You may hear revelations from new books that purport to tell the “real story” about Jesus, opinions from friends who have discovered a “secret” on the Web about the son of God, and airtight arguments from co-workers who can prove he never existed.
Beware of most of these revelations; many are based on pure speculation and wishful thinking. Much of what we know about Jesus has been known for the last 2,000 years.
Still, even for devout Christian there are surprises to be found hidden within the Gospels, and thanks to advances in historical research and archaeological discoveries, more is known about his life and times.
With that in mind, here are five things you probably didn’t know about Jesus.
1.) Jesus came from a nowhere little town.
Nearly all modern-day archaeologists agree the town of Nazareth had only 200 to 400 people. Jesus’ hometown is mentioned nowhere in either the Old Testament or the Talmud, which notes dozens of other towns in the area.
In fact, in the New Testament it is literally a joke.
In the Gospel of John, when a man named Nathanael hears the messiah is “Jesus of Nazareth,” he asks, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” He’s dissing Jesus’ crummy backwater town.
2.) Jesus probably didn’t know everything.
This is a thorny theological question. If Jesus is divine, wouldn’t he know all things? (Indeed, on several occasions Jesus predicts his death and resurrection.)
On the other hand, if he had a human consciousness, he needed to be taught something before he could know it. The Gospel of Luke says that when Jesus was a young man he “progressed” in wisdom. That means he learned things. (Otherwise how would he “progress”?)
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus initially refuses to heal the daughter of a non-Jewish woman, saying rather sharply, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
But when she replies that even the dogs get the crumbs from the table, Jesus softens, and he heals her daughter. He seems to be learning that his ministry extends beyond the Jewish people.
3.) Jesus was tough.
From age 12 to 30, Jesus worked in Nazareth as a carpenter. “Is not this the carpenter?” say the astonished crowds when he begins to preach.
The word used for Jesus’ profession in the original Greek is tekton. The traditional translation is “carpenter.” But most contemporary scholars say it’s more likely a general craftsman; some even translate it as “day laborer.”
A tekton would have made doors, tables, lamp stands and plows. But he probably also built stone walls and helped with house construction.
It was tough work that meant lugging tools, wood and stones all over Galilee. Jesus doesn’t simply stride onto the world stage after having dreamily examined a piece of wood when the mood suited him. For 18 years, he worked—and worked hard.
4.) Jesus needed “me time.”
The Gospels frequently speak of Jesus’ need to “withdraw” from the crowds, and even his disciples.
Today by the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus carried out much of his ministry, you can see how close the towns were, and how natural it would have been for the enthusiastic crowds to “press” in on him, as the Gospels describe.
There’s even a cave on the shoreline, not far from Capernaum, his base of operations, where he may have prayed.
It’s called the “Eremos Cave,” from the word for “desolate” or “solitary,” from which we get the word “hermit.” Even though Jesus was the son of God, he needed time alone in prayer with the father.
5.) Jesus didn’t want to die.
As he approaches his death, and prays hard in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus says, “Remove this cup.” It’s a blunt prayer addressed to the father, whom he affectionately calls Abba. He doesn’t want to die.
Unlike the way some Christians portray Jesus as courting death, and even desiring it, like any human being, the idea of death is terrifying. “My soul is sorrowful even unto death,” he says.
In other words, “I’m so sad that it feels like I’m going to die.” But once Jesus realizes that this is somehow the will of the father, he assents to death, even on a cross.
It’s natural to want to know as much as we can about Jesus; that’s one reason I wrote my new book. But beware of the more outlandish claims about the son of God (he fathered children, he was married to Mary Magdalene, he spent time in India and so on.)
Many of these claims tend to project our own desires on a man who will always remain somewhat elusive, hard to fully understand and impossible to pin down.
In the end, as theologians like to say, Jesus is not so much a problem to be solved as a mystery to be pondered.
But a new study has shown that playing the computer game Tetris within hours of experiencing trauma can prevent those feelings from taking over your mind.
PTSD occurs when intrusive memories linked to fear from a traumatic event become consolidated in a person’s mind by them visualizing the event in a loop until it becomes locked in their brain.
Competing with the visualization, such as with a game like Tetris, can block that consolidation form happening.
“An intrusive memory is a visual memory of a traumatic event,” said Emily Holmes, Professor of Psychology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, whose team led the study. “Tetris also requires imagination and vision. Your brain can’t do two things at once, so this interrupts.”
Tetris is a simple, visual and addictive computer game in which the goal is to line up falling shapes to form rows that then disappear when aligned. As rows disappear, more shapes fall and the longer the game lasts, the higher the score.
The goal in Tetris is to line up falling shapes to form rows that disappear when aligned.
Holmes hopes that use of these simple and early strategies with patients could help prevent the onset of PTSD. The current standard treatment doesn’t begin until after people develop the condition.
Researchers tested the game on 71 patients in a UK emergency room who were seeking care after a motor accident. Half of them received standard care for their injuries, while the other half received a psychological intervention within six hours of their accident in which they were asked to recall their trauma, practice playing Tetris and then given the game to play on their own.
The patients were then monitored for one week, during which time they tracked how often they had memories, or flashbacks, relating to their accident. The people who has played Tetris reported 62% less memories on average over the week.
“After two days they had gone down to pretty much zero,” Holmes told CNN.
Researchers have long believed that intervening early — within hours or days of the event — could stop the fearful memories from developing in the brain. This is the first study using something as simple as a computer game.
Holmes has been researching the use of Tetris in this way for more than a decade in the lab and this proof-of-concept study is the first time she has experimented with patients.
The research remains in it’s early stages, she stresses. What we need to do is a larger study,” said Holmes who also hopes to monitor the effectiveness of her approach over a longer period of time, up to six months.
The need for more insight using a larger cohort of people was raised by consultant Mark Salter from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, as well as the need to test options other than Tetris. “The study is small … and not everyone plays Tetris or is computer literate,” he told CNN. He added that there is also the challenge of “getting someone to participate when they’ve just seen something terrifying.”
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But he was intrigued by the findings and the ability of this prevention measure to be given soon after someone experiences a trauma. “What’s exciting about this is that it happens quickly,” he said. “It allows an immediacy to the intervention.”
Salter said the approach needs to include other options that are more universally acceptable since “it’s not just Tetris that does this.”
Holmes said that anything visual and engaging could have a similar effect. But, he added, other engrossing activities using other parts of the brain, such as number or word activities, may not work, or make things worse.
America’s biggest oil company told the White House it believes the Paris agreement is an “effective framework for addressing the risks of climate change” and the U.S. should remain a party to it.
Exxon(XOM) said the country is “well positioned to compete” under the terms of the Paris deal, which was reached in late 2015 with the goal of slowing global warming. President Obama hailed the agreement as “the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.”
The Exxon letter was sent to the White House on March 22, just days before Trump took a massive swipe at environmental regulations implemented under Obama. The administration had asked Exxon for its views on the Paris accord.
Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to undo the Clean Power Plan, which aimed to slash carbon emissions by coal plans and other power utilities.
Before taking office, Trump called climate change a “hoax” and blasted the Paris COP21 agreement as a “bad deal” for the U.S.
However, after winning the election Trump told The New York Times he has an “open mind” about the Paris agreement and said he believes clean air and “crystal clear water” are important.
But in 2007 Exxon admitted publicly that climate change poses risks and said it’s responsible to begin working on ways to reduce emissions.
Exxon has also been a consistent public supporter of the Paris agreement.
“We welcomed the Paris Agreement when it was announced in December 2015, and again when it came into force in November 2016. We have reiterated our support on several occasions,” Peter Trelenberg, Exxon’s environmental policy and planning manager, wrote to the White House.
Last month Exxon CEO Darren Woods, who replaced Rex Tillerson when he left to become Trump’s secretary of state, wrote a blog post saying the company is “encouraged” that the Paris agreement creates a framework for “all countries” to address rising emissions.
Exxon noted in its letter to the White House that unlike the Kyoto Agreement, the Paris deal is the first major international accord to feature pledges from developed nations like the U.S. and developing ones like China. Exxon pointed out that China is the world’s leading greenhouse gas emitted and India is likely to pass the U.S. as No. 2 before mid-century.
Even though Trump is a climate change skeptic, his secretary of state and leading emissary on climate issues, does not appear to be one.
During his confirmation hearing in January, Tillerson said he came to the conclusion years ago that “the risk of climate change does exist and the consequences could be serious enough that action should be taken.”
But Tillerson ducked allegations that Exxon misled the public on climate change. He refused to answer repeated questions during the hearing about whether the company ignored internal research going back to the 1970s on the impact of burning fossil fuels.
Earlier this month it emerged that Tillerson allegedly used the pseudonym “Wayne Tracker” to send emails related to climate change while serving as CEO of Exxon.
— CNNMoney’s Julia Horowitz contributed to this report.
CNNMoney (New York)First published March 29, 2017: 1:50 PM ET
In the past, my family and friends would’ve typically described me as pleasant but hurried. My baseline restlessness and edginess, however, have now nearly vanished.
Without difficulty, I have sustained attention when my young children spend time with me. Instead of constant surveillance of my phone, there is an ability to quickly hyper-focus on the task is at hand and a corresponding joy of living in a distraction-less world.
This change seems to have started the end of last year, after I spent a morning meditating with the Dalai Lama.
First off: Yes, I do feel a little ridiculous writing a line like that, and I didn’t feel worthy of his invitation at the time. Even though I meditate, I’ve never been sure whether I was using proper technique or whether there was an acceptable way to meditate in the presence of His Holiness.
If he was looking forward to a good meditation partner, I worried he was unlikely to find it in me. Even my posture is terrible when sitting cross-legged on the floor. My back starts to hurt, followed by my knees. Thus, my breathing, which is supposed to drive my focus, sounds raspy and uneven. All this makes my mind race instead of slowing down and calming.
Just thinking about meditating with His Holiness was making me anxious.
Nevertheless, who says “no” to a chance to meditate with the Dalai Lama? I agreed to join him early the next morning at his private residence.
A practice that begins at 3 a.m.
At 81 years, old, the Dalai Lama keeps a very active schedule. I met him in Mundgod, India, at the Drepung Monastery, where he was overseeing a symposium bridging Buddhism and science.
The monastery itself is a dazzling bejeweled structure built 600 years ago. Inside, there are enormous golden Buddhas standing next to ornate walls. The discussion hall itself is grand but warm, with doors and windows open to the hot South Indian sun.
For three days, his Holiness moderated sessions on weighty metaphysical topics such as the criteria for valid reasoning, the fundamental constituents of the universe, origins of life and the subjective experience of the mind.
It was fascinating and mind-bending — but also mentally exhausting. It was difficult to stay awake, let alone keep up with the rapid-fire debate between the Buddhists and the scientists. Yet his Holiness was mentally engaged and inquisitive throughout, even more remarkable given more than half the comments were being translated for him.
The Dalai Lama typically wakes about 2:40 a.m. and starts his daily meditation routine at 3 a.m., even as most of his staff is still snoozing.
This was the backdrop when one of his senior staff members picked me up outside the monastery early one morning. We drove in a three-car convoy to the gates outside his private residence.
From there, several more staff members escorted us to a small conference room where his security detail was slowly waking and drinking their morning tea. Finally, his chief of staff walked me just outside the personal quarters of the Dalai Lama.
Meditating is hard for him, too
There were a few minor instructions before we entered. Eye contact is not a problem, and shaking hands is acceptable if you use two hands, not just one. Try not to turn your back to him when leaving the room, and instead walk backward, as much as possible facing him. When sitting cross-legged on the floor, don’t point your feet at the Dalai Lama. And the correct address is “your holiness.”
Shortly after, the doors opened, and I nervously walked into a very modest room where the Dalai Lama was sitting on a raised platform, already deep in meditation. I slipped off my shoes, sat cross-legged at a slight angle on the floor to avoid my toes being pointed in his direction, closed my eyes and started to focus on my breathing.
All my meditation insecurities immediately started to kick in. After a few minutes, I heard his deep, distinctive baritone voice: “Any questions?”
I looked up and saw his smiling face, starting to break into his characteristic head-bobbing laugh.
“This is hard for me,” I said.
“Me, too!” he exclaimed. “After doing daily for 60 years, it is still hard.”
It was at once surprising and reassuring to hear him say this. The Dalai Lama, Buddhist monk and spiritual leader of Tibet, also has trouble meditating.
“I think you will like analytical meditation,” he told me. Instead of focusing on a chosen object, as in single-point meditation, he suggested I think about a problem I was trying to solve, a topic I may have read about recently or one of the philosophical areas from the earlier sessions.
He wanted me to separate the problem or issue from everything else by placing it in a large, clear bubble. With my eyes closed, I thought of something nagging at me — something I couldn’t quite solve. As I placed the physical embodiment of this problem into the bubble, several things started to happen very naturally.
The problem was now directly in front of me, floating weightlessly. In my mind, I could rotate it, spin it or flip it upside-down. It was an exercise to develop hyper-focus.
Less intuitively, as the bubble was rising, it was also disentangling itself from any other attachments, such as subjective emotional considerations. I could visualize it, as the problem isolated itself, and came into a clear-eyed view.
Too often, we allow unrelated emotional factors to blur the elegant and practical solutions right in front of us. It can be dispiriting and frustrating. Through analytical meditation, His Holiness told me, we can use logic and reason to more clearly identify the question at hand, separate it from irrelevant considerations, erase doubt and brightly illuminate the answers. It was simple and sensible. Most important, for me — it worked.
Meditation for skeptics
As a neuroscientist, I never expected that a Buddhist monk, even the Dalai Lama, would teach me how to better incorporate deduction and critical thinking to my life — but that is what happened.
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It changed me. And I am better for it. I practice analytical meditation every day, usually early in the morning. The first two minutes are still the hardest, as I create my thought bubble and let it float above me. After that, I reach what can best be described as a “flow” state, in which 20 to 30 minutes pass easily.
I am more convinced than ever that even the most ardent skeptics could find success with analytical meditation.
Over the holidays, I spent as much time as possible relaying the Dalai Lama’s teachings to my family and friends and teaching them basic principles of analytical meditation. This was the gift I most wanted to share with them. And now with you.
America’s biggest oil company told the White House it believes the Paris agreement is an “effective framework for addressing the risks of climate change” and the U.S. should remain a party to it.
Exxon(XOM) said the country is “well positioned to compete” under the terms of the Paris deal, which was reached in late 2015 with the goal of slowing global warming. President Obama hailed the agreement as “the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.”
The Exxon letter was sent to the White House on March 22, just days before Trump took a massive swipe at environmental regulations implemented under Obama. The administration had asked Exxon for its views on the Paris accord.
Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to undo the Clean Power Plan, which aimed to slash carbon emissions by coal plans and other power utilities.
Before taking office, Trump called climate change a “hoax” and blasted the Paris COP21 agreement as a “bad deal” for the U.S.
However, after winning the election Trump told The New York Times he has an “open mind” about the Paris agreement and said he believes clean air and “crystal clear water” are important.
But in 2007 Exxon admitted publicly that climate change poses risks and said it’s responsible to begin working on ways to reduce emissions.
Exxon has also been a consistent public supporter of the Paris agreement.
“We welcomed the Paris Agreement when it was announced in December 2015, and again when it came into force in November 2016. We have reiterated our support on several occasions,” Peter Trelenberg, Exxon’s environmental policy and planning manager, wrote to the White House.
Last month Exxon CEO Darren Woods, who replaced Rex Tillerson when he left to become Trump’s secretary of state, wrote a blog post saying the company is “encouraged” that the Paris agreement creates a framework for “all countries” to address rising emissions.
Exxon noted in its letter to the White House that unlike the Kyoto Agreement, the Paris deal is the first major international accord to feature pledges from developed nations like the U.S. and developing ones like China. Exxon pointed out that China is the world’s leading greenhouse gas emitted and India is likely to pass the U.S. as No. 2 before mid-century.
Even though Trump is a climate change skeptic, his secretary of state and leading emissary on climate issues, does not appear to be one.
During his confirmation hearing in January, Tillerson said he came to the conclusion years ago that “the risk of climate change does exist and the consequences could be serious enough that action should be taken.”
But Tillerson ducked allegations that Exxon misled the public on climate change. He refused to answer repeated questions during the hearing about whether the company ignored internal research going back to the 1970s on the impact of burning fossil fuels.
Earlier this month it emerged that Tillerson allegedly used the pseudonym “Wayne Tracker” to send emails related to climate change while serving as CEO of Exxon.
— CNNMoney’s Julia Horowitz contributed to this report.
CNNMoney (New York)First published March 29, 2017: 1:50 PM ET
You may hear revelations from new books that purport to tell the “real story” about Jesus, opinions from friends who have discovered a “secret” on the Web about the son of God, and airtight arguments from co-workers who can prove he never existed.
Beware of most of these revelations; many are based on pure speculation and wishful thinking. Much of what we know about Jesus has been known for the last 2,000 years.
Still, even for devout Christian there are surprises to be found hidden within the Gospels, and thanks to advances in historical research and archaeological discoveries, more is known about his life and times.
With that in mind, here are five things you probably didn’t know about Jesus.
1.) Jesus came from a nowhere little town.
Nearly all modern-day archaeologists agree the town of Nazareth had only 200 to 400 people. Jesus’ hometown is mentioned nowhere in either the Old Testament or the Talmud, which notes dozens of other towns in the area.
In fact, in the New Testament it is literally a joke.
In the Gospel of John, when a man named Nathanael hears the messiah is “Jesus of Nazareth,” he asks, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” He’s dissing Jesus’ crummy backwater town.
2.) Jesus probably didn’t know everything.
This is a thorny theological question. If Jesus is divine, wouldn’t he know all things? (Indeed, on several occasions Jesus predicts his death and resurrection.)
On the other hand, if he had a human consciousness, he needed to be taught something before he could know it. The Gospel of Luke says that when Jesus was a young man he “progressed” in wisdom. That means he learned things. (Otherwise how would he “progress”?)
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus initially refuses to heal the daughter of a non-Jewish woman, saying rather sharply, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
But when she replies that even the dogs get the crumbs from the table, Jesus softens, and he heals her daughter. He seems to be learning that his ministry extends beyond the Jewish people.
3.) Jesus was tough.
From age 12 to 30, Jesus worked in Nazareth as a carpenter. “Is not this the carpenter?” say the astonished crowds when he begins to preach.
The word used for Jesus’ profession in the original Greek is tekton. The traditional translation is “carpenter.” But most contemporary scholars say it’s more likely a general craftsman; some even translate it as “day laborer.”
A tekton would have made doors, tables, lamp stands and plows. But he probably also built stone walls and helped with house construction.
It was tough work that meant lugging tools, wood and stones all over Galilee. Jesus doesn’t simply stride onto the world stage after having dreamily examined a piece of wood when the mood suited him. For 18 years, he worked—and worked hard.
4.) Jesus needed “me time.”
The Gospels frequently speak of Jesus’ need to “withdraw” from the crowds, and even his disciples.
Today by the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus carried out much of his ministry, you can see how close the towns were, and how natural it would have been for the enthusiastic crowds to “press” in on him, as the Gospels describe.
There’s even a cave on the shoreline, not far from Capernaum, his base of operations, where he may have prayed.
It’s called the “Eremos Cave,” from the word for “desolate” or “solitary,” from which we get the word “hermit.” Even though Jesus was the son of God, he needed time alone in prayer with the father.
5.) Jesus didn’t want to die.
As he approaches his death, and prays hard in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus says, “Remove this cup.” It’s a blunt prayer addressed to the father, whom he affectionately calls Abba. He doesn’t want to die.
Unlike the way some Christians portray Jesus as courting death, and even desiring it, like any human being, the idea of death is terrifying. “My soul is sorrowful even unto death,” he says.
In other words, “I’m so sad that it feels like I’m going to die.” But once Jesus realizes that this is somehow the will of the father, he assents to death, even on a cross.
It’s natural to want to know as much as we can about Jesus; that’s one reason I wrote my new book. But beware of the more outlandish claims about the son of God (he fathered children, he was married to Mary Magdalene, he spent time in India and so on.)
Many of these claims tend to project our own desires on a man who will always remain somewhat elusive, hard to fully understand and impossible to pin down.
In the end, as theologians like to say, Jesus is not so much a problem to be solved as a mystery to be pondered.
“Is that not treason, when you work against your own government?” Huckabee said.
“I don’t understand why there isn’t a great outrage over the leaking of information out of the highest levels of US intelligence,” he said.
“I don’t understand why there isn’t a great outrage over the leaking of information out of the highest levels of US intelligence,” Huckabee, whose daughter is an aide to President Donald Trump, told radio host Laura Ingraham.
Huckabee continued, “This is of grave concern, because if people who are supposed to be guarding our secrets are letting them go — Laura, I hate to use this word, but I don’t know what else to use — is that not treason? Is that not treason, when you work against your own government?”
The former governor also criticized Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham for comparing House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes to Inspector Clouseau from the Pink Panther.
“I’m very disappointed in Lindsey,” Huckabee said. “I sometimes wonder what uniform he puts on each morning when goes out to the field to play, and I’m not just talking about the partisan uniform.”
“But I think to bring that kind of criticism and to call the chairman of the House Intel Committee — who is a person of integrity — to call him Inspector Clouseau, to use those kind of terms basically to diminish him, it’s very unfortunate, it’s demeaning, and frankly it just makes no sense,” Huckabee added. “He ought to be calling Devin Nunes and saying, ‘Congressman what do you have? Tell me what you know that you can tell me about, because we need to find out if there’s something going on here that is nefarious.'”
During a check-up, on his 43rd birthday, his doctor named summertime flu the most likely culprit.
Then the same thing happened again, and it settled into a disturbing pattern: midweek chills and an escalating fever that would break on Sunday. By Monday, Chris would feel fine, only to have the sequence repeat itself.
He joked about it with colleagues at T-Mobile, where he works in software development, “Well, I hope it’s not cancer!”
On alternating weekends from May to October, Chris would volunteer as a back country ranger for the US Forest Service — a physically demanding role that involves patrolling Washington’s Cascade Mountain forests and hiking along high-altitude trails with a backpack that can weigh up to 32 kilograms.
But now, even at sea level, he was getting winded just walking his two dogs around the block. What was going on?
A medical appointment revealed a heart murmur and suspicions of endocarditis, an infection of the heart’s inner lining. The scare triggered another series of tests that led Chris and his husband, Bill Sechter, to Emergency Room 4 at the University of Washington Medical Center.
A whiteboard checklist documented his Saturday morning: insertion of a large-bore IV as a potential conduit for antibiotics, a round of blood draws, and discussions with the ER doctor.
Then the phone rang and the nurse answered, listened and responded to multiple questions in quick succession: “Yes. Yes. Oh, OK. OK. Yeah.” He excused himself from the room and soon returned in a “full hazmat suit”, as Chris describes it. Yellow.
“And that’s when we were like, ‘Oh s***, it’s on. Something is seriously bad.'”
Chris learned that his level of infection-fighting neutrophil cells, normally churned out by the bone marrow, had fallen so low that his defenses were in tatters. He was also severely anemic, with roughly half the normal amount of red blood cells in his blood.
It wasn’t endocarditis. And when one of his doctors performed a blood smear, she saw something on the microscope slide that shouldn’t be there: blasts.
These leukemic cells, stuck in adolescence, were the harbingers of the coming horde that had so astonished 19th-century surgeons.
The doctor apologetically broke the news and Chris and his sister dissolved into tears. In an emotional Facebook post later that day, he attached a picture of himself in a hospital gown and pink face mask and wrote: “this avowed agnostic could actually go for your good juju / positive thoughts or even your (gasp) prayers.”
More tests, including a bone marrow biopsy of his pelvic bone, painted an increasingly disturbing picture. He had acute myeloid leukaemia, a fast-progressing cancer.
The biopsy suggested that an astonishing 80 per cent of his bone marrow cells were cancerous. Strike one.
Chris Lihosit was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, a fast-progressing cancer, in 2015.
Other results suggested that chemotherapy wouldn’t be as effective on his form of leukemia. Strike two.
And genetic tests put him in the unfavorable risk category by revealing that his cancer cells carried only one copy of chromosome 21, a rare anomaly associated with “dismal” outcomes, according to recent studies. Strike three.
Chris needed to start chemotherapy immediately.
But first, he had his sperm banked. Then, with family and a close friend at his side, he celebrated his impending treatment with prime rib and cheap champagne smuggled into his hospital room.
Over three days, he received multiple doses of the anticancer drugs cladribine, cytarabine and mitoxantrone, the last a dark blue concoction often dubbed “Blue Thunder.” The drug turned his urine a shade he describes as “Seahawks green” in honor of Seattle’s football team. Other patients have had the whites of their eyes temporarily turn blue.
On the third night of his drug infusion, a sudden back pain grew into an intense pressure in his chest that felt like he was being stabbed. A heart attack? An emergency CAT scan instead revealed two newly formed blood clots: one in his right leg and another in his right lung — not uncommon consequences of chemotherapy.
Over the next six months, Chris would need transfusions of blood-clotting platelets whenever his level of them dipped too low, and daily injections of a blood-thinning drug whenever it rose too high.
Thirteen days after being admitted into the hospital, he posted a more hopeful Facebook entry: “And I’m finally going home! Now the real adventure begins.”
New hope
Based on his leukemia classification, Chris was braced for multiple rounds of chemotherapy. He and his husband were overjoyed when a second bone marrow biopsy suggested that the leukemia had become undetectable after only a single round.
Because of his high-risk classification, however, Chris’s doctors said that the cancer was likely to return without a bone marrow transplant.
But Chris discovered that he had inherited an extremely rare set of cell-identifying protein tags. Only one bone marrow donor on the worldwide registry matched his genetic tags, and that person was unable to donate.
An umbilical cord blood transplant, Chris and his doctors agreed, was his best hope.
Like bone marrow, cord blood is unusually rich in hematopoietic stem cells — which can give rise to every type of blood cell — and their more developed descendants, progenitor cells, which are more limited in what they can become. But, unlike bone marrow, cord blood can be collected in advance and stored for decades in liquid nitrogen.
First, Chris would need to spend another five days in the hospital for a standard follow-up round of chemotherapy to pick off any hidden cancer cells. Chris marked the occasion with a Facebook post of himself in a grey felt Viking helmet and attached braids. “Round 2… And FIGHT!” This time, the chemo went off without a hitch.
He was a familiar face at the medical center, though, with three additional hospitalizations: twice for bacteremia, a bacterial blood infection marked by high fevers, and once so doctors could tame an allergic reaction to a transfusion of platelets, which always reminded Chris of chicken broth.
He had to steel himself again on Christmas Eve for the arrival of the “big guns”: two days of conditioning chemotherapy, headlined by a derivative of mustard gas. Its name is cyclophosphamide, and it works by sabotaging the machinery that copies DNA in rapidly dividing cells. As it does this, it breaks down to form toxic chemicals, including a pungent one called acrolein, which can destroy the lining of the bladder.
To neutralize its effects, patients must take another drug, called mesna, and drink plenty of water.
After a day of rest, Chris began a radiation therapy regimen so intense that it would have killed him if delivered in a single dose. Instead, his radiologists used a particle accelerator to fire X-rays at him in multiple bursts during morning and evening sessions over four days.
“You basically get into a tanning booth made out of clear Plexiglas,” he said.
Wearing nothing but a paper gown, Chris had to stay completely still behind two metal shielding blocks, each the size of a brick, positioned to protect his lungs from irreversible radiation-induced scarring. He did get a mild tan, he says, along with damaged skin that still resembles crepe paper.
Another absurdity still makes him laugh: while he requested punk rock for one of the sessions, he was instead blasted with the tune of Prince’s ‘Erotic City’.
When he finished the final round of total body irradiation on 30 December, the radiology team gathered for a final tribute and let Chris hit a small ceremonial gong.
Help from newborns
The morning of New Year’s Eve, Chris wrote on Facebook, “I’m as nervous as an expectant father!” An hour and a half later, he marked the delivery of his “zero birthday” with a small chocolate cake and a decorative “0” candle: the day when his own bone marrow cells, erased by radiation and chemotherapy, were replaced by roughly four tablespoons of a life-granting elixir from the cord blood of two baby girls.
Even with some of the best help that medicine can offer, transplant recipients face a daunting few weeks without functional bone marrow when nearly anything can kill them.
Chris and Bill have nicknamed the donors Amelia and Olivia based on their blood types, A-negative and O-positive. In a later post, Chris marveled at the new arrivals reseeding his bone marrow: “I use more vanilla flavoring creamer in my coffee than the volume of cells that are rebuilding my entire blood and immune system.”
Four hours after the initial infusions, he received his protective bridge of blood-forming stem cells, collected and expanded from the cord blood of a third baby, a boy he and Bill have nicknamed Eddie.
Less than three weeks after the transplant, Chris’s neutrophils had fully engrafted and genetic tests suggested that Amelia had decisively won the fight to form his new blood and bone marrow. He progressed so rapidly, in fact, that he had to stay in the hospital for two days after he was fit to leave, so that Bill could finish preparing the apartment.
28 January: discharge day. As his family packed up his hospital room, Chris was taking a shower when a wall of exhaustion hit him. He could no longer stand or even dry himself off and sat dripping on the shower bench until Bill heard his calls for help.
He had survived, but life had fundamentally changed.
At home, every surface had to be disinfected daily with a bleach solution. At first, Chris couldn’t walk 100 feet down the apartment hallway without leaning on his brother. Until he hit the 100-day milestone after his transplant, the end of the most vulnerable period for recipients, he returned to the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance every other day for blood tests and checkups.
On the 97th day, Chris and his family celebrated a hard-fought victory when he was officially declared cancer-free: a leukemia survivor.
Cord blood today
Despite dozens of studies documenting its curative powers, cord blood is saved after only 5 per cent of all US births. The rest is simply thrown away.
Michael Boo, chief strategy officer for the National Marrow Donor Program, estimates that only one in ten of those retained units passes the required screening tests and has enough volume to merit long-term storage.
Cord blood is also notoriously expensive, ranging from $22,000 to $45,000 per unit. Due to the relatively low demand from doctors, Boo says, public banks — at least in the US — are collecting as much as they can afford to keep. Beyond persuading new parents to donate, then, lowering the cost of cord blood transplants may depend upon persuading more doctors to use the cells and more insurers to cover them.
One potential use has attracted the avid interest of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services. As part of Project BioShield, the federal agency has been on the lookout for medical interventions that could treat acute radiation syndrome after a dirty bomb or nuclear disaster.
Keeping people alive
Cord blood transplants in adults, still an option of last resort in the early 2000s, nearly slammed to a halt over the quandary of how to keep patients alive until their new bone marrow cells could kick in.
Some researchers reasoned that they could boost the transplant volume by giving adults two cord blood units instead of one. John Wagner and colleagues at the University of Minnesota performed the first double transplant in 2000, using cells from two infant donors.
The tactic dramatically reduced the rate of graft failure, in which the recipient’s body rejects the new cells. But it barely changed the time needed to regenerate the bone marrow, and some critics have questioned whether a double cord blood transplant offers any significant benefits.
Wagner says his research suggested that transplanting enough blood-forming cells was necessary − but likely not sufficient − for better results. Improved patient survival, in fact, seemed to depend more upon a revised roster of drugs given pre-transplant.
Blood is extracted from an Umbilical cord at UCLH in London.
To their surprise, researchers also discovered that the donors in a double cord blood transplant seem to battle for dominance, a curious “graft-versus-graft” phenomenon that almost always results in the victor dominating the recipient’s new bone marrow and blood cells.
Filippo Milano, associate director of the Cord Blood Program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, compares it to a pivotal scene in the 1986 movie Highlander, when the antagonist exclaims, “There can be only one!”
On a sunny morning nearly a year after Chris’s transplant, he and I meet the Italian-born doctor in his lab so he can greet one of his star patients and explain the science behind the therapy that saved Chris’s life. Milano is passionate about coaching soccer and cooking. On the side, he jokes, he conducts research on cord blood transplants.
Upon his arrival to “The Hutch” in 2009, Milano teamed up with Colleen Delaney, founder and director of the Cord Blood Program, to test and refine a treatment strategy that may yet prove a better option than a bone marrow transplant for people with leukemia who are at high risk of relapsing.
Based on collaborations and discussions with other experts in the field, Delaney pioneered a method to minimize the risk of infection and bleeding after a cord blood transplant by reducing the time needed for the new blood cells to kick in. The strategy relies on what she and Milano call an “expanded” blood unit.
Starting with an extra batch of cord blood, they separate out the minuscule fraction of blood-forming stem cells and their early descendants and expand that population in the lab.
The hundreds of millions — even billions — of resulting stem and progenitor cells can jump start the generation of protective blood cells in the recipient. When infused along with a more traditional transplant, they can act like a temporary bridge until the replacement bone marrow takes over. “The net gain was that you didn’t have those very prolonged periods of recovery,” Wagner said.
Blood extracted from an umbilical cord and placenta by a member of the Cord Bank Team at NHS Blood and Transplant.
One crucial component, Delaney discovered, is a protein called Notch ligand.
When added to the blood-forming stem cells, Notch ligand lets them divide quickly in the lab but temporarily pauses their development by preventing them from maturing into the normal range of cell types. Critically, they never give rise to T or B immune cells, which would seek out and destroy any perceived threats lacking the proper “self” ID tags.
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Putting a donor’s T cells into an unmatched recipient, Delaney says, would trigger fatal graft-versus-host disease. “That’s the key: we get rid of all those bad parts of the immune system that need to be matched or they can kill you.”
The “bridge of recovery” lasts only so long before the full contingents of other donor cells begin attacking and dismantling it. But, with no cells checking IDs initially, the early flood of blood-forming stem cells need not be matched to the recipient at all, meaning that the “expanded” cord blood unit could be created well ahead of time and used whenever needed as a universal donor.
Other researchers are working on strategies toward the same end, and Mary Laughlin describes the overall progress as “very exciting”.
Delaney’s work, she says, “is very important, saving lives and improving the tolerability of these transplants and the success of these transplants”.
This is an edited extract from an article first published by Wellcome on Mosaic. It is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
I recognized the dress immediately. It had been his older sister’s — cast away, no doubt, in a donation bag that was never donated.
I didn’t race outside, tear the dress off and proffer admonishments. I watched, instead, as his makeshift wand of willow danced through the air — a little princess going from flower bed to flower bed casting enchantments over the marigolds.
I let our child continue playing undisturbed, but before I returned to my soup, I did what we all do when we see something adorable: I grabbed my phone and snapped a photo.
Later that night, my husband and I went to dinner with another couple we didn’t know well. As a fellow mom will do, the wife asked to see photos of our children, so I took out my phone and began swiping through recent family shots.
“Aren’t their children adorable?” she exclaimed, grabbing the phone out of my hands and showing photos to her husband.
Before I could get my phone back, they had discovered the photo from that afternoon.
I saw them exchange puzzled looks, then the wife said: “This is your son?”
‘Indulgence and permission are two different things’
Sensing their disapproval, I smiled and responded as calmly as I could, “Yes, he likes to play princess sometimes.”
“You really shouldn’t encourage that behavior,” the wife said with the grave compassion usually reserved for a potentially terminal illness. “When our son was little, he liked to play dress-up, too, but we didn’t indulge it. Not one bit. I even hired a male nanny! And now our son is completely normal! A strapping teenage boy — very popular with the girls — nothing odd about him at all!”
“You can’t indulge it,” the husband concurred. “That’s the key. It’s no different than enforcing bedtime. Children are very malleable. You can shape them, but not if you indulge their every whim.”
I politely thanked them for their (unsolicited) advice and my husband deftly changed the topic, but as I lay in bed later that night I couldn’t stop thinking about the the word “indulgent.”
My child at play.
Was it really indulgence to allow our child the freedom to express himself? It’s not as if he was shooting a BB gun at the neighbor’s pet cat, or throwing sand in another kid’s face.
Since that incident, I’ve had the word “indulgent” leveled at me many times by various detractors who disagree with the unconditional love and support my husband and I have offered our now-eight-year-old transgender daughter, as if that choice was the same as offering her an extra slice of chocolate cake even though we knew she already had seconds.
And here’s what I would say to those people: when it comes to parenting, indulgence and permission are two different things.
When we indulge a child, we let them get away with something — usually a behavior considered reprehensible by others. When we offer a child permission, we give them the reassurance that what they are doing is okay.
I like to think that the permission we gave Samuel to play as he saw fit in his early years paved the path for later emotional security.
On the eve of his sixth birthday, after a four-year battle with self-hatred and depression, he felt safe enough to transition from living as a boy to living as a girl. It was like witnessing a second birth.
And now we have a daughter who greets each day with excitement. Her name is Sadie, and she’s just as precious to us as her male counterpart was, only much, much happier.
What if we had punished Samuel instead of embracing Sadie?
I sometimes ask myself what would have happened if we had taken our dinner companion’s advice. What if we had shamed our son, or punished him? What if we had refused to let him out of his room unless he agreed to behave like a traditional boy?
In those early years of our child’s life, when my husband and I searched the Internet for information about children who claim to be the opposite gender than their anatomy indicates, we found these two statistics: Forty percent of transgender people attempt suicide each year, whereas a child who is accepted by his or her family is eight times less likely to attempt suicide later in life.
Better to be labeled as over-indulgent parents for letting our son play princess, we told ourselves, than to have a dead child.
If you worry that you, or someone you know, is indulging a young child by allowing him or her to cross-dress or do otherwise non-stereotypical activities, think again. Child development experts claim that children understand their gender identity as young as age 2.
But most children lack the vocabulary to articulate how they feel when they are so young. Their only recourse at gaining understanding may be to don a tutu as a boy, or to wear a Superman costume as a girl.
If your young child or student is a boy who likes traditional girl things, or a girl who likes traditional boy things, it doesn’t mean that he or she is transgender. It might mean nothing at all, or it might indicate that the child is what experts call “gender fluid.” It could be a phase, or it could be something more permanent.
No matter the reason, a child’s gender exploration isn’t something to punish.
Of course the nonconforming child’s behavior may be something you fear, and possibly for good reasons. You might live in a community that lacks understanding and compassion. You might be part of a religious group that doesn’t accept transgender identity as a possibility.
It doesn’t matter. Support that child anyway.
‘We’re living our lives, just like you’
Some may decry this decision, as if you are aiding and abetting a criminal. Nothing could be further from the truth. You are aiding and abetting the crucial work we all do in trying to figuring out who we are and why we’re here.
Like me, like my husband, like hundreds of other parents who have faced their young children’s gender dysphoria, you must push past fear and replace it with curiosity. And then you need to start learning, and connecting with other families who are going through similar experiences.
And if you don’t know any gender nonconforming children, or if you think the parents who support nonconforming children are mentally ill, child-abusing monsters — all things we have been called — I would wager a bet that if you came over to visit some afternoon, you might be surprised at how similar we are to you.
You might notice my teenage daughter’s school books and SAT prep manual scattered around. You might hear the sound of my younger daughter’s squeals as our dogs chase her around the house. You might notice we have the same favorite show playing on our TV, and if you look closely enough, you might see the imprint in the sofa where my husband naps as he pretends to watch.
What you wouldn’t notice is that one of my two daughters is transgender. You wouldn’t notice because there is nothing to notice.
We’re living our lives, just like you: struggling to keep things balanced, trying to look on the bright side, trying to get enough sleep, to drink enough water, to remember to brush our hair before we leave the house, to floss before bed, to say please and thank you, to apologize when wrong.
Those of us who are raising transgender children know it is time for us to be brave; to step forward; to introduce ourselves to you and welcome you into our lives; to prove that we haven’t indulged our children but merely chosen to love them.
GoPro has laid off 7 percent of its workforce, and warned investors of poor sales of the company’s action cameras. The news comes just a few weeks before GoPro is set to officially announce its fourth quarter earnings for 2015.
The company is also downgrading its guidance for the fourth quarter from about $500-$550 million in revenue to $435 million. GoPro blames that drop on what it’s calling “lower than anticipated sales of its capture devices” in the final quarter of 2015. That would represent only 70 percent of the company’s revenue in its big fourth quarter in 2014, when it pulled in $633.9 million. Industry analysts were originally projecting that GoPro’s Q4 revenue in 2015 would be somewhere closer to $690 million.
