homenews | College of Science

In Detox: Woodrats use ‘quantity over quality’ as a plan

January 9, 2025

Part of the team doing field work in California to capture wild woodrats.

The critter’s constitution has astounded biologists and represents a decades-long debate—over evolutionary time, how do animals adapt to a deadly diet? Do detoxification enzymes become more specialized or more abundant?

The study, led by University of Utah (U) biologists, is the first to pinpoint the specific genes and enzymes that allow woodrats to eat the near-lethal food without obvious harm. The scientists compared the detoxification pathways of two woodrat species that encountered creosote independently in their evolutionary histories to those who had never encountered creosote. Before creosote invaded parts of the Southwest, woodrat populations had a smaller number of genes that coded for enzymes that process creosote toxins. As creosote grew to dominate the landscape, natural selection drove a detox-gene duplication bonanza, resulting in massive increases in the numbers of genes that produce enzymes that eliminate creosote toxins. Curiously, these enzymes did not become more specialized to detoxify creosote—there was just much more of them.

The authors propose that gene duplication is an important mechanism by which animals initially adapt to new environmental pressures.

“These woodrats have only been exposed to creosote bush for about 15,000 years—in an evolutionary timescale, that’s very little time,” said Dylan Klure, postdoctoral researcher at the U and lead author of the study. “Some other changes may happen in the future, but right now, the duplication innovation is what’s allowed them to become so toxin-resistant so quickly.”

The study published on Jan. 10, 2025, in the journal Science.

There are two primary hypotheses for how animals evolve tolerance to toxic chemicals. The first is that new DNA mutations modify existing detoxification enzymes to metabolize toxins faster and more efficiently—a lower quantity, higher quality approach. The second is that detoxification genes and the enzymes they produce don’t change much, but duplicate in number over evolutionary time, allowing animals to produce more detoxification enzymes in response to toxin consumption—a greater quantity, lower quality approach. Previous research found that herbivorous insects process toxins using specialized enzymes that metabolize chemicals faster. Since the 1970s, biologists have favored this “enzyme quality over quantity” hypothesis. This study found the exact opposite.

“We discovered that creosote-feeding woodrats don’t have specialized enzymes to metabolize creosote toxins, just more—many more, and from a wide variety of existing detox enzymes,” said Denise Dearing, U biologist and senior author of the study. “These duplications of existing genes increase the quantity of detoxification enzymes produced, enabling more toxin to be eliminated.”

Coyote numbers are often higher in areas where they are hunted

January 9, 2025

Coyote populations across the United States are influenced by a number of factors, but surprisingly their abundance is found to be higher in areas that allow hunting of the predator, according to research by a University of Utah wildlife biologist and colleagues in other states.

As U.S. landscapes became increasingly plowed and paved over the past couple centuries, wildlife has become less abundant thanks to the loss and fragmentation of habitat. But not coyotes, North America’s most successful mid-sized predator, which have expanded their range despite eradication campaigns and rapid urbanization.

Coyotes are bold generalists, eating anything from seeds, trash, roadkill, rodents, deer fawn, even pets, and fill niches left vacant by the elimination of bears, wolves and cougars, according to co-author Austin Green, a researcher with the U’s Science Research Initiative and former graduate student in the School of Biological Sciences.

It is reasonable to expect hunting to reduce species abundance, especially in conjunction with other anthropogenic factors that spurred the wave of Holocene extinctions. Unregulated hunting, after all, resulted in the disappearance of the passenger pigeon, dodo and monk seal, and near-extinctions of many other now-rare species, including iconic megafauna such as the American bison and white rhinoceros.

Coyotes, on the other hand, have displayed a pronounced resiliency in regions, such as Utah where hunting and trapping these predators is heavily subsidized and barely regulated, according to the findings based on extensive camera surveys.

“This is corroborating a lot of other evidence that direct hunting and intervention is actually not a really good way to manage coyote populations, if the goal is to decrease their abundance,” Green said.

The new study, which was funded in part by the U’s Global Change and Sustainability Center, was led by the University of New Hampshire (UNH). It relied on data compiled by Snapshot USA, a sprawling collaborative campaign to sample wild mammal populations with motion-triggered trap cameras arrayed in transects each fall.

Alumnus Paul Keim, 2024 Lark Lecturer

January 8, 2025

One of this year's distinguished alumni awardees, Keim was a natural pick for the distinction, not only because of his work with Lark in the 80s but because of his auspicious career in The Pathogen and Microbiome Institute (PMI), an impressive cross-disciplinary research unit at Northern Arizona University where, after graduating from NAU with a BS, he returned to and has been on the faculty for the past 36 years.

PMI is closely associated with TGen North, with whom the institute shares infrastructure to maximize Arizona’s investment in science.

At the U Keim studied everything from soybeans to kangaroo rats. “We did everything," he says about the lab’s variety. “It’s what I call either the Lark curse or the Lark blessing… Gordon was willing to work on any interesting biological problem.” This was before Keim found himself working in infectious diseases, in particular with the deadly bacterium anthrax and later cholera and more recently the SARS-COVID-19 coronavirus, among others. At one highly elevated juncture he would find himself on the world stage as, following the attacks on American soil September 11, 2001, letters laced with anthrax spores started showing up in people’s mail. Five individuals eventually died from it.

The "Father of the Dept. of Biology," now the School of Biological Sciences, K. Gordon Lark (1930-2020). The annual Lark Lecture is in his honor. Credit: Ben Okun

How the story played out during the era of the “Anthrax Letters,” the title of a recent Netflix docudrama in which Keim is prominently featured, has all of the intrigue you would expect of a compressed but harrowing era starting in October 2021. It was a time when the country was rattled to the bone and saw terrorists, it seemed, around every corner–and in every letter delivered by the postal service. It was through the use of genomic technology and evolutionary principles at PMI and TGen North that Keim and his team were able to trace the specific, professionally processed spores, used in the attacks to an American microbiologist, vaccinologist, Bruce Ivins, a professional acquaintance of Keim’s and a known expert in the handling of anthrax spores.

Keim was readying to testify in court when Ivins took his life. “Whether or not Bruce Ivins actually did it or not is still hotly debated. But the Justice Department is convinced that he did it and they shut the whole thing down and destroyed all the evidence. So all the evidence that we were analyzing, all the anthrax strains, all the letters,” he says with some disappointment if not bitterness “... it's gone.”

Being pressed into the harsh and sometimes unforgiving media light (and hype) has been a defining feature of Keim’s career, but it has always been unapologetically rooted in the ethic of scientific inquiry that relentlessly follows the facts, honors the data and reaches conclusions that counter sacred paradigms in different scientific fields. His mentor Gordon Lark would be proud.

Demonstrating the magic of physics

January 7, 2025

Beehler, who is the Lecture Demonstration Specialist for the Department of Physics & Astronomy, manages the university’s large collection of demonstration equipment, runs demonstrations for instructors and teaches a class of his own, entitled The Way Things Work, a kind of physics show-and-tell.

The concepts he demonstrates are old – one law that predicts the effects of electromagnetism dates back to 1834 – and don’t really change, but he says the job doesn’t get old.

“No, I like the concept so much this doesn’t get boring to me,” Beehler said.

To demonstrate the pressure of our atmosphere, he puts a student (all but his head) in a plastic bag and evacuates the air inside. With the pressure of the atmosphere pressing down on him, the students cannot move.

To show that pressure in a confined liquid is transferred throughout, aka “Pascal’s Principle”, a student on a leaf-blower-powered hovercraft floats across the classroom floor.

The semester ends with his big finale. Also, Sprach Zarathustra (also the theme from “2001 – A Space Odyssey”) plays.

Beehler holds two fluorescent tubes and inches them towards a large Van de Graaff generator until they attract loud, crackling bolts of purple lightning, hundreds of thousands of volts, lighting up the bulbs and turning the teacher into a modern-day Zeus.

The demonstration generates laughter and a round of applause.

“Sometimes the students will think, ‘Oh, that’s magic.’ Physics seems like magic. It’s just magic of the universe. It just naturally works that way,” he said.

Below: Watch the KSL-TV video of the above story and experience the magic of Beehler.

Demonstrating the magic of physics

Why mobile farm technology won the 2024 Wilkes Climate Launch Prize

January 7, 2025

This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through student journalism.

A "pyrolizer," a machine that can apply high heat without oxygen to crop waste and create a soil additive called biochar, dumps loads of the substance into bags. Applied Carbon, a Texas startup, has received a $500,000 prize from the U's Wilkes Center to develop the technology as a way to store carbon. Credit: Applied Carbon

The stalks and husks of corn plants — the waste product left by combine harvesters — could be a key tool in the fight against climate change, and the University of Utah is putting up $500,000 to test the idea.

The U.’s Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy recently awarded its half-million-dollar Wilkes Climate Launch Prize to Applied Carbon, a Texas-based startup.

Applied Carbon won the prize for its mobile farm technology, which turns crop waste into a soil additive that decreases the need for fertilizer and stores the remaining carbon in the earth’s soil.

William Anderegg, director of the Wilkes Center, said one of the main selling points of Applied Carbon’s technology is its potential to be made for scale.

“The scalability is very exciting, and you can see a path for them to really scale up across many different agricultural fields in the next couple of years,” he said.

The crop waste is produced when combine harvesters sail through tall corn fields, their rotating blades slicing through the stalks, filtering them into the machine’s mouth, where its spinning cylinders rip the corn kernels from the husk and stems. The combine saves the kernels of corn in its body and spits out the stalk and husk remnants, leaving it to waste on the flattened field.

The prize, one of the largest university-run climate prizes in the world, was created in 2023 to help jump-start promising climate solution ideas. At a September reception in partnership with the Southwest Sustainability Innovation Engine, Anderegg awarded the prize money to Jason Aramburu, Applied Carbon’s CEO and co-founder.

At the reception, Aramburu said that “as a startup company … there’s often a funding gap, particularly in this sector, to get your technology to market.” He later added that the prize money will help the company produce more of their biochar machines and get them into the field.

Applied Carbon now has four mobile pyrolizers, a machine that can reach high temperatures without oxygen, and the company will apply the prize money to its field operations in Texas, Aramburu said. These operations, he said, work in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

“We’ve got about 4,000 acres of corn that we’re working with. We will test our equipment [in Texas] and also test how effective the biochar is on the soil,” he said.

The yield and soil chemistry testing, Aramburu said, will determine if the process works and to measure the impact of the technology. The project, in its first multi-season trial run, is expected to remove 100,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere by 2026, he said.

Biochar, a charcoal-like substance derived from biomass waste, is made through pyrolysis, a heat-driven process that uses virtually no oxygen and stores carbon in the waste product, according to Utah State University. Biochar, Anderegg added, is promising as a nature-based tool for fighting climate change because its carbon storage is stable and lasts hundreds of years.

“By contrast, a huge number of companies and governments are interested in tree planting, … but forests are at increasing risk from fire and drought and climate change,” he said. “We really worry about planting trees in one area that may be dead in 10 to 20 years.”

By Giovanni Radtke

You can read the full story for free at Amplify or with a subscription in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Pace Yourself: Season 2 Episode 6

January 4, 2025

Listen Here:

Introduction

Ben Lewis

Benjamin Lewis, MD, Associate Professor (Clinical), practices inpatient adult psychiatry at the University of Utah Huntsman Mental Health Institute where his clinical interests involve the diagnosis and treatment of major psychiatric disorders. He has additional interests in medical ethics, the philosophy of psychiatry, and the emerging science and clinical applications of psychedelic medicine.

Resources:

University of Utah Psychedelic Science Initiative (U-PSI)

TEDTalkxSalt Lake City with Ben Lewis:

Could psychedelics help patients in therapy?

Transcript:

This podcast discusses trauma related to illness, including suicide. If you’re having suicidal thoughts, you can dial or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at nine, eight eight. That’s 9-8-8.

David Pace 0:00

Hi, my name is David Pace and this is Pace Yourself, a podcast from the University of Utah College of Science on Wellness. Today, my guest is Dr. Ben Lewis, an associate professor of psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at the Huntsman Mental Health Institute here at the U. Dr. Lewis’s research focuses on psychedelic-assisted therapies and his clinical work focuses on adult inpatient psychiatry, as well as ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. He’s currently the clinical director of the Huntsman Mental Health Institute Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy Clinic in Park City, Utah. Welcome, Ben. It’s so good to have you here. Great.

Ben Lewis 1:51

Great to be here. Yeah, Thanks. Thanks for having me, David.

David Pace 1:54

Yeah. So, as I mentioned in an email to you yesterday, my first introduction to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy was in the prime video movie or series, legal drama on CBS titled “The Good Fight” with lead actress Christine Baranski. She plays an attorney who is having major anxiety over the run up to and the result of the 2016 presidential election. And I’m sure there are a lot of misconceptions about psychedelic-assisted therapies. And I’m sure Christine Baranski perhaps didn’t help that, but maybe she did. I don’t know. Can you give us a brief background on its history? Bring us up to date?

Ben Lewis 2:36

Sure. Happy to. I’m not familiar with that show, so I’m not certain how psychedelic-assisted therapies were presented there. And I think you’re right. There’s a lot of media attention currently on this topic, and that is a mixed bag. Some of that is accurate, some of that is not-so-accurate. And also a time where there’s a lot of hype and perhaps some overpromising on this set of therapies as well. And so I do think it’s a nuanced, middle ground message in terms of kind of the state of the science and in many ways, nothing new. Psychedelics have been around for millennia and have been used in different ways by different indigenous groups for spiritual and ceremonial purposes, often in group settings. And there had been a really robust period of clinical research in the 1950s and through the 1960s in psychiatry, looking at psilocybin and mescaline and LSD, specifically for mental health purposes. And a lot of those studies were very promising for a range of conditions, studied for alcohol and substance use disorders, studied for depression, studied for existential distress associated with end-of-life for terminal illness at that period of time. And yeah, a lot of very promising results and all of that really came to an end in the early 1970s when these compounds were all rescheduled, put on schedule one during the Nixon administration, and effectively that shut down any clinical research for the next 40 years or so, 40 to 50 years. And really more recently in the last decade, and then more more significantly in the last five years, there has been a real resurgence in interest in clinical trials looking at a range of different classic psychedelics, including psilocybin and LSD.

David Pace 4:49

So you’ve got two clinical trials going on right now. Is that correct?

Ben Lewis 4:54

Well, let’s see. We have a number of them. Actually, we have we have. ..

David Pace 5:02

Well, let me tell you the first two that I think you’re doing based upon my research. One is, I think what you were just talking about, although it says that it’s in combination with mindfulness=based stress reduction to address burnout and depression in frontline health care providers. Is that clinical trial over?

Ben Lewis 5:25

That’s correct. Yeah. We have finished that trial. We’re currently writing up the results. We ran that trial over a couple of years. And you’re right, that was a study looking at the combination of group psilocybin-assisted therapy and mindfulness based stress reduction – MBSR, which is annualized eight week mindfulness training program, and that’s run through our Resiliency Center. So we used those resources and enrolled physicians and nurses who were dealing with depression and burnout related to the COVID 19 pandemic. And yeah, really, really fun and challenging and interesting study. We randomized participants to either just receiving the mindfulness training. So people either did an eight-week mindfulness training protocol or they did that same program with a high-dose group psilocybin session and asking the question, are there differences between the groups in terms of, you know, severity of depressive symptoms, severity of burnout? We looked at a range of outcomes related to just mindfulness. Like, is this a helpful thing as far as mindfulness training? So yeah, we finished that study.

We did another group trial with psilocybin for patients dealing with depression associated with cancer. That was our first psilocybin trial here at the U. We finished that a few years ago. We’re running a few other studies, actually. We’re running a trial for treatment-resistant depression with psilocybin, and we’re running a study for postpartum depression. Also not using psilocybin, but using a sort of novel, short-acting psychedelic called 4-HO-DiPT. And then we have a couple studies with ketamine, assisted psychotherapy going on right now.

Ketamine vs psyilocybin

David Pace 7:24

So ketamine is, I understand, is FDA-approved in certain settings, but not necessarily for some of the stuff that you’re doing clinical trials in?

Ben Lewis 7:36

Yeah, that’s correct. Ketamine is used clinically. Currently, it has an FDA approval in its Spravato® formulation, which is a nasal spray, and that’s approved for treatment resistant depression. Ketamine is used in as an I.V. infusion, also for depression. This style of working with ketamine that I’ve been doing clinically in that we’re doing research with is ketamine, assisted psychotherapy. So a little bit of a different framework for using that medicine. And in also to be clear, ketamine is distinct from other classic psychedelics. It’s distinct pharmacologically. The risk profile with ketamine is pretty different than, say, psilocybin. Classic psychedelics, like psilocybin, are still on schedule one, so we can’t use them clinically. Really, we’re using them only for research purposes and you have to go through hurdles with the FDA and the DEA, whereas ketamine is clinically available. And so in certain respects, easier to to study, currently.

David Pace 8:43

So I’m interested in this interface or how mindfulness might inform the use of these psychedelics, because I think a lot of us are familiar with mindfulness.

David Pace 9:00

Is that is that designed to process the experience? Because we’re really talking about having an experience or what? Yeah, people used to call a trip, maybe they still do, right? And so is the mindfulness really to like in a guided way to try to process the experience, whatever that might have been for the individual. Is that the intent?

Ben Lewis 9:23

Yeah, it’s a great question and I think there’s different angles for thinking about that. I think there are experiential elements of overlap between states that people can access through mindfulness meditation, in psychedelics. Certain kinds of non-dual experiences are overlapping with those practices. There’s also, to your point, questions about how to adequately prepare somebody for an experience with something like psilocybin where they maybe have some tools for navigating what can be a challenging or difficult or very unusual experience.

And then on the flip side, there are questions about how do we integrate or sustain those kinds of benefits that might happen. Right? And I think in a complementary way, there are questions: Are those kinds of experiences with the psychedelic? Are they helpful in sustaining or growing or developing a mindfulness practice? So many of those questions, we don’t really have great answers to right now. This is not super well studied, but most of those questions really inform the motivations for a study like this.

David Pace 10:45

What are the group-based interventions that you’re talking about?

Ben Lewis 10:49

So one real challenge with, say, the majority of psychedelic-assisted therapies in clinical trials is that they’re typically individual format, so they involve two therapists per participant. And it’s a long session, right? It’s an eight-hour dosing day typically with psilocybin. So a long, long day. And it’s bookended by preparatory sessions and then integration sessions on the flip side. So it’s very resource-intensive, and so like to move a single participant through that protocol that might be 20 hours times two, so 40 therapist hours. And there are just really significant questions how might we scale this or make this accessible for the ability to treat more people down the road? So there are research questions, there is a safe and feasible to do, and then there are there are questions just in terms of scalability when this rolls out is a form of clinical treatment.

Ben Lewis 11:58

So the group models we’ve done and this has been novel in terms of the research we’ve done here has involved the full-group format. So we’ll have a group of say, five participants and we’ll do group preparation where, you know, people are engaging in a group format, kind of moving into the dosing-day session. And then we have a full group dosing session where everybody’s in the same room. We have music played over a speaker system to do that and then group integration, and that has not been done in the modern era. So we’ve done two trials with that model so far, and they’ve been small studies, but they’ve been feasible, they’ve been safe, they have seemed in certain ways to suggest some unique efficacy of that group environment for people with this kind of experience.

David Pace 12:55

So it sounds to me like you’re talking that this is not like a one on one talk therapy thing, but there’s a kind of a social element to this kind of therapy that might inform or aid what results you’re maybe gunning for.

Ben Lewis 13:14

Yeah, exactly. I think part of, for instance, depression and burnout can be a real sense of isolation, a real sense of disconnection. And so it has felt like that group format makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways as far as targeting those kinds of conditions. And insofar as that group format dosing session, it’s not especially interactive. It’s a pretty internal experience. People are wearing eyeshades. It’s, you know, there’s not a lot of interaction per se on that day apart from before and after the dosing sessions.

David Pace 13:58

So it’s not like a group therapy scenario where you’re sharing stories.

Ben Lewis 14:03

Not during the active drug effects, but certainly before during preparatory sessions and then subsequent integration sessions. Yeah, it really does have a group therapy feel to it.

David Pace 14:17

So the brain chemical that we’re working with, at least in ketamine, is called glutamate.

Ben Lewis 14:25

Yeah.

classic psychedelics

David Pace 14:25

And is that different than what you’re using with the other psychedelics?

Ben Lewis 14:29

Yeah. Good question. And ketamine is distinct. It works differently in the brain. It works on the glutamatergic system by targeting NMDA receptors. And that’s very different than something like psilocybin, which is considered a classic psychedelic, and classic psychedelics really refer to psilocybin, LSD, DMT, mescaline. So like a family of different compounds that all act on the serotonin 2A receptor, so a different receptor subtype, different certainly duration of effect with those compounds, different experiential effects, presumably different clinical effects, and some overlapping elements too. So there are overlapping elements in the kinds of therapeutic approaches that we might use. They’re overlapping effects for what people might experience on those different compounds with some distinctions.

David Pace 15:31

And they’ve got to be extremely unique to each individual. Isn’t that part of the difficulty in measuring and assessing the value of these psychedelics?

Ben Lewis 15:43

Yeah, exactly. Those experiences are really different for everybody. They tend to have a quality of ineffability, so people can’t really describe or characterize or put into words what that experience was like or meant to them. And are quite varied, unpredictable. And there are many questions as to what is the relationship between the experience itself and therapeutic outcomes. We don’t know the answer to a lot of those questions. Most studies to date have shown that certain kinds of experiences that people have — the higher the magnitude on those experiences — the more significant and sustained the therapeutic effects. And that’s been studied primarily in terms of this concept of mystical experience. And there’s a range of questionnaires that get used to, you know, imperfectly characterize what people might have experienced. And most of the studies to date have have really shown that the higher the magnitude of mystical experience that people experience during the session, which is really characterized by a sense of connection, a sense of ineffability, a sense of sacredness, a sense of deep personal meaning, those experiences seem to predict therapeutic response, which is like an interesting and like very unusual thing in psychiatry.

spiritual enhancement

David Pace 17:24

So, yeah, you walked into your typical psychotherapist office and, maybe I’m speculating here, but I’ve had some therapy myself, and you start talking about spiritual matters, spiritual enhancement, which is what these drugs can can do, along with a whole list of other maladies that it can address. Although spirituality, I guess, is not a malady, but a condition, I guess is the better word. And you can’t get very far with a lot of psychotherapists if you start talking about religion or spirituality, in my experience. And so this is kind of like you were hinting at just now, it’s like, we’re not in Kansas anymore. That’s right. In some way. Is that must be kind of exhilarating.

Ben Lewis 18:21

Yeah, well, exhilarating, scary, uncertain, right. Like, and it brings in all of these elements that science has historically been somewhat antithetical to. Right. And for new, really good, deep reasons, though, I would say, I mean, I don’t think there’s anything about spirituality that is not open to scientific study, and I don’t think it necessarily has to be woo-woo in ways that preclude thinking carefully about it and studying it and taking it seriously as an avenue, an important vein of human flourishing and well-being.

Ben Lewis 19:06

There’s a there’s a philosopher, Thomas Metzinger, who wrote this great essay called “Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty,” which I always come back to, and this essay really argues that spirituality and science share this common underlying value of intellectual honesty, a sort of radical kind of honesty. And I sort of like that framing for spirituality. But yeah, I don’t think it’s very easy in the field of psychedelic science to strip out elements of spiritual experience for people. That’s an important part of what people experience, and it seems to be important as far as what happens for them therapeutically.

David Pace 19:56

Yeah, well, I think it’s an opportunity to bridge a divide that maybe doesn’t really need to be there. Actually, there’s a lot of literature, I won’t say a lot of literature, but some literature now around the “spirituality of science.” And of course everybody just kind of around here, kind of ducks, ducks and covers when they hear that, you know, especially when you’re in an environment here where religion is very the civilizing force of the state. Right. In many ways, politics and otherwise. But yeah, I think it’s an opportunity, and I’m glad that you suggested human wellness because of course that’s what this podcast is about. So we’ve approached this, just as a little back story to this podcast, we’ve approached this with eight dimensions of wellness that the National Institutes of Health, have established, one of those of which is spirituality. So it’s kind of nice to see. And of course, the irony of all of that is that they’re all related, right? And so it’s kind of superficial in a way to break it out into components. And we found that out very quickly ast year, didn’t we Ross because every time we tried to talk about social wellness, we very quickly started talking about physical wellness, mental health. In a way we went. So maybe we should have all been taking a trip. I don’t know. Maybe that would have helped.

Ben Lewis 21:27

I could see a utility in sort of dividing different categories because there are ways in which we might neglect certain aspects that, when framed in a certain way, maybe become a little bit more salient, right?

David Pace 21:40

Well, and the notion of holistic health, you know, and wellness is huge right now, somewhat of a buzz term. But I think it’s worth unpacking really a lot because there are these segmented, siloed disciplines that we’ve had traditionally. And the modernist experiment, if you will, since the Enlightenment, we’ve kind of broken those up into silos, which is a danger. So again, it must be a bit exhilarating for you to kind of see these connections coming together and seeing opportunities to explore them.

from Maine to Iowa Medical School

Ben Lewis 22:25

Absolutely. I mean, I went into psychiatry in the first place because it seemed to offer this broader way of thinking about humans and approaching various ways in which people suffer or struggle, and this for me has been a really wonderful way of kind of connecting with that original motivation for me.

David Pace 22:51

Tell us a little bit about your background. Where are you from and where did you go to school and and what was your journey into psychiatry? Did you decide you wanted to be a medical doctor to begin with, or did you decide that you wanted to be a psychiatrist right out of the gate?

Ben Lewis 23:05

Yeah, I had a little bit of a yeah, and not a not a very direct path, I guess. I grew up in Maine mostly and went to undergrad in Cambridge at Harvard University and studied English and philosophy. So medicine was not really on my radar at that point in time, although my father was a physician. So it was it was on my radar to some extent. I met my now wife during undergrad and we subsequently moved to Iowa City when she got into medical school. And it seemed to me, Jeez, that doesn’t look so bad. It seems to be fine what you’re doing there. I think I could probably do that as well. And so I took pre-med classes and, and then eventually went to medical school at the University of Iowa with much less ease than my partner.

David Pace 24:00

Well you were a Humanities guy.

Ben Lewis 24:02

Humanities guy.

David Pace 24:03

The dangers of humanities.

Ben Lewis 24:05

You know, prior to that, I had been first volunteering and then working in a research lab at the University of Iowa that was at that time run by Antonio Damasio, and they were doing a whole range of really cool projects around emotion and consciousness and autobiographical memory. And I really liked that. I really liked the way we were engaging with study participants. I really liked thinking about the brain. I liked kind of all of the philosophy of mind stuff that went into that. So I was thinking, you know, in relation to medical school, something about the brain: neurology, psychiatry, and then just really liked psychiatry a lot more in school.

We finished. My wife did a public health degree, so we finished at the same time and then couples-matched here for residency back in 2008. So and then have been here since then a little, little while.

David Pace 25:08

Yeah. So let’s talk really quickly before we pivot to maybe what most of our listeners want to know. Like, am I a candidate for this? I’m interested in the conditions that it looks like PTSD is one of them. I wanted you to expand on those kind of hard core conditions that people are suffering from, that this therapy or therapies could could help.

Ben Lewis 25:55

That answer is a little different depending on which compound you’re talking about. And so, for instance, starting with ketamine, really the bulk of the evidence for ketamine is in treatment-resistant depression and treatment-resistant anxiety disorders. And so that’s mainly what we treat in our clinic right now, looking at psychedelics like psilocybin or LSD. Again, these are still predominantly in sort of research phases and have been studied for depression, including treatment-resistant depression; have been studied for substance and alcohol use disorders; have been studied for anxiety. They have been studied for end of life, existential distress or anxiety and depressive symptoms surrounding fears around death and dying. You mentioned PTSD and that’s really referencing MDMA. So, again, a somewhat distinct chemical, not a classic psychedelic.

David Pace 26:59

Tell me again what MDMA is.

Ben Lewis 27:00

MDMA, the street name or the street drug name for MDMA is ecstasy or Adam. And, you know, has had a history in the club drug scene. And MDMA has been studied extensively at this point for PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. And there have been two completed phase three trials for MDMA, assisted psychotherapy, for PTSD. And in fact, that compound was just reviewed by the FDA this past summer, this past July. And the FDA said, no. The FDA did not approve MDMA assisted therapy based on two phase three trials that had been sponsored by Mapp/Lycos now, which was a big deal and a disappointment and in many ways spurred a lot of discussion, a lot of strong feelings there. Certainly problems with the approach to certain elements of the approach to those trials. So the FDA and the preceding advisory committee meeting, they put their fingers on some very legitimate concerns and issues and came down pretty hard against approving that medicine, requesting that that company completes another phase three trial, really digging into some safety data prior to approving that medicine. So that was a was a pretty big deal for the field as a whole. And certainly pushes back the timeline of that style of treatment being available for people clinically.

David Pace 28:49

Yeah. I was reading in the “Lancet” regional health journal out of Europe, but I guess it was just almost exactly a year ago when it came out. But they were talking about the, first of all, the need for new therapies in this way. They were talking about how many people suffer from mental illness in Europe. And I’m sure that it’s just as bad here. I’m trying to find that statistic readily. But they also were talking about how complex the treatment protocol is of these sorts of attempted therapies, and definitely that there needs to be more trials and so forth. They’re being obviously cautious, which is why I suppose we have these trials and these institutions that try to keep us on track. But I guess I was just struck by what a problem mental illness is. And I don’t know, maybe you could talk briefly about that and the kind of the broad picture of mental illness as we move forward through this technological age, which I think is being linked to some of the isolation that people are feeling and the despair and the confusion, maybe.

Yeah. Can you speak briefly about that broad picture of mental illness in the United States, maybe in particular?

Ben Lewis 30:31

Sure yeah, I think you’re totally right. You know, there are certain things we can do in mental health fields and in psychiatry, and there is just an ocean that we’re not really able to effectively do a whole lot about. And for me, that has just taken an increasing toll as a psychiatrist over my career, where I’ve practiced predominantly inpatient, adult psychiatry. PTSD, for instance, our current treatments are inadequate, and there’s really no other way to to say that a huge fraction of people are not helped by the medicines that are available. A huge fraction of people are not able to really complete or adhere to the evidence-based psychotherapies for PTSD, and the impact of that condition over time — which is a chronic condition — hose impacts are just huge and growing. And to your point regarding the milieu we find ourselves in now, where we have sort of increasing sense of existential crisis; we have an increasing sense of disconnection in large part levied by our technological devices and the way we were living in modern society; many features of mental illness appear to be getting worse.

And so a huge motivation for me with this field is this hope surrounding a style of treatment and a way of engaging that, yeah, holds promise of being effective in a sustained way for people. And for sure, many, many questions still to be answered and still pretty early on and in understanding that. But I think enormous promise is there, especially for very difficult to treat conditions.

David Pace 32:31

Yeah the single dose psilocybin is that what it’s called has been incredibly promising at least in the studies that they have done. Maybe not as big of the study as they need, but it’s apparently, according to The Lancet, it’s just striking at how those single dose experiences can shift, get people out of their “stuckness.”

Ben Lewis 32:56

Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s a different model than taking a medicine every day forever. Right. It’s a discrete number of sessions: one or several. And again, like a lot of of questions still, there have been studies looking at, for instance, treatment-resistant depression. And there are still a number of questions in terms of how long are those benefits sustained and that differs for different patients. Right? But yeah, no, I think you’re totally right. There’s been a lot of like early, very, very promising results with this style of treatment.

David Pace 33:36

So I found the statistics that I was referencing earlier from the Lancet article, almost 1 billion people, they estimate, have mental health conditions globally. And in the European Union alone, mental health problems affect more than one in six people and the economic cost exceeds 4% of the gross domestic product. So we’re talking about a major crisis or opportunity to rethink something.

Ben Lewis 34:05

Exactly.

David Pace 34:08

So there’s PTSD, there’s depression, there’s alcohol use disorders, addictions, social anxiety, like the kind that Christine Baranski was having in her show. And I think it’s very telling that we’re talking about this just weeks before the election, again, I’m sure a lot of that has happening. And again, enhancement of spirituality being another condition that this can deeply affect.

Is this for me?

So here’s a couple of questions for you. I think we’re kind of wrapping up here. If someone were to ask, am I a candidate for this kind of therapy, what would you first ask them?

Ben Lewis 34:50

Yeah, I think as far as enrolling in a clinical trial, a lot of those parameters are very, very narrow. That’s a very limiting aspect right now for people who are interested in accessing this kind of treatment. It’s also a really interesting time and that there are legalization measures afoot in states where this is now clinically available: Oregon and Colorado. So there are a range of pathways and, you know, they’re not all aligned with similar thinking necessarily or similar models.

But engaging in clinical trials with classic psychedelics is hard. I mean, they’re very limited and they’re hard to get into and very specific and pretty narrow and also very intensive for participants. So that’s a real challenge. There’s many more people that are really interested in these kinds of treatments than we have availability for in trials or like in clinical avenues. And then it gets interesting as well because there’s a whole host of underground avenues that people people access this to. And those are heterogeneous in terms of what that looks like and in terms of safety.

So it’s tricky. It’s tricky to navigate in this, tricky to advise people on this topic.

Looking at ketamine, yeah, that that is much more accessible. So ketamine is available clinically. People are receiving ketamine infusions and ketamine treatments. Ketamine assisted psychotherapy is clinically available for certain conditions. So that’s much more of like a available clinical avenue for people right now.

David Pace 36:44

So it really it’s it’s very individual, and it’s very just depends on the diagnosis of the psychiatrist which. I assume you have to have a prescription to get into these trials and to get some help.

Ben Lewis 37:00

So yeah, to enroll in a trial. Basically, people just need to go through a screening process So people can contact our study coordinator team to to be if they think they’re eligible for a trial on, say, postpartum depression or treatment resistant depression can either reach out to me. We have information for our study coordinator contact and that would put somebody on a list of people to be screened and that would include like reviewing medical records, sort of consulting with their outpatient providers, reviewing medications, reviewing other health conditions that might be like an exclusion criteria, making sure they’re not on any like conflicting medications.

David Pace 37:51

So yeah, a lot of questions to answer. It’s very interesting to have this available to us in our backyard in a way.

So we are observing here at the University of Utah Mental Illness Awareness Week this week. So we want to thank Dr. Ben Lewis, professor of psychiatry here in the Department of Psychiatry at the Huntsman Mental Health Institute for joining us today. And we will put some of these resources in our transcript with some links that maybe you can share with us.

Ben Lewis 38:35

Sounds great.

David Pace 38:36

Yeah. So thank you again, Ben. Anything else you want to say before we sign off?

Ben Lewis 38:40

Yeah. Thank you, David. Yeah, Pleasure talking with you. Thanks for the opportunity.

David Pace 38:43

Thank you.

FORGE Workshop with Alumna Anke Friedrich

December 23, 2024

Anke Friedrich

Managing Principal Investigator Joseph Moore in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, says that “this next phase allows us to build on our important achievements and to further develop and de-risk the tools and technologies necessary to unlock the potential of next-generation geothermal power.”

That’s one hefty piece of good news. But there’s more, and it’s rooted largely in the form of one woman: G&G alumna Anke Friedrich. This past September Friedrich convened a 10-day workshop at Utah FORGE for students from the U and from her home base of Germany where she has an appointment as endowed professor of geology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. (She is also an adjunct in Geology & Geophysics at the U.) “It was extremely important to me to have this workshop authentically at the site where things are happening,” she says, “because it has this sense of urgency that really makes it special and different.”

A recent recipient of the U’s Founder’s Day Alumni Award, Friedrich says it was “priceless” to have the project’s two principal investigators on site—along with Moore, John McLennan, U professors with appointments at the Energy & Geoscience Institute. The setting too, is priceless: Milford Valley in Beaver County, Utah, a place of burgeoning alternative energy operations, including the two geo-thermal plants in operation along with windmill and solar farms running like giant stitches in the dry steppe at the foot of the Mineral Mountains. In the middle of it, to the west, is the FORGE site which includes the double-wide “container” classroom with internet, screens, a kitchen and—very important—air conditioning.

'Liquid gold'

Ten students were the focus of the unique place-based workshop, but a total of twenty-seven participants threaded through the 10-day event, including imported faculty and experts for half-day visits. Additionally, there was a visit from a YellowScan drone and an opportunity to learn how to fly these devices and operate LIDAR to get high surface resolution for fractures wherein is found “liquid gold”—water at a piping hot temperature of at least 275 °C.

Workshop cohort with Anke Friedrich, far right. The site for Utah FORGE is at the foot of the Mineral Mountains with most of the exploration going on, naturally, underground.

Some of that water is naturally circulating, a classic convection system in the earth. Other hot water used for generating turbines for electricity has to be recruited through fracking and inserting surface water underground where it is heated by natural forces, then re-surfaced. All of this has to be done using seismic monitoring via the U’s Seismograph Station where professor Kris Pankow, who helped organize the workshop, is associate director. The monitoring is in concert with geological data collected from drill cores at the geothermal site as well as 3D models of fractures on the surface of nearby mountains using the YellowScan drone.

Giving back

Though a daunting task, it is a deeply calculated and calibrated one, and, happily, a recent benchmark test at Utah FORGE has proven successful. Students from both sides of the Atlantic are there, feeling the heat and doing hands-on research to better experience the process of hydro-fracking in the geothermal industry. For Friedrich this unique experience, which will be repeated, is also a way to give back to the community she encountered as an undergraduate when she came to the U in 1989 as a competitive skier. (Last year she was inducted into the Crimson Hall of Fame for winning three of the four NCAA Championship races she entered.)

But this time she’s in the Beehive State to indelibly “give back” in a way that “is really worth sharing with students, young scientists, and even colleagues.”

SRI Stories

December 23, 2024

If there were a single word to describe the Science Research Initiative (SRI), “mutualistic” would rank among the best choices. Most are aware that the program uniquely allows undergraduate students to build a strong undergraduate resume, connect with expertise in the field, and ultimately learn if the career path is right for them far earlier and easier than what tradition entails. But did you know a similar benefit exists for the mentors?

SRI mentors are able to build a resume of their own as they teach and foster their students’ growth, showing proof-positive results that they can help students thrive under their leadership. That’s useful in its own right, but they also get to “home-grow” a roster of assistants with tailor-made expertise to assist with their projects. These are assistants that then use that expertise as groundwork for projects of their own. It’s a system that benefits everyone involved

Kendra Autumn is a prime example.

Parasitic fungi adaptation

Kendra arrived at the U with a BA in Biology from Willamette University in tow and quickly became involved with SRI as a graduate student stream leader. Under the guidance of her PhD advisor Bryn Dentinger, she developed a research focus on how parasitic fungi adapt to their hosts and how they might adapt to switch to a new host. The study of parasitic relationships can lead to deeper understandings of the evolution and mechanism of parasitism and often leads to practical applications.

“Say you’re trying to grow a crop plant and a pathogenic fungus attacks that plant,” Kendra explains, “you can get a different fungus that is a parasite of the crop-attacking fungus to deal with the issue, which is a potential pesticide-free approach to mitigating fungal crop pathogens.” She is currently studying the DNA of several mushroom specimens and their mold parasites, building evolutionary trees to better understand how these parasites have adapted to counter their hosts' defensive measures.

SRI's signature mutualism

This sort of adaptive specialization is a potential goldmine of breakthroughs as parasitism is all around us. Its utilization could affect everything from medicine to waste reduction. But as these parasitic studies built momentum, so, in tandem, did the new SRI with its signature mutualism. Now in its fifth year, the program for undergraduates is perfectly poised to place a handful of undergraduates under Kendra’s leadership, allowing them to adapt and grow together, often in ways you might not expect.

Kendra explains that “Many streams are able to create a lab culture, where fresh SRI students will go on to become learning assistants or TA’s in their stream to help mentor new students. There’s an actual sense of community. It’s something [where] I’m looking around and asking, ‘How do I develop this more in my stream?’” It becomes not just a project that students are invested in, but an environment, a place, where they feel comfortable enough to plant a few roots and start growing in turn.

Even SRI's infancy, the benefits to both students and mentors, like Kendra, have been astounding. Now with her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology awarded last spring, she gets to lead her upcoming students as a fully fledged SRI Fellow, to ask more ambitious questions and find new ways to expand student’s horizons as the program continues to evolve.

Kendra Autumn has big plans, ranging from introducing genomic studies in an accessible way, to creating and involving her students with outreach programs to build their science communication skills. And all the while they will be helping her lift her own projects towards new heights. It truly is a mutualistic relationship, as the years continue to pass it's no longer a question of if SRI will benefit students. Instead, it’s a question of what kind of extraordinary new heights both mentor and students together will be able to reach.

Our DNA 2024

December 17, 2024

Season’s Greetings from Dean Trapa

December 16, 2024

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

This past year has been marked by remarkable growth and achievement in the College of Science. Student enrollment has increased by nearly 10% year over year, reflecting the prominence and excellence of our academic programs. The Science Research Initiative continues to thrive, with undergraduate participation surging to over 550 students this fall—a testament to the curiosity and dedication of our students and faculty alike.

Looking ahead, next summer we will celebrate the dedication of the world-class Crocker Science Complex, a significant milestone in our commitment to cutting-edge research and innovation. This state-of-the-art facility—comprising the Crocker Science Center, the renovated Stewart Building, and the new L.S. Skaggs Applied Science Building—will solidify the College’s presence on campus and drive scientific and educational advancements for generations to come.

These achievements are made possible by the immense talent, passion, drive, and collaborative spirit that define our community. To our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and supporters: thank you for being an integral part of our continued success.

Wishing you a peaceful holiday season and a prosperous New Year.

Sincerely,

Dean Peter Trapa
College of Science
University of Utah

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Listen Here:

Introduction

Transcript:

Ketamine vs psyilocybin

classic psychedelics

spiritual enhancement

from Maine to Iowa Medical School

Is this for me?

FORGE Workshop with Alumna Anke Friedrich

The good news for the Utah Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) managed by the U is that with an additional $80 million in funding from the Department of Energy, the project is fully funded through 2028.

'Liquid gold'

Giving back

SRI Stories: Mutualistic Mentorship

Creating stepping stones for students and mentors alike

Parasitic fungi adaptation

SRI's signature mutualism

Our DNA 2024

Season's Greetings FROM DEAN TRAPA