2008: June 12th Good News (13 of 15 Stolen Art Objects Recovered; Paul Newman donates $120 Million; more...)

Good Afternoon All,

Today there are no photos, due to time constraints. However, I do have some great articles for you, and I will get back into doing photos soon, as I like seeing the blog with photos.

My husband arrives today! Yea! I'm so excited!

Anyway I hope you enjoy the articles!



Today's Top 5:
1. US Life Expectancy Tops 78 (Time)
2. Vitamin D: New Way to Treat Heart Failure? (Science Daily)
3. US Still Leads the World in Science and Technology (Eurekalert)
4. Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Officially Announce Recovery of 13 of 15 Objects Stolen from UBC Museum of Anthropology (Art Daily)
5. Pine Needles, Antlers and Bears - Oh My! (Inventor Spot)



Honorable Mentions:
1. Ailing Paul Newman Turns Over $120M to Charity (Fox News)
2. Students Collect Shoes for Charity (TV NZ)
3. Dell Recycles 100 Million Pounds of Equipment (Earth 911)
4. One Man's Mission to Rid India of its Dirtiest Job (Yahoo News)





Today's Top 5:


1. US Life Expectancy Tops 78
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1813589,00.html?xid=rss-topstories
Wednesday, Jun. 11, 2008
By AP/MIKE STOBBE
(ATLANTA) — For the first time, U.S. life expectancy has surpassed 78 years, the government reported Wednesday, although the United States continues to lag behind about 30 other countries in estimated life span.

The increase is due mainly to falling mortality rates in almost all the leading causes of death, federal health officials said. The average life expectancy for babies born in 2006 was about four months greater than for children born in 2005.

Japan has the longest life expectancy — 83 years for children born in 2006, according to World Health Organization data. Switzerland and Australia were also near the top of the list.

"The international comparisons are not that appealing, but we may be in the process of catching up," said Samuel Preston, a University of Pennsylvania demographer. He is co-chairman of a National Research Council panel looking at why America's life expectancy is lower than other nations'.

The new U.S. data, released Wednesday, come from the National Center for Health Statistics. It's a preliminary report of 2006 numbers, based on data from more than 95 percent of the death certificates collected that year.

Life expectancy is the period a child born in 2006 is expected to live, assuming mortality trends stay constant.

The 2006 increase is due mainly to falling mortality rates for nine of the 15 leading causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, accidents and diabetes.

"I think the most surprising thing is that we had declines in just about every major cause of death," said Robert Anderson, who oversaw work on the report for the health statistics center.

The overall death rate fell from 799 per 100,000 in 2005 to about 776 the following year.

Health statisticians noted declines of more than 6 percent in stroke and chronic lower respiratory disease (including bronchitis and emphysema), and a drop of more than 5 percent in heart disease and diabetes deaths. Indeed, the drop in diabetes deaths was steep enough to allow Alzheimer's disease — which held about steady — to pass diabetes to become the nation's sixth leading cause of death.

The U.S. infant mortality rate dropped more than 2 percent, to 6.7 infant deaths per 1,000 births, from 6.9.

Perhaps the most influential factor in the 2006 success story, however, was the flu. Flu and pneumonia deaths dropped by 13 percent from 2005, reflecting a mild flu season in 2006, Anderson said. That also meant a diminished threat to people with heart disease and other conditions. Taken together, it's a primary explanation for the 22,000 fewer deaths in 2006 from 2005, experts said.

U.S. life expectancy has been steadily rising, usually by about two to three months from year to year. This year's jump of fourth months is "an unusually rapid improvement," Preston said.

Life expectancy was up for both men and women, and whites and blacks. Although the gaps are closing, women continue to live longer, almost to 81, compared to about 75 for men. Among racial categories, white women have the highest life expectancy (81 years), followed by black women (about 77 years), white men (76) and black men (70). Health statisticians said they don't have reliable data to calculate Hispanic life expectancy, but they hope to by next year.

Increases in female smoking are a major reason that men's life expectancy is catching up with the women's, Preston said. Improvements in the care of heart disease — a major health problem for black Americans — helps explain an improving racial gap, he said.

About 2.4 million Americans died in 2006, according to the report.



2. Vitamin D: New Way To Treat Heart Failure?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080611135038.htm
ScienceDaily
Jun. 12, 2008

Strong bones, a healthy immune system, protection against some types of cancer: Recent studies suggest there’s yet another item for the expanding list of Vitamin D benefits. Vitamin D, “the sunshine vitamin,” keeps the heart, the body’s long-distance runner, fit for life’s demands.

University of Michigan pharmacologist Robert U. Simpson, Ph.D., thinks it’s apt to call vitamin D “the heart tranquilizer.”

In studies in rats, Simpson and his team report the first concrete evidence that treatment with activated vitamin D can protect against heart failure. Their results appear in the July issue of the Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology.

In the study, treatments with activated vitamin D prevented heart muscle cells from growing bigger – the condition, called hypertrophy, in which the heart becomes enlarged and overworked in people with heart failure. The treatments prevented heart muscle cells from the over-stimulation and increased contractions associated with the progression of heart failure.

About 5.3 million Americans have heart failure, a progressive, disabling condition in which the heart becomes enlarged as it is forced to work harder and harder, making it a challenge even to perform normal daily activities. Many people with heart disease or poorly controlled high blood pressure go on to experience a form of heart failure called congestive heart failure, in which the heart’s inability to pump blood around the body causes weakness and fluid build-up in lungs and limbs. Many people with heart failure, who tend to be older, have been found to be deficient in vitamin D.

“Heart failure will progress despite the best medications,” says Simpson, a professor of pharmacology at the U-M Medical School. “We think vitamin D retards that progression and protects the heart."

The U-M researchers wanted to show whether a form of vitamin D could have beneficial effects on hearts that have developed or are at risk of developing heart failure. They used a breed of laboratory rats predisposed to develop human-like heart failure.

The researchers measured the effects of activated Vitamin D (1,25 dihydroxyvitamin D3, a form called calcitriol) in rats given a normal diet or a high-salt diet, compared to control group rats given either of the same two diets, but no vitamin D treatment. The rats on the high-salt diet were likely to develop heart failure within months.

The rats on the high-salt diet, comparable to the fast food that many humans feast on, quickly revealed the difference vitamin D could make.

“From these animals, we have obtained exciting and very important results,” Simpson says.

After 13 weeks, the researchers found that the heart failure-prone rats on the high-salt diet that were given the calcitriol treatment had significantly lower levels of several key indicators of heart failure than the untreated high-salt diet rats in the study. The treated rats had lower heart weight. Also, the left ventricles of the treated rats’ hearts were smaller and their hearts worked less for each beat while blood pressure was maintained, indicating that their heart function did not deteriorate as it did in the untreated rats. Decreased heart weight, meaning that enlargement was not occurring, also showed up in the treated rats fed a normal diet, compared to their untreated counterparts.

Simpson and his colleagues have explored vitamin D’s effects on heart muscle and the cardiovascular system for more than 20 years. In 1987, when Simpson showed the link between vitamin D and heart health, the idea seemed far-fetched and research funding was scarce. Now, a number of studies worldwide attest to the vitamin D-heart health link (see citations below).

The new heart insights add to the growing awareness that widespread vitamin D deficiency—thought to affect one-third to one-half of U.S. adults middle-aged and older—may be putting people at greater risk of many common diseases. Pharmaceutical companies are developing anti-cancer drugs using vitamin D analogs, which are synthetic compounds that produce vitamin D’s effects. There’s also increasing interest in using vitamin D or its analogs to treat autoimmune disorders.

In more than a dozen types of tissues and cells in the body, activated vitamin D acts as a powerful hormone, regulating expression of essential genes and rapidly activating already expressed enzymes and proteins. In the heart, Simpson’s team has revealed precisely how activated vitamin D connects with specific vitamin D receptors and produces its calming, protective effects. Those results appeared in the February issue of Endocrinology.

Sunlight causes the skin to make activated vitamin D. People also get vitamin D from certain foods and vitamin D supplements. Taking vitamin D supplements and for many people, getting sun exposure in safe ways, are certainly good options for people who want to keep their hearts healthy. But people with heart failure or at risk of heart failure will likely need a drug made of a compound or analog of vitamin D that will more powerfully produce vitamin D’s effects in the heart if they are to see improvement in their symptoms, Simpson says.

Vitamin D analogs already are on the market for some conditions. One present drawback of these compounds is that they tend to increase blood calcium to undesirable levels. Simpson’s lab is conducting studies of a specific analog which may be less toxic, so efforts to develop a vitamin D-based drug to treat heart failure are moving a step closer to initial trials in people.

In addition to Simpson, other U-M authors include Peter Mancuso, Ph.D., of the U-M Department of Environmental Health Sciences; Ayesha Rahman, Ph.D., Stephen D. Hershey, M.D., Loredana Dandu and Karl A. Nibbelink, M.D. of the Department of Pharmacology in the U-M Medical School.

Funding for the study came from the National Institutes of Health.

Patents related to this research have been applied for by the U-M Office of Technology Transfer.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Michigan Health System.





3. US Still Leads the World in Science and Technology
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/rc-usl061008.php
12 June 2008

Despite perceptions that the nation is losing its competitive edge, the United States remains the dominant leader in science and technology worldwide, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today.

The United States accounts for 40 percent of the total world's spending on scientific research and development, employs 70 percent of the world's Nobel Prize winners and is home to three-quarters of the world's top 40 universities.

An inflow of foreign students in the sciences -- as well as scientists and engineers from overseas -- has helped the United States build and maintain its worldwide lead, even as many other nations increase their spending on research and development. Continuing this flow of foreign-born talent is critical to helping the United States maintain its lead, according to the study.

"Much of the concern about the United States losing its edge as the world's leader in science and technology appears to be unfounded," said Titus Galama, co-author of the report and a management scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. "But the United States cannot afford to be complacent. Effort is needed to make sure the nation maintains or even extends its standing."

U.S. investments in research and development have not lagged in recent years, but instead have grown at rates similar to what has occurred elsewhere in the world -- growing even faster than what has been seen in Europe and Japan. While China is investing heavily in research and development, it does not yet account for a large share of world innovation and scientific output, which continues to be dominated by the United States, Europe and Japan, according to RAND researchers.

However, other nations are rapidly educating their populations in science and technology. For instance, the European Union and China each are graduating more university-educated scientists and engineers every year than the United States.

Policymakers often receive advice from ad hoc sources. Although their viewpoints are valuable, they should be balanced by more complete and critical assessments of U.S. science and technology, said report co-author James Hosek, a RAND senior economist. The absence of a balanced assessment can feed a public misperception that U.S. science and technology is failing when in fact it remains strong, even preeminent.

"There is a pressing need for ongoing, objective analyses of science and technology performance and the science and technology workforce. We need this information to ensure that decision makers have a rigorous understanding of the issues," Hosek said.

Among the study's recommendations:

- Establish a permanent commitment to fund a chartered body that would periodically monitor and analyze U.S. science and technology performance and the condition of the nation's science and engineering workforce.

- Make it easier for foreigners who have graduated from U.S. universities with science and engineering degrees to stay indefinitely in the United States.

- Make it easier for highly skilled labor to immigrate to the United States to ensure the benefits of expanded innovation are captured in the United States and to help the United States remain competitive in research and innovation.

- Increase the United States' capacity to learn from science centers in Europe, Japan, China, India and other countries.

- Continue to improve K-12 education in general, and science and technology education in particular.

The inflow of foreign students, scientists and engineers has been a key factor that has enabled the U.S. science and engineering workforce to grow faster than the U.S. is graduating native-born scientists and engineers, according to the report. Researchers found that foreign-born scientists and engineers are paid the same as native born, suggesting their quality is on par.

But a recent reduction in the cap on skilled immigrant visas (H1-B) has the potential to reduce the inflow of foreign science and engineering workers, and the report argues that curtailing the supply of these scientists and engineers can lead U.S. firms to outsource more research and development to foreign countries and locate new facilities overseas. Rather than protecting jobs, this could lead to reduced investment and employment at home.

Among potential weaknesses faced by the United States are the persistent underperformance of older, native-born K-12 students in math and science and the heavy focus of federal research funding on the life sciences versus physical sciences. Another unknown is whether an increasing U.S. reliance on foreign-born workers in science and engineering makes the U.S. vulnerable. In recent years, about 70 percent of the foreign scientists and engineers who receive PhDs from U.S. universities choose to remain here, but the stay rate could fall as research conditions and salaries improve abroad.

###

The RAND report was sponsored by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel & Readiness and conducted within the Forces and Resources Policy Center of the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps., the defense agencies and the defense Intelligence Community.

The report, "U.S. Competitiveness in Science and Technology," can be found at www.rand.org.

The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit research organization providing objective analysis and effective solutions that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors around the world. To sign up for RAND e-mail alerts: http://www.rand.org/publications/email.html





4. Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Officially Announce Recovery of 13 of 15 Objects Stolen from UBC Museum of Anthropology
http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=24684
12 June 2008

VANCOUVER.- At a press conference on June 10 at 2:00 pm, RCMP Supt. McGowan, Operations Officer and Assistant District Commander of the Lower Mainland District and Insp. FitzPatrick, Operations Officer E Division Major Crime Unit, announced that thirteen of the fifteen objects stolen from the UBC Museum of Anthropology on May 24, 2008 have been recovered safely.

The objects, which included twelve original works by renowned Haida artist Bill Reid and three items of Mexican jewellery, were the subject of an intense recovery effort initiated by the RCMP immediately following the break-in. Among the recovered items are Bill Reid’s extraordinary gold box with a sculptured, three-dimensional eagle on top, his gold Frog brooch, and two bracelets. An argillite pipe and an eagle brooch, also by Bill Reid, are still missing.

“We are extremely grateful to the RCMP for their efforts to locate these cultural treasures, and to all those who assisted in their investigation,” said Moya Waters, who represented Museum Director Dr. Anthony Shelton at the press conference. “We were devastated by their loss, and profoundly grateful for their safe return.” Dr. Shelton, who is out of town on business, also conveyed his thanks to the RCMP. “We are very appreciative of the extraordinary efforts of all concerned in the search for and recovery of the majority of these precious objects.”

According to Supt. McGowan and Insp. FitzPatrick, the RCMP have “worked tirelessly and around the clock investigating this crime that has attracted international attention…. While we are satisfied that we have recovered most of the stolen items, the RCMP would like to seek the public’s assistance in recovering the last two items which we have reason to believe are still in the Lower Mainland area….If anyone has information as to the whereabouts of these pieces of the collection, please contact 778.886.2870 or Crime Stoppers.” (1-800-222-TIPS (8477) or www.bccrimestoppers.com)







5. Pine Needles, Antlers and Bears - Oh My!
http://inventorspot.com/articles/pine_needle_art_14447
Posted June 12th, 2008 by Diana Eid



Artist Richard Carpenter makes life-size bears out of pine needles. Hundreds of thousands of pine needles to be exact.

Mountain Magic - A New Life
It took over 8 months to make this life-size bear. One of these bears weighs anywhere from 40 to 60 pounds. The cub took about 3 months. The pine needles were gathered off the ground, sorted, washed, trimmed and hand-woven.

Richard Carpenter lives in Salmon, Idaho near the Salmon River. When he moved there to take care of his Dad, he needed to find a way to make a living other than a minimum wage job. So he brought his creative talents into the picture. He was inspired by his surroundings and started using the natural elements to create his artwork.

He also makes gorgeous carvings from antlers of various animals, whatever he can find. He uses antler from deer, moose and elk, which are shed every year.

What an environmentally friendly guy, using natural products to create his bears. And animal activists, take note, he waits for the animal to shed its antlers.

I would say that this artist has a ton of patience. If it were me, I would have given up after gathering the pine needles off of the ground.

What do you think of this pine needle and antler artwork?

#

Several nice photos can be viewed by clicking the inventorspot link.



Honorable Mentions:

1. Ailing Paul Newman Turns Over $120M to Charity
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,365221,00.html
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
By Roger Friedman


Ailing Paul Newman Turns Over $120m To Charity Coldplay, Beatles Lose Leader Spielberg's Gift; Diddy Graduation; Polanski Update; World Turns Slower; Old Lox

Ailing Paul Newman Turns Over $120m To Charity

Movie star Paul Newman has quietly turned over the entire value of his ownership in Newman’s Own — the company that makes salad dressing and cookies — to charity.

Completed over a two-year period in 2005 and 2006, the amount of his donations to Newman’s Own Foundation Inc. comes to an astounding $120 million.

This is unprecedented for any movie star or anyone from what we call Hollywood. Of course Newman and actress wife Joanne Woodward have never been Hollywood types. They’ve lived their lives quietly in Westport, Conn., for the last 50 years. (They were married in January 1958. And people said it wouldn’t last!)

This column learned about this extraordinary gift as news started coming out recently about Newman’s battle with lung cancer. This is not news to my readers. I told you several months ago that Newman — who has five grown daughters — was seeing an oncologist, that he’d been in and out of Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital on many visits from Westport. Like everything else, the Newmans tried to keep Paul’s illness a private matter.

But a tip-off that he was maybe not doing so well came in late May. Newman announced that he would not direct a production of “Of Mice and Men” later this summer at the Westport Country Playhouse, where Woodward is the artistic director.

News of his illness seems to have been exacerbated by none other than neighbor Martha Stewart. She recently published pictures of Paul on her Web site from a party she hosted. He looks gaunt but nevertheless smiling his trademark smile. Nothing will set him back. This racecar driver and adventurer should not be written off as “dying.”

“He’s a fighter,” one of his close friends told me Tuesday morning. “And he’s going to keep fighting.”

In the meantime, I also told you last August that in Botswana, the Newman name is known not for being a movie star. It’s known for his famous Hole in the Wall Gang camps. The camps go to Africa every summer to run programs for impoverished and ill children. It’s the same program they run in dozens of similar camps all over the United States.

The Hole in the Wall camps are just a few of the places the hundreds of millions of dollars have gone that Newman has raised since he got the idea to bottle salad dressing for charity.

According to Newman’s Own federal tax filing for 2006, the actor personally gave away $8,746,500 to a variety of groups that support children, hurricane relief in the Gulf Coast, education and the arts.

Some of Newman’s recipients are well-known: He gave Rosie O’Donnell’s children's program $5,000 and even donated $25,000 to his pal Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute. But most of them are for the kinds of programs that we never hear about, the kind that simply keep people alive.

But don’t think that Newman — who received his Kennedy Center honor in 1992 and deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom — did this because he suddenly thought he was dying. When he set up the new foundation, he hadn’t yet been diagnosed with lung cancer. It was just in honor of his 80th birthday, and an acknowledgment that he wanted to make sure his charities would continue receiving his largesse.



2. Students Collect Shoes for Charity
http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/1842224
Jun 11, 2008 6:59 PM

A Christchurch school is making sure its students appreciate all the small things in life, like a simple pair of shoes.

Cobham Intermediate students have been collecting and cleaning old footwear, so they can be sent for use in impoverished countries.

Over 2000 pairs of shoes, slippers, boots, jandals and pretty much shoes of all different sizes and colours have been collected, all in the name of charity.

The collected shoes are then cleaned by the students before they are sent to a charity in the USA called "Share your Soles", which then sends them to countries around the world where people cannot afford them.

Nick Leith, a Cobham Intermediate teacher, says the teachers are trying to teach the students how they can make a contribution to society: "&so even though they're young and think there're at the mercy of everything around them, they're actually able to achieve so much by working together".

The students say getting the footwear was the easy part. Now they have to make plans on how they are going to raise $5000 to ship them, and they may just have one.

They are organising a letter writing campaign to big businesses all across the country, asking them to fund their charity.

And for the students, every shoe they can send overseas will be a step in the right direction.



3. Dell Recycles 100 Million Pounds of Equipment
http://earth911.org/blog/2008/06/11/dell-recycles-100-million-pounds-of-equipment/
by Ashley Schiller on June 11th, 2008
June 11th 2008

With 100 million pounds of equipment recycled, 2007 marked a new record for Dell as the year with the largest product recycling volume. This is a 20 percent increase from 2006.

“Our customers and stakeholders are inspiring us to lead a new era of environmental responsibility,” said Director of Sustainable Business Tod Arbogast in a news release. “We are at a historic point in time when the combined efforts of companies, customers, employees and suppliers will make the critical changes to protect our shared Earth.”

Dell offers free home pick-up for obsolete company products and has 370 drop-off locations around the country. It is also the only computer manufacturer to offer free recycling worldwide, according to the Dell site.

Do you have electronics to recycle? FInd out the manufacture’s take-back options or use Earth 911’s recycling locator to find a drop-off in your community.

Dell has its own (copywrited) news release on its green activities, which was printed on 5 June 2008. To visit that website click the following link: http://www.prdomain.com/companies/D/Dell/newsreleases/20086657856.htm




4. One Man's Mission to Rid India of its Dirtiest Job
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/oplumbing
By Mian Ridge
Wed Jun 11, 5:00 AM ET

Alwar, India - Usha Chaumar, a gregarious 40-something with an enormous grin, can pinpoint the exact day she stopped being one of the "untouchables," the Hindu caste that was supposedly abolished in 1950.

It was 2003, and Ms. Chaumar was on her way to work when Bindeshwar Pathak stopped her. She recalls being amazed that a "nicely dressed" man would even speak with someone like her: a manual scavenger. As such, it was her job to clean human waste, by hand, from homes that lack flushing toilets in this dusty town in the state of Rajasthan.

Usually, neighbors crossed the street when they saw her coming with the tools of her trade: a metal pan and wire brush. And even when she had finished her gut-churning work and scrubbed her body clean, she was treated as a pariah.

But Dr. Pathak asked her why she covered her face with her shawl and why she seemed ashamed to talk to him. At the time, Chaumar had no idea she was speaking to the man whose mission it was to end manual scavenging and who would eventually change her life.

Pathak founded an organization called Sulabh in 1970 to eradicate the practice by replacing unplumbed toilets with affordable flush ones, and by giving scavengers training for other jobs.

"Shopkeepers would drop the rice to me – they wouldn't touch me," Chaumar remembers, losing her smile for a moment. "And they made me put my money down, away from them. They threw water over it before taking it."

Today, she earns a living selling homemade pickles and embroidered cloths.

Manual scavenging was banned in India in 1993, by a law that forbids the construction of dry toilets and requires existing ones to be destroyed. But in India, such laws tend to be implemented slowly. There are thought to be several hundred thousand manual scavengers still working; a recent report found there were over 1,000 in Delhi alone.

Sulabh has built 1.2 million affordable hygienic toilets throughout India and helped 60,000 former manual scavengers move into other jobs.

All those jobs are held by members of the Valmiki community, a substratum of the Dalit caste – formerly known as untouchable – at the bottom of the ancient Hindu caste system. The term untouchable – along with, theoretically, the stigma attached to it – was made illegal by India's Constitution in 1950.

In Alwar, in 2003, Pathak set up a retraining program for the town's manual scavengers which has given more than 50 women vocational training. The center, where women learn to read and write, make clothes, and train as beauticians, is housed in a prosperous area of Alwar.

"At first they felt uncomfortable coming here, but we wanted to give them a different perspective," says Suman Chahar, who runs the center.

In one room, Lalita Nanda is making wicks for oil lamps in Hindu temples. The priests who buy them did not let Lalita into the temple until recently, she says, smiling.

One of the first things Pathak did with Alwar's scavengers was usher them into the town's biggest Hindu temple. He also took a group out to dinner at the Maurya Sheraton, a five-star hotel in Delhi.

The manager was so appalled he tried to stop the women entering. Pathak promised to pay for anything that was broken or stolen; nothing, of course, was; and as the party left, the manager apologized to them.

Sulabh's transformation of manual scavengers would not be possible without the other part of its work, the development of cheap hygienic toilet technology.

"The toilet is a tool of social change," declares Pathak, who defies the stereotype of the scruffy Gandhian activist dressed in rough-spun cotton. He is wearing, instead, a starched white pajama suit with a smart jacket; his hair is dyed black, and he wears a fine gold ring.

Born into a family of Brahmins – the highest of all the castes - in a village in Bihar, Pathak remembers, as a little boy, being intrigued by the notion that the ordinary-looking woman who sold kitchen utensils to his family could be "untouchable."

"So I touched her," he says, "Just to see. And my grandmother made me drink a mixture of cow urine, cow dung, and Ganges water." That combination is meant as both cleanser and punishment.

Later, Pathak joined a committee established to celebrate the centennial of Mahatma Gandhi's birth. During this period he was struck by what Mr. Gandhi had said about scavengers: "I may not be born again, but if it happens I will like to be born into a family of scavengers, so that I may relieve them of the inhuman, unhealthy, and hateful practice of carrying night soil."

Curious, Pathak went to live in a community of scavengers for three months. At this point, he says, he was not yet inspired by their cause. But two experiences changed this.

The first, he says, was when he saw a newly married girl being forced by her mother-in-law to clean human waste by hand. "I can't describe how awful her crying was," he says. The second was when he saw a small boy being attacked by a bull. People rushed to save him, but when someone cried out that he came from the Valamiki caste, they left him, and he was killed.

"These things still happen," says Pathak. "But we have everything we need to change things. It is so, so simple, if people only have the will."