GU-Journal no 2 2013

UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG

n o 2 | M a r c h /A p r i l 2 0 1 3

The answer is in the blood Anna Winkvist wants to find out what you really eat Your guide to MOOC

South africa and sweden

Lars Hamberger

Cost-free online courses – just a PR stunt?

Wayne´s fight against injustice

Actually wanted to be a painter

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Vice Chancellor

A magazine for employees of the Universit y of Gothenburg

March/April 2013

Clear career paths make us more attractive T h e U n i ve r s it y b oa r d decided the University of Gothenburg’s annual report for 2012 on February 20th. Last year was a good year. Allocation of external research grants increased. Student applications continued to be high and there were positive developments in a number of other areas. Altogether, our economic situation is good. We can add that Sweden as a nation has a competitive advantage in comparison with many other countries in Europe where there are substantial cutbacks in research and education.

With our relatively large amount of capital, we can now take on the recruitment goals set out in Vision 2020.

The decision of the University board for revised employment regulations also gives us possibilities to recruit to tenure-track positions with the post of assistant professor as a first step. After four years and acceptable testing, the person will be able to be promoted to position of lecturer. The employment regulations also make it possible to recruit to a four-year research assistant post, although without the right to promotion.

Seve r a l d i ffe r e n t evaluations and international comparisons have emphasised that a lack of clear career paths in Sweden impedes our national competitiveness in research.

I thus look forward to this opportunity for positions that give merits contributing to our being able to work more strategically and in a longer term perspective with respect to ensuring skills among teachers and researchers. This also includes recruitments on the lecturer and professor levels, which will take place with open competition nationally and internationally.

New challenges constantly arise in our activities. In terms of education we see new ways to gain knowledge such as MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). These are distance courses “online” that are offered by several private actors and universities – courses that perhaps 100 000 “students” can have access to and whose material has often been developed by prestigious universities.

Some of the universities that already offer MOOCs see them as a form of marketing to attract campus students. Others see them as

E d i to r - i n C h i e f a n d P u b l i s h e r

Allan Eriksson 031 - 786 10 21 allan.eriksson@gu.se E d i to r a n d V i ce P u b l i s h e r

Eva Lundgren 031 - 786 10 81 eva.lundgren@gu.se P h oto g r a p h y a n d Rep r o d u c t i o n

Johan Wingborg 031 - 786 29 29 johan.wingborg@gu.se G r a p h i c F o r m a n d L ayo u t

Anders Eurén 031 - 786 43 81 anders.euren@gu.se Contributing Graphic Form a n d L ayo u t

Björn Eriksson T r a s l at i o n

Janet Vesterlund address

GU Journal University of Gothenburg Box 100, 405 30 Gothenburg e-post

gu-journalen@gu.se Photogr aphy: Johan wingborg

a complement to what they offer in education. It’s clear that they expand the availability to knowledge. What we need to do is relate to the development of events, form an understanding of what this can become in the future and think about how we can use new technology in our courses. This will be a theme in the series of seminars about the world around us that is being planned.

I a l s o wa n t to take the opportunity to bring up the University of Gothenburg’s involvement in International Women’s Day on March 8th.This is an example of our ambition to increase our contact with the public. A full day with seminars on different themes attracted a large public to the University’s main building. This is very gratifying and is clear evidence of the interest in what we do at the University.

At the time of my next piece in GU Journal, the University of Gothenburg will hopefully have a new University board, appointed by the Government. Proposals were submitted to the Government on March 4th.

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Contents

GUJOURNAL 2 | 2013

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From the Vice-chancellor

2 New recruitment positions will be introduced news

4 What can GU profit by joining MOOC? 6 Shallow debate about open online courses 7 Cecilia Schelin Seidegård proposed as new chairman of the University’s board profile

8 Anna Winkvist learned to swing a machete when she did field work in Papua New Guinea

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new thesis

Controversial professor

11 Eva-Maria Ström has studied a language with only about twenty adjectives

Lars Hamberger continues to fight for his rights.

Report

12 Wayne Coetzee wonders why Sweden’s voice went silent after the ANC took power in South Africa

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World class senior researchers

14 He’s the author of one of the world’s greatest book successes and the researcher who laid the ground for test tube fertilization in Scandinavia

Better health advice Anna Winkvist develops a new method that will measure what we really eat.

12 Doctoral student Wayne Coetzee comes from a poor white background.

Online open courses Not a solution.

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Threathened languages Eva-Marie Ström studies a small African language.

Editorial Office: What can GU profit from MOOC? We ’ r e s u r e yo u haven’t missed the debate about the University College of Gävle. The management has adopted a new communication policy where they write that employees must always communicate internally before they go out with information externally, for example to the media. All employees are also expected to support decisions that are taken and send the “desired picture” of the University.

The management obviously isn’t aware that public employees have a constitutionally protected right to express themselves. But the policy has been harshly criticised. In a debate

article in Gefle Dagblad, four Uppsala professors write that they’re seeing a university that’s in free fall. “In addition to the fact that the document itself is remarkably badly written, the head of communication and the Vicechancellor have chosen to formulate principles that obviously contrast with our constitution.”

This is to some extent related to the debate article (in Swedish) in this number of GU Journal. Thomas Forser and Thomas Karlsohn write that university management groups have used the autonomy reform to crop collegial governance. A line organisation

requires loyalty toward supervisors in a completely different way than collegial governance does.

We a l s o w r it e i n this number about the well-known professor Lars Hamberger, who has fought over a decade with the management of the University of Gothenburg. He’s the person behind the first test tube baby in Scandinavia, who turned 30 a while ago. He is also a stem cell researcher and author of a truly big success around the world: the book A Child is Born.

Another hot issue is cost-free

Internet courses, also called MOOC, that are offered by prestigious universities primarily in the US. Should Swedish universities catch on to this trend? Unlike other countries, our universities offer cost-free courses in which the teachers and the students are actively involved. So, the question is – what would we win by offering similar courses? Or is the question whether the University of Gothenburg can stand on the platform when every­ one else jumps onto the train?

Allan Eriksson & Eva Lundgren

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News

Illustr ation: Pet ter Lönnegård

Free Internet courses a global trend A revolution of higher education, a PR stunt or a serious effort?

2012 was the year that MOOC made its breakthrough. The digital education culture has suddenly become available to everyone, completely cost free. But should GU join the group of global no-cost educators?

Ope n co u r s e s on the Internet have been around for a few years, but large American elite universities ventured onto the market in 2012 and offered a number of cost-free courses on line.

Since then the development has literally exploded. The largest Internet course agent, Coursera, had a million registered students

around the world last year. At the end of February, the number passed 2.8 million.

The University of Lund recently said that they are considering offering similar courses.

At GU, Lars Hansen, responsible for e-administration, has been given the task of keeping an eye on developments.

“I’ve applied to a number of courses, World History from the 1300s and Onward and a course in jazz improvisation at Berklee College of Music. Cost-free Internet courses are a possibility for many people around the world to take part in higher education that they’ve been excluded from for economic, geographic and social reasons. As interest in these courses grows, even more questions are coming in the picture about how universities can make a monetary profit, but also about how students will be

able to use the knowledge they acquire to go further in the educational system.”

Co st- fr ee co u r s e s can be a lift for individual researchers in a narrow area. An example is Stanford teacher Sebastian Thrun, who gave a course in artificial intelligence in 2011.

The campus course attracted 200 students and the Internet course 160,000. Thrun is now part owner of a new company, Udacity, that offers about 20 courses.

News

GUJOURNAL 2 | 2013

With the exception of edX, Udacity and Coursera are profit companies but, according to Lars Hansen, it’s currently not clear what is going to give profit to the companies. is that the courses don’t have any eligibility requirements, they’re completely cost free and it’s possible to get a statement about having passed the course.

Lars Hansen distinguishes three sides of the debate about MOOC: 1) that it’s described as something transformative in higher education, 2) that it’s a T h e ba s i c t h i n g

FAQ on Massive Open Online Courses

number of Internet courses is still relatively small compared with what a large university offers.“ An interesting Swedish effort is the Institution of Computer and System Sciences in Stockholm that started about ten university courses for all people last year. But this should sooner be seen as a pilot, according to Lars Hansen.

He’s basically positive to MOOC. “The initiative is in line with the development of open educational resources, the dispersion of research results in open access and fulfilling the third task, coo-

Who are the cost-free courses meant for?

“People all over the world who are interested.

There are no requirements for formal qualifications and there are no limits to the number of participants.

You can follow the course, do the lessons and get a kind of certificate, but you can also follow it without actually doing anything else than observing and learning. A common criticism is that this kind of course requires so much self-discipline that students who need a little more support can’t participate.”

Do the courses give university credits?

»Cost-free courses can be a lift for individual researchers in a narrow area.« Lars Hansen

complement to our educational system and 3) that it’s a trend, with serious quality deficits, that can’t challenge the present education model in any way.

“For me the answer is: Correctly used, it’s a good complement. It doesn’t threaten traditional education in any way.

The big problem with MOOC is that there’s such a small extent of teacher and student interaction and that no teacher checks the level of answers that are submitted but that these are checked by students’ own judgements of each other. A kind of student peer review. In some technical and natural science courses, there’s a great deal of automatic correction.”

It ’ s ve ry c le a r that it’s a development that’s moving along very quickly. On February 20th, the two largest agents, Coursera and edX, gave the news that the number of open, cost-free on line courses would be doubled. Both are expanding internationally and offer courses in French, Italian, Chinese and Spanish. ”Altogether, Coursera for example gives 325 courses from 62 different universities, and almost three million students have registered for them. Trying to describe this is like trying to shoot at a moving target. But we can’t forget that this development is still in its infancy; the

“No, but you can get a certificate in the majority of courses that shows that you’ve followed the course and done the necessary parts. Coursera has recently started to offer something they call Signature Track in a few courses that means that students – for a certain fee ($30–100) – can get a verified certificate where their identity is guaranteed.”

How can you know that students have learned something?

“It depends on what you mean by learning something. There are certainly a lot of people who take these courses only to learn and/or learn more in an area that they already know. But if you mean ‘learning something’ requires some kind of examination that shows that you’ve taken in knowledge, MOOCs hardly fulfil that kind of requirement today.”

peration with society.”

What profits do you see if GU joins the trend?

“I don’t know. Who can see what will happen when it goes so quickly? We usually overestimate the change in the short run, but underestimate it in the long run.

For a university like Berklee College of Music, it’s clearly a form of marketing. They don’t make anything on the courses but see them as a way to attract students. For GU, this could lead to greater visibility internationally.” decide to give these courses, videos have to have a very high quality. Careful thought also has to be given to the fact that over 50 000 participants are taking the course. And there have to be teachers that are extremely keen on working with this kind of education and are given the resources for it.

It might be smart to put effort into courses where GU is strong internationally, both in terms of research and education.”

Lars Hansen encourages people who are curious to register for a course and test it out.

“Even if it doesn’t giv any university credits, the knowledge in itself is important. You can see it as a form of continuous learning and a part of life-long learning.”

Can GU compete on a “cost-free market” with elite universities like Harvard and Stanford?

“The elite universities are primarily research oriented, and there isn’t actually anything that says that they’re better at educating extremely large groups of students via Internet than lower ranked universities can. In the end it has to do with being able to give good, well structured and well thought out Internetbased courses. Instead of working on MOOC I think that GU in the long term should build up competence in Internet-based education in general. If we manage that, I think that we could probably be able to offer a few MOOCs where GU has special competence, and be able to do that without its costing very much.”

“ B u t i f yo u

Allan Eriksson

What would GU gain by giving cost-free courses on Internet?

“Primarily this would be marketing and the third task. Spreading knowledge to the whole world is a satisfactory goal. MOOCs are, in the best of worlds, a part of a much larger movement that has to do with people all over the world being able to participate in the knowledge that’s produced by researchers at all the world’s universities.”

Harvard and MIT put 60 million crowns into developing digital learning platforms for their courses. How much would GU need to spend? And how would this be financed?

Read more at: http://chronicle. com/article/ What-YouNeed-to-KnowAbout/133475/

“I think there needs to be a national strategy for this. It can’t be up to each school to make these efforts themselves. The alternative is to connect with Courser or edX, for example, in the same way that the University of Copenhagen has done.”

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News

14 000

Only British!

The number of students that are now in the University’s alumnae network. This means many possibilities for contacts all around for knowledge exchange and higher educational quality! www.gu.se/alumn

Listen to baroque masters John Dowland, Henry Purcell and William Lawes and to Vaughn Williams and Thomas Adès. The University of Gothenburg Symphony Ochestra will play and the conductor, Andrew Manze, is also British.

Time: April 5, 7:00 – 20:45 pm At: Artisten Find more concerts at: www.hsm.gu.se

continues Free Internet Courses

»It isn’t a revolution« The uncritical wave of MOOC enthusiasm has travelled over the Atlantic and reached Sweden. It isn’t a complete success, according to historian Kenneth Nyberg, who has closely followed the American discussion about massive online courses.

lack of contact with a teacher and supervision that makes Kenneth Nyberg sceptical: “The courses are built on one-way contact from the teacher to the student to a great degree, but without the possibility for real interaction. The lectures are excellent, of course, but it isn’t the case that the student gets supervision from the star professors that are the instructors. This may not be a problem for some students, but the MOOC model just doesn’t hold water for the ones that need a lot of help or for courses that deal with developing critical thinking and an ability to analyse.”

Despite there being interactive features built on student cooperation, the foundation of the courses are video-taped lectures, certainly in a pretty package, but without a possibility for discussion and analysis led by a teacher. Kenneth Nyberg thinks that this is an outmoded view of education and that it has to be taken for granted that learning is a social process.

“What we can offer our students is human contact, feedback, dialogue. The students are looking for more instruction It ’ s t h e ve ry

Photogr aphy: Johan Wingborg

A lm o st eve ry t h i n g Kenneth Nyberg has read during recent months has been effusively positive, often completely without critical distance.

“It’s like politicians who work with education and schools think that they can suddenly revolutionise higher education, a seemingly simple solution to a complicated problem that also makes it possible to save money. But it isn’t so simple, even if there’s a lot in the concept that’s interesting,” says Kenneth Nyborg.

He’s primarily worried about the risk that the MOOC courses are beginning to be seen as a satisfactory alternative to traditional education, including distance courses that usually include a certain amount of contact with a teacher and interactivity.

When they don’t, it’s usually seen as a problem, not as an innovation.

Kenneth Nyberg is sceptical of MOOC and thinks that the Swedish discussion thus far is too simple.

»The courses are built on one-way contact from the teacher to the student to a great degree, but without the possibility for real interaction.« given by teachers and what they mean isn’t seminars for large groups, even if they’re good in their way, but more seminars.

What’s really exciting in what’s coming up isn’t MOOC but rather how digital tools can be used to develop learning and education in a genuinely new way. An example is the ideas about the ‘flipped classroom’, where video-taped lectures can be included but where the actual point is that they free time and resources for seminars and instruction in smaller groups. This doesn’t work in the MOOC courses because it would be too expensive.”

A n ot h e r pro b le m that isn’t often brought up is the very low through-put rates, which vary for the largest and most popular courses from about one per cent up to maybe 15-20 per cent. Kenneth Nyberg also points out that the American online courses are often run with business interests, both by universities and investors.

“Even if it isn’t seen in principle as a problem, it’s important to be aware of how it affects making priorities about what’s done, especially when the service that’s offered seems to be completely cost free for the user. In the US, higher education is ‘big business’ and everyone involved has thoughts about how to get a profit from the MOOC courses. In some cases, a fee will be required for different types of formal evidence or examinations. In other cases, companies have a provision from Amazon and other large bookstores for the course literature that’s sold via links from their homepages. But there’s also an obvious risk that the MOOC consortia will be advertising companies, roughly like Google and Facebook, and that they will start to sell information about the students to advertisers and others to make a profit.

Even if this is speculation at the moment, it seems to have good grounds, and the question is how we should look at the actors who supply courses where the students aren’t even customers any more but have become purely a commodity.”

B u t, i n s pit e o f his criticism, Kenneth Nyberg isn’t completely negative.

“The MOOC courses are of course a fascinating development and they can, in the best case, become an interesting complement to or features in existing educational programs. But I don’t think, or at least I hope not, that in their present form they’ll revolutionise higher education in the same way that digitalisation has shaken for example the music branch. However, without doubt, they will in some form attract many students in the future. If this happens, it’s important that Swedish schools don’t react primarily by starting their own massive Internet courses, since it’s that arena where we have very little to come with as compared to well known American universities. We should instead use their free lectures in our own existing courses where we add unique added value that the MOOC companies can’t offer: local roots and the possibility for contact with both teachers and other students in a smaller scale learning community.”

Allan Eriksson

News

GUJOURNAL 2 | 2013

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Proposal for new University board

Combative governor takes over after Bennet S h e wa s b o r n in 1954, has a doctorate in biochemistry and was made CEO of Huddinge University Hospital in 2003. She was given her most difficult task the following year – leading the hospital’s fusion with Karolinska, which started a storm of protests.

“It meant a great deal of change work and an extraordinary challenge,” Cecilia Schelin Seidegård explains. “Then I was hospital director for the merged Karolinska University Hospital until 2007. I’ve also been chairman of the board of KTH for six years.”

S h e i s c h a i r m a n of System­ bolaget and in 2010 was named governor of Gotland, where she’s become involved in ferry traffic, parking fees and reconstruction of the street network in Visby harbour. When she said last year that Gotland needed more residents from abroad, she received a surge of hate letters. She also got criticism for pleading for a stop of Nordkalk’s logging activities in the Ojnare forest.

“But mostly I’ve gotten positive responses to what I say. And a governor has the right to have opinions.”

So, what does Cecilia Schelin Seidegård know about Gothenburg?

“Actually, not very much yet, beyond that it’s a beautiful city. But I’m very familiar with Sahlgrenska Academy, I’ve met Pam Fredman several times and the University director, Jörgen Tholin, was previously vice-chancellor on Gotland, so I know him well. I have great enthusiasm for both life science and the automobile industry, which are important areas for the Gothenburg region. And a broad university like Gothenburg has fantastic possibilities, especially in cooperation with Chalmers and Sahlgrenska University Hospital.”

Cecilia Schelin Seidegård also likes to communicate. Among

Photogr aphy: Gotl and count y administr ation

She studied in Lund, worked in Stockholm and is governor of Gotland.

Now Cecilia Schelin Seidegård is being proposed as chairman of the board of the University of Gothenburg.

“I feel well prepared: I’ve worked with research and development my whole life.” other things she publishes a weekly chronicle on Gotland’s county administration’s homepage.

“Many people think that a governor doesn’t do much more than cut ribbons. That’s why I think it’s important to regularly inform people about what I do.

I’ll also of course tell them about my new honourable mission in Gothenburg.”

B ot h h e r s o n s live in Lund, although the youngest is in Shanghai at the moment. And if she has a little extra time she flees to her summer house in Österlen.

“My interests are nature and cooking and I play a little golf. I also like to be physically active and spend time with friends.

But I don’t have especially much leisure time; I’m very energetic and like to work.”

Cecilia Schelin Seidegård

»… a broad university like Gothenburg has ­fantastic possibilities, especially in co­opera­ tion­with Chalmers and Sahlgrenska U ­ niversity ­Hospital.«

Eva Lundgren

Chairman Cecilia Schelin Seidegård, governor of Gotland county.

She has a PhD in biochemistry and has worked for AstraZeneca, been CEO of Huddinge University Hospital, hospital director of the merged Karolinska University Hospital and chairman of the board of KTH. She is chairman of the board of Systembolaget and member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.

Governor Lars Bäckström has submitted the ­following proposals to the Government for the board of the University of Gothenburg. The period will run from May 1, 2013 to April 30, 2016.

Here are the other board members

Eva Halvarsson, CEO for Andra AP-fonden, is suggested to be re-appointed. She is vice chairman and has special responsibility for the contact between business representatives.

Andreas Carlgren, former minister and head of the Environmental Department.

He is active in environmental and sustainability issues and has a global network after UN’s climate negotiations.

Carin Götblad, chairman of Gotland University and former chief of county police in Stockholm county. She represents a broad social involvement and experience of cooperation between a small and a large university.

Kerstin Brunnberg, chairman of the Swedish Arts Council, formerly CEO of Swedish Radio and guest professor at the University of Gothenburg.

She represents the University’s cooperation missions.

Lauritz HolmNielsen, vice-chancellor of Arhus University, president of Euroscience and previously active in the World Bank.

He brings with him an international perspective.

Tomas Brunegård, former CEO of the media concern Stampen AB, prospective chairman of the World Association of Newspapers.

He represents both a business and a cultural perspective.

Ulf P Lundgren, former general director of the Swedish National Agency for Education and professor of education at Uppsala University. He represents an important competence area.

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Profile

Escort in a research minefield During her first experience of field work in Papua New Guinea, Anna Winkvist became known as the one who couldn’t open a coconut. But she soon learned to swing the machete.

Diet, health and reproduction have always been a theme in her work. She’s now ­working to develop a new method called metabolomics which will make it easier to map what we actually eat. old and has been let out from a propeller plane in the jungle in Papua New Guinea. She’s going to do her first field work about women and their newborns with the help of the local field worker, Daina.

“It was a shock for me to be there. But Daina knew how to take care of field work and she was my lifeline. It was a fantastic experience to go into an area that was so untouched! It was primitive in a positive way, beautiful and friendly and Papua New Guinea has a special place in my heart.”

Daina doesn’t speak English so Anna is forced to quickly learn New Guinea’s local language. A jeep has been shipped along the coast and they drive and wander around in the villages in the jungle and look for women who have recently given birth – they even get to observe childbirths. The village elder’s drums tell the next village that they are on their way. n n a W i n kv i st i s 2 3 y e a r s

T h e y w e i g h a n d m e a s u r e the children within 48 hours after the birth and talk with the mother about thoughts and practices in pregnancy and childbirth.

“I brought a lot of attention, everybody knew who I was. People were curious and they thought that it was fantastic that I could sit in a hut and talk with them. For some of them I was the first person with white skin that they had ever seen.”

She’s often asked how her mother and father let her go alone. The rumour has

spread that she can’t even open a fresh coconut – it’s vital to be able to cut off the top and drink the coconut water when you wander in the hot and humid jungle. But she learns quickly to manage a machete.

The area is so difficult to reach that the authorities know very little about newborn children. Anna Winkvist made two important findings that she reported back to the research institute in the city of Madang.

O n e wa s t h at, when women give birth squatting, no one takes the child and it risks being injured when it falls down on a banana leaf. The other is that, if the child doesn’t scream on its own, no one tries to revive it, as they think that the child is dead.

“The doctors at the institute were shocked that they didn’t understand that it’s possible to revive the child. When I think back to the difference that I made, it was that I saw these things that no one had described before.”

Anna Winkvist has lively, warm memories of her time as a young researcher in Papua New Guinea 27 years ago. Today she’a professor at the Department of Internal Medicine at Sahlgrenska Academy.

We meet at her workplace high up on Medicinareberget, with an impressive view to the west toward the Botanical Garden and Slottsskogen. She recently left her commission as head of the Department.

“I decided that already when I got the position; I think that managership should

rotate, partly because as head you lose the desire to think of new things after a while and you’re not so interested in changing things that you yourself have created. And then also it’s easy to create bonds; each head sees certain persons and not others.

But if there’s a rotation in managership, everyone gets a chance and new contact opportunities are created.”

A n n a W i n kv i st n ow has more time for her own research. The projects she runs have a public health perspective and deal with how diet affects our bodies and what causes diseases such as obesity and cardiovascular problems.

Why is it that we see contrasting information about diet? Anna Winkvist says that diet research includes many sources of error and that there are often exaggerations in the media. We’re also genetically different and the same diet isn’t suitable for everyone.

An example of how wrong things can be is the fear of fats. That made us eat too much sugar, which Anna Winkvist and many others see as one of the explanations for the obesity epidemic.

“In the food industry, fats were replaced with sugar. It was a way to compensate for fats so that foods would taste good, and sugar is cheap to produce. We went in the wrong direction there.”

She mentions soft drinks in particular as a culprit. Many of us can remember how we shared a 33 cl bottle when we were small – today both bottles and glasses have increased to gigantic sizes.

Now when we’ve started to realise the dangers of sugar, the LCHF diet has become popular. But the problem with diets with a great deal of saturated fat and little fruit and vegetables is that we don’t know how

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GUJOURNAL 2 | 2013

Anna Winkvist Currently: Professor of nutrition at the Department of Internal Medicine at Sahlgrenska­ Academy.

Occupation: Nutritionist.

Age: 50 years.

Grew up: In Lerum.

Lives: In Eklanda, Mölndal.

Family: Two sons, 11 and soon 6 years.

Background: Nutritionist at Stockholm University, doctorate in international nutrition at Cornell University, associate professor in public health and professor in epidemiology at Umeå University.

Current projects: Metabolomics, a fiveyear method development project with support from Vetenskapsrådet. Development of the diet database in the Västerbotten cohort.

LEVA, Lifestyle in Effective Weight Reduction during Breastfeeding and its follow-up study.

Interests: Other cultures and travelling, being sporty (jogs and has earlier played a lot of squash and badminton) and philosophy. “I once had ideas about having philosophy as my occupation. I read a great deal of philosophy during all my study years.”

Most recently read book: Rikitikitovi

by Rickard Wolff. “I’m impressed with how nicely and with what insight he describes his childhood and his parents.”

Most recently seen film: Judgement over Dead Man (Dom over död man) about Torgny Segerdtsedt.

Favourite food: Grilled.

Makes her happy: A good day with the children, being at the cottage.

Upsets her: Injustice, on all levels.

Pl ans for the future: Thinks about starting international work again when the children are bigger.

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Profile

»We don’t look for the needle in the haystack but for the haystack’s structure.« they affect the body in the long run. There are still no good longitudinal studies, but certain results indicate that blood fats can rise after a couple of years.

A big problem with research on diet and health is that it is so difficult to measure food intake. Who remembers exactly what and how much they ate the other day, if it’s going to be reported in an observation study? We forget or we try to make our answers sound better. Many studies show this.

B u t t h e r e a r e objective measurement methods that may be able to be used in the future. One of Anna Winkvist’s most exciting projects is metabolomics, an analytical method that has developed in the wake of the mapping of the human genome. It makes it possible to measure tens of thousands of components in blood or urine samples in a second and produce a kind of fingerprint of what has happened in a person’s metabolism during the past 24 hours.

The method is still in its early stages, and Anna Winkvist and her colleagues got a five-year grant from Vetenskapsrådet last year to build up a method platform. In terms of laboratory technology, it’s possible to analyse many samples in a short time, but it also requires strong statistical programs and analytical strategies to know what should be looked for.

“We don’t look for the needle in the haystack but for the haystack’s structure.

The vision is that metabolomics would be able to capture what people really eat, so that we can ensure relationships between diet and health. Then we’d be able to give good diet advice that can prevent disease.”

A n n a W i n kv i st b ec a m e interested in diet in high school. Her biology teacher, Rolf Eriksson, spoke about the body’s metabolism in a very inspiring way.

“I thought it was so fascinating how the body works, how we manage metabolism and take in everything we need.”

She decided to be a nutritionist and studied in Stockholm. She discovered there that there was a subject called international nutrition and things fell into place. She could combine everything that she thought was exciting: other cultures, language, travelling and working with nutrition at the same time.

Anna Winkvist has had good role models at home. Both her parents are teachers with Master’s degrees and her mother was one of the first women to study math, chemistry and physics in Lund.

“Following your interests and being curious about science come from them. There was great encouragement at home to study and to dare to do things.”

After her studies she applied to Cornell University in the U.S., which is one of the

world’s best schools in global nutrition, and she wrote her Master’s thesis with the material from Papua New Guinea. Then she decided to travel to Pakistan and do studies for her doctoral thesis.

She learned Urdu, packed and gave a farewell party. But the night before she was going to fly to Lahore the first shot was fired in the 1990 Kuwait War. “I remember sitting on my packed suitcase in the house at Cornell University and seeing the first attacks on CNN.” The attacks provoked strong anti-American reactions and she called the researchers in Lahore, who said, “You can’t come. You represent an American university and it isn’t safe for you here.” Instead she wrote her doctoral thesis using data material that her supervisor had collected in Guatemala about how women’s health is affected by giving birth to many children.

W h e n t h e wa r was over a few years later, Anna Winkvist did go to Pakistan, now as a postdoc. She held detailed interviews with women about how their life situation had been affected by having children or not and by the sex of the child.

“It was incredibly hard for women who remained childless or only gave birth to daughters. It went very badly for them and they had a completely different social situation than women who had at least one son. I almost can’t think of a more difficult destiny.”

After having finished her postdoc in the U.S. she returned to Sweden, to the Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine at Umeå University, which is one of the leading Swedish departments in international health research.

“It was an expansive, fun and creative workplace with heads that always found possibilities. Nothing was a problem.”

S h e wo r ke d w it h health, poverty and democracy questions in the third world, was responsible for a large research cooperation with Indonesia and participated in projects in Vietnam, Thailand and Nicaragua.

With time Anna Winkvist became homesick for her roots in the south. She moved back to Gothenburg in 2004 and got a post as professor of nutrition. In addition to metabolomics, she is involved in handling and processing nutritional data in the Västerbotten cohort, a population-based study that started in 1985 with a great deal of data and blood samples from 200 000 individuals.

“It’s Europe’s largest database with nutritional data, a fantastic resource where we follow up via register studies who has died of, for example, a heart attack or cancer.”

Another project that she is responsible for is LEVA, Lifestyle in Effective Weight Reduction during Breastfeeding, an intervention study whose purpose is to help women who were overweight or obese before their pregnancy to reduce their weight.

fantastic results. The women who have gotten diet treatment according to the Nordic nutrition recommendations have lost weight and kept their weight after one year.”

I ask whether we will be able to handle the obesity epidemic.

“Obesity is complex. There’s so much that has an influence. You have to work on many different levels, with the food industry, with building societies that reward being physically active and with diet and exercise counselling. It’s a huge challenge, it really is. But it seems like we’re on the way to turning the trend with children.”

Right now, Anna Winkvist is doing research at home, but when the children get bigger she’d very much like to work internationally again. A dream is to travel back to Papua New Guinea.

“I’ve often thought that it would be exciting to come back to the villages that I so often wandered through and see how it looks there today, how much contact with the world they’ve had since I was there.

A number of the girls that were born in my study were given the name Anna, so it would be fun to see these now 27-year-old women today!”

“ We ’ ve g ot t e n

Text: Helena Östlund Photography: Johan Wingborg

GUJOURNAL 2 | 2013

11

New Thesis

Ndengeleko

– one of the world’s threatened languages Black, white and red are the only colours that can be expressed in Ndengeleko, ­according to Eva-Marie Ström, who made the world’s first description of the language.

Maybe the last one, too.

Ba n t u i s o n e of the largest families of languages in Africa with about 600 languages and 300 million speakers, primarily in the central and southern parts of the continent. Many languages are small, however.

Ndengeleko, which is spoken in the Rufiji district, southeast Tanzania, is estimated to have only 72 000 speakers, but there is no certainty about this figure.

“In school the children have to speak Swahili in high school, English is used, in spite of the fact that few students are particularly good at it. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why the school system there works so poorly.”

Eva-Marie Ström has devoted four arduous years to describing a language that lacks a written system and that has never been studied before. To do that, she’s travelled innumerable times to Tanzania and interviewed people on site.

important for the language being spoken naturally. It’s the same thing for us; I come from Dalarna but it would feel strange to speak the dialect dalmål in Gothenburg. So much time has gone to sitting on rugs outside the informants’ houses, taping everything from individual words and phrases to conversations, stories and descriptions of everyday activities, like cooking or fishing. In the bargain I’ve gained insight into the culture that the language belongs to.”

According to Eva-Marie Ström, you can’t do interviews for more than two hours at a time. The rest of the day goes to listening to the tapes, making notes and analysing.

“Ndengeleko is different from Swahili at least as much as Swedish is different from German. But since everyone there speaks two languages, words in Swahili and sometimes whole phrases often find their way into speech. Happily I’ve found some informants who are very aware of the language and understand exactly what I’m trying to find. Sometimes for example I want to hear a word spoken very clearly, while later I want to tape ordinary everyday talk.” “ T h e e n v i ro n m e n t i s

Ndengeleko is an agglutinating language, which means that the words mean Tanzania different things by adding different Zambia parts. The word Malawi “aatekunnuma” conMozambique sists for example of five parts and means “he/she bit him/her”.

Verbs are conjugated more often according to aspect than tense; it’s in other words more important that an action is completed, ongoing or repeated than if it took place yesterday or will take place tomorrow.

Kenya

“ N d e n g e leko h a s only about twenty adjectives. Instead, verbs are used or “of” plus a noun. A fresh fish becomes “a fish of freshness” and if the fruit is bitter they say that it “bitters”. To the extent they use other words for colour than “white”, “black” and “red”, they’re either borrowed from English via Swahili, such as “bulu”, or they explain; for instance, “green” can be “colour of leaves”.

However, speakers of Ndengeleko can choose between 15 different place adverbs.

Where Swedish has two, “here” and “there”, you can distinguish in Ndengeleko between “over there”, “there inside” or “there but it doesn’t show”.

“Does a Ndengeleko speaker understand the world in a different way from, for example a a Swedish speaker? There are psycholinguists that say so, but my thesis is descriptive and doesn’t go into questions like that.”

Why did Eva-Marie Ström become interested in Ndengeleko?

It began with studies in African languages in Leiden, Holland. ”When I wanted to do research there were hundreds of undocumented languages in Africa to choose from. But that Ndengeleko is spoken in peaceful Tanzania and not for example in the Congo had a part in it. All the people I’ve met have been extremely kind and no one has questioned my right to be there.”

Unfortunately, Eva-Marie Ström thinks that Ndengeleko is one of many hundreds of languages that will soon no longer be spoken.

“You never hear children speak the

Eva- Marie Ström Currently: Presented her thesis The Ndengeleko Language of Tanzania.

Lives: In Majorna.

Family: Children Michelle, Simon and Louise and live-apart Johan.

Age: 45 years.

Interests: People and the world.

language. And in our globalised world, where there are Internet cafes even in the villages, the development goes quickly. But just for that reason, it’s extra important to document threatened languages. I hope to get the time to go through all the material I haven’t had time yet to archive. Then I’d like to continue to do research. I’d like to work cross-disciplinarily with anthropologists, historians or why not botanists who are interested in how the people there use different herbs. Every language contains a richness that is tied to a special way of living. Language is the actual foundation for all humanistic research.”

Text: Eva Lundgren photography: Johan Wingborg

12

Report

Wayne’s fight against injustice

Wayne Coetzee Age: 29 years.

Family: Father Stephan, mother Desireé, sister Angela and partner Tove Sigfridsson.

Interests: Reading, watching sports, cooking and drinking good red wine.

Lives: In a two-room apartment, rented second hand, in Linné.

Curious about: Will people move to Mars some day? What political system will we have there?

Loves: His partner.

Protects: Animals, particularly dogs (supports Stellenbosch Animal Welfare, which works for dogs that run loose and animals that are mistreated).

GUJOURNAL 2 | 2013

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Few countries were so involved against the apartheid regime in South Africa as Sweden. But since ANC took power, critical voices have become silent. Why? Wayne Coetzee intends to find out. ay n e Co e t zee is a doctoral student at the Department of Global Studies. His thesis will be about the relation between Sweden and South Africa in the time before and after 1994, when the apartheid regime fell.

It was love that brought him to Gothenburg. But he had been interested in Sweden earlier, this small country in north­ ern Europe that developed from being a martial power to a peaceful and high tech nation.

“Many Swedes fought for citizens’ rights in South Africa. But why have they been so unwilling to criticize the policies that the ANC has introduced? That’s something I’m trying to understand now.”

T h e roa d to a research career for this South African has been long and crooked.

Wayne Coetzee was born in 1984 in a poor working class family in Pietermaritzburg, in the Natal province.

“I grew up in a socially mixed environment, so it was natural for me to be together with people of different races.

My best friend Temba was Black. But the older I got, the more aware I became of segregation, although not only Blacks were discriminated against. In school, rich white people actually looked down more at poor whites than Blacks, since we were seen as failures in society.”

He’ll never forget his teacher’s words when he was seven years old: “Look carefully! Boys from families like that will never get anywhere.”

The family wasn’t politically active, but was against the establishment, the military and the police. In spite of being opponents of apartheid, they were worried the day the regime fell.

“We were afraid of civil war. Both the school and the shopping centre were threatened with bombs several times, but happily war never broke out.”

D u r i n g t h e 1 9 9 0 s , South Africa suffered great economic problems and the family often had to move to where the jobs were.

Wayne had a harder and harder time of keeping up in school.

“I knew early on that I didn’t want to work with my hands like my father and grandfather. But there was no academic tradition in my family; university studies weren’t anything we even talked about. But even though I wasn’t a brilliant student, I fled to the library as often as I could, where I could sit and read for hours. I fell in love with history and wanted to learn more about the world.”

Cricket and rugby became Wayne’s way to assert himself.

“Sports are like a religion in South Africa. It was also an interest that I could share with my father and my classmates.

And everyone is equal on the playing field, regardless of class or race.”

The family valued hard work and orderliness. He started to work when he was 14 years old, despite the fact that this wasn’t permitted. He saved all his money. When he finished school at the age of 18 he travelled to London to work.

A f t e r t h r ee y e a r s in England, he still didn’t know what he wanted to do. But when he had time he read everything he came across.

One day he received a surprising letter from his sister Angela, who had started university studies.

“She sent her literature list and thought that it should actually be me who is studying at university. Although I hardly knew what philosophy and sociology were, I got very interested.”

So when the family moved to Stellen­ bosch in 2005, he saw a possibility to apply to the university there.

He passed the entrance exams but the family had no possibility to pay the course fee. He had to take a number of extra jobs and a study loan.

“South Africa is a fantastic country in many ways but this made us think twice.

We moved to Sweden in May of 2011 to complete our studies at Stellenbosch here, by distance. We lived exotically in a little cottage outside of Alingsås. Walking around freely was fantastic.”

E ve n t h o u g h h e realises that there are also problems in Sweden he thinks that Scandinavia is a good example in terms of equality and social welfare.

“I love Sweden and like it more and more the better I get to know it. Sweden has allemansrätt (The right of Public Access) and the people are friendly, but I miss the South African humour.”

He’s realised that his research interest isn’t a coincidence.

“I’m writing my thesis in part to understand my own background but I hope that other people will also be interested.

Sweden and South Africa have an interesting history and strong ties. Swedes were very active opponents of apartheid but have a harder time seeing the current problems with ANC. It seems to be a blind spot.”

Wayne points out that South Africa has developed in both positive and negative ways.

“The oppressive regime is gone and

»ANC is corrupt and it’s never good for democracy that a party leads the country for such a long time..« “I ran between jobs and lectures but didn’t fail even one exam. It made me very good at planning my time.”

Although he was accepted to a dream program, the meeting with the students was a shock.

“Many of my fellow students were millionaires and drove around in Mercedes while I didn’t even have a bicycle. I experienced that I was back in the class discriminating school structure that I always hated.”

H i s st u d i e s w e n t better than expected and Wayne received three academic awards and could pay for parts of his study loan. One year later he began an international Master’s program at Stellenbosch University. At the university he met Tove from Gothenburg, and they later moved in together.

One night they were victims of a brutal robbery outside of their home and they were lucky to get away.

South Africa can now boast with international icons like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. But South Africa is also a country that’s at war with itself. The ANC is corrupt and it’s never good for democracy for a party to lead the country for such a long time. If the international community had the power to get rid of apartheid it should also be able to put pressure on ANC much more than they do.”

It worries him that South Africa is so full of unsolved conflicts.

“When I lived there, I got used to the violence but you should actually never do that. Violence in all forms is something I’ve always hated. I don’t take anything for granted now; because of my background I appreciate and am grateful for every day.”

Text: Oskar Brandt Photography: Johan Wingborg

14 New series:

World class senior researchers

A combative professor

”I actually wanted to be an artist. Instead I become a controversial professor,” says Lars Hamberger.

But he can’t be completely dissatisfied. He’s the person behind Scandinavia’s first test tube baby, who turned 30 a while ago. He’s also a stem cell researcher and author of a really big world success: the book A Child is Born. cold day in Febru­ ary Lars Hamberger receives us in his renovated home from 1881, once for the working class, very close to Råda manor. Paintings of his hand hang on the walls.

He’s full of enthusiasm after a symposium in Lund that treated the enormous possibilities that modern technology gives for reproduction. So called pre-implantotory genetic diagnostics means for example that an embryo with serious genetic defects is screened and removed before a test tube fertilization. n a s pa r k li n g

“But the method could also be used for selecting children with attractive features,” says Lars Hamberger. “The ethical responsibility is enormous; just because you can do something, there’s no certainty that you should do it. And the trust in genetics is probably too large today; the environment plays an important role in what features a child develops.”

L a r s H a m b e rg e r i s best known as the researcher behind the first test tube baby in Scandinavia, a girl that turned 30 in September. Since then about five million

people have been born via test tube fertilization, of which almost 50 000 in Sweden.

But he’s also the author of one of the world’s greatest book successes: A Child is Born. It all started at the end of the 1970s with a West German spy camera that could amplify light a thousand times after a picture was taken, and a laboratory that held a constant temperature of 37 degrees. work of work, where Lennart Nilsson visited the laboratory a couple of times a week, resulted in a blackand-white film that ran for two minutes. It may not sound so exciting, but when pioneers Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe organised the world’s first IVF congress in the fall of 1981 we were there and could show the very beginning of life as no one had seen it before.”

The third edition of A Child is Born beca-

“Ove r a y e a r ’ s

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GUJOURNAL 2 | 2013

»I look forward to patients with spinal injuries, maybe as soon as in five years, being able to learn to walk again with the help of stem cells.« Another new edition came out in 2009.

All in all, 20 million copies of A Child is Born have been sold the world over.

When US president George W Bush forbid research on other than already developed stem cells in 2001, Lars Hamberger was once again in the headlines. His laboratory had namely 19 of 60 permitted stem cell lines.

“How can a little lab at a little university in a little land do such prominent research?

That was a question that kept American media busy when we were in Washington to discuss cooperation with the minister of health, Tommy Thompson.”

E ve n t h o u g h the development hasn’t gone as rapidly as many people perhaps thought then, Lars Hamberger is convinced that stem cells have a future.

“The first human that will be 200 years is probably already born. And I look forward to patients with spinal injuries, maybe as soon as in five years, being able to learn to walk again with the help of stem cells.”

Lars Hamberg isn’t just a researcher, however. He’s also been involved in establishing several companies, among them Vitrolife, Cellartis and, four years ago, DocOnNet. These companies now have over 300 employees. In 1984 he also opened Scandinavia’s first private clinic for test tube fertilization at Sofiahemmet in Stockholm.

He did the same thing two years later at Carlanderska here in Gothenburg.

And he showed his engagement for patients by protesting against the merger of women’s health care in Gothenburg in 1999.

“First the maternity wards were moved from Sahlgrenska to Mölndal and Östra and the year after they closed down the children’s clinic at Mölndal. That was not good for patients.”

me an immediate success all over the world.

Lennart Nilsson had written the earlier editions with a group of colleagues. But the book had now been fundamentally revised and Lars Hamberger was responsible for the text. It took four years for the fourth edition to be ready, since Lennart Nilsson started first to make digital photos and then got tired of it and re-did all the work with an analog camera instead.

“I suggested to the well known Ebbe Carlsson, who was the publisher, that the book should be given another title since parts of it were new. He answered that Coca-Cola had changed the ingredients ten times but was still called Coca-Cola. So the name was kept, probably a wise decision.”

T h e b o o k wa s published in 2003. It sold 11 million copies and was translated into 18 languages.

He ’ s b ee n u p s e t that follow-up visits after legal abortions have been taken away. And a thesis that has just been published showing that almost 50 per cent of women have vaginal complications after giving birth makes him see red.

“Aftercare is much too short. And it’s shameful that the relationship between the number of caesarean sections and area of residence is so strong: in for example the rich area of Danderyd, they are almost twice as common as in the poor area of Botkyrka.”

But Lars Hamberger’s strong opinions have also led to problems. For more than a decade, he’s been in a feud with the University of Gothenburg over the interpretation of two letters: tv. Does it mean that he requested a leave of absence in 2000 up to the time of his retirement, as the University claims? Or does it have to do with his requesting leave of absence until further notice (“tills vidare” – tv) as Lars Hamberger thinks?

Lars Hamberger Currently: Is the man behind the first test tube baby in Scandinavia, who turned 30 last September.

Career: Professor emeritus, gyncologist, fertility researcher, businessman.

Pioneer in Swedish test tube fertilization. Internationally known as a stem cell researcher. Wrote the text for the book A Child is Born with photographs by Lennart Nilsson, that has sold 20 million copies all over the world.

Age: 74 years.

Lives: Råda säteri in Mölnlycke, summer cottage on the west coast.

Family: Wife, three sons and five grandchildren.

“I’ve had a proxy professorship since 1983, a form of employment with a salary guarantee. I was thus appointed by the Government and couldn’t be dismissed for any other reason than committing a crime that gives a minimum of two years in prison. Why would I negotiate to get rid of that position and thus my salary?”

In spite of the fact that the University refused to pay his salary, he went to work every day, supervised four doctoral students and wrote about 40 scientific articles up to 2006. And he continues to fight even after the labour court determined that Hamberger does not have the right to return to his work.

You’re so successful in so many other ways – why can’t you just ignore this adversity?

“It doesn’t have primarily to do with the money. But I can’t give up when I feel that I’m right. In the unlikely event that I get the 3.2 million crowns that the University owes me, I’ll start a fund for whistleblowers that supports other people who dare to be difficult.”

He points out toward the stalls where he has his studio and then to the inn that his son Pär ran up to a few years ago.

“My path in life was predetermined.

Since my father was a professor and physician, his three sons should also be that.

My sister got a little more freedom and studied to become a hospital psychologist.

I’ve never forced my boys to be anything and none has chosen to be a doctor. But when I was young I was actually accepted into Valand, together with my classmate Jan Håfström. And I can’t stop myself from wondering what would have happened if I’d become a painter instead of a fairly controversial professor and doctor.”

Text: Eva Lundgren & Allan Eriksson photography: Johan Wingborg