Associate Professor of Anthropology Stephen Bailey wrapped up this semester's Taste of Tufts, the Experimental College's weekly lecture series, on Friday. His discussion focused on the physical adaptations of human beings to extreme environments in which they live, which is also the topic of a class he will be teaching next spring called Extreme Environments: Human Adaptability to Novel Habitats. Specifically, his research has focused on human beings' ability to adjust to living in high altitudes.
I am a believer in serendipity," Bailey said at the start of his discussion.
This belief became increasingly evident as he revealed how he double majored in biology and anthropology with the full intent of becoming a newspaper reporter. He worked as a reporter for a year until a fateful lunch with the biological anthropologist who convinced him to go to graduate school and change the course of his career. He eventually earned his Master's degree in clinical hematology, or the study of blood, blood-forming tissues and related medical disorders.
Bailey said he served as a research assistant for his advisor who studied human growth. He was offered a research opportunity in Bolivia to study high altitude populations, a topic that would later become the center of his work. The study involved comparing lowland and highland indigenous populations by looking at differences of basic genotypes of populations at 12,000 feet to those at 1,200 feet.
"It was like 1940 again," Bailey said. "In fact, the equipment we used had been donated by the U.S government, and it was apparently dated to the '30s. One thing I learned in fieldwork is to not expect for everything to go according to plan. Once we had a shipment held up in customs long enough for it to go spoilt."
After this experience in Bolivia, Bailey worked in Jamaica and Costa Rica to study the risk of diseases. This experience influenced his dissertation.
"Then in 1994, actually right at Tufts, I got a call from a fellow at Indiana State University to come and study kids in high altitudes," he said.
The two collaborated and the next year joined a team to the province of Abba in Tibet, Western Sichuan. Their study took place in a city called Barkam, where they studied elementary school children and how they responded to high altitudes.
"This study also compared children of different [ethnic groups] under the same kind of environmental stresses," Bailey said.
According to Bailey, the ethnic groups studied included the Tibetan, the Hui and the Han.
Bailey explained how the Chinese government was concerned about the Han children experiencing adverse effects at high altitudes.
"In fact, if you were a Han family at high altitude, you [would] send your kids to relatives at sea level for their first few years of life," he said.
Bailey's most recent work was on a research study of children in Northwestern Sichuan, examining a whole school of five different ethnic groups, each with different genetic history and lifestyle.
Bailey then commented on the logistical difficulties of planning research abroad.
"It's very complicated to work in China," he said. "There is lots of paperwork, permission granting, and it takes years to plan even one trip. You think we have bureaucracy in the U.S.
