Professor of Anthropology Pat Whitten has tapped into an area of research quite relevant to baby boomers as they move into and through middle age. Her research topic is menopause, and she is exploring the possibility that phytoestrogens, a plant chemical found in foods such as soybeans, can be used as natural treatments for menopause or as anticancer agents.

It has been suggested that these dietary estrogens may be doing something quite beneficial for women in Japan, who reportedly lack the hot flashes characteristic of menopause in Western populations. Until now, however, no one has conducted a long-term study that looked at the effect of soy-based phytoestrogens on menopausal symptoms in Japanese women.

The problem has been that trials for studies of this kind involve keeping women in a clinical environment for weeks of tests. Either that, or women are required to make frequent trips to a lab so that a nurse can draw blood. Not only are both situations inconvenient, they also take women out of their natural element and introduce new types of stress.

Employing a technique developed by her colleague Carol Worthman, Whitten and Melissa Melby (an anthropology graduate student) use a finger prick method that makes it possible for Japanese women to test themselves once a week over a six-month period. As a result, more women participate in the study, and they provide a more extensive view of the menopause cycle.

Currently, Whitten is also collaborating with fellow colleagues Michelle Lampl (Anthropology) and Amanda Thompson (graduate student) to apply noninvasive methods of hormone analysis to the study of infant growth. Specifically, they are developing techniques for recovering and analyzing growth-related hormones from infant diapers. These unique methods will provide a window into the activity of gonadal steroids and growth hormones, and enable Whitten and her colleagues to test their role in regulating the tempo and pattern of growth in infancy.

However, Whitten's use of such techniques does not stop with humans. As founder and director of Emory's Laboratory of Reproductive Ecology and Environmental Toxicology, she also employs noninvasive techniques with primates and is interested in what the social behavior of other animals can tell us about human origins and human social relationships.

Years ago she began examining lemurs, a primitive type of primate that is believed to demonstrate some of the most ancient types of primate behavior and motivation. One of her current projects involves seeing how testosterone levels correlate with social interactions in Madagascan lemurs, called sifakas.

One of her goals is to determine what makes males successful and what testosterone and aggression have to do with that. But she has also noticed something that is leading to a new research angle. She and colleagues have observed some males who are very interested in infants, even in cases where they are not the fathers.

The implications are far reaching: if we see males caring for infants among the sifakas—animals that evolved 60–100 million years ago—this suggests a more ancient and deeper basis for this same response seen in other primates and humans. It tells us more about the circumstances that led to human paternal behavior. And it leads to the thought that perhaps this aspect of human behavior isn't so unique in itself but has evolved over time from behaviors shared by other species.

FYI

The Laboratory of Reproductive Ecology and Environmental Toxicology, located in the Department of Anthropology, specializes in noninvasive hormone analysis for use in field endocrinology, the study of social and ecological influences on endocrine physiology in natural settings. It is one of the few labs in the United States that has developed noninvasive methods to study primates in the wild.