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Other Science Facts

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:07:00 EDT

The BBC reports:

Ancient humans started down the path of evolving into two separate species before merging back into a single population, a genetic study suggests.

The genetic split in Africa resulted in distinct populations that lived in isolation for as much as 100,000 years, the scientists say.

That's one possibility, anyway; the reporter adds that "other scenarios could also account for the data." The paper, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, is available here.

[Via The Art of the Possible.]

The Genetics of Ensoulment

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Until about a decade ago, there was only one way to make an embryo—the old-fashioned technique of combining an egg with a sperm. Then came Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996. Scottish scientists created her by injecting the nucleus of a breast cell from one sheep into the enucleated egg of another sheep. Dolly was essentially genetically identical to the donor of the breast cell nucleus.

Since then researchers have used reproductive cloning to produce mice, cats, dogs, horses, cows, goats, pigs, and other mammals. As valuable as reproductive cloning is for producing livestock and research animals, most researchers were excited by the prospect of using cloning to create human embryonic stem cells. These stem cells produced by therapeutic cloning might be used to grow perfect transplants to replace and repair damaged tissues and organs.

Therapeutic cloning to produce transplants fell directly into the heated abortion debate. From the pro-life point of view, cloned human embryos, like all other embryos, have the same moral status as adult human beings. The moral status of five-day embryos is still contested. Hoping to avoid controversy, researchers searched for sources of cells that would have the valuable properties of embryonic stem cells (self-renewing and transformable into any type of cell), but would be acceptable to pro-lifers.

One proposal is to create human stem cells using altered nuclear transfer (ANT). Championed by Stanford University bioethicist William Hurlbut, the technique is essentially the same as regular cloning except that it uses RNA interference to disable a single crucial gene so that the cloned entity cannot implant into a womb and thus cannot grow into a fully developed embryo. In ANT all of the genes involved would be human, even the one that has been deliberately broken.

A number of prominent Roman Catholic thinkers recently endorsed ANT as a morally acceptable way to produce human embryonic stem cells. So whether or not an entity can house a human soul evidently depends on the timing of the operation of a single gene. Other theologians question this, asking why such a cloned entity should not be considered a defective human embryo deserving of same the moral solicitude owed to disabled adult human beings.

The search for a morally unproblematic source of stem cells continued. Last fall, Shinya Yamanaka and his colleagues at Kyoto University in Japan and another team at the University of Wisconsin announced the good news that they had been able to transform adult human skin cells into cells that act very much like embryonic stem cells. Yamanaka took skin cells and inserted four genes—Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and Myc—that are expressed in embryonic stem cells, causing the skin cells to revert to the embryonic state. These induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells are generating a huge amount of excitement among stem researchers and were even hailed as the end of the stem cell wars.

Well, not quite. The Kyoto and Wisconsin researchers used skin cells originally derived from human fetuses in their research. Still, such cells are not necessary to generate new iPS cells; they were just convenient. But let's approach the moral issue from another direction.

It turns out that, at least in mice, injecting iPS cells into mouse blastocysts creates chimeric mice. The iPS cells are incorporated into the developing mouse embryo and form part of the tissues and organs of new mouse pups. Researchers at the Whitehead Institute in Massachusetts have gone even further. They created a mouse comprised entirely of iPS cells. The iPS cells form an embryo after they are embedded into tetraploid embryonic cells that grow into a placenta. There is no apparent reason why this technique wouldn't work in humans.

In April, this insight caused The Independent to hyperventilate, "Now we have the technology that can make a cloned child." The Independent quotes stem cell researchers Robert Lanza: "It raises the same issues as reproductive cloning and although the technology for reproductive cloning in humans doesn't exist, with this breakthrough we now have a working technology whereby anyone, young or old, fertile or infertile, straight or gay can pass on their genes to a child by using just a few skin cells." Maybe so, but iPS cell research raises an even more intriguing question.

Back in 1999, during a hearing of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, then-Director of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus made the intriguing observation that "It may eventually become possible to take a cell from any one of our organs and to expose it to the right set of environmental stimuli and to encourage that cell to return to a more primitive stage in the hierarchy of stem cells. Under those conditions, one might in fact generate the cell with as great a potential as a pluripotent cell from a very mature cell." Nine years later Yamanaka proved that Varmus was prophetic.

Varmus continued, "One might even in fact imagine generating a cell that is totipotent [able to develop into a complete organism] in that manner." In other words, researchers may one day take human cells all the way back to the embryonic stage, at which point they could be implanted into a womb, where they could eventually develop into complete human beings. This is the direction in which iPS cell research is heading. So instead of switching off one gene to make sure that an entity is not worthy of their moral concern, pro-lifers may soon have to worry about the opposite, pushing an adult cell so far back in its developmental stage that switching on a single gene will turn it into an embryo.

Advances in stem cell research may be provoking a kind of "God of the Gaps" retreat on the moral status of embryos. People who subscribe to God of the Gaps thinking believe that the hand of God can be seen in those things which science cannot explain. In this case, the closing gaps in the details of molecular biology are forcing pro-lifers into an uncomfortable corner where they have to decide whether or not a cell can be imbued with a soul by turning a single gene on or off.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Collectivist Genes

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Are bullying, haranguing, collectivists just expressing adaptive evolutionary behavior? A new paper in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B suggests that when societies are hostile to individualism, sexual selection may be to blame.

Jumping off a growing body of research linking cultural traits to disease risk, the study’s lead author, University of New Mexico biologist Corey L. Fincher, hypothesizes that collectivist behaviors evolved to protect populations from illness. Both ethnocentricism, which discourages contact with disease-carrying outsiders, and conformity, which encourages the transmission of risk-averse behaviors, can serve as buffers against disease. Individualism may be adaptive in that it encourages innovation, but safe, wary behavior could prove more important where pathogens are prevalent.

Fincher and his three co-authors compared data on individualist vs. collectivist values across the globe with data on historical and contemporary measures of disease transmission. Controlling for other factors that may cause cultures to become more individualistic, such as income and urbanization, the researchers found that “worldwide variation in pathogen prevalence substantially predicted societal tendencies toward individualism/collectivism.” In other words, societies living in regions where infectious diseases historically have posed the biggest threats were most likely to discourage individualism. Societies most open to contact with outsiders live in regions where such contact poses the least threat of infection.

The correlation doesn’t explain how these behaviors are passed along through generations. Transmission may be cultural, as with methods of food preparation that guard against infection, or heritable, as a selection process weeds out anti-collectivist tendencies. Either way, the effect is likely to weaken as medicine reduces the risk of infection—good news for individualists, or anyone who dares stray from the tribe.

'Technology Is at the Center'

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

A Better Way to Fight Crime

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In June 2006, a minor brawl erupted at Ye Olde Six Bells pub in Horley, England. In the aftermath, police arrested Mark Dixie, a chef at the pub, who surprised them by breaking into tears.

He had good reason. As a standard practice in arrests, a DNA swab was taken from him. What the authorities didn't suspect, but he did, is that his DNA would match that of the man who raped and murdered an 18-year-old woman nine months earlier. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison.

This is just one of many cases that have vindicated the use of DNA in cracking crimes. Britain, which now has the world's biggest collection of such profiles, has found it abundantly useful as a law enforcement tool. In a typical month, police get 3,500 matches between samples recovered at crime scenes and DNA profiles in the database.

Now the U.S. government is set to expand its own database to include anyone arrested by federal agents, as well as many foreigners who are detained for one reason or another. It will add more than 1 million samples each year, greatly increasing the chances of getting "cold hits" from crime scenes.

But the expansion alarms some civil liberties advocates, who think it is dangerous to include people who may be innocent. They would prefer to see the files limited to those who have already been convicted of crimes. By that logic, we would throw out the fingerprints of anyone who is arrested but never prosecuted. In reality, we don't. Why? Not because we impute guilt to anyone who is arrested, but because a bigger database is more helpful in solving crimes than a smaller one. And because the only people who stand to be implicated by such information are those who are guilty of later crimes.

We could "protect" innocent arrestees by discarding such helpful identifying information. But we have reached the conclusion that the potential value of preserving it outweighs any burden it places on those who were wrongly arrested.

In some instances, the database can be a boon to the innocent. In 2004, when Chester Turner was implicated in a string of Los Angeles murders through DNA analysis, a man wrongly convicted for three of them was freed from prison.

Opponents of the new system fear that information from the federal bank may someday be used for purposes other than law enforcement—say, screening insurance applicants for certain diseases. But this is a weak excuse for rejecting the administration's proposal.

In the first place, the potential uses of the DNA information kept in databases have been greatly exaggerated. "The profile's not useful for anything much other than identification," says David Kaye, a law and life sciences professor at Arizona State University. "The 'medical' information is, and is likely to remain, no more significant than, say, a blood type."

The actual DNA swabs tell far more. But those are not what goes into the database. The privacy concern is an argument for getting rid of the original samples—not for getting rid of the identifying markers they yield.
Besides, the obvious way to address potential abuses of useful information is by enforcing appropriate rules.

The government might do something alarming with the existing fingerprint files—such as require employers to cross-check prints from all private-sector job applicants. But you don't need to throw out the fingerprints of anyone not convicted to prevent such misuse, as we have found. You can prevent it by not allowing it.

In the case of the DNA database, the looming imposition on the guiltless is minimal. Under the proposed policy, when someone is arrested or detained, his DNA will be taken and a profile included in the federal collection. If he is not convicted, though, that profile will be expunged on his request.

The American Civil Liberties Union thinks the removal should occur automatically. But if keeping the profile is of no concern to the innocent person in question, it's hard to see why it should be of concern to the rest of us. Those who consider it an intolerable invasion of privacy, after all, will avoid it. Those who couldn't care less won't.

DNA analysis is one of the most valuable instruments ever devised for snaring the guilty and exonerating the innocent. This expansion will make it even more potent.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Flunk This Movie!

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

"This is not a religious argument," asserts Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman in conservative Hollywood gadfly Ben Stein's new anti-science propaganda film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie opens this Friday in 1,100 theaters, the largest theatrical release ever for a documentary, according to Expelled's producers.

The movie's basic point? To quote a transcript from a Rush Limbaugh show posted to the movie's offical website: "Darwinism has taken root, taken hold at every major intellectual institution around the world in Western Society, from Great Britain to the United States, you name it. Darwinism, of course, does not permit for the existence of a supreme being, a higher power, or a God."

Yet despite its topic, the film is entirely free of scientific content—no scientific evidence against biological evolution and none for "intelligent design" (ID) theory is given. Which makes sense because biological evolution is amply supported by evidence from the fossil record, molecular biology, and morphology. For example, the younger the rocks in which fossils are found, the more closely they resemble species alive today, and the older the rocks, the less resemblance there is. In addition, molecular biology confirms that the more distantly related the fossil record suggests species lineages are, the more their genes differ.

Instead of evaluating this evidence, Stein spends most of the movie asking various proponents of evolutionary theory, including Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, Michael Ruse, and Daniel Dennett, for their religious views. Neither the producers nor Stein understand that offering critiques of a theory with which they disagree is not the same as proving their own theory.

Stein and the film's producers maintain that belief in evolutionary biology makes societies more likely to succumb to totalitarianism. The flick is replete with grim black-and-white shots of Soviet armies, Nazi thugs, Stalin, Hitler, and concentration camps. The filmmakers portray opposition to teaching ID in universities and public schools as a threat to freedom on a par with Communist and Nazi repression. But ID proponents in the academy are not being dragged off to concentration camps by goose-stepping Darwinist thugs—the worst thing they suffer is the loss of their jobs. That's not fun, but it's not the gas chamber either.

This silly, duplicitous film features one associate after another of the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based "think tank" that has been at the forefront of campaign to smuggle intelligent design into science classrooms and public discourse. This campaign was outlined in the Discovery Institute's infamous "Wedge Strategy" document in 1998. That document begins with the sentence, "The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built." The Wedge document goes on to complain: "Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science."

The Wedge document makes it crystal clear what comes first for intelligent designers, and it isn't evidence. Under activities to popularize intelligent design, the Wedge document mentions "documentaries and other media productions." Expelled is just part of that propaganda strategy.

The film is being bankrolled by Walt Ruloff, a Christian evangelical software millionaire. A resident of Vancouver, British Columbia, Ruloff hooked up with another Expelled producer, Logan Craft, when Craft was studying with evangelical theologian J.I. Packer at Regent College in Vancouver. Ruloff claims that he was shocked when one of the leading genomic researchers in the U.S. told him that as much 30 percent of research in his field is never published because it points toward intelligent design theory. Just how this much research is hidden from view goes unexplained.

The film begins with moody shots of Ben Stein backstage before he addresses an unidentified audience on the alleged suppression of scientific research in the name of Darwinian orthodoxy. Stein stalks onstage and declares that freedom is the essence of America. So far, so good. Then he muses, What if our freedom was taken away? In fact, Stein asserts that this is already happening. We are losing our freedom in one of the most important sectors of our society—science.

As evidence of this loss of freedom, Stein trots out a small parade of intelligent design martyrs. Let's look at a few cases. In 2004, Richard Sternberg, who was editor of the scientific journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, published an article by Stephen Meyer arguing that the "Cambrian explosion" 570 to 530 million years ago in which most of the body types of animals developed was evidence for intelligent design. Meyer was then a professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University where all "trustees, officers, members of the faculty or of the staff, must believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments; that man was directly created by God."

Sternberg was serving on the editorial board of the Baraminology Study Group, a group of young-earth creationists. Baraminology is the study of biblical animal "kinds." Sternberg argued that he was a friendly outsider advising them against their young-earth views. Meyer is now the head of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and Sternberg is a signatory of the Discovery Institute's A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.

Many of Sternberg's colleagues reacted with dismay and the journal retracted Meyer's article. In the film, Sternberg says he lost his office at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, was pressured to resign, and had his religious and political beliefs questioned. Yet, he still has office space in the Museum and has been reappointed for three more years. To be sure, probably some of his colleagues are unhappy with him and don't want to hang out with him anymore. This is far cry from the concentration camps, or what Stalin did to proponents of evolutionary biology in the name of Lysenkoism.

In another case of alleged persecution, George Mason University (GMU) did not renew a teaching contract with Caroline Crocker, an adjunct biology lecturer who believes in ID. She says that she only wanted to teach students to question scientific orthodoxies. "I was only trying to teach what the university stands for—academic freedom," she says in the Stein's film. Since GMU let her go, she says that she can no longer find work. In the film, Crocker insists, "I did not teach creationism." Interestingly, Crocker apparently delivered the same offending lecture at a local community college later. It didn't turn out to be a "balanced" presentation of evidence for and against biological evolution. Why not? "There really is not a lot of evidence for evolution," Crocker said.

Assistant professor of astronomy and ID proponent Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure at Iowa State University in 2007. In 2004, Gonzalez was coauthor, with theologian and Discovery Institute fellow Jay Richards, of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery. The publisher's press release claims that the authors "demonstrate that our planet is exquisitely fit not only to support life, but also gives us the best view of the universe, as if Earth—and the universe itself—were designed both for life and for scientific discovery." Gonzalez is arguing that the Earth is precisely positioned to enable researchers like him to make scientific measurements. But is this so? An Iowa State colleague, associate professor of religious studies Hector Avalos, disagrees and neatly skewers this conceit. To wit:

This rationale is analogous to a plumber arguing that if our planet had not been positioned precisely where it is, then he might not be able to do his work as a plumber. Lead pipes might melt if the Sun were much closer. And, if our planet were any farther from the Sun, it might be so frozen that plumbers might not exist at all. Therefore, plumbing must have been the reason that our planet was located where it is.

Did Gonzalez fail to get tenure because of his ID views? Although the university denies it, my guess is probably yes. Why? On the evidence of The Privileged Planet, Guillermo's colleagues could reasonably worry that his ID views weren't likely to lead to fruitful research results. Gonzalez was not thrown into a concentration camp for his views. He just didn't get tenure.

The most egregious part of the film is the attempt to link evolutionary biology with Communism and Nazism. The claim that Communism was motivated by Darwin is just plain silly. Official Soviet biological doctrine was Lysenkoism, which was opposed to the findings of the modern synthesis of genetics and evolutionary biology. In fact, evolutionary biologists and geneticists were denounced as "Trotskyite agents of international fascism" and actually thrown into the Gulag for their scientific sins.

As for Nazism, the film interviews mathematician and Discovery Institute fellow David Berlinski who says, "Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism, but I think it was a necessary one." To visually illustrate the alleged totalitarian temptations of evolutionary biology, Stein wanders through the Nazi death camp at Dachau. Berlinski and other Discovery Institute denizens are basically claiming that scientific materialism undermines the notion that human beings occupy a special place in the universe. If humans aren't special, goes this line of thinking, then morals don't apply. This is a variation of the adage, "If god is dead, then everything is permitted."

Of course, this overlooks the fact that people down through the millennia have found all sorts of justifications for why they are permitted to murder each other, including plunder, tribal competition, and, yes, religion. Meanwhile, insights from evolutionary psychology are helping us to better understand how our in-group/out-group dynamics contribute to our disturbing capacity for racism, xenophobia, genocide, and warfare. Evolutionary psychology is also offering new ideas about how human morality developed, including our capacities for cooperation, love, and tolerance.

Near the end of the film, Stein asks Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and arguably the best-known living evolutionary biologist on the planet, if he could think of any circumstances under which intelligent design might have occurred. Incautiously, Dawkins brings up the idea that aliens might have seeded life on earth; so-called directed panspermia. This idea was suggested by biologists Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel back in the 1970s. In the film, Stein acts like this a great "gotcha" and is the silliest thing he's ever heard. Of course, the irony is that this is precisely what proponents of intelligent design are claiming—that a higher intelligence created life on earth. Only, they don't want that higher intelligence to be a race of purple space squids. (By the way, Dawkins says that he is not a proponent of directed panspermia.)

The film's close returns to Stein's speech in which he declares, "There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can't possibly touch a higher power." Earlier in the film, Warwick University "science studies" sociologist Steve Fuller archly poses the question: Which comes first, worldview or evidence? Fuller aims his question at the proponents of evolutionary biology. However, as this dreary film itself makes it painfully clear, the question is far more relevant to the supporters of intelligent design theory.

If ID is all worldview and no evidence, here's something else to ponder. At an April 15 press conference for bloggers held at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., the movie's producers said that they plan to use the movie as part of a campaign to roll out legislation in states—so-called "freedom bills"—that would forbid anyone from "punishing" teachers and professors who question "Darwinism." Walt Ruloff noted that the science standards of about 26 states are currently in play and that Florida was likely to pass such a "freedom bill."

Asked if the movie's makers expected any friendly interest from scientific journals, Ruloff noted that Scientific American had savaged Expelled, adding, "I would expect that any other 'science rag' would do exactly the same thing."

"What's happening here is politics," lamented the film's star, Ben Stein, at Heritage. "Politics in the halls of science and that needs to be stopped."

I couldn't agree more.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Is Suppressing Scientific Research Sinful?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

A couple of weeks ago, the Vatican denounced "experiments [and] genetic manipulation" as "violations of certain fundamental rights of human nature." Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican body which oversees confessions and absolutions, told the London Times, "You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbour's wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos." So what kinds of genetic manipulation might earn researchers consignment to the flames of Hell should they die unshriven?

First, the Vatican has not spoken with clarity on the issue of genetically improving crops. Back in 2003, the London Times reported that the Vatican would soon come out in favor of biotech crops as part of the solution for world starvation and malnutrition. A year later, a message from Pope John Paul II expressed reservations about biotech crops. Last year, Filipino Archbishop Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales warned that "genetically modified crops and food products could be very harmful to the environment and to human beings." The Archbishop is factually wrong about the alleged dangers of current biotech crops. What are the divine penalties for the sin of scientific ignorance?

The Roman Catholic and generally free market think tank, the Acton Institute, notes that some religious thinkers believe that it might be all right with God for us to modify plants, but not animals. The distinction is based upon the idea that while God commanded Noah to save animal lineages, the Almighty said nothing about preserving plants on the Ark. As evangelical biologist Calvin Dewitt explains, "These lineages are creations of the Creator, and they are... gifts to the whole of creation."

However, the Creator doesn't seem to be much of a steward of His Creation, since an estimated 99.9 percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct. And of course, argument against genetically modifying animals overlooks the fact that the genetic lineages of all domesticated animals have been dramatically modified by people over the millennia. Perhaps the souls of some of our ancestors are roasting in the infernal abyss for the sin of turning wolves into dogs and aurochs into Holsteins.

Of course, modern scientists are constantly tampering with the genetic make-up of animals. Just this week, researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York announced that they had used embryonic stem cells to cure Parkinson's disease in mice. The researchers, using a technique called nuclear transfer, isolated the nuclei from skin cells from the tails of mice that suffered from Parkinson's disease and installed them in mouse eggs that had been stripped of their nuclei. These eggs started growing into embryos that were genetic clones of the mice from which the skin cells were taken. The researchers then derived stem cells that were genetically matched to each individual mouse and in turn transformed the stem cells into dopamine producing neurons. These genetically matched neurons were injected into the brains of the mice.

The treatment worked. These perfect genetic cellular transplants basically cured the mice. As a control the researchers treated other mice with neurons derived from embryonic stem cells that were not genetically matched to each individual mouse. Those mice fared worse. This work is aimed at figuring out eventual treatments for the 1.5 million Americans who suffer from Parkinson's disease. Can research on mice designed to heal sick people really count as sinful genetic manipulation?

Also this week religious controversy broke out in Britain over new legislation that would allow researchers to combine abundant eggs from animals like cows and rabbits with human nuclei as way to produce stem cells. The BBC reported that Cardinal Keith O'Brien used his Easter sermon to condemn the bill as a "monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life." In contrast, some 200 British medical charities signed a letter urging Parliament to pass the legislation. "The bill will allow new avenues of scientific inquiry to be pursued which could greatly increase our understanding of serious medical conditions affecting millions of people throughout the UK," declared the charities.

Roman Catholic bioethicist Michael Cook, who also opposes the combining human and animal genes, asserts, "To envelop all that makes us human, our genetic inheritance, in an animal carapace is creepy and repugnant." I wonder how "creepy and repugnant" Cook would find the fact that out of the 23,000 genes that comprise the human genome as few as 50 to 100 genes do not have counterparts in other animals. Our genetic make-up has come down to us through the animal carapaces of our evolutionary forebears. Of course, while our genes are very similar to animal genes, it is differential regulation of those genes that accounts for much of what makes us distinctively human.

O'Brien and Cook clearly believe that in some sense the human genome is sacrosanct. But surely it is morally laudable to insert the human insulin gene into bacteria to produce a better medicine for 14 million diabetic Americans. Or what about cows with human genes to produce human antibodies to fight disease? Human skin color genes in fish? Human color vision genes in mice? I suspect that Cardinal O'Brien and Cook do not think such manipulations of single human genes are monstrous or creepy. It is true that the proposed human animal cybrids would contain mostly human genes, but researchers have no intention of creating cow/human or rabbit/human babies. So perhaps it is the quantity of human genes involved in experiments that provoke accusations of monstrous violations of human dignity. That doesn't seem to be the case.

For example, a number of prominent Roman Catholic thinkers recently endorsed a proposal by Stanford University bioethicist William Hurlbut to create human stem cells through altered nuclear transfer. The technique is essentially the same as regular nuclear transfer except that it uses RNA interference to disable a single crucial gene so that the stem cells cannot grow into a fully developed embryo. In altered nuclear transfer all of the genes involved are human, even the one that has been deliberately broken. But doesn't altered nuclear transfer circle us back to Bishop Girotti's denunciations? The technique could be interpreted as "genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos."

Finally, any genetic manipulations that aim to create human beings with diminished mental and physical capacities must be fiercely and relentlessly opposed. On the other hand, research whose goal is to reduce human suffering and increase our capacities should be vigorously encouraged.

In tracing these theologico-biotech controversies, many contemporary thinkers and leaders in the Roman Catholic Church appear to be haunted by the fear that scientific research will transgress God's will. It's as though they still find some wisdom in the old adage, "If God had meant for people to fly, He would have given them wings." But it could also be the case that "if God hadn't meant for people to fly, then He wouldn't have given them the brains to figure out how to do it." Finally, if the Vatican is looking for new sins, perhaps it would consider adding attempts to block important scientific research to the list.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

No 21st Century Big Chill

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Humanity will soon experience a "demographic winter." So claims a new documentary that premiered at the conservative Heritage Foundation last month. The demographic winter is supposed to result from dramatically falling global fertility rates. If current fertility trends continue, world population will top out around 2050 at 8 billion and began to decline back to 6 billion by 2100.

The documentary asserts that falling fertility rates threaten to have "catastrophic social and economic consequences." Among the dire consequences are contracting economies and social welfare systems overburdened by pensioners. The documentarians argue that vital youngsters keep economic growth humming and enable them to support ailing oldsters. The film's analysis relies implicitly on life cycle consumption economics, which suggests that young workers need to buy (and produce) all of the things of the good life.

Thus the demand for housing, cars, furniture, clothing, education, just about everything burgeons as young workers demand more goods and services. Consumption over a person's life cycle typically peaks at around age 50—by then people have their houses, cars, and so forth. Demographic Winter claims that if the merry-go-round of generational consumption stops, so too will economic growth. Jobs will disappear, fewer taxes will be collected, and improvident and childless old folks will be left to fend for themselves amidst the economic rubble.

Is the assertion that a rising population produces a robust economy correct? There are reasons to doubt it. Economic demographers note that in the 20th century, economic growth has been strongest in those countries that have undergone the "demographic transition" from high to low rates of mortality and fertility. Brown University economist Oded Galor finds that when a country undergoes the demographic transition, its economic growth generally accelerates. Having fewer children means that people have more resources to invest in themselves and their children which improves human capital. Evidence suggests that countries with high population growth rates experienced relatively lower economic growth rates in the 20th century. So there doesn't appear to be any iron law that says that sheer population growth is necessary to fuel economic growth.

The proponents of demographic winter agree that reducing the number of children dependent upon each worker does boost economic growth, but only temporarily. Eventually, the number of elderly dependent upon each worker begins to rise. Then econosclerosis will set in as resources are diverted from productive activities to support the consumption of the elderly. But it is not at all likely that older people in the future will dutifully follow the life-cycle consumption patterns of the past.

As we've seen, people do not get rich simply because they live in countries that have more workers. People get rich because they live in countries in which workers become increasingly more productive. Higher productivity means that workers produce more output per hour.. Ever increasing productivity results from a positive feedback loop of human capital (education and effective social institutions) combined with constantly improving physical capital. Rising productivity is what supplies the modern world with the plethora of goods and services that people in developed countries enjoy.

The same positive feedback loop is improving medical technologies that are already lengthening healthy lifespans. In 1935, the average 65 year-old could expect another 9 years of active life without suffering a major disability. By 2015 it will be 17 years. This trend will enable increasing numbers of older people to remain longer in the workforce producing more than they consume. Already the percentage of Americans between ages 65 and 74 who are still working rose from 20 percent in 2000 to 23 percent today.

Besides being physically healthier, advances such as memory pills and personal robots will help older people to maintain and enhance their mental acuity. Even more tantalizing is the possibility that some time in this century anti-aging research could achieve actuarial escape velocity that would allow people to have indefinitely long healthy and productive lives. This means that instead of peaking, people's life cycle consumption (and production) will stretch into an open-ended future driving economic growth forward.

Finally, will societies filled with older people become more set in their ways, and less open to new ideas and innovation? No. In fact, a recent study found that people become more tolerant and politically liberal as they age. If the world somehow drifts into a demographic winter of catastrophic proportions, it won't be because of a lack of children, it will be because of a lack of imagination.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Stuff I've Been Meaning to Blog

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:26:00 EST

From Nicholson Baker, one of the best essays I've read about Wikipedia.

Wired on the autistic pride movement.

A sequel to Stop Snitching.

Plagiarism in the world of online dating.

"Kremlin hawks feed conspiracy theories with 3,200 white mice."

Shouting "Screw You" At Prozac

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:35:00 EST

Found via Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly, an interesting new metastudy written up in the UK Guardian that casts doubt on the effectiveness of such SSRIs and SSNIs commonly prescribed for depression as Prozac and Effexor.

An excerpt from the Guardian account:

The study examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. The trials compared the effect on patients taking the drugs with those given a placebo or sugar pill.
When all the data was pulled together, it appeared that patients had improved - but those on placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs.
The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, according to the authors - Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada. But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better.
"Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients, unless alternative treatments have failed," says Kirsch.
The paper, published today in the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine, is likely to have a significant impact on the prescribing of the drugs.
.........
The pattern they saw from the trial results of fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Seroxat), venlafaxine (Effexor) and nefazodone (Serzone) was consistent. "Using complete data sets (including unpublished data) and a substantially larger data set of this type than has been previously reported, we find the overall effect of new-generation antidepressant medication is below recommended criteria for clinical significance," they write.

From my own perspective on the rolling juggernaut of psychatric medicine, I somehow doubt the optimistic "likely to have a significant impact" bit. Especially given Kevin Drum's observation on how little play this has gotten in American media, which still seems to be the case.

Drum's comment thread is very interesting and worth at least skimming for those who care about this topic. Lots of people jousting with the results, some of them of the level of intellectual sophistication of those who note that, damn, that horoscope that day really described exactly what I was going through; others raise the notion that the study might be misleading for either conflating some drugs that work with others and dragging down the working drugs average, or for mixing subjects who really are depressed with a bevy of people to whom the drugs were misprescribed and thus don't work.

The full study, from the open-access Public Library of Science.

Ronald Bailey wrote back in July 2007 for reason on the fascinating world of public access open source scientific journals such as Public Library of Science.

This July 2007 reason feature by me touches on some of the things that psychiatric medical science can't quite tell us.

And see this July 2000 reason interview with psychiatric critic Thomas Szasz, conducted by Jacob Sullum.

All About Ron Bailey

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 06:28:00 EST

The latest issue of DoubleThink, the magazine of America's Future Foundation, has an in-depth and very interesting story about reason's own science correspondent, Ronald Bailey, and why he changed his position on anthropogenic global warming (which, in my view, is testament to Bailey's dedication to going where the facts lead; as I say in the article, Ron Bailey is by far the most scrupulously honest and intellectually serious science writer I know). Here's an early snippet:

A socialist when he went to college in the early 1970s, Bailey's undergraduate years happened to coincide with a boom in books warning of a coming environmental apocalypse. In just a few years, natural resources would run out. Oil reserves would dry up. The air and rivers would turn toxic. Overpopulation would lead to famine and disease. To Bailey's college professors, it was the gospel truth.
Meanwhile the young socialist's idealism led him, ironically enough, towards libertarianism.
"I became a libertarian, politically speaking because—and I know this is going to sound sanctimonious but it is literally true—if you are really concerned about the poor people then you have to pick the system that in fact helps poor people. And the only one that has done that is democratic capitalism, period," he says during a long interview at his Dupont Circle apartment.

The whole article, which delves into Bailey's reasons for changing his position on global warming and the reception of that switch within the broadly defined free-market movement, is well worth reading. Check it out here.

And check out the fantastic panel on "Global Warming: Risks and Consequences" that we hosted at last fall's Reason in DC conference. Moderated by reason's Matt Welch, and featuring economist Lynne Kiesling, Competitive Enterprise Institute's Fred Smith, and Bailey himself, it's well worth watching over at reason.tv. Click below to get started.

Neither Gods Nor Goo

info@reason.com (Todd Seavey) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

By the middle of the century, the inventor Ray Kurzweil suggests in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, human beings will live in perpetual clouds of nanobots, molecule-sized robots that spend each moment altering our micro-environments to our precise preferences. Over the longer term, he imagines that nanotechnology—the manipulation of matter at the molecular level—will let us change our shape and appearance, become immortal, and transfer our minds with ease between far-flung planets.

By contrast, the thriller writer Michael Crichton describes nanobots running amok in his 2002 novel Prey. With his signature mix of tech savvy and paranoia, Crichton imagines the tiny automatons forming “nanoswarms,” clouds that visually mimic human beings in order to infiltrate and destroy us—sort of microscopic, sentient super-kudzu.

Both our hopes and fears regarding nanotechnology have been extreme from the beginning, if we take as the beginning K. Eric Drexler’s 1986 book Engines of Creation. Drexler, an engineer, described nanotech as the ultimate fulfillment of humanity’s dynamic, self-transforming tendencies: the ability to create whatever we want, whenever we want it, combined with an imperative to take this godlike new power to the stars and turn the universe into our playground. Drexler also described the dark twin of this vision: the “gray goo” scenario. Self-replicating nanobots, which proliferate by turning surrounding matter into copies of themselves, would go out of control, turning the entire Earth into themselves—the most homogeneous imaginable version of the apocalypse. In the words of a technophilic but precaution-prone acquaintance of mine, a computer programmer who has his wristwatch set to alert him if a tsunami approaches Manhattan: “The gray goo scenario should at least give one pause.”

Such disaster fears are already fueling calls for regulation, even with the technology barely out of the cradle. Nanotech-related products will soon account for $2.6 trillion in sales each year, according to a London School of Business/Rice University study. The current applications are concentrated in products that benefit from highly efficient filtering or surface-application processes, such as microchips, car wax, and sunscreen. But down the road, the likely applications include molecule-perfect wound-healing, flawless cleaning processes, quantum computing, far easier bioengineering, much more efficient photon and electrical transfer, and much more. In a June 2007 press release, Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, noted that nanotechnology “promises to be the most important innovation since electricity and the internal combustion engine.” At the same time, it called for more testing and oversight, warning that some nanotech applications “might pose substantial risks to human health and the environment.”

Although Consumers Union concedes that “no confirmed cases of harm to humans from manufactured nanoparticles have been reported,” it adds that “there is cause for concern based on several worrisome findings from the limited laboratory and animal research so far.” It worries that particles that are nontoxic at normal sizes may become toxic when nanosized; that these nanoparticles, which are already present in cosmetics and food, can more easily “enter the body and its vital organs, including the brain,” than normal particles; and that nanomaterials will linger longer in the environment. All of this really comes down to pointing out that some particles are smaller than others. Size is not a reliable indicator of potential harm to human beings, and nature itself is filled with nanoparticles. But the default assumption of danger from the new is palpable.

Anti-nanotech sentiment has not been restricted to Consumers Union’s relatively short list of concerns. In France, groups of hundreds of protesters have rallied against even such benign manifestations of the technology as the carbon nanotubules that allow Parkinson’s sufferers to stop tremors by directing medicine to their own brains. In England members of a group called THRONG (The Heavenly Righteous Opposed to Nanotech Greed) have disrupted nanotech business conferences dressed as angels. In 2005 naked protesters appeared in front of an Eddie Bauer store in Chicago to condemn one of the more visible uses of nanotech: stain-resistant pants.

These nanopants employ billions of tiny whiskers to create a layer of air above the rest of the fabric, causing liquids to roll off easily. It’s not quite what Kurzweil and Crichton had in mind, nor is it “little robots in your pants,” as CNN put it. But nanotechnology arguably embraces any item that incorporates engineering at the molecular level, including mundane products like this one.

Just as the nano label can be broadly applied to products for branding and attention-grabbing purposes, so too can critics use the label to condemn barely related developments by linking them to the (still hypothetical) problems of nanopollution and gray goo. But there’s a danger in thinking of nanotech only in god-or-goo terms. People at both extremes of the controversy fail to appreciate the humble, incremental, yet encouraging progress that nanotech researchers are making. And focusing on dramatic visions of nanotech heaven or hell may foster restrictions that delay or block innovations that can extend and improve our lives.

In a Small Country
To get a look at some of the real nanotech re-search, neither divine nor gooey, I went on a junket to one nanotech hotspot, visiting researchers in Glasgow, Dundee, and Edinburgh. (Scottish Enterprise, a public-private economic development agency that promotes international awareness of such researchers and other Scottish ventures, paid for the trip.) I also made a quick visit to the Edinburgh grave of Adam Smith, a reminder that the Scots are proudly, even pugnaciously, entrepreneurial and inventive—“punching above our weight,” as many people in that nation of only 5 million like to put it before rattling off a list of the famous inventors who have come from Scotland.

One of those famous Scots was the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Today, thanks to nanotech, one of his countrymen may be on the verge of creating a workable version of a system that Maxwell first imagined. “It’s a little bit frustrating when people talk about nanobots and gray goo, because it’s not as exciting as what we’re really going to be able to do,” says Edinburgh University chemist David A. Leigh. Leigh believes nanotech might allow us to create a system physicists call Maxwell’s Demon. With virtually no expenditure of energy, it could sort all the warmer particles of gas in a chamber to one side and all the cold particles to the other. It would be almost like getting heat from thin air, an immense source of energy at virtually no cost. Maxwell recognized that such a process would border on violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states, in essence, that entropy wins in the end, that things tend not to assume a more complex, orderly form unless energy is added to them. Since filtering—a far cry from robotically conquering the world—is what nanoparticles currently do best, Maxwell’s Demon is not such a far-fetched application.

In the meantime, Leigh contents himself with miracles like making water droplets run uphill, thanks to tiny, twisting “motors” created by simple chemical reactions between a few atoms. Similarly, the Livingston-based company Memsstar is creating more efficient surfaces for industrial coatings and wafers by, for instance, finding ways to keep them dry with microscopic gyroscopes. Leigh recognizes that this is “complete sci-fi stuff,” but he suggests it’s a wonder we haven’t made more use of such processes before. “Nature uses molecular machines to do everything…every single biological process,” he says. “We used controlled molecular motion for nothing. Nature isn’t using it for nothing. When mankind learns to make molecular machines, it’s going to change everything.” He expects that revolution within a decade.

Being able to design surfaces at the molecular level increasingly means being able to alter them on cue at the molecular level. “You can make surfaces that change their properties, so you can drag objects toward you just using light,” says Leigh. “One day, you might walk into your house to find that the kids have made some big mess, and you just turn on some lasers that put everything back in place.” After years of using nanotech for micro-level processes such as more efficiently sorting chemicals, Leigh says, his water droplet stunt “showed that you could use microscopic machines to do things in the real world, the big world.”

The staff of Leigh’s Edinburgh lab, perhaps as a reminder to remain humble, has put up a poster of actor/singer David Hasselhoff that reads, “ ‘I tried to save the world and I forgot to save myself.’ —The Hoff.” Leigh is mindful that for all our fantasies of transforming the outside world, our own bodies are an important locus of nanotech potential. “Nature carries cargo throughout the cells using molecular machines,” he says, and that opens up all sorts of possibilities for manipulating the system.

Pumping Ion
Medical uses offer some of the most immediate benefits of improved molecular manipulation. Adam Curtiss, a professor of cell biology at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Cell Engineering, has shown that by restructuring molecules on the surface of stem cells—just altering the roughness of the surface, without making chemical or biological changes—scientists can determine what sort of tissue the cells will grow into. Scott Wilson, a senior project manager with Scottish Enterprise, enthuses that nanotech may soon allow the easy transfer of signals between wires and nerves. That could be useful in many cybernetic and medical devices, such as more versatile prostheses. A step farther removed from the human body, ArrayJet, a company based in the Midlothian town of Dalkeith, is quietly improving the quality of scientists’ microscope slides by using inkjet-like technology to place samples on them with unprecedented accuracy. Meanwhile, the Intermediary Technology Institutes in Glasgow, taking a page from the comic book character Wolverine with his adamantium-plated skeleton, are studying potential reinforcement coatings for osteoporosis-ravaged bones.

In the past people were content simply to imagine such things, says Brendan Casey, chief executive of the Glasgow-based company Kelvin Nanotechnologies, but now “people expect delivery.” Delivery, in the case of Casey’s company, means fabricating materials in an ultramodern, stray-particle-free “clean room” in an old Victorian building at the University of Glasgow (where, Casey says, you become very adept at recognizing people in their jumpsuits and hoods). Sometimes clients know precisely what materials they need, he says, while other times they’ll say, “I’m not even sure if this is possible, but can you do this for me?”

Kelvin Nanotechnologies has been involved in research on so-called “labs on a pill” and “labs on a chip,” tiny chemical diagnostic and medicine-delivery devices within the body that eliminate such macroscopic clumsiness as time-release capsules, lengthy probes, and the need for many medicines to travel through the entire bloodstream. They employ precise fits between target cells and injected substances that Casey describes as “molecular Lego.” The ability to sort substances at the molecular level has applications from water flow in nine-inch pipes to fiber-optic cables. It also will likely mean the ability to regrow injured tendons along grooves created by nanomaterial within the body that melt away after use.

At the University of St. Andrews, the scientists of the Biophotonics Programme, aided by the fact that sufficiently small particles can be manipulated by light, are working with lasers as optical tweezers—the “ultimate sterile instrument,” one researcher calls them. Such instruments could decrease the odds of hospital infections by moving cells and microscopic dollops of medicine without the need for contact between flesh and solid instruments. Sufficiently fine-tuned tweezing, of a sort impossible with larger tools made from metal, may make it possible to deactivate tumors by identifying and destroying their stem cells. St. Andrews physicist Kishan Dholakia has high hopes for using molecular sorting and lasers to make more diagnoses at the chemical level rather than through patient observation.

Rather than looking at macroscopic phenomena, doctors of the future may be able to tag, track, and observe the cellular-level damage that is causing problems, whether it’s a perforated spleen or a misfiring nerve in the lower back. If that sounds too distant and speculative, St. Andrews researchers are already working with light-activated creams that speed wound healing and are less likely to leave scars than conventional bandages and stitches.

Defense of Mechanisms
Wonderful as all this is, it is gradual and piecemeal—not as frightening, terrible, or transformative as either the sci-fi optimists or the doomsaying activists would have it. And that makes it all the more ridiculous that such valuable work might be impeded by regulations or protests motivated by mostly imaginary or far-off scenarios. One reason the Scots are so optimistic about their potential to be big players in nanotech is their belief that wariness about cloning and stem cell research in the U.S. and a general aversion to biotechnology in continental Europe do not bode well for nanotech research in those places.

Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, along with various European green groups, have called for a moratorium on nanotech until it can be proven safe. At their urging, the European Commission last year began to consider whether nanotech fits under existing E.U. safety regulations or must be subjected to special reviews and controls. This sort of legal limbo tends to inhibit investment.

In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regards nanotech as a “combination product” that bridges the divide between pharmaceuticals, biological agents, and medical devices. That means nanotech must be proven safe and effective before approval and may risk being shuttled between different offices, but is not as yet presumed especially dangerous. The FDA concedes it has no regulatory authority over nondrug, nonfood products such as nanotech-incorporating cosmetics, a frequent target of unscientific health scares. It would not be surprising if the FDA eventually invites discussion of whether to expand its regulatory authority to cover nanotech uses currently outside its bailiwick or cedes such regulatory responsibility to other agencies. In 2006 the Berkeley City Council, often in the vanguard of green regulations, became the first U.S. locality to explicitly require tracking of production processes involving nanoparticles.

While nanotech has not yet attracted as much ire as biotech, nanotech researchers are worried by the negative tone of much of the press coverage biotech receives. Shortly before my visit to Scotland, the Roslin Research Institute—a source of Midlothian pride 11 years ago when it unveiled the cloned sheep Dolly—declined to participate in a BBC special about biotech because it was clear the show would take a “Frankenstein unleashed” approach, according to Harry Griffin, the institute’s former science director and CEO. I saw an ad for the broadcast, an episode of the BBC series Animal Farm, while I was in Scotland. In the sort of overt appeal to ignorance that has become the norm in media coverage of biotechnology, it suggested that what viewers don’t know about high-tech animal husbandry should be cause for alarm.

Among those making a conscious effort to stave off similar paranoia about nanotech are Richard Moore and Ottilia Saxl of the Institute of Nanotechnology in Stirling. Moore laments green activists’ “tendency to consider any of the risks and not the benefits.” He likens the recklessness of being overcautious about nanotechnology to regulators’ longtime resistance to portable defibrillators, once feared because of their potential misuse in inexpert hands but now so valued in the U.K. that they are routinely carried on garbage trucks and kept in other widespread places to make their rapid deployment possible. “There’s no medical device that’s free of risk,” he notes.

Suppose “you’ve got a disseminated brain tumor, and you’re offered nanoparticles or you’ve got three weeks to live,” says Saxl. “If you can actually minutely target these nanoparticles at the tumor, what a wonderful thing.” She has helped organize awareness-raising conferences on “bioinspired nanotechnologies” and nanotech’s environmental benefits (such as radically more efficient oil spill cleanups) because the sense that nanotech is “unnatural” could make it the next target of green or Luddite revulsion. “Lipids and other natural substances can be called nanoparticles,” she notes, “but companies didn’t want to call their work nanotechnology.”

Moore adds that people tend to assume that “natural” things are safe and that the products of industry are automatically a cause for concern. “We’re talking about manmade nanoparticles,” he says, “but we’ve had natural nanoparticles for centuries”—from volcanoes and other natural sources, spewed far and wide—with little concern except among those directly in the blast zone.

No Pants, No Implants
In the U.S., despite our flirtation with paranoia about biotech and our routine panics over pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals, our resilient gee-whiz attitude toward machines may yet make our country a haven for unbounded nanotech. But we will have to be watchful of those who seek to smother it as a potential monster long before it has had a chance to yield anything remotely resembling the dreams of the optimists or the nightmares of the detractors.

Given people’s instinctive unease about strange things entering their bodies, we may be better off if the American public becomes enamored of relatively trivial nanotech applications, such as the now-omnipresent stain-resistant pants, before taking much notice of the far more beneficial medical uses. Biotech endures in the U.S. largely because people are accustomed to seeing it used in corn, soybeans, wheat, and other staples of the food supply before opponents had really spread their message. Similarly, we may find that a nation long accustomed to unnaturally clean pants is more receptive to nano-based treatments for cancer and Parkinson’s.

Today’s researchers can only dream of someday possessing the technology to make self-construction by nanobots more efficient than a macroscopic process for making nanobots. Only then could they begin to dream of making the self-construction process propagate itself so rapidly that it constituted a widening menace. Worrying at this stage about the theoretical potential for nanotech to destroy the world—or to transform us into shape-shifting gods—is a bit like worrying that if we engage in laser research we might someday create a laser weapon so powerful that it could destroy the entire planet. There’s a long way between here and there, and those distant prospects should not cause us to hobble people taking tiny steps in far more benign directions.

Todd Seavey edits HealthFactsAndFears.com for the American Council on Science and Health and blogs at ToddSeavey.com.

Are Farmers Stupid, or Deluded, or Both?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Last week, the ideological environmentalist group Friends of the Earth (FOE) launched another attack in its misinformation campaign against biotech crops. FOE's latest salvo is its report "Who Benefits from GM Crops?," issued explicitly to counter the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications' (ISAAA) annual global assessment of biotech crops. FOE claims biotech crops yield less than conventional crops, harm the environment, are technologically stagnant, have done nothing to help poor farmers, and are monopolized by a few giant corporations.

The ISAAA 2007 report on the global status paints a far different picture. The ISAAA notes that farmers around the world continue their rapid adoption of biotech crop varieties. In 2007 the global planting of biotech crops rose to an all time high of 282 million acres, a 12 percent increase over 2006. In addition, the number of farmers choosing to grow biotech crops rose from 10.3 million in 2006 to over 12 million in 2007. The ISAAA report notes that 11 million of the biotech growers are resource poor farmers in developing countries, the majority of whom cultivate insect-resistant cotton. Biotech crops are now planted in 23 countries, and 29 others have approved the import of biotech food and feed.

Let's look at FOE's claims about the alleged faults of biotech crops.

Do biotech crops yield less than conventional crops? FOE is artful in its use of data. Some biotech varieties did initially impose slight yield penalties when compared to conventional varieties. This occurred because breeders improved conventional varieties during the years it took biotech crops to be approved by regulatory agencies. Even so, farmers adopted slightly lower yielding biotech crops because they were cheaper to grow. Biotech crops need fewer pesticide applications and require less plowing. A 2006 study by the British agricutural and food economics consultancy, PG Economics, found no impact from biotech on soy yields while cotton and corn enjoyed higher yields. Even though biotech seeds cost more, overall lower production costs more than make up for the initial expense. The PG Economics report estimates that biotech crops have increased farm incomes by $27 billion since 1996.

Do biotech crops harm the environment? FOE claims that biotech crops use more pesticides than conventional varieties and it identifies crops resistant to the herbicide glyphosate (aka Roundup) as the chief offenders. Farmers kill weeds without harming their biotech crops by spraying with glyphosate. The PG Economics study found that the adoption of biotech crops reduced the use of pesticides since 1996 by 224 million kilograms (493 million pounds), or just about 7 percent.

In addition, herbicide resistant crops enable farmers to switch to no-till farming which dramatically reduces soil erosion. In fact, an August 2007 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that "no-till farming can build soil fertility even with intensive farming methods." However, some regions experienced an increased use of glyphosate as farmers shifted to no-till agriculture. So if glyphosate applications are going up, is it harmful to the environment or human health? Not even the hyper-cautious Pesticide Action Network puts glyphosate on its list of "bad actors." Nor does glyphosate linger in the environment—it is rapidly degraded by soil microbes with a half-life of a week to several months, which is shorter than many of the herbicides that it replaces.

FOE also claims that spraying biotech crops with herbicides is forcing the faster evolution of herbicide resistant superweeds. Just as bacteria eventually evolve to resist antibiotics, so too do weeds evolve to resist herbicides. This process started with the introduction of modern herbicides after World War II, well before the advent of modern biotech varieties. Fortunately, biotechnology is a fine tool for developing new ways to control weeds.

FOE argues that crop biotechnology has stagnated and correctly points out that the vast majority of biotech crop varieties incorporate just two traits: insect resistance and herbicide tolerance. These traits are valuable to farmers though they don't not offer obvious benefits to consumers. If few new biotech crops have yet to make it to the tables of consumers, FOE can take a good bit of the credit. FOE and other ideological environmentalists have campaigned tirelessly to block the development and spread of new beneficial biotech crop traits. FOE does its best to stop biotech in its tracks and then turns around to assert that researchers have developed nothing new.

However, FOE will soon not be able to make that hypocritical claim. Biotech researchers are now incorporating traits for drought resistance, salt tolerance, and one which enables plants to thrive on half a dose of nitrogen fertilizer. Crops with these traits will be particularly valuable for poor farmers in developing countries. Despite FOE's opposition, "Golden Rice," which has been genetically improved to help prevent vitamin A deficiency, which blinds 300,000 to 500,000 poor children each year, should become available by 2011. In addition, researchers are creating crops that provide enhanced nutrition such as tomatoes with increased folate.

Anti-biotech campaigns by activist groups like FOE have succeeded in frightening the governments of many developing countries into banning biotech crops. Nevertheless, biotech crops have been embraced by poor farmers around the world—whenever their governments will let them. The World Banks's World Development Report 2008 (WDR) notes that second-generation biotech crops are now making their way to the market. The WDR reports, "Transgenic rice, eggplant, mustard, cassava, banana, potato, sweet potato, lentil, and lupin have been approved for field testing in one or more countries. Many of those technologies promise substantial benefits to poor producers and consumers."

And finally, FOE complains that biotech seeds are monopolized by a few large companies. Again, FOE activists should look in the mirror to find the culprits behind this industry consolidation. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the number of startup and well-established seed companies that aimed to develop agricultural biotech exploded. But, as we've seen, crop biotech ran into a buzz saw of environmentalist opposition, especially in Europe. Consequently, since biotech seeds are relatively low in value compared to biomedical treatments, small crop biotech companies withered and the industry consolidated into fairly large companies, chiefly Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta and Bayer. St. Louis, Missouri-based Monsanto dominates the market for biotech seed. Some 60 percent of all biotech improved seeds contain traits developed by Monsanto. FOE is certainly responsible, in part, for Monsanto's exploding profits.

Finally, let's revisit the title of FOE's new report: "Who Benefits from GM Crops?" As the ISAAA report clearly shows, millions of farmers around the world think that they benefit from biotech crops. Since this is so, FOE can only conclude that these farmers are either stupid or deluded or both. If biotech crops did not deliver their promised benefits, farmers around the world would not be adopting them at exponential rates. Not even FOE's most determined efforts to spread anti-biotech misinformation can obscure this plain fact.

Disclosure: I used to own some Monsanto shares years ago. It looks as though I should have held onto them. I don't own any other crop biotech stocks. I grew up on a farm and I can tell you that plowing and weeding are not all that much fun.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Science Writer's Motto: We Don't Ask Questions. That Is Not Our Role.

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:12:00 EST

Over at AlterNet, Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project suggests questions reporters should have asked about a recent trio of cannabis studies that generated alarming headlines. In addition to the lung cancer study I discussed the other day, he covers a study of marijuana withdrawal and a study of the association between pot smoking and gum disease that prompted an Australian news site to announce that marijuana "makes teeth fall out." The saddest part of Mirken's article is this response from an American editor to his suggestion that reporters should have asked about the possible influence of confounding variables, such as dental hygiene and use of other drugs, on the link between marijuana and bad gums:

We are dealing with a peer-reviewed journal study, and I don't feel at all comfortable going beyond what they are publishing. That is not our role.

Any journalist who doesn't feel comfortable going beyond what appears in a medical journal to put a study's findings in context and offer caveats where appropriate has no business writing about science. Reporters can't be experts on everything, but they can ask smart questions and seek informed comments regarding a study's potential weaknesses. If news organizations refuse to do so on the grounds that the study was peer reviewed and therefore must be faultless, they might as well just reprint researchers' press releases. Which is pretty much what they do, all too often.

Decrying the "Pursuit of Unnecessary Things"

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin has written a provocative column, "The Endless Pursuit of Unnecessary Things," on his always interesting Dot Earth blog. The title is from a line attributed to Adam Smith: "An investment is by all right-minded people to be commended, because it brings comforts and necessities to the citizenry. But, if continued indefinitely, it will lead to the endless pursuit of unnecessary things." (I confess my usual sources of Smith arcana could not turn up this quotation anywhere online, but no matter, let's assume Smith wrote it.) Revkin uses the quotation as a launch point for a discussion of sustainable development. He sums up his concerns in two questions:

How many people will inhabit Earth in the next few generations? How much stuff—energy, land, water, marine life—will they consume?

Let's look first at Revkin's population concerns. World population increased from about 1.5 billion in 1900 to 6.5 billion today. Along the way, Malthusians predicted that massive famines would occur. They didn't. Food supplies increased faster than population growth and food became cheaper and more abundant. In addition, the amount of land devoted to farming barely changed. As a consequence of growing food security and the spread of improved public health and medical technologies, global human life expectancy more than doubled. Perhaps the Malthusians are at last right? There are good reasons to think not.

Globally fertility rates have been falling since the 1960s. What does this mean for the future? At the Transvision 2007 conference, Jerome Glenn, head of the United Nations' Millenium Project and author of its annual State of the Future report, pointed out something what I've been saying for years—that the U.N.'s low variant trend appears to be the path that world population is following. If that trend holds, Glenn noted, that would mean that world population would grow to about 8 billion in 2050 and start declining to 5.5 billion in 2100. That's a billion fewer people than currently live on the planet.

So if overpopulation isn't the problem, then perhaps overconsumption is? Americans are held up as the poster children of overconsumption and Revkin's column plows that well-worn furrow with its meditation on "the endless pursuit of unnecessary things." But before looking to see what things are unnecessary, let's look at the resource consumption trends that worry Revkin. He quotes long-time limits-to-growth proponent and current President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science John Holdren on the challenges of sustainability. Holdren (along with his colleagues Paul Ehrlich and John Harte) famously lost a bet with economist Julian Simon that prices of a basket of mineral resources valued at $1,000 and chosen by Holdren et al. would increase between 1980 and 1990. They didn't. Holdren and his colleagues mailed a check to Simon for $576.07.

Revkin also mentions land. So what's happened with trends in land usage? A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that "among 50 nations with extensive forests reported in the Food and Agriculture Organization's comprehensive Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005, no nation where annual per capita gross domestic product exceeded $4,600 had a negative rate of growing stock change." Biotech tree plantations would enable humanity to produce all the timber we need on an area roughly 5 percent to 10 percent of the total forest today. This would mean that more of the Earth's forests could remain in their natural states.

Similarly, the amount of land needed to grow enough food to feed a person has plummeted from about one-and-a-quarter acres in 1950 to about half an acre today. Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, finds, "If the world farmer reaches the average yield of today's US corn grower during the next 70 years, ten billion people eating as people now on average do will need only half of today's cropland. The land spared exceeds Amazonia. This will happen if farmers sustain the yearly 2 percent worldwide yield growth of grains achieved since 1960, in other words if social learning continues as usual."

And what about water? Americans are using less water per capita too. Water withdrawals peaked in 1980 and have been flat since. All kinds of innovative techniques for stretching freshwater supplies are being developed. An example of that is the low-cost drip irrigation systems designed by International Development Enterprises that can reduce the cost of irrigation in poor countries from about $6,000 per acre to about $37. In addition, strides are being made in developing seawater agriculture.

Overconsumption of marine resources is an institutional problem—fisheries are open access commons which encourage wanton plundering. If a fisher doesn't take a fish, the next guy will, so fishers have no incentive to leave fish in the sea to replenish themselves. This can be changed via privatization and by the expansion of aquaculture.

What about non-renewable resources? This is a tougher issue. Even as workers in modern societies have shifted from manufacturing to service jobs, the raw stuff used to make goods has not declined. We are, however, getting far more value and services out of the stuff we do use. For example, between 1980 and 2000, the amount of stuff consumed in the European Union 15 was essentially flat while their economies grew by 50 percent. As the poor in the developing world become wealthier, they will want better housing, transport, and modern energy supplies. Can the world's resources meet their desires? Again, there are good reasons to think so.

People do not get rich just by doing more of the same—they get rich by doing things better, cheaper and with less stuff over time. As Stanford University economist Paul Romer argues, humans become wealthier by improving the recipes for how we make stuff. Sand and iron used to be just building materials; now we use them to make computer memory. As described above, there are strongly positive trends in the future supply of renewable resources, such as food, fiber, wood, and so forth.

The vast majority of non-renewable material flows are used in construction (housing and infrastructure) and energy production. There is no likely future shortage of construction materials. In addition, fossil fuels will not run out in the 21st century. However, humanity will either have to figure out how to control the pollution produced by fossil fuels or shift away from them because of their deleterious effects on the environment, including their contribution to man-made global warming. There are good reasons for optimism with regard to pollution control. Air pollution in the U.S. has been declining for decades and even China's notoriously bad air pollution may be decreasing. Supplying adequate clean energy is the central challenge to future human well-being. Fortunately, the ideas for sustainably improving and increasing energy, food, and any other form of industrial production are far from being depleted.

Revkin entertains the suggestion by Boston College sociologist Juliet Schor that we should all relax and stop working so hard and instead "opt for a new economic and social vision based on quality of life, rather than quantity of stuff." Quality of life can have all sorts of dimensions, but one important aspect is increased leisure and access to learning. And that's what people in modern societies have done throughout the last couple of centuries, plus getting all the nifty new stuff.

In a 2005 National Bureau of Economic Research study, economists Jeremy Greenwood and Guillaume Vandenbroucke found, "Over the course of the last century there was a precipitous drop in the average length of the workweek, both in the marketplace and at home. In 1830 the average workweek in the market place was 70 hours. This had plunged to just 41 hours by 2002. At the same time there was a 9-fold gain in real wages." In other words, people in modern societies aren't working harder, they're working better. So what do we do to fill up all those extra hours of leisure? Perhaps we buy "unnecessary things" with which to entertain and enlighten ourselves. And then there is that horrible suspicion that most people actually like to work.

Which bring us to the question: Just what are all those "unnecessary things" that allegedly clog our shopping malls? Which does Revkin think we should want to give up? He mentions not a single product—yet the implication is that the mandarins of good taste and restraint know best what the rest of us really need. Our cellular phones? Our iPods? Our pink sunglasses? Our kids' paint-by-number set? The 246 varieties of dog food and 165 kinds of cat food, and even Valentine gifts for your favorite mutt? Necessity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And in fact, consumers in markets winnow out all kinds of unnecessary things every day.

The Malthusian meme always insists "things just can't go on like this." Of course, if "things can't go on like this," then they don't. Humanity changes course and things get better. At least that has been the story of the last two centuries and the evidence is that it will be the story of the 21st century as well.

Disclosure: I think that the cat toys my wife bought for our two felines are unnecessary. And does she really need that many pairs of black shoes?

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Discuss this story at reason's Hit & Run blog.

Marijuana and Lung Cancer: A Burning Question

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:54:00 EST

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws responds to a recent study linking heavy cannabis use to lung cancer. The study, reported in the European Respiratory Journal, generated headlines like these:

Cannabis Bigger Cancer Risk Than Cigarettes: Study
Smoking One Joint is Equivalent to 20 Cigarettes, Study Says
Single Joint=20 Cigarettes And Huge Lung Cancer Risk: Researchers

But as NORML's Paul Armentano points out, the researchers actually reported that "cannabis smoking (defined as lifetime use of ≥20 joints) was not associated with a significantly increased risk of lung cancer." Only in the group with the highest exposure (more than 10.5 joint-years) was there a statistically significant increase in risk. The lung cancer risk in this group, which included just 16 subjects (14 out of 79 cases and two out of 324 controls), was about six times the risk among nonsmokers, compared to an overall risk ratio of about 7 to 1 for the cigarette smokers in the study. Armentano notes that the findng is at odds with the results of several other much larger epidemiological studies that failed to find clear evidence that smoking pot increases the risk of cancer. He takes a more detailed look at that research here.

As Armentano notes, there is some evidence that cannabinoids help counteract the effects of carcinogens, whereas nicotine may potentiate them. Still, it makes sense that inhaling enough combustion products from any burning organic matter for a long enough period of time could lead to lung cancer. It may just be that pot smokers, who typically smoke far less than cigarette smokers do, are not, by and large, getting a big enough dose. For relatively heavy consumers worried about a possible cancer risk, there are always vaporizers (which heat cannabis to release THC instead of burning it). And brownies.

Are Science Geeks the New Soccer Moms?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 14:37:00 EST

A little science for you on this fine (indeed, Super) Tuesday: The New York Times’ always-correct, always-reliable John Tierney has a great wrap-up on where the candidates stand on various science-related issues.

All the candidates support more R&D (surprise, surprise) and more reliance on biofuels (yes, ethanol’s appeal extends even after the Iowa caucuses). None of the candidates endorse my favorite policy, a carbon tax. Both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama do support another approach favored by economists, a cap-and-trade system. They both also support an array of other subsidies and mandates ( many of which remind me of the boondoggles of the plans in the 1970s and 1980s that were supposed to lead us to “energy independence.”) Mrs. Clinton’s plan calls a doubling of money for basic energy research a $50-billion Strategic Energy Fund financed in part by oil companies. Mr. Obama’s plan calls for $150 billion to be spent over 10 years but doesn’t say how it will be financed.

Mr. McCain, unlike Mr. Romney, explicitly supports a cap-and-trade system to limit emissions. Both of the Republican candidates acknowledge that global warming is a problem but are less specific than the Democrats in saying what they’ll do about it. They do, however, look to decrease carbon dioxide emissions by more reliance on nuclear power, a form of energy that is conspicuously absent in the Democrats’ list of promises.

For more, including health care and InTrade elections futures markets, read the whole thing.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Evolutionary Economics and the Google Theory of Peace

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:34:00 EST

To Suggest That We Can Learn Anything About the Simian Nature from a Study of Man is Sheer Nonsense

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 10:15:00 EST

ScienceDaily summarizes a paper from PNAS:

Socially-learned cultural behaviour thought to be unique to humans is also found among chimpanzees colonies, scientists at the University of Liverpool have found.

Historically, scientists believed that behavioural differences between colonies of chimpanzees were due to variations in genetics. A team at Liverpool, however, has now discovered that variations in behaviour are down to chimpanzees migrating to other colonies, proving that they build their 'cultures' in a similar way to humans.

The paper itself is available only to PNAS subscribers, but the abstract is open to all.

2007: Insulin Lettuce, Blood-Staunching Bandages, and Glow in the Dark Cats

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 11:56:00 EST

Two geektastic year-end lists from 2007:

Wired lists the Top 10 new organisms (!) of the year. Highlights:

Insulin-producing lettuce
In July, a University of Central Florida researcher announced he had genetically modified lettuce heads that produce insulin. They could be transformed into time-release capsules for people with diabetes, to help them maintain blood-sugar levels without regular injections.
Glow-in-the-dark cats
Photographs of cats genetically engineered by South Korean scientists to glow red when exposed to UV light made headlines around the world. What most news stories didn't mention was the reaosn for fluorescent creatures: The animals' glow acts as a "green light" that lets scientists know that their genetic transformations of other, non-glowing genes have worked.
Schizophrenic mice
July's news that Johns Hopkins researchers had created schizophrenic mice was a surprise, even to scientists who regularly create genetically altered mice to model human diseases. In recent years, we've seen very big mice, fearless mice, Rain Man mice and a host of others. But the schizophrenic experience of hallucinations, delusions of grandeur and paranoia seemed somehow distinctly human. However, scientists recently identified a single gene called DISC1 as a major schizophrenia risk factor, leading to the creation of these mice, which lack the gene. Anatomical examinations revealed similarities between the mice's brains and those of human patients. The mice also revealed behaviors -- trouble finding food, agitation in open fields -- that researchers say parallel human schizophrenic activities.

New Scientist lists the Top 10 inventions of the year:

Blood staunching bandages
Bandages made from about 65% glass fibre and 35% bamboo fibre not only absorb blood, but also stimulate the body's ability to staunch the flow. A popular idea based on clicks alone, but in the comments New Scientist readers merely punned in response. One wrote: "I think dages should be banned. Definitely. Bandages!", while another replied: "Some time ago, I myself made a comment like that on a stricter board than this. I've been banned ages."
Wide-angled gigapixel satellite surveillance
A wide-angle camera that can photograph a 10-kilometre-square area from an altitude of 7.5 kilometres with a resolution better than 50 centimetres per pixel. Such a camera would be able to survey an entire city in one sweep. Perhaps predictably, the discussion focused on whether such a device would be able to see female sunbathers. "I'll bet the NSA has the best collection of unauthorized pinups in the world," mused one reader.

Via KurzweilAI.net