When Marie Antoinette allegedly said "let them eat cake" as a response to peasants rioting for bread, newly appointed PIK professor Adrian Raine thinks the French queen might have been on to something.
Part of the interdisciplinary Penn Integrates Knowledge program, Raine and fellow PIK professor Philippe Bourgois focus their research on violence prevention - work that could be contributed to long-term efforts to reduce crime.
Bourgois, who will be a professor of both Anthropology and Medicine, focuses on the social conditions that lead to violence.
Raine, who will hold appointments in both the Criminology and Psychiatry departments, studies the biological basis of criminal behavior.
And if his research is correct, it seems that perhaps Antoinette should have instead said "let them eat fish" if she really wanted to quell the riots.
Raine studies the theory that nutrition can influence criminal behavior, and, at Penn, he plans to "explore the possibility that fish oil supplements may help reduce aggressive, violent behavior."
He explained that brain images have shown that some criminals have low levels of the omega-3 fatty acid prevalent in fish oil, and that researchers in England have found that providing fish oil supplements to prisoners for five months significantly reduced crime and violence in the prison.
Raine added that statistics show that increased fish consumption in a country leads to lower murder rates.
"There may be some substance to the notion that fish may be beneficial in reducing out-of-control, emotional behavior," he said.
And while Raine admits that his theory "sounds like a fad," he knows from experience that initially scorned ideas can be accepted later.
After earning his Ph.D. studying biological factors in antisocial children, Raine spent four years as a psychologist at top-security prisons in England.
Over those four years, he applied for, and was rejected from, 67 academic positions because his ideas that biology could shape criminal behavior "didn't make sense to anyone at that time."
"People were saying, 'It's all due to society,'" he said.
But 30 years later, spurred by a "genetic revolution," Raine's ideas are no longer regarded as unsound.
"We have a greater understanding and acknowledgement of how genes, in part, shape our behavior," he said. "The past decade has revolutionized our understanding of brain-behavior relationships."
For Bourgois, the relatively recent emphasis on studying violence in a number of fields, including his own, makes it natural that Penn has sought to attract scholars on the subject.
"It's only been in the past half-dozen years that [violence has] been a theoretically important question in anthropology," he said. "It's such an urgent problem facing the nation and finally being taken seriously from a theoretical, academic perspective."
Bourgois' recent work has focused on drugs, violence, poverty and ethnic tensions - all topics that make Philadelphia an ideal place to study, he said.
"It's a pretty incredible social laboratory for looking at these issues in a dynamic city with lots of problems, lots of violence, lots of segregation and lots of public policy challenges," Bourgois said.
Lawrence Sherman, director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, said the two scholars will not directly be engaged in the work of the Penn Police, but will offer complementary research to enhance the study of crime at Penn.
"They're going to provide so much more that we don't have at present in thinking about crime, as it develops in the brain and as it develops in culture," he said.
