¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder distinguished professor and Marine veteran Richard Jessor reflects on what the planting of the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi Feb. 23, 1945, meant for the country and for him personally

Eighty years later, Richard Jessor vividly recalls hitting the beach on Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945.

“The island had been under severe bombardment from U.S. aircraft and our Navy ships offshore,” says Jessor. “Both types of bombardment had been going on for quite some time, and the sense was that Iwo Jima could be taken in three or four days because nothing could have survived such a massive bombardment from American forces.”

The first three waves of Marines landed on the beach without taking enemy fire.

“By the time we in the fourth wave hit the beach, the Japanese—who were concealed, waiting for us—pulled their artillery out of the caves and had every inch of the beach registered, so when our tractor hit the beach, we were under severe fire,” recalls Jessor, then a 20-year-old Marine. “Our tractor got stuck at the beach edge and could not move us up, so we jumped out of the tractor into the water.

“As I hit the beach, I looked over and there was a Marine lying on his back, a bubble of blood coming out of his mouth. He died there, and that was my first exposure to combat.”

Jessor was hit in the back by shrapnel during the first day ashore but was able to continue fighting. After four days of fighting, he and his company were pulled back from the front line and told they could write one letter.

He wrote a letter to his parents, thanking them for everything they had done for him. He also said his goodbyes, “because I didn’t think anyone was going to get off the island alive,” he says, explaining, “there was carnage all of the time, every day, and you felt every day that it was going to be your last day.

“We were constantly being fired upon by the Japanese, who would come to the openings of their caves and fire, and then withdraw, so we didn’t see the enemy, and that was a huge source of frustration,” he adds. As it turned out, the Japanese had heavily fortified the island and had a dense network of tunnels from which they could launch attacks.

The flag raised atop Mount Suribachi

Back on the line the morning of the fifth day, Jessor looked at the opposite end of the island to see something in the distance atop Mount Suribachi, the dominant geographical feature on Iwo Jima.

“As I looked, I suddenly saw the American flag flying. I couldn’t see anything else that was that far away, but I saw the flag flying and I started shouting, ‘The flag is up! The flag is up!’” he says. “The other Marines around me began turning around to look. Seeing that made us realize that our rear was now being covered, because we had been under attack from behind as well as in front.

“For me, it was a moment of being able to say to myself, ‘Maybe I will get out of this alive,’” he adds. “In that sense, it was transformative for me, and I remember it well.”

The flag raising lifted the spirits of the Marines on the island, and later it did the same for a war-weary American public at home, when the image of Marines raising the flag was captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. Rosenthal won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for photography, and the photo has is one of the 

Jessor says the photo symbolized the Marines’ perseverance in the face of one of the bloodiest battles of the war, and it helped shape the public’s sentiment that victory in the Pacific was at hand. However, it also may have inadvertently created a false impression among the public, he says.

“Some people may think that when the flag went up the island was secure—and that was absolutely not the case,” Jessor explains. “When the flag went up, on day five, we still had 31 more days of fighting—and most of the casualties took place after the flag raising. Close to 7,000 Marines were killed in the 36-day battle.”

Meanwhile, as the Marines advanced, they sometimes came across the bodies of dead Japanese soldiers, whom they searched for souvenirs. Marines were particularly interested in Japanese “good luck flags,” which bore well wishes from friends and family and which were often tied around soldier’s waist.

“One morning, when I looked out my foxhole, I saw a dead Japanese soldier. I walked over to him to see whether he had a flag under his shirt, and as I bent over, I saw he had letters in his shirt pocket,” presumably from his family, he says. “Well, I had letters from family in my pocket—and suddenly I was struck by the fact that in so many ways we shared the same humanity. I couldn’t blame him any more than I could blame myself for being in the same situation. It gave me pause about how stupid it was to be engaged in this kind of activity (war).”

An epiphany amidst combat

Jessor called that moment an epiphany. He made two vows then and there: that he would never go to war again and that he would go on to do something meaningful with his life.

First, though, he had to get off the island alive.

His next challenge came a few days later, when he was ordered to take a Japanese soldier captured at the front lines under his guard to the beach, where interpreters could question the prisoner about the placement of weapons facing the Marines.

“As I said, there was a great deal of frustration that we could not see the enemy we were fighting, so I anticipated there could be some attempts on my prisoner as I started walking him back through the rear lines,” Jessor recalls. “As we got through the rear of the lines, where our artillery was, a Marine jumped up, running toward me and my prisoner, saying, ‘I’m going to kill that son-of-a-bitch.’

“I had to point my rifle at his head and say, ‘I have orders to shoot anybody who touches my prisoner,’ and so he stopped and finally backed off. And the same thing happened a second time before I got the prisoner to the beach and turned him over to command headquarters,” he says.

“As I’ve ruminated these 80 years, I’m not sure whether I would have shot that fellow Marine if he had not desisted from his threat, and it worries me that I might have done that.”

Finally, the objective is achieved

After 36 days, the Marines secured Iwo Jima. A short time later, U.S. aircraft were able to use its runway, which—combined with the island’s proximity to the Japanese mainland—made it a strategic military objective.

“Capturing Iwo Jima had immediate consequences for the approach to Japan,” Jessor says. “What was happening was that our bombers were leaving from Saipan or Tinian, and some of those bombers would get hit over Japan and not be able to make it back, so they would have to ditch in the sea, and many were lost. So, the fact Iwo Jima had a landing strip on it was important for that reason, as well as serving as a base for the projected attack on Tokyo.”

But the victory came at a tremendous cost to the Marines.

“We were destroyed. As I said, almost 7,000 Marines were killed on that island,” Jessor says. The scale of the loss was on display when Jessor and fellow Marines retraced their steps to the landing beach, which was arrayed with crosses where Marines were temporarily buried after falling in combat.

The Marines were shipped back to their training grounds in Maui for their next mission—the planned invasion of Japan.

They spent their days practicing landing craft invasions. At night, Jessor says he and a few of his fellow Iwo Jima veterans would gather in their tent to relive details of the battle, which he believes had a cathartic effect.

Jessor also recalls being on Maui when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“When the bomb dropped, we all thought it was a great thing,” he recalls. “We were saying to each other, ‘No more war! We get to go home!’”

However, in retrospect, as the scale of the death and destruction in those cities became known, Jessor says he reevaluated his opinion about that fateful decision. At the same time, Jessor says he developed a deep disdain for politicians who were so easily willing to put American troops in combat.

“They talk about it like it’s a game,” he says. “They haven’t the slightest sense of what combat is like and what it does to people and the destruction it causes. Even for the many people who survive the experience, their lives are changed forever.”

After the war

After he was discharged, Jessor made good on his promise to himself to make a difference for the better. After earning his doctorate, in 1951 he accepted a position as an assistant professor of psychology at ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder.

During his ensuing 70 years at ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder, he co-founded and later directed the (its building was recently renamed in his honor); wrote in January 1970 critiquing the lack of diversity on campus and making suggestions for positive changes; wrote a report in the 1960s that took the ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Board of Regents to task for being unresponsive to students and faculty, which earned him the ire of former Regent Joe Coors; and wrote 10 books. He retired as a distinguished professor in 2021, which makes him the university’s longest-serving professor.

Like many World War II veterans, Jessor rarely spoke of his experiences during the war, even to close friends and his own family. That changed for him after he saw the World War II movie , which opens with a scene of American soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy, France, under intense fire from German soldiers.

“As a trained clinical psychologist, I didn’t want to share my experiences with others, so I didn’t talk much about having been a Marine,” he says. “And then one day, my wife, Jane, and I were in Aspen. It was raining, so we couldn’t go hiking, so instead we went to the movies and saw Saving Private Ryan.

“The Steven Spielberg-directed movie was the real thing,” he says. “When the invasion scenes start at the beginning, I was sobbing, and the tears were running down my face. And while that was happening, I’m saying to myself, ‘You’re a psychologist and you didn’t know that you still had this inside you?’ And obviously, I didn’t.

“The movie brought it all back to me, and so I began talking about it from that point on.”

“I don’t ever want to forget that experience, because it strengthened me in many ways. Sometimes I would say to myself, ‘If I can get through Iwo Jima, I can get through anything.’ But in other ways, it reminds me what war is all about and what has to be done so they don’t happen anymore.”

Jessor had hoped to return to Iwo Jima last year. The  in New Orleans offered to cover all expenses for him and his wife to attend a Pacific war theater travel lecture tour series it offers to patrons, which was to include a visit to Iwo Jima. However, the island is open to visitors only one day a year, and volcanic activity on the island at the time resulted in the tour being cancelled. Noting his age—he is 100—Jessor says he’s unsure he will ever have the opportunity to return to the island, despite his strong desire to do so.

Reflecting on the past

These days, Jessor keeps some mementos on his work desk to remind him of his time on Iwo Jima: a deactivated Japanese hand grenade he took home from the battle and a jar containing black sand from the beach where he landed. The jar of sand was given to him by a friend who visited the island in 2002.

“Sometimes I’m barely aware they are there, and then other times I’ll look over and see the grenade or the vial of sand and it all comes back to me. It’s a reminder that I value a great deal,” he says.

“I don’t ever want to forget that experience, because it strengthened me in many ways. Sometimes I would say to myself, ‘If I can get through Iwo Jima, I can get through anything.’ But in other ways, it reminds me what war is all about and what has to be done so they don’t happen anymore.”

Did you enjoy this article?  Passionate about behavioral science?

Related Articles

Xuedong Liu of ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder is one of 170 ‘exceptional inventors’ who are helping to ‘propel us into the future,’ academy says

Xuedong Liu, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of biochemistry, has been named a member of the 2024 Class of Fellows by the , the group recently announced.

Liu is one of an elected group of 170 “exceptional inventors” honored in 2024.

The 2024 cohort of fellows exemplifies the academy’s belief that groundbreaking innovation knows no bounds and inventors can be found everywhere, the NAI said, adding that the honorees represent 39 U.S. states and 12 countries.

“This year’s class of NAI Fellows represents a truly impressive caliber of inventors. Each of these individuals are tackling real-world issues and creating solutions that propel us into the future. Through their work, they are making significant contributions to science, creating lasting societal impact and growing the economy,” said Paul Sanberg, NIA president.

He added: “NAI Fellows as a whole are a driving force of innovation, generating crucial advancements across scientific disciplines and creating tangible impacts as they move their technologies from lab to marketplace.”

Liu’s laboratory works to understand the fundamental mechanisms underlying cell-cell communication. Aberrations of normal signaling networks can lead to human diseases such as cancer. The Liu laboratory is developing novel therapeutic solutions for treating cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.

Liu is co-founder of OnKure Therapeutics (Nasdaq: OKUR) and founder of Vesicle Therapeutics. His lab discovered and patented a profile-specific histone deacetylase inhibitor, which has entered phase II clinical trials, and a new type of drug delivery system.

He received his PhD in genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994 and was a National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Liu joined the ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder faculty in 2000 and won the university’s Inventor of the Year Award in 2013.

"I am deeply honored to receive this recognition,” Liu said. “This accolade not only validates the impact of our team's work but also highlights the indispensable contributions of my trainees, collaborators, colleagues and co-founders over the years. More than a personal milestone, it is a testament to the collective effort and dedication that have driven our innovations in tackling challenging problems. Additionally, this accomplishment reflects the entrepreneurial spirit cultivated by Venture Partners at our university, whose support has been essential.”

The 2024 Class of Fellows will be honored and presented their medals by a senior official of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) at the  on June 26 in Atlanta.

The NAI Fellows Program was established to highlight academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.

The NAI Fellows Program has 2,068 fellows worldwide, representing more than 300 universities and governmental and nonprofit research institutes. Collectively, the Fellows hold more than 68,000 issued U.S. patents, which have generated more than 20,000 licensed technologies, 4,000 companies and created more than 1.2 million jobs. In addition, more than $3.2 trillion in revenue has been generated based on NAI Fellow discoveries, the academy said.

Among all NAI Fellows, there are more than 170 presidents and senior leaders of research universities, governmental and nonprofit research institutes; about 755 members of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine; about 63 inductees of the National Inventors Hall of Fame; 70 recipients of the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation and U.S. National Medal of Science; and 57 Nobel Laureates.

The  is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to academic inventors. The full list of 2024 Fellows can be found .

Did you enjoy this article?  Passionate about biochemistry? Show your support.

Related Articles

Lightning strikes link weather on Earth and weather in space

There are trillions of charged particles— and , the basic building blocks of matter—whizzing around above your head at any given time. These high-energy particles, which can travel at close to the speed of light, typically remain thousands of kilometers away from Earth, trapped there by the shape of Earth’s magnetic field.

Occasionally, though, an event happens that can jostle them out of place, sending electrons . These high-energy particles in space make up what are known as the , and their discovery was one of the first of the space age. from my research team has found that electromagnetic waves generated by lightning can trigger these electron showers.

A brief history lesson

At the start of the space race in the 1950s, professor and his research team at the University of Iowa were tasked with building an experiment to fly on the United States’ very first satellite, . They designed sensors to study , which is caused by high-energy particles originating from the Sun, the Milky Way galaxy, or beyond.

After Explorer 1 launched, though, they noticed that their instrument was detecting significantly than expected. Rather than measuring a distant source of radiation beyond our solar system, they appeared to be measuring a local and extremely intense source.

This measurement led to the Van Allen radiation belts, two doughnut-shaped regions of high-energy electrons and ions encircling the planet.

Scientists believe that the inner radiation belt, peaking about 621 miles (1000 kilometers) from Earth, is composed of electrons and high-energy protons and is relatively stable over time.

The outer radiation belt, about three times farther away, is made up of high-energy electrons. This belt . Its location, density and energy content may vary significantly by the hour in response to solar activity.

The discovery of these high-radiation regions is not only an interesting story about the early days of the space race; it also serves as a reminder that many scientific discoveries have come about by happy accident.

It is a lesson for experimental scientists, , to keep an open mind when analyzing and evaluating data. If the data doesn’t match our theories or expectations, those theories may need to be revisited.

Our curious observations

While I teach the history of the space race in a space policy course at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I rarely connect it to my own experience as a scientist researching Earth’s radiation belts. Or, at least, I didn’t until recently.

In a study led by Max Feinland, an undergraduate student in my research group, we stumbled upon some of our own of Earth’s radiation belts. Our findings have made us rethink our understanding of Earth’s inner radiation belt and the processes affecting it.

Originally, we set out to look for very rapid—sub-second— entering the atmosphere from the outer radiation belt, where they are typically observed.

that a type of electromagnetic wave known as “chorus” can knock these electrons out of position and send them toward the atmosphere. They’re called chorus waves due to their when listened to on a radio receiver.

Feinland developed an algorithm to search for these events in decades of measurements from the . When he showed me a plot with the location of all the events he’d detected, we noticed a number of them were not where we expected. Some events mapped to the inner radiation belt rather than the outer belt.

This finding was curious for two reasons. For one, chorus waves aren’t prevalent in this region, so something else had to be shaking these electrons loose.

The other surprise was finding electrons this energetic in the inner radiation belt at all. Measurements from prompted renewed interest in the inner radiation belt. Observations from the Van Allen Probes suggested that high-energy electrons are in this inner radiation belt, at least not during the first few years of that mission, from 2012 to 2014.

Our observations now showed that, in fact, there are times that the inner belt contains high-energy electrons. How often this is true and under what conditions remain open questions to explore. These high-energy particles and harm humans in space, so researchers need to know when and where in space they are present to better design spacecraft.

Determining the culprit

One of the ways to disturb electrons in the inner radiation belt and kick them into Earth’s atmosphere actually begins in the atmosphere itself.

Lightning, the that light up the sky during thunderstorms, can actually generate electromagnetic waves known as .

These waves can then travel through the atmosphere out into space, where they in the inner radiation belt—much as chorus waves interact with electrons in the outer radiation belt.

To test whether lightning was behind our inner radiation belt detections, we looked back at the electron bursts and compared them with . Some lightning activity seemed correlated with our electron events, but much of it was not.

Specifically, only lightning that occurred right after so-called geomagnetic storms resulted in the bursts of electrons we detected.

are disturbances in the near-Earth space environment often caused by large eruptions on the Sun’s surface. This solar activity, if directed toward Earth, can produce what researchers term . Space weather can result in stunning auroras, but it can also disrupt satellite and power grid operations.

We discovered that a combination of weather on Earth and weather in space produces the unique electron signatures we observed in our study. The solar activity disturbs Earth’s radiation belts and populates the inner belt with very high-energy electrons, then the lightning interacts with these electrons and creates the rapid bursts that we observed.

These results provide a nice reminder of the interconnected nature of Earth and space. They were also a welcome reminder to me of the often nonlinear process of scientific discovery.

Lauren Blum is an assistant professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences.

This article is republished from  under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Related Articles

In honor of Darwin Day Feb. 12, ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder evolutionary biologist Daniel Medeiros explains what we get right and wrong about Darwinism

For evolutionary biologists, the big day is imminent.

No, not Valentine’s Day.

For many scientists, educators, historians and humanists, the upcoming event of note is , which supporters say is a time to reflect and act on the principles of intellectual bravery, perpetual curiosity, scientific thinking and a hunger for truth, as embodied by .

The noted British naturalist and biologist is widely recognized for his book  which is considered the foundation of modern evolutionary biology. Darwin Day is celebrated internationally every Feb. 12, the anniversary of Darwin’s birth on Feb. 12, 1809, outside of London.

Scientists say it’s hard to quantify the impact Darwin had on evolutionary theory. At the same time, , and some propagandists have used his scientific theories to support a variety of  and, in some cases, would likely be appalled by.

Recently, Professor Daniel Medeiros with the ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology talked with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about some of the mistaken ideas associated with Darwin while also delineating why some of his scientific concepts can be so difficult to grasp. His responses have been lightly edited for style and condensed for space.

Question: One idea about Darwin is that he originated the idea of evolution. True or false?

Medeiros: False. I actually had a colleague, Ned Friedman, a plant evolutionary biologist, who taught a whole course on evolutionary thinking before Darwin. And in fact, Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had some pretty clear evolutionary thoughts and logic. I think Darwin collected the most data and articulated the best case for evolution by natural selection, but he didn’t come up with it out of whole cloth.

That’s how things happen in evolution—there’s ‘convergence.’ Similar solutions can occur in different lineages around the same time or given the same environmental pressures. That’s the idea of evolution by natural selection; I think several scientists came to that conclusion simultaneously. So, it wasn’t all Darwin, but I think he did the best, most comprehensive way of presenting things.

Question: What about the idea that Darwin’s theory on evolution encompasses the origins of life?

Medeiros: I think he may have hypothesized on the origin of the living creature from a primordial soup of chemicals, but I don’t think he knew enough about chemistry or cell biology to go beyond that. I don’t know how he would have even begun to hypothesize about cellular evolution.

Question: What about the idea that Darwin believed humans are descended from apes?

Medeiros:  That’s kind of a tough one, even for some of my students in my upper division class. The proper way to think about evolution is as a family tree. The idea that humans evolved from a chimp or humans evolved from a monkey; specifically, what you think of a modern monkey, is incorrect. It’s easy to conceive given that those modern species are clearly related to us, but we are not descended from them.

Now, our last common ancestor looked something like a chimp and would definitely be classified as a “great ape”. We also had an ancestor who looked something like a monkey, but technically, ‘we came from a monkey’ is not how you would describe it in evolutionary biology terms. We evolved from species that were chimp-like, but we’re not chimps and we did not come from modern monkeys.

Any species that’s alive today is a successful modern species, as much as we are. If it’s around today, it’s a survivor. It’s a successful species that has its own set of innovations. If it’s living today, it’s its own success story.

Question: What about the idea some attribute to Darwinism that modern humans aren’t evolving?

Medeiros: That’s incorrect. That’s a property of all living things—that they are always changing. It’s not something you can stop. DNA is always accumulating mutations. There’s always genetic variation, and that variation responds to the environment. In the short window of time we have been around, it’s hard to see, but it’s true.

I’m not sure how we’re evolving, but there’s no organism that’s not evolving. So, we’re changing for sure, in some way, but I don’t know how. It will be interesting to see.

Question: There’s also this idea associated with Darwinism that animals are deliberately attempting to adapt to their environments. Accurate or not?

Medeiros: That’s a misconception. The word ‘evolution’ means unfolding, originally, which implies that you have some truth or something that’s unfolded or revealed. But it’s actually much more chaotic and there’s a huge random factor.

From the organism’s perspective, they’re just throwing out babies with variations. And hopefully, one of them sticks. And if one sticks, your lineage hangs around and has another chance for more mutation. So, it’s random and it’s chaotic.

Andthere are limitations. Species go extinct all the time. Maybe their environment changed too quickly, and they were unable to adapt. Maybe they just didn’t hit upon the right mutations, or there could be constraints to their development or their genome that wouldn’t allow adaptive traits to evolve and they go extinct. That’s common.

(The word) ‘evolved,’ in terms of how people use it in common language, it’s like, ‘Oh, I evolved. I became better.’ It’s about this idea of better and more. But then extinction is evolution, too. It’s just change over time, however, that manifests itself.

A cool thing that I teach in my class is that a lot of animal evolution since the Cambrian or a little later—has been about loss; trimming down, getting rid of what you don’t need. I think that’s one thing that’s not really recognized too much, that evolution is not always—or even mostly—about gaining fancy new features. It’s not necessarily this march toward more and more sophistication. It’s a lot about use it or lose it—about losing features that are not adaptive anymore. A lot of evolutionary change, especially in animals, is loss.

Then you have these blockbuster new things, like feathers, which are a huge innovation, or a turtle shell, or the human brain, which is another huge innovation. But then, even more than that, what makes a lot of species different from each other is that they’ve lost different things.

Question: Why do you think it seems so hard for people to grasp the idea of evolution?

Medeiros: Evolution is hard to understand because it’s inherently about processes beyond any individual’s experience. It’s about things happening on a scale of tens, hundreds, thousands and millions of years. That’s hard for us to fathom, and it’s not necessarily intuitive.

It’s kind of like the idea of the earth spinning around the sun. That’s not intuitive. If you look outside, that’s not what you see happening. You don’t feel like you’re spinning. The sun moves up over you. It defies your experience as a human.

So, it’s easy to have misconceptions and I don’t fault people for that. It’s a hard, hard concept just by itself, much less the implications where it could be perceived as taking human beings down several notches, as just another animal that evolved.

Question: There is an idea in some quarters that evolution and religion, whether it's Christianity or another faith, are incompatible. Any thoughts on the notion that if you believe in one of those ideas you can’t believe in the other?

Medeiros: I think that’s mostly on the religion side of things. It’s really up to you, whether you, as a religious person, can believe in evolution. That’s a great thing about religion: If you want to incorporate evolution into it, you could surely work it in, but if it somehow interferes with your beliefs, you won’t. You can shape your religion to exclude any kind of science, if you want.

In my education, I’ve had several biology teachers, evolutionary biologists and otherwise, who were quite religious people and (evolution) didn’t interfere with their belief.

As I understand it, Darwin himself was a religious person for most of his life, and finally ended up calling himself agnostic. You can see some of that in his writing. With some (discoveries) it was like, ‘OK, where does this place God? This evidence maybe puts the role of God in a different place than I was taught when I was younger.’ I think he used some language like that in his writing.

I’m not a historian, but I don’t think Darwin ever excluded a role for religion.

Question: It seems like not long after Darwin published The Origin of Species, people began using his work to promote their own political, religious or ideological agendas?

Medeiros: Yes, 100%. I couldn’t give you the exact timing on when that started to happen, but I think it was while he was still alive that people began to formulate ideas around his work. I think that’s not uncommon: You figure out some scientific truth and there will be people to exploit it for good and bad.

Evolution by natural selection and survival of the fittest—all of those touch phrases and concepts—in isolation have been used to justify some very horrible things.

Question: The Darwin Awards were created a few years back as a tongue-in-cheek honor bestowed on people who removed themselves from the gene pool by doing something really dumb. How far removed are those awards from anything associated with the actual British biologist?

Medeiros: I remember first hearing about them in graduate school. At the time, I thought it was humorous, but after I became a parent, the idea of people getting hurt and dying in weird ways was no longer so funny.

And really, that’s not how natural selection works. It’s not like, you’re an evolutionary loser, so you get attacked by a lion because you’re dim-witted.

Really, it’s all about the numbers at the margins. For example, with this particular adaptive allele, you have lineage that has 5% more offspring—and you do that over many generations and throw in some random environmental change—and they’re the fittest. But their fitness is just kind of at the margins and there’s a lot of luck involved, too.

So, it’s not as clear as, ‘Oh, this is person’s a ding-dong; they strapped themselves to a rocket' or whatever. That’s not an accurate representation of Darwin’s ideas.

Question: Will you be doing anything for Darwin Day this year?

Medeiros: In past years I’ve given a talk about Darwin, mentioning some things about the ‘modern synthesis’ concept, which includes things that Darwin was not aware of at the time—filling in some of the gaps he was unaware of—like DNA and genes.

That’s not to take anything away from Darwin. It’s fun to read Darwin because he’s so modern in how he thought and deduced things. I think a lot of biologists feel like, ‘Well, if I was back then, that’s how I would have figured things out, too.’

But to answer your question, nothing special planned, like reading from Origins. I might celebrate by going to my lab and writing a grant.  Also, my youngest son has the same birthday as Darwin, so we will be focusing on that! I think Darwin would appreciate that 
 by all accounts he wasn’t just a great scientist, but a really devoted dad.

Did you enjoy this article?  Passionate about ecology and evolutionary biology? Show your support.

Related Articles

¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder distinguished professor recognized for ‘transformative contributions to restoration ecology’

Katharine Suding, a University of Colorado Boulder distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, has won The and Prize for Achievement in Science and been named a Franklin Institute Laureate.

Suding is recognized for making “transformative contributions to restoration ecology by increasing our understanding of degraded ecosystems and their recovery dynamics. Her work addresses urgent environmental and societal challenges, and guides policies and practices of ecological restoration, biodiversity conservation and sustainable ecosystem management,” notes The Franklin Institute.

The Bower Awards honor extraordinary excellence in science, technology and business. Suding and her eight colleagues in the 2025 Franklin Institute Laureate cohort are cited as “true visionaries, pushing the boundaries of innovation to find solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges—and their achievements are transformative.”

“I am incredibly honored to receive The Franklin Institute’s Bower Award for Achievement in Science,” Suding said. “Ecosystem restoration is tasked with solving complex environmental challenges facing the world today, a discipline that well represents Benjamin Franklin’s spirit of innovation and application. I could not have done this work if not for amazing collaborations with students, postdocs and colleagues, as well as indispensable partnerships with restoration practitioners. This award is for them, for the field and for everyone working to bring back nature.”

Suding is a plant community ecologist who works at the nexus of ecosystem, landscape and population biology. Her research aims to apply cutting-edge “usable” science to the challenges of restoration, species invasion and environmental change. She and her work with a range of conservation groups, government agencies and land managers to provide evidence-based solutions that take into account biodiversity, human well-being and management opportunities.

They employ a combination of long-term monitoring, modeling and experimental approaches in settings that range from alpine tundra to oak woodlands to grasslands. Common themes of their work include plant-soil feedbacks, functional traits, species effects on ecosystem processes and non-linear and threshold dynamics.

Founded in 1824, The Franklin Institute of Philadelphia strives to honor the legacy of Benjamin Franklin by presenting awards for outstanding achievements in science, engineering and industry. As the oldest comprehensive science and technology awards program in the United States, The Franklin Institute Awards Program has recognized more than 2,000 of the most pioneering scientists, engineers, inventors and innovators from around the world.

Previous laureates include Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Pierre and Marie Curie, Max Planck, Orville Wright, Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ruth Patrick, Jacques Cousteau, Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, Gordon Moore, Shuji Nakamura, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Blackburn, Bill Gates, Jim West and Gerhard Sessler, Cornelia Bargmann, John Goodenough, Jim Allison and Frances Arnold.

Suding and the other members of her laureate cohort will be honored in Philadelphia the week of April 28–May 2. Awards will be bestowed during a ceremony at The Franklin Institute on May 1 hosted by Chief Astronomer Derrick Pitts.

Did you enjoy this article?  Passionate about ecology and evolutionary biology? Show your support.

Related Articles

¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder researchers Colleen Reid, Emma Rieves and their colleagues explored the potential impact of objective and perceived greenspace exposure on mental health

If you or a loved one is struggling with mental health, you’re not alone. Roughly one in every five adults experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression over the past two weeks, according to a 2022 CDC . The good news is a better state of mind could be right in your backyard—literally.

Perceived greenspace exposure—which represents a person’s perception of the amount and quality of access to and time spent in nearby greenspace—may have a significant positive effect on certain aspects of mental health, according to from an interdisciplinary University of Colorado Boulder team.

With Associate Geography Professor Colleen Reid at the helm, researchers from the Geography, Psychology and Neuroscience departments as well as the Institute for Behavioral Genetics and the Institute of Behavioral Science explored the link between greenspace exposure and stress, anxiety and depression.

Their study revealed a strong association between perceived greenspace exposure and reduced anxiety. Could better mental health be as simple as a walk in the park? Perhaps, says lead study author and geography PhD candidate Emma Rieves.

The relationship between greenspace and mental health “isn’t just about the greenspace that’s empirically there,” which they measured by aggregating the green pixels, representing greenspace, from aerial imagery, also known as objective green space. “The relationship is mainly influenced by aspects of green space that aren’t well captured by objective measures, such as the quality of the green space, how much time someone spends in green space and how accessible it is,” she says.

Research in the time of COVID-19

Reid started the study in late 2019, says Rieves, who arrived on campus to begin her graduate education in the fall of 2020. “It was weird,” she recalls. “But the [geography] department did a lot to facilitate interactions between students despite the restrictions that were in place at the time.”

Even before Rieves dove into the research project, she had personal experience with nature’s capacity to ease her mind, particularly during the early days of lockdown. “Being in nature definitely helped to combat some of the negative emotions you have when you’re stuck sitting in your house, doomscrolling and wiping down all your produce,” she recalls.

To determine the effect of greenspace exposure on the study’s research subjects, the team had to switch gears early in the data-collection process to account for the extra stress associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, says Rieves.

Once COVID-19 public health restrictions were in place, however, they added pandemic-specific questions to their mental health survey so that subjects could share the extent to which they were impacted by stressors such finances, resources and the possibility of infection. Their analysis could then control for pandemic-specific variables to more accurately identify the connection between mental health and greenspace exposure, says Rieves.

Is greenspace exposure a key to mental health?

The researchers found that perceived greenspace exposure was directly linked to reduced anxiety metrics and had a borderline statistically significant relationship with lower levels of depression metrics. Meanwhile, objective greenspace exposure bore no statistically significant association with anxiety, depression or stress.

In other words, when it came to mental health, and anxiety in particular, objective greenspace exposure mattered far less than subjects’ perceptions of greenspace exposure.

“ Based on the presence of green pixels, a vacant lot full of weeds would register as having a high green space signal. But if you were there, you might not perceive it as a superabundant green space,” says Rieves. “We found that other factors, like the quality of the environment in this example, is more important to the mental health and greenspace relationship.”

At the same time, the findings revealed a positive association between socioeconomic status and both objective and perceived greenspace, where people with higher socioeconomic status had higher perceived and objective greenspace exposure.

The takeaway

While no one is promising that a walk in the woods is a magic bullet, getting out in nature is never a bad idea, says Rieves. And no matter what the pixels indicate, or how many minutes a day you spend around trees, the data indicate that people’s perceptions of their own greenspace exposure are important to unlocking better mental health, says Rieves.

“This study doesn’t prescribe any specific level of greenspace exposure needed to reap its mental health benefits, but if you feel like you’re surrounded by greenspace, it’s probably good for you.”

¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder scientists Naomi Friedman and Samantha Freis contributed to this research.

Did you enjoy this article?  Passionate about geography? Show your support.

Related Articles

Roselinde Kaiser, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, is being recognized for her research on the science and treatment of adolescent depression

Roselinde Kaiser, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, has been named a winner, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their independent careers.

“PECASE embodies the high priority placed by the government on maintaining the leadership position of the United States in science by producing outstanding scientists and engineers and nurturing their continued development,” according to the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), which was commissioned in 1996 to create PECASE.

“The awards identify a cadre of outstanding scientists and engineers who will broadly advance science and the missions important to the participating agencies.

In honoring scientists and engineers who are early in their research careers, the PECASE Awards recognize “exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge during the 21st century. The awards foster innovative and far-reaching developments in science and technology, increase awareness of careers in science and engineering, give recognition to the scientific missions of participating agencies, enhance connections between fundamental research and national goals, and highlight the importance of science and technology for the nation's future,” according to the NSTC.

Kaiser is a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist who studies the science and treatment of adolescent depression. With her research group, the Research on Affective Disorders and Development Lab (RADD Lab), she conducts research that asks questions such as: How can brain functioning and behavior help us to understand the experience of depression in adolescence and over the course of human development? Can we use brain or behavioral markers to better predict depression—or to predict resilience? How can we enhance brain and behavioral functioning to promote emotional health and wellness throughout the lifespan?

The mission of the RADD Lab is to gain insight into the brain and behavioral processes that reflect or underlie depression and other mood experiences, with the goal of leveraging research discoveries to foster emotional health. This year, in partnership with an interdisciplinary team of scientists, educators and young people, Kaiser and her team are launching an initiative to scale and translate scientific discovery into high-impact programs aimed at promoting mental health.

“I am delighted and honored to receive the PECASE, which truly reflects the dedicated efforts of our research team and the commitment to innovation at the University of Colorado,” Kaiser says.

“Youth depression is an urgent public health priority; in our research, we are advancing new paths to promote healthy mood through interdisciplinary discovery achieved with and for young people. The PECASE recognizes the promise and innovation of this work and is a launchpad for research that will develop and scale programs for personalized health insight and wellness promotion. We are enthusiastic to begin the next chapter in research discovery and real-world impact.”

Also recognized with a PECASE award was , JILA fellow, National Institute of Standards and Technology physicist and ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder physics professor and Jerome Fox,  a ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder associate professor of chemical and biological engineering.

Did you enjoy this article?  Passionate about psychology and neuroscience? Show your support.

Related Articles

¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder Professor Jamie Nagle will discuss the quarks and gluons that formed at the Big Bang in his Distinguished Research Lecture Feb. 6

Ten trillion degrees Fahrenheit is unfathomably hot—more than 10,000 times hotter than the Sun’s core—and it’s the temperature of the universe just moments after the Big Bang. At such extreme temperatures, according to nuclear theory, ordinary matter made of protons and neutrons transforms into a plasma of fundamental particles called quarks and gluons.

At the world’s most powerful accelerators, scientists recreate tiny droplets of this early-universe matter by colliding heavy nuclei at near-light speeds. One of these scientists is Jamie Nagle, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of physics who for 20 years has studied these fleeting droplets and, along with his research group, engineered their shapes, sizes and temperatures to better understand their properties.

Nagle will discuss this work in the 125th Distinguished Research Lecture, “10 Trillion Degrees: Unlocking the Secrets of the Early Universe,” at 4 p.m. Feb. 6. in the Chancellor's Hall and Auditorium of the Center for Academic Success and Engagement (CASE).

¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Jamie Nagle

Nagle has spent much of his career investigating the early universe through high-energy nuclear physics. His research has focused on understanding the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter theorized to have existed just microseconds after the Big Bang. 

“As you go back to about six microseconds after the universe started, the temperature was around two trillion Kelvin,” Nagle explains. “It was theorized that protons and neutrons inside of nuclei would melt away, creating a bath of more fundamental particles—quarks and gluons.”

Nagle's work involves recreating droplets of this quark-gluon plasma in a laboratory by colliding large nuclei at nearly the speed of light. These collisions occur at the world’s highest-energy accelerators, including the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. 

“In the world's highest-energy accelerators, we can collide very large nuclei like gold, lead or platinum at such high velocities that we create a tiny droplet of this 2 trillion Kelvin plasma,” he says.

   What: 125th Distinguished Research Lecture, 10 Trillion Degrees: Unlocking the Secrets of the Early Universe

  Who: Professor Jamie Nagle of the Department of Physics

  When: 4-5 p.m. Feb. 6, followed by a Q&A and reception

  Where: Chancellor's Hall and Auditorium, Center for Academic Success and Engagement (CASE)

Reflecting on the award, Nagle expresses gratitude and a sense of accomplishment: “It means a lot to me. You get to a certain middle age and are more self-confident, but this recognition feels rewarding. There's a lot of effort, and much of the hard work goes unnoticed. It’s nice to feel like the fruits of that labor are appreciated.”

The Distinguished Research Lectureship also emphasizes communicating complex scientific concepts to broader audiences. For Nagle, this is a vital part of his work: “This award is very meaningful to me because I often listen to the lectures of past recipients. It's about communicating the broader context of why this scientific research is important, not just within the microcosm of nuclear physics.”

¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” the Distinguished Research Lectureship

The Distinguished Research Lectureship is among the highest honors given by faculty to a faculty colleague at ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder. Each year, the Research and Innovation Office requests nominations from faculty for this award, and a faculty review panel recommends one or more faculty members as recipients.

The lectureship honors tenured faculty members, research professors (associate or full) or adjoint professors who have been with ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder for at least five years and are widely recognized for a distinguished body of academic or creative achievement and prominence, as well as contributions to the educational and service missions of ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder. Each recipient typically gives a lecture in the fall or spring following selection and receives a $2,000 honorarium.

Read the original article from the Department of Physics

Did you enjoy this article?  Passionate about physics? Show your support.

Related Articles

¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder chemist Niels Damrauer and his research colleagues use visible light to break environmentally persistent carbon-fluorine bonds in PFAS

The strength of the bond between carbon and fluorine can be both a positive and a negative. Because of its seeming unbreakablility, food doesn’t stick to Teflon-coated frying pans and water rolls off rain jackets rather than soaking in.

However, these bonds are also what put the “forever” in “forever chemicals,” the common name for the thousands of compounds that are perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). PFAS are so commercially abundant that they can be found in everything from candy wrappers to home electronics and guitar strings—to say nothing of their presence in industrial products.

The C-F bond is so difficult to break that the products containing it could linger in the environment for thousands of years. And when these molecules linger in a human body, they are associated with increased risk for cancer, thyroid disease, asthma and a host of other adverse health outcomes.

“There are a lot of interesting things about those bonds,” says Niels Damrauer, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of chemistry and fellow in the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute. “(The C-F bond) is very unnatural. There are a lot of chemical bonds in the world that natural systems have evolved to be able to destroy, but C-F bonds are uncommon in nature, so there aren’t bacteria that have evolved to break those down.”

Instead of long-used methods of breaking or activating chemical bonds, Damrauer and his research colleagues have looked to light. , the scientists detail an important finding in their ongoing research, showing how a light-driven catalyst can efficiently reduce C-F bonds.

“What we’re really trying to do is figure out sustainable ways of making transformations,” Damrauer explains. “We’re asking, ‘Can we change chemical reactivity through light absorption that we wouldn’t necessarily be able to achieve without it?’ For example, you can break down PFAS at thousands of degrees, but that’s not sustainable. We’re using light to do this, a reagent that’s very abundant and that’s sustainable.”

A foundation of spectroscopy

An important foundation for this research is spectroscopy, which can use light to study chemical reactions that are initiated with light, as well as the properties of molecules that have absorbed light. As a spectroscopist, Damrauer does this in a number of ways on a variety of time scales: “We can put light into molecules and study what they do in trillionths of a second, or we can follow the paths of molecules once they have absorbed light and what they do with the excess energy.”

Damrauer and his colleagues, including those in his research group, frequently work in photoredox catalysis, a branch of photochemistry that studies the giving and taking of electrons as a way to initiate chemical reactions.

“The idea is that in some molecules, absorption of light changes their properties in terms of how they give up electrons or take in electrons from the environment,” Damrauer explains. “That giving and taking—giving an electron is called reduction and taking is called oxidation—so that if you can put light in and cause molecules to be good reducers or good oxidizers, it changes some things you can do. We create situations where we catalyze transformations and cause a chemical reaction to occur.”

Damrauer and his research colleague Garret Miyake, formerly of the ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder Department of Chemistry and now at Colorado State University, have collaborated for many years to understand molecules that give up electrons—the process of reduction—after absorbing light.

Several years ago, Miyake and his research group discovered a catalyst to reduce benzene, a molecule that’s notoriously difficult to reduce, once it had absorbed light. Damrauer and his graduate students Arindam Sau and Nick Pompetti worked with Miyake and his postdoc and students to understand why and how this catalyst worked, and they began looking at whether this and similar catalysts could activate the C-F bond—either breaking it or remaking it in useful products. This team also worked with Rob Paton, a computational chemist at CSU, and his group.

They found that within the scope of their study, the C-F bond in molecules irradiated with visible light—which could, in principle, be derived from the sun—and catalyzed in a system they developed could be activated. They found that several PFAS compounds could then be converted into defluorinated products, essentially breaking the C-F bond and “representing a mild reaction methodology for breaking down these persistent chemicals,” they note in the study.

Making better catalysts

A key element of the study is that the C-F bond is “activated,” meaning it could be broken—in the case of PFAS—or remade. “C-F bonds are precursors to molecules you might want to make in chemistry, like pharmaceuticals or other materials,” Damrauer says. “They’re a building block people don’t use very much because that bond is so strong. But if we can activate that bond and can use it to make molecules, then from a pharmaceutical perspective this system might already be practical.”

While the environmental persistence of PFAS is a serious public health and policy concern, “organofluorines [containing C-F bonds] have a tremendous impact in medicinal, agrochemical and materials sciences as fluorine incorporation results in structures imparting specific beneficial attributes,” Damrauer and his colleagues write.

By pursuing systems that mitigate the negative aspects of C-F bonds and harness the positive, and using the abundant resources of visible light and organic molecules, Damrauer says he hopes this research is a significant step toward sustainably producing products that use light as a reagent rather than heat or precious metal-based catalysts.

While the catalytic process the researchers developed is not yet at a level that it could be used on PFAS in the environment at a large scale, “this fundamental understanding is really important,” Damrauer says. “It allows us to evolve what we do next. While the current iteration isn’t good enough for practical application, we’re working to make better and better catalysts.”

Xin Liu, Arindam Sau, Alexander R. Green, Mihai V. Popescu, Nicholas F. Pompetti, Yingzi Li, Yucheng Zhao, Robert S. Paton and Garret M. Miyake also contributed to this research.

Did you enjoy this article?  Passionate about chemistry? Show your support.

Related Articles

¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder researchers find that socioeconomic status is a key indicator of heart health

Cardiovascular disease, the  in the United States, significantly affects those of lower socioeconomic status. In addition, members of historically marginalized groups—including Black, Indigenous and Asian populations—suffer disproportionately. Therefore, public health advocates and policy makers need to make extra efforts to reach these populations and find ways to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease.

These are the findings of researchers Sanna Darvish and Sophia Mahoney, PhD candidates in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Integrative Physiology. Their  on socioeconomic status and arterial aging—written with ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” Boulder co-authors Ravinandan Venkatasubramanian, Matthew J. Rossman, Zachary S. Clayton and Kevin O. Murray—was published in the Journal of Applied Physiology.

Darvish and Mahoney conducted a literature review of cardiovascular disease, looking specifically at how it affects various demographics. Their focus was on two physiological features that are predictors of cardiovascular issues: endothelial dysfunction—a failure of the lining of blood vessels that can cause a narrowing of the arteries—and stiffening of arteries.

“It’s pretty well established that individuals of lower socioeconomic status have increased risk for many chronic diseases, but our lab focuses on the physiological and cellular mechanisms contributing to that increased risk,” Darvish explains. “We’re looking at what studies have been conducted, looking at blood vessel dysfunction, arterial dysfunction in these marginalized groups that then will predict their risk for cardiovascular disease.”

Exercise as therapy

Beyond the clinical findings, Darvish and Mahoney cite four social determinants of health regarding cardiovascular disease across ethnic and racial groups: environmental factors, like proximity to pollution or access to green spaces; psychological and social factors, such as stress or structural racism; health care access; and socioeconomic status.

While each of the four has different facets that contribute to overall cardiovascular health, the authors found that socioeconomic status was the “cause of causes,” and thus the most important indicator to examine in their goal of recommending effective therapies.

“It became clear to us that socioeconomic status really played a role in every single aspect of social determinants of health,” says Mahoney. “So, our paper naturally centered around socioeconomic status as we realized that it was the most integrated and affected the rest of the determinants of health.”

To help overcome the barriers to better cardiovascular health among those in lower socioeconomic groups, Darvish and Mahoney recommend exercise.

“Exercise is well established as first line of defense, especially aerobic exercise,” says Mahoney. “It’s easy for us to say that in Colorado, but there are plenty of barriers to people everywhere who do not have access to resources.”

One option the researchers propose is high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which packs a robust aerobic effort into workouts as brief as five or 10 minutes. The authors also recommend inspiratory muscle strength training (IMST), during which users breathe into a simple handheld device that inhibits air flow and get a simulated aerobic workout that also strengthens the diaphragm.  that just a few minutes of IMST therapy a day can reduce blood pressure and the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Reducing research barriers

One thing Darvish and Mahoney hope their study will do is galvanize researchers to include more diverse populations in their research. While investigating the existing literature for their review, the two were dismayed to find few studies that included or focused on populations from the lower socioeconomic echelons.

There are structural reasons for that, Darvish explains. Time is an issue, as those lower on the socioeconomic ladder often work more hours and have more demands on their non-work time. In addition, transportation can be an obstacle, as research facilities may not be near neighborhoods with more diverse populations. “We pay our participants an appropriate amount for their participation, but not all clinical trials do,” Darvish says.

“Another thing we are doing is instituting a lift service through our lab, to drive people in from their homes in Denver to our lab in Boulder, and we hope this will help improve access for more people to participate.”

Language barriers can be another impediment, as all release forms and study literature would need to be translated for those who don’t speak English. Darvish and Mahoney say it is important that researchers work to overcome these structural barriers. “Our lab is working to do all we can to reduce biases, and include these diverse populations,” says Mahoney. “We need to practice what we preach and start with ourselves.”

Did you enjoy this article?  Passionate about integrative physiology? Show your support.

Related Articles