A wired baby in a neonatal intensive care unit.
I'll never forget the experience of having a child in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
Now more than ever, we're working to remove the barriers between new parents and their infants.
It was another layer of uncertainty that filtered into my experience of being a first-time parent. There was so much I didn't know, and the wires attached to my son's small body for the first week of his life were a reminder of that.
I wanted to be the best mother possible. I deeply desired to bring my son home to start our lives. More than anything, I longed for a wireless baby whom I could hold and love freely without limitations.
The wires suggested my baby was fragile and it left me feeling severely unprepared, anxious, and depressed.
In recent years, research has documented the ways that NICU experiences take a toll on parents' mental health. But thankfully, medical technology is rapidly being developed to help reduce the emotional fallout of the NICU. Now more than ever, we're working to remove the barriers between new parents and their infants. The latest example is the first ever wireless monitoring system that was recently developed by a team at Northwestern University.
After listening to the needs of parents and medical staff, Debra Weese-Mayer, M.D., a professor of pediatric autonomic medicine at Feinberg School of Medicine, along with a team of materials scientists, engineers, dermatologists and pediatricians, set out to develop this potentially life-changing technology. Weese-Mayer believes wireless monitoring will have a significant impact for people on all sides of the NICU experience.
"With elimination of the cumbersome wires," she says, "the parents will find their infant more approachable/less intimidating and have improved access to their long-awaited but delivered-too-early infant, allowing them to begin skin-to-skin contact and holding with reduced concern for dislodging wires."
So how does the new system work?
Very thin "skin like" patches made of silicon rubber are placed on the surface of the skin to monitor vitals like heart rate, respiration rate, and body temperature. One patch is placed on the chest or back and the other is placed on the foot.
These patches are safer on the skin than previously used adhesives, reducing the cuts and infections associated with past methods. Finally, an antenna continuously delivers power, often from under the mattress.
The data collected from the patches stream from the body to a tablet or computer.
New wireless sensor technology is being studied to replace wired monitoring in NICUs in the coming years.
(Northwestern University)
Weese-Mayer hopes that wireless systems will be standard soon, but first they must undergo more thorough testing. "I would hope that in the next five years, wireless monitoring will be the standard in NICUs, but there are many essential validation steps before this technology will be embraced nationally," she says.
Until the new systems are ready, parents will be left struggling with the obstacles that wired monitoring presents.
Physical intimacy, for example, appears to have pain-reducing qualities -- something that is particularly important for babies who are battling serious illness. But wires make those cuddles more challenging.
There's also been minimal discussion about how wired monitoring can be particularly limiting for parents with disabilities and mobility aids, or even C-sections.
"When he was first born and I was recovering from my c-section, I couldn't deal with keeping the wires untangled while trying to sit down without hurting myself," says Rhiannon Giles, a writer from North Carolina, who delivered her son at just over 31 weeks after suffering from severe preeclampsia.
"The wires were awful," she remembers. "They fell off constantly when I shifted positions or he kicked a leg, which meant the monitors would alarm. It felt like an intrusion into the quiet little world I was trying to mentally create for us."
Over the last few years, researchers have begun to dive deeper into the literal and metaphorical challenges of wired monitoring.
For many parents, the wires prompt anxiety that worsens an already tense and vulnerable time.
I'll never forget the first time I got to hold my son without wires. It was the first time that motherhood felt manageable.
"Seeing my five-pound-babies covered in wires from head to toe rendered me completely overwhelmed," recalls Caila Smith, a mom of five from Indiana, whose NICU experience began when her twins were born pre-term. "The nurses seemed to handle them perfectly, but I was scared to touch them while they appeared so medically frail."
During the nine days it took for both twins to come home, the limited access she had to her babies started to impact her mental health. "If we would've had wireless sensors and monitors, it would've given us a much greater sense of freedom and confidence when snuggling our newborns," Smith says.
Besides enabling more natural interactions, wireless monitoring would make basic caregiving tasks much easier, like putting on a onesie.
"One thing I noticed is that many preemie outfits are made with zippers," points out Giles, "which just don't work well when your baby has wires coming off of them, head to toe."
Wired systems can pose issues for medical staff as well as parents.
"The main concern regarding wired systems is that they restrict access to the baby and often get tangled with other equipment, like IV lines," says Lamia Soghier, Medical Director of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Children's National in Washington, D.C , who was also a NICU parent herself. "The nurses have to untangle the wires, which takes time, before handing the baby to the family."
I'll never forget the first time I got to hold my son without wires. It was the first time that motherhood felt manageable, and I couldn't stop myself from crying. Suddenly, anything felt possible and all the limitations from that first week of life seemed to fade away. The rise of wired-free monitoring will make some of the stressors that accompany NICU stays a thing of the past.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault preserves more than one million of the world's seeds deep inside Platäfjellet Mountain.
"Before, we trusted the permafrost. We do not trust the permafrost anymore."
Art installations on the building's rooftop and front façade glimmer like diamonds in the polar night, but it is what lies buried deep inside the frozen rock, 475 feet from the building's entrance, that is most precious. Here, in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, are backup copies of more than a million of the world's agricultural seeds.
Inside the vault, seed boxes from many gene banks and many countries. "The seeds don't know national boundaries," says Kent Nnadozie, the UN's Secretary of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
(Photo credit: Svalbard Global Seed Vault/Riccardo Gangale)
The Svalbard vault -- which has been called the Doomsday Vault, or a Noah's Ark for seeds -- preserves the genetic materials of more than 6000 crop species and their wild relatives, including many of the varieties within those species. Svalbard's collection represents all the traits that will enable the plants that feed the world to adapt – with the help of farmers and plant breeders – to rapidly changing climactic conditions, including rising temperatures, more intense drought, and increasing soil salinity. "We save these seeds because we want to ensure food security for future generations," says Grethe Helene Evjen, Senior Advisor at the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food .
A recent study in the journal Nature predicted that global warming could cause catastrophic losses of biodiversity in regions across the globe throughout this century. Yet global warming also threatens the permafrost that surrounds the seed vault, the very thing that was once considered a failsafe means of keeping these seeds frozen and safeguarding the diversity of our crops. In fact, record temperatures in Svalbard a few years ago – and a significant breach of water into the access tunnel to the vault -- prompted the Norwegian government to invest $20 million euros on improvements at the facility to further secure the genetic resources locked inside. The hope: that technology can work in concert with nature's freezer to keep the world's seeds viable.
"Before, we trusted the permafrost," says Hege Njaa Aschim, a spokesperson for Statsbygg, the government agency that recently completed the upgrades at the seed vault. "We do not trust the permafrost anymore."
The Apex of the Global Conservation System
More than 1700 genebanks around the globe preserve the diverse seed varieties from their regions. They range from small community seed banks in developing countries, where small farmers save and trade their seeds with growers in nearby villages, to specialized university collections, to national and international genetic resource repositories. But many of these facilities are vulnerable to war, natural disasters, or even lack of funding.
"If anything should happen to the resources in a regular genebank, Svalbard is the backup – it's essentially the apex of the global conservation system," says Kent Nnadozie, Secretary of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture at the United Nations, who likens the Global Vault to the Central Reserve Bank. "You have regular banks that do active trading, but the Central Bank is the final reserve where the banks store their gold deposits."
Similarly, farmers deposit their seeds in regional genebanks, and also look to these banks for new varieties to help their crops adapt to, say, increasing temperatures, or resist intrusive pests. Regional banks, in turn, store duplicates from their collections at Svalbard. These seeds remain the sovereign property of the country or institution depositing them; only they can "make a withdrawal."
The Global Vault has already proven invaluable: The International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), formerly located outside of Aleppo, Syria, held more than 140,000 seed samples, including plants that were extinct in their natural habitats, before the Syrian Crisis in 2012. Fortunately, they had managed to back up most of their seed samples at Svalbard before they were forced to relocate to Lebanon and Morocco. In 2017, ICARDA became the first – and only – organization to withdraw their stored seeds. They have now regenerated almost all of the samples at their new locations and recently redeposited new seeds for safekeeping at Svalbard.
Rapid Global Warming Threatens Permafrost
The Global Vault, a joint venture between the Norwegian government, the Crop Trust and the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre (NordGen) that started operating in 2008, was sited in Svalbard in part because of its remote yet accessible location: Svalbard is the northernmost inhabited spot on Earth with an airport. But experts also thought it a failsafe choice for long-term seed storage because its permafrost would offer natural freezing – even if cooling systems were to fail. No one imagined that the permafrost could fail.
"We've had record temperatures in the region recently, and there are a lot of signs that global warming is happening faster at the extreme latitudes," says Geoff Hawtin, a world-renowned authority in plant conservation, who is the founding director of -- and now advisor to -- the Crop Trust. "Svalbard is still arguably one of the safest places for the seeds from a temperature point of view, but it's actually not going to be as cold as we thought 20 years ago."
A recent report by the Norwegian Centre for Climate Services predicted that Svalbard could become 50 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by the year 2100. And data from the Norwegian government's environmental monitoring system in Svalbard shows that the permafrost is already thawing: The "active layer," that is, the layer of surface soil that seasonally thaws, has become 25-30 cm thicker since 1998.
Among the 35 depositors were several bringing their seeds to Svalbard for the first time, including the Cherokee Nation, which deposited nine heirloom seed varieties that predate European colonization.
Though the permafrost surrounding the seed vault chambers, which are situated well below the active layer, is still intact, the permafrost around the access tunnel never re-established as expected after construction of the Global Vault twelve years ago. As a result, when Svalbard saw record high temperatures and unprecedented rainfall in 2016, about 164 feet of rainwater and snowmelt leaked into the tunnel, turning it into a skating rink and spurring authorities to take what they called a "better safe than sorry approach." They invested in major upgrades to the facility. "The seeds in the vault were never threatened," says Aschim, "but technology has become more important at Svalbard."
Technology Gives Nature a Boost
For now, the permafrost deep inside the mountain still keeps the temperature in the vault down to about -25°F. The cooling systems then give nature a mechanical boost to keep the seed vault chilled even further, to about -64°F, the optimal temperature for conserving seeds. In addition to upgrading to a more effective and sustainable cooling system that runs on CO2, the Norwegian government added backup generators, removed heat-generating electrical equipment from inside the facility to an outside building, installed a thick, watertight door to the vault, and replaced the corrugated steel access tunnel with a cement tunnel that uses the same waterproofing technology as the North Sea oil platforms.
To re-establish the permafrost around the tunnel, they layered cooling pipes with frozen soil around the concrete tunnel, covered the frozen soil with a cooling mat, and topped the cooling mat with the original permafrost soil. They also added drainage ditches on the mountainside to divert meltwater away from the tunnel as the climate gets warmer and wetter.
New Deposits to the Global Vault
The day before COVID-19 arrived in Norway, on February 25th, Prime Minister Erna Solberg hosted the biggest seed-depositing event in the vault's history in honor of the new and improved vault. As snow fell on Svalbard, depositors from almost every continent traveled the windy road from Longyearbyen up Platåfjellet Mountain and braved frigid -8°F weather to celebrate the massive technical upgrades to the facility – and to hand over their seeds.
Among the 35 depositors were several bringing their seeds to Svalbard for the first time, including the Cherokee Nation, which deposited nine heirloom seed varieties that predate European colonization, and Israel's University of Haifa, whose deposit included multiple genotypes of wild emmer wheat, an ancient relative of the modern domesticated crop. The storage boxes carried ceremoniously over the threshold that day contained more than 65,000 new seed samples, bringing the total to more than a million, and almost filling the first of three seed chambers in the vault. (The Global Vault can store up to 4.5 million seed samples.)
"Svalbard's samples contain all the possibilities, all the options for the future of our agricultural crops – it's how crops are going to adapt," says Cary Fowler, former executive director of the Crop Trust, who was instrumental in establishing the Global Vault. "If our crops don't adapt to climate change, then neither will we." Dr. Fowler says he is confident that with the recent improvements in the vault, the seeds are going to remain viable for a very long time.
"It's sometimes tempting to get distracted by the romanticism of a seed vault inside a mountain near the North Pole – it's a little bit James Bondish," muses Dr. Fowler. "But the reality is we've essentially put an end to the extinction of more than a million samples of biodiversity forever."