A better way to stop

New handling of harassment

– It should be easy to do the right thing, explains Gunilla Hellén, HR specialist in equal treatment at the Human Resources unit. She has led the effort to identify five areas on which the University of Gothenburg will focus in order to prevent sexual harassment.

But the foundation is a well-functioning organisation with employees and students who feel safe and secure.

IN SEPTEMBER last year, HR conducted the pilot study, The Road Ahead, a Strategy for Preventing Sexual Harassment, which has subsequently been discussed in the Strategy Council and in other contexts.

Headed by Gunilla Hellén, HR then drafted a proposal on how to continue the work to prevent sexual harassment. The proposal was adopted by the Vice-Chancellor on June 4. – Among other things, we propose that equal treatment is integrated into health and safety, as it is already an established way of working with an annual cycle of surveys, analyses, implementations and follow-ups. Having parallel systems will just complicate matters, Gunilla Hellén explains.

THE PROPOSAL emphasizes that a good working environment, where the equal dignity of all permeates the entire organisation, constitutes the foundation for achieving equal treatment. Furthermore, five areas are highlighted in terms of preventing sexual harassment. It involves the statutory obligation to support the efforts to analyse risks in connection with sexual harassment. But it also involves creating a clear management system, says Gunilla Hellén. – New managers, in particular, must be informed of their responsibilities, and how we handle these matters. To support the managers, we are proposing that we produce an information package with checklists and other kinds of material that can be used for employee meetings and workshops.

ANOTHER ITEM concerns how equal treatment can be developed within the central and local health and safety committees. For example, it might entail extending the meeting hours to ensure that we have time to bring up equal treatment, and also improving transparency for employees and students. – We also highlight the role of the equal treatment representative, who is a resource for management in terms of drafting and implementing equal treatment throughout the organisation. It is important that their duties are not confused with those of the health and safety representatives, who represent the employees and, on occasion, act as a counterparty to the employer.

The fifth item concerns anonymous reporting, explains Gunilla Hellén. – This is something that is always brought up when we talk about sexual harassment. On the one hand, it is difficult to defend yourself against an anonymous complaint, which in itself can be

- With clear preventive equal treatment practices, our University can be even better, says Gunilla Hellén.

The goal is an organisation that employees and students can be proud of.

GUNILLA HELLÉN perceived as a violation. On the other hand, we must of course take these type of complaints seriously, and not brush them under the carpet. Our proposal is to use a Norwegian model in which the person accused is given an opportunity to defend themselves while the person who filed the complaint is also listened to.

THIS AUTUMN, a formal process will be completed with a policy on the actions the University of Gothenburg will take when someone claims to have been subjected to discrimination, whether it is on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, belief, disability or age. The goal is an organisation that employees and students can be proud of, Gunilla Hellén states. – I believe that many people are already proud of their university. Many things work well, but with clear preventive equal treatment practices, the University of Gothenburg can be even better.

Text: Eva Lundgren Photo: Private

Facts

The report, The Road Ahead, a Strategy for Preventing Sexual Harassment, forms the basis for the Vice-Chancellor’s decision on June 4 to adopt the report, Proposal on the continued efforts to prevent sexual harassment at the University of Gothenburg. This autumn, we will publish a process for handling discrimination.

Text: Eva Lundgren Photo: Johan Wingborg

Why do people with type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease risk becoming severely ill with Covid-19, while others who are infected have no symptoms at all?

A new project, headed by Åsa Torinsson Naluai, is looking into this. – By studying Covid-19, we may also increase our knowledge about these two major endemic diseases.

GENOMICS, TRANSCRIPTOMICS and metabolomics are different methods through which researchers in one single chemical analysis are able to simultaneously study thousands of molecules in one sample. This is precisely the type of analyses that Åsa Torinsson Naluai wants to develop. She is the associate professor at the Institute of Biomedicine and a researcher at Biobank Väst, a partnership between the University of Gothenburg and the Västra Götaland region.

But she was not always interested in genetics and biological processes. She could also have worked in business or marketing. – It was my parents who submitted different applications to universities when I was young. They were probably worried that I wouldn’t get into a profession. Because after upper-secondary school, I went to Zermatt in Switzerland to work in a hotel bar. Part of the job was to take pictures of tourists, sunbathing with the Matterhorn in the background. That is where I met my husband, who developed the photos. He is from Hawaii, and when the children were young, we would often visit there. Eventually, they grew a little tired of travelling and wondered if we couldn’t go somewhere more exciting, like Germany or something.

When Åsa Torinsson Naluai eventually started studying, she chose science and in particular, biology. – I was on a reserve list, but the student counsellor gave me a place anyway, just to stop my mother from nagging him. I never thought I would like lab work, but it turned out to be really interesting. And when I met Jan Wahlström, who set up the clinical genetics unit, I was suddenly hooked; I knew that this was the job for me.

AS A DOCTORAL STUDENT in the beginning of the 2000s, she was part of a co-doctoral project with a clinician and a mathematician. – That was an amazing way of learning research, which gave me insights into other modes of thought than that of a biologist. That inspired me to continue to collaborate across different disciplines. For example, in a psoriasis study we included a historian who could explain why certain mutations exist in western Sweden and Denmark, but not in eastern Sweden; it is linked to the fact that vast forests were a barrier to interaction between the eastern and western parts of the country.

The reason why Åsa Torinsson Naluai is now involved in virus research is because the risk of becoming severally ill with Covid-19 is correlated with type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. – It is about major endemic diseases that have been researched for more than 50 years. And progress has still been slow in terms of understanding the underlying mechanisms. Perhaps studying Covid-19 can provide new approaches?

The project involves asking people who come to the Östra Sjukhuset hospital for examination whether they have had any flu-like symptoms in 2020. – What we are hoping to find are people who have had the virus without realising it. Over the summer,

we are planning to collect blood and saliva samples from around 1,000 people. The samples will subsequently be tested for Covid-19 antibodies but they will also be stored at Biobank Väst.

Sweden is a leading country in terms of biobanks. The oldest bank is the PKU register with samples from all the children born in the country since 1975. Other countries got started later with this but are now investing considerable resources in it. One such example is UK Biobank Ltd which was established in 2007 and contains samples from half a million Britons.

A biobank is like a time machine .. .

ÅSA TORINSSON NALUAI

– A biobank is like a time machine where you can examine biological molecules from a group of people, or track one individual over time. It is important to sample healthy people for comparison; a sample from a sick patient tells us very little about what is normal for that individual. At the same time, the samples must be interpreted with caution. Our biological systems will be affected by how the sample is handled, the time of day, season, food intake and sleep, more or less everything that comes into contact with the body.

IT IS THAT very complexity that interests Åsa Torinsson Naluai. – Researchers of old, such as Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin, travelled the world and gathered facts, only to later propose an explanation for their observations. Today’s research is very much driven by hypotheses, you have to make an assumption and then investigate whether it is correct. If you apply for funding for a major mapping project you are immediately told that you have to narrow the scope. Yet we know that the body is one whole system: for example, cardiovascular disease is interlinked with obesity and diabetes, but also with inflammatory diseases and caries.

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False is the header of an article from 2005 that garnered plenty of attention, written by the Greek-American researcher John Ioannidis. – What he shows is that hypothesis-driven research often misleads us. That is why biobanks are so interesting. Just like Linnaeus and Darwin, we are now able to map the world, only not the external one but the internal world, consisting of cells and molecules. DNA is the blueprint that holds all the information about an organism, while RNA is the part of the blueprint that is currently being built, both the proteins that are being expressed right now, and the ones that are being saved for later use. What I want to do is to investigate and be part of mapping our interior reality, all of the 20,000 human genes, in the DNA as well as the way they are expressed in the RNA and proteins. Our hope is to discover previously overlooked correlations. – We know, for example, that psoriasis causes an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, but we do not know why. Extensive mapping may provide the key that enables us to formulate well-founded hypotheses that can subsequently be tested.

INFLAMMATORY DISEASE that seem to be interlinked include psoriasis, celiac disease, arthropathy and diabetes. There seems to be a relationship between these diseases and nutritional signalling. One amino acid that may be playing an important role is proline, says Åsa Torinsson Naluai. – Proline can be found in the tough and resilient connective tissue, collagen, that binds together the body’s cells. When a pathogen is trying to enter the body, they attack the collagen. The body seems to interpret high levels of protein in the blood as being under attack and it must therefore defend itself. And it does so with the help of tissue transglutaminase, the role of which is to repair the holes in the connective tissue caused by the pathogen.

And food also appears to affect the levels of proline in the blood. Gluten protein, which can be found in large quantities in wheat flour, cheese and certain vegan food products, consists largely of proline. – Starvation causes the connective tissue to degrade and the body uses proline as a source of energy. Under such conditions, proline in food causes no problems. But if you are not starving, the proline may trigger an inflammation. Today’s wheat contains one thousand times the level of gluten compared to wild wheat; this is due to centuries of breeding cereal that will produce fluffy bread. If we ingest large amounts of proline, the body may interpret it as an invasive disease.

THAT A HIGH consumption of wheat may be dangerous is not something that all researchers agree on. – There are plenty of peculiar ideas about what we should eat that you obviously need to be critical about, Åsa Torinsson Naluai points out. I am not saying that we should stop eating wheat flour entirely, but even though I baked bread with gluten for the children when they were young, nowadays we use gluten free flour. Rye, on the other hand, does not contain nearly as much gluten as wheat. It is interesting that in Denmark, for example, where they eat a lot of rye bread, they have half the number of type 1 diabetics as in Sweden. Whereas in France, they have half as many as in Denmark. Even if we do not know the cause behind these differences,

Åsa Torinsson Naluai will investigate why some people become seriously ill from Covid-19 while others infected do not notice anything at all.

we do know that it must primarily be related to environment or lifestyle, rather than genetics. People in other parts of the world who adopt a western lifestyle also adopt our endemic diseases. Interestingly enough, in South-East Asia, there is not as clear a correlation between type-2 diabetes and obesity as we see in Europe and the US. This has led to the hypothesis that obesity is a consequEnce of the disease, rather than the other way around.

Understanding the interaction between genetics and lifestyle will require the type of major mapping at the molecular level that Åsa Torinsson Naluai wants to do. But genetics can be interesting for other reasons as well. – My daughter is really interested in her origins and wanted a DNA test for her 18th birthday. It showed that her ancestors came from England, Portugal, Polynesia, from practically all the corners of the globe, except Australia. It would be very interesting to keep exploring.

Åsa Torinsson Naluai Currently: Heads one of eight projects at the University of Gothenburg, funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, for research into Covid-19. The project, Assessment of SARSCoV-2 specific antibodies in adults, and building a repository of samples from seroconverted asymptomatic adults is a collaboration between Biobank Core Facility and Biobank Väst. Current position: Associate Professor of experimental clinical genetics at the Institute of Biomedicine. Family: Husband and three children: 20, 18 and 16 years of age. Lives in: Ekebäck. Interests: Family, skiing, walking her dog.