Officials announced Thursday that a third U.S. dairy worker has been infected by avian flu, or H5N1. This is the second case in Michigan.

Federal officials said that unlike the first two U.S. cases — whose symptoms were limited to conjunctivitis, or pink eye — this person presented with more typical flu-like respiratory symptoms. None of the three cases are associated with the others.

The risk to the general population is still considered low, federal officials said.

However, the case “underscores the importance of recommended precautions in people with exposure to infected or potentially infected animals,” officials said in a written statement.

Officials said in a news conference Thursday that 40 people have so far been tested for H5N1, and they have actively monitored more than 350 people — that includes 220 in Michigan.

They’ve also issued roughly 17,000 PCR tests for cattle — although, that does not mean 17,000 individual cows were tested, said Eric Deeble of the United States Department of Agriculture. Some of those are pooled samples, so an individual test could “represent many more animals.”

He would not provide an estimate regarding how many cows are infected.

The latest dairy worker had been exposed to H5N1-infected cows and reported flu symptoms to local health officials. The person complained of a cough and eye discomfort with watery discharge. The worker did not have a fever. The patient was given antiviral treatment, is currently isolating at home and symptoms are resolving.

Nobody else in the person’s home has developed symptoms, although they are being monitored. In addition, no other workers at the same farm have reported symptoms, and all staff are being monitored.

They underscored that there is no indication of person-to-person spread of bird flu at this time.

In March, federal officials reported that H5N1 had jumped from birds to dairy cattle. The virus has been detected in 67 herds across nine states. There are no known dairy cattle cases in California.

Earlier this week, Idaho reported that the virus had been detected in a herd of llamas. And a chicken farm in Iowa was infected, necessitating the culling of 4.2 million birds.

Federal officials said in April that they believed the nation’s milk supply is safe, after H5N1 was detected in grocery store milk. However, they recommend avoiding raw milk, which can have high levels of active virus.

Twenty years ago this month, Marcia Kadish and Tanya McCloskey exchanged wedding vows at Cambridge City Hall in Massachusetts and became the first same-sex couple to legally marry in the United States.

The couple had been together since 1986, but their decision to wed was radical for its time. In 2004, only 31% of Americans supported same-sex marriage, while 60% were opposed, according to a Pew Research Center poll.

Much of that opposition was fueled by fears that expanding the definition of marriage beyond the traditional union of a man and a women would undermine the institution and be destabilizing to families. Researchers at the Rand Corp. decided to find out if those predictions turned out to be true.

A team from the Santa Monica-based think tank spent a year poring over the data. The result is a 186-page report that should be reassuring to supporters of marriage equality.

“If there were negative consequences in the last 20 years of the decision to legalize marriage for same-sex couples, no one has yet been able to measure them,” said Benjamin Karney, an adjunct behavioral scientist at Rand.

Karney, who is also a social psychologist at UCLA, led the report with Melanie Zaber, a labor economist and economic demographer at Rand. They spoke with The Times about what they learned.

Does marriage make people better off?

Benjamin Karney: On average, yes. People who are married experience fewer health problems, they live years longer, they make more money, and they accumulate more wealth than people who marry and divorce or who don’t marry at all. People who are married also experience more stable and positive psychological health, and they have sex more frequently than people who are not married.

All those benefits accrue primarily to people who are in happy marriages. Unhappy marriage is very, very harmful. But most people who are married are happy — that’s why they stay married.

What prompted you to examine same-sex marriage now?

BK: At the time that these policies were changing, there were a lot of arguments on both sides about whether the consequences would be positive or negative. Twenty years is a long time, and during that time, a lot of research has been conducted. It seemed like a good time to ask the question: What did happen as a consequence of legalizing marriage for same-sex couples? So that’s one reason.

The second reason is that in the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe vs. Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurring opinion said explicitly that this Supreme Court should consider reviewing and potentially overturning other decisions, and he named the 2015 Obergefell vs. Hodges decision that legalized marriage for same-sex couples by name. Given that people may be wondering about the merits of that decision, it seemed like a good time to evaluate the consequences of that decision, and that’s what we’ve done.

What did you find?

BK: We found 96 studies across a range of disciplines. Some are in economics. Some are in psychology. Some are in medicine. Some are in public health.

Melanie Zaber: We wanted it to be research that actually measured something. There were a number of more qualitative or theoretical or legal arguments that we excluded.

BK: What I found most notable is that all of the studies drew the same conclusions: There was either no effect or beneficial effects on any outcome you could look at. That’s 20 years of research, 96 studies, and no harms.

Does it seem plausible that the results could be so one-sided?

BK: I was not surprised. There’s a lot of good theory in family science and relationship science to argue that if you extend rights to a group that’s been stigmatized, that group should do better, and the majority group should not be affected. Indeed, that’s what we found.

MZ: I don’t find it particularly surprising. When we say there are no harms, that doesn’t mean everything’s coming up sunshine and roses — it means sunshine and roses or nothing. In this case, where the prediction was something negative, then nothing still feels like sunshine and roses.

What sorts of things did these studies measure?

BK: There were three general categories. The largest group was looking at outcomes for LGBT individuals and same-sex couples. The second bucket looked at the children of same-sex parents. And the third bucket was the effect on everybody else.

There was no evidence of harms anywhere.

That’s interesting because opponents of these policy changes very strongly — and very explicitly — predicted there would be harms. They predicted it in front of the Supreme Court, arguing that if we allow same-sex couples to marry, the consequences for the country will be negative and severe and unavoidable and irreversible.

Who benefits the most from legalizing same-sex marriage?

BK: Same-sex couples. Their relationships last longer when they are able to marry and cement their commitment. Their incomes go up. Their mental health improves.

That mental health improvement extends to LGBT individuals whether or not they are married. Even if you’re not married, if you’re a member of a sexual minority and live in a world that validates same-sex relationships, that relieves a stressor and has measurable benefits on physical and mental health.

What’s behind these improvements?

BK: The effects on health seem like they operate partly through employer-based health insurance being extended to spouses.

The mechanisms for mental health have been described by minority stress theory. Living in a society that is constantly sending you a message that you are less worthy of equal treatment is stressful, partly because it leads to discrimination. Being the target of discrimination is stressful, and that stress has real mental and physical consequences.

You found 96 studies about gay marriage. Why did you conduct your own research as well?

MZ: Some of those studies were conducted when only a few states had marriage for same-sex couples. A state like West Virginia or Wyoming might say, “Well that’s all well and good that you have evidence from Massachusetts or Vermont, but New England isn’t the center of the universe.”

By looking at a broader range of years, we’re better able to capture some of those states that did allow same-sex couples to marry but weren’t among the first to do so. We have reason to think those states may be very different environments. Our approach was to use each state as a quasi-experiment.

What did all that data tell you?

MZ: The headline from our new analysis is no negative impacts and some positive ones.

We see an increase in marriage, and that increase is driven not just by newly marrying same-sex couples, but also by an increase in marriage among different-sex couples. That was a bit surprising to us.

What do you think was going on?

MZ: There are a few different mechanisms for this, none of which we can explicitly test.

One could be allyship. There are individuals who identify as cisgender straight individuals, but they want to show their allyship so they delay marriage until everyone’s able to marry.

There’s an increasing number of individuals who identify as bisexual in the United States. Even if they’re marrying a different-sex partner, they may be trying to have validation of their broader identity.

The argument we find most compelling is that having people loudly clamoring for all the great things that come along with marriage made people in the broader population say, “Oh hey, getting married means people can go visit me in the hospital, and that if I’m in an accident there’s no concern about who my property will go to, and we have more access to health insurance.” Talking about that may have made some people realize, “You know, marriage actually is pretty helpful.”

BK: If you hear about a restaurant that everyone’s trying to get into, you want to eat at that restaurant.

MZ: That is an excellent way of putting it!

Do you think this research will persuade those who were concerned that same-sex marriage would have terrible consequences?

MZ: That’s our goal — to put evidence out to the public so policymakers can make informed choices.

BK: I’d like to believe so. At the time those arguments were made, they were speculative. People were trying to predict the future. Now we don’t have to predict the future. Twenty years have passed and we have the data. We can document what has happened.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Consider the sea urchin. Specifically, the painted urchin: Lytechinus pictus, a prickly Ping-Pong ball from the eastern Pacific Ocean.

The species is a smaller and shorter-spined cousin of the purple urchins devouring kelp forests. They produce massive numbers of sperm and eggs that fertilize outside of their bodies, allowing scientists to watch the process of urchin creation up close and at scale. One generation gives rise to the next in four to six months. They share more genetic material with humans than fruit flies do and can’t fly away — in short, an ideal lab animal for the developmental biologist.

Scientists have been using sea urchins to study cell development for roughly 150 years. Despite urchins’ status as super reproducers, practical concerns often compel scientists to focus their work on more easily accessible animals: mice, fruit flies, worms.

Scientists working with mice, for example, can order animals online with the specific genetic properties they are hoping to study — transgenic animals, whose genes have been artificially tinkered with to express or repress certain traits.

Researchers working with urchins typically have to spend part of their year collecting them from the ocean.

“Can you imagine if mouse researchers were setting a mousetrap every night, and whatever it is they caught is what they studied?” said Amro Hamdoun, a professor at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Marine invertebrates represent about 40% of the animal world’s biological diversity yet appear in a scant fraction of a percentage of animal-based studies. What if researchers could access sea urchins as easily as mice? What if it were possible to make and raise lines of transgenic urchins?

How much more could we learn about how life works?

“You know how during the pandemic, everyone was making sourdough? I’m not good at making sourdough,” Hamdoun said recently at his office in Scripps’ Hubbs Hall. He set his sights instead on a project of a different sort: a new transgenic lab animal, “a fruit fly from the sea.”

In March, Hamdoun’s lab published a paper on the bioRxiv preprint server demonstrating the successful insertion of a piece of foreign DNA — specifically, a fluorescent protein from a jellyfish — into the genome of a painted urchin that passed the change down to its offspring.

The result is the first transgenic sea urchin, one that happens to glow like a Christmas bulb under a fluorescent light. (The paper has been submitted for peer review.)

The animals are the first transgenic echinoderms, the phylum that includes starfish, sea cucumbers and other marine animals. Hamdoun’s mission is to make genetically modified urchins available to researchers anywhere, not just those who happen to work in research facilities at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

Postdoctoral researcher Elliot Jackson works with sea urchin eggs in a lab at Scripps.

(Sandy Huffaker / For The Times)

“If you look at some of the other model organisms, like Drosophila [fruit flies], zebrafish and mouse, there are well-established resource centers,” said Elliot Jackson, a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps and lead author of the paper. “If you want a transgenic line that labels the nervous system, you could probably get that. You could order it. And that’s what we hope we can be for sea urchins.”

Being able to genetically modify an animal supercharges what scientists can learn from it, with implications far beyond any individual species.

“It will transform sea urchins as a model for understanding neurobiology, for understanding developmental biology, for understanding toxicology,” said Christopher Lowe, a Stanford professor of biology who was not involved in the research.

The lab’s breakthrough, and its focus on making the animals freely available to fellow scientists, will “allow us to explore how evolution has solved a lot of really complicated life problems,” he said.

Researchers tend to study mice, flies and the like not because the animals’ biology is best suited to answer their questions but because “all the tools that were necessary to get at your questions were built up in just a few species,” said Deirdre Lyons, an associate professor of biology at Scripps who worked with Hamdoun on early research related to the project.

Expanding the range of animals available for sophisticated lab work is like adding colors to an artist’s palette, Lyons said: “Now you can go get the color that you really want, that best fits your vision, rather than being stuck with a few models.”

Painted urchins and humans live vastly different lives but genetically are quite similar.

(Sandy Huffaker / For The Times)

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On the ground floor of Hamdoun’s office building is the Hubbs Hall experimental aquarium, a garage-like space crammed with tanks full of recirculating seawater and a motley assortment of marine life.

On a recent visit, Hamdoun reached into a tank and gently dislodged a painted urchin. It scooched with surprising speed across an outstretched palm, as if exploring alien terrain.

The last common ancestor of L. pictus and Homo sapiens lived at least 550 million years ago. Despite the different evolutionary paths we’ve since traveled, our genomes reveal a shared biological heritage.

The genetic instructions that drive the transformation of a single zygote into a living body are strikingly similar in our two species. Specialized systems differentiating from a single fertilized egg and the translation of a jumble of proteins into a singular living thing — on the cellular level, all of that proceeds in much the same way for urchins and people.

These animals are “really fundamental to our understanding of all of life,” Hamdoun said, placing the urchin back in its tank. “And historically, very inaccessible genetically.”

The experimental aquarium was built in the 1970s, when scooping life from the sea was the only way to acquire research specimens. A few floors up in Hubbs Hall, Hamdoun led the way into the urchin nursery — the first large-scale effort to raise successive generations of the animals in a laboratory. At any given moment, the team has 1,000 to 2,000 sea urchins in various stages of development.

Hamdoun points to transgenic sea urchins his lab is raising at Scripps.

(Sandy Huffaker / For The Times)

Row upon row of tiny plastic tanks stood against a wall, each containing a lentil-size juvenile urchin. A strip of tape on each tank noted the animal’s genetic modification and date of fertilization. On some, a second bit of tape indicated animals that had the modification in their sex cells’ DNA, meaning it could be passed down to offspring. (For this reason, the lab keeps its urchins scrupulously separate from the wild population.)

“One of the big questions in all of biology is to understand how the series of instructions in the genome gives you whatever phenotype you want to study,” Hamdoun said — essentially, how the string of amino acids that is an animal’s genetic code gives rise to the characteristics of the living, respiring creature. “One of the fundamental things you have to do is be able to modify that genome, and then study what the outcome is.”

He pointed to a tank containing a tiny urchin from whose genetic code the protein ABCD1 has been snipped.

ABCD1 acts like a bouncer, Hamdoun explained, parking along the cell membrane and ejecting foreign molecules. The protein’s action can preserve the cell from harmful substances but can sometimes work against an organism’s best interest, as when it prevents the cell from absorbing a necessary medication.

Researchers using urchins in which that protein no longer works can study the movement of a molecule through an organism — DDT, for example — and measure how much of the substance ends up in the cell without the confounding interference of ABCD1. They can reverse-engineer how big a role ABCD1 plays in preventing a cell from absorbing a drug.

One biology professor said Scripps’ work will transform sea urchins as a model for research.

(Sandy Huffaker / For The Times)

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And then there are the fluorescent urchins.

“The magic happens in this room,” Jackson said, walking into a narrow office with $1 million worth of microscopes at one end and a decades-old hand-cranked centrifuge bolted to a table at another.

He placed a petri dish containing three pencil-eraser-size transgenic urchins under a microscope. At 120 times its size, each looked like the Times Square New Year’s Eve ball come to life — a glowing, wiggling creature of pentamerous radial symmetry.

Fluorescence is not just an echinoderm party trick. Lighting up the cells makes it easier for researchers to track their movement in a developing organism. Researchers can watch as the early cells of a blastula divide and reorganize into neural or cardiac tissue. Eventually, scientists will be able to turn off individual genes and see how that affects development. It will help us understand how our own species develops, and why that development doesn’t always proceed according to plan.

The lab has “done a great job. It’s really been welcomed by the community,” said Marko Horb, senior scientist and director of the National Xenopus Resource at the University of Chicago’s Marine Biological Laboratory.

Horb runs the national clearinghouse for genetically modified species of Xenopus, a clawed frog used in lab research. Funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, the center develops lines of transgenic frogs for scientific use and distributes them to researchers.

Hamdoun envisions a similar resource center for his lab’s urchins. They’ve already started sending tiny vials of transgenic urchin sperm to interested scientists, who can grow bespoke urchins with eggs acquired from Hamdoun’s lab or another source.

Hamdoun vividly recalls the time he spent earlier in his career trying to track down random snippets of DNA necessary for his research, the disappointment and frustration of writing to professors and former postdocs only to find that the material had long been lost. He’d rather future generations of scientists spend their time on discovery.

“Biology is really interesting,” he said. “The more people can get access to it, the more we’re going to learn.”

Three transgenic sea urchins in a petri dish.

(Sandy Huffaker / For The Times)

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