurring chemical, lipoic acid, he thought, should work by tuning up mitochondrial function, thereby lowering free radical oxidation.

The results were staggering. Said Ames earlier this year, after the findings of his research team were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

"With these two supplementstogether, these old rats got up and did the Macarena. ... The brain looksbetter, theyare full of energy. Everything we looked at looks more like a young animal."

Some researchers believe the hope offered by maintaining healthy cells or rejuvenating old ones is limited.

"You can achieve immortality at the cellular level, but I don't see how it would be practical in extending life span," says Robert Lanza, the medical and scientific director of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass. "There'sa wall at 120 years. We can continue to piece things together. But we'relike tires; there are just so many times you can be patched up."

Ames acknowledges he hasnot discovered the Fountain of Youth but lays claim to a Fountain of MiddleAge. The evidence,he says, lies not only in the physical rejuvenation he observed in his rats,but in their improvements on cognition and memory tests. Says Ames: "It wasthe equivalent of making a 75- to 80-year-old person look and act middle-aged."

Ames looks every bit the part of an elderly gent, with his white hair, bifocals and quaint bow tie. While he has a penchant for mixing plaids, his mind is relentlessly mixing and matching ideas.

"I was always sort of aB-student in school, but I loved reading enormously. Still do. I was alwaysa prettycreative thinker. I try to be a generalist. I make my living as a big pictureguy, always looking for the next big idea."

Ames put his current big idea into a pill. In 1999, he and a colleague, Tory Hagen, founded a company to sell the energy formula as a dietary supplement. The pill, available over the Internet, includes 200 milligrams of alpha lipoic acid and 500 milligrams of acetyl-L-carnitine, but Ames says the two nutrients just as easily can be purchased separately at any health food store.

While Ames and Hagen's company, Juvenon, licenses the supplement, the University of California holds the patent. Juvenon has yet to make a profit. If it does, the university will get a third. Another third will go to the university's department of molecular and cell biology, where Ames is a professor, and the remaining third will be split by Ames and Hagen, now at the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University.

Clinical human trials are ongoing. Ames, for one, is satisfied enough with the animal results that he takes a dose of his own supplement twice a day. He admits he hasn't noticed any significant changes in himself just yet.

"Is it a reversal of aging or just a slowing?" he asks himself out loud. "Therats seem to do better on the IQ test as well as the treadmill test, so thatlooks like a reversal. ...

"I don't want to over-hypeit. If you're an old rat, it looks very good. But we still have to wait fortheresults from the human trials. There's every reason to think it's going towork in people. I'm very optimistic."

THE TICKING CLOCK

In her basement officein nearby Berkeley, Judith Campisi perches herself on the edge of a chairand speakswith a wide-eyed enthusiasm usually reserved for first-year graduate students.Campisi is a senior molecular biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.An expert in the genetics of aging and a proponent of the "biological clock" theory, the 54-year-old scientist believes that "reprogramming" humangenes to extend life span may not be far off.

It is 7:30 in the eveningand Campisi is in no hurry to go home. "I have no separation between my work life and the rest of my life," sheadmits without hesitation, and the evidence is all around her: three emptyyogurt cups in the wastebasket, and on a shelf below a side table, a kindof researcher's survivor kit -- a couple of cans of Progresso hearty chickensoup, a container of Cafe Vienna coffee, a makeup mirror and hand lotion.

Piles of papers rise fromthe floor like unsteady chimneys, forcing pedestrian traffic to take a serpentineroutethrough the room. The stacks are layered with journals bearing such titlesas "Trends in Cellular Biology" and "Experimental Gerontology." On a nearby table, "Handbook of the Biology of Aging," atextbook co-written by Campisi, sits atop a tower of paper nearly as tallas the 4-foot-10 biochemist.

Campisi's research focuses on the telomere, a structure containing a repeated DNA sequence that is found on both ends of every chromosome in the human body. In 1990, Calvin Harley, now the chief scientist at Genron, a California biotech company, discovered that as cells divide, the telomeres of the new cells become shorter.

A few years later, it was shown that in some cells telomeres also get shorter with age. When telomeres become too short, they send a signal to the cell to stop dividing and a natural cellular state called senescence ensues. Campisi believes the primary function of senescence is to fight off cancer.

"Senescent cells are not dead," she says, "they'reperfectly alive, they metabolize, but what they can never, ever do againis divide. And if you can't divide, you can't form a tumor. ...

"It's only in the last.00001 percent of human evolution that we have had the luxury of living inan environmentwhere the food supply is good, infections are pretty much kept at bay, andthere are no lions jumping out of the savanna to kill us. But for the vastmajority of evolution, we evolved under very hazardous conditions. The lifespan was probably only 25, 30, 35 years at most. So think about what happens.If all evolution really does is devise a system to keep an organism -- keepus -- cancer-free for 30 years, well, then it does a pretty good job."

What it doesn't do is keep us young.

Campisi's research has shown that the longer we live, the more senescent cells our bodies accumulate, and it's those senescent cells, she says, that may play a leading role in making us look and feel old. If she can prove this hypothesis, Campisi will have identified one of the main contributors to aging: We age not because our cells die, but because they stop dividing.

"We reasoned several yearsago that because the senescence response is an arrest of cell proliferation,but notcell death, after about age 50 we start to see significant numbers of thesecells appearing. And we know from our culture studies that these cells don'tfunction properly, and so we're filling up with these dysfunctional senescentcells the longer we live, and so this may be an important reason we age."

A FOOT IN BOTH CAMPS

Campisi, like Ames, came to aging by way of cancer research. She came to research, however, by way of a Catholic girls high school.

"When I finally got to college," she says, "Idecided I wanted to take classes with lots of guys. I was good at scienceand I liked it, but the best part was all those men majoring in it."

Campisi, who was born in Queens, graduated from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1974 and stayed on for her doctorate, which she received five years later. Along the way, she married, divorced and settled into a career in cancer research. In the mid- 1980s, during a postdoctoral fellowship at Boston University, a colleague came calling with an offer.

"He was putting together a project grant on aging, which I wasn't even interested in at the time," says Campisi, "andthey needed one more scientist. He said, 'Do you think we could get you interestedin a problem called cell senescence?' The funny thing is, he didn't thinksenescence had anything to do with aging."

Campisi came to see thatcancer researchers were looking at one aspect of senescence, researcherson agingwere looking at a different aspect of it, and "nobody tried to get thosetwo to come back and talk to each other."

Campisi didn't have to. She looked at both aspects herself, and like several other molecular biologists discovered a critical connection among cancer, aging and cellular senescence.

"When the telomere becomes dangerously short but not completely gone, it sends that signal to the cell to stop dividing," she says. If it didn't, the DNA tips on the end of the chromosome would become raggedy, and the chromosome would start seeking out other broken chromosomal pieces -- and "that," says Campisi, "isthe hallmark of cancer.

"Now, how does a healthycell know that it doesn't have a broken piece of DNA? The telomere."

Telomeres allow cells tosenesce, and if such cells stop dividing, they can't form a tumor. "The question is," says Campisi, "whathappens to an organism that begins to accumulate senescent cells with age?"

Cancer, again, may hold the key.

While normal cells can divide only so many times (known as the Hayflick Limit), cancer cells are essentially immortal, and in 90 percent of them telomerase, an enzyme, can be found. Telomerase replaces the bit of telomere clipped off after each cancer cell's division.

If telomerase production can be turned on in normal cells, it seems reasonable to assume that normal cells could be immortalized.

"One thing we've learned from the mouse model," says Campisi, "isthat you don't want cells to not senesce at all, because if you do that,you have cancer. What would be great would be to have some of those senescentcells die, so that they don't accumulate with age. That's what we're workingon. It's not going to be easy to do that, but that's the idea, that's thelong-term goal."

Campisi credits her scientific creativity to her wide-ranging education, which includes an undergraduate degree in chemistry, a Ph.D. in biophysics and postdoctoral research in the biology of cancer.

"I kind of learned at an early age not to be bound by field or science or even technique. And so I think when you have that kind of broad training, you move between fields very easily." Moving between fields allows Campisi to keep looking for the next thing she needs to know. "Youhave to have this fire in the belly to know the answer to something, andthen you just go and find out."

Research, says Campisi,is a lot like one of her favorite pastimes, cooking. A little of this, alittle ofthat -- the best of meals are unplanned, the result of intuition and experimentation. "I consider recipes advisory only," saysthe microbiologist.

Likewise in her research. Campisi enjoys creating her own path to an answer, pursuing solutions not with a sprinter's speed but at an ambler's pace, taking the time to search out familiar territory for missed clues and overlooked details.

"I have this philosophy of I just start doing this random walk," says Campisi, "andeventually I wind up where I need to go."

Currently, she is walking her way through the complex problem of aging by trying to identify the molecular mechanisms responsible for cellular arrest, studying the defective genes in premature aging diseases, and determining how telomere length is regulated. The payoff from that research, she hopes, will be a postponement of aging.

Some scientists, such as Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, express caution when it comes to the promise of research into aging.

The co-author of "The Quest for Immortality" said last year: "Whenwe survive into old age, just as with automobiles and race cars, things startto go wrong, and unless we can change the structure of the body itself orthe rate at which aging occurs, then inevitably things will go wrong as wepush out the envelope of human survival."

Lanza, of Advanced Cell Technology, believes the problem of wear and tear will soon be overcome.

"I think there's no question that in two or three decades we'll be able to replace every part of the human body," says Lanza. "Wholeorgans, like blood vessels and bladders, have already been grown in the lab."

Like Ames, Campisi believes the secret to longevity is about maintaining a balance in the biological processes, whether it's mitochondrial function or the stability of the DNA.

"Eventually you run out of cells, which is why immortality is not on the books," she says. "Buta reversal of aging -- as long as you define the aging process segmentally-- is within our grasp.

"We really are talkingabout how to preserve the health of tissues for the maximal period of time,for a verylong and healthy extended middle age."

Faith's Place: Belief in a spiritual power is a universal trait. That's becausewe've been designed for religious experience.

Dec.3, 2002

By Amy Ellis Nutt
The Star Ledger
Newark, N.J.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Thehuman brain, even at its ancient, primitive core, is less an organ of impulsethan a machine of reason. We are built to make sense of things. Our brainsrestlessly scan the world for patterns in chaos and causes in coincidence.

We crave explanation and, when faced with the ineffable, sometimes we create the answer.

For many people, the answerto the most ineffable question of all — "Why do we exist?" — is God.

Neuroscientist Rhawn Joseph has spent years studying history, myth and biology in his quest to understand the universality of spiritual experience and its evolutionary function.

In his studies of the brains of Tibetan monks and Franciscan nuns, radiologist Andrew Newberg seeks out the relationship between neural activity and mystical experience.

Both men believe that theconnection between the brain and spirituality suggests that there is a physiologicalbasis for religion — that human beings, in essence, are hard-wired forGod.

REALMS OF REALITY

Rhawn Joseph slowly stirs his third cup of coffee, staring at the whirlpool of milk that spreads across the top and then disappears. Joseph is an oasis of quiet in the lunchtime havoc of the Cozy Restaurant in Santa Clara. Maybe that's because Joseph is thinking about God.

Joseph believes there is a neurological, even genetic, explanation for religious belief and spiritual experience.

Homo sapiens, he theorizes, have evolved the capacity to experience God primarily through the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped structure buried deep in the brain. The amygdala, along with the hippocampus and hypothalamus, make up the limbic system, the first-formed and most primitive part of the brain, where emotions, sexual pleasure and deeply felt memories arise.

Says Joseph: "These tissues,which become highly activated when we dream, when we pray or when we takedrugssuch as LSD, enable us to experience those realms of reality normally filteredfrom consciousness, including the reality of God, the spirit, the soul,and life after death."

Joseph, who has a doctoratein neuropsychology and is the author of a comprehensive textbook called "Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology, and Clinical Neuroscience," published by Lippincott, cites his own clinical and historical research, as well as studies of epileptic patients who have experienced religious hallucinations, as evidence that "spiritualexperience is not based on superstition but is instead real, biological,and part of our primitive biological drives."

The quest for the truth of spiritual experience started early for the 51-year-old neuroscientist:

"My grandparents were very religious, especially my grandmother," says Joseph, whose heritage is Jewish and Catholic. "Shewould read to me from the Bible when I was a little kid. I loved listeningto those stories, and I still remember the evening when she was readingto me about Sodom and Gomorrah. I was 3 or 4 years old, and I asked herif God had killed the little children, too, and she said yes, and I said,'What did they do wrong?'

"She didn't have an explanationfor it, and it really made me wonder: What kind of God is this?"

That question stayed withJoseph through college at San Jose State University, where he majored inpsychologyand minored in philosophy, and at University of Health Sciences/The ChicagoMedical School in Illinois, where Joseph enrolled in the neuropsychologyPh.D. program. He finished his requirements for the doctorate in two years,half the usual time, and then interned at the Traumatic Brain Injury Centerof the VA/Palo Alto Health Care System, which, says Joseph, gave him "awhole different direction in life: the brain."

After a second internship, this time in the neurology department of Yale University Medical School, Joseph was offered academic positions at a number of colleges and universities.

"I turned them all down," says Joseph. "Thesalaries were too low, my ego was too big, I wanted to be independent,and I didn't like cold weather.

"It was a big mistake.It is the tragedy of my life. I have always wanted to teach; unfortunately,the rightjob and the right school in the right location has never been offered."

Today, the scientist isthe founder of an independent publishing company in Santa Cruz called UniversityPress.Some of the company's nonfiction books concern astrobiology, the scienceof consciousness and, in a recent collection of essays, neurotheology — thestudy of the relationship between brain function and spiritual experience.

PEERING THROUGH THE MYTH

There is a maverick, evenprovocative bent to much of Joseph's writing. He has published a half-dozenbooks ofhis own at University Press, including "The Transmitter to God: The Limbic System, the Soul, and Spirituality," andhe continues to research a number of subjects, many of then in evolutionarybiology.

Most of Joseph's investigations begin with a look into cultural contexts.

"In a lot of myth, you can go back and find elements of history," he says. "Youcan look at the Old Testament as fanciful stories, or as containing theseeds of historical information. ... If you're going to be a scientist,you can't dismiss things and you have to go take a good look and try andsift through it all. It's like panning for gold."

Joseph admits his approachto questions is sometimes unorthodox. Like other scientific seekers, he iscreative and intuitive, more comfortable taking his own route to an answerthan someone else's. In the 1970s, Joseph was one of the first scientiststo demonstrate the hormonal and environmental foundations of gender differencesin learning, as well as the neuroplasticity of the brain — recovery of brain cells — inprimates. Though he is unaffiliated with any academic institution, Josephhas been invited to speak on all these subjects, at different times, bythe University of California at Berkeley, Brigham Young University andthe University of Geneva in Switzerland.

For the past 20 years, Joseph has been mining neuroscience, astronomy, history, religion, archeology and anthropology for clues about the meaning of intense religious ecstasy during which a person may see an image of God or hear the voice of an angel. Joseph believes those experiences are the result of hyperstimulation of the amygdala, which releases large quantities of natural opiates. The same opiates are released in response to pain, terror and trauma, as well as social isolation and sensory deprivation.

"Hyperactivation of the amygdala, hippocampus and overlying temporal lobe gives a person the sense that they're floating or flying above their surroundings," says Joseph. "Itcan trigger memories and hallucinations, create brilliant lights, and atthe same time secrete neurotransmitters that induce feelings of euphoria,peace and harmony."

Many religious people mightview the cause and effect in reverse — it is the divine inspiration that activates those areas of the brain, instead of the other way around — but to Joseph, the order is irrelevant. For him, the more important question is, "Why?"

"There are creatures living in caves who don't have eyes," he says, "because there's nothing for them to see. But we have a visual cortex and an auditory cortex, because there are things we were made to see and hear. You don't develop a brain structure to help you experience something that doesn't exist." Weare hard-wired for God, in other words, because there is a real God toexperience.

Matthew Alper, author of "The 'God' Part of the Brain," believes this assumption is flawed. "We're capable of repression, of phantom limb pain — ourcapacity to believe what isn't there is also sometimes helpful."

Joseph acknowledges this but argues there is an equally possible alternative explanation for spiritual experience: evolution.

"Maybe the ability to experienceGod and the spiritually sublime is an inherited limbic trait. Maybe weevolved these neurons to better cope with the unknown, to perceive andrespond to spiritual messages because they would increase the likelihoodof our survival."

We became genetically predisposed to spirituality, says Joseph, because belief in a divine being makes us stronger.

It also makes us less anxious, says Alper, and that is critical for a self-conscious species like our own.

"Consciousness creates so much anxiety that our species had to come up with a cognitive adaptation to deal with the pain of our intelligence — being able to think about our own mortality, for instance," he says. "Soit came up with a brain modification that allows us to believe in an alternativereality, that when we die there is a spiritual part of us that will liveforever."

Proving the evolution argument, says Massimo Pigliucci, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, is an entirely different matter.

"It is possible that if there is an advantage — that believing in an afterworld or God reduces anxiety or allows you to better navigate the world — thatnature selected for that belief. But there's no evidence for that, andnot only do we not have any evidence, there is no way to gather the evidence.It is inconceivable that you could do an experiment on survival of peoplewho believe in an afterlife, because human beings in the past evolved ina totally different environment than any of us live in today."

THE ENCHANTED LOOM

The lack of opportunity for empirical studies does not deter Joseph. He sees similarities across cultures in near-death experiences; beliefs in ghosts, spirits and demons; symbols such as crosses, triangles and circles, as further evidence of the neuro-anatomical basis of spirituality.

"If you're a scientistand you find people having the same experience, colored by their own culturaldifferences,all over the world 4,000 years ago and among both children and adults,you have to say, well, there's something there that's worthy of scientificexplanation."

For Joseph, the brain isa magical vessel, "an enchanted loom," as neurologist Charles Sherrington wrote 60 years ago, "wheremillions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningfulpattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns."

The search for those patterns, says Joseph, is what brain research is all about.

"You throw open a doorand there is another door and another door. Most people don't even realizethey'reclosed, or they don't care. I want to open all of those doors."

When he's not readying his company's next book for publication, Joseph, who is single, spends most of his time writing and reading, or thinking as he walks in a nearby park. His home, he says, is piled high with journals from every scientific discipline.

There is a restlessnessto Joseph's mind that is revealed only in his eyes. They are constantly scanningthelandscape wherever he is — in a diner, in a park — looking for some missedopportunity to make a connection, to find an answer, or to uncover anotherquestion.

Sometimes on the weekend, Joseph will travel around Santa Cruz, where he has lived for 16 years, and stop in at a religious service. One day it's a gathering of Jehovah's Witnesses, another time it's a synagogue. Or the Church of Christian Science.

"Am I religious? No. AmI spiritual? Yes. I certainly don't believe in an anthropomorphic God. Iwould say thekingdom of God is inside us all. The brain is the chamber of God. It allowsus to realize God and contemplate God, whatever God is."

THE COLORS OF MEDITATION

Huddled inside a shoe box of an office that is buried deep inside the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, Andrew Newberg is also looking for God. Though he believes the limbic system is important in explaining religious phenomena, he does not think it is solely responsible. The complexity and diversity of those experiences, he says, must involve other higher brain structures, specifically the autonomic system.

The 36-year-old radiologist is a study in intensity. When he speaks, his sentences often spill into one another like excited children on the cafeteria lunch line.

"Going back to when I wasyoung, as a child, I just was always asking a lot of questions, always wonderingabout why we were here and how we can know something and what it meantto have that kind of knowledge and how we got to it."

Newberg's day job is radiology. Three days a week, he takes pictures of kidneys, lungs and hearts, looking for signs of disease. Two days a week, when he has willing subjects, he takes pictures of the brains of deeply religious people, looking for signs of God.

Newberg is conducting brain-imaging experiments trying to identify those areas where neural activity is linked to religious experience. In so doing, Newberg is taking Joseph's theories about the relationship between the limbic system and spirituality one step further.

A dozen times over five years, Newberg has brought in men and women, Tibetan Buddhists and Franciscan nuns, to peer into their brains as they meditate and pray. In the first experiment, involving a Tibetan monk, Newberg attached an intravenous line to the subject's arm and had him meditate inside a small, darkened laboratory on the third floor of the hospital. When the monk was deep into meditation, Newberg injected a chemical tracer into the IV line.

A minute later, the monk was placed on an inclined table, his head directly beneath three rotating lenses of a massive, high-imaging machine known as a single photon emission computed tomography camera.

The images from the SPECT scans were filled with pools of neon green and red. The patterns represented increased and decreased blood flows to various parts of the brain, especially the lobes. Newberg found areas of increased blood flow in the frontal lobes, where higher thinking takes place, and decreased blood flow in the back or parietal lobes, where spatial orientation takes place.

Newberg said the frontal lobe activity might be an indication of heightened activity in the amygdala, as Joseph theorizes, although better imaging techniques would be needed to prove it.

"We believe that we were seeing colorful evidence on the SPECT's computer screen of the brain's capacity to make spiritual experience real. We saw evidence of a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence and acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that connects us to all that is," Newberg says in "Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief," oneof the two books he wrote with the late psychiatrist Eugene d'Aquili.

The son of Reform Jewish parents, Newberg practices Judaism but has an affinity for Eastern religions as well. His scientific searching, he says, is just part of what it means to be fully human:

"I read in a book aboutTaoist teaching that there's this two-way street between you and God. Andthatin some way, as a human being, you have to kind of go up and reach towardsit. And to me it's a little bit like that: that whatever is real out there,you have to let it come to you, but you also have go towards it.

"And I think that the contemplativepart for me is the waiting part and the scientific is the going-after-itpart. And so for me personally, the thing is to keep pushing yourself towardthe questions and keep asking about the issues, and not being satisfiedwhen the answers don't quite make sense."

THE PATH TO NEUROLOGY

Newberg has been pursuing reality and trying to describe it for most of his life. As a chemistry major at Haverford College, just outside Philadelphia, he had nearly enough credits to graduate in 1988 with degrees in astrophysics, philosophy, religion and Russian history. Before going off to get his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania, Newberg conducted an unusual senior research project at Haverford: trying to create life.

"It was one of these classicexperiments where you put together methane and ammonia and water in a testtube andthen jolt it with electricity or ultraviolet light or something like thatand try to make amino acids. That's the basis for a lot of theories abouthow early life started. I had this big test tube, and I had these visionsof coming in and seeing two little eyes looking out at me. I think we mayhave made an amino acid at some point. ...

"I just wanted to tacklesomething like that. I'm always tackling the big questions."

In medical school, Newbergrealized a lot of his interests kept leading him back to the brain. Radiology — taking pictures of the inside of a person's body and especially the brain — seemeda good fit. Research in dementia and Alzheimer's led Newberg to readingpsychiatry bulletins, which in turn led the young doctor to d'Aquili, thenan associate professor of psychiatry at Penn's medical school and a pioneerin the neurological research of religion.

D'Aquili was heavily involved in his own work but finally relented and agreed to meet the persistent medical school student. Newberg bombarded the psychiatrist with questions. By the time he finished medical school in 1993, Newberg had teamed with d'Aquili.

"We came up with a very detailed model about what we thought was going on in the brain" during intense spiritual experiences, Newberg said. "Sowe started working toward testing those hypotheses by doing imaging studies."

The imaging studies revealed that two specific areas of the brain, the posterior superior parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex, play a critical role in intense spiritual experiences. In their books, Newberg and d'Aquili refer to these two brain structures as the areas of orientation and attention, respectively.

The "orientation association area" isresponsible for creating the mental experience of personal physical boundariesand for providing a kind of spatial, three-dimensional matrix in whichthe body locates and orients itself.

The "attention association area" iscritical in organizing all goal-directed behavior and actions.

The SPECT scans of Newberg's subjects during deep meditation revealed two things: that there was increased activity in the attention association area, and decreased activity in the orientation association area.

"Several studies suggest that the attention area is able to focus the mind upon important tasks through a process neurologists describe as 'redundancy,'" write Newberg and d'Aquili in "Why God Won't Go Away." "Redundancyallows the brain to screen out superfluous sensory input and concentrateupon a goal. It's what allows you to read a book in a noisy restaurantor daydream while walking along a crowded street. ... Victims of damage(to the attention association area) are often unable to complete long sentencesor plan a schedule for the day. They also frequently exhibit emotionalflatness. ...

"We believe part of the reason the attention association area is activated during spiritual practices such as meditation is because it is heavily involved in emotional responses — andreligious experiences are usually highly emotional."

In the scans of one of Newberg's Buddhist subjects, this attention association area was lit up in red at the peak of his meditation. However, the orientation association area in the parietal lobe registered little electrical activity.

Newberg asked himself: What if the orientation area was working as hard as ever but the incoming flow of sensory information had somehow been blocked? With no information flowing in from the senses, the orientation association area wouldn't be able to find any boundaries. What would the brain make of that?

Using the evidence of hismeditating monks and praying nuns, Newberg says he now believes the brainhas no choicebut "to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses," and that this perception, to those in the midst of an intense spiritual experience, feels "utterlyand unquestionably real."

ROAD CLOSED

The University of Tennessee'sPigliucci believes Newberg's experiments are "well-done and interesting," buthe takes exception to Newberg's interpretation of the results:

"Suppose we wanted to investigatesome paranormal phenomenon, such as telepathy, and you claim that yourbrain behaves in a particular way when you do telepathy. So we do a brainscan, and we see that the pattern of neural activity will change becauseyou are trying to concentrate on doing telepathy.

"The scan will obviously be different from your brain at rest, but does it show that telepathy is going on? No. The brain is always working. ... You go to the movies, you eat a piece of chocolate, you dream — yourbrain patterns will change."

Newberg acknowledges thatat some fundamental level, the question of the existence of God will foreverremainunanswered. "You can't throw open that veil of the brain and get outsideof your own brain and see what's going on in the objective external world."

Even if science can't pry open that door, Newberg remains sanguine.

"Regardless of the perspectiveyou take, the idea of God doesn't go away. I don't think we would eversay we could prove or disprove God just on the basis of our imaging studies."

Like Pigliucci, Anne Harrington, a Harvard professor in the history of science, believes Newberg's interpretations are overreaching, but she thinks his attempt to understand, scientifically, the nature of spiritual experience is worth the pursuit.

"If you really want to understand humans, you can't say anything is off bounds," says Harrington. "MaxWeber, an important sociologist, gave a talk ... in which he said sciencewas disenchanting us of our idea of reality, and that if people couldn'tcope, then the doors of the churches were still open. They (Newberg andJoseph) aren't trying to re-enchant science. They're just saying that everythingis still open to scientific investigation."

Newberg is willing to follow those investigations wherever they lead.

"What we're really talkingabout is that, regardless of whether God truly exists or not, in some senseit'snot even a relevant issue. Human beings are always going to have this senseof connection to God, defining God broadly, whether we create it ourselvesor whether there really is a God. ... In either case, to me it's a partof who we are. I've always felt that that which is absolute is everywhere,and it's just a matter of being open to it."

How faith happens — its connection to the thick forest of neurons inside our skulls — maybe just one more leap of the imagination, the brain's gymnastic way ofexercising its instinct for order.

"I don't think I've found any answers yet," Newberg says. "I think I'm finding ways of understanding the questions better, and I think — or, at least, I hope — I'mheading down a path that will give me more and more tools to be able toreally answer those questions ... Just because we can't figure these experiencesout doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about them, even if they're intenselyinexplicable. How we ultimately describe them, that's what's important."

Genesis: If the universe is flat, the best way to show how it happened is totake its temperature.

December 4, 2002

ByAmy Ellis Nutt
The Star Ledger
Newark, N.J.

GREENBELT, Md. -- We are acquainted with the universe through science, butwe are intimate with it through ancestry. Mingling in our blood is the breathof creation -- hydrogen molecules born billions of years ago in the nuclearfurnace that marked the beginning of time. In some fundamental way, our fascinationwith the cosmos is nothing more than an attempt to understand our own celestialroots.

For more than two decades, physicist Alan Guth has been fine- tuning his answer to the ultimate cosmic question: How did it all begin?

Late on a winter night in 1979, he believed he'd figured it out when he looked down at the pages of equations he'd just scribbled. Embedded in all those numbers was a theory about the origin and shaping of the universe that would shake the foundations of cosmology.

The theory -- called "inflation" --explained how in the first fraction of a second of the big bang, space rolledout like a cosmic carpet, flat and infinitely large. And just as the weaveof a carpet captures dust, the fabric of space captured bits of matter inits seams until billions of years later there were stars, planets and galaxies.

For the past 15 years, radio astronomer Charles Bennett has been working on experiments that could prove or disprove Guth's theory. Bennett's laboratory tool? The ancient light of the big bang.

Next month, Bennett and his colleagues at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center here at Greenbelt will announce new findings based on years of studying that light, which is called the cosmic microwave background radiation. The results should help confirm not only the shape of the universe but the origin of all matter.

If Bennett's findings bear out what the preliminary evidence suggests, Guth's concept soon could be elevated to a perch in the pantheon of scientific ideas alongside Einstein's theories of relativity.

The power of Guth's proposal lies in its ability to explain not only our most distant past but our present as well -- how a universe that was infinitely small is now infinitely large.

Bennett and Guth, both New Jersey natives, are peering back nearly to the beginning of time, close to the genesis moment, seeking answers to the why and how of creation. For thousands of years, those were questions only philosophers dared to ask.

THE CARPET UNROLLS

A deep-throated murmur leaks out of a brightly lit computer room at the Goddard Space Flight Center and escapes down a labyrinth of beige corridors. The hum, it turns out, is not coming from the bank of computers inside the room, but from a nest of pulsing, 4-inch-wide silicon coils that are keeping the computers cool. Without the air conditioning, the computers' 170 processors, which are analyzing information about the heat of the universe from a probe nearly a million miles from Earth, would turn to toast.

Charles Bennett checks the thermometer. It reads a steady 73 degrees. The 46-year-old astronomer smiles. The principal investigator of NASA's Microwave Anisotropy Probe, Bennett helped build the spacecraft that today is taking the temperature of the universe as it was when it began.

Most scientists believe the universe came into existence in an event known as the big bang. Contrary to popular belief, big-bang theory is not about an initial explosion of matter. There was no primordial firecracker that exploded in the middle of nothing.

There was, rather, a ferocious spasm of infinitely dense, immeasurably hot subatomic particles. This spasm created the fabric of space, which has been unrolling for 14 billion years, carrying along with it the remnants of light and heat from the beginning of time.

Of the three most fundamental methods of measurement -- time, distance and temperature -- it is temperature, which measures the motion of particles that make up the universe, that has the most to tell about how the universe was created and the shape it took. Temperature helped determine the contents of our solar system, the size of our planet and the conditions for human life.

Before there were stars, even before there was light, the universe had a temperature. Minuscule dips in the temperature of the universe's background radiation are seen as evidence of slightly denser points in space where matter began to coalesce into what would become the planets and stars.

THE SCREAM

The universe's first light-- the background radiation -- has been called the afterglow of creation,and itis streaming all around us, invisibly sifting though our hair, mingling withour breath, even settling in our lungs. Most of the time we are completelyunaware of its presence, although 1 percent of the "snow" or static pickedup by a TV antenna when no program is being broadcast is big-bang radiation.

"The light comes from a time before there were any stars or galaxies, any carbon or oxygen," says Bennett. "Thetiny temperature fluctuations (anisotropies) that we're measuring in theuniverse hold the key to its shape."

Because light travels at a finite speed (186,282 miles per second), it takes time for it to reach us. The farther away an object, the longer it takes. The light from the sun, for example, takes eight minutes to reach the Earth; the light from the Andromeda Galaxy, 2 million years. Writer Edgar Allan Poe, an amateur astronomer, was the first to suggest some stars were so distant their light had not yet reached us.

The deeper we look into space, therefore, the deeper we are looking into our past. What astronomers such as Bennett are hoping to find there is a snapshot of the infant universe and evidence of its first features -- the tiny bits of subatomic matter that one day would become the stars, planets and galaxies.

When the universe was 100 million years old, the first stars appeared. At 1 billion years old, the first galaxies. Galaxies gathered into clusters. Clusters congregated into superclusters. The universe cooled to minus 475 degrees, and the primal scream of creation became a sigh.

For decades scientists sifted through the background radiation like cosmic archeologists trying to dig up an artifact -- some piece of evidence that their theories about the big bang and the beginning of time weren't just numbers and equations, but had substance and reality.

If a detailed picture of the universe's background radiation revealed subtle variations in temperature, that would be evidence that the landscape of the early universe had tiny hills and valleys where matter would gather, just as Guth's theory predicted.

Those were the issues facing Bennett when he worked on the Cosmic Background Explorer from 1984 to 1996. COBE was the most ambitious effort to measure the background radiation since its discovery in 1965.

Bennett loves sweating the small stuff. In fact, he was born for it. The son of a scientist, he spent the first two years of his life in New Brunswick, where his father was in graduate school at Rutgers studying solid-state physics. The family moved to Bethesda, Md., when his father landed a job as a research scientist with the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology).

Bennett grew up a tinkerer, happiest when he was building things -- especially new and better antennae for his ham radio. His world was circumscribed by circuits, transistors and capacitors until he was 14, when his grandmother gave him a telescope.

"Every night I'd take itinto the back yard and look at whatever I could see. I loved looking at themoon,the planets and especially the rings of Saturn. Then I learned that therewas something called radio astronomy. You get to build circuits to look atstuff in the sky.

"That really just combinedthe two hobbies I had, and I decided right then that that's what I was goingto do.... It used to drive my friends crazy that I knew exactly what it was I wantedto do. I didn't want to do just physics or astronomy. I wanted to do radioastronomy."

His freshman year at the University of Maryland, Bennett was one of about 120 physics majors. By the time he graduated four years later, there were half a dozen.

"I wasn't the brightest guy in there," he says with a laugh, "andso I had to make up for it with harder work ... but I loved it. I loved beingable to solve problems."

Bennett graduated with high honors in physics and astronomy and headed off to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his Ph.D.

In the mid-1980s, just as he was finishing his doctorate in radio astronomy, COBE came calling. The COBE team, headquartered at Goddard, was starting to build the instruments that would be used to measure the cosmic microwave background radiation, and the team needed a radio astronomer.

By the time COBE launched on Nov. 18, 1989, Bennett was the deputy principal investigator for the Differential Microwave Radiometer, the instrument that would measure the brightness of the radiation and produce a map of the average anisotropies in cosmic temperature. The measurements of these variations, it was hoped, would bring into clearer focus the origin, shape and size of the universe.

THE RIPPLES

At the beginning of the 20th century, the universe was thought to be finite, bounded by the edges of the Milky Way. By the end of the century, the Milky Way was just one of a hundred billion galaxies, and the sun one of trillions of stars. The limits of space had been pushed into infinity.

The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, was an attempt to see into that vastness. And its views confirmed what scientists had believed for some time -- that the universe was uniform in all directions, but also that it was a bit lumpy. Instead of matter being spread out evenly through space like butter on bread, it looked like a bowl of cold, clumpy oatmeal someone forgot to stir. Oceans of stars were pooled into galaxies, galaxies were bunched into superclusters, and in between was a latticework of gas and dust and seemingly empty space.

Throughout the summer andfall of 1991, Bennett sat in front of his computer at the Goddard Space FlightCenter.Day after day, hour after hour, he studied thermal maps of the sky. Whenhe was not on his computer at Goddard, he was on his laptop at home, oftenspread out on the floor of the family room after he and his wife, Renée,had put their two young boys to bed.

Finally, that December, Bennett felt satisfied with what he was seeing. When the team announced its findings in the spring of 1992, the reaction by the scientific community was nothing short of astonishment.

COBE had produced a mapthat showed the background radiation differing in temperature ever so slightlyin differentdirections, sometimes just 30 millionths of a degree hotter or colder thanaverage. "These variations are so small," says Bennett, "they're like height variations of only 4 inches on a mile- high plateau," orthe difference in the weight of a cup of sand when one grain is removed.Still, these ripples in the background radiation were just irregular enoughto correspond to the slight clumpiness from which all structure in the universeevolved.

"Seeing these fluctuations is like the first peek into a window of the physics of the early universe," says Princeton cosmologist and MAP team member David Spergel. "All these things we couldn't measure before are emerging and keep fitting with the standard model" ofthe big bang.

Another COBE team membersaid that seeing that first thermal map of the background radiation was like "seeingthe face of God."

COBE's detection of tiny temperature fluctuations was the strongest evidence yet in support of theories that suggest the universe is flat, with just enough matter to keep it glued together while it continues to expand -- instead of too little matter, which would make it fly apart, or too much, which would make it collapse back on itself.

Bennett and his team of astronomers had done something cosmologists usually only dream about: They had verified that all the late-night musings and academic papers of theoreticians, all the mathematical hypotheses and conjectures, were grounded in reality. Big-bang and inflation theories were the best things on the table not because they were the best guesses, but because they fit the evidence.

COBE's limitation, however, was that it could measure the differences in average temperature only for huge swaths of the sky. It couldn't pinpoint the fluctuations. Enter the Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or MAP, launched in June 2001. Next month Bennett and the MAP team will release its first findings, which are expected to answer the question: What did the universe look like shortly after its birth?

"What we have is a bunch of theoretical possibilities of what the temperature patterns mean for what the universe is like," says Bennett. "Andeach of those specific theories predicts a kind of pattern. MAP is goingto measure the pattern that's really on the sky, and then it's like a detectivestory: matching the fingerprint with the mug book."

THE WAIT TO BE RIGHT

Alan Guth believes he made that match more than 20 years ago. In 1979, the young physicist invented inflation theory, which described why the big bang happened and then what happened in the next trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

By the time COBE was launched, Guth had been waiting more than a decade, without much hope, for the empirical evidence that would tell him he was on the right track.

That pessimism was born from historical frustration. Cosmology is unlike most sciences, where theories spring from evidence. Ideas about the universe, such as Guth's, are born in the absence of evidence . For the better part of the 20th century, facts about the origin and shape of the universe had been impossible to come by.

Guth seems an unlikely candidate for a scientific revolutionary. The 54-year-old physicist is boyish in appearance, his slightly graying hair swept over his forehead like a'60s surfer. He sits, hunched over, on the edge of a threadbare armchair in his office at M.I.T. in Cambridge, Mass., and speaks quietly, almost conspiratorially, as if he is letting his visitor in on some secret of the universe.

He is.

"The classical big-bang theory was never really a theory of a bang," says Guth. "Itwas a really a theory about the aftermath of the bang. Inflation answersthe question of what happened before that -- what made the universe bangin the first place."

Where Charles Bennett is a cosmic gumshoe, tracking down leads and gathering evidence to prove his case, Guth is a cosmic magician, a lover of numbers and equations who still marvels that something he thought up in the solitude of night might be the key to creation.

Both men believe the cosmic microwave background radiation holds the clues to solving the mysteries of the universe's creation, evolution, shape and fate. For Guth, who created his inflation theory 20 years ago in an empirical wasteland, the thermal maps of the microwave background could either confirm or destroy his idea of creation.

In 1979, Guth was at theStanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, Calif. It was his fourthstop onthe postdoctoral "beauty pageant" circuit, during which freshly minted Ph.D.saudition for university professorships. Eight years and stints at Princeton,Columbia and Cornell well behind him, Guth saw his career wilting on thevine.

The son of a grocer, Guth grew up in Highland Park and went to the local public schools, then on to M.I.T. for his undergraduate and graduate degrees. Now, with his tenure at SLAC in its final months, he was facing unemployment and, worse, failure as a scientist.

Everything changed in the space of four hours late on the night of Thursday, Dec. 6, 1979.

Guth was holed up in his small study in a rented one-bedroom house not far from the Stanford campus. While his wife, Susan, and 2-year-old son, Larry, slept in the next room, Guth began writing. He and a colleague were trying to rush a paper into print on a topic in particle physics dealing with the transitional phases of the early universe as it expanded and cooled. Guth's job that night was to check whether one of these phases would affect the expansion rate.

By 1 a.m. Guth had theanswer, and it was a surprising, emphatic "yes." What came next can be described only as a "eureka" moment,because Guth realized that this idea of an early transition phase could haveprofound implications for solving the mystery of why the big bang happenedat all.

"In order to make the big- bang theory work," he says, "youhave to very carefully fine-tune your assumptions about the initial conditionsof the universe, to put the universe just on the borderline of the rightmass density to allow eternal expansion. Too much mass density would causethe universe to collapse back on itself. Too little would cause it to flyapart. The mass density at the time of big bang had to be just right. ...So the big question was, what caused that to happen?"

A few pages of equations later, Guth had the answer: inflation.

THE MOMENT OF TRANSITION

Guth's insight was to seethat before there was a universe, there was an infinitely small energy fieldof subatomicparticles, and what caused the universe to "bang" into existence was a fluctuationin that energy field. Like shaking a can of Coke and then popping its top,in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second of theuniverse's existence, an enormous amount of energy was trapped, creatinga negative pressure, which in turn caused a sudden and violent stretchingof space. In one brief massive burst, the budding universe -- smaller thanthe width of a proton -- doubled in size 100 times over.

This transitional phase left small pockets of subatomic particles scattered through space, like the bubbles left in a boiling pot of water after the heat is suddenly turned down. It was those particles that created the seams in the early universe where matter would gather, eventually growing into galaxies and galaxy clusters.

Everything that exists today -- from the stars and planets to every rock, tree and human being -- can trace its ancestry to less than an ounce of original matter, according to Guth's theory.

Early on the morning of Dec. 7, 1979, on little sleep, Guth bicycled to the center -- somehow having the presence of mind to time his ride, a habit he had picked up in graduate school. The soon-to-be- world-renowned cosmologist would proudly note in his journal that night that he had broken his personal speed record with a time of 9 minutes and 32 seconds.

When he sat down at hisdesk at the center, his first notation wasn't about his bike ride, but hisnew theory.With equations stirring restlessly around in his brain, Guth wrote at thetop of a page in his notebook, "SPECTACULAR REALIZATION."

Within weeks of announcinghis theory, the physicist was inundated with offers from universities. ButGuth wantedto return to his alma mater, and took his cue from a fortune cookie he openedat dinner one night: "An exciting opportunity lies just ahead if you arenot too timid."

Guth called the physics department at M.I.T. to see whether there was an opening. Twenty-four hours later he was offered an associate professorship.

More than a decade later, Charles Bennett's team on NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer project provided the first empirical evidence validating the equations Guth had puzzled out with pen and paper.

Today, inflation is considered by many scientists to be one of the greatest achievements in cosmology in the 20th century. Last year Guth received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, which in past years had been given to Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble and Stephen Hawking. Several months ago he was awarded, along with two other cosmologists, the 2002 Paul Dirac Medal by the Institute for Physics, which honored Hawking in 1987.

'GORGEOUS TO LOOK AT'

Using his IBM Thinkpad, which sits on his desk in his M.I.T. office wedged between discarded computer keyboards and 3-foot stacks of paper, Guth calls up four graphs on the screen, one on top of the other. He does this a few times a week, he says, just because he likes looking at them. The graphs are four different measurements of the cosmic microwave background, and the lines appear nearly identical.

"Back when I came up with inflation, I never believed anybody would ever measure the predictions," says Guth, smiling at the results on the computer screen in front of him. "Ijust thought it would be fun to calculate it. Now that they have, it's amazing.Looking at the results of COBE, and how the measurements agreed perfectlywith the predictions of the inflationary model, was absolutely wonderful.It's really gorgeous to look at."

From its debut as little more than a theoretical blip on the screen, inflation theory has become the golden child of cosmology, the best explanation yet of what happened at the genesis moment.

"When inflation was introduced, there were a lot of disbelievers," says Michael Turner, chairman of the astronomy and astrophysics department at the University of Chicago. "Sofar it has passed the test. It predicted the universe was flat, and that'swhat we're seeing. It predicted these 'acoustic' peaks in the cosmic microwavebackground, and that's what we're seeing and what we're zeroing in on. Thereal question now in terms of inflation is how much of the truth it has and,of course, what caused it."

If inflation is the dynamiteof the universe, says Turner, "then cosmologists are still looking for thematch."

Inflation theory has been refined and updated and altered. There are now several variations on the theme, including chaotic inflation, extended inflation, hyperextended inflation, open inflation and two-round inflation. All can trace their ancestry to Guth, the struggling Ph.D.

Other recent findings about the cosmic microwave background radiation offer more direct evidence that what is now the standard model of cosmology -- big bang plus inflation -- is correct. There also is every indication that when the MAP team announces its results next month, the evidence finally may be overwhelming.

"I believe it will be a major success for inflation," says cosmologist Andreas Albrecht of the University of California at Davis. "WheneverI talk with someone from the MAP collaboration, they can barely contain theirjoy at the success of their experiment. The results should be fantastic."

How will it end?: Will the universe disappear, or does a mysterious force haveother plans for it?

December 5, 2002

ByAmy Ellis Nutt
The Star Ledger
Newark, N.J.

PASADENA, Calif. -- The unknown is a great seductress. Never is this moreobvious than when we look up into the illimitable darkness of night. In itscapacity to enchant, the universe has been siren and muse to poets and scientistsalike.

Some 70 years after the discovery that there were galaxies beyond the Milky Way too numerous to count, the most elusive questions of cosmology are beginning to be answered. Scientists believe they now know what happened in the first microsecond of creation, how the big bang got started and how seeds of energy gave birth to matter.

What they still don't know is how it will all end.

The answer lies within the fabric of space itself, where a titanic tug of war is being staged between gravity and a mysterious dark energy, a repulsive force that is tantalizing scientists with its tenacity.

Understanding dark energy and how it affects space could help in figuring out the future of the universe, whether it is destined to continue expanding, fall back on itself in a violent implosion, or be consumed by everlasting darkness.

Two forces. Three possible futures.

Astronomer Wendy Freedman has all but determined the speed of the universe's expansion. Physicist Paul Steinhardt is working to understand how dark energy affects that expansion.

Together, these discoveries could tell us what will become of the universe hundreds of billions of years from now.

THE ELUSIVE NUMBER

Like many scientists who have a passion for what they do, Wendy Freedman remembers the exact moment her fascination with astronomy began -- on a summer night, beside a lake, under a trellis of stars ribboned by darkness.

Leaning back in a chair in her second-floor office at the Carnegie Observatories, Freedman smiles, her soft brown eyes squinting slightly as if to better focus the memory.

"I was 7 years old and we were on vacation at Lake Simcoe in Toronto," says the Canadian native. "AndI remember that the sky was very, very dark and my father told me that thelight from the stars we were looking at had left a long time ago, maybeso long ago that those stars weren't even there anymore. And that just knockedmy breath out."

Freedman, 47, is a soft-spoken anomaly in a field historically dominated by testosterone and braggadocio. But she is a no-nonsense astronomer who has spent 25 years reeling in galaxies with a telescope and transforming their starlight to data.

Templing her fingertips together, she talks about her decade-long search for the Hubble constant, a number that would tell her how fast the universe is moving. That simple, two-digit number had been the quarry of some of the 20th century's greatest astronomers -- until Freedman bagged it in 1999.

"It took many, many years and there were lots of low points," she says. "Youkeep measuring and remeasuring, and problems come up with calibrations,and things go wrong with the telescope, and it seems like you're never,ever going to finish and find the answer."

Many before Freedman certainly had tried, beginning with Edwin Hubble himself, the American astronomer who first demonstrated the existence of galaxies outside the Milky Way (and for whom the Hubble Space Telescope is named). It was Hubble who, in 1929, was the first to observe galaxies rocketing away from each other. His conclusion, that the universe was expanding, was viewed by many as a second Copernican Revolution, further displacing the notion that the Earth was the cozy, static center of a one-galaxy universe.

The question that plagued Hubble and other astronomers for years afterward was how to measure the speed of that expansion. The answer looked simple. Find distant stars and then measure two things, the speed at which they are receding from Earth, and their distance.

Easier said than done. A star's outward speed, known as redshift velocity, can be calculated by observing the wavelength of the star's light (the longer and redder the wavelength, the faster the star is speeding away), but distance is another matter altogether.

In 1838, the distances to the stars nearest Earth were measured for the first time using a simple geometric principle known as triangulation, or parallax.

To understand how parallax works, hold your index finger in front of your face at arm's length and look at it while quickly covering one eye and then the other. Your finger appears to jump back and forth because you are looking at it from two angles. Now hold your finger directly in front of your nose and do the same thing. Your finger seems to jump more dramatically. The same thing happens when looking at stars from two different sides of the globe. The closer the star or planet is to the Earth, the larger the parallax.

For an object far beyond the boundaries of the Milky Way, however, parallax is almost impossible to detect. To measure the distance to extragalactic objects, a different tool is needed: a type of highly luminous star called a standard candle.

Among the best standard candles are a class of stars known as Cepheid variables. Cepheids blink in predictable patterns and with predictable intensity, which allows astronomers to know exactly how bright -- and therefore how distant -- they truly are. Combined with stellar velocity, the distance calculation produces a kind of cosmic speedometer for the expansion of the universe.

Freedman has been studying Cepheids for two decades, and her brain is brimming with facts and figures about the stars. When she talks, she wields those statistics like a mathematical seamstress, using numbers to buckle her sentences together and snap thoughts into place:

"Cepheids had been studiedreally well for seven decades. Our project was to ... look at those Cepheidsandalso to find more of them at larger distances. We looked at 800 in 24 differentgalaxies. A typical galaxy has between 50,000 and 100,000 stars, and wetook 32 different images of each galaxy. ...

"The breakthrough thatthe Hubble telescope provided was by getting up above the Earth's atmosphere,wherewe didn't have the blurring that takes place and where we could survey galaxiesthat were at a distance 10 times as great as we normally could see fromthe ground."

With the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, Freedman knew if she could find Cepheid variables far enough away, she'd have a set of candles by which she could measure how fast the universe was expanding.

THE GANTLET

The daughter of a medical doctor and a concert pianist, Freedman always had an affinity for research. When she arrived at the University of Toronto as an undergraduate, her intention was to study biophysics, but a freshman astronomy course reminded her of those summer nights on the lake with her father -- and her fascination with the stars.

"I wrote term papers first on the solar system and then star formation and later did a senior thesis on galaxy evolution," says Freedman. "Ieven had a teacher tell me he was sorry I left the solar system. So I guessI've been moving farther and farther out as I've gone along."

Freedman continued on at Toronto for her Ph.D. in astronomy, eventually married her graduate adviser, Barry Madore, and then began a postdoctoral fellowship at Carnegie Observatories. Within three years she had become the first woman staff member in the institution's nearly 100-year history.

Founded in 1903 by George Hale, one of the leaders of modern astrophysics, the Carnegie Observatories is a small two-story building nestled among suburban homes on a tree-lined Pasadena street. The wood-paneled hallways are populated less with the living -- all of them appear to be behind closed office doors -- than the dead. Newton, Einstein, Hubble -- the brightest lights of science -- form a kind of gantlet as they peer down from paintings and photos that line the Observatories' corridors.

As soon as Freedman got to Carnegie, she drew up plans for a project involving the Hubble Space Telescope: to determine the speed of the universe by finding the most distant variable stars ever observed. The pitch worked. Freedman's Extra-Galactic Distance Scale project was named the key, or primary, project of Hubble before its launch.

Freedman's euphoria was fleeting. Hubble's first observations brought bad news: Instead of new vistas, there was a cosmic blur. The telescope had a flawed lens, and it would be three years before shuttle astronauts could fix the problem. When they did, Freedman had new hope for the success of her hunt for the Hubble constant.

Her best chance was to find a Cepheid variable in the Virgo cluster, the nearest big cluster of galaxies to the Milky Way. If she could find a variable star in Virgo, Freedman thought, it would be more than twice as far as the most distant Cepheids then known and would make an ideal standard candle for measuring the Hubble constant.

The telescope was trained on the edge of the Virgo cluster at a spectacular spiral galaxy known as M100. With more than 100 billion stars, M100 can be viewed face-on through a telescope, its majestic swirling arms filled with bright blue clusters of hot, newborn stars and winding avenues of dust and gas.

The 30 members of the key project team honed in even closer on M100 -- on one of its outer arms laced with young massive stars. They pored over nearly three dozen exposures taken over a two-month period, searching for flickering Cepheids as if they were diamonds in a sunlit sea. It took the computers a month just to crunch the data and another month for the key project team to read through it all.

Most of the time Freedman woke at 3 a.m., and though she, her husband and their two young children lived just a mile and a half from Carnegie, she would boot up her computer at home, impatient to study new data.

On May 9, 1994 -- her daughter Rachel's birthday -- Freedman saw stars that seemed to have that certain brightness.

"I remember sitting thereand looking at my computer, and it was amazing. Not only were they there,they werebeautiful. They were really high-accuracy, low-scatter, unmistakable Cepheidvariables."

Like a nearsighted person finally putting on eyeglasses, Freedman had found what she was looking for, and by the time she and the team finished studying all the images from the Virgo cluster, they had 20 Cepheid variables -- 20 different standard candles that would help them nail down the Hubble constant.

"It's like when you'rehiking and you're looking at some distant sight, or you're climbing andit just lookslike you're never going to get there and you slog on, and you have nicetimes but you have hard times, too, and then suddenly you're at the topand you did it and it's exhilarating."

THE CONTRADICTION

By the summer of 1999, Freedman and her team had the answer that had eluded astronomers for 70 years. After more than 400 hours of observation time on the Hubble Space Telescope, after the sampling of 800 known and newly discovered Cepheids in two dozen galaxies over a swath of sky millions of light-years across, the Hubble constant was no longer a mystery. They had a number, and it was 72.

The universe, the team concluded, was expanding at a rate of 72 kilometers per second per megaparsec (3.26 million light-years) of distance. This means that two galaxies 3.26 million light-years apart are moving away from each other at an average of 160,000 miles per hour, and galaxies twice as far apart are moving away from each other at twice that speed.

Hubble constant in hand, Freedman's team was able to rewind the film of creation back nearly to the beginning of time. But when they did, they had a problem. The age of the universe appeared to be only 8 to 10 billion years old -- younger than the generally accepted age of 14 billion years, younger even than some of the stars in our own galaxy.

Other astronomers, notably a team led by Allen Sandage, who works just down the hall from Freedman at Carnegie Observatories, had been making different kinds of measurements that fit with an appropriately older universe. But Freedman's team seemed to have the more commanding data -- different methods of measurement, over a wider and more distant range of objects. So where was the error?

In the fall of 2001, two independent teams of astronomers, one led by Saul Perlmutter from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Northern California, and another led by Brian Schmidt of Australia's Mount Stromlo Observatory, found an explanation.

There wasn't a miscalculationof the Hubble constant, the two astronomers concluded. Freedman's team simplydidn't know that another, completely unexpected factor was affecting theexpansion of the universe -- something they simply called "dark energy," aninexplicable force continually working against gravity.

The universe wasn't just expanding, it was expanding at an accelerated rate, not slowing down as was previously thought.

The discovery astonished astronomers, but it helped clarify the age problem that arose with the Hubble constant. The new calculations showed that today's accelerating universe had taken a lot longer than 8 to 10 billion years to expand to its present size -- 14 billion years was back on the map.

There is some bad news, however. If dark energy continues to cause the hyperexpansion of space at its present rate, the fate of the universe appears horrifyingly grim.

Long after the sun has expended all its hydrogen, becoming bigger and hotter and turning the Earth into a cinder, stars and galaxies will speed away from each other. Eventually, vast stretches of black space will push the clusters so far apart that, for all intents and purposes, there will be no more starlit nights.

Galaxies will die, no new stars will be born and, right before the end, only black holes will fill the infinite darkness until even they are consumed, leaving, at the very end of time, pretty much nothing at all.

Said Michael Turner, aworld-renowned cosmologist at the University of Chicago, last year: "Welive in a preposterous universe. ... Dark energy. Who ordered that?"

The presence of dark energywasn't a complete surprise. Ninety-five percent of the universe is a mystery.Only5 percent of space is filled with known matter -- stars, planets and interstellargas and dust. Astronomers believe an additional 30 percent of the universecontains "dark," or unknown, matter -- perhaps subatomic particles thathave yet to be detected. The rest, a whopping 65 percent, is this dark,repulsive energy that works in opposition to gravity and is seemingly acceleratingthe universe into extinction.

THE INFLATION CHALLENGER

The discovery of dark energy had opened a window onto the future, and the view was staggeringly bleak. But could there be a different theory, a way of understanding the universe that told a different story?

It's exactly the kind of question Paul Steinhardt had been waiting his whole life to answer.

The path to the end of the universe, however, started with a question about the beginning.

The 49-year-old Princeton University physicist was an early contributor to inflation theory. First set forth in 1979 by Alan Guth, inflation says that the big bang was set in motion by a fluctuation in an energy field that suddenly and exponentially stretched the size of the universe in the first microsecond of creation.

Steinhardt provided some crucial refinements to inflation theory, for which he shared the prestigious Paul Dirac Medal in physics with Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Neil Turok of Cambridge University in England earlier this year.

Ironically, Steinhardt is now taking dead aim at inflation. He is a rambunctious scientist, a muscular thinker who prefers the discomfort of nagging questions to the boredom of accepted theory.

"There was always a question in my mind that maybe we just haven't been imaginative enough to think of an alternative to inflation," says Steinhardt. "Probablybecause I was looking at inflation at close range, I also could see itsflaws, incompleteness, and so I've always had my eye out for alternatives.I think that's the way as a theorist that you test an idea, to see how difficultit is to come up with an alternative."

Finding an alternative to inflation was no quick fix. It meant coming up with an entirely new, even revolutionary, model for the universe.

Eight months ago he andTurok presented their new theory, dubbed the cyclic model, to the public.For Steinhardtin particular, the alternative had a significant advantage over inflation:It made dark energy the "good guy" -- an infinite but ever-changing forcethat would endlessly expand and contract the universe. There would be nocosmic armageddon. The universe -- or a series of different universes --would go on forever.

"Cosmology has this problemthat we can't go back in time and actually see how things were. Our informationis through a kind of fossil evidence, so it's always an issue whether you'reinterpreting that fossil evidence correctly. So you develop a good story-- the big-bang inflation is a good story, and everything seems to fit init. But how do you know it's the only story?"

Steinhardt began his searchfor a different story in 1998. First he looked at "brane theory," the branchof physics that suggests there are multiple universes, or membranes, existingin multiple dimensions. What if the big bang was simply a collision betweentwo branes? And out there pushing them together was dark energy?

In cyclic theory, instead of inflation and big-bang expansion, universes undergo an endless sequence of cosmic epochs -- bangs and crunches -- that begin when two membranes collide like two weather systems slamming into one another to create two new ones.

"This assumes that time has no beginning," says Steinhardt, "orat least that the big bang is not the beginning; rather that the universehas gone through many stages of expansion and contraction."

The cosmological communityis intrigued by the cyclic model but not altogether convinced. "It has a certain aesthetic attraction," says Arthur Kosowsky, a theoretical cosmologist at Rutgers, "inthat you don't have to worry about what caused the big bang, which in theinflationary model is likely a question for metaphysics rather than science.Right now the cyclic model is very new. It seems likely that variants andsubtleties will continue to be uncovered for a while."

Juan Maldacena, a theoreticalphysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, is more skeptical. "It'sinteresting, but it involves some assumptions that are less well motivatedthan the assumptions of inflationary theory. It is nice to have an alternative,but I would still bet my money on inflation."

WHERE EINSTEIN HESITATED

For Steinhardt, the cyclicmodel serves a dual purpose -- it eliminates the question of what existedbeforethe big bang, and it makes dark energy the force that causes branes to collide. "Expanding and contracting, heating and cooling, being highly dense to being highly under-dense: The best way to produce these features in the cyclic model is by using the physics of dark energy," saysSteinhardt.

Dark energy made its firstappearance as a hypothetical early in the 20th century. When Einstein wasrefininghis general theory of relativity, he was forced to assume the existenceof a mysterious force (which would later be called "dark energy") in order to keep gravity from causing the universe to contract. At the time, Einstein and nearly everyone else believed the universe to be static and essentially unmoving, so the father of relativity factored in what he called a "cosmological constant," representedby the Greek letter lambda, to balance gravity and keep the universe essentiallyunmoving.

Einstein, however, wasnever comfortable with his "fudge factor" and later, when Hubble discoveredthat in fact the universe was expanding, Einstein called the cosmologicalconstant his biggestblunder.

But maybe it wasn't. Perlmutter and Schmidt brought Einstein's fudge factor back into the picture. How else to explain this repulsive, antigravitational force, this acceleration, that is trying to tear the universe apart?

There are two fundamentally different ways of viewing dark energy. Either it is like Einstein's cosmological constant and is woven into the fabric of space, or it is something that inhabits space and is more unpredictable.

Steinhardt believes thelatter -- that dark energy is actually an energy field that interacts withmatterand can change in intensity. He calls this dark energy "quintessence."

Steinhardt considereddifferent names for his particular explanation of dark energy -- other scientistswere independently calling it the "x-factor" and "funny energy." Finally he let his children select "quintessence" from among several of his own suggestions. Coined by Aristotle, quintessence means "fifth element." Theancient Greek philosopher believed that the universe was composed of fourelements (earth, air, fire and water) and a fifth, ephemeral substance,called quintessence, which held the planets and stars in place.

The advantage of quintessence in scientists' calculations is that its energy varies. Early in the universe, when matter dominated, quintessence might have been weak, but with expansion it is now exerting a stronger force.

An energy that varies means the density of the universe is not fixed, nor is its fate. A universe propelled by quintessence is constantly changing, endlessly cycling through periods of expansion and contraction.

Most cosmologists feel forced to choose among three very different futures for the universe:

A future where the universe speeds off into nothingness because it is too light -- that is, there is not enough matter exerting a gravitational pull to hold it together.

A future where the universe collapses back onto itself in a big crunch because there is too much matter exerting a gravitational pull.

A future where the universe expands infinitely but ever more slowly, because its weight is perfectly balanced against expansion.

In Steinhardt's cyclic theory, all three scenarios play a part.

The weight of his "multiverse" isalways changing, as universes bang, crunch and then bang again.

"I think the quintessence model is economical," says Marcelo Gleiser, an astrophysicist at Dartmouth College. "Itgives us a way to show how dark energy can evolve and change. ... Of course,we still need to find the facts that justify it. But so goes theoreticalphysics. Often ideas precede observations."

THE LURE OF DISCOVERING

The fact that Steinhardt is proposing an entirely new way of viewing the universe -- when no one else is really looking for one -- is just part of his nature, he says. Big questions need big answers, and he wants to be in the middle of the battle to find them.

The son of an Army lawyer who died when Steinhardt was only 9, he spent the first few years of his life on the move. After settling in Miami with his mother and siblings, Steinhardt quickly took up math and science.

"I remember my father used to tell me these very dramatic stories of people like Madame Curie and all that and about moments of discovery," says Steinhardt as he sits drinking yet another cup of coffee in his office at Jadwin Hall at Princeton. "Andever since then, I thought that was just a wonderful thing, to be the firstperson to know something, which is the greatest fun in doing science --that moment when you think you know something important that no one elseknows."

Steinhardt studied particle physics as an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology and as a graduate student at Harvard University. It was at Harvard that Steinhardt, as a physics post-doc, happened to attend a weekly visitor's lecture in which Guth was the guest speaker, talking about inflation.

"That's really how I got into cosmology," says Steinhardt. "AndI always thought that his talk was the most exciting and the most depressingtalk I ever went to. Ninety percent of it was about how inflation solvedso many questions about the universe, and then the last 10 percent was how,unfortunately, once inflation takes hold it never ends."

Laughing, Steinhardt says: "Ithought, well, I'll spend a few weeks and try to see if I can find a wayaround thisproblem."

It was more like a year and a half, and when he did find a solution, he was hooked on cosmology. What better place than the universe to seek out new discoveries and find answers to age-old questions?

"Cyclic theory is an attemptat a better theory. ... My goal is to explain as much data, with as powerfula theory, as possible. ... That's what drives me."

The attraction of quintessence for the nonscientist is its hopefulness. If dark energy is a cosmological constant, then it will never change and the universe will expand forever until all that is left is a vacuum. But if dark energy is quintessence or something like it, then the universe could one day decelerate or contract and be spared its gloomy fate.

"Quintessence is just a much more exciting and appealing interpretation of what the dark energy is," Steinhardt says. "It'ssomething really, really important. It's not just important for the future,it's important for the whole story."

Steinhardt doesn't know yet how to measure quintessence.

More than most, however, he understands that science is a cerebral ballet of leaps between the known and unknown, between truth and possibility, and that it is the capacity for wonder that inspires the dance.

"Thought is a flash between two long nights," wrote 19th-century mathematician Henri Poincaré, "butthis flash is everything."

For Steinhardt, it is thought that creates the story of the universe, a story that astronomer Wendy Freedman continues to read in the stars. The numbers at the heart of the story are almost within reach.

Like all scientists, Steinhardt and Freedman are seekers. Curiosity is stitched into their genes, and the search for ultimate answers is fueled by their uncertainty.

"The goal is to get these secrets out of nature," says Steinhardt. "Whateverit takes."

Stories copyright 2002 The Star-Ledger. Reprinted with permission.