Baboons led Robert Sapolsky to study stress. Here he explains what happened to a baboon troop when its alpha males' aggressive behavior wiped them all out, leaving a troop of "good guys" and females.

Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine at Wired, by Jonah Lehrer is a good weekend read.

"The person most at risk for heart disease isn't the high-powered executive anxious about their endless to-do list -- it's the frustrated janitor stuck with existential despair." Lack of control over our lives -- low status in the baboon world and the human -- affects physical health: "the women with mean bosses and menial work showed the highest incidence of heart disease."

The sweeten aside is a graphic of ways to reduce stress, with some explanation. The headlines:

Make friends Get enough sleep Don't fight Meditate Confront your fears Drink in moderation Don't force yourself to exercise

But the hard-science core of this story -- vaccine design -- I had to read a few times: It's how to program a human:

If the chronic drip of glucocorticoids ("stress hormones that puts the body in a heightened state of alert") is so toxic, why can't the chemicals be stopped before it's too late?

That straightforward goal concealed a series of technical challenges. The first was that Sapolsky couldn't just eliminate glucocorticoids from the bloodstream, because they are involved in all sorts of important functions, like helping you run for your life. Second, Sapolsky needed to get his treatment past the blood-brain barrier -- the specialized capillaries that prevent blood contaminants from entering the brain. Sapolsky's vaccinelike cocktail needed to deliver a potent mixture of genes to the cortex -- these genes would counteract the stress response -- but the most common mechanisms of delivery, like free-floating strands of DNA called plasmids, were denied entry. There were a few years of false starts, but Sapolsky and his postdocs continued to play around with the herpes simplex virus, which has been used as a viral vector in gene therapy research for two decades. Herpes was a good candidate because it's able to slip easily into brain cells. Sapolsky then set about deleting all the dangerous genes in the herpes virus, replacing each of them with an assortment of "neuroprotective" ones, which increase the production of growth factors, various antioxidants, and substances that mimic estrogen. (Estrogen counters many of the deleterious effects of stress on the brain.) As a result, brain cells infected by Sapolsky's version of herpes would be protected in case they were subjected to stress.

The question was how to get the engineered herpes to turn on at key moments, then turn off so the cells could resume normal function. Fortunately, natural selection had already solved the biologist's technical problem. "Viruses aren't dumb," he says. "They don't want to become active until we're really vulnerable and our immune response is suppressed." How does the virus know we're stressed? To Sapolsky's pleasant surprise, the virus already had the necessary genetic machinery: It automatically monitors the flux of glucocorticoids in the bloodstream. It had evolved to start expressing its genes whenever its host felt overburdened by the world.

The video above is about a completely different sort of programming. At one point in it, there's mention of the Whitehall Study: "After tracking thousands of civil servants for decades, (Michael) Marmot was able to demonstrate that between the ages of 40 and 64, workers at the bottom of the hierarchy had a mortality rate four times higher than that of people at the top."