Dean's World

Looks like there are two more moons around Pluto.

I have a rather ambivalent attitude toward the prescription drug industry. Some treat them like Satan's minions on Earth, which is dumb. Many others treat them as Sainted Visionaries giving the world better living through chemistry. I think both views are wrong. I think what they are is large corporations, and thus fundamentally driven by profit and thus amoral. (Not immoral, amoral--there is a distinction.)

I have a similar, if slightly more skeptical, attitude toward the dietary supplement industry. I've long believed that it's probably wise to take vitamin/mineral supplements, in moderate doses, especially if you live a hectic, busy life and don't eat a very balanced diet. I don't believe in megadoses of vitamin C or the supposed miracles of colloidal minerals or shark cartilege or all that stuff. There are a lot of people who are, I think, making too much money peddling modern snake oil in the form of dietary supplements.

Yet I cannot help but notice that the advocates for dietary supplements and certain nutritional therapies raise a very good and very troubling point: drugs can be patented, but most dietary supplements cannot be. Which means that there is very little economic incentive to run in-depth studies of dietary supplements, but huge incentive to run in-depth studies of patentable drugs that you can sell for a fortune.

All of that came to mind when I read this interview with Dr. Jason Theodosakis objecting strenuously to a New England Journal of Medicine paper on combination glucosamine and chondroitin treatments for arthritis. I neither advocate nor disapprove of this treatment, but his objections seemed very troubling, especially in light of the perverse incenetives the market does offer to researchers and physicians these days--and as Freakonomics author Steven Levitt has documented many times, when you have perverse incentives in place it's surprising how often these affect behaviors in ways most people would never expect.

I was also struck by his objection that the abstract to the NEJM paper does not match the data inside the paper. This is quite significant, since it's now so popular to search Medline and to simply look at the abstract and accept that the abstract faithfully reports what's in a paper. The case of Woo Suk Hwang demonstrated this most dramatically, but I've seen it in many other cases.

I have no sweeping conclusion here, it's just that I find it all troubling. It all seems to tie in with Jonathan I. Katz' essay, Don't Become A Scientist! somehow, with a very few at the very top making all the money and glory, with almost no one else able to directly question them without their very tenuous careers being threatened.

Michael Bérubé notes that environmentalists and Christian groups are alarmed that President Bush met and chatted with author Michael Crichton at the White House. I'm not surprised to see some Christian groups unhappy with the President--despite paranoid claims to the contrary, he's no lock-step fundamentalist and never has been--but I'm amused that some people don't like the idea that the President might actually think for himself or question scientific authority. One wonders how unhappy they'd about that if they themselves were dissenters in some area of scientific authority--say, if they had dissented from the eugenics movement of the early 20th century?

Besides, anyone who claims that science should be immune to politics is peddling rank nonsense. For starters, if you know any real working scientists you know that science is often fraught with petty bickering and squabbles, ego clashes, and ruthless competition for grant money--even sabotage and character assassination. In short, science is riddled with politics.

Second, and probably more important: because so much science these days is funded by the U.S. government (i.e. the taxpayers) it is outright obscene to suggest that scientists shouldn't answer to our elected leaders. You do not have a right to demand billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers, then slap a label on your chest and say, "We are scientists! You are not allowed to question us! Just give us your money and accept whatever we tell you!"

If you don't want the dirty, dirty politics in your science, then stop taking the dirty, dirty taxpayer money. Until then, it is entirely appropriate to note that an awful lot of scientists who advocate various theories--including the theory that humans are causing catastrophic global climate change--have a perverse incentive: they're being paid to look for evidence that their theories are correct. They're not getting paid to fail to find any such evidence. In the science of economics, this is what is known as a "perverse incentive," and it's hardly inappropriate to note when this happens, and to ask hard questions about it.

So while scientists are still accepting their paychecks from government-funded agencies, or from universities that depend heavily on government funding, and doing studies based on fat grants handed out by the government, let's have a little less hubris, hmm? We didn't elect you. We did elect the President--for, even if we voted against him, we still had our say in the process.

Our elected officials have not just a right, but a duty to be skeptical on our behalf when dealing with the people whose livelihood depends on our good graces.

Chuck Simmins notes a space of anthrax stories in the news. Without being intentionally rude, I can't get worked up about it. Honestly, I often wonder: do people get freaked out about anthrax because the word "anthrax" sounds so evil, or what? Here's an anthrax fact sheet. The best estimates available suggest there are 20,000 to 100,000 human cases of anthrax every year worldwide, the vast majority of them from highly impoverished people who work with and live amongst goats and certain other animals. And by "live and work amongst," this frequently means "sleeps in the same room with"--yeah, that kind of poverty. And even then, if the animals are given the anthrax vaccine, it's not a big deal.

So the big news is that some guy in the U.S. who imports animal skins--probably goat skins--from third-world countries to make drums got infected. Well that makes perfect sense doesn't it?

Freakin' cool! The exponential growth of human knowledge continues apace...

You know, I'll be shocked if by 2020 we aren't able to repair or replace most severed nerve tissue.

Man, I don't know what's funnier, when Pravda writes about politics or when they write about science:

Meantime, terrible news has been reported. A killer cloud is approaching the Earth. Cambridge astrophysicist Albert Shervinsky said that a dust cloud absorbing everything on its way is approaching Solar System. It is thought to reach the Earth by 2014. According to Shervinsky NASA keeping back this information fearing disorders.

The cloud of 17 million kilometers in diameter consists of particles that flew out of some black hole close to the Galaxy center. It was thought earlier that black holes only absorb thу substance. But now scientists assume that the holes can also splash out some substance that devours normal matter.

"If the cloud reaches the Earth", the astrophysicist says, "its effect on our planet will be equaled to that of a water spilled on a text written in ink, that eats away the words and turns them into jumble"

Just for kicks I searched the web for anyone associated with Cambridge with the name Shervinsky. Nothing came up but Pravda. Big shock.

(Thanks Bill.)

Update: Breast science! Also, astronomy pr0n!

(h/t Bill & Willem)

Quote:

To make the cable, researchers sandwiched three carbon-fibre composite strings between four sheets of fibreglass tape, creating a mile-long cable about 5 centimetres wide and no thicker than about six sheets of paper.

"For this one, the real critical test was making a string strong enough," says Michael Laine, president of LiftPort. "We made a cable that was stationed by the balloons at a mile high for 6 hours…it was rock solid."

You know this is both funny and interesting: Japanese scienetists have determined there are two kinds of human ear wax, and have isolated the specific alleles that cause them. Moreover, not only does the gene in question associate with the type of earwax you have, but also your tendency to sweat and have body odor.

This is the sort of information about the human animal and genetics that interests me, not because I'm fascinated by ear wax so much as that it's fascinating that we increasingly learn so much about what's controlled by our genes (and, conversely, what is not).

I also have to admit to having a burning curiosity as to what dry ear wax looks like. I know, that's gross--I'd probably make a good physician or nurse, I don't gross out very easily--and as someone with wet ear wax I find it hard to imagine what the dry stuff must be like.

Good lord: Researchers at Rensslaer Polytechnic have developed a desktop particle accelerator capable of producing fusion at room temperature. No, not for power generation, but for a wide variety of other applications.

Anyone who doubts that human knowledge and technological advancement follows exponential and not linear growth curves has to have blinders on. Room temperature fusion in a desktop device! Now, today, in 2006! Paul Simon didn't know the half of it when he sang, "these are the days of miracle and wonder..."

(Via Gerund.)

James N. Garner has an interesting article describing his concept of the Selfish Biocosm, which as best I can make out is simply stating that intelligence is the main organizing principle of the universe and that both this universe and others will come into existence either because of it, or to inevitably develop it.

As I read it I can't see how it's anything but a recasting of the Strong Anthropic Principle. Some scientists strongly dislike the Strong Anthropic Principle because they think it requires the existence of a God or Gods, but this is just a misunderstanding of the theory. You can invoke a creator or not, the SAP is silent either way. All the SAP says is that the development of intelligent life is as inevitable as the development of atoms, molecules, comets, planets, stars, galaxies, etc. It's a phenomenon that simply will happen as an inevitable result of how the universe is structured. Gardner seems to be saying the same thing, only to be going a little further and positing that intelligence may actually serve a specific purpose within the grand order.

Well, give it a read and tell me what you think.

Here's an interesting page that attempts to debunk the notion that 'Spacetime' is anything other than a convenient mathematical trick, i.e. it's mathematically successful but by definition cannot be an accurate real-world descriptor because if we accept the concepet of spacetime, we must accept that nothing ever moves--as in, ever. He claims that by definition "spacetime" if it were real would mean everything is permanently frozen and unmoving.

I notice that the folks at Slashdot linked this page, somewhat approvingly. But I also note that the page starts with a lot of bold assertions and ad hominem attacks on well-known physicists of great accomplishment, and only then proceeds to sharing its reasoning. That's always a red flag for me--if your reasoning is strong, you don't need to start with snotty attacks on people who disagree with you. I notice that the page also purpports to show well-known physicists and mathematicians who agree that nothing could move if "spacetime" were real, but I notice that the supposed endorsements are pretty short and lack specificity, and that most of the supporting links don't actually work.

I also note that the page is rather short on any competing predictions. A successful theory makes predictions that can be falsified. Are there stronger theories that make more accurate predictions than Einstein's concept of "spacetime," with time being the fourth dimension?

Regardless, the central falsification he purports to share with us is that nothing can move in Spacetime--that, regardless of how useful this mathematical trick is, if it were anything more than a math trick then nothing would ever move, period. Anyone know if that claim's been debunked anywhere? Does Einstein's concept of "spacetime" require that nothing ever moves? It certainly runs counter to all the books on physics I've read (which is quite a few as it happens) but I don't pretend to have the math background to know if he's making this up or not. The other red flags on the page make me skeptical though.

On Power Laws, and how with many social ills, including pollution and homelessness, very tiny minorities can cause enormous damage: Million-Dollar Murray by Malcolm Gladwell.

I suggest reading the whole thing. It will surprise you. Especially the parts about the cars, and the bad cops.

Remember the cool Freedom House analysis stuff I posted yesterday? While I was poring over the data, I kept noticing strange things. Here was one I noticed that just made my jaw drop.

Now remember, they've used the same basic methodology for decades, and the numbers you're looking at here are not things they went back later and filled in. This is what their reports on various countries looked like at the time, and we're just going through a historical record on it.

Also remember, the lower the number the better, and the 4,4 mark is where you meet the minimum threshhold where we say "okay, you're a democracy."

Here's what the Soviet Union looked like in the 1980s and 1990s, starting the year that Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary:

1985: 7,7
1986: 7,7
1987: 7,6
1988: 6,5
1989: 6,5
1990: 5,4
1991: 4,4

The numbers then just stop. There are no more.

People remember the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as the great symbolic moment. But in 1991, when the old guard couldn't stop the democratic process from working anymore, the people looked at each other and asked, "do we still really want this?"

They voted. And with a puff of smoke, the Soviet Union vanished.

What did the old Soviet states look like as of the end of? Well Mother Russia isn't looking hot:

Russia: 6,5

Anyone who trusts Putin's a fool (and yeah that includes our current President).

What about the rest?

Armenia: 5,4
Azerbaijan: 6,5
Belarus: 7,6
Estonia 2005: 1,1
Georgia: 3,3
Kyrgyzstan: 5,4
Latvia: 1,1
Lithuania: 1,1
Moldova: 3,4
Ukraine: 3,2

Then there are those formerly in the Soviet orbit:

Czechoslovakia--defunct:
...Czech Republic: 1,1
...Slovakia: 1,1
Germany (now reunified): 1,1
Mongolia: 2,2< br /> Poland: 1,1

If I've missed any let me know.

That is really all rather remarkable to look at. In 1985, almost every one of those states was rated 7 or 6 at best. Obviously it's not all perfection now, but look at what 20 years brings.

Anyone notice how all this blows away the notion that the Freedom House ratings are somehow "racist?" Yes, they are certainly anti-communist and anti-fascist--well duh.

By the way, the most common complaint about these numbers I've seen is that the numbers do not include economic freedom, and that these are more important than such piffling things as free elections or the right to speak your mind in public.

You might be able to make that point, but you cannot get a strong consensus on what "economic freedom" means. Socialists are convinced that freedom is measured by how much access you have to free health care and other amenities that make your life better and less stressful. Libertarians are convinced that freedom is measured by how little the government intereferes with capitalism.

Which is why the Freedom House data set, at least, mostly avoids the question. Thus an American who wants his country to have national health care, or someone from France who wants his country to loosen its stranglehold on business, can still look at this data objectively. They measure the degree to which people are able to exercise governance through elections, and are otherwise free to speak their minds, write and publish what they will, travel freely, associate freely, and so on.

These numbers do a remarkably good job of that. They also do a good job of making some people look foolish in retrospect. Even Bosnia and Serbia are doing pretty well these days, and if that's not a remarkable statement I don't know what is.

In an earlier discussion (see below), several people scoffed at my notion that there would ever be a market for artificial wombs for human babies. I'm rather astonished that anyone would make this claim. I can refute it with one picture:

(Source)

Really, do I need to say more?

Well I will anyway.

That poor kid's a preemie. Not sure what level of gestation, but I'm guessing somewhere around 28 weeks (someone with more expertise may well correct me).

It's an undeniable fact that some women wind up spontaneously miscarrying, with doctors unable to do anything about it. We're getting better at preventing it, but there are times when nothing will work, and that baby's going to either come out or die--including cases where the mother dies, and the family (including the mother) would want the child to live.

Those incubators, with their oxygen tubes and feeding tubes and temperature-controlled environments, are miraculous. But I suspect that 20 or 30 years hence people will look on them much like we look at a photo like this:

(Source.)

That's an iron lung, and while the kid may be smiling she probably spent her entire life in that contraption, or one very much like it. We still use devices like this but they're very rare. At one time, however, they were almost commonplace:

(Source.)

Now we have better treatments for paralysis, and so such devices are quite rare, if not (quite) gone.

What premature infants go through is pretty awful. The last I checked, 25 weeks of gestation is considered the lowest ethical level at which to try to keep a preemie alive in an incubator, and it carries huge risk of massive complications, including blindness and permanent severe brain damage. For every miracle kid who survives at 25 or 26 weeks okay, there are others who die or have lifelong disabilities. There are significant ethical concerns about efforts to save such preemies, although people try every day.

It doesn't look very comfortable, does it? They're not ready to be out in the world yet. Nowhere near ready to breathe even though we put them on oxygen--their lungs aren't ready. They aren't ready for the feeding tube--their digestive tracts are barely functional. Even their skin isn't ready for exposure to air or regular touching. Twenty years ago these infants were just allowed to die. In some countries with poorer standards of care--including some advanced Western nations--they still are allowed to die.

The notion that there will never be a market for an artificial womb is just silly. If you can come up with a way to remove such a preemie from her mother and put her in a womblike incubator for at least a few extra weeks--weeks that could make the difference between death, lifelong disability, or good health--wouldn't you do it? Well never mind what you'd do: please have no doubt what many people would do.

And once you start doing that, especially once you've gone past the experimental stage and have it working solidly, it's going to get cheaper, more common, and more reliable. Then at some point, the ethical questions it raises vis-a-vis abortion are simply undeniable.

As for those saying that such technology is 50 or 100 years out, I have another photo for you:

Anyone recognize the girl in the middle there, standing between her parents? She was born in 1978. Her name is Louise Brown. Yes, THAT Louise Brown.

1978. That was only 28 years ago. I remember well when her mother was pregnant with her--I was 12 years old--and how many people called her "the test-tube baby." She was right up there with "the boy in the bubble." I also remember how huge objections were raised by people who said the technology was monstrous, unethical, inhuman, unnatural, and against God's will.

Oh yeah, and millions of dollars were spent on getting that first test-tube baby birth. Louise's birth. Many million$. Now the technology is standard medical care in a lot of countries.

Some still say these technologies are monstrous, but most people accept them without much fuss. The researchers who worked on the original technology only spent about 10 years developing it. Now it, and a host of newer fertility-oriented treatments, are orders of magnitude cheaper, more common, and more reliable. They still aren't 100% reliable of course, but they're surprisingly common, with hundreds of thousands of such children born around the world.

Ray Kurzweil often notes that the most common fallacy experts fall for is to assume that growth is linear when it's really exponential. Even in their own field, experts often do this. But in field after field, we double what we know and can do, and halve its price, every few years--sometimes as quickly as every year. Biotechnology is one of the fastest-growing areas of research, and what we can do today compared to what we could do just five or ten years ago is extraordinary.

The last I'd read much about artificial wombs was only a few years ago, wherein Japanese researchers had grown goats (as in "baah-aaah-aah!") in vats. They were getting them to near-viability before having technical problems. You can read about it here. You can find a more up-to-date article on the state of the art in this Popular Science piece (thanks Jason). Now the Japanese researchers have (temporarily I'll bet) given up, but Hung-Ching Liu is still hard at work trying to make a viable artificial womb, and she's showing more success all the time. And her experiments are meant to be an outright replacement for the womb, as a fertility treatment. Indeed, I found this quote telling:

"As Liu pursues the science of hormone levels and gene expression, she too worries about the ineffable. In 2001, after her earliest experiments with human zygotes were publicized, she was inundated with calls from infertile women begging to become test subjects. Overwhelmed by the response and by her own unwonted realization that, as she says, 'this work could have great social impact,' she halted the artificial-womb experiments for a full year, resuming only after reaching certain decisions."

I have no doubt that she'll have this working eventually--if someone else doesn't beat her to it.

Yes, yes, those of you who pooh-pooh this will point to her failures. What you need to acknowledge is her impressive successes, and how much more is learned with each iteration. As the story goes, Thomas Edison tried over a thousand ways to make a light bulb, but when asked if he'd had any failures, he answered, "Not at all. Now, I definitely know more than a thousand ways how not to make a light bulb."

So, to summarize:

1) It's just plain silly to say there's no market for artificial wombs. Talk to either a) infertile women, or b) the parent of a preemie, and you'll know better.

2) While there's no guarantee as to when we'll see this technology, you have only to consider how fast research has come along in recent years, and how huge the pent-up demand is, to realize this is something people want and will likely go to extraordinary lenghts to get.

3) People often assume growth in knowledge is linear when in fact it's geometric. It would shock me if we didn't have artificial wombs working fairly well within a decade or two.

4) Once we have those wombs working well, it's going to fundamentally alter the abortion debate. In ways that neither hard-line pro-choicers nor hard-line pro-lifers are going to be fully comfortable with.

That is all. :-)