-
sponsorship
I'm sitting here with four passports on my desk. They all have photos. The subject of one looks like a 9/11 hijacker. Another looks like a high-school boy delivering pizza. Another looks like a washed-out ex-kid TV star who's been busted for drugs. Another looks like a Latin American child who needs a liver transplant.
The people in the photos are, respectively, me, my wife, my son, and my daughter.
I'm sharing this embarrassing information with you for two reasons. One, because it's already in the possession of the U.S. government and every government that coordinates with ours. And two, because today's news file brings us a story from the Guardian about British plans to scan passengers at airport gates using face-recognition software. The idea is to "improve security and ease congestion."
The scans certainly will improve security. But that's because of a human decision as to how the machines will be programmed. And that decision, in turn, might exacerbate, rather than ease, congestion. To make this kind of technology work, we have to understand that it requires human management and human assistance.
Face-recognition software looks for a match between the passenger at the gate and a stored photo. There are two kinds of photos you can ask the computer to match. One is a collection of bad guys whose pictures the government has stored in a database. The other is the photo stored by the government as the face that goes with the chip in your passport. Let's call the first kind a suspect scan and the second an ID scan.
If we set up the scanner to look for suspect matches and it can't match you to any of the bad guys in the database, you go through. But if we set up the scanner to look for an ID match and it can't match you to your passport photo, you have a problem. The suspect scan puts the burden of matching on the computer. The ID scan puts the burden of matching on you.
My passport photo was taken nine years ago. I had a lot more hair. I wasn't wearing glasses. I looked tanner and stronger. Last month, when I went through airport security, the officer took a good, long look at both me and my passport. She had to look past the changes of nine years and evaluate both images for subtle similarities.
If she'd been a computer, I probably would have flunked that test. Remember, the whole point of using computers to relieve congestion is that they'll scan us and render their decisions more quickly than humans do. My wife might have flunked, too. And even though my kids' photos were taken just a month ago, I can see how the sheer weirdness of staged photography and the randomness of how they looked that day could cause them to be bounced as well.
This is the problem with the British plan. According to Guardian reporter Owen Bowcott, "Unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers' faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports." In other words, it's an ID scan. If the computer can't match you to your ID, you flunk. And there's nobody at the gate to follow up. You have to get in some other line or go through "additional checks."
It's not clear what "additional checks" means. Here's what it should mean: If the computer flunks you, a human being is on hand to give you and your photo a visual scan. Experts point out to Bowcott that current face-recognition software errs strongly on the side of not finding matches. That's fine: The decision to insist on ID matches is a human decision, and it does enhance security. But if you want to ease congestion at the same time, the computer's failure to match you to your photo can't be treated as a conclusion. It has to be treated as an initial sorting process that directs you to old-fashioned human scanners.
"There is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate," Bowcott reports. I'll say. I'm a fan of high-tech security scans, even when they see through your clothes. But technology alone is never enough. The buck still stops with us.
-
sponsorship
Wow. Chastity belts.
Here's the report from Indonesia, courtesy of Paul Watson in Sunday's L.A. Times:
In a bid to prevent any hanky-panky between masseuses and their clients, several massage parlors ... are insisting that the women wear padlocks across the zippers of their work pants. ... [The instigating parlor owner] settled on black pants that zip up at the side, where a padlock is slipped through two cloth loops and snapped shut each time a masseuse meets a client. ... He stores the padlocks and keys in a special box at the cashier's counter. When a customer arrives for a massage, given in a private room behind a curtain, the "cashier calls one masseuse, asks her to prepare things and locks her pants," ... [and] "when the client is done, the masseuse comes to the cashier, and the cashier opens the padlock."
Several other parlor owners have supposedly decided to adopt similar locks. A local official says, "We expect this policy to be enacted as city legislation."
Any time somebody tries to take society back a few centuries, I like to know why. The instigating owner, Franky Setiawan, says he resorted to the belts because men "bombarded" his masseuses with sexual demands, and he wanted the women to feel safe. He says he and other owners have been looking for ways "to handle some naughty guests."
Ah. The old feminine-protection rationale.
The idea isn't crazy. To say that men often behave like pigs is to insult pigs. Boorishness, harassment, and sexual coercion are real problems. But let's think this through.
To begin with, there's the small problem of excretion. What the man thinks of as his—or some other guy's—way into the woman happens to be, rather more importantly, her way out. That's why, as Setiawan mentions, the masseuse "usually pees" before the cashier locks her pants. So, we're starting with a glaring engineering mistake: inconveniencing the victim more than the perpetrator.
Next, there's the political context. "In recent years, conservative Islamic values have gained influence" in Indonesia, Watson reports. "Last month, Indonesia's parliament passed a bill that makes it a crime to look at violent or pornographic material on the Internet. The penalty is up to three years in prison." So when Setiawan talks about how the chastity outfits will improve his industry's public image, you can see how workplace protection serves as a fig leaf for his awkward mix of puritanism and financial self-interest.
Finally, there's the telltale language of sexual paternalism. The problem with the some of the industry's male clients, according to Setiawan, is that "they try over and over and over again, persuading our workers with their dangerously sweet words."
Persuasion? Sweet words? This is the crisis? Words are intolerably coercive, but chastity belts aren't?
You can see how easy it is, as a paternalist, to talk yourself into absurdity. Once you get it into your head that motive is more important than method, you and your excellent motives are on the way to dystopia.
Before you deride the Indonesians, look at what's happening in the United States. Legislatures are passing laws right and left to mandate provision of ultrasound images to women seeking abortions. I support the idea of viewing an ultrasound before you make the decision. But when legislators add doctor scripts, patient viewing mandates, waiting periods, and other heavy-handed paternalist garbage, count me out.
Now comes a ballot initiative in Missouri that would hold doctors liable for "medical negligence" unless, prior to any abortion, they administer a formal psychological evaluation to ascertain whether the woman has been pressured into it. The measure's sponsors propose that women be asked: "Is someone else encouraging you to have this abortion? Do you want this abortion to satisfy your own needs or are you looking to do this to please someone else?" These questions are necessary because, as all paternalists know, women don't really want what they came to the clinic for. "The sad reality is that many abortion providers simply do abortions on request, no questions asked," the measure's sponsors lament. By failing to second-guess their patients, these providers fail "to help women in the ways they want and deserve."
I'm not saying coerced abortions never happen. There's clear evidence that they sometimes do. But you can see from the Missouri initiative how easily the notion of feminine vulnerability leads to interference dressed up as protection. And this is the crucial lesson of chastity belts, abortion regulation, and most other paternalist measures: The pressure from which you set out to protect women, bad as it may be, is seldom as ugly or coercive as the pressure your intervention imposes.
-
sponsorship
In Sunday's Washington Post, Rick Weiss detailed an important and underreported trend: the increasing role of genetics in legal disputes. His reporting illustrates how the march of science and the evolution of law are changing the way we think of ourselves. In South Carolina, the state's highest court overturned a murder conviction based on evidence that the killer acted out of genetically based depression. In Tennessee, a murder defendant blamed his conduct on inherited mental illness. In Georgia, lawyers in a murder case sought tests to determine whether their client had a gene associated with violence. In Arizona, a convicted killer argued on appeal that his attorney should have told the court about a similar gene-based propensity.
How did we get here? Weiss's research suggests a confluence of two trends. One is the habituation of courts to DNA. The growing familiarity of this kind of evidence masks the evolving purposes to which it has been put. First came DNA as identification, basic CSI stuff. Then came DNA as evidence of harm: Plaintiffs sued companies over toxic damage, but their DNA failed to show the toxin's expected effects. Then there's DNA as a cause of disease: In pollution and malpractice cases, courts have tested plaintiffs' DNA to check out the argument that genes, not products or procedures, sickened them. And if DNA explains the past, why not use it to predict the future? HIV tests have already been court-ordered to project victims' longevity and thereby calculate lifelong damages. Genetic longevity tests will be next. In a custody case, one parent successfully demanded that the other be tested for the deadly Huntington's gene. Apparently, the point was to challenge the second parent's fitness.
So, we're already in the business of testing for genes to predict fitness. That brings us to the second trend: the increasing use of biology to assess criminal responsibility. U.S. case law has traditionally discounted perpetrators' culpability in the event of sleepwalking, epileptic seizures, insanity, retardation, or "diminished capacity." Three years ago, the Supreme Court struck down death sentences for teenagers, citing evidence of their "underdeveloped sense of responsibility." Every month, scientists find new correlations between genes and traits such as aggression or mental illness. Just two weeks ago, the Human Nature News roundup flagged a study showing a genetic correlate of ruthlessness. As the cost of genetic testing declines, the temptation to test defendants increases. The persuasiveness of some genes increases as well: The allele cited in the Georgia murder case has subsequently been connected to violence in additional studies.
Put the two trends together, and you're looking at a gradual invasion of personal responsibility by genetic determinism. It's a conceptual shift from thinking of people as subjects to thinking of them as objects. The shift helps defense lawyers who need excuses for their clients' behavior. But it comes at a price: If your client is an object, why should we treat him like a subject?
As Weiss points out, courts already use unscientific evidence of "future dangerousness" to decide which killers should be executed. Genes could hardly do worse at predicting such risks. Weiss cites an Idaho case in which the defendant's genetic "propensity to commit murder" became a justification for executing him. A judge in the Arizona murder case drew the same conclusion about the appellant's "alleged genetic predisposition for violence." If your client's genes made him kill, they'll do it again. So don't expect us to let him live.
Nor should you expect us to protect his DNA from scrutiny under the Fourth or Fifth Amendment. If he's the product of his genes, as opposed to their manager, why should we treat them as his possession? He's their possession. Ditto for self-incrimination: If mental states are products of genes, we don't need his testimony; we just need his DNA. We can't make him open his mouth to testify, but we can make him open it for a swab, which could tell us plenty about his mind.
Are we more than our programming? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I leave that question in your hands.
-
sponsorship
Another good story from this morning's batch: Ivan Oransky of the Wall Street Journal writes about the development of a "biological pacemaker." He focuses on the work of researchers Ira Cohen and Michael Rosen:
By inserting genes into rat heart cells growing in a dish, they were able to create a beating pattern that was faster and more regular than had been seen before. ... [Their first step was] to load up a common cold virus with a pacemaker gene, and then used the virus to successfully infect heart cells in a dish. The infected cells ended up with the gene and began making a pacing current they had lacked. Next the scientists tried the technique in dogs with slow hearts. The gene transfer worked. Parts of the dogs' hearts that had been beating 25 to 40 times per minute were restored to a normal 60 beats per minute. ... [Later] they stitched pacemaker genes into adult stem cells, using a technique that doesn't require viruses, and then injected the altered cells into the heart. ... [W]hen the researchers tested the pacemaker stem cells in dogs for six weeks, the cells behaved just as they hoped. As a precaution, the researchers showed that they could turn off a cellular pacemaker if it becomes hyperactive with a drug ...
This is a great illustration of the point I was trying to make two weeks ago about the superiority of flesh-based technology. First we had flesh but no pacemakers. If your heart lost it rhythm, you had no backup. Now we have electronic pacemakers. They solve the problem of unreliable flesh, but they introduce the problems of electronics. Inserting them requires surgery. Their batteries are finite, and, as we learned from the Medtronic fiasco, their wires can fail. Worse, like other electronic devices, they can be hacked -- in this case, with potentially lethal results.
The long-term solution is flesh. Unlike electronics, flesh can be grown inside your body, avoiding the need for surgery. It's self-correcting, self-repairing, and self-renewing in a way that electronics aren't. And there isn't an easy way to hack somebody else's genes -- at least, not yet. For the same reason, we do need a way to remotely reset your biological pacemaker if it runs out of control. That's where the aforementioned drug comes in. But if you're in the pacemaker market, you had that problem already.
Oransky ends with a wonderful quote from Cohen: "Just like Lasik is a better solution than eyeglasses, a biological pacemaker would be a better solution than an electronic one." Having written about Lasik before, I like the analogy. At the time, I saw Lasik as a potential enhancement of human powers, with athletes boosting their vision beyond 20/20. But as Cohen points out, you can also look at it the other way: Instead of outfitting you with gizmos we've come to think of as normal -- glasses or contacts -- we just fix your flesh. Sometimes the most effective technology is also the most natural.
-
sponsorship
This morning's news brings a face-slapping AFP story from the land of the mullahs: Iran is setting up vending machines to sell condoms and syringes. The country's drug czar tells its state news service that the machines will be in shelters for addicts: "Condoms, syringes, bandages and plasters will be easily accessible just by inserting a coin. This protects addicts from acquiring AIDS and hepatitis." Cost per item: about 5 cents.
Yes, you read that right: The country that brought you fundamentalist theocracy, Middle East proxy wars, presidential Holocaust denial, an implacable nuclear weapons program, and hundreds of days of Americans held hostage is practically throwing needles and rubbers at junkies.
Why? First, because living under a fundamentalist theocracy evidently doesn't make you any less likely to get hooked on drugs. Iran estimates that some two million of its 71 million people are regular users. We're talking pot, heroin, morphine, and opium. The country consumes some 700 tons of drugs from Afghanistan alone.
Second, because even a fundamentalist theocracy has to deal with reality. According to the AFP report:
Condoms are freely available in Iranian pharmacies. The Islamic republic in the 1990s started actively promoting contraception as it encouraged families to have just two children to prevent the country's population growth increasing further. Iran has tried to change its approach to drug addicts by treating users as "people who need help" rather than throwing them into already overcrowded jails.
How do you like that? On drugs and HIV, the United States has been out-liberalized and out-pragmatized by the right wing of the Axis of Evil.
No moral equivalence intended, but ... speaking of holocaust denial ...
-
sponsorship
Six years ago, I wrote about the science and ethics of incest ("The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Surname"). At the time, a study showed that having a child with your first cousin raised the risk of a significant birth defect from about 3-to-4 percent to about 4-to-7 percent. The authors concluded that this difference wasn't enough to justify genetic testing of cousin couples, much less bans on cousin marriage.
Now the incest taboo has taken another hit. Ecologists Kelly Zamudio and Chris Chandler have published a study in Molecular Ecology on sexual selection among spotted salamanders. From this and other research, Science News reporter Ewen Callaway has teased out a fascinating theme: Incest, apparently for sound Darwinian reasons, is surprisingly common in nature.
Through interviews with biologists and ecologists, Callaway looks at several cases. Among spotted salamanders, DNA analysis shows inbreeding "at the level of first cousins, on average. Despite having hundreds of possible mates to choose from, females tended to fertilize their eggs with sperm from related males." Another study found that "Japanese quail prefer first cousins over brothers and sisters and over less-related birds." Among ambrosia beetles: "Brothers and sisters tend to mate." A comparison over two generations of mating found that "inbred beetles fared no worse than outbred insects, and the eggs produced by brother-sister pairs were likelier to hatch than the eggs of unrelated pairs."
At least one fish species similarly prefers brother-sister mating. Scientists "found that fathers from brother-sister couples spent more time, on average, defending their caves and that both parents tended to pay more attention to their kids than unrelated couples." This makes obvious sense. The ecologist who supervised the study reports, "Couples which are full siblings are more cooperative in brood care. ... [T]he males and females stay with the offspring for several weeks and guard them—they defend them—and there's less aggression between full siblings."
These aren't the only rationales for inbreeding. Paraphrasing a Cambridge biologist, Callaway notes, "Many organisms might have slight genetic tweaks or adaptations tuned to their local habitats, and too much genetic mixing with outsiders can dilute these adaptations." Among ambrosia beetles, the practice "may cement the slight genetic differences between the insects," thereby helping to "create new species."
Nor is inbreeding universally taboo among humans. A study in Pakistan found that "three out of five marriages were between first cousins." Another in India that found "one-fifth of marriages occurred between uncles and nieces and a third between first cousins." And before you dismiss this as Eastern barbarism, read up on Charles Darwin and Rudy Giuliani.
The incest taboo does have a firm biological basis. As Callaway explains, "Inbreeding ups the chances that a child will inherit two versions of a disease-causing gene." Data show higher mortality among infants born from first-cousin pairs. But beyond that range, there's evidence that breeding within the family has advantages. Two months ago, a study in Science reported "a significant positive association between kinship and fertility," with a likely "biological basis." The study found "the greatest reproductive success" among "couples related at the level of third and fourth cousins." On average, these cousins produced more kids than less related—and more related—pairs did.
The upshot seems to be that there are advantages and disadvantages to breeding with a relative, and as far as nature is concerned, the ideal course is to strike a balance. You're free to argue that incest is wrong, of course. But be careful what you call unnatural.
-
sponsorship
One thing I hope to do more of, now that I've got this network of Web pages, is to integrate reader comments into the blog. Here's a good thread in response to yesterday's post on dog meat. Lid writes,
I like pigs just fine but dogs share a place with people like no other animal. Without dogs man could not have herded goats and sheep. Man would not have settled the Arctic before modern technology. Dogs are largely responsible for our ability to sucessfully hunt game and establish populations in arid climates. Without dogs civilization would have evolved much differently, its dispersion limited and its progress stunted.
To which Sevumar adds,
Very few people relish the idea of eating an animal they've developed a personal bond with. Because dogs are so common as pets in our culture, it's understandable that many would be squeamish about eating them. These attitudes are the result of the culture we've been born into or raised in and they vary widely from place to place. In Peru, it's common for residents of the highlands to eat guinea pigs. Many African and Asian cultures use a variety of insects in their cuisine. In many East Asian cultures, the keeping of dogs as pets is a relatively recent phenomenon, so eating them was not considered taboo. Nomads of steppe cultures regularly ate horse meat. Typically, cultures learned to make use of whatever sources of protein were available to them.
It's an interesting conversation. If you start with the logic of the first post -- that the dog's moral priority stems from its role in our history -- then the second post seems correct in pegging this as a kind of relativism. So if you come from a population that didn't rely on dogs as other populations did, you have no obligation to treat dogs as pets rather than as food.
Still, I have to agree with the first post that there's something icky about relying on dogs as our teammates and then eating them when it suits us. In fact, I'd push the point further. We didn't just team up with dogs. As a study in Science explained several years ago, we fed them, bred them, and spread them. My take on this is that through relentless genetic selection and breeding, we essentially invented the dog. We derived dogs from wolves by selecting those that excelled at interpreting our behavior and executing our assignments. To borrow the Biblical metaphor: We made a species in our image.
Objectively, going by intelligence alone, it still strikes me as irrational that we think it's more wrong to eat dogs than to eat pigs. Our compunction is purely subjective, based on our current or past relationships with dogs. But maybe this is one of those cases that suggests we should respect subjectivity (or, more precisely, intersubjectivity -- somebody stop me before I start quoting Habermas) as a basis for ethics. Not only is our relationship with dogs deeply enmeshed in history - arguably the most objective thing there is among people - but that history includes our creation of dogs. The nature of dogs is that we made them to suit ourselves; so if our aversion to eating them arises from the same basis, then it's based -- objectively, you might say -- on their nature.
All this philosophy has my head spinning. I'm gonna go find a simpler topic for my next post. Somebody else carry the ball from here.
-
sponsorship
I feel strangely obliged to say something about today's dog-food story.
No, I'm not talking about food for dogs. I wish I were. I'm talking about making food from dogs—and serving it to people.
Yes, this is happening. It's been happening for a long time. I first wrote about it six years ago, when the soccer World Cup was coming to South Korea. In that country, at latest count, 2 to 4 million dogs are eaten each year. (This was shortly after I wrote about sex with dogs—but let's take our perversions one at a time.) Here are this week's developments, as reported yesterday by AFP:
Officials in the South Korean capital Seoul said Monday they will launch their first health inspection of illegal dog meat restaurants ... "We do not intend to regulate the selling of dog meat but to examine their safety," a food safety official told AFP ... The city will conduct regular inspections, publicize a list of restaurants that serve unhealthy dog meat and suspend their operations, he said. Such restaurants are technically illegal.
To avoid adverse publicity before the 1988 Olympics, the city banned dog meat and snake meat as "abhorrent food." But the order is now largely ignored.
"Many citizens enjoy dog meat despite the ban. But there have been no hygiene regulations on their slaughter and trade because dogs are not classed as livestock," the official said. The city government has proposed reclassifying dogs as livestock so it can set food safety standards. But the proposal, which will be sent to the central government next month, has sparked angry reactions from animal rights activists, who staged street protests and launched online signature campaigns.
Confused? I sure am. Let's sort this out. To comply with Western sensibilities, the Koreans officially banned dog meat. But they don't enforce the ban, presumably because they don't share the abhorrence. And why should they? Why exactly is it gross to eat dogs but OK to slaughter pigs, which, by most measures, are smarter? So we've started with irrationality compounded by hypocrisy.
Now we have a health problem. According to the article, Korean dog "slaughtering and processing is carried out in dirty environments and poses risks to diners' health." Why the dirty environments? Apparently because the formal ban prevents the government from classifying dogs as livestock so it can regulate their slaughter and processing as it does with pigs.
What are animal-rights activists doing about this? They're trying to stop the reclassification, which means, in effect, preserving the risks to human health.
In general, I have a soft spot for animal rights. Not just for adopting puppies, but for the broader agenda of recognizing higher animals as way smarter than we've given them credit for. I keep an entire directory of news clips about all the amazing things animals can do. (Here's a trivial example from this week's news file; here's a far more profound one from last week's file.) The reason we've underestimated animals is that we've overestimated ourselves. We haven't studied them carefully enough. When we do, we keep finding "new" abilities.
Conservatives who preach a binary distinction between human dignity and the status of animals will be in for many rude shocks as this research proceeds. And, for the rest of you, I'm sorry to say that your practice—and mine—of slaughtering and eating sentient beings will gradually be recognized, God willing, as barbaric and obsolete.
So that's my lefty position on eating animals. But I'm afraid it doesn't lead me to the same conclusion as the Korean animal-rights lobby. If dogs are no better than pigs, I don't see the point of maintaining the current hypocritical distinction, particularly at the expensive of human health.
The Korean debate also appeals to my libertarian pragmatism. One reason I'm against abortion bans is that abortions will happen anyway; they'll just be more dangerous to the born people involved, in addition to killing the unborn. The piety of being able to claim you've outlawed abortion doesn't amount to much next to the harm and suffering you cause by driving abortions underground. I'm for bringing it out in the open. I'd like to believe that if a practice is truly immoral and unnecessary, sunshine will lead to its erosion. In the case of abortion, the latest statistics seem to bear out that belief.
So I guess I'm for 1) getting rid of the hypocritical distinction between dogs and livestock, 2) legalizing and regulating dog meat like other meat, and 3) gradually persuading everybody, including us pious Westerners, to stop eating meat.
Note to self: How do I square this with my previous piece about fetal sex selection, which warned that reducing regulation of an abhorrent practice to "a mere question of consumer protection" leads us to declare it "adequately regulated" and no longer taboo? I'll have to keep, um, chewing on that one. In the meantime, all you pro-life vegetarians can feel free to consider me a hypocrite.
-
sponsorship
Last week I promised to start using this blog to highlight and explain the day's top stories. Unfortunately, scanning wires, papers, magazines, journals, and Web sites for the best stories (make sure to bookmark the Human Nature home page so you'll get the list every day) has taken so much time that I haven't been able to make good on my promise. Sorting out how long these tasks take, and which of them I should spend my time on, will take at least a few weeks. Anyway, I've cleared some time this afternoon to talk about today's stories, so let's get to it.
One item worth noting is today's Wall Street Journal article [subscription required] on hospitals replacing factories. Reporter Conor Dougherty lays out the data:
Demand for health care tends to stay strong during recessions. Cash-strapped consumers are more likely to cut back on new appliances or cars than emergency-room visits. Indeed, while the number of manufacturing jobs nationwide fell by 48,000 in March and by 310,000 over the past 12 months, health-care employment rose by 23,000 last month and is up 363,000 jobs on the year ... Growth in health care is fueling local economies across the country, as medical facilities replace factories. In Duluth, Minn., 20% of the jobs are in health care, compared with 14% a decade ago. In the Canton, Ohio, area, which lost the maker of Hoover vacuum cleaners and dozens of other manufacturers, the health-care industry is expanding rapidly. A similar story is unfolding in Anderson, Ind., once a major producer of cars and car parts.
I haven't researched this topic enough to analyze all the factors. But one theme is already intriguing: An economy based on constructing and repairing objects is giving way to an economy based on repairing and maintaining the human body. Faced with recession, consumers are deciding that widgets are expendable, but people aren't.
Actually, that's not quite right. We haven't decided that the health of all people is so important. The manufacturing that used to happen here is migrating to the developing world. Likewise, its replacement by hospitals is happening here, not there. Yes, American and European medicine are often being outsourced to poorer countries. But the patients benefiting from this overseas treatment are still American and European. Just ask all those transplant tourists.
My bet is that the trends reflected in this article will dominate the economy of the next century. The biotechnology of human health will increasingly become the technology most highly valued by the measure that counts most: economic demand. To put it in moral terms: The most valued objects of maintenance and repair will be subjects.
That's the good news. The bad news is that because the mechanism behind this process is economic, and because wealth is unevenly distributed, billions of people will benefit little or not at all. Dougherty shows us, through interviews and stories, how easily supply and demand can shuffle workers not only from manufacturing to health care, but vice versa when nursing wages don't add up. That's why, in much of the world, the economy will continue to value objects more than subjects, no matter what morality says.
-
sponsorship
My colleague Jack Shafer says the Pulitzers are a fraud. "There's no real science or even fairness behind the picking of winners and losers," he wrote in a piece published four years ago and reprinted last week, after this year's winners were announced. In particular, he noted, "I doubt that one newspaper reader in 10,000 could tell you a day after the Pulitzers are awarded who got the prize for explanatory reporting."
Well, never argue with Shafer. Except this once. The winner of this year's prize for explanatory reporting deserved every bit of it, not just for her terrific writing, but because, for the past two years, she's been pioneering the journalism of the next century.
The prize announcement salutes Amy Harmon of the New York Times for her "examination of the dilemmas and ethical issues that accompany DNA testing." Harmon's series, "The DNA Age," has actually covered far more than that. It began two years ago and has weaved its way through a thicket of emerging controversies. Her opening topic was people who used DNA tests to establish unexpected ancestry—such as whites claiming to be black, or Christians claiming to be Jewish—in order to gain the ensuing advantages in areas such as minority admissions, Israeli citizenship, or Native American entitlements. Then she turned to the psychological and social effects of studies that tell us much of our behavior is genetically influenced.
Harmon wrote about the moral deliberations of couples who used preimplantation genetic diagnosis to weed out embryos that might carry or pass on diseases. She talked to parents of Down syndrome kids, who worried that the eradication of Down fetuses by prenatal tests would turn their children, in the public's mind, from disabled people into freakish burdens that should never have been brought to term. She detailed our increasingly methodical genetic engineering of dogs as a potential preview of genetic engineering of human beings. She introduced us to women who had healthy breasts surgically removed based on genetic predictions of cancer. She explored fears that analyses of average genetic and trait differences among populations might foment a "new era of racism." She chronicled the emerging ability to Google your own DNA. She wrote about families who use the Internet to find and bond with other families over shared genetic disorders.
Last month, Harmon looked at "genomic elitism," the practice among rich people of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a full DNA analysis normal people couldn't afford. And a week ago, she scrutinized "surreptitious sampling," the law-enforcement technique of obtaining incriminating DNA samples by testing cells and fluids you inadvertently leave in public places every day.
Half of what's amazing about this body of work is that nobody else has done anything quite like it. In retrospect, the trends Harmon has covered will be recognized as the story of our age. We're living in an era of science and technology. Discoveries about ourselves and the world, coupled with our increasing power to transform both, are changing how we live, what we think, and who we are. This is happening at a pace unheard of in previous generations. In Sunday's Washington Post, another of my favorite science writers, Joel Achenbach, points out:
The most important things happening in the world today won't make tomorrow's front page. They won't get mentioned by presidential candidates or Chris Matthews or Bill O'Reilly or any of the other folks yammering and snorting on cable television. They'll be happening in laboratories—out of sight, inscrutable and unhyped until the very moment when they change life as we know it. Science and technology form a two-headed, unstoppable change agent.
The fact that such developments are now being recognized by the Pulitzer board and are blanketing the Post's Sunday opinion section is, in itself, good news.
But that's only half the reason to applaud Harmon's award. The other half is the way she has covered—or, in her case, invented—the beat. Lots of writers, including me, have opined about the abstract virtues or evils of biotechnology. We think we're being visionary or "morally serious." But real moral seriousness isn't about abstractions. It's about flesh and blood: the real people in whom, and in whose lives, the abstractions take shape. You can't really understand or explain abortion, war, or economic globalization until you've talked to people who have been through it. The same is true of biotechnology. If you go in with moral assumptions, the experiences you see or hear about may change your mind, or at least complicate it. That's part of the point of reporting, not to mention reading.
I can't do justice to "The DNA Age" in a blog post. Read it for yourself. It's as provocative as any sci-fi collection and as nuanced as any novel. Except it's real.
-
sponsorship
In yesterday's piece on nerd doping, I mentioned that I'm a skeptic of anti-doping policies for at least three reasons. One, many of the complaints tend to be based on harm (e.g. from steroids), but that harm can be mitigated or avoided through improved techniques. Two, the lines we draw tend to be pretty arbitrary. Three, once we've trampled the old rules (e.g., the employment of private coaches), we often wonder why we ever enforced them.
This morning's batch of news underscores the first point. A summary of a study presented at a biology conference reports:
Taking daily recommended dosages of ibuprofen and acetaminophen caused a substantially greater increase over placebo in the amount of quadriceps muscle mass and muscle strength gained during three months of regular weight lifting. ... [T]he chronic consumption of ibuprofen or acetaminophen during resistance training appears to have induced intramuscular changes that enhance the metabolic response to resistance exercise, allowing the body to add substantially more new protein to muscle.
Ibuprofen or acetaminophen are the key ingredients in Advil and Tylenol, respectively. You probably have these performance-enhancing drugs in your medicine cabinet.
Don't start popping Tylenol and expecting huge quadriceps just yet. The participants in the study were all 60 or older, with an average age of 65. It's possible that the muscle-boosting effects apply only to people who have lost muscle mass and strength, not to athletes or other healthy young folks who just want to add to their normal allotment. But the fact that it works in old folks reinforces another problem with regulation of performance-enhancing substances: If a substance is OK because it helps a 60-year-old recover the strength of a 25-year-old, why shouldn't a 25-year-old be allowed to try the same substance in pursuit of additional strength? Surely today's 25-year-old athletes are stronger than the 25-year-old athletes of previous, less nutritionally and medically savvy generations. That's why records keep falling. Why exactly should we draw a line at the norms of the 20th -- whoops, 21st -- Century?
I'm sure you've got your answers. Let's hear them.
-
sponsorship
Here's my favorite news story from this morning's batch: The New York condo smoking suit has been settled. I did an introductory item on this two months ago when the suit was first reported. Basically, the plaintiffs accused the defendant of letting smoke seep out from her apartment, around a closed door, and into the hallway, where it allegedly endangered the health of their child. The story has several juicy angles, including that both members of the plaintiff couple are lawyers and that the defendant is named Huff. According to the New York Times, the plaintiffs also accused the defendant of "encouraging her Chihuahua to urinate on their son's stroller in retaliation for their complaints." Evidently unable to refrain from putting his worst thoughts in writing, the lawyer-plaintiff husband added an e-mail message to the Times, stating, "I am confident you will find a way to make us look like terrible people all over again for insisting on such an onerous thing." The Times duly reprinted it.
I've been amazed by the speed and scope of the worldwide crackdown on smoking. In this case, I'm particularly sympathetic to the defendant, since she lived in the building 10 years before the plaintiffs arrived. On the other hand, I regard smoking as equivalent to constant farting, except for the fact that farting—apart from its carbon footprint (buttprint?)—doesn't harm anyone else.
So how did the case settle? Apparently, initial reports of the suit prompted a company to offer a free air-filtering system. Ms. Huff has "agreed to use the donated air filters and a smokeless ashtray, which is all we ever asked her to do," the plaintiff husband explains. Technology to the rescue again! And since the filtration company offered its goods and services gratis, let's make sure it gets the publicity it was angling for all along: http://www.aerusonline.com/.
Now for the really interesting question. Which is worse: smokers or lawyers? My answer is that it depends how far they're standing from you. Lawyers can make a lot more trouble by phone, mail, and electronic text. But for companionship in close quarters, I'll take a lawyer any day. In fact, I already did so, nine years ago, when I got married. So don't send your smoke under my front door, or you'll have to answer to my lawyer.
Outdoors is another matter. If, after this post appears in Slate, you find my clothes and furniture out in front of our house, feel free to park on the sofa and enjoy a cigarette.
-
sponsorship
My wife gave me grief a couple of days ago for sending a link to Slate's home page that, when clicked, took people to the Human Nature home page and ultimately to plain old headlines. She was expecting something I'd written instead of something I'd linked to.
I see her point. Let me explain what I'm trying to do, and I'll keep looking for ways to improve it. I'm trying to use the new headline-only links—here for News, and here for Hot Topics—to flag stories I find really interesting. I can't blog or write pieces on all these stories, but I do a lot of scouring and weeding to select them. You don't have to click on any of them if you don't want to. But if you're looking for cool stuff on any given day, I think you'll generally find them the most efficient way to get it.
The thing I'm getting a sense of as I tinker with the new format is that people expect to hear my voice. I'm a bit reluctant to push my voice into everything. By and large, the Internet, and the blogosphere in particular, is way too full of people opining rapidly, ignorantly, and thoughtlessly. I don't want to add to that problem. If possible, I'd like to help rectify it. That's part of why I wrote the old Human Nature news items the way I did: I wanted to lay out the evidence and arguments without injecting my instant opinion all the time. Eventually, I gave in and started adding a line here or there.
I set up this blog in part to create a space for this kind of informal thinking out loud. I'll try to make sense of things. Often, I'll get it wrong, and that'll be OK, as long as you and I keep working to correct the errors and improve the thinking. The lesson I'm going to draw from my wife's complaint, for the time being, is that when I post new headlines to the News and Hot Topics pages, I should write a blog post announcing them and saying at least a little bit about them. So the blog can be the place where a human voice (mine) introduces you to what's new each day. And you and I can take it from there.
Got a better idea? Let's hear it.
-
sponsorship
New piece this morning on the recession in cosmetic surgery. As I was writing it, I realized how completely it dovetails with the previous post about nipple rings. Both argue for a distinction between elective and necessary procedures. That's an old theme of bioethics, and it suits my conservative streak. Or maybe it's not conservative; maybe it's just hard-nosed. I do think some things in life are way more important than others, and both abundance and indulgence can make you forget the difference.
On the other hand, I don't want to become cranky. When I think of cranky, I think of Bob Dole, or at least Dan Aykroyd's caricature of Bob Dole, muttering bitterly about how easy some people now have it. In general, there's nothing inherently wrong, and there's usually a lot that's wonderful, about making things easy that used to be hard. That's certainly true of medicine. It's just important to keep in mind the relative value of the things achieved and the relative importance of effort in making a particular result worthwhile.
I remember going to a transhumanist conference a couple of years ago. For those of you who don't know them, transhumanists are people who believe in the technological transformation of humanity into something greater. When I first left politics to cover this beat, I took a pretty conservative line on bioethics generally, and the transhumanists sounded pretty fruity to me. Well, they're still kind of fruity. But they certainly are interesting, if you treat them as a voice in the public dialogue rather than as a threat to dictate future policy and destroy human nature (whatever that is). And the more you listen to their assault on conservative assumptions, the more you find yourself asking questions about the way things are and whether they have to be that way. Those are good questions to ask.
I'm still trying to find my own blend of progressive and conservative, liberalism and discipline. Nipple rings? Just not that big a deal, either way. Face lifts? Ditto. But sex-reassignment surgery? That's pretty fundamental to who you are, and I'm inclined to listen to people who have lived in what they profoundly experience as the wrong body. I'll keep thinking about these things, and I'll try to keep my mind open to all ideas, including the idea of limits.
-
sponsorship
There's one more contrarian study I want to pick up on this morning: a paper in the Journal of Public Economics that links smoking bans to drunk-driving accidents.
The authors, Scott Adams and Chad Cotti, report: "Using geographic variation in local and state smoke-free bar laws in the US, we observe an increase in fatal accidents involving alcohol following bans on smoking in bars that is not observed in places without bans." They present evidence suggesting two explanations: 1) "smokers driving longer distances to a bordering jurisdiction that allows smoking in bars," and 2) "smokers driving longer distances within their jurisdiction to bars that still allow smoking, perhaps through non-compliance or outdoor seating."
Not too many folks read the Journal of Public Economics or have the time to wade through the whole paper. But if you follow Fox News or live in a country like Australia, Colombia, India, or Turkey, you've probably seen the AFP wire story about this study. It quotes the authors as summarizing their findings this way: "Banning smoking in bars increases the fatal accident risk posed by drunk drivers."
The AFP story leaves non-Americans with the impression that we have some kind of national smoking ban. "A ban on smoking in American bars has caused the number of accidents from drunken driving to surge," it begins. Later, it adds, "The ban is spreading across the United States, but in a piecemeal fashion."
Ideally, at this point, the reader starts to smell something wrong with the story. "The ban" can't be piecemeal. If some jurisdictions ban smoking in bars and others don't, it must be a patchwork of independent bans—as, in reality, it is. Furthermore, if you think about the causal mechanism the evidence apparently supports—"smokers driving longer distances" to get to places where they can light up—you begin to realize that the problem isn't "banning smoking in bars." It's the fact that these bans are piecemeal and inconsistently enforced. If "the ban" actually existed as such—if bar smoking were effectively prohibited nationwide—there'd be no incentive to get in your car and drive somewhere else. The drunk-driving problem is just as good an argument for nationalizing the bar-smoking bans as for scrapping them.
I'm not proposing total tobacco prohibition. That'd be just as foolish as the failed experiment in alcohol prohibition. But we don't have to go that far. The true implication of the drunk-driving study, if you think it through, is that the safest place to let people smoke is the place that doesn't require them to get in a car at all. It's called home.
-
sponsorship
Writing about contrarian research reminds me of a report I saw on EurekAlert this morning. The headline said, "New study shows children benefit from drinking chocolate/flavored milk." "Wow!" I thought. EurekAlert generally relays press releases from journals or academic institutions about peer-reviewed research. I was about to post the report as news. Then I started reading the release. "Children who drink flavored or plain milk consume more nutrients and have a lower or comparable body mass index ... than children who don't drink milk," it said. Oh. Kids who drink any kind of milk get more nutrients than kids who drink no milk. You don't friggin' say! In other words: Milk has nutrients.
Nowhere does the release compare the garbage intake from a glass of plain milk to the garbage intake from a glass of chocolate milk. That's because the release was issued by the National Dairy Council. Next I'll be getting alleged research reports about the benefits of drinking ethanol.
I've posted a link to the chocolate-milk study in the Hot Topics page. Feel free to fire away at it, between chugs of Yoo-hoo.
-
sponsorship
Impressive cluster of contrarian research in today's batch: Coffee can help prevent Alzheimer's; trans fats can be good for you; fat kids have fewer cavities; and the alleged benefits of drinking lots of water are unfounded. I love reports like these. I've flagged and commented on lots of them in the previous Human Nature news roundups. Part of it is that I just enjoy contrarianism. Part of it is that discoveries like these expose our overconfidence about what we know. Biology is enormously complex. Sometimes extra weight is bad for you; sometimes, at death's door, it can save your life. We vilify and prohibit alcohol as a sin, then discover it can help your circulation.
But I don't want to let the mischievous fun of medical contrarianism obscure reality. The reason why studies like these are surprising and intriguing is that they generally run against the grain of biology. By and large, trans fats are horrible for you. Relying on coffee instead of sleep for daily energy is dangerous. And even if being fat somehow improves your kid's dental health, the damage done to the rest of his body isn't worth it.
When you see a report about the benefits of booze or chocolate, always remember that the reason it's worth a headline is that these things, in their usual form and consumed quantity, are generally unhealthy. Not a very entertaining takeaway, I admit. But true.
-
sponsorship
I'd like to start the blog on a high note. But it's hard to pass up the nipple-ring story. It brings up some topics I've addressed before, and, weirdly enough, it does raise the kinds of issues HN is designed to explore.
Here are the basics, as outlined in a letter issued Thursday and reprinted in Slate's Hot Document: About a month ago, a woman named Mandi Hamlin set off a handheld airport metal detector and was told by TSA screeners that she'd have to remove the metal object in order to pass screening. The object was a nipple ring. According to the letter, signed by attorney Gloria Allred, "Ms. Hamlin has several body piercings, including in her ears, belly, and nipples."
Hamlin told the screener "that she could not remove" the piercings "but that she would show them to a TSA officer." The screener said no dice; she would have to take them out (behind a privacy curtain) and stop setting off the detector. She eventually gave in and did so. The letter says Hamlin heard male officers "snickering" nearby. It says she was "publicly humiliated" and "made to suffer the physical pain of removing a nipple ring with pliers." It demands a "public apology" and an "investigation of this matter by the Office of Civil Rights and Liberties."
On one point, Allred nails TSA. The agency's guidance to passengers says, "Hidden items such as body piercings may result in your being directed to additional screening for a pat-down inspection. If selected for additional screening, you may ask to remove your body piercing in private as an alternative to a pat-down search." Hamlin says she wasn't even offered the pat-down option. On Friday, TSA issued a statement promising, "In the future TSA will inform passengers that they have the option to resolve the alarm through a visual inspection of the article in lieu of removing the item in question. TSA acknowledges that our procedures caused difficulty for the passenger involved and regrets the situation in which she found herself."
If TSA thinks a visual or pat-down inspection is sufficient to discount metal detection, I guess that's their business. I don't really see why nail clippers are more dangerous than piercings, but hey, they're the experts. And if the officers snickered, that's out of bounds. But for my money, that's not the crux of the case. The crux of the case is that all the metal in Hamlin's body was elective.
If you need metal in your pacemaker or your artificial hip, that's one thing. Adornments are another. Metal can be dangerous on planes, and TSA's first responsibility is to protect other passengers. Want to pierce yourself silly? Go ahead. But if you expect to fly commercial, take out the tongue stud, Stud.
Allred thinks this is too much to ask. "After nipple rings are inserted, the skin can often heal around the piercing, and the rings can be extremely difficult and painful to remove," her letter argues. "In addition, once removed, the pierced skin may close up almost immediately, making it difficult and painful to reinsert the piercing."
Forgive me if this sounds, um, callous, but aren't these medical concerns a pretty good argument against getting pierced in the first place? Isn't this nature's way of telling you you're designed to be made of flesh, not metal?
"The last time that I checked a nipple was not a dangerous weapon," Allred writes. No, Ma'am, it isn't. But nobody asked your client to remove her nipple—or to puncture it.
-
sponsorship
One thing I hope to do in this blog is to keep connecting news stories and trends to each other. It's not enough to mock the idea of a civil right to body piercings. The larger theme of today's earlier post was the difference between necessary and elective body parts, and the difference between flesh and metal.
Both of those differences touch on an article in the current issue of Scientific American. Right now, the best we can do for amputees is fit them with prostheses designed to approximate normal limb motion. Such limbs don't feel anything, which in turn makes it harder to learn how to use them. The ideal solution isn't to outfit these people like cyborgs; it's to give them good old flesh. That's what the authors-Ken Muneoka, Manjong Han, and David Gardiner-are working on. They conclude that "we may be only a decade or two away from a day when we can regenerate human body parts."
The path will require many steps. At the moment, the authors are still working on inducing basic regeneration in mice. Growing larger structures-paws, and later arms-will be progressively more difficult. But in principle, the project should be doable, since it's modeled on an animal that already regenerates its own limbs: the salamander.
If we're going to start handing out new bodily civil rights, as the nipple-ring lawyer proposes, I'd put replacement flesh way ahead of ornamental metal.