10 Questions for Oprah Winfrey

By Richard Zoglin Monday, Dec. 15, 2003

Her book club is back, her ratings are up, and she has just returned from a trip to South Africa, where she visited hospitals and orphanages and met with officials at a school she is building in Johannesburg. Can anything stop Oprah Winfrey? TIME's Richard Zoglin inquired.
YOUR SHOW IS UP IN THE RATINGS THIS SEASON. WHY?
I keep growing into myself, and the show just keeps evolving. I think the shows have veered away from doing so many topics that were of the same nature. I went through a phase where we did a lot of spiritual-related shows, and this year we just did more fun things, I think.
WHY DID YOU MOVE AWAY FROM SPIRITUAL TOPICS?
For several years I did Remembering Your Spirit, and then just one year I said, "O.K., well, everybody ought to know what their spirit is by now." We had evolved to shows reflecting the spirit of people triumphing in their lives or overcoming difficulties, and I thought these shows became so much more reflective of what we were trying to represent.
A LOT OF PEOPLE THINK ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER'S APPEARANCE ON YOUR SHOW GAVE HIS CAMPAIGN A BIG BOOST. DO YOU AGREE?
Oh, I heard that about George Bush too, and I totally disagree. I will not give myself that kind of credit. I think what we are able to do is allow people to see a side of a person that you wouldn't normally see, and you either relate to that or you don't.
LAST YEAR YOU WENT TO SOUTH AFRICA AND GAVE OUT GIFTS TO 50,000 KIDS. HOW ABOUT THIS YEAR?
Last year it was a life-changing experience for me. I had a moment of ... a supreme moment of destiny is what I call it, where you realize, "Oh, so this is why I was born." When I was 12 and on welfare with my mother, I was told we weren't going to have a Christmas. Some nuns showed up at the last minute and brought food and presents. And I never forgot that. I wanted to create something like that for these children. Now I am working on building schools there. I understand what it means to be poor and not have your possibilities revealed to you. So I feel like if I can do that for as many young girls as I can reach, I would have served part of my purpose here. WHY SOUTH AFRICA? I am drawn to South Africa because of Nelson Mandela, who has become a personal friend, and my love of the country. I think that for every act of generosity in the world, regardless of where it is given--in Mississippi, Montana or Mozambique--it's O.K., because it's spreading that kind of energy out into the world in a way that can make a difference.
DID YOU IDENTIFY WITH ROSIE O'DONNELL IN HER LAWSUIT OVER HER MAGAZINE?
I didn't follow the case, if you really want to know the truth. [But] I couldn't believe that she didn't have ultimate editorial control. There are many times in my magazine when I have not agreed with the editor, and we just talk it out. Sometimes I let it go. And there are other times where I feel strongly enough about it, and I say that absolutely cannot happen. Because it's an O on the magazine.
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BOY DR. PHIL'S DIET BOOK?
I think it's solid. I mean, you've still got to do the work at the end of the day. But there is nothing in that book, if you followed it and went through the process that he asks you to, that you wouldn't be successful.

DO YOU THINK HE OUGHT TO BE ENDORSING A LINE OF NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS?
Well, it's not a choice that I would have made for myself.
DAVID LETTERMAN SAYS YOU WON'T COME ON HIS SHOW. ARE YOU SNUBBING HIM?
No, I'm not. I've done the show twice. Both times I was sort of like the butt of his jokes. I felt completely uncomfortable sitting in that chair, and I vowed I would not ever put myself in that position again. But I have a great deal of respect for his talent, and I sent him what I think is the best baby gift I ever gave. It was a tub of children's books.
EVERY COUPLE OF YEARS YOU TOY WITH THE IDEA OF WALKING AWAY FROM YOUR SHOW, AND THEN YOU DON'T. ARE YOU TEASING US?
I really am not. I like having the ability to decide whether it's still working or not. But also, I just feel like this is the best forum to reach people, so that I don't have to run around and try to get a spot on the Larry King show to tell them how important I think AIDS is. To have been granted the opportunity to have a forum like this, it just seems stupid, really, to give it up.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1006443,00.html#ixzz1NJtJZHI3

Advice From Doctors: Top 5 Ways to Lower Costs and Improve Care

By Meredith Melnick Tuesday, May 24, 2011 |

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Thomas Barwick / Taxi via Getty Images

• If anyone knows where health-care dollars are being wasted, it's primary-care physicians. So, the National Physicians Alliance recently assembled working groups of doctors within three fields of primary care — family medicine, internal medicine and pediatrics — and asked each to come up with five ways to reduce costs in their areas while enhancing patient care.

The groups' recommendations were then field-tested by 255 other doctors, and the three final "Top 5" lists were published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The central theme? Less is more. Most of the physicians' advice focused on eliminating expensive tests and drugs that aren't shown to improve patient care.
Following is a rundown of their recommendations:

Top 5 List in Family Medicine
1. Don't do imaging for low back pain within the first six weeks, unless the patient has red flags like progressive neurological deficits. Low back pain is the fifth most common reason for all physician visits, but early imaging only increases costs without improving patient outcomes.
2. Don't routinely prescribe antibiotics for mild or moderate sinusitis, unless symptoms last more than seven days or worsen after an initial improvement. Despite the fact that most sinusitis is caused by a viral infection, antibiotics are still prescribed in more than 80% of outpatient cases. That adds up: each year sinusitis results in 16 million office visits and $5.8 billion in costs, even though viral infections will clear on their own.
3. Don't order annual ECGs or other cardiac screening for healthy, low-risk patients with no symptoms. False-positives and other potential harms of the tests, such as unnecessary invasive procedures and overtreatment, are likely to exceed the benefits.
4. Don't perform Pap tests on patients under 21 or in women who have had hysterectomies for benign disease. In these populations, Pap smears tend to cause unnecessary anxiety and cost, with no improvement in patient outcomes.
5. Don't do DEXA bone scans to screen for osteoporosis in women under 65 or men under 70 with no risk factors. The scans aren't cost-effective in younger patients, unless they have risk factors like calcium or vitamin D deficiency, fractures after age 50, long-term corticosteroid use, smoking or alcoholism.

Top 5 List in Internal Medicine
The recommendations for low back imaging, cardiac screening and DEXA screening are the same as the above. The two additional recommendations are:
1. Don't do blood chemistry panels or urinalyses for screening in healthy adults with no symptoms. Full blood workups don't improve health for already healthy adults, except for cholesterol screening and Type 2 diabetes screening in adults with hypertension.
2. Use generic statins when initiating cholesterol-lowering therapy. Generic drugs benefit patients with high cholesterol just as much as popular name brands like Lipitor and Crestor, but cost a great deal less.

Top 5 List in Pediatrics
1. Don't prescribe antibiotics for sore throat unless the patient tests positive for streptococcus. Most cases of sore throat are viral, yet antibiotics are prescribed more than half the time, contributing to drug resistance and high costs.
2. Don't order diagnostic imaging for minor head injuries, unless the child has loss of consciousness or other risk factors like dizziness, neurologic deficits, age under 2, or "raccoon eyes" — blood pooling around the eyes that is often evidence of a basilar skull fracture. Otherwise, imaging low-risk patients rarely detects traumatic abnormalities, while the early exposure to the scans' radiation can increase kids' risk of radiation-related cancer.
3. Don't refer cases of OME (ear infections with fluid) early on. Most cases resolve on their own within three months; however, reasons for early referral include language delay, learning problems or neurologic abnormalities.
4. Advise patients not to use over-the-counter cough and cold medications. More than 10% of children use cough or cold medicine every week, even though there's little evidence that the drugs reduce cough, runny nose or other cold symptoms. Plus, parents tend to administer improper doses of these medications, which increases the risk of side effects and even death.
5. Use corticosteroid asthma inhalers properly. Inhalers are safe, and when used properly, reduce asthma complications and hospital and emergency room visits.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/24/advice-from-doctors-top-5-ways-to-lower-costs-and-improve-care/#ixzz1NJrkRrXw

Netanyahu Sets Out His Peace Terms

Netanyahu Sets Out His Peace Terms but Is Unlikely to Find a Palestinian Taker

Posted by Tony Karon Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 2:04 pm

President Barack Obama, currently in Europe trying to muster opposition to the Palestinians who are seeking recognition of statehood by the U.N. General Assembly in September, had hoped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would help him out — by using his address to a joint meeting of the Congress on Tuesday to offer peace terms that could restart talks. That would allow Obama to argue that any U.N. action would be beside the point, or even harmful to an evolving peace process. The problem for Obama, however, even if he tries to put the best face on it (as he will, no doubt), is that the peace terms outlined by Netanyahu on Tuesday are unlikely to tempt the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. The rapturous reception for the Israeli leader on Capitol Hill made clear that his position enjoys solid support in Washington. But if it fails to breathe new life into the stalled peace process with the Palestinians, then the international community's impatience, of which Obama warned about on Sunday, is likely to translate into further diplomatic pressure on Israel.

Netanyahu insisted that he was "willing to make painful concessions to achieve [a] historic peace" with the Palestinians and made clear that this would require that Israel "give up parts of the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people." He railed against the notion of occupation, saying that in Judea and Samaria — the biblical names traditionally used on the right of Israel's political spectrum for what is internationally known as the West Bank — "Jewish people are not foreign occupiers." Instead, he stressed what he said was a "4,000-year-old bond between the Jewish people and the Jewish land."
Still, he said, "the Palestinians share this small land with us," and "we seek a peace in which they'll be neither Israel's subjects nor its citizens" but would live as a "free, viable and independent people in their own state."
The reason such a state has not emerged, Netanyahu argued, is that "so far the Palestinians have been unwilling to accept a Palestinian state if that meant accepting a Jewish state alongside it." In other words, the obstacle to peace is Palestinian obduracy.
In fact, the demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state and the national homeland of the Jewish people as a precondition to peace was first made by Netanyahu himself in 2009, and the Palestinian leadership responded by saying it was a red herring. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist within the Oslo Accords and that Israel was free to define its own character. Palestinian leaders remain reluctant to take a position that would appear to diminish the rights of Israel's non-Jewish citizens, which include a million Palestinians.
But the underlying issue is the fate of the Palestinian refugees: the Palestinian leadership wants the refugees' right of return as established by U.N. resolutions to be part of the negotiating process, even if the outcome of talks involves an agreement to settle them primarily in a new Palestinian state. But Netanyahu made clear that the fate of the Palestinian refugees was not Israel's concern and that it would have to be resolved outside of Israel's borders. Indeed, he challenged Abbas to lay to rest "the fantasy that Israel will one day be flooded by the descendants of Palestinian refugees." Essentially, the Israeli leader was demanding that Abbas make clear to his people that which he may have been prepared to accept in previous rounds of talks. But even if they're prepared to compromise on the outcome, the Palestinians are unlikely to simply drop the refugee issue from its designated place among the "final status" issues to be resolved in the peace process.
While Abbas may have been willing to accept a deal under which Israel would keep the major settlement blocs in exchange for equivalent land from inside Israel's 1967 borders, he sees it as a matter of international law rather than one of Israeli generosity. Part of the logic of going to the U.N. for a ruling on sovereignty, in fact, is to establish the principle in international law that all West Bank land is the Palestinians' to trade away, rather than, as Netanyahu suggested on the basis of biblical claims, Israel's to concede.
"We'll be generous about the size of a Palestinian state," said Netanyahu, "but we'll be very firm about where we put the border with it," stressing that Israel would not return to the borders of June 4, 1967. Israel's "unique security requirements" would also have to be at the forefront of any peace agreement, the Prime Minister stressed, and that would require, among other things, "that Israel maintain a long-term military presence along the Jordan River" — i.e., that the Palestinian state's border with its only Arab neighbor, Jordan, be effectively policed by Israeli troops.
And if the vague promise of generosity while also claiming the major settlement blocs and the right to a long-term military presence in the Palestinian state were not likely to be welcomed by Abbas as a basis for renewed talks, Netanyahu had more bad news for the Palestinian leader: Israel is not prepared to share Jerusalem as the capital of both states, despite the international consensus on the issue.
After telling Congress that only Israel could be trusted to maintain freedom of worship for all faiths, Netanyahu insisted that "Jerusalem must never again be divided; Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel." Disagreement over the Holy City had been a key deal breaker at Camp David in 2000, and no Palestinian or Arab leader would be willing to accept Palestinian statehood without Jerusalem despite Netanyahu's pledge that "with creativity and goodwill, a solution can be found" to the difficulties that his position on Jerusalem presents for the Palestinians.
The Israeli Prime Minister then added a final hurdle for Abbas to cross in order to restart talks: he would have to reverse the reconciliation agreement that his Fatah movement has struck with Hamas, the Islamist movement that has engaged in both terrorism attacks and successful electoral politics, and which refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist as a precondition for negotiations. "We will not negotiate with a Palestinian government backed by the Palestinian version of al-Qaeda," Netanyahu thundered. "I say to President Abbas, tear up your pact with Hamas and sit down and negotiate with Israel."
The agreement with Hamas, of course, was concluded by Abbas under pressure from his base, seized by the spirit of the Arab Spring. He'd only likely tear it up if he believed negotiating with Israel could yield an outcome sufficiently acceptable to justify such a move to the Palestinian public. And he's unlikely to see such an outcome on the basis of what Netanyahu said on Capitol Hill.
A spokesman for Abbas predictably rejected Netanyahu's demands, claiming that he had put "more obstacles" in the path to peace. A resumption of talks looks as unlikely after Tuesday's speech as it did before Netanyahu spoke.
Obama noted in his speech to the Israel lobbying organization AIPAC on Sunday that the Palestinians were finding the international community receptive to their efforts to pursue their interests at the U.N. because of the "impatience with the peace process, or the absence of one." The President warned that "the march to isolate Israel internationally — and the impulse of the Palestinians to abandon negotiations — will continue to gain momentum in the absence of a credible peace process. And for us to have leverage with the Palestinians, to have leverage with the Arab states and with the international community, the basis for negotiations has to hold out the prospect of success."
The smart money says that the coming months are more likely to see an escalation of the diplomatic confrontation than an outbreak of peace.

Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/05/24/netanyahu-sets-out-his-peace-terms-but-is-unlikely-to-find-a-palestinian-taker/#ixzz1NJqhztxr

MAGAZINE: Obama’s Young Mother Abroad

Obama’s Young Mother Abroad

Friends and family of Stanley Ann Dunham

Stanley Ann Dunham at Borobudur in Indonesia, in the early 1970s.

By JANNY SCOTT

The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising — the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elas­tic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. She met the camera head-on, dressed in hand-loomed textile dyed indigo, a silver earring half-hidden in the cascading curtain of her dark hair. She carried her chin a few degrees higher than most. His right hand rested on her shoulder, lightly. The photograph, taken on a Manhattan rooftop in August 1987 and e-mailed to me 20 years later, was a revelation and a puzzle. The man was Barack Obama at 26, the community organizer from Chicago on a visit to New York. The woman was Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother. It was impossible not to be struck by the similarities, and the dissimilarities, between them. It was impossible not to question the stereotype to which she had been expediently reduced: the white woman from Kansas.

Multimedia

 Milestones: The Life of Obama's Mother

Barack Obama with his mother in Hawaii.

The president’s mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama’s life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively to the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not. In “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that helped power Obama’s political ascent, she is the shy, small-town girl who falls head over heels for the brilliant, charismatic African who steals the show. In the next chapter, she is the naïve idealist, the innocent abroad. In Obama’s presidential campaign, she was the struggling single mother, the food-stamp recipient, the victim of a health care system gone awry, pleading with her insurance company for cover­age as her life slipped away. And in the fevered imaginings of supermarket tabloids and the Internet, she is the atheist, the Marx­ist, the flower child, the mother who abandoned her son or duped the newspapers of Hawaii into printing a birth announcement for her Kenyan-born baby, on the off chance that he might want to be president someday.

The earthy figure in the photograph did not fit any of those, as I learned over the course of two and a half years of research, travel and nearly 200 interviews. To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out to be about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story — of a girl with a boy’s name who grew up in the years before the women’s movement, the pill and the antiwar movement; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at 24, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anticommunist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered; who lived more than half her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where a lone Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of blacksmithing, a craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Belafonte; and then died at 52, never knowing who or what he would become.
Obama placed the ghost of his absent father at the center of his lyrical account of his life. At times, he has seemed to say more about the grandparents who helped raise him than about his mother. Yet she shaped him, to a degree Obama has seemed increasingly to acknowledge. In the preface to the 2004 edition of “Dreams From My Father,” issued nine years after the first edition and nine years after Dunham’s death, Obama folded in a revealing admission: had he known his mother would not survive her illness, he might have written a different book — “less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life.”
Dunham, for whom a letter in Jakarta from her son in the United States could raise her spirits for a full day, surely wondered about her place in his life. On rare occasions, she indicated as much — painfully, wistfully — to close friends. But she would not have been inclined to overstate her case. As she told him, with a dry humor that seems downright Kansan, “If nothing else, I gave you an interesting life.”
Ann Dunham, who jettisoned the name Stanley upon emerging from childhood, was just 17 years old in the fall of 1960 when she became pregnant with the child of a charismatic Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama, a fellow student at the University of Hawaii who was more than six years her senior. She dropped out of school, married him and gave birth shortly before their union ended. In the aftermath, she met Lolo Soetoro, an amiable, easygoing, tennis-playing graduate student from the Indonesian island of Java. They married in 1964, after Ann’s divorce came through, but their early life together was upended by forces beyond their control. On Sept. 30, 1965, six Indonesian army generals and one lieutenant were kidnapped and killed in Jakarta, in what the army characterized as an attempted coup planned by the Communist Party. Students studying abroad, including Lolo, whose studies were sponsored by the government, were soon summoned home. A year later, in 1967, Ann graduated with a degree in anthropology, gathered up her 6-year-old child and moved to Indonesia to join her husband.
The four years that followed were formative for mother and son — and are a subject of curiosity and an object of speculation for many Americans today. These were years in which Ann lived closely with the young Obama, who at the time was called Barry; she impressed upon him her values and, consciously and unconsciously, shaped his emerging understanding of the world. She made choices about her own life too, setting an example that in some ways Obama would eventually embrace, while in other ways intentionally leaving it behind.

• Janny Scott (jannyscott@gmail.com), a reporter for The New York Times, went on leave in 2008 to write “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother,” from which her article in this issue is adapted. Editor: Lauren Kern (l.kern-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

Small-Business Guide

Real-Life Lessons in the Delicate Art of Setting Prices

Jeff Swensen for The New York Times

To raise prices, Naomi Poe, founder of Better Batter Gluten-Free Flour,  had to convince customers her products offered added value.

By EILENE ZIMMERMAN

Setting prices can be tricky for a small business. If prices are too high, it is usually obvious, and there is an easy solution. But if they are too low, things can get complicated. That is because many business owners find it difficult to raise prices — even if they know they are losing money on every sale.

You're the Boss

Why Is It So Hard to Raise Prices?

Have you tried to raise prices? What has your experience been?

Quick Tips:

From Rafi Mohammed, a pricing consultant and author of “The 1% Windfall: How Successful Companies Use Price to Profit and Grow” (Harper Business):

Create a baseline and set goals for improvement.

Don’t set prices only by marking up the cost of your product or service by a certain percentage. Look also at what your competitors charge and determine why your product is worth more.

Give your customers choices, like off-peak pricing or tiered pricing, where the price varies depending on enhancements to the product.

Talk to your customers to understand their needs. You may find they will pay more for access to a help line or would be willing to order in volume for a small discount.

The fear, of course, is that raising prices will send customers fleeing. While that can happen, many small businesses have raised prices and lived to tell about it.

They echo a common sentiment: setting prices strategically is not just about the numbers. Buyers are not necessarily looking for the best price, said Mark Kronenberg, founder of Math 1-2-3, a New York-based tutoring and test preparation company.
“I learned it’s a misconception that if you raise prices too much, you’ll have no business,” Mr. Kronenberg said. “There are many customers who shop based on quality, not lowest price.”
Over the years, some prospective clients have balked at Mr. Kronenberg’s rates — his highest hourly rate is now $200 — but he said the company has more than made up for the losses by attracting and retaining higher-end clients who are more inclined to keep a tutor for a long time.
“I think it’s best to avoid a race to the bottom,” he said. “It’s an easy race to win, but you won’t have a lot of profit to show for it.”
This guide offers examples of small-business owners who decided to raise prices and the lessons they learned.
DON’T ASSUME PRICE IS ALL About three years ago a computer error caused all of the prices on Headsets.com to be displayed at cost rather than retail. With the lower prices on display for a weekend, Mike Faith, the chief executive, expected sales to soar. Instead, the increase was marginal. “It was a big lesson for us,” Mr. Faith said.
He realized that sales for his company, which is based in San Francisco, were far less dependent on price than on what he now says differentiates his business: customer service. “Every call we get is answered by a human being within four rings,” he said, “and our reps are well trained and know a lot about the headsets.”
Since the incident, Mr. Faith has raised prices once, by 8 percent and without much fanfare, although regular customers were told in advance. The result? Revenue rose about 8 percent as well.
“Over all, we didn’t notice any change in sales revenues, but all our sales were of the higher margin,” he said. “Did some customers not like the price? Yes, I’m sure. But that’s the case with any price you charge — there’s always somebody cheaper. The truth about pricing is it’s an art with a little bit of science, rather than a science with a little bit of art.”
Melanie Downey, the owner of Wilava, which manufactures and sells natural skin care products, also assumed that her customers were motivated primarily by price. Over time, she realized she had set prices too low to sustain the business. Yet she hesitated to raise them because she wanted her products to be affordable for those who needed them, and many of her customers have cancer or severe skin problems, including children with eczema. Concerned about maintaining trust, she decided not to act until after the company’s spring busy season.
The increase will range from 4 percent to 20 percent across Wilava’s line. Ms. Downey has been alerting customers in person and has gotten positive, even encouraging, feedback. In the next few weeks she will begin telling online customers. “I’m nervous about that,” she said, “since I won’t get immediate feedback.”
Still, looking back at the last year, she said, “I wish I had done this months ago.”
RIVALS’ PRICES MAY NOT MATTER A lot of small-business owners set prices just by looking at what their competitors charge. Naomi Poe, founder of Better Batter Gluten Free Flour near Altoona, Pa., learned that it is important to try to understand how your customers value your product.
In the food industry, Ms. Poe said, customers generally look for the cheapest price, but because her flour and baking mixes contain no gluten, they cost more to manufacture. She initially tried to compete with products that contain gluten on price but lost money on every sale.

SCIENCE: Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Say

Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Say

By CARL ZIMMER

In the early 1900s, scientists discovered that each person belonged to one of four blood types. Now they have discovered a new way to classify humanity: by bacteria. Each human being is host to thousands of different species of microbes. Yet a group of scientists now report just three distinct ecosystems in the guts of people they have studied.

 

Blood type, meet bug type.

“It’s an important advance,” said Rob Knight, a biologist at the University of Colorado, who was not involved in the research. “It’s the first indication that human gut ecosystems may fall into distinct types.”
The research team, led by Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, found no link between what they call enterotypes and the ethnic background of the European, American and Japanese subjects they studied.
Nor could they find a connection to sex, weight, health or age. They are now exploring other explanations. One possibility is that infants are randomly colonized by different pioneering species of gut microbes. The microbes alter the gut so that only certain species can follow them.
Whatever the cause of the different enterotypes, they may end up having discrete effects on people’s health. Gut microbes aid in food digestion and synthesize vitamins, using enzymes our own cells cannot make.
Dr. Bork and his colleagues have found that each of the types makes a unique balance of these enzymes. Enterotype 1 produces more enzymes for making vitamin B7 (also known as biotin), for example, and Enterotype 2 more enzymes for vitamin B1 (thiamine).
The discovery of the blood types A, B, AB and O had a major effect on how doctors practice medicine. They could limit the chances that a patient’s body would reject a blood transfusion by making sure the donated blood was of a matching type. The discovery of enterotypes could someday lead to medical applications of its own, but they would be far down the road.
“Some things are pretty obvious already,” Dr. Bork said. Doctors might be able to tailor diets or drug prescriptions to suit people’s enterotypes, for example.
Or, he speculated, doctors might be able to use enterotypes to find alternatives to antibiotics, which are becoming increasingly ineffective. Instead of trying to wipe out disease-causing bacteria that have disrupted the ecological balance of the gut, they could try to provide reinforcements for the good bacteria. “You’d try to restore the type you had before,” he said. Dr. Bork notes that more testing is necessary. Researchers will need to search for enterotypes in people from African, Chinese and other ethnic origins. He also notes that so far, all the subjects come from industrial nations, and thus eat similar foods. “This is a shortcoming,” he said. “We don’t have remote villages.”
The discovery of enterotypes follows on years of work mapping the diversity of microbes in the human body— the human microbiome, as it is known. The difficulty of the task has been staggering. Each person shelters about 100 trillion microbes. (For comparison, the human body is made up of only around 10 trillion cells.) But scientists cannot rear a vast majority of these bacteria in their labs to identify them and learn their characteristics.
As genetics developed, scientists learned how to study the microbiome by analyzing its DNA. Scientists extracted DNA fragments from people’s skin, saliva and stool. They learned how to recognize and discard human DNA, so that they were left with genes from the microbiome. They searched through the remaining DNA for all the variants of a specific gene and compared them with known species. In some cases, the variants proved to be from familiar bacteria, like E. coli. In other cases, the gene belonged to a species new to science.
These studies offered glimpses of a diversity akin to a rain forest’s. Different regions of the body were home to different combinations of species. From one person to another, scientists found more tremendous variety. Many of the species that lived in one person’s mouth, for example, were missing from another’s.
Scientists wondered if deeper studies would reveal a unity to human microbiomes. Over the past few years, researchers have identified the genomes — the complete catalog of genes — of hundreds of microbe species that live in humans. Now they can compare any gene they find with these reference genomes. They can identify the gene’s function, and identify which genus of bacteria the microbe belongs to. And by tallying all the genes they find, the scientists can estimate how abundant each type of bacteria is.
In the recent work, Dr. Bork and his team carried out an analysis of the gut microbes in 22 people from Denmark, France, Italy and Spain. Some of their subjects were healthy, while others were obese or suffered from intestinal disorders like Crohn’s disease. Dr. Bork and his colleagues searched for fragments of DNA corresponding to the genomes of 1,511 different species of bacteria. The researchers combined their results with previous studies of 13 Japanese individuals and four Americans.
The scientists then searched for patterns. “We didn’t have any hypothesis,” Dr. Bork said. “Anything that came out would be new.”
Still, Dr. Bork was startled by the result of the study: all the microbiomes fell neatly into three distinct groups.
And, as Dr. Bork and his colleagues reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature, each of the three enterotypes was composed of a different balance of species. People with type 1, for example, had high levels of bacteria called Bacteroides. In type 2, on the other hand, Bacteroides were relatively rare, while the genus Prevotella was unusually common.
“You can cut the data in lots of different ways, and you still get these three clusters,” Dr. Bork said.
Dr. Bork and his colleagues found confirmation of the three enterotypes when they turned to other microbiome surveys, and the groups continue to hold up now that they have expanded their own study to 400 people.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 20, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of microbes relative to the number of cells in the human body. Each person shelters about 100 trillion microbes, not 10 trillion, and is made up of about 10 trillion cells, not one million. 

ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT

Solar on the Water

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Elvin Batz, an installer at SPG Solar, checks the pontoon structure and panels of a floating solar array in an irrigation pond in Petaluma, Calif.

By TODD WOODY

PETALUMA, Calif. — Solar panels have sprouted on countless rooftops, carports and fields in Northern California. Now, several start-up companies see potential for solar panels that float on water.

Mark Defeo

The solar panel system at Far Niente Winery involves nearly 1,000 panels on pontoons and about 1,300 panels on adjacent land.

Already, 144 solar panels sit atop pontoons moored on a three-acre irrigation pond surrounded by vineyards in Petaluma in Sonoma County. Some 35 miles to the north, in the heart of the Napa Valley, another array of 994 solar panels covers the surface of a pond at the Far Niente Winery.
“Vineyard land in this part of the Napa Valley runs somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 an acre,” said Larry Maguire, Far Niente’s chief executive. “We wanted to go solar but we didn’t want to pull out vines.”
The company that installed the two arrays, SPG Solar of Novato, Calif., as well as Sunengy of Australia and Solaris Synergy of Israel, are among the companies trying to develop a market for solar panels on agricultural and mining ponds, hydroelectric reservoirs and canals. While it is a niche market, it is potentially a large one globally. The solar panel aqua farms have drawn interest from municipal water agencies, farmers and mining companies enticed by the prospect of finding a new use for — and new revenue from — their liquid assets, solar executives said.
Sunengy, for example, is courting markets in developing countries that are plagued by electricity shortages but have abundant water resources and intense sunshine, according to Philip Connor, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer.
Chris Robine, SPG Solar’s chief executive, said he had heard from potential customers as far away as India, Australia and the Middle East. When your land is precious, he said, “There’s a great benefit in that you have clean power coming from solar, and it doesn’t take up resources for farming or mining.”
Sunengy, based in Sydney, said it had signed a deal with Tata Power, India’s largest private utility, to build a small pilot project on a hydroelectric reservoir near Mumbai. Solaris Synergy, meanwhile, said it planned to float a solar array on a reservoir in the south of France in a trial with the French utility EDF.
MDU Resources Group, a $4.3 billion mining and energy infrastructure conglomerate based in Bismarck, N.D., has been in talks with SPG Solar about installing floating photovoltaic arrays on settling ponds at one of its California gravel mines, according to Bill Connors, MDU’s vice president of renewable resources.
“We don’t want to put a renewable resource project in the middle of our operations that would disrupt mining,” Mr. Connors said. “The settling ponds are land we’re not utilizing right now except for discharge and if we can put that unproductive land into productive use while reducing our electric costs and our carbon foot footprint, that’s something we’re interested in.”
Mr. Connors declined to discuss the cost of an SPG floating solar array. But he noted, “We wouldn’t be looking at systems that are not competitive.”
SPG Solar’s main business is installing conventional solar systems for homes and commercial operations. It built Far Niente’s 400-kilowatt floating array on a 1.3-acre pond in 2007 as a special project and has spent the last four years developing a commercial version called Floatovoltaics that executives say is competitive in cost with a conventional ground-mounted system.
The Floatovoltaics model now being brought to market by SPG Solar is the array that bobs on the surface of the Petaluma irrigation pond.
“We have been able to utilize a seemingly very simple system, minimizing the amount of steel,” said Phil Alwitt, project development manager for SPG Solar, standing on a walkway built into the 38-kilowatt array.
“With steel being so expensive, that’s our main cost,” Mr. Alwitt said.
Long rows of standard photovoltaic panels made by Suntech, the Chinese solar manufacturer, sit tilted at an eight-degree angle on a metal lattice fitted to pontoons and anchored by tie lines to buoys to withstand wind and waves.
The array, which is not yet operational, will be hooked up to a transmission line through a cable laid under the pond bed. Mr. Alwitt said that when the array is completed, 2,016 panels would cover most of the pond’s surface and generate one megawatt of electricity at peak output.
He noted that the cooling effect of the water increased electricity production at the Far Niente winery by 1 percent over a typical ground-mounted system.