Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Neanderthals Among Us,” on the genetic legacy of our ancestors’ pairings with Homo neanderthalensis and what such genes tell us about prehistoric life, with Alexander Platt, evolutionary geneticist and senior research scientist at University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/neanderthals-among-us .]

“Extinction” is a slippery word. Neanderthals went extinct tens of thousands of years ago, yet in a sense they’re more genetically present on Earth than ever given all of the markers of Neanderthal ancestry found mixed in the genes of the eight billion Homo sapiens around today. Moreover, Neanderthals aren't the only type of humans whose extinctions weren’t the end of the line.

Come to Baltimore’s Section 771 bar to learn about fascinating research on the relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans being done by the University of Pennsylvania’s Tishkoff Lab. That lab, broadly devoted to studying genetic variation in global populations, generated worldwide headlines in February with a study finding that most of our Neanderthal ancestry appears to come from the pairing of male Neanderthals with Homo sapiens females.

Dr. Alexander Platt, lead co-author of the recent study, will talk about what we know about human-Neanderthal interactions and the major questions that have yet to be answered.

You’ll learn how fossil evidence helps us know where and when individuals from various early human groups lived, while anatomical similarities between them let us speculate about their respective migration histories and their relationships. Genetic evidence, from both modern humans and samples of ancient DNA, offers us fresh insights into the connections between some of them.

Dr. Platt will talk about how modern humans and Neanderthals shared a common ancestor over 500,000 years ago. They then spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving on separate continents, only to encounter each other repeatedly over the last 250,000 years, during which their interactions and interbreeding left each carrying a complex set of genetic relics of the other.

Exactly how and why such pairings took place is one of the key mysteries that Dr. Platt and his colleagues are working to solve. To get a better sense of how sex differences shaped those interactions, the researchers contrast genetic diversity in non-sex chromosomes with genetic diversity in the X chromosome, more reflective of the history of women than men.
You’ll emerge from the talk with a much better understanding of how breakthroughs in genetics are contributing to our understanding of human evolution, as well as a recognition that our own genetic makeup tells us about our roots in prehistory. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk starts at 6:30.)

Image: A reconstruction of a Neanderthal man on display at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettman, Germany (Neanderthal Museum / Wikimedia Commons).

Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore presents: “NASA’s New Quest to See the Unseen,” a look at the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and its mission to expand our understanding of dark matter, dark energy, and the Milky Way, with Bear Witherspoon, payload systems engineer for the Roman telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/metro-baltimore-nasa-quest .]

NASA’s Roman Space Telescope is set to be launched into space in late summer or early fall, and what it sees out there is likely to leave us spellbound.

Its to-do list includes performing a demographic census of planetary systems in the Milky Way, testing out a new camera that directly images exoplanets to help us find habitable worlds, and shedding light on the universe's most mysterious features—dark energy and dark matter.

Come get an insider’s perspective on that mission from Bear Witherspoon, who has overseen the assembly of the telescope and will be part of its launch team.

He’ll walk you through the design of the telescope and how it was built and tested. You’ll learn how it has a field of view 200 times that of the Hubble telescope as well as infrared vision that will help astronomers peer far across space and deep into the universe’s dustiest regions. It was subjected to rigorous vibration and sound tests to ensure it could survive launch as well as extreme cold in a vacuum to ensure it can function in space.

We’ll look at how the Roman space telescope will work with those that preceded it into the space, the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, by taking a much broader view and pinpointing worthy subjects of investigation for the more-focused instruments.

You’ll learn how the Roman telescope will help us investigate the roughly 95 percent of energy and matter called “dark” because we’ve been unable to observe it and how it works. Witherspoon will walk you through how it’s surmised that dark energy and matter provide the infrastructure for visible matter in the universe, and how the Roman telescope will try to identify the presence and effects of dark matter by observing visible matter on an incredibly large scale.

The talk promises to leave you in a state of wonder and excited about all we’ll be learning out there. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A NASA illustration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Fairy Tales and the Body,” an examination of the forms characters take in the Grimms’ stories and what they tell us about real life in those times, with Linda Lee, lecturer in folklore and fairy tales at the University of Pennsylvania.

[Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-fairy-body ]

The bodies of fairy-tale characters are alternately magical and monstrous. Depending on the story, they might be transformed through curses or disenchantments, or they might endure incredible hardships and complete impossible tasks. They can be maimed by violent acts, they can be healed or harmed by medicinal potions, and they can manifest both punishments and rewards.

Consider the depictions of bodies in the Grimms tales—as well as what they convey about nineteenth-century understandings of medicine and how bodies work—with Linda Lee, a folklorist who has earned a loyal following among Profs and Pints fans by giving excellent talks in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

We’ll look at how beauty standards got conveyed through fairy tales and the sacrifices their characters were willing to make to achieve those standards. We’ll consider how those beauty standards marginalized bodies rendered grotesque by deformity or the effects of physical labor.

Lee will explore how fairy tales conveyed anxieties about pregnancy and childbirth, with wishes for children sometimes going unexpectedly wrong. She’ll some fairy tales that conveyed uncertainty about the boundary between life and death and others that blurred the difference between the bodies of animals and humans.

Overall, we’ll consider how fairy tales’ treatment of bodies contribute to our understanding of what it means to be human. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: From a 1913 Warwick Goble illustration of “Beauty and the Beast" (public domain).

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Medical Ethics and ‘The Pitt,’” an interactive discussion of how physicians navigate tough questions, with Sean Aas, associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, research scholar at its Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and author of the innovative textbook Bioethics: 50 Puzzles, Problems, and Thought Experiments.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-the-pitt ]

Nothing has higher ethical stakes than the field of medicine, where decisions can be life-or-death. And nowhere are the stakes of medicine more evident than in the emergency department, where split-second decisions can forever alter the course of the lives of patients and, sometimes, practitioners.

Life-or-death decisions drive the drama of the blockbuster HBO Max television series The Pitt, which has explored a host of ethical issues associated with medical triage, surrogate decision-making, the distribution of scarce resources, the role of medicine in society, and the intersection of clinical care and social justice.

Such decisions have long been the focus of Sean Aas, a philosopher who teaches medical ethics at all levels—to undergraduate and graduate students as well as medical professionals—and advised researchers about the ethics of ongoing clinical trials in his previous capacity as a fellow at the National Institutes of Health. He recently began using The Pitt in teaching bioethics at Georgetown.

Learn the basics of medical ethics—and have a blast being involved in interactive discussions of how to apply them—when Dr. Aas comes to Baltimore’s Guilford Hall to give a talk prescribed for fans of The Pitt and anyone who simply loves to think.

He’ll start by reviewing basic concepts in medical ethics. Then he’ll give his audience a chance to apply such concepts by reviewing and discussing some of the most dramatic dilemmas presented in The Pitt in its first two seasons.

Audience members will have a chance to judge for themselves how well characters handled decisions, and then they’ll take part in both small-group and large-group discussions of whether and how these judgments can be justified. They’ll learn how to think more philosophically about ethical dilemmas in medicine and in everyday life. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image by Canva.