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More than 22 million people live at altitudes of 12,800 feet and higher. How these people have adapted over time to this thin-air environment -- which sometimes makes sea-level dwellers extremely sick -- has fascinated anthropologist Cynthia Beall for the past three decades.
She has received this year's Frank and Dorothy Humel Hovorka Prize for her ground-breaking research into human adaptation, for which she has studied Tibetans living in the Himalayas, Bolivians in the Andean Mountains, and Ethiopians on the East African Plateau.
The Hovorka Prize recognizes a CWRU faculty member whose exceptional achievements in teaching, research, and scholarly service have benefited local, national, and global communities.
Beall received the honor May 21 during the Commencement Convocation. She is the seventh recipient of the prize, which is accompanied by a $5,000 award.
The Sarah Idell Pyle Professor of Anthropology began her studies of high-altitude populations while in graduate school at the Pennsylvania State University, from which she earned her M.A. in 1972 and her Ph.D. in 1976 in anthropology. She earned her B.A. in biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970.
"Some people may ask why I am still studying this topic," says Beall, whose dissertation research was on high-altitude adaptation -- but she has found that each ethnic group has adapted differently to its high-altitude environment, making this a complex and interesting research question to pursue.
Technology also has advanced, making it easier to cart into the field the necessary laboratory equipment, such as a pulse oximeter, which measures the blood's oxygen level by shining a light through the finger. The light is absorbed differently with the varying levels of oxygen carried by the hemoglobin.
Beall began her studies with the Andean people, who are known for their barrel chests and lung capacity that provide the oxygen needed to survive. While this became the standard for altitude adaptation, Beall overturned that idea while studying Tibetans in Nepal in the 1970s and 1980s. She found that the Tibetans had developed a genetic allele for higher oxygen saturation of hemoglobin.
A 1996 trip to Ethiopia further intrigued the researcher, as she found the oxygen-saturation levels of these plateau dwellers was almost the same as those dwelling at sea level, with no signs of a genetic variation or physical characteristics seen in the Andean and Tibetan populations.
Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Committee on Research and Exploration, and the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China.
Beall has studied families and has begun to explore from where the Tibetan people derived this genetic adaptation. She has studied more than 4,000 people in 14 rural villages and nomad camps, while living in a tent or mud hut and cooking over dung fires while in the field. She is in the process of analyzing the data from her eighth trip to Tibet in 1998.
This summer, she will return to Bolivia as well as Tibet to continue her work.
She is also working with Melvyn Goldstein, CWRU's Harkness Professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology, gathering information about the cultural changes that have come about since the Chinese government disbanded Tibetan communes and assigned families specific land plots. With Luce Foundation support, they will examine such issues as how this has impacted the family, family planning, education, and distribution of the land between family members.
Beall also undertook a pilot study to look at sea-level dwellers to see the variations for adapting at high altitudes. She measured the oxygen level in people who trekked to 12,000 feet for an open house at one of the four White Mountain Research Stations which the University of California operates in Bishop.
In addition to the Hovorka Prize, Beall became a member of the National Academy of Science in 1996. She was also named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1997.
CWRU trustee Dorothy Hovorka established the Hovorka Prize in 1994. Past winners were Frederick Robbins (1994), Ernest Yeager (1995), Marie Haug (1996), David Van Tassel (1997), Eric Baer (1998), and Arthur Steinberg (1999).
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