As a professor of medicine and molecular biology at UCSD, Ajit Varki has spent much of his career looking inward, initially at blood cancers, more recently at complex sugar molecules called glycans.
EARNIE GRAFTON / Union-Tribune
The center brings together scientists from many fields. Directors are (above, from left) Salk neuroscientist Fred Gage; Margaret Schoeninger, a UCSD anthropologist; and Ajit Varki, a molecular biologist at UCSD.
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But in the back of his mind, bigger questions have tugged: Why do humans function the way they do? Why is the human body built like that? To what purpose? For what reason?
“Very few medical schools teach anything about evolution,” said Varki. “Doctors are taught how to care for a single species but nothing about the origin of that species.”
It's a real problem, he said – one that affects actual medical care today.
“Evolutionary knowledge has practical implications. It affects how you treat specific diseases. You hear some physicians say they don't need to know where a machine came from to fix it, just the blueprint. But it's useful to know how that machine came to be built that way.”
Such knowledge isn't only for doctors, either, Varki said. It should be shared among scientists of all stripes, from geographers and nutritionists to biochemists and psychiatrists.
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CARTA – the beginning
With $3 million in funding from the New York-based Mathers Foundation, the new Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny at UCSD and the Salk Institute encompasses several missions and goals:
 Regular meetings on human-origin topics for researchers from diverse disciplines
Public symposiums
Development of anthropogeny (the study of human origins) courses for UCSD undergraduates, graduate students and students at the UCSD School of Medicine
Creation of an online museum of comparative anthropogeny
Housing and stewardship of data and skeletal collections donated by the Primate Foundation of America
Creation of a peer-reviewed journal
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To that end, Varki and colleagues have launched a novel institute that will emphasize the study of human origins. Dubbed the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny, or CARTA, the institute will have offices at both UCSD and the nearby Salk Institute. Mostly, however, CARTA will be virtual, its members connected via the Internet and a common curiosity about how man began.
“The question of human origin is not something that can or will be solved by any single field of science,” said Varki. “Finding answers requires cooperation, but how do you bring everybody together?
“There's one place in Germany – the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology – that sort of tries to do this, but that's not enough. We need to expand and deepen the effort. There's just too much we don't know or understand.”
Learned conversations
Varki once counted himself among the uninformed.
“Fifteen years or so ago, when I first started asking questions about human evolution, I didn't really know much about human origins – just what I had learned reading National Geographic or watching the Discovery Channel,” he said.
So Varki began quizzing local anthropologists and paleontologists, but he also talked with neuroscientists, organic chemists and linguists. All of them, he discovered, had something to say about the beginnings of mankind. The problem was, they often weren't saying it to each other.
“Ajit would come in quite regularly for long talks,” said Fred Gage, a Salk neuroscientist and co-director of CARTA. “He would say he'd just spoken with so and so. It was all so interesting. I would tell him it wasn't fair. He was getting all of this input and not getting a chance to share it.”
Thus emerged the first glimmerings of CARTA. Varki, with growing enthusiasm from colleagues and fellow scientists, began organizing occasional informal sessions about human origins for scientists of diverse disciplines, each researcher bringing a particular expertise and point of view.
The meetings weren't publicized or open to outsiders. No one wanted the distraction. It was hard enough, in the beginning at least, to get participants to communicate effectively among themselves.
“The most basic problem was jargon,” said Varki. “Somebody who works with DNA would start throwing out words that were incomprehensible to a linguist. A single word could have two different meanings, depending upon the field of science. People would start arguing: 'Why don't you get your own term.' ”
But the meetings were useful and thought-provoking nonetheless, he said. “Somebody would ask a question that others would consider naive, but it would get people thinking. Every scientific discipline has its cherished theories, its dogma. You need somebody to come along and say, 'Hey, wait a minute. What's the basis for that?' ”
The meetings grew in popularity. “At first it was just a few people in a single room, most of them local,” said Gage. “But then it became clear that many of the questions being asked required more expertise, so we began inviting people.”
Funding from private foundations allowed them to bring in speakers. Membership bloomed. Varki and others began to see a compelling need and opportunity to establish a more formal center and program.
“We had these small seminars for perhaps 10 years, and the amount of knowledge that was brought forth was astonishing,” said Kurt Benirschke, a retired pathologist and UCSD professor who helped create the San Diego Zoo's Center for the Reproduction of Endangered Species.
“It became abundantly clear that work in different disciplines is often neglected or unknown by other disciplines. Think, for instance, of language development. Linguists rarely, if ever, really comprehend or discuss things with neuroanatomists, let alone with anatomists who might understand the mechanics of the larynx.”
More profoundly, the scientists realized there was no easy means for such scientific interplay to be conducted. Anthropogeny – the study of human evolution and origins – is not a single established discipline. It tends to be taught piecemeal, if at all.
One of CARTA's goals, said UCSD anthropologist and co-director Margaret Schoeninger, will be to promote undergraduate and graduate education in anthropogeny.
“A lot of people just don't have a clue about evolution, even among those who say they believe in the theory,” she said. “They don't understand its broader and deeper implications, like the evolutionary aspects of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”
CARTA, Schoeninger said, can help expose and train students in the ideas of anthropogeny. “They might get their degrees in something else, but they would understand anthropogeny perspectives. It will influence their work.
“And if anthropogeny ultimately becomes a recognized scientific discipline, that would be marvelous. As Fred (Gage) notes, 20 years ago there weren't any neuroscientists, either.”
Just the facts
But what about the 800-pound primate in the room? The controversy of evolution versus creationism rages and endures in the United States like nowhere else in the world.
A 2007 Gallup poll reported that 43 percent of Americans surveyed believed God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years; 38 percent said mankind evolved, but under God's guidance. Only 14 percent said the evolutionary process involved no divine participation.
In polls and in public, Americans remain clearly split in their beliefs and explanations of human origins, even though researchers pointedly note that the theory of evolution has successfully survived all scientific challenges.
“Scientists no longer question the basic facts of evolution as a process,” the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine recently declared in a new effort to explain and promote public understanding of evolution. “The concept has withstood extensive testing by tens of thousands of specialists in biology, medicine, anthropology, geology, chemistry and other fields. Discoveries in different fields have reinforced one another, and evidence for evolution has continued to accumulate for 150 years.”
Varki hopes CARTA doesn't become part of the debate – that it can avoid the philosophical and theological thicket by sticking exclusively to the science of human origins.
“We want to look only at documentable facts, theories that are testable,” he said. “That automatically excludes purely religious issues or articles of faith.”
But Schoeninger isn't so confident that such separation can be maintained – or that it's entirely desirable.
“Part of our responsibility, I think, is not to keep this work under the radar,” she said. “You have to have the discussion. You have to have an honest debate based on science. Skirmishes are unavoidable and important.
“People who have philosophical differences deserve to be treated with respect, just as we do. But I think science has to vigorously and repeatedly present its evidence. If there are people who cannot be persuaded by the science, you need to agree to disagree and then push forward.”
Schoeninger and colleagues believe anthropogeny can accelerate that “push forward,” that comparing our extinct ancestors and extant cousins – the great apes – with what's known about modern humans is indisputably valuable.
“For instance,” said Benirschke, “the details of the glycosylation of cells (when sugars combine with proteins and fats) that Varki pioneered are hardly ever really addressed by scientists, although they are groundbreaking aspects of the differences between chimps and humans.”
Such particulars may not mean much to most people, but they are part and parcel of the larger equation explaining what it means to be human.
“They help tell us how we got here,” said Varki. “And that's something we all want to know.”
