clear thinking

Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's safe

2009-02-04T12:01:00.004-08:00

Green tea is widely reputed to be good for you - many people drink it for its antioxidant properties in an effort to prevent heart disease and cancer. Given the fact that it has been sipped by millions of people in Asia for many generations, green tea certainly seems to be safe. At least by itself.

A study published online today in the journal Blood does nothing to diminish green tea's reputation as an overall tonic, but it does raise an important flag about natural remedies in general. From the press release by the American Society of Hemotology, we find out first why scientists are focusing upon green tea:

Because of its increasing popularity and availability to the public in many formulations, green tea has been increasingly studied to understand its effect on cancer, heart disease, and other conditions. In animal studies, an antioxidant compound in green tea called the EGCG polyphenol (epigallocatechin gallate) has been shown to be a potent anticancer agent, with effects demonstrated against leukemia, as well as lung, prostate, colon, and breast cancer."

So far, so good. But it turns out that some components of green tea may counteract the anticancer effects of one cancer therapy, bortezomib (Velcade®)

"In this study, researchers evaluated whether the combination of green tea and bortezomib would improve outcomes against multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, and glioblastoma, a malignant brain tumor...the team was surprised to find that the EGCG compound seemed to prevent bortezomib from fighting the disease...the two compounds effectively contradicted one another in the cell, leaving nearly 100 percent of the tumor cells intact.

This is not some extreme version of the relevant compound - the authors found that "EGCG blocked bortezomib’s antitumor effects at levels that are commonly achieved with the use of available concentrated green tea supplements (as low as 2.5 μM – which can be attained with two to three 250 mg capsules of green tea extract)."

Of course, this hardly means that everyone should stop drinking green tea. In fact, that would be silly (unless you are taking Velcade, and then you should probably check with your doctor pronto). But it does provide convincing evidence regarding something that has been worrying the mainstream medical community for some years: natural products may be safe, especially in isolation, but they are still chemicals [before reading this post, did you know that green tea contained EGCG polyphenol?] and are likely to interact with other chemicals in unknown ways.

Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's safe.

Cross posted at Open Salon

Make more. Consume less.

2009-01-28T06:31:00.009-08:00

Douglas Coupland has an op-ed in today's New York Times in which he asks the question,

"What if we actually do spend 10 percent less this year — and then decide to stay at that level? Is that healthy?"

The answer is actually quite simple: Yes.

The root source of the problems afflicting our world is too much consumption. The historian Andrew Bacevich has a rather clear-eyed perspective on the issue. From his interview with Bill Moyers:

"Sometime around the 1960s there was a tipping point, when the "empire of production" began to become the "empire of consumption." When the cars started to be produced elsewhere, and the television sets, and the socks, and everything else. And what we ended up with was the American people becoming consumers rather than producers."

Bacevich links the consumer issue to a host of troubles afflicting the United States, and he is arguably correct in his analysis. But, like the financial crisis, the malaise has spread to much of the developed world, and in the modern day, is infecting the developing world as well. On a planet with 6.7 billion humans (and counting), consumption at this level is unsustainable.

The dilemma that we face is how to unwind society to a lower consumption state. It seems that no one has a satisfactory answer. James Howard Kunstler tells us (again and again) that "the party is over". Andrew Bacevich thinks we should save money by drastically retrenching our military, turning it into a more modest defense force rather than an expensive and ungainly worldwide police force. And while our newly installed President Obama (how good it feels to say that!!) mentions that there will be communal sacrifice in the weeks and months ahead, the 'stimulus package' is designed to, well, stimulate us to spend. As a short term remedy, this might be a way to ease some of the pain, but as a long term solution, it solves nothing.

The challenge is that we are hooked on this drug called consumption. It is not so much that we want stuff, but rather that we want what others have. It is an old saw of behavioral economics that we measure our wealth not by what we have in absolute terms, but what we have relative to others. The theory is based mostly on making more money not less, but there are a raft of studies on the neurobiology of reward that suggest it should work in the other direction just as well. Once we adjust to the new reality, we should be as content tomorrow as we were yesterday. It is only the transition that is problematic.

Cross Posted at Open Salon

A cup of tea

2009-01-24T09:21:00.003-08:00

From Fiona Robyn's A Small Stone:

"Made-for-you tea always tastes much nicer."

Who could disagree?

Steady State Economics & GDP

2008-12-27T12:27:00.011-08:00

Adbusters have named Herbert Daly as their Person of the Year. Daly has long been champion of the notion of the steady state economy. A former Senior Economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank, Daly is currently Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Daly is no slouch: he has been awarded the Right Livelihood Award and the Heineken Prize for Environmental Science, the Sophie Prize, and the Leontief Prize.

Daly's ideas are nicely summarized in the Adbusters article, Towards a Steady-State Economy: (originally posted at the Oil Drum)

The closer the economy approaches the scale of the whole Earth, the more it will have to conform to the physical behavior mode of the Earth. That behavior mode is a steady state – a system that permits qualitative development but not aggregate quantitative growth. Growth is more of the same stuff; development is the same amount of better stuff.

Clearly the economy must conform to the rules of a steady state – seek qualitative development, but stop aggregate quantitative growth. GDP increase conflates these two very different things.

Quality not quantity. What a novel idea. Or perhaps not so novel after all. Forty years ago, in his first campaign speech, Robert F. Kennedy put forward prescient comments on the Gross National Product. The video below is but two minutes and eleven seconds long. A good investment of time.

The video was produced by the Glaser Progress Foundation. If you want to dig deeper into ways in which we might better measure progress, their website has quite a good resource library. You might also want to peek here and here and here.

Cross Posted at Open Salon

What causes hot flashes?

2008-12-08T19:20:00.000-08:00

It's a common enough complaint - "Is it me, or is it hot in here?" Affecting about three quarters of all post-menopausal women, hot flashes are hardly rare. Yet the underlying mechanism is not understood as well as athlete's foot, or spider venom for that matter.

You might think that it is due to chronic lack of attention to issues of women's health, but this does not seem to be the case: using 'hot flash' as a search in PubMed brings up 1,937 studies, while only 1,466 studies have been published on athlete's foot and 1,402 on spider bite. Yet if you look at any recent review of the topic, you find only vague reference to a drop in estrogen levels, with little insight as to how this might affect dilation of blood vessels, alter thermoregulatory centres in the brain, or any of a dozen other underlying mechanistic questions.

So why is it that we don't know what causes hot flashes? The answer is at once surprising and obvious: we don't know everything about how the human body works. For all the advances that scientists have made, there are still enigmas in the world. [Actually, there are a raft of unresolved issues out there - Science recently put together a list of 125 issues that demand scientific inquiry over the next 25 years. Hot flashes were not on the list.]

Many people find it irritating when they have a malady that can't be treated. We somehow expect that in this day and age, if some part of our body itches, aches, oozes or is otherwise not working properly, medical science should have a solution. Unfortunately, reality tell us otherwise.

Cross posted at Open Salon

What do you notice?

2008-12-04T22:25:00.001-08:00

There has been a flurry of activity on total recall lately. One set of reports arose in response to Der Spiegel's story about the travails of Jill Price, the 42 year-old California woman with perfect recall. Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder's post on the topic was followed in rapid succession by Andrew Sullivan's alert, and Jonah Lehrer's thoughtful follow-up, reminding us not only that it is hardly heaven to be saddled with perfect episodic memory, but that Luria described just such a case in his classic text The Mind of a Mnemonist.

At about the same time, James Fallows pointed out that #5 on IBM's list of "Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years" includes technology that will allow smart appliances to record, store and analyze details of everyday life and provide them to us at the appropriate time and place.

In fact, it turns out that we already have the capacity to take in vast amounts of information. Aude Oliva and his students at MIT recently published a paper in PNAS with astonishing results. They showed people 2,500 photos over 5.5 hours, and then a clever psychological task was used to test whether they recognized images that they had seen. Remarkably, people could identify the image 92% of the time (for more information on how they did it, watch the video below from Science Daily). As it happens, the major challenge is not taking in information, but recalling it.

The paradox is that in the face of all of this information, we wander around in a state of seeming oblivion most of the time. We clearly have the ability to absorb it all, but to what do we choose to pay attention?

Consider:

The deer that treat our property on Galiano Island as their own (I just have to finish that fence one of these days!!) love the leaves from our sumac tree. The other day, I watched as a small herd ambled across the yard, carefully picking out the sumac leaves but leaving the oak leaves behind. Earlier, I had walked across that same patch of ground and the presence of the leaves barely registered. They noticed; I had not.

A homeless guy wanders down the street, examining the sidewalk for anything of value. He knows which trash bins are likely to contain food, which recycling bins are best bets for bottles to return for their deposit, where useful items that have been discarded by the rest of us might be. He notices things I never see.

With all of our basic needs satisfied there is little that we have to notice about our surroundings anymore. And so we don't.

The people in our modern world who do notice things are artists. Take Mari Nakano for example (she created the image at the start of this post). She has devoted an entire installation to the subject of noticing things, and she tells us

When it comes to the news, images and headlines scream for our attention. But do we notice? Or do we just pass by because our eyes have grown accustomed to the facade of a newspaper? Do we go elsewhere to search for truth and stories? And if so, where are those places? We seek to know how the world is evolving around us, but are we really reading in–depth about the going-ons around us nowadays? If not, why not? And how, as designers, can we think of alternative ways of looking at the news? How, as creatives, can we better capture a viewer's curiosity in a way that will stimulate them the delve beyond a catchy headline?

What Do You Notice? was an attempt to reinterpret the way a viewer can enter the news. By adopting the goals of tenbyten.org, this experiential piece tried to translate the interaction that takes place on the web into an interaction that takes place in real life.

And then there is Bjork. Reticent and shy throughout this interview with Charlie Rose, watch how she lights up (about 8 minutes into the conversation) when he brings up the topic of sound. Bjork notices sound in a profound way.

The question stands.

What do you notice?

Cross Posted to Open Salon

Recycling's Butterfly Effect

2008-11-18T12:09:00.020-08:00

At first glance, you would think that the environment would be a big winner as the global financial crisis is felt by all. After all, excessive consumption is at the heart of our planetary ecological catastrophe (for one particularly distressing example, see here and here). Following on this line of reasoning, as people cut back their consumption, environmental pollution should also decrease.

The logic is fine as far as it goes, but it turns out that this does not work for one of the great success stories of the environmental movement, recycling. As commodity prices have plunged, so too have the prices of the materials that we recycle the most: aluminum and steel, paper, glass, and plastic.

I first noticed the problem when I went to the recycling centre the other day here on lovely little Galiano Island. We are environmentally conscious lot and recycle assiduously but the truth is we have no choice: there are no garbage facilities on the island, so we engage in Natural Recycling. But as a result of the drop in commodity prices, our self-sufficient little recycling centre is no longer able to sell many of the recycled items that were coveted only months ago.

A bit of research reveals the problem to be widespread. Recycling Today reports that:

"The drop in prices being paid by North American steel mills for ferrous scrap has continued in November, with scrap now trading at between $113 and $167 per ton. In early November, buyers paid roughly from $60 to $110 per ton less for scrap than they did in October... In the global scrap market, reduced demand from steelmakers throughout the world remained the key factor in the dramatic change in ferrous scrap pricing in the past 90 days."

Or take a look at Nine Dragons Paper, one of the world's largest cardboard recyclers (whose founder and Chairwoman, Cheung Yan, was China's wealthiest person a couple of years ago). The company had this to say when releasing their financial results for 2008:

"We are now experiencing challenges of a downturn in the global economy..."

One might argue that the laws of supply and demand should take care of matters. As people buy less stuff, they produce less waste and therefore the system will self-correct. Unfortunately, such simple solutions don't work in the real world. Not only is a critical mass of recyclable material required to make the entire enterprise cost-effective, the price of the underlying commodity must also be sufficiently high to warrant continuing recycling as a viable business. It appears, at least for the moment, that neither of these conditions obtain.

There is a bit of a butterfly effect about all of this. A few thousand people in Nevada buy homes on ridiculously cheap credit. A few years later, housing prices plunge and suddenly many homeowners owe more on their mortgages than the houses are worth. The mortgage rates begin to rise (apparently, no one read the fine print) and homeowners begin to default. At the same time, we realize that the geniuses on Wall Street have bundled these mortgages into complex investment vehicles, and nobody knows what they are worth today or, even worse, what they will be worth tomorrow. Banks begin to fail. The economy craters. Commodity prices drop. And our little recycling centre on Galiano Island is unable to sell scrap metal anymore.

Oh what a tangled web we weave...

Cross posted to Open Salon

Why do politicians try to lower expectations before debates?

2008-09-27T16:27:00.001-07:00

Well before the presidential candidates took the stage yesterday evening, both of their campaigns worked hard (see articles here and here) to lower expectations for their performance. [Intentionally or not, Sarah Palin has done a masterful job of lowering, some might say demolishing, expectations for her performance, especially in her interview with Katie Couric.] It is a well-established tactic that now has strong support in fundmental findings from leading edge research in neuroscience.

For over 50 years, neurobiologists have been intensively studying an important network of neurons that use the neurotransmitter dopamine. A great deal of data suggests that these neurons are part of a system in the brain that encodes reward: drugs such as amphetamine and cocaine exert their addictive effects in part by increasing the duration of dopamine action in the brain, and, even more remarkably, rats will repeatedly press a lever to get a tiny jolt of electricity that activates dopamine pathways, even foregoing food and sex in favor of such self-stimulation.

The field was revolutionized by a series experiments carried out by Wolfram Schultz and his colleagues who showed that dopamine neurons don't respond to rewarding stimuli unconditionally, but rather do so in relation to expectations. The basic behavior of a dopamine neuron is to fire at a slow, steady rate; that is what is happening in your brain right now. If an animal is not expecting a reward (let's say a squirt of fruit juice) and it arrives, their dopamine neurons start firing like crazy, and their brains interpret this as rewarding. If the animal is already expecting the fruit juice when it arrives, nothing much changes; the dopamine neurons continue their boring, steady firing. The inescapable conclusion is that dopamine neurons do not encode reward per se - the fruit juice is the same in both cases - but rather compare expectation with outcome. And when we are pleasantly surprised, the burst of dopamine tells our brains that something wonderful has happened and we experience delight.

You can see this in everyday life as well. Imagine you come home from work one day and for no particular reason your partner has prepared a wonderful meal, there are flowers on the table and two glasses of wine sitting on the counter. A feeling of pleasant surprise washes over you and the evening is a success. Now imagine that this is the scene that awaits you every day; in short order you find it pleasant enough but its sheer predictability substantially reduces that feeling of delight.

By lowering expectations before the debates, political campaigns are really manipulating our brains in a fundamental way, priming our dopamine neurons to fire in a burst when the candidate performs reasonably well. Why should we care? What we really want to know is not how someone performs compared to our expectations but how they perform in some sort of absolute sense. The inherent wiring of our brains makes this a challenge, and lowering expectations makes it even more difficult.

The Vice-Presidential debate is scheduled for Thursday. Barring some dramatic change such as Sarah Palin withdrawing from the campaign this week, think about the role of your dopamine neurons in your perception of the outcome and try to evaluate her performance objectively rather than in relation to how (poorly) everyone expects her to perform. And if the pundits say she did better than expected, tell them that their dopamine neurons are modifying reality.

Really.

Cross posted to Open Salon

A Whiff of Apocalypse in the Air

2007-07-08T19:34:00.000-07:00

Inside the front cover of the July/August issue of the Atlantic is a two page advertisement from Chevron. The crux of the message is that global energy security is everyone's responsibility, and the ad invites us to visit a website that they have setup at willyoujoinus.com. Right there on the front page it says, "One thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over." Explore the site and you find a few other remarkable gems, including a section with e-cards that you can send to your friends to encourage them to conserve energy. That's right, Chevron is encouraging us to become conservationists.

Then there is the recent piece in the Times by Jeroen van der Veer, the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, in which he tells us about three hard truths:

Global demand for energy is growing, but the reality of how fast hasn’t really sunk in.

The growth rate of supplies of “easy oil”, conventional oil and natural gas that are relatively easy to extract, will struggle to keep up with accelerating demand.

Increased coal use will cause higher CO2 emissions, possibly to levels we deem unacceptable.

He concludes his article by suggesting that,

we should aim to become twice as efficient in our use of energy by the middle of the century. That is entirely feasible, provided that the will is there.

So the oil companies are telling us, both in expensive advertisements and in opinion pieces written by their chief executives, that we need to use less energy. I believe that this situation is unprecedented: I can think of no other example of an industry that recommends that consumers use less of their product. Why would they do such a thing?

It would appear that the oil industry has concluded that peak oil is real and that unless demand is reduced, there is a very real risk to the entire infrastructure upon which they rely for their business. CEO van der Veer concludes his piece on this decidedly unreassuring note:

The world’s energy system is entering a turbulent phase, and the only question is: how turbulent? A cooperative world will respond more effectively than a fragmented one. Provided governments create the right rules and incentives, and don’t throw up barriers, the global market will direct money and brainpower to the best solutions. The alternative is a global market failure, and future generations would pay the price.

I don't mean to be alarmist, but when these guys become conservationists, the whiff of apocalypse in the air becomes quite pungent indeed.

Eating locally

2007-06-30T20:48:00.000-07:00

The speakers at today's Galiano Conservancy AGM were Alisa Smith & James B. MacKinnon, authors of the 100-Mile Diet. It was wonderful to hear the thoughts of two bright young people who had touched upon the right topic at the right moment; for those of you who don't know, the book is about their efforts to spend an entire year eating food that was grown within 100 miles of their apartment in Vancouver. The premise is wonderful, and the notion of eating locally has much to recommend it: not only is less energy required to transport the food, but one is naturally forced to eat seasonally.

But as I listened to Alisa and James speak about the manifold advantages of eating locally, I could not help but reflect upon the fact that it is unlikely to be widely adopted. At least not yet. True, it is better for the planet, and these days there is a remarkable groundswell of support for all things green. But such efforts are not sustainable when motivation is tied to altruism; an economic incentive is required as well. Indeed, the epidemic of obesity is linked to the observation that never before in human history have so many calories been available for so little money.

Of course, when the ongoing party enabled by cheap oil ends, eating locally will not just be in vogue but will become a practical necessity. Suburban lawns will convert very nicely into subsistence gardens. Urban gardens will spring up everywhere. Local farms will once again be valued for the edible bounty that they provide. One can only hope that we are not already so estranged from the good earth that we will still be able to make the transition.

Update: James posted a nice piece on the 100 mile diet website about their day on Galiano, including the wonderful local lunch that they had at Rose's home.

Technorati Tags: Farm,
food security, peak oil, Green

Natural Recycling

2007-06-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

Here on Galiano Island, it is really quite easy to recycle. True, we have a wonderful recycling depot that accepts not only the usual suspects such as hard plastic, glass bottles, tin cans and newspapers, but also aluminum foil, plastic bags, corks, and more. All that is required is to bring your recyclables in on Thursday or Friday, and the nice folks at Galiano Island Recycling take it away for you.

But what really sets Galiano Island apart from other places is that essentially everyone recycles here. No, the people on Galiano are not saints. And while we have our fair share of true blue Greens, this rural island's population consists of people just the same as everywhere else. The reason everyone recycles here is because there is no garbage dump on Galiano. If you live on Galiano and have garbage that needs to end up in a landfill, there is a guy with a truck who will take your green garbage bag away for five bucks. When he collects enough bags he takes a trip on the ferry to a neighboring municipality and pays to dump our garbage in someone else's backyard. Eventually, nearly everyone here ends paying to have a bag of garbage taken away. But it is easier and cheaper to recycle. So people do.

The natural recycling that takes place on Galiano Island is arguably unique, but it illustrates one of the central challenges of the Green movement. People recycle, or take the bus, or reduce their carbon footprint, because they know it is the right thing to do, but reliance on altruistic behavior is insufficient. What is needed is convergence of incentive and action. Here is an example, drawn once again from the universe of recycling, that lends further supports to this idea.

A paltry 32 percent of people in the US recycle. In Philadelphia, a clever company called RecycleBank started paying people an average of $8 per week for recycling; rather than pay in cash, RecycleBank gives people coupons that are redeemable at various local shops. Not only do they pay people, but they take the headache out of recycling: they collect it at curbside and do all the sorting. They make their money by receiving the refundable deposit that accompanies bottles and cans, and they are paid a fee by the municipality for reducing garbage that would otherwise end up in the landfill. Six months after the program was rolled out, the percentage of people who recycled shot up to 90 percent. [For a more extensive report on how their business works, you can read the New York Times article here, but a paid subscription is required.]

That is why a proposal from Richard Stuebi over at Cleantech Blog makes sense. He argues that the price of gas should include all of the costs associated with its production, including defense spending in the Persian Gulf. He calculates that this would bring the price to roughly $6/gallon. His proposal would really make sense if income taxes were reduced commensurately. This is precisely what Elizabeth May, the head of the Green Party in Canada had in mind when she recently proposed a $.12/litre carbon tax.

Aligning actions with consequences makes sense. It may not save us from Kunstler's Long Emergency, but it is a step in the right direction.

Technorati Tags: Recycling,
Gas Price, Garbage, Green

Canada Gored

2006-06-05T06:29:00.000-07:00

Al Gore brought his dog and pony show to the University of British Columbia on Thursday evening, speaking to a packed crowd of the faithful at the Chan Centre. His Keynote presentation (he is on the Board of Apple and obviously eschews Microsoft’s PowerPoint) was filled with images, graphs, and data on the looming crisis that is global warming. At times passionate, the infamous policy wonk presented the issue with the scholarship befitting a University Professor. On this topic the former Vice President has serious street cred: he was among the first politicians in the world to have recognized its importance, co-organizing the first hearings on the topic by the US Congress in 1979.

Nearing the end of his speech, Gore showed a list of the 163 countries that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, bemoaning the fact that the United States and Australia have not signed. And then he stopped. He slowly walked forward on the stage and in a sonorous voice, pointed out that the Kyoto Accord is in trouble in Canada. The former Vice President of the United States of America unequivocally stated that Canada is the most respected country in the world, reminding us that Canada has participated in every peacekeeping mission that the United Nations has mounted since the United Nations was founded. He directly challenged the audience saying, “You are not going to let Canada exit Kyoto, are you?”

It was a highly emotional moment, one that drove home the fact that at this delicate time in human history the world is watching Canada very carefully. How we handle the debate over Kyoto will have a major impact on the future of the planet. It would be a disaster of unimaginable proportions were Canada’s good name to be besmirched by leaving the Kyoto Protocol. People around the world would rightly shake their heads, and, with a disheartening change in emphasis, wistfully intone the words “Oh, Canada”.

Urban farming

2006-05-27T06:46:00.000-07:00

I have been reading Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma, a lucid account of the path that food takes to arrive in our stomachs. The book is filled with facts and observations put together in a way that are at once fascinating and repulsive - reading this book might cause you to hesitate before putting a steak on the grill this weekend. Of course, that is the point, to get you to think about your food and where it comes from.

One observation which struck me as remarkable was the degree to which our food supply has become urbanized. No, we are not growing our food in the sprawling metropolises in which the majority of North Americans now live. Rather, we have turned the rural landscape into cities.

We are probably all aware that farming is no longer the pastoral occupation that it was before industrialization ushered in the 'green revolution'. What Michael Pollan alerts us to is the fact that most farms these days are really just monocultures of densely packed corn. In the 1920's, an acre of corn yielded 20 bushels of corn. With the introduction of hybrid corn in the 30's, the yield went up to 75 bushels per acre. Add modern fertilizer to the mix and you get a whopping 180 bushels of corn out of an acre of farmland. What you can see in this green revolution is the transformation from pastoral to urban: an acre of land whose population density has risen 9 fold in 90 years, spurred on by advances in technology.

The metropolitan analogy does not end there, but continues when one considers the feedlots in which cattle stand crowded shoulder to shoulder, their legs mired in a foot or more of manure. Just as with humans in cities, they are no longer threatened by natural predators but by the scourges of metropolitan life, the richness of their diets and the stress of crowded conditions.

It was probably not intentional, but it is now a fact of life: we humans have urbanized the farm.

Tags: Science, Technology, Food, Farm, Cities

Social Context of Commercializing Science

2006-04-25T16:55:00.000-07:00

Dr. Sir John Sulston delivered the 2nd Annual Michael Smith Lecture yesterday afternoon at UBC on the topic of Biology in the Public Domain. As one would expect when a Nobel Laureate comes to town, the lecture hall was packed, and Sir John certainly delivered a lively address. As former Director of the Sanger Institute in the UK, he oversaw 1/3 of the public project devoted to the sequencing of the human genome, and was a forceful advocate for keeping the sequence information in the public domain. It was no surprise, then, to hear Sir John decry the widespread growth of patents in the field of experimental biology, a topic that has been much discussed in recent years. Indeed, there is a modest movement to build bridges between the open-source movement and biotechnology.

One very interesting morsel that Sir John tossed out to the audience was his suggestion that the commercialization of academic science could be readily connected to triumph of capitalism and the implosion of the Soviet Union. Although he did not mention the book by name, he was clearly referring to the premature crowning of victory to the capitalist enterprise by Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book The End of History [the link is to the introduction; you can probably get an already-read copy of the book for a good price at your local used bookstore.] Personally, I think that the watershed was the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed Universities not only to patent inventions but to retain and profit from the resultant intellectual property rights, even when the fundamental discovery was made using public funds.

Irrespective of the pressures that have led to the current state of affairs, it is clear that academics increasingly view their research as not only knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but also as a potential gateway to application in the real world, including full-scale commercialization. My personal view is that there is nothing wrong with scientists moving from the bench to the boardroom and back so long as they keep their perspective on the propriety of what they are doing, and do all that is possible to minimize the potential for conflict-of-interest. If one is seriously pursuing new cures for disease, the private sector is precisely the right place to practice the craft. On the other hand, crass commercialization accompanied by restricted access to knowledge for all is an inappropriate outcome for public funds. Even a coarsely-tuned moral compass can help lead the way.

Tags: Science, Society, Drugs, Patents, Human Genome

Truth in Advertising

2006-04-22T17:45:00.000-07:00

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we can learn a thing or two from bees. Tom Seeley, a Professor at Cornell reports (subscription required; for a precis of the original research, check out the media relations story from Cornell) that honeybees use a clever strategy for decision making, in this case, moving the swarm to a new hive. 'Scouts', a subset of the group, head off to find plausible sites for the swarm to settle. When they return, they use the infamous waggle dance to let the others know where the site is, and most importantly, how good it is. The group assesses the scouts' reports, and then the swarm moves to the best site.

The system is not really all that surprising - but it does represent a remarkable display of decision by committee. The authors highlight the fact that the collective decision "is a product of disagreement and contest rather than consensus or compromise". What I found notable about the piece was the honesty of the scouts. If the site that an individual scout finds is excellent, the resultant waggle dance is exuberant. On the other hand, if the site is only acceptable, the waggle dance is more muted. The competition for having found the best site does not result in deception: given that the objective is the overall welfare of the swarm, the scouts are scrupulous about being honest in their assessments.

Being highly evolved animals, you would think that we humans would treat important decisions with equal candor. Unfortunately the evidence goes against us. Earlier this month, Carl Elliot published a damning piece in the Atlantic entitled The Drug Pushers. Even more alarming, this past week witnessed the Inaugural Conference on Disease Mongering in Newcastle, Australia. Draw your own conclusions, but this much is clear: we would be better off if humans treated the marketing of medicines with the same veracity as honeybees.

Technorati Tags: Science, Society, Drugs, Decisions

Multicultural baboons

2006-04-02T10:05:00.000-07:00

Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford with a long-standing interest in primatology has written a thoughtful article in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs (of all places). In the piece, he describes a remarkable social phenomenon observed in a troop of Savannah baboons in Kenya. Normally, about half of the male members of the troop are very aggressive and the other half more social - a version of the storied alpha male phenomenon. When a tourist lodge expanded its territory into one occupied by this particular troop, they became rather adept at pilfering food from the garbage dump. Soon thereafter an epidemic of tuberculosis swept through the troop, with the infection apparently caused by some tainted garbage. Because the most aggressive males had preferential access to the food they were also preferentially affected, and this caused a sea change in the behavior of the troop as a whole: the aggressive males died quickly and the few remaining males were markedly less aggressive and more social. Despite the fact that more than 20 years have elapsed and all of the Savannah baboons that were alive during the tuberculosis event have died, the "Garbage Dump" troop remains highly social today, in stark contrast to other troops of Savannah baboons in the area.

This phenomenon is even more remarkable when one considers the mating behavior of Savannah baboons. As with many species, Savannah baboons exchange members between troops, an adaptation that presumably reduces inbreeding. But the social rules are quite precise: juvenile males leave their troop and join neighboring troops, working their way through the hierarchy of the new community. One would expect that about half of the males that joined the Garbage Dump troop would be aggressive and the other half social. Yet twenty years later, the entire troop remains highly social, suggesting that the newcomers adopted the social mores of the local group.

Apparently, a similar experiment has been going on in the Netherlands, except in reverse, and with tragic consequences. Writing in the New Yorker, Jane Kramer describes the approach that Holland has taken to multiculturalism, something called the "pillar model". A solution to the fighting between the Catholics and Protestants in the seventeenth century, the pillar model allows each group to manage its own affairs, with separate neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, and even state-supported media. The model worked well as tolerant Holland managed its affairs from the Enlightenment into the modern age, and by the twentieth century the country was essentially divided into Catholic, Protestant and humanist pillars.

The wrinkle appears to have come with the wave of recruitments from Turkey and Morocco that began in the 1960s. Rather than integrate these newcomers into Dutch society, the pillar model was applied, allowing the growing Muslim population to not only continue to maintain their religious and cultural heritage, but essentially walling them off from Dutch society at large. The experiment is now widely viewed as a dismal failure, defined perhaps most vividly by the murder of the provocateur Theo van Gogh in 2004 by a young Dutch-Moroccan fanatic who, incensed by the filmmaker's scurrilous depiction of Islam in his film Submission, shot van Gogh eight times, repeatedly slit his throat and then pinned a long diatribe to his chest with a knife.

Surely the abominable socioeconomic conditions of Dutch Muslims contributes to the problems that Holland is experiencing, but the concept of the pillar society plays a role as well. It is here that the story of the Garbage Dump troop of Savannah baboons is informative: cultural integration is an entirely normal occurrence, and probably needs to be achieved on some level if multicultural societies are to live in harmony. Certainly, tolerant societies must be respectful of cultural and religious diversity, and the heritage that immigrants bring to multicultural societies imbue them with vibrancy. At the same time, it is imperative that when social groups with different cultural backgrounds live together, efforts are made to bridge the inevitable gaps between them. Societies that ignore the lessons of the Dutch experiment do so at their peril.

Current Affairs, Science, Society, Multiculturalism

Sloth is now a disease

2006-04-01T18:12:00.000-08:00

Scientists in Australia have come up with a new disease: extreme sloth. Australian neuroscientist Leth Argos has identified a new disease called Motivational Deficiency Disorder. Described in a new article in the British Medical Journal (subscription required), Ray Moynihan reveals further that people who suffer from MoDeD can be characterized by overwhelming and debilitating apathy. Moreover, the little-known biotechnology company Healthtec is testing a new drug, Indolebant, as a potential treatment for MoDeD. In a wonderful piece of scientific sleuthing, they discovered that drugs that block the effects of THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) at the CB1 receptor antagonize the slothful behaviour of MoDeD sufferers. Critics have been quick to point out that medicalization of laziness is just the latest, and perhaps most audacious example of disease mongering by the pharmaceutical industry.

British Medical Journal has a nifty Rapid Response feature. If you can, it is worth checking out the responses to this piece of news.

[April Fool]

Burning Wood

2006-03-15T10:19:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking a lot about wood lately. First there was a post from Verlyn Klinkenborg in which he talked about some of the ambivalence that he feels about burning wood. Then we were visiting our friends Ian and Dianna, and she mentioned that someone had been horrified that anyone in this neck of the woods was using wood - that electric baseboard heating was the only environmentally sound way to heat one's home insofar as all of the electricity in British Columbia derives from hydroelectric power. Hmmm. If this is the case, should I be thinking seriously about powering down my wood stove?

No, I think not. And here is why.

First there is the question of particulate matter. Admittedly, my wood stove emits various nasty molecules into the air, and certainly more than a hydroelectric plant. However, I minimize this by burning it with the air intake fully open. My wood burns a bit faster, but the burn is much much cleaner - I can tell because there is no residue building up on the window of my stove, and my flue remains clean as a whistle. This burning strategy ends up causing the house to be a bit warm for an hour or so, and then as we let the fire burn down, it gets a bit cool. We deal with this by putting on a sweater. It works. So on the particulate matter measure, a point for the hydroelectric strategy.

Then there is the issue of greenhouse gases. Again, burning wood releases greenhouse gases. But allowing a dead tree to rot in the woods releases precisely the same amount of greenhouse gas as burning it. Since the wood that I burn is all from deadfall, my woodstove doesn't change the environment a bit. Moreover, a fact sheet from Charles Darwin University in Australia states the case quite clearly: "While the carbon contained in fossil fuels has been stored in the earth for hundreds of millions of years and is now being rapidly released over mere decades, this is not the case with plants. When plants are burned as fuel, their carbon is recycled back into the atmosphere at roughly the same rate at which it was removed, and thus makes no net contribution to the pool of carbon dioxide in the air." Woodstove and hydroelectric dam are even on this one.

Wood is a local product. I buy my wood every year or two from a guy that I know personally. He lives pretty modestly and the couple of hundred dollars that I spend on wood each year goes a long way to putting food on the table of his family. The electricity that comes through the wires is produced by a large and faceless utility. I have nothing against this company, as it does provide a meaningful service. It just represents one more highly impersonal transaction. Chalk up a point for the woodstove.

Finally, there is the meaning of the woodstove in my life. Historically, humans have used fire both for heating and cooking, and consequently the hearth has prominet role as the center of the home. There exists even a series of regular rhythms that the fireplace requires - the seasonal preparation of the wood; starting the fire first thing in the morning; tending the fire as the day progresses; even not lighting the fire as the weather warms in the spring. All of these rhythms put me in touch with my surroundings in a very intimate fashion. And then there is the unqualified joy that comes from sitting near a fire, seeing it burn, and knowing that somehow, in the midst of the chaos out there, all is right with the world. Because mastering fire represents one of the essential adaptations that distinguishes humans from all other species on this planet, it seems to evoke some ancient memory which is comforting like no other. Needless to say, the electric baseboard heater falls far short on this measure. A large and important point awarded to the woodstove.

In Carl Elliot's book Better than Well, he describes philosopher Albert Borgmann's use of the evolution of heating as the classic example of the distinction between a 'thing' and a 'device'. [The words thing and device are not as important as the distinction, so bear with me here.] Borgmann describes how the hearth was once the central focus of the household, but was gradually replaced by a variety of 'central heating devices' with the aim being to heat the house in the most efficient manner possible. The advance in technology completely satisfies the physical need, but increasingly leaves us disconnected from the natural world. I am no Luddite, but somehow it seems important that we maintain some connections to our shared past. I will draw my own personal line at my woodstove.

MAD Petrodollars

2006-02-27T12:52:00.000-08:00

The impending ribbon-cutting ceremony for the opening of the Iranian Oil Bourse is receiving scant attention - but should be front and center for every one. If the Bourse opens as anticipated in March 2006, it is likely to shake up the global order significantly.

Here is the background. In 1971, the US took the dollar off of the gold standard, essentially turning currency trading in the dollar into a confidence game. To reassure investors, the US made a (not so secret) deal with Saudi Arabia to insure that Saudi oil would be denominated in dollars; the quid pro quo was a series of security assurances. Ever since then, essentially the entire world has been buying oil on the international market for dollars. For the world at large, this means that they need to find a way to get their hands on US dollars so that they can purchase oil, and in the normal course of events this is accomplished by trading goods for dollars. On the other hand, the US can buy oil with dollars that they print themselves.

As pointed out recently in Z Magazine, this essentially allows the US to purchase oil with fiat money - bills that have value only because the issuing country says they do - as opposed to commodity money, which the rest of the world must use to purchase oil. The interesting and compelling observation is that this situation has allowed the US to run up deficits ($725 billion in 2005!!!) that would be otherwise unsustainable, especially in a world where money can move so easily.

Of course, this is the nub of the matter. So long as oil is denominated in dollars, the US economy retains its ability to dominate. But what happens if this situation changes and oil becomes denominated in another currency, Euros for example? Several people (here and here and here) have speculated that this represents the underlying reason for the invasion of Iraq, and with the looming threat of the Iranian Oil Bourse, tongues are wagging at the relationship between the threat to petrodollars and the level of rhetoric about Iran's nuclear program.

In a world awash in misinformation, it is always difficult to know what is true (and there are contrary views). However, one observation that supports this line of argument is that the US dollar has not cratered in the face of astoundingly poor financial performance. In a sense, the scenario that has developed is analogous to that which arose in the Cold War. All of the players need to keep the US dollar propped up lest their holdings of US dollars lose their value. If countries (Japan and China come to mind) stops buying oil in dollars, the entire house of cards comes crashing down and everyone loses. When the Russians were on the other end of the 'hot line', there was reason to expect that Robert McNamara's notion of Mutually Assured Destruction would stay their hand. It is worth pondering whether the Iranians will be equally prudent.

Beware the ides of March.

oil, dollars, economy, Iran

Relax....

2006-02-24T16:59:00.000-08:00

Two recent news items demonstrate just how jumpy we have become. We need to get a collective grip on reality.

First came the news that scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre have successfully developed a vaccine against the potent toxin ricin. The science behind the experiment is elegant, and was appropriately published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (subscription required). But wait a minute - there are really only two known instances in which ricin has been used in a way that might warrant concerns. The first was when Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was killed after being jabbed with a ricin-filled dart hidden in a KGB agent's umbrella in London in 1978. The second was when two ricin-laced letters were intercepted in 2003 by postal authorities in the USA. One of the letters was addressed to the White House. Given this rather sparse history, the question arises: who is going to take a ricin vaccine?

The second piece of exaggerated news arises from a report released by the National Academy itself. Writing in MIT's technology review, Emily Singer describes the prospect of terrorists 'hijacking your brain' with new generation chemicals. Perhaps disruption is possible, but hijack is just a tad hysterical.

While it is understandable to be vigilant, this level of paranoia is just plain silly. Not only does it demonstrate that otherwise level-headed folks are getting a bit carried away, the noise that it generates has the potential to blind us to real threats which should be judiciously minimized.

Relax.

terrorism, science

Take a Media Holiday

2006-02-17T12:57:00.000-08:00

A well-dressed man in a 3 piece suit walks out his front door with briefcase in hand, kisses his wife and walks purposefully down the pathway apparently leading to the street. One more step and he disappears off a cliff, the camera following him as he plummets down the canyon, a parachute opening just before he lands next to an SUV. The marketing guys sure know how to get your attention. But what really interested me was the disclaimer at the bottom of the screen as the man opens the car door: Professional stunt man. Do not try at home.

Are people really as stupid as the mythical lemmings that follow each other over the cliff? More to the point, are we unable to distinguish between the drivel shown on TV and reality? Sadly, the answer is yes, and, as I have written about previously, the fact that our sense of well-being derives from how we stack up against our peers causes a fair bit of unhappiness. This is particularly the case when our peers are idealized media darlings.

Given how appealing our media-infested world is to our attention-seeking brains, it is hard to imagine this situation improving any time in the near future, at least on a large scale. A personal solution that a wise person offered up some time ago is to take a media holiday from time to time. No TV. No Internet. No Newspapers. I have tried it and can report that not only was I able to survive such deprivations, but remarkably the world continued to revolve on its axis with the same wobbliness as it had before I took my little media holiday. As for me, it seemed to provide excellent fodder for Clear Thinking.

The quest for truth

2006-02-08T15:04:00.000-08:00

The growing reliance on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the brain in action is leading, inexorably, to the search for better lie detectors. At least two companies, No Lie MRI and Cephos are developing variants of this technology with several applications in mind.

At issue in all of this, of course, is the accuracy of the tests. Before anyone runs off and gets too excited about this new technology, it would be worth reading at least the abstracts of the academic papers (here and here) upon which the commercial strategies rest. It turns out that using fMRI provides accuracy in the range of 85-90%. Not bad, but hardly foolproof.

Of course, the reason that this is important is because of the famous case of Aldrich Ames, the CIA spy who was convicted for sying for the Ruskies in 1994. Ames succesfully deceived investigators using a polygraph, and has continued to watch the field of lie detection from Allenwood federal penitentiary. He sent a fascinating letter to Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists that is worth a read (I prefer the handwritten version, but you may wish to see the transcribed version). It seems that in the intelligence business, polygraphs are often used to coerce confessions from people, a conclusion that is hardly surprising given the current climate of paranoia.

The 'yuk factor' derives from the fact that this technology might breach a sanctuary that we all cherish, the privacy of thought. It may be only a minor comfort, but the truth of the matter is that scientists are still a long way off from reading your mind. So rest well.

What could you do with Two Hundred and Fifty Billion Dollars?

2006-01-30T17:33:00.000-08:00

Over on the right hand side of my blog, you can see a handy little counter that I found which estimates the cost of the war in Iraq, based on Congressional Appropriations. It is set to hit $250 billion in March 2006. It is really quite staggering to think about why that money was spent, and what else it could have been used for.

First, let's address why the money is being spent. The honest answer, of course, is that the war is about oil. Not only does Iraq produce tons of the stuff (or at least it did before the US bombed it flat), Saddam Hussein was in a position to threaten oil shipments throughout the Persian Gulf. The calculation went something like this: a significant disruption of oil supplies would mortally wound the US economy. As a result, removing Saddam from power was deemed to be worth the political and economic cost of removing him from power. Other explanations (weapons of mass destruction, building democracy, etc.) are convenient, but frankly, they are a load of horse manure.

Let us assume for a moment that Saddam's threat was real. The unsophisticated response is what we have seen: utilize the power of the military to secure the Persian Gulf. The more nuanced response would have been to seize the moment and launch a massive project to develop alternative energy sources. Imagine what $250B would buy in terms of research and development. Not only would the money have provided the only realistic opportunity to identify alternative energy sources that might come on line as cheap oil became a distant memory, but it also would have provided a much needed boost to the US economy.

Yes, that's right, the same US economy that the Bush gang invaded Iraq to defend. Two hundred and fifty billion dollars later, and what do we have to show for it?

The vulnerability of energy supplies

2006-01-26T15:14:00.000-08:00

After the recent attacks in Nigeria and Russia on oil and gas pipelines, the possibility of social disruption leading to a new energy crisis moves from dystopic fantasy to looming reality. The Global Guerrillas website adds an interesting twist: the possibility that such attacks might come not just because groups with political objectives may wish cripple governments or supranational corporations, but rather that individuals may stage such attacks to profit from the change in world oil prices. It has always been the case that individuals have seen windfall profits following disasters. But now it seems that small scale adventurers, operating independently or in collusion with others, can cause both anarchy in energy producing countries (with secondary effects upon liberal democracies) and make substantial profits. Given how obvious this opportunity is, it would be surprising if it didn't happen in the very near future. Get ready for $100/barrel oil.

On Happiness

2006-01-19T10:06:00.000-08:00

I have been reading Happiness - Lessons from a New Science by Richard Layard, Director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and a member of the House of Lords. He is among the rising tide of voices advocating that governments should include measures of happiness in devising policy, essentially adopting some form of the Bhutan's pursuit of Gross National Happiness. This is, of course, a wonderful idea, and it seems like a fantastic platform for politicians to pursue as they try to convince voters that they deserve their support. Indeed, some governments are giving consideration to the issue, but the truth is that this is going to be a hard sell.

Layard recounts the evidence that despite the fantastic increase on our material wealth over the last 50 years, we are no happier than we used to be. He offers many reasons for our collective malaise, and it is worth reading to book to get the full picture - his writing is engaging and I found the book an enjoyable read. One of the insights that Layard emphasizes is the importance that we all place on our relative status with respect to those around us. Essentially, we measure ourselves against others, and we do so with alarming regularity. This exercise had little impact when our brains evolved as members of communities of 150 or so individuals on the African Savannah. Even as industrialization rose to prominence, it was rare for individuals to encounter compatriots who lived lives that were radically different than theirs. But our brains are poorly equipped to deal with today's reality, where the availability of cheap oil allows for us to travel widely, and in so doing observe and inevitably crave the lifestyles of others. Even more pernicious is television which brings the rich and famous directly into our living rooms. Is it any wonder that the real lives of real people pale by comparison?

Anticipating the new science of happiness, Ferenc Mate devoted a chapter in his book A Reasonable Life to the ills of television, concluding that the best thing that you can do with your TV is to pick it up and chuck it out the window. It seems that his advice is sound indeed.

Law of Unintended Consequences

2006-01-18T12:47:00.000-08:00

A letter in today's issue of Nature draws attention to the law of unintended consequences. Scientists are not often thought of as frivolous types, but they can be: many of the genes that have been discovered have been given rather silly names (Homer; dunce; Sonic Hedgehog, to name but a few). This trend was begun innocently by some 'cool' scientists who were involved in sequencing the fruitfly genome, but grew rapidly to include human sequences as well. Unfortunately, patients seem less than amused to find that they have a mutation in a gene with a whimsical name (Are you telling me that my son the genius has a dunce mutation?).

Who knew?

Welcome

2006-01-18T11:47:00.000-08:00

We seem to be hurtling down the tracks towards an uncertain future. Despite our best intentions, the impact of humans on the world around us seems to be less benign with each passing day. Whether it be hubris, the law of unintended consequences, or just plain stupidity, we are clearly in a bit of a bind.

It really is a pity that we are in such trouble, for the human experiment has much to recommend it. In the days and weeks to come, we'll take a look at some of the fine things that humans have achieved, as well as irreverently poking fun at a few items that have been less well-thought out. As with evolution, I don't know where it will lead, but the journey is always interesting.