First Working Replacement Lung Created in Lab

Rat-artificial-lungs-created_22310_600x450Ker Than in National Geographic:

For the first time scientists have reconstructed working lungs in the lab and transplanted them into a living animal.

The achievement is a breakthrough in biomedical engineering that could lead to replacement lungs for humans in the near future, experts say.

Currently, the only way to replace diseased lungs in adults is a lung transplant, a high-risk procedure that's vulnerable to tissue rejection.

In a new study, researchers took lungs from a living rat and used detergents to remove lung cells and blood vessels, revealing the organ's underlying matrix.

This lung “skeleton”—made of flexible proteins, sugars, and other chemicals—consists of a branching network that divides more than 20 times into smaller and smaller structures. (See an interactive graphic of lung structure.)

The researchers placed these “decellularized” lungs into a bioreactor, a machine filled with a slurry containing different types of lung cells extracted from rat fetuses.

Within several days, the fetal cells naturally attached to the lung matrix and formed a functional lung.

“By and large, the correct subsets of cells went to their correct anatomical locations,” explained study leader Laura Niklason, a biomedical engineer at Yale University. “It appears that the lung matrix has cues, or 'zip codes,' that tell the cells where to land.”

When the team implanted the engineered lungs into an adult rat for short periods of time—between 45 minutes and two hours—the lungs exchanged oxygen and carbon dioxide in the same way as natural lungs.



Not for Profit

20100623_2010+25books1_wGuy Dammann reviews Martha C. Nussbaum's Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, in The New Statesman:

As the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues in this limpid polemic, the vacuum left by conventional ideas about the value of education has been filled by an instrumental conception tied not to the notions of citizenship and moral autonomy, but to short-term economic benefit. The stakes, Nussbaum says, could not be higher. “If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful, docile, technically trained machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticise tradition, and understand the significance of another person's sufferings and achievements.” The price, in other words, is capitalism's noble partner, liberal democracy.

Nussbaum describes a “worldwide crisis” taking place in education. She identifies the ways in which democracy relies on the values embedded in the arts and humanities. Societies have always used their arts and history as a mirror in which to see, understand and question their own values and desires, their fears and dreams, and their internal contradictions. But the value of the arts, in this respect, is contingent on the ability to think, judge and criticise for oneself.

The citizen educated in the art of following “argument rather than numbers”, Nussbaum writes, “is a good person for a democracy to have, the sort of person who would stand up against the pressure to say something false or hasty. A further problem with people who lead the unexamined life is that they often treat one another disrespectfully.”

This aspect of tolerance and openness occupies the core of Nussbaum's case.

A Genome Story: 10th Anniversary Commentary

Collins_human_genomeFrancis Collins in New Scientist:

For those of you who like stories with simple plots and tidy endings, I must confess the tale of the Human Genome Project isn't one of those. The story didn't reach its conclusion when we unveiled the first draft of the human genetic blueprint at the White House on June 26, 2000. Nor did it end on April 14, 2003, with the completion of a finished, reference sequence.

Instead, human genome research is an epic drama being played out year after year, in sequel after exciting sequel, as scientists continue to make new discoveries about the role of our DNA instruction book in health and disease.

The First Law of Technology says we invariably overestimate the short-term impact of a truly transformational discovery, while underestimating its longer-term effects. Indeed, that appears to be true about the sequencing of the human genome. Many news articles are coming out right now reflecting upon what has—or hasn't—happened in the decade since we announced the first draft sequence. Cynics tend to view the immediate health benefits from genomic research as a glass half empty, but I see a glass half full—and growing fuller every day.

For me as a physician, the great appeal of the Human Genome Project was the opportunity it offered to seek answers to some of medicine's biggest puzzles. Today, as I look across all fields of biomedical research, it is clear that genomics is helping to piece together many of those puzzles. Whether their work focuses on cancer, diabetes, infectious diseases, mental illness or other conditions, researchers are using tools that have sprung out of the Human Genome Project to identify the molecular causes of disease and to develop new strategies for diagnosis, treatment, and prevention.

the last tuna

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Applying more pressure, I felt the needle slide into the flank, felt the resistance of the dense sushi flesh, raw and red and most certainly delicious. But for the first time in my life I felt tuna flesh for what it was: a living, perfect expression of a miraculous adaptation. An adaptation that allows bluefin to cross oceans at the speed of a battleship. An adaptation that should be savored in its own right as the most miraculous engine of a most miraculous animal, not as food. Perhaps people will never come to feel about a tuna the way they have come to feel about whales. Whales are, after all, mammals: they have large brains; they nurse their young and breed slowly. All of that ensconces them in a kind of empathic cocoon, the warmth of which even the warmest-blooded tuna may never occupy. But what we can perhaps be persuaded to feel, viscerally, is that industrial fishing as it is practiced today against the bluefin and indeed against all the world’s great fish, the very tigers and lions of our era, is an act unbefitting our sentience. An act as pointless, small-minded and shortsighted as launching a harpoon into the flank of a whale.

more from Paul Greenberg at the NYT Magazine here.

picking up bits of the past

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When Anthony Thwaite first read Philip Larkin’s work, in 1955, he was “as transfixed as I was when I first read The Waste Land”. The two poets became friends and collaborators. Thwaite helped Larkin to compile his Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse and edited a festschrift, Larkin at Sixty. “One day in March 1971,” Thwaite recalls, “I got a letter from him. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he wrote, ‘I’ve just written a little poem that might suit Ann’s next Garden of Verses for the Kiddies’,” [Ann, Thwaite’s wife, was compiling a children’s annual called Allsorts] “and there was This Be The Verse.” So Thwaite was first to read that now-iconic poem that begins “They f*** you up, your mum and dad . . .”. Thwaite’s reaction was odd. He says he “felt got at”, as a father of four, by the childless Larkin. Only much later did he realise that Larkin meant him to publish it, if he dared, in the New Statesman, where he was literary editor. He is still dismayed that this poem predominates whenever Larkin is mentioned. I protest that Larkin’s reputation thrives anyway — and it’s a useful poem, hence its ubiquity.

more from Valerie Grove at The Times here.

The human brain is a kluge

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There’s a cartoon on my office wall captioned, “How our brain recalls things.” It shows an old galoot (overalls, baseball cap) in a stockroom, leaning on the drawer of a filing cabinet, one hand draped across the folders, the other holding up a sheet of paper. A phone receiver is tucked under his chin, and he seems to be relaying the extracted information to someone upstairs. It’s a satisfying metaphor for a process that neuroscientists have struggled to pin down for decades. In “101 Theory Drive,” Terry McDermott gets us a lot closer to the problem of how the brain records experience. The intrepid McDermott, a former national reporter for The Times with no background in neuroscience, does this by embedding himself in the lab of Gary Lynch, a leading memory researcher and one of the field’s most radical practitioners. “101 Theory Drive” is the lab’s address at UC Irvine. Hard-drinking, cigar-chomping and potty-mouthed, Lynch — described by one colleague as “the hippie of neurobiology” — is nothing if not good copy.

more from Sara Lippincott at the LA Times here.

His fondest wish was to turn himself into a nuclear bomb and get dropped on India

Shakil Chaudhary in Viewpoint:

Pic-full-8-june-25a India is Pakistan’s eternal enemy. Unless we defeat it in a nuclear war, it will keep plotting conspiracies against Pakistan, said Mr Majeed Nizami, the owner of the Nawa-i-Waqt, The Nation, and Waqt TV channel, while addressing a function in his honour (Nawa-i-Waqt, June 24). Our missiles and nuclear bombs are superior to India’s ghosts, so tackling India is imperative, he declared. “Don’t worry if a couple of our cities are also destroyed in the process.”

Dr Mujahid Kamran, vice chancellor, Punjab University, Syed Asif Hashmi, chairman, Evacuee Trust Property Board, Bushra Rahman, MNA, Niaz Hussain Lakhvera, director, Lahore Art Council, Pervez Malik, PML-N MNA and finance secretary, Shoaib Bhutta, a staunch journalist friend and fan of President Zardari, and Khushnood Ali Khan, chief editor of Jinnah newspaper, paid glowing tributes to the “living legend”. Mr Bhutta blasted the Jang Group by saying that Aman ki Asha was a conspiracy to turn Pakistan into Hindus’ slave. “They want to annihilate the two-nation theory.” Only Majeed Nizami can stop the Hindu culture from entering Pakistan in the garb of Aman ki Asha, he added. Pervez Malik described Mr Nizami as the most credible (motabir) personality in Pakistan. He also praised Mr Nizami’s position on the Kashmir issue, saying that it deserved to be followed by everybody. Only Majeed Nizami’s power and force can save Pakistan, said Mr Lakhvera. Khushnood Ali Khan said that one of the missiles should be named after Mr Nizami.

Mr Nizami has changed his rationale for initiating a nuclear war with India. The Nawa-i-Waqt (Nov 5, 2008) quoted him as saying: “Pakistan should not hesitate to use nuclear weapons to wrest Kashmir from India”. He had also said that his fondest wish was to turn himself into a nuclear bomb and get dropped on India. In the 1980s, General Zia once invited him to accompany him to India. He angrily turned down the invitation saying “If I ever go to India, I will travel by tank.”

More here. [Thanks to Omar Ali.]

Conservation and Eugenics: The environmental movement’s dirty secret

From Orion Magazine:

Eugenics THE RAIN HAD JUST STOPPED in the little eastern Kansas town of Osawatomie when thirty thousand people, gathered in an atmosphere not unlike that of a country fair, fell quiet. Their hero, former president Teddy Roosevelt, climbed atop a kitchen table and began to speak in a high, almost falsetto voice, orating amid cheering for ninety minutes. When finished, he had delivered the most controversial and influential address of his career, in which he described a radical new program that was both denounced and celebrated in newspapers across the country. The date was August 31, 1910. The New Nationalism Speech, as it came to be known, emphasized conservation, as did most of Roosevelt’s speeches written by his friend Gifford Pinchot, who had been his conservation chief for the two terms of his presidency. But it also newly placed the “moral issue” and “patriotic duty” of conservation into the context of a racial conversation, as well as a much broadened concept of progressivism.

In appealing to the folks in Osawatomie, Roosevelt went well beyond the program he had pursued in office, proposing a powerful national government strong enough to address many of its citizens’ problems. In this new regime, government would be a general antidote to corporate power. Federal programs would control wages and hours, health, and corporate governance. The government would take over utilities and railroads if necessary to stop monopolies. Corporate political contributions would be limited and publicly reported. Most radically, this vastly empowered national government would transform America’s economy to reward only merit, using graduated estate and income taxes to pull down the fortunes of the very rich.

More here.

The Psychology of Bliss

From The New York Times:

Henig-sub-popup In 2003, a German computer expert named Armin Meiwes advertised online for someone to kill and then eat. Incredibly, 200 people replied, and Meiwes chose a man named Bernd Brandes. One night, in Meiwes’s farmhouse, Brandes took some sleeping pills and drank some schnapps and was still awake when Meiwes cut off his penis, fried it in olive oil and offered him some to eat. Brandes then retreated to the bathtub, bleeding profusely. Meiwes stabbed him in the neck, chopped him up and stored him in the freezer. Over the next several weeks, he defrosted and sautéed 44 pounds of Brandes, eating him by candlelight with his best cutlery.

Hold on a minute. Why does this story appear in “How Pleasure Works,” a book whose jacket copy promises a “new understanding of pleasure, desire and value”? If this is a “new under­standing,” maybe we’ll just stick with the old one, thank you very much. For heaven’s sake, we’re only on Chapter 2, and already we’re deep into cannibalism, compounded by a suicidal-masochistic impulse. Still to come are such topics as rubber vomit, human grimacing contests and monkey pornography. But stick with it and trust the author, Paul Bloom, to use these weird digressions to get us someplace interesting. Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, has written a book that is different from the slew already out there on the general subject of happiness. No advice here about how to become happier by organizing your closets; Bloom is after something deeper than the mere stuff of feeling good. He analyzes how our minds have evolved certain cognitive tricks that help us negotiate the physical and social world — and how those tricks lead us to derive pleasure in some rather unexpected places.

More here.

Friday, June 25, 2010

With Les Murray, you have to get the speed

Les_MurrayIn the majesty of his years and accomplishments, Les Murray, sole author of the several increasingly massive editions of his New Collected Poems – one of the great books of the modern world – is in the position of a monarch who, having successfully constructed Versailles all on his own, is now pottering in the grounds building sheds. Six years ago The Biplane Houses was such a shed, and very prettily done. Now Taller When Prone is another. Perhaps I would not have had the idea of an enormous building and its satellite bâtiments if the first poem in the new book had not been about the Taj Mahal. The poem, called “From a Tourist Journal” starts like this.

In a precinct of liver stone, high
On its dais, the Taj seems bloc hail.

Immediately he’s got you in. He has always been able to do that. The way he can register, in words nobody else would quite choose, a perception nobody else could quite have, is at the centre of his art, ensuring almost infallibly that a poem will work like a lucky charm for as long as he pours in the images. A Taj made of hail: you and I might say that we would have seen that to be true eventually, and we might even argue learnedly that the word “Mahal” phonically suggested the word “hail” (points for an essay there), but the daunting truth is that he doesn’t just think that way, he sees that way.

more from Clive James at clivejames.com here.

the worship of a cosmic principle

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“May all that emerges from me be beautiful,” Yves Klein prayed, with what seems like utter sincerity, in the handwritten text of a reliquary-like work, enshrining blue and pink pigment and gold leaf in little Plexiglas boxes, from 1961. The last French artist of major international consequence, Klein, who died the following year, at the age of thirty-four, was entreating Rita of Cascia, a saint of lost causes, abused women, and baseball. He was likely unmoved by the last. Klein’s sport was judo, which he wrote a book about, after studying it at a prestigious school in Tokyo and earning a black belt. The refusal of the French Federation of Judo to recognize his Japanese diploma, in 1954, frustrated his career plans in that line, to the benefit of his commitment to art. Hanging in a gallery near the St. Rita piece, in a sumptuous retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, D.C., is a drawing in which the word “humility” is repeated twenty times.

more from Peter Schjeldhal at The New Yorker here.

that mysterious force, sensed in childhood and scrutinized in maturity

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I was nine years old when I first encountered the Creeping Man. Having wolfed down nearly all Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in approximate order of publication, I had reached, with a feeling of regret, the final volume, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. Composed of a dozen short tales, the Case-Book dates from the 1920s, a decade when Conan Doyle’s interest in his most famous creation had dwindled to a kind of mercenary contempt and the bulk of his time and attention were spent evangelizing for the spiritualist cause. Unaware of any of this, I noted no downturn in quality and found the eighth item in the collection, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man”, to be one of the richest and most singular investigations of Holmes’s long career – an opinion which I have had no reason to change. The story begins as Dr Watson is summoned to Baker Street, “one Sunday evening early in September of the year 1903”, by means of a splendidly terse telegram (“Come at once if convenient – if inconvenient come all the same”) in order to hear an account of the mystery of Professor Presbury, “the famous Camford physiologist”. The Professor, a “staid, elderly” widower, has recently become engaged to a much younger woman and “the current of his life” has been disrupted. Formerly “the frankest of men”, his behaviour has turned “furtive and sly”. He “lives as in a strange dream”, ventures out on unexplained expeditions and receives envelopes in the post, “marked by a cross under the stamp”.

more from Jonathan Barnes at the TLS here.

Friday Poem

The Fourfold

Automobiles are flowing like droplets down the string of the highway,
then all of a sudden they’re absorbed into housing estates and courtyards,
the reinforced concrete gardens of hypermarkets. Water

does not wash anything clean, it insistently drums on the brow, seeking
the plumb-line; droplet asking droplet what’s the way.
I turn onto my other side, here naked trees

flex themselves, as if trying to use their youthful branches
to prop up the sky’s support wall, on which weevils
are skillfully pretending to be seagulls and a damp mark is just as

remarkably spreading to form some artificial rose.
I get up, wake up, switch on the TV; the world goes
back to the beginning.

by Tadeusz Dabrowski
translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
from The Boston Review

The Runaway General

Michael Hastings in The Rolling Stone:

Mcchrystal_nato 'How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?” demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.

“The dinner comes with the position, sir,” says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.

McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.

“Hey, Charlie,” he asks, “does this come with the position?”

McChrystal gives him the middle finger.

More here.

Researchers design more reliable invisibility cloak

From PhysOrg:

Glasscloak Researchers have proposed a new design for an invisibility cloak – a device that could make objects invisible by guiding light around anything placed inside the cloak.

In the study, Elena Semouchkina from Michigan Technological University and Pennsylvania State University and her coauthors designed an made of glass for the infrared range. Currently, most metamaterial cloak designs require that the metamaterial response be homogeneous. However, the new design relies on simulations of a true multi-element cloak structure and takes into account the inhomogeneity of a real metamaterial response. “This is one of the first designs of an optical cloak, in particular, of a cylindrical shell,” Semouchkina told PhysOrg.com. “This is a non-metallic low-loss all-dielectric cloak. … In contrast to the previous designs, the design of our cloak has been developed at a careful control of interactions between resonators, since a true multi-resonator structure has been simulated. It makes the design essentially more reliable.”

The structure of the proposed cloak consists of identical nanosized chalcogenide glass resonators arranged in a concentric pattern. In simulations, the researchers found that glass resonators in the shape of a cylinder with a diameter of 300 nm and a height of 150 nm provided the best results for the of 1 micron. “The design employs identical resonators in all layers of the cloak, which, from the point of view of fabrication tolerance, presents a tremendous advantage versus fabricating nano-sized elements of different prescribed dimensions,” Semouchkina said.

More here.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

AfPak: Punjab’s growing militant problem

Conversation with Hassan Abbas in Foreign Policy:

1. Your article in the CTC Sentinel last spring defined the conglomeration of militant groups known collectively as the ‘Punjabi Taliban.' We hear most often, however, about the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan militant groups based in the tribal regions. What are some similarities and differences between the two? How has the ‘Punjabi Taliban' developed since your CTC article?

ScreenHunter_05 Jun. 25 13.13 First, I would prefer to tweak the title of the group to ‘Punjabi militants,' for there are many differences between the band of militants operating in Punjab and those based in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province (previously NWFP). Though this classification may sound purely academic, it has policy implications also. These Punjabi militants, who had drifted away from their parent organizations (such as Jaish-e-Mohammad and Sipah-e-Sahaba), had moved towards FATA after 2005 because they considered the area safer to live, train, and operate from. These were called ‘Punjabi' not because they were all ethnically from Punjab province — in fact, a few Sindhi and Urdu speaking militants were also present in this group. Hence, all non-Pashtuns (with the exception of non-Pakistanis like Uzbeks) came to be called “Punjabi Taliban.”

Relations between Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan — TTP) and these Punjabi militants were complicated. They never merged and the nature of this collaboration remained restricted to distribution of tasks for a limited number of terrorist attacks in Punjab. Of course, they learned from each other, provided useful information and training to each other but their larger goals remained distinct. The Pakistani Taliban are partly a reaction to U.S. and Pakistani policy in Afghanistan and FATA, whereas Punjabi militants are frustrated from Pakistan's policies vis-à-vis Kashmir. Unacknowledged by India as well as the U.S., Pakistan achieved some success in stopping militants from going towards the Kashmir conflict zone in recent years. There are some exceptions here of course, but by and large, Punjabi militants started challenging the state after getting frustrated that they were abandoned.

More here.

Collaborating with Citizen Scientists

MonarchButterflyResearch_NSF_160Lucas Laursen in Science:

Climbing one of the world's biggest granite walls is different from climbing trees, as National Park Service botanist Martin Hutten discovered while dangling from a cliff in the spray of Vernal Falls high above the Yosemite Valley. Hutten apprenticed in the logging industry before he started graduate school, so he new how to climb trees. “I could trust myself to a rope,” he recalls, “but I'd definitely never hung off a cliff or collected [samples] from a cliff.”

So when Hutten — who is seeking a Ph.D. in forest ecology at Oregon State University, Corvallis — and his fellow park rangers needed help surveying the park's lichen, they enlisted experienced rock climbers. Over 2 weeks in 2007 and 2008, those volunteer climbers helped collect 394 lichen specimens. This year, the researchers are asking volunteers to help with other parts of their biodiversity survey, such as counting birds from the valley floor.

Hutten's project is one of many worldwide in which volunteers help scientists collect data in ways that range from mundane to vital. Such help, although voluntary, is not free. Recruiting volunteers, finding appropriate ways for them to contribute, training them, keeping them motivated, and ensuring the quality of the data they collect requires time, money, and management expertise.

One of the keys is to communicate well and keep the volunteers plugged in to the scientific big picture, says Chris Lintott, an astronomer at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and a coordinator of the Galaxy Zoo project which uses volunteers to catalog a database of galaxies. “You really need to treat the volunteers as collaborators,” he says.

How I Stopped Being A Slut, And Learned To Cash Massive Book Advances

Chastity-belt Amanda Marcotte in Pandagon:

Another day, another sweet book deal for a woman who lambasts her former slutty self as unloveable, and renounces sex (because men don’t love women they stick it to). Reading this interview with Hephzibah Anderson, the author of Chastened, I realized something about the women trotting out the “no one will marry sluts” line—they are the flip side of the “pick-up artist” world.

At first, this seems like a weird thing to say. PUAs are all about the casual sex, right? But if you look a little deeper, you see the born-again non-sluts and the PUAs are singing the same tune. David Wong at Cracked describes the PUAs this way:

They believe the male/female relationship is adversarial in nature, and that sex is a way of conquering you.

Agreed. And that is exactly the attitude taken by the champions of chastity:

Did you pinpoint what changed in a relationship after sex? Was it a perceived shift in the power dynamic, was it one-sided or mutual?

Yes, I felt that I needed so much more from them. And, to me, it felt like I needed much more than my right. At the end of the year, I would be able to say, “Well, that’s ridiculous.” I think we’ve lost any sense of healthy emotional entitlement. I think if you go to bed with somebody, it is a kind of bond; it’s not nothing, however much we try to say it’s nothing. Whether you’re a man or woman, you’re absolutely in your rights to expect there to be some kind of emotional gain.

In both cases, the relationship between men and women is basically seen as a game of Capture The Flag, or in this case, Capture The Pussy.

Two Poets

Article_hassRobert Hass in The Believer:

The film, 24 City, directed by Jia Zhange Ke and written by him and a poet named Zhai Yongming, tells the story of the closing of a factory in the city of Chengdu, in Sichuan Province. The factory, a dinosaur of the planned economy, was situated in an immense, paternalistic company town where thousands of people had worked at jobs and lived their lives, performing the tasks involved in fabricating airplane engines and refrigerators. The combination of long, slow pans of empty buildings, the animated faces of the storytellers, the way their stories made a fifty-year history of their country, the sudden, meditative cuts to spaces of silence in which objects spoke, made for a sense of elegy and wonder at the shapes lives take and the way people live inside the worlds given to them—a mix which also gave the film a terrific sense of aesthetic risk and surprise.

Zhai Yongming, the poet who had cowritten the film, was born in 1955 in Chengdu, so she was writing about a world that she was familiar with. I knew that she had been sent away for two years of rural reeducation during the Cultural Revolution, and that she had published her first book of poems, a work about the lives of women, in 1984. That was about the time that a new generation of poets appeared in China who had broken with the official aesthetic line of the Communist Party. Critics, disapproving of their militant subjectivity, labeled them the “Misty School,” and many of them went into exile after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. But they were a clear sign that Chinese poetry had come alive, and settling in to hear another generation of poets, I had no idea what to expect.

The reading consisted of one live and surprising voice after another. The poets, men and women, ranged in age from their late thirties to early fifties. They belonged, as did Zhai Yongming, to what critics were calling the New Generation. All of them seemed to me interesting, and—the most surprising thing about them—interesting in different ways.