Humans, being social, can’t live without rules. Certain rules work better. Game theory provides “behavioral telescopes” to study with.

The naturalistic fallacy says we can derive no ethical lessons from nature. But without seeking good and evil in nature, we can compare the productivity and sustainability of behavioral rules—and map negative ethical spaces, which are inherently unworkable, and thus inherently bad.

For example: we can compare how ethical traditions do in Prisoner’s Dilemmas against the game’s best strategy, called Tit-For-Tat, which is an “evolutionarily stable strategy.” As Tomas Sedlacek asks: What would Christians do? Or practitioners of any religious or secularly sourced Golden Rule?

The results are clear: Rationalists do worse than the Golden Ruled. And Jewish preferences beat Christian ethics. So-called rationalists, dominated by some dire logic, produce no cooperation and low productivity. Two Golden Ruled players cooperate, thus beating rationalists. But New Testament turning-the-other-cheek is exploitable (as Machiavelli and Nietzsche complained). Old Testament eye-for-an-eye comes closer to Tit-For-Tat, if forgiveness follows (which might be divine, but is also evolutionarily adaptive). But punishment sufficient to ensure that cheating doesn’t pay must also prevent escalating revenge. Hunter gatherers avoid such feuds by delegating the severest punishment to close male kin. A “Golden Punishment Rule,” that mimics Tit-For-Tat, enables cooperation by sustainably preventing exploitation. Similar logic likely applies beyond Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Darwin, being un-Darwinian, said “social instincts…with the aid of active intellectual powers… naturally lead to the golden rule.” Game theory shows that simple rigidly followed rules can create workable cooperation. Evolution is a game theorist, endlessly testing behavioral strategies and naturally selecting the more productive.

Another religious idea can clarify evolutionary thinking. Richard Dawkins’s selfish gene errs by overusing the non-exhaustive binary of selfishness vs. altruism. Dawkins uses and inverts the Christian framing that promotes self-sacrifice and discourages self-benefit. Jewish ethics, however, encourages self-benefit, but warn against the dangers of selfishness. Rabbi Hillel said, “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I?” Hillel’s self-and-other frame includes the win-win space in which cooperation can evolve (and which Dawkins initially ignored).

It’s still early in the use of game theory, but it seems the behavioral universe has gravity-like pull towards certain stable high productivity social rules. We should use our “active intellectual powers” to adjust what’s deemed rational, and to more intelligently design our economic and political (once called moral sciences) systems.

Illustration by Julia Suits, The New Yorker Cartoonist & author of The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions.

Previously in this series:

It Is in Our Nature to Be Self-Deficient
Inheriting Second Natures
Our Ruly Nature
It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories
Tools Are in Our Nature
We Fit Nature To Us: Evolutions two way street
Justice Is In Our Nature
Behavioral Telescope Shows How Cooperation Works
Selfish Genes Also Must Cooperate

Insurance offers a mechanism to share this risk. The stumbling block was the possibility that the insured might burn down their home to collect. Once it was realized that “moral hazard” could be held at bay by investigating for fraud, there was little to hinder the growth of an industry designed to serve our risk adverse proclivities. Almost every adult has some experience valuing the expense of sharing risk for a variety of hazards. After all, automobile insurance is generally compulsory and most of us are familiar with notions of deductibles and riders when it comes to homeowners’ policies. The possibilities are not an abstraction; we can envision the house or its contents damaged, destroyed, or stolen leaving us bereft. What would reducing that prospect be worth to us? As is true for many value-based decisions, the answer brings a mix of reason and intuition¹ that can produce surprising outcomes².

Health insurance is even more complex, and has always been so. The industrial revolution saw the development of “Friendly Societies” in Britain and the Prussian “Krankenkassen”. These were trade-based institutions that allowed advantaged workers to purchase insurance to provide “sick pay” but there was little else. The sea change was the Prussian “welfare monarchy”³, an extensive insurance scheme that encompassed universal health care and a complex approach to disability insurance.⁴ Modifications of the Prussian scheme spread across the industrial world. It made landfall in the United States in time for the presidential election of 1912. Only one component took root in America: Workers’ Compensation Insurance but not as a national insurance scheme. It fell to the each state to regulate an insurance scheme to compensate injured workers for lost income and medical expenses.

This set the stage for state-based regulation of employer-sponsored private health insurance schemes going forward. But forward momentum appears anything but swift or linear in a country that trusted physicians to charge “commensurate with the services rendered and the patient’s ability to pay” (AMA Code of Medical Ethics, 1957.) Health Insurance as both an industry and a product has become a frustrating web of inefficiency and confusion.

No one needs to be reminded of the escalating costliness of this approach to sharing the risk in healthcare or discordance between the costliness in the United States and elsewhere. No one needs to be reminded of the bizarre machinations already in place and now unfolding to reign in this costliness. What are less discussed are the processes by which these machinations distort peoples’ values, all of us, for whom purchasing health insurance is to provide security against the untoward consequences of clinical misadventures.

The standard approach is to ask employees to decide how much insurance should be purchased and for what coverage. If only it were that simple, but it is not. The average employee has to decide on an insurance plan that hosts a dizzying array of fees and coverage: How much will you pay out-of-pocket before insurance kicks in (deductible)? What’s the maximum coverage (cap) if I get really sick? Is a million dollars enough? Two million? What about co-insurance?  What is co-insurance? Do co-pays count towards the deductible? What about tests?

Answers to these and similar questions dramatically alter the monthly premium, which is not a trivial consideration for the average American employee. In homeowner’s insurance such questions can test one’s mettle when valuing the loss of a family heirloom. How are they even ponderable when valuing health care for one’s self or one’s family? Research suggests they are not, at least not in an optimal way⁵.

Today’s American employees register their preference for health insurance at the start of employment or during an annual confusing and worrisome time called “open enrollment”. The process is familiar to most employed Americans who must consider and value variations in premiums, deductibles, co-pays, and the like. It is an annual rite because the menu of options often varies year-to-year reflecting employer prerogatives.

The workers’ input to the design of healthplans and their component fees is after the fact; their preferences are constrained by the options offered. They are faced with a complicated choice that pits financial savvy and preconceptions as to the value of health care against their tolerance of risk. This is the model that has been adopted by the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) in the formulation of the Exchanges which are about to make their way deeper into the American landscape.

One might predict that few of us are a match for weighing the array of benefits in light of the costs we might predict we would face. That assumption did not prove true when we put it to the test. We invited members of the North Carolina State Employee Association and faculty/staff of Duke University to volunteer for a web based survey. The survey assessed demographic features of 400 volunteers and presented them with a series of panels, each of which offered up 3 options in health plan design with variations in the description of doctor visit fee, annual deductible, proscription fee, lifetime coverage, choice of doctors, and monthly premium. The Figure (below)  is a display of the features of the plans that influenced the preferences of the State Employees.

With further analysis we could demonstrate that the State and Duke employees would be willing to spend several out-of-pocket dollars on co-pays rather than a dollar more in premium. Furthermore, this sensitivity to premium is greatest for younger employees insuring only themselves; non-white families are more sensitive to annual deductibles.⁶ Clearly these volunteers were weighing the value to them of greater expense assuming that the health policy had intrinsic value worthy of as much as they could afford. The more their resources were limited, the more they were willing to run the risk of incurring expense modulated by their assessment of their risk for sickness.

Utility for Plan Attributes in the State Employee Sample (click to enlarge). aRange, $100, $300, $500. Results show a preference for the lowest deduction amount. bRange, $1 000 000, $2 000 000, unlimited. Results show a preference for unlimited coverage. cRange, $0, $1 000, $2 000. Results show a preference for the lowest deductible amount. dRange, $0, $20, $40. Results show a preference for the lowest prescription copay amount. eRange, 100, 200, 400 doctor network. Results show a preference for more choices. fRange, $0, $25, $50. Results show a preference for the lowest copay.

Generations of Americans have now been lulled into thinking all of this is sensible. “Gaming” the system is the way it is and the way it will be. Health insurance may seem like a logical variation on homeowners’ insurance. But there is nothing sensible about it. Choosing health coverage is a totally different exercise from choosing to insure a family home or heirloom. For one, the home or heirloom can be appraised. Health can’t be appraised; in fact, it is difficult to define. How valuable is the care, which elements of care are less valuable and which might one rationally do without? No one offers a policy designed to such particulars, and no person can be reasonably expected to fully know what they will want or need as a sick, scared, patient during the savvy consumer-minded extravaganza of open-enrollment. For health insurance, the “moral hazard” does not pertain to the insured; it pertains to the other stakeholders participating in the system.

Medicine in the 21^st century should be an exercise in informed medical decision making. For each option in diagnosis and intervention, the patient must be encouraged to ask, “Based on the available science, what is the best I can expect?”  And then actively and with comprehension, listen to the answer. For some options, there is no informative science. For many, the science may be robust but demonstrations of efficacy have proved elusive, inconsistent or marginal. Examples include interventions for occlusive atherosclerotic disease, elective procedures on backs, shoulders and knees, pharmaceutical management of cognitive impairment, situational affective disorders, type 2 diabetes and essential hypertension, along with various screening protocols that afford minimal if any demonstrable benefit. The therapeutic decision hinges on how the patient values the remote possibility of benefit and the probability of harm.

Shouldn’t health insurance in the 21^st century live by the same razor? How valuable is the care, which elements of care are less valuable and which can one rationally do without? Rather than tolerate increases in co-pay and deductible, shouldn’t we be able to pay less because we do not value particular options. Better yet, shouldn’t the options relate to the likelihood of benefit? Those of us who consider interventions with unlikely or small benefits of little value should not be asked to burden the cost of providing such for those who value such. We should be offered a “high efficacy option” at lower cost than an “any efficacy option” and no one should be offered an option that indemnifies for interventions that have been studied and cannot be shown to offer a clinically meaningful benefit. In fact, if the “any efficacy option” was transparent in terms of limitations in efficacy and risk of toxicity, would anyone want to share in the expense of indemnification or balk at a policy that did not cover interventions that lacked substantive evidence for meaningful effectiveness⁷?

Focusing primarily on cost, costliness, and administrative priorities takes the health of the “health care system” as the primary goal. It is a focus that provides no measurable advantage in caring for people. Persisting in this approach, and even expanding it, provides a temporary diversion, but not a solution. Neither the practice of medicine nor its infrastructure is the reason for medicine to exist. Furthermore, becoming a savvy consumer of “health care” is not what is meant by informed medical decision making. Medicine’s primary calling is to the personal, unique, idiosyncratic needs and values of each person who chooses to be (or must become) a patient. And in that calling is the solution to the crisis of costliness.⁷

References:

1. Kahneman D. Thinking Fast and Slow. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2011.

2. Ariely D. Predictably Irrational. The hidden forces that shape our decisions. New York, NY: Harper Collins; 2009.

3. Beck H. The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press; 1995.

4. Hadler NM. Stabbed in the Back. Confronting back pain in an overtreated society. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press; 2009, 93-138.

5. McGraw AP, Schwartz JA, Tetlock P. From the Commercial to the Communal: Reframing Taboo Trade-offs in Religious and Pharmaceutical Marketing. Journal of Consumer Research 2012; 39: 157-73.

6. Schwartz J, Hadler NM, Ariely D, Huber JC, Emerick T. Choosing among employer-sponsored health plans. What drives employee choices? J Occupational and Environmental Medicine 2013; 55: 305-9.

7. Hadler NM. The Citizen Patient. Reforming health care for the sake of the patient, not the system. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press; 2013.

For me, though, I really like the list of his abilities that come from the 1940s radio serials. This was back when Superman was described as “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound”. These descriptions all have to do with super-strength when you get right down to it. And with this summer’s “Man of Steel” Superman re-boot, super-strength is the focus of this post.

I have to admit I’ve always found the explanation for Superman’s powers to be, well, a bit dubious. He has his powers because of our yellow sun. That is, because he was from a red sun planet (Krypton) somehow the yellow sun of Earth unleashes some inner super power mechanism that gives Superman all his…super-ness. Of course it’s a bit pure escapist fun. But what if there actually was something to that, though?

I don’t mean something to the “yellow sun / red sun” stuff. You can just check in with our “friendly neighborhood physics” professor Jim Kakalios and his bok “Physics of Superheroes” for the real deal on that one. I mean rather the unleashing of some inner mechanism bit. What if something inside the human body could be unleashed—like removing the shackles from Hercules—and allow for dramatically increased strength?

Which brings me to two proteins with the superhero sounding names of myostatin and activin A. These are “chalones”—factors secreted by your cells to suppress excessive growth of an organ—found in your muscles. They basically work to keep the size and number of your muscle cells—and thus your overall strength—within a certain range. Since these factors work to negatively regulate muscle cell growth, removal of these factors allows muscle cells to get larger and increase in number. That’s where the “super-strength” comes from!

The Source of Super-Strength Here On Earth…

Myostatin itself has a pretty interesting history in animal husbandry and selective breeding. Although it didn’t go by the name myostatin back then, the effect of this growth factor was first described in cattle as “bovine muscular hypertrophy” by the British farmer H. Culley in 1807. Cattle that have a myostatin gene deletion look unusually and excessively muscular. So much so that the term “double muscled” is often used because of the look and the reality that such a cow has less bone, less fat and much more muscle than a “normal” cow.

This mutation, and more recently that of activin A, has been shown in many mammals so far, including rodents, dogs, pigs, sheeps, and—wait for it—humans. In fact I used this as partial basis for a genetic basis for Batman’s abilities in my first book.

The best example of myostatin gene deletions in humans was provided by Schuelke and colleagues back in 2004. The figure comes from that study and shows the image of the child at 6 days old (left side) and at 7 months (right). Arrowheads point to clear increases in muscle tissue at the hip and lower leg. The ultrasound images show the areas and sizes of the muscles (F=femur bone, VL, VI, VM, and RF are all parts of the ‘quadriceps’ knee extensor muscle group) for the child with the mutation (left) and a child of the same age without the mutation. This boy continued to develop normally but with greatly enhanced strength. In fact, at the age of 4½ this child could hold two 3 kg dumbbells with arms straight out to the sides!

But, there’s more. The story so far…your strength is a function of the number and size of your muscle cells. And the size and number of your muscle cells is regulated by myostatin and activin A. What if there was something that also guarded the guards? Well, it appears follistatin might fit that requirement. This means there could be a way to turn off the genetic switch that keeps muscle strength in check. Maybe.

Superhero Genetic Engineering… What Do We Want To Super-Charge?

Recent advances have decoded genes related to high performance in many bodily systems in humans. This gives us a kind of road map over what we want to mutate on purpose. Super-strength is a good place to start.

First of all, a note of caution. The long-term effects of deliberately inducing genetic manipulations on these growth factors aren’t known. And it hasn’t been used clinically in humans yet. But it has been done in monkeys.

That’s right. We are close to super strong monkeys. Which, in a bit of an aside, I have to admit actually scares me a little bit. That’s because of this thing I’ve had about monkeys since I first saw “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” when I was 5 years old. It was the scene where the Wicked Witch of the West calls out her flying monkeys (okay, actually called “winged monkeys”). Those creepy monkeys defeated the Winkies, the Great Oz, and kidnapped Dorothy. When those winged primates came spilling over the rooftops to pick up Dorothy I thought it then and I still think it now—monkeys should not fly.

Instead of flight, muscle strength was on order in 2009 when research scientists at the Center for Gene Therapy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio and at Ohio State University carried out their work. They used a virus (a viral vector) to insert the human gene for follistatin into knee extensor muscles of macaque monkeys. Remember that follistatin works to block the action of myostatin. To remove the brake on muscle growth, in other words.

This gene insertion permanently modified the muscle properties of the monkeys. The muscle grew about 25% larger and stronger than normal. This kind of experiment had been done before in other animals like mice, but this was the first time it had been successfully shown in non-human primates. It hints at possible application in humans—and beyond—yet to come.

That’s my scientific explanation for Kal-El’s super-strength under our yellow sun. Using comic book willful suspension of disbelief and assuming a similar physiology for Kryptonians and humans, perhaps the radiation from our yellow sun activated some epigenetic mechanism that eventually led to increased follistatin expression in all the muscles in Clark Kent’s body. Voila. Super-strength. Or super-strength light, I guess, since the strength gain isn’t on the order of 100 x or more that we eventually see in Superman.

But it’s a start. And, more importantly, this approach has huge potential to improve muscle mass and function in those with degenerative muscle disorders. Superman would definitely approve.

Exam results are often posted on bulletin boards in schools and colleges in India

When Debarghya Das’ friends approached him to obtain their final grades from the education board before the official announcement, he gave it a try and got nowhere. Das, a computer science student at Cornell, had just finished his own exams and was to begin an internship at Google in a few days. Having graduated from the same education system as his friends a few years before, he had always suspected that the board was doing something fishy, but had never found any proof of it — he’d only heard rumors.

Intrigued by the prospect of analyzing the data of thousands of students, he began poking around on the results page after the grades were announced and found that the web security was rather lax. In a few hours, he slipped past the education board’s poorly-designed website, scraped together the results of the thousands of students who had written the exam that year and found potential evidence that the grades were being tampered with.

The quality of education in India depends heavily on the kind of syllabus followed by the school, which in turn depends on the state the school is located in. But the exception to this are the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) controlled by the central government of India and the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE or ISC) run by the independent Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE).

The CISCE does not have governmental oversight and compared to the other state-run systems, it has a smaller, economically well-off student population. This year over 200,000 students took the CISCE’s tenth and twelfth grade exams. Their results were distributed to external media sources and published on various websites. The security on these websites was almost non-existent and since they had posted the data in the public domain, Das was able to scrape it easily.

The graphs of six subjects overlap perfectly with the same 33 scores missing

When Das analyzed the “26 megabytes of pure, magnificent data,” as he puts it in his blog post, he found that in six different subjects — English, Hindi, computer application, science, math and history, civics and geography — not one student had scored over half of the possible grades attainable to pass the exam. The tests are scored out of 100 and the minimum score required to pass is 35, which means students should theoretically be able to get any of the 66 numbers between 35 and 100 to pass. However, Das’ data showed 33 missing scores.

In other words, of the nearly 150,000 tenth grade students who had taken the exam, no one had scored 33 of the possible 66 marks. Not one student, in all six subjects! It resulted in the sharp peaks shown in the graph above, instead of the expected smooth bell-shaped curve. And even more shockingly, the same 33 numbers were missing in all six subjects. Coincidence?

“It’s statistically impossible,” says Bhubaneswar Mishra, a professor of computer science at NYU. And Das agrees; having heard stories of students complaining about how they expected higher grades, he had always suspected there might be some tinkering going on.

But Gerry Arathoon, the chief executive and secretary of the CISCE, denied Das’ allegations. In a statement to the Times of India, he said, “in keeping with the practice followed by examination conducting bodies, a process of standardization is applied to the results.”

Since the difficulty level of exams varies every year, many examination systems like the SAT and GRE, compute a raw score based on the number of correctly answered questions, which is then converted into a standardized score. If the exam is tougher than previous years, the standardization corrects for it and students receive a higher final grade. However, if the exam is easier, then the grades are lowered.

“But the inherent flaw with the council’s standardization is that they’ve been passing off the standardized score as the raw score,” says Das. Arathoon’s statement also doesn’t explain how the exact same scores could be missing in six different subjects’ results.

In addition, it’s common practice amongst standardized testing bodies to release both the raw and standardized score, which the CISCE doesn’t follow. The SAT, for instance, provides statistical data including averages and percentile distributions in order to reveal how students did on the whole without violating privacy laws. It makes the SAT a lot more transparent in its dealings when compared to the CISCE.

Das compared the CISCE’s system to a big black box. “Things go in and things come out but we don’t know what’s happening inside. It’s unfair to the students. They deserve to know more,” he said.

The Indian education system places a lot of importance on tenth and twelfth grade marks. It decides what subjects you’ll be allowed to study, the colleges you’ll be accepted in and how much you’ll pay to enroll in the major you’re interested in. Colleges announce “cut-off marks” for every major and only those students who have scored above the minimum required score are considered by the college’s admission office. Often the cut-off marks are as high as 99% or incredibly, even 100%.

The pressure to do well is intense during the final years of high school and a shift of one or two points on an exam can make the difference between studying on scholarship or paying thousands of dollars in capitation fees or “donations” to guarantee a place in the university. In such a competitive environment, the CISCE’s lack of transparency can lead to a lot of psychological and financial stress for students as well as their families.

Despite the significant coverage of Das’ allegations by the Indian media, it would be unrealistic to expect any major changes in the CISCE’s system. Since Arathoon has openly accepted that results are standardized, without acknowledging the other discrepancies that Das’ analysis revealed, it’s highly unlikely that the CISCE will change its methodology. At best, they might improve the security on the websites where the results are released.

Image credits: IgnitionMind (top) and Debarghya Das (bottom).

The gene centered view of evolution was popularized by Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, which mixed the best thinking available, with great prose, logical errors and sinfully unscientific sermonizing. It remains influential, even beyond its readers, its misleading title seeming sufficient to substitute for its contents.

Dawkins promoted this gist: “a society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very very nasty society… Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature…because we are born selfish”.

But Dawkins’ doctrine of everlasting selfish doom, a kind of an evolutionary original sin, contains errors. He over-extrapolates from incomplete categories, and makes an error so common it has its own name, the fallacy of composition. Dawkins’s devil isn’t in the details, but in straying too far from them.

Dawkins defines: X as “altruistic if it behaves in such a way as to increase another such entity’s [Y] welfare at the expense of its own. Selfish behavior has exactly the opposite effect.” His scheme sees only two outcomes, selfish or altruistic, and is zero-sum: X gains by Y’s loss. This accurately describes genes competing against variations of themselves for the single slot of dominance in future populations. But does all of creation fit into that scheme? Clearly not, since it excludes: X and Y both lose; X and Y both gain cooperatively. Many biologists confuse cooperation with altruism, but by Dawkins’ definition win-win cooperation is neither selfish nor altruistic. Yet this logical space is crucial for all species with team survival strategies.

Oddly, Dawkins describes how every “selfish” gene depends on many other genes in the “intricate cooperative venture” of propagation, and notes that advantages accrue to any gene “that cooperates well with most of the other genes” it depends on (a minimum of 181), but he still makes irrationally inconsistent prophecies like we “can expect…little help from biological nature” towards cooperation. Dawkins isn’t entirely responsible for the cooperative components of his book not being as well known as his misleading title, but his unscientific sermonizing has lent the shield of science to much bad thinking. Especially the false idea of a “universal ruthless” aspect of biology, a sort of evolutionary original sin, that dooms all that lives to live in a selfish world. Cooperation abounds and all genes depend on it.

Dawkins falls for a “fallacy of composition.” He inappropriately extends properties of parts to wholes. An absurd example is: each atom in a teacup is invisible, therefore the teacup is invisible. Dawkins projects his preferred “selfish” zero-sum property of genes onto everything built by genes, and falsely concludes everything that has “evolved…should be selfish.” But all genes are also cooperative. And besides, no gene-level property can be safely projected onto all things that have genes, or everything they do. Biology isn’t that simple. It mixes competition and cooperation.

In later editions Dawkins partially recants his central selfish dogma, saying “without departing from fundamental laws of the selfish gene theory… cooperation and mutual assistance can flourish.” Game Theory had proved his prophecy of “little help from biological nature” to be false. Cooperating generously can be an evolutionarily stable strategy, with higher productivity than selfishness.

Sadly the unsimple details of Dawkins partial reversal haven’t spread as successfully as his initial sermonizing. In the 30th anniversary edition, he conceded that “born selfish is misleading” and asked readers to “Please mentally delete that rogue sentence and others like it.” Specifying those others would help. It’s time all needed corrections were preached as zealously as the prior errors.

The cooperative, interdependent team aspect of genes suggests cautious generalization. Just as no gene can survive alone, neither can members of any interdependent species. What could be called the “natural dependency principle” can be useful in mapping the evolutionary limits of selfishness: nature ultimately eliminates all that damages what it depends on.

Similar team logic is built into human social instincts, which should limit what counts as rational self-interest. But many leading practitioners of reason somehow deem it rational to damage what they depend on. Their unskilled reasoning yields poor results in many of life’s social coordination problems, like the Tragedy of the Commons.

The pop-science of selfishness needs an upgrade. Cooperation and team survival and selfishness are all natural and rational. Each is sometimes fittest for the circumstances. Dawkins says he could have called his book “The Cooperative Gene.” Evolution would be better understood if he had.

Illustration by Julia Suits, The New Yorker Cartoonist & author of The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions.

Previously in this series:

It Is in Our Nature to Be Self-Deficient
Inheriting Second Natures
Our Ruly Nature
It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories
Tools Are in Our Nature
We Fit Nature To Us: Evolutions two way street
Justice Is In Our Nature
Behavioral Telescope Shows How Cooperation Works

Last month, Idaho-based J.M. Simplot asked the Agriculture Department to grant a deregulated status for a new variety of potatoes genetically engineered to reduce bruising and develop lower levels of acrylamide, a neurotoxin and possible carcinogen, when cooked.

Unlike the transgenic crops thatt use genetic material from other organisms – like the genes from a bacterium that makes Bt corn, soybeans and cotton – Simplot’s Innate (TM) potatoes only use genetic material from other varieties of potatoes. Instead of adding genetic material for desirable traits, certain undesirable traits are “silenced” by inhibiting RNA from carrying the genetic base pairs from the DNA to synthesize proteins.

Simplot has taken genetic fragments from wild and domestic potatoes and arranged them in a way that results in silencing of two genes, one that lead to browning and the other that makes the amino acid that oxidizes to create acrylamide.

Simplot speeds up a process that has been “painfully slow” through conventional breeding, wrote Walter Stevenson, a professor emeritus in plant pathology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in a letter to USDA in support of deregulating Innate potatoes.

The technology promises to bring both health and economics benefits. Bruising costs the potato industry about $298 million per year. As for acrylamide, there is not enough information to date to set a reliable threshold for how much is safe, but it’s a good idea to keep levels low — from both a safety and business standpoint.

Margaret Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote about Simplot’s potatoes in UCS’s The Equation blog. Although she welcomes the possibility of safer potatoes with lower acrylamide levels, she warns of the unknowns of gene silencing, referring to a recent paper from the University of Cantebury that warns of the biosafety risks. The papers’ authors, led by John Heinemann, warn that small interfering RNA (siRNA) used to silence genes could disrupt human cells. siRNA is a type of double stranded RNA (dsRNA).

The author stirred fears down under last year with well-publicized warnings around the development of genetically-modified wheat by the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. The wheat is being tested for a variety of nutritional and resilience traits. This gene silencing wheat, said the authors, could turn off human genes and lead to ailments like glycogen storage disease, which causes liver malfunction. RNA engineered to maintain toxic traits could also enter the natural environment to harm plants and animals, Heinemann argued.

The paper was lambasted by the Food Standards Australia New Zealand, which assesses food safety risks:

“In formulating their hypothesis, the authors have not taken into account the fact that small dsRNAs are ubiquitous in the environment and in the diverse range of organisms we consume as food, including plants and animals. This establishes a long history of safe human consumption which pre-dates the use of such techniques in GM plants,” the agency responded, adding that the study underestimated the strengths of the food safety regulatory system to detect possible unintended effects.

“There is no scientific basis for suggesting that small dsRNAs present in some GM foods have different properties or pose a greater risk than those already naturally abundant in conventional foods,” the agency concluded.

To provide clarity to a thoroughly confused population, afraid of gene-altering bread in the sandwiches of the future, the New Zealand Science Media Centre called on scientists to provide some feedback to FSANZ’s conclusion. Three scientists defended the agency, saying that Heinemann’s suggestions to tighten scrutiny on gene silencing would create an unnecessary burden to regulators and unfounded anxiety in consumers.

The only voice to reject FSANZ’s conclusion? Heinemann himself.

There is undoubtedly much more to learn about dsRNA, a field that only began in the early 1990s. But a panicked reaction to technology only promotes a volley of contradictory messages for people who want safe, healthy food.

At the same time, Simplot is marking its distance from trangenic crops by explicitly promoting the fact that the Innate ™ genes come from good, old-fashioned potatoes. As USDA mulls its decision to deregulate the potatoes, it will be interesting to see if the company can successfully disassociate from one M — Monsanto — while pleasing the customers of another M — McDonalds.

Is it just a simple conversational error that only the grammatically fastidious find grating, or is there something more to it? The truth is that mathematicians recognize the gravity of the error as well. In fact, far from being a mere linguistic slip, this error does a profound disservice to concepts that are at the very foundation of modern technology.

The fundamental distinction that is glossed over in that usage is the one between the continuous and the discrete. Now “continuous” is a word that is ubiquitous in day-to-day conversation, and its meaning is well-understood, at least in the sense that the common-sense understanding is consistent with its technical or mathematical meaning. (To understand the full ramifications of continuity, one has to dig deeper.) Simply put, if someone says, for example, that she has worked continuously for twenty years in a particular office, she means that there were no breaks or gaps in her service at that office during that twenty-year period.

On the other hand, “discrete” is not a word that occurs often in common parlance, although people seem to understand it well enough. It is difficult to define it precisely – one has to start with the notions of a set and a one-to-one correspondence between sets and go through the basic ideas put forward by the great nineteenth century mathematician Georg Cantor. (There are many books where they are discussed, but a beautiful and perspicuous description of them can be found in the book “Satan, Cantor, and Infinity” by Raymond Smullyan. As one might guess from the title, the book is accessible to anyone with a junior high school mathematics background. It is a delectable read.) The meaning of “discrete” becomes clear, however, when one uses it in an example: one has one child, two or more children, or none at all. One instinctively understands that it is absurd to talk about 1.2 or 3.5 children. The same thing applies to apples or oranges in a basket.

So, without going into a detailed construction of real numbers, an ordinary person understands that some things, such as children, books, or cars can only be counted, whereas certain other things, such as water, milk, or the weight of a person have to be measured. Discrete objects are counted, while continuous ones are measured.

Lest one should dismiss these thoughts as the idle ruminations of a disgruntled fusspot, let us observe that the difference between continuity and discreteness is the basis for the profound and spectacular developments in science and technology that define the 21st century as well as the second half of the 20th. One often hears that ours is the digital age. What does it mean? It means, for example, that music recorded in the old days was analog, meaning that the signals were continuous.

In contrast, when music is digitized, the signals are sampled at distinct points in time. Yet if the number of sampling points is large enough, and the duration between successive sampling points very close to, but distinct from, zero, then our ears cannot distinguish between the continuous and discrete signals. In other words, it is beyond our powers of resolution. And this sampling at discrete time or space intervals is at the heart of digital technology, the hallmark of our times. Thus when we confound the continuous and the discrete and speak of the “amount” of people, for example, we are in effect saying that digital and analog technologies are the same. Of course, in mathematics itself, there are entirely different sets of ideas and techniques for dealing with continuous as opposed to discrete problems. Any mathematician worth her salt will tell you that they are very different ways of mathematical thinking. (The two points of view meet, however, when one considers asymptotics, i.e. what happens in the long run. This is rather like two parallel lines meeting in the far distance, at what mathematicians call the point at infinity.)

As the great Henry Fowler, author of “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,” said, the ultimate arbiter of correctness of a word or a phrase is usage. So it behooves those of us who care about the words we use and their meanings to raise alarm bells about the lumping of “amount” and “number”, or “less” and “fewer” as synonyms. Otherwise we will be stuck with them forever and have nobody else to blame. In that spirit, one only hopes that, in typical English fashion, that sign outside the bookstore in London has spurred many an enraged stickler-for-precision into action.

Acknowledgments: It is a pleasure to thank John Rennie and Keith Johnson for helpful comments and suggestions and Aileen Penner for the illustration.

Note: Continuity is a property of functions. For sets, the corresponding property is connectedness. However, in the interests of keeping the discussion simple and easy to understand, this was not mentioned in the article.

Before you run off to eat a handful of spoiled sushi or roll about in a cow pasture allow me to clarify. It isn’t you that needs to become infected, it is the mosquitoes that spread these diseases.

Dengue Fever and malaria are common diseases of the tropics. Both are spread through by the bite of infected mosquitos, which in turn acquire the pathogens by feeding on an infected host.  At the turn of the twentieth century both Ronald Ross and Alphonse Laveran were separately recognized with the Nobel Prize for their contributions to our understanding of how malaria is transmitted from person to person.

Southeastern U.S. Malaria deaths in 1930.

Malaria was once common in the southeastern U.S. but today it has been effectively eliminated.  This was accomplished not by curing those who carried the parasite, but by reducing the rate of infection.  Fewer infected people meant fewer infected mosquitoes leading to fewer infected people… well, you get the idea.  And to do this all that was required was to keep mosquitoes from biting people!

As anyone who ventures out on a summer night knows this is easier said than done, especially in a part of the country where short winters provide the only respite from the onslaught of these real life vampires.

A combination of events brought this about.  The migration of people from rural areas to cities, the aggressive use of pesticides and the draining of swamps all contributed.  But the single most effective measure was one that was decidedly low-tech.  Screened doors and windows.  The species of mosquito most commonly associated with malaria tends to feed in the evening. With more and more people safely behind the protection of fine mesh the cycle of transmission was effectively broken and malaria in the U.S. became a memory.

But what about the rest of the world that cannot afford well screened homes? And what about the more aggressive pathogens such as the virus that causes Dengue?  The solution may lie with a humble bacterium.

Wolbachia is a naturally occurring organism that infects somewhere between 60-70% of all insect species and can change the nature of its host. Not only that but unlike most other bacteria Wolbachia can be passed from mother to offspring via eggs, effectively creating an entire population of infected bugs.

Scott O’Neil of the University of Queensland, Australia

In a landmark 2008 paper Scott O’Neil of the University of Queensland demonstrated that infection with Wolbachia could actually protect some insects from viral infections.  What had been thought to be a benign symbiont was actually a beneficial partner for the insect.

Then O’Neil got an idea. What if he could infect mosquitoes with a strain of Wolbachia that would “protect” them from the Dengue virus?  People might still suffer annoying bites but they would be spared the painful agony that has earned Dengue the nickname “breakbone fever.”

In 2011 O’Neill and co-workers reported that they had developed just such a strain of mosquitoes that are immune to the Dengue virus. Later that year, working with colleagues at James Cook University they intentionally released Wolbachia infected mosquitoes in the area around the resort city of Cairns in northern Queensland.

Preliminary results suggest that the disease resistant mosquitoes are competing well with the natural population and are maintaining their immunity to transmitting Dengue.  Within a few years the citizens of Cairns may no longer fear contracting Dengue, even if they will still suffer annoying bites from the mozzies.

Now comes word that American and Chinese researchers have teamed up to develop mosquitos infected with a different strain of Wolbachia. A strain that can block the transmission of the big “M” itself.  Malaria.

In laboratory tests the Wolbachia infection is passed down from female mosquitoes to their young, and those that have the bacteria are resistant to contracting the most dangerous strain of human malaria, Plasmodium falciparum.   Field trials are planned.  If the success of the Cairns project is any indication in coming years the threat of malaria may become as distant a memory for the three and a half billion people who are currently at risk as it is for those who live in the comfort and safety of well screened homes.

One day we may be similarly protected from West Nile virus, Yellow fever, equine encephalitis, and most other mosquito-borne diseases.  This would make those annoying welts a little easier to tolerate.

Images: U.S. map 1930.; Scott O’Neil; World malaria map 2011.

However, this is still the end of the research cycle, or at least the end of most researcher’s dealing with their outputs. There is of course all the power that has yet to be fully realised by reusing, mining and building on top the existing research. But it was all of the steps before this that I fell down on. I was bad at documenting my research in my lab book. Half of this problem was laziness and half was the fact that text based lab notebooks are not ideal for the digital world we live in. Videos and large spreadsheet datasets do not translate well to paper, even after the obligatory printing, cutting and pasting. This led to me developing my own file management system, as did lots of my colleagues, leading to massive heterogeneity in research data management plans on a case by case basis. So what can be done?

Online lab notebooks

A lot of these technologies seem to fall down in their lack of innovation. Just like in academic publishing, where text based documents have moved from paper to ipads, there is so much more that can be done with today’s technology. Some great examples of researchers who have been using or used open notebook’s for years include Carl Boettiger and Cameron Neylon. While Cameron has now moved onto a role at the Open Access giant PLOS, Carl is still being innovative with new technologies to help make his research management process automated and seamless. Open notebook science has been around since Jean Claude Bradley first coined the term back in 2006. Previous efforts to organise some standardisation of online notebooks include the wiki-based OpenWetWare. While all of these efforts look to capture the detail of a normal paper based lab book, there is potential to think further and collect all of the extra metadata in an automated manner. This can be machine settings or other processes that we rely on human documentation for at the moment.

Desktop research management tools.

One thing we have been working on internally at Digital Science is a desktop tool for managing your research output. It has a few really cool features, such as the timeline that gives you an easily browsable and filterable view of your files. This is the kind of innovation that I previously mentioned has been lacking in this space. Just like a lot of my former colleagues used ‘Papers’ to manage their pdf documents, now you can manage all of your research outputs using ‘Projects’. The roadmap for ‘Projects’ looks bright with syncing between computers and the ability to push to the cloud, through services like figshare. Other players in this space include Evernote, Sharepoint and Google Docs. Evernote is an amazing organisation tool in general. They, like the other products mentioned here do sometimes fall down in this space in that academics are not their target audience, rather it is another case where forward thinking academics have taken great existing software and tried to bend it into their workflow.

Don’t be lazy.

It’s easy for me to say now that I don’t have to manage my research outputs, but putting an extra 10 minutes in at the end of the day will save you days when it comes to writing up papers or your thesis. This is something that comes back to haunt me to this day. Since leaving academia 18 months ago, I have made several trips back to the lab. Even though the papers that we are trying to get out may not benefit me career wise anymore, it is still important to me to get those findings out to the world. But there must be so many who don’t have the luxury of still working in the same town that they did their research. Likewise, there must be so many who just cannot be bothered. Herein lies the problem. I had to go back to look for files that my old team couldn’t find, as they couldn’t navigate through my chaotic management system. Folders for every month with files that have names like ‘Updated characterisation of mobilised MSCs – Use this one – New’.

As mentioned previously the academic reward system is changing and with all things like this, the early adopters will benefit. Some of the people who have been acting in an open manner for the last few years are already seeing the benefit. C. Titus Brown, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University wrote in a blog post this month, “I can tell you that my career has already been immeasurably improved by my openness, including posting our software, writing blogs, and engaging with people on twitter.” The funder disruptions in this space mean that all sorts of innovative behaviour is coming out of research labs. Publishers are taking note of this and trying to incubate these tools to get them past the point where most academic projects fail to get traction. Companies like Digital Science, the newly formed PLOS labs and Elsevier’s Scopus platform are all looking at innovative ways to work into the academic workflow. This use of new technology should bring a level of efficiency to research that academics have long been waiting for and have long deserved.

Stone’s film premiered at Sundance to positive reviews (Variety, Slate) and is scheduled for theatrical release this summer. It makes a convincing case for nuclear power as a carbon-free source of energy to reduce the harm of climate change in a world in which population is rising and the demand for electricity is soaring as the developing world develops. (For the record, I was already convinced; See Beware the Fear of Nuclear…FEAR) Nuclear power, Shellenberger says, can contribute to “…a world of seven to ten billion people, living resource-intensive high energy lives, without killing the climate.”

But Pandora’s Promise will probably persuade some environmentalists to rethink nuclear power not just because of the facts but because of how those facts are framed. The information in the film is presented in ways that resonate with many of the emotional, instinctive, affective characteristics that shape how people feel about risks in general, and about nuclear power and climate change in particular.

One of the most powerful of those characteristics is the influence of trust, and the central case of Stone’s main characters is “Trust us, we’re environmentalists and we hated nuclear power too.”  Mark Lynas, author of The God Species, who helped organize radical environmentalist opposition to genetically modified food in Europe, says “We were against nuclear power. As an environmentalist, those two things go together.” Gwyneth Cravens, author of The Power to Save the World, says: “I grew up in an anti-nuke family. My parents were anti-nuclear.” Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, goes further, and notes how for the baby boom generation, the fear of nuclear power grew directly out of the existential fear of nuclear weapons, and radioactive fallout from atmospheric weapons testing, and cancer, all of which fed the rise of the modern environmental movement. “I grew up having nightmares that my home was bombed into oblivion,” Brand says. “There was Duck and Cover. Those things cut pretty deep. You had the strong sense that this is not a primary energy source. This is a weapon that we feel pretty badly about.”

As much Stone establishes the trustworthiness of the his environmentalist protagonists, he challenges the trustworthiness of prominent anti-nuclear thought leaders, focusing on Helen Caldicott. Caldicott calls those who deny the science of climate change “…idiots,” adding “ How dare they deny science.” But Pandora’s Promise suggests she is doing the same thing by claiming Chernobyl may ultimately kill more than a million people, when more than 20 years of research by the World Health Organization estimates the radiation released from world’s worst nuclear plant accident will cause a maximum of about 4,000 lifetime excess cancer deaths. Caldicott is asked how she can she reconcile doing the same sort of science denial she says the ‘idiot’ deniers of climate change are doing? “I can not,” she stumbles.

The film also directly challenges the groupthink psychology that shapes our perceptions of risk, and certainly has shaped environmentalist opposition to nuclear power. The pro-nuclear environmentalists in the film confess that their original anti-nuke views were more the product of automatic tribal acceptance of what the group believed – Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader and Bill McKibben are against nukes? Then so am I. – than informed independent analysis. They acknowledge that it literally felt threatening to change their minds and go against the whole tribe; “I was at no doubt that my entire career as an activist was at risk if I went and talked (positively) about nuclear,” Lynas.

Stone’s effective presentation will resonate with other psychological aspects of risk perception as well. People worry more about risks that are human-made than risks that are natural. Pandora’s Promise highlights how this is more emotional than rational, showing organizers of a rally protesting against the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant handing out bananas, a single one of which contains more radiation than the daily radioactive water emissions from the plant they were so afraid of. (Radioactive potassium 40 is absorbed into the banana from the soil, see Banana Equivalent Dose.

We worry more about any risk we can’t detect with our own senses, an aspect of risk perception that Pandora’s Promise addresses by ‘visualizing’ radiation, having Lynas display a radiation detector in several locations where people are leading their normal lives; Tokyo, Paris, on a mountain top in New Hampshire, on a plane ride. We also see the levels at Chernobyl, and outside trailers in which Fukushima evacuees are living. In all those places, the now-visible radiation levels are similar, and low.

We worry more about risks to children than risk to adults, a psychological ‘fear factor’ relevant to the coming threat of climate change (which the film visualizes with dramatic graphics that show how much the climate has warmed over the last century). So there will be persuasive emotional effect when we see Lynas with his family as he says “Having kids has deepened my commitment to the future and concern about global warming.”

Finally, environmentalist culture generally prefers a society in which people believe ‘we are all in this together’, what the study of Cultural Cognition refers to as communitarians. Communitarians believe in fairness and justice and equal opportunity, and the film appeals directly to that worldview when another central character, Richard Rhodes – Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb – says, “Unless you want to condemn more than half the population of the earth to sickness and impoverished lives, we have to produce more electricity.”

Pandora’s Promise uses these devices instinctively, naturally. They don’t feel overtly manipulative, but just the intuitively applied tools of persuasive story telling. And because they resonate with important psychological characteristics that shape our perception of risk, they will probably persuade some viewers to rethink their opposition to nuclear power. For the same reasons, however, anti-nuclear advocates will probably react to the film defensively, because it threatens their tribal view and their self-identity.

Some will probably bristle at the film’s less-than-flattering depiction of Caldicott and anti-nuclear rallies. Others won’t like how, as we see rows of huge wind mills in California sitting motionless, Shellenberger mocks renewable solar and wind as ‘a hallucinatory illusion’ that can’t supply nearly as much electricity as the world will need. Nuclear opponents won’t like graphics that show how all of America’s nuclear waste would fit on a football field a few feet deep, or video showing that it can be stored safely (the film shows how high level nuclear waste is currently stored in containers outdoors at many American nuclear power plants, and how all of France’s high level nuclear waste is stored in canisters set into the floor in one room at a power plant).

Anti-nukes won’t like descriptions of new nuclear technologies that are safer, and cheaper. They will probably jump on the fact that Pandora’s Promise mentions only in passing that these technologies are probably decades away, and until then, without regulatory assistance, nuclear power technology is way too expensive to compete against cheaper fuels. Nor will nuclear opponents like the way that Pandora’s Promise undermines the claim that nuclear power is a weapons proliferation threat. We see glowing nighttime urban skylines as Brand tells us some of those lights are powered by nuclear material taken from decommissioned Russian and American warheads “Poetic” Brand calls it…swords into plowshares.

Pandora’s Promise is open, earnest, unabashed advocacy, and it makes a persuasive case, using images and emotional framings that will resonate with innate affective cues that influence our perceptions of risk. It may not change the minds of baby boomer environmentalists whose fear of anything nuclear grows from deep historic roots and whose self-identities are too tightly bound to the expected tribal opposition to nuclear power. But to younger viewers, and to any viewer with an open mind, Pandora’s Promise may help encourage fresh thinking about the huge pros, as well as the better known cons, of this important, if controversial, source of clean energy.

(In the name of transparency, I have participated twice in the Breakthrough Institute’s annual Breakthrough Dialogue, a two-day retreat that brings together several dozen experts and thinkers – not sure how I got invited – to ponder solutions to big problems. Shellenberger, Lynas, Brand, Cravens, and Stone, have been part of those conversations.)

The invitation said “the press study tour will focus on commercialization of ideas from clinics and hospitals and give an insight into the Danish health and biotech sector  through an innovative agenda with recommendations on how to create a competitive health economy in the Baltic Sea Region.”

BSHR HealthPort is a pillar of the EU Baltic Sea Region Strategy flagship ScanBalt Health Region.The tour was organised by Tartu Biotechnology Park in collaboration with the European Union of Science Journalists Associations (EUSJA), Biopeople, Danish Biotech Association, COBIS, The Nordic Council of Ministers and ScanBalt® fmba.  It was co-financed by the Baltic Sea Region program 2007 – 2013 as a part of the BSHR HealthPort project.

Except for me, the other 11 journalists who attended were members of EUSJA. Indeed, the press tour was the result of a collaboration several years ago between EUSJA and Scanbalt. There were journalists from the Netherlands, Russia, Poland, Belgium, Denmark and Austria.  Some had been on past tours, but most like me were new.  To this day I am not sure exactly how I got to be included. Peter Frank, who was our liaison and serves as the General Secretary of ScanBalt, said he could not remember either.

Anyhow I was delighted to be invited. Unlike other press tours which I have been invited to and turned down, there was no expectation or requirement of placing articles about the trip. (Full disclosure. I did receive a stipend, which paid for about half of my flight and three nights in a hotel. The other journalists also received travel grants.)

Frank said the tours are helpful to ScanBalt. “It is important for ScanBalt to encourage dialogue between society, science and innovation. A press tour is also in itself a reality check of the relevance of what we do. If it cannot be explained in clear terms to the participating journalists maybe it’s time to consider if it is worth doing. We learn a lot from the direct contact with the media; it forms part of our quality control.”

Our first day was at Copenhagen Bio Science Park, also known as, COBIS, which is a new building located between the Faculty of Health Sciences and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Copenhagen University and the university’s hospital.  COBIS houses startups, midsize companies as well as biotech centers.

We were given an overview by Sophie Labrosse, deputy director of  Biopeople, which was established by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Higher Education. Labrosse said ‘Biopeople is Denmark’s innovation network for health and life sciences. We believe that new collaborations and innovation are needed to address the great societal challenges in health and life sciences. Innovation can, in our eyes, only be achieved by cooperation across borders – of countries, of industry sectors, of public/ private sectors and between industry and academia. Our events are open for all and allow for interaction, and that is where the most innovative ideas come from.”

Among the presenters that day were Xinhua Han, marketing director of BGI Europe and Lene Lange, a professor and campus director at Aalborg University. Han told us about the history of BGI and how it comprised just 1% to the Human Genome Project and is now one of the largest genomics center in the world. Most recently BGI helped finance the research that led to a new and painless blood test for Down Syndrome.  Professor Lange spoke of the Aalborg University’s excellent job record based on its leadership in the use of problem based learning (PBL) where students work collaboratively on projects that put them at high demand in the business world.

Our second day was at the Symbion Science Park which was created to help in the commercialization of  innovative and high tech projects in the fields of IT, telecommunication, biotech, pharmaceuticals and medicine. Peter Torstensen, the CEO of Symbion, spoke of the “Danish challenge” which he said consists of “plenty of ideas, plenty of startups. but few blockbusters.” He spoke of the need to create in Denmark serial entrepreneurs, who like those in Silicon Valley, have run several successful startups. “Our goal is to help companies move from national accelerators to international accelerators; from having a broad focus to a narrower one and to promote collaboration between the Baltic partners, ” Torstensen said.

We also heard a presentation from Martin Bonde, chairman of the Danish Biotech Association and CEO of EpiTherapeutics, which is developing new and innovative cancer drugs. The drugs are the result of epigenetic research being conducted at the Biotech Research & Innovation Centre (BRIC) at the University of Copenhagen.

Our final day was spent at the headquarters of the Nordic Council of Ministers, which promotes cooperation between its members countries in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Greenland as well as others, in many areas including culture and leisure, economy and business and health.

Maria Skoog, of the Nordic Trial Alliance, which is “based on established national networks for clinical research, and will lay the foundation for increased collaboration between national and Nordic stakeholders.” The three-year pilot project is funded by the Council and NordForsk, an organization that provides funding for Nordic research cooperation as well as advice and input on Nordic research policy. There was also a presentation by Wolfgang Blank, CEO of Biocon Valley and Chairman of ScanBalt, who discussed the efforts of the Baltic Alliance against Multi-Resistant Bacteria.

What most impressed me over these three days of presentations was the commitment each speaker had to a spirit of cooperation. All of the speakers stressed the importance of working together and said that improvement and innovation occurs when people work together in a collaborative spirit. And although there were differences between the countries that border the Baltic Sea, there was agreement that they all had a stake in a successful future. Which brings me back to thinking about why Denmark is one of the happiest countries in the world; the people feel part of a larger community and have a spirit of sharing. And they also like to ride bikes.

_______________________________________________________________________

Quotes from journalists:

Mirjam Bedaf, freelance medical journalist, Holland.

“Holland is a small country. For me it’s always enriching to look across borders to see how research is organized and done elsewhere and what research topics are hot at the moment. The press tour was also great for meeting both researchers and journalists. I made contacts that were useful now and in the future. Furthermore, I gained two concrete ideas for articles. So it was certainly a successful trip for me.”

David Redeker , freelance science writer and communications advisor, The Hague Area, Netherlands

“I learned that small countries join forces to test new medicines and to explore four or five slightly different markets at once. And it is nice to speak to fellow journalists from other countries and see that we have a lot in common.”

Beehives stacked and secured on a truck for transportation (Photo: Mark Lehigh)

With all the talk of honey bee decline in the news, you may already know that honey bees don’t just make honey. They also give us almonds, cherries, avocados, raspberries, apples…pretty much everything delicious. Of course, there are plenty of native pollinators that can also do that job. But domestic honey bees (first brought to the American continent in the 1600s) are great for large-scale agriculture for a couple of reasons. First, they live in huge colonies of tens of thousands of bees: one colony can visit 50,000 blossoms in a single day. Second, those colonies can easily be picked up and moved around to wherever they’re most needed. So the same bees that are used in February to pollinate almonds in California can be moved in April to pollinate cherries and apples in Washington state. Over a million honey bee colonies are moved around the US, going from crop to crop as they come into bloom.

The honey bees in a single colony can actually move among crops in a similar way, but on a much smaller scale. When a bee comes back to the hive with a full load of sweet nectar or nutritious pollen (food for bees), she’ll do what’s known as a “waggle dance”—pointing other bees in the direction of the flowers she found.

It’s been more than 50 years since Karl von Frisch first figured out what bees were saying with the waggle dance, but we still don’t know much about why. What does the colony as a whole gain from dancing—can they collect more food faster, or with less effort? When is the ability to dance most useful? To figure this out, I decided to mess with the bees a bit, and make it so that when they danced, it came out gibberish. Then I asked how this affected how much food the whole colony could collect. What I found was that dancing was much more important for large colonies than it was for small ones [1]. This is because a large colony can send out hundreds or even thousands of bees to search the landscape in parallel, getting lots of information very quickly. If any one of those searchers finds a lush patch of flowers, she can do a dance back at the nest and recruit plenty of other bees to help her collect pollen and nectar from those flowers. I also found that dancing was most important when a wide variety of flowers were in bloom [2]. So, particularly when there is a nice mix of different types of flowers available, the bees in one big colony can actually move themselves around among different flower patches as they come into bloom.

Almond flowers as far as the eye can see (Photo: David Gallagher)

But the way agriculture is done these days, there doesn’t seem much point to dancing. Why bother telling your hivemates about a great patch of almond flowers, when there are only almond flowers as far as the eye can see? By planting crops in monoculture, we’ve increased the scale of flower patches so much that a honey bee colony can’t effectively search across many patches: they’re stuck in just one. That patch blooms for a short period of time, and then the bees have nothing else to eat. So instead of letting the honey bees move themselves around on a scale of several miles, we’re forced to truck ailing colonies across states. This is terrible for the bees: too much stress and poor nutrition make them more vulnerable to pesticides and diseases. As a result, we’re losing around 30% of our bee colonies each year, and we may soon be at the point where there aren’t enough bees to go around.

How can we fix this problem? A recent report released by the USDA and the EPA suggests we need to approach it from a number of angles, including better control of diseases and parasites and more research on the effects of potentially harmful pesticides. And—I think, crucially—we need to figure out how to quit moving so many bee colonies over such long distances. Instead, we should let the bees make the most of their amazing capacity to search the landscape and go where the flowers are. That means making a broader diversity of flowers available to bees on a scale where they can really take advantage of them. We’ve got to convince farmers to plant a wider variety of crops and let weeds grow on crop margins, and persuade landowners to maintain wild habitat near agricultural land. That’s going to be hard. But if it means that beekeepers can maintain big, healthy colonies of honey bees—and that farmers can attract native bees to pollinate their crops as well—wouldn’t it be worth it?

~~~

For more information on honey bees and native pollinators, and how you can get involved, see:

Pollinator Partnership – promoting pollinator health through public involvement and education, e.g. through National Pollinator Week and regional planting guides

The Xerces Society – conservation of native pollinators; see the Bring Back the Pollinators campaign and their book Attracting Native Pollinators

Project Apis m. – enhancing honey bee health; work directly with farmers and beekeepers, and support scientific research

References:

[1] Matina C. Donaldson-Matasci, Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman, Anna Dornhaus, Bigger is better: honeybee colonies as distributed information-gathering systems
Animal Behaviour, Volume 85, Issue 3, March 2013, Pages 585-592

[2] Matina C. Donaldson-Matasci and Anna Dornhaus, How habitat affects the benefits of communication in collectively foraging honey bees
Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology, Volume 66, Issue 4, April 2012, Pages 583-592.

“Never in my audiology career has something so simple helped so many people at so little cost.”

“I can’t stop smiling. . . . I could understand every word. . . .  What an overwhelming experience.”

“I am not exaggerating when I tell you that at EVERY [theatrical] performance we get big thank you’s.  We have subscribers who are returning and telling their friends.”

These reports—from an audiologist, a person with hearing loss, and the business manager of an 882-seat Chicago theatre—aptly describe my response when first experiencing the hearing assistance technology to which they each refer.  As I sat, unable to understand the words reverberating off the ancient stone walls of Scotland’s Iona Abbey, my wife noticed a hearing assistance sign with a “T” and nudged me to turn on the “telecoils” in my new aids.  The instant result was a stunningly clear voice, speaking from the center of my head.  I was on the verge of tears.

A TV room hearing loop

In our subsequent UK sojourns, I have experienced the spread of this “hearing loop” technology—to auditoriums, churches and cathedrals, and to tens of thousands of transient venues, including ticket and post office windows, and all London taxis.  Although specific applications need professional design, the gist of the technology is simple:  an amplifier picks up sound from a PA system and transforms it into a magnetic signal sent by a wire loop surrounding an audience.  The telecoil—an inexpensive magnetic sensor in most of today’s new hearing aids and all new cochlear implants—receives this signal, enabling the hearing instrument to become an in-the-ear speaker that broadcasts sound appropriate to each user’s needs.  And I bet you didn’t know this:  all U.S. landline phones, and select mobile phones (including my new iPhone5), also are “hearing aid compatible.” That means they can similarly transmit improved sound via magnetic communication with telecoil-equipped hearing instruments.

Back home, I installed hearing loops in my home and office.  Voila!, my TV and phone now broadcast wonderfully clear sound through my aids (and binaural phone listening is vastly superior to one-eared listening).

Other modern wireless technologies also connect hearing aid wearers to their TVs and phones.  When connected to a TV or stereo, a transmitter can “stream”  audio directly to one’s hearing aids.  When synced with one’s phone, conversation can be broadcast to both hearing aids.  Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids can receive sound from a host of Bluetooth devices, including phone and computer.

So, people often wonder, might Bluetooth or other streaming wireless technologies enable assistive listening in public venues—and without the expense of a running a loop wire?

Grand Rapids Airport has looped both its concourses and all individual gate areas. This enables hearing instruments to serve as wireless, in-the-ear speakers that broadcast announcements.

Alas, each hearing aid company offers a different proprietary wireless technology.  The one universal wireless receiver—which anyone can use, no matter what their hearing aid brand or what country they are in—is the humble telecoil (a part that costs hearing aid companies about $2).  Moreover, unlike Bluetooth’s battery-sucking demands, the telecoil requires zero power. With today’s popular “open-fitting” hearing aids, a person may hear both immediate sound from a TV and slightly delayed Bluetooth sound, creating an annoying echo.  And unlike Bluetooth and other wireless technologies that serve only small areas, hearing loops work in places both small and big.

Indeed, the accelerating move to hearing loops in the USA—sparked by local and national hearing loss associations and now supported by a new cottage industry of hearing loop vendors and installers—has led to thousands of newly looped venues.  Some venues are small, such as New York City’s 450 subway booths and all its future taxis.  Some are bigger, such as auditoriums and worship places.  And some are huge, such as airports and Michigan State University’s basketball arena.

Are hearing loops the final word in assistive listening?  Likely not.  But the challenge for hearing technologists is to make any alternative technology similarly

• simple for people of all ages to operate (without needing to pair and charge special equipment),
• affordable, without adding to the cost of already-expensive hearing instruments,
• available with nearly all hearing instruments,
• energy efficient,
• scalable, with applications in public spaces both small and vast, and
• universal, with the same signal serving everyone, no matter their location or hearing instrument manufacturer.

Given a future with a universal wireless receiver (for now, a telecoil) in virtually every hearing instrument, and given the continuing spread of hearing aid compatible assistive listening, we can envision a better future for Americans with hearing loss—a future in which hearing aids will serve as customized, wireless speakers in all sorts of public venues.  That, methinks, would be a future where doubly useful hearing aids for challenged ears would be as commonplace as glasses for challenged eyes.

Game theory is to the behavioral universe what the telescope was to Galileo, or calculus to Newton—a powerful new tool for probing previously unsolvable problems. Modeling the agency and behavioral contingency that are key in biology, but don’t exist in physics, required new logic. Using these “behavioral telescopes” to scan for patterns in distant effects, scientists are discovering an evolutionary ethics that increases social productivity.

Game theory’s most studied scenario is the Prisoners Dilemma, which due to its origin in Cold War nuclear strategy, assumes everyone is untrustworthy. Its two players can’t communicate but must choose to either cooperate or defect. If both cooperate each payoff = Reward, if only one defects his payoff = Temptation while the cooperator payoff = Sucker, and if both defect each payoff = Punishment. In strong versions payoffs are ranked: Temptation > Reward > Punishment > Sucker. Conventional thinking says that since the other player is “rational” and can’t be trusted, he will defect. So it’s “rational” for you to defect. This “logic” guarantees poor outcomes. But evolution has a smarter solution.

Computer contests of iterated Prisoner’s Dilemmas show, as Sam Harris notes, “that evolution probably selected for two stable orientations towards human cooperation tit-for-tat…and permanent defection.” Permanent defection yields the low payoffs of “red in tooth and claw” zero-cooperation. In tit-for-tat a player cooperates initially then mimics the other player’s last move. Thus tit-for-tat-players retaliate if defected against, but forgive a defector that starts cooperating. Once established in a population tit-for-tat provides higher productivity for all, and can become an ‘evolutionarily stable strategy,’ which means it can’t be beaten by other approaches. Even with short-term incentives for defection, cooperation can thrive.

It wasn’t humanly possible to tackle game-theory problems until computers enabled large-scale simulations. But evolution has been doing precisely that for hundreds of millions of years, running trials of what Darwin called “endless forms most beautiful” and similarly endless varieties of behavioral strategies, and naturally selecting adaptations that are more productive. Species that evolved tit-for-tat behaviors could overcame the productivity ceiling of short-sighted selfish competitions.

Key games in our nature, such as group hunting, have greater incentives for cooperation and disincentives for defection than Prisoners Dilemmas. Christopher Boehm has shown that hunter gathering cultures have punished uncooperative behaviors for perhaps 10,000 generations.

As Steven Pinker notes, “The emotions of sympathy, gratitude, guilt, and anger allow people to benefit from cooperation without being exploited by liars and cheats.” Our highly interdependent social species has evolved mechanisms to create trustworthy team behaviors and to punish team disruptors. Any science that can’t see this moral math isn’t seeing humans clearly.

Illustration by Julia Suits, The New Yorker Cartoonist & author of The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions.

Previously in this series:

It Is in Our Nature to Be Self-Deficient
Inheriting Second Natures
Our Ruly Nature
It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories
Tools Are in Our Nature
We Fit Nature To Us: Evolutions two way street
Justice Is In Our Nature

Think about it. Everything you have ever eaten, or will ever eat, can ultimately be traced back to an organism carrying out photosynthesis.  The word itself, “Photosynthesis” says it all: “To create from light.”  And the precious oxygen we breathe is one of the waste products of that creation.

The oldest known fossils are those of cyanobacteria, microscopic organisms that 3.5 billion years ago evolved the ability to turn water, carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugar, that magic molecule that fuels all cellular life.  Through a fateful encounter with a different and more complex cell, cyanobacteria eventually gave rise to the ancestor of those organisms today known as plants.  Today those remnant cyanobacteria are known as chloroplasts.

Most people know that plants take in water and CO2 and produce carbohydrates and gaseous oxygen.  But what is often misunderstood is the source of those oxygen molecules.  They come from the splitting of water, not the CO2.

The first step in photosynthesis uses the energy of sunlight to break a water molecule into its basic parts; an atom of oxygen and two atoms of hydrogen.  Known as “photosystem II” (named that way because it was discovered after the second step in the process, photosystem I) the hydrogen protons are stripped away from a water molecule and two atoms of oxygen are joined together released as a waste product.

As positively charged protons accumulate on one side of a membrane a sort of chemical battery is created, the power of which is then used to generate the energy-rich molecule ATP which in turn is used to fix CO2 into the sugars that feed almost all life on the planet.

Ramaraja Ramasamy,right, and Yogeswaran Umasankar work together to capture energy created during photosynthesis. Ramasamy is an assistant professor in the UGA College of Engineering and Umasankar is postdoctoral research associate working in his lab.

Now researchers at the University of Georgia have figured out a way to tap into these most ancient of power plants.  By coupling the isolated chloroplast membranes from a spinach plant onto carbon nanotubes Ramaraja Ramasamy and colleagues have succeeded in generating a small electrical current when light strikes the sample.

The ability to generate electricity by recombining the hydrogen and oxygen atoms from a split molecule of water has been around for a long time.  Known as fuel cells these power stations have been used by NASA for decades to power space craft.  They are also employed as back up emergency generators or in places that are off the grid but still require electricity.  Most researchers who looked to green plants to power our future economy focused on harvesting the hydrogen atoms that are created when photosynthesis splits water and then recombining these atoms in a fuel cell; creating electricity with water as the only waste product.

Ramaraja Ramasamy

Dr. Ramasamy’s device gets around this whole problem by generating electricity directly from the plant material itself.  He says “We have developed a way to interrupt photosynthesis so that we can capture the electrons before the plant uses them to make these sugars.”

At the moment the amount of electricity generated in this way remains tiny, but the potential is huge. Powering our nation’s cities and factories from plant chloroplasts is not something that is going to happen anytime soon but in the near future this technology may enable power generation in remote or isolated places in which even a small amount of electricity is enough to make a difference.

Three and a half billion years ago algae, with their ability to harvest the near limitless amount of sunlight, forever changed the course of life on the planet.  They may be poised to do it again.

Images: Image 1; Image 2; Images 3 and 4.

Researchers have been able to cloister within an academic ivory tower – conducting their research without paying much attention to what’s going on in the wider world – only because there has been a relatively stable funding base for science. Governmental sources have been vital to that funding base, particularly for basic research where the government picks up most of the tab.

Unfortunately, the stability of that funding is now a thing of the past. Thanks largely to the federal budget sequester, research outlays by the government were slashed by over nine billion dollars in just this fiscal year. And political leaders have further changes in mind, such as potentially drastically shrinking the bounds of the kinds of research that the government will fund.

These tremors in the science funding landscape are just the beginning of what is to come. What is driving all of this is a two-front budgetary squeeze, the likes of which have never been seen in the history of the United States. In short, retirement and health care spending are eating the federal budget alive, leaving fewer and fewer dollars for everything else that the government buys (like research).

Americans are aging as a population, which means more and more are receiving retirement checks through Social Security. Social Security’s share of the federal budget has doubled since 1963: 11% of the budget then, 20-22% of the budget for the rest of this decade (budget figures in this post come from a 2012 Congressional Research Service report).

Federal dollars spent on health care have exploded even faster, not just because more and more Americans are eligible for Medicare and Medicaid, but also because the per-person costs for health care keep climbing. In 1970, 4.9% of the federal budget went to Medicare and Medicaid spending. By 2011, that share had more than quadrupled to 23.2%. And the numbers keep rising, with federal health care spending expected to eat just under a third of the budget (32.8%) within the next ten years.

Growth of mandatory spending (chiefly retirement and health care spending) in the federal budget (source: Congressional Research Service).

To make matters worse, retirement and health care spending are on autopilot. For other parts of the budget – defense, national parks, research, etc. – the government decides every year how much to spend. Retirement and health care spending aren’t like that. They are considered mandatory spending and the amounts spent on them are essentially based on preassigned formulas that are extremely politically difficult to change. Mandatory spending (which mostly consists of health care and retirement spending) continues to ratchet upward and is projected to soak up well over sixty percent of the federal budget within the next ten years.

Everything else in the federal budget, from new aircraft carriers to food inspections to the National Science Foundation, is facing an ever-more dire squeeze. As a consequence, every program needs to fight like crazy to defend its place in the budget – or find itself out of the budget altogether.

A key part of this budget defense is making the case directly to the American people about why they should care about your program. Take the F-35 for example, a new fighter aircraft being developed for the military at the cost of billions of dollars a year. Even though the manufacturer Lockheed-Martin employs an army of lobbyists on Capitol Hill, the company still sees the need to convince the American people they ought to keep the F-35 funded.

The scientific community must also do the same, by convincing the public that it is worth spending tax dollars on research. Scientists: this isn’t someone else’s job – this is your job, starting immediately. If you personally hope to receive government research funds in the future, public engagement is now part of your job description. And if you and your colleagues don’t convincingly make the case to the public that your discipline should be funded, well then it won’t be. Without a public broadly supportive of funding science, it is all too easy for politicians looking for programs to cut to single out esoteric-sounding research programs as an excuse to further slash science funding.

How do we as scientists convince the public that our science is worth funding? The answer is simple: consistently engage people with our science. Almost all scientists care deeply about their research. All we need to do is to frequently share that passion with a broader audience, in any of a hundred ways. We can give public talks about our science. We can write blogs. We can put together science videos on YouTube. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter what method we use, so long as we connect to the public on a frequent basis with our science. And that consistency of engagement is key, because we can’t build a constituency for anything on a one-off basis.

All scientists must do much more right now to build a broad base of public support for science funding. If we don’t – if we close our eyes to the fact that the federal budget is in absolute crisis – we could easily see government support for research quickly fade to a shadow of what it is now. If research spending is crippled, it isn’t just our careers on the line. It’s the future of scientific innovation in this country and this world that are imperiled. We simply can’t let that happen. Let’s get to work.

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On April 30th, COMPASS published a commentary in PLOS Biology on the journey from science outreach to meaningful engagement. This post is part of a series of reactions, reflections, and personal experiences we hope will expand the conversation. Read the summary post, or track the conversation by searching on Twitter for #reachingoutsci.

Gryllus--and that’s an Order! Actually, it’s not an order but a genus of some crickets related to grasshoppers and katydids. Other edible genera include fryus, buyus and tryus.

Excuse me, waiter, but there’s not a fly in my soup. Increasing the prominence of insects on menus is just one of the suggestions made in a report recently issued by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) The recommendation to consider the untapped potential of insects as food comes at a time when there is looming concern regarding food security. The world population is anticipated reach nine billion by 2050, and food production will need to double to meet the corresponding increased need for food.

If ethical or religious objections are extracted, what would bug a person about eating insects? For starters, it’s just that–terms like “bug” and “pest” have made insects synonymous with nuisance and not something to be dined on. According to the report, if people could get past its ick factor, entomophagy could be a more sustainable protein for the planet and its population.

In addition to protein, insects are also a significant source of zinc, iron, and vitamin A. Their genetic distance from humans decreases the chance of disease or a virus such as swine flu being transferred through their consumption. Insects not only produce less greenhouse gases, they also return nutrients back to soil, are more easily farmed and require less water than livestock.

To avoid cochineal extract, check food labels to see if they contain ingredients such as carmine and Natural Red 4. Their appearance in food can also be avoided by refraining from saying “Beetlejuice” three times.

As it is, insects have a way of making it into foods regularly eaten even if they aren’t ordered. Last year, Starbucks agreed to stop using cochineal extract in its products. Dubbed “beetle juice,” although it’s not technically from a beetle, the dye is commonly used to enhance the coloring of food. Its use raised objections by vegans and vegetarians because it comes from the Dactylopius coccus, a small white insect gives a vibrant red color when crushed. As an alternative, Starbucks agreed to enhance the hue of their red velvet whoopie pies, strawberry frappuchinos and other goods using the tomato-based extract, lycopene.

Even if they aren’t ingredients, the Food and Drug Administration permits a certain amount of insects in food products because it’s practically impossible to keep them completely out. The Food Defect Action Levels outlines the permissible amount of bugs (and other natural contaminants) allowed in food. According to guidelines, pasta may contain an average of 225 insect fragments or more per 225 grams; a cup of raisins can have 33 fruit fly eggs and still make its way to shelves–it’s 34 or more that are unacceptable. While these levels represent limits and the actual amount consumed is probably lower, on average an individual probably ingests about one to two pounds of flies, maggots and other bugs each year without even knowing it.

It wasn’t that long ago that sushi was met with apprehension upon its introduction in the United States. The founders of Ento, a portmanteau of entomology and bento box, are hoping insects can have a similar success story. They currently offer insect meals presented in an ento box. The sushi inspired presentation is beautiful but not so blatantly bug. They’re hoping the ento box will be a gateway bug and that by 2020 insects in their original form will be carried in grocery stores, presumably somewhere near its predecessor, sushi.

The Ento Vision from Ento on Vimeo.

Insects and the City: Sushi Samba was so 2002–there’s a new trend currently invading chic cities.

Insects in recognizable form are already on the menus of some acclaimed restaurants. James Beard award winning chef Jose Andres’ restaurant, Oyamel, offers a grasshopper taco and the Artesian Bar in London’s Langham Hotel serves a tarantula and scorpion infused punch. More interesting combinations are on the way; Noma chef René Redzepi’s organization, the innovative Nordic Food Lab, recently announced funding to explore insect gastronomy.

The recent cooking techniques and flavor pairings are inventive but there is nothing new about eating bugs. In fact, it’s quite old–paleoanthropologists and biologists believe insects were consumed as part of our paleolithic predecessors’ diet. During biblical times it was determined Of them you may eat: the locust of any kind, the bald locust of any kind, the cricket of any kind, and the grasshopper of any kind. (Leviticus 11:22) Later, first century scholar Pliny the Elder wrote that Roman aristocrats “loved to eat beetle larvae reared on flour and wine.”

The practice continued for centuries. Even in the late 1870s gastronomes like the French were eating grasshoppers, Italians dined on beetles and Russians ate locusts but entomophagy was on the decline. In 1885 Vincent Holt published his manifesto, Why Not Eat Insects? Despite being well articulated, the argument failed to catch on, much to the relief of insects.

Although the practice has mainly been abandoned in Europe and English speaking countries, currently about 30 percent of the world’s population–nearly 2 billion people are entomophagists. Of the one million distinct species of insects, over 1,900 have been reported to be edible. The most commonly eaten insect groups are beetles, followed by caterpillars, bees, wasps, and ants.

Bugs can provide a source of nutrition during seasonal times of food scarcity. Caterpillars are eaten during the rainy season in Central Africa. Their sales provide a supplemental income and nutrition. Caterpillars have more protein, fat, and calories than fish and meat and species that are iron rich are also given to people who are anaemic, pregnant or breastfeeding.

Insects are popular not just for being nutritious but also because they’re considered delicious–a whole range of insects are considered delicacies throughout the world. Escamoles, also known as insect caviar, is a dish of ant eggs that are either fried in butter with spices or boiled then served along with tortillas. The eggs come from the gigantic Liometopum ant, which scientifically speaking, is one big ass ant. There’s also the option of simply trying an ant with a big ass. A specialty in Columbia is known for its sizeable derriere. Hormigas culonas, meaning “big ass ants” have serious junk in the trunk along with some protein but not much saturated fat, making them a good snack option.

Although they’re actually winged termites, white ants are commonly eaten in Uganda. After being de-winged, they are fried, sun dried, or steamed in banana leaves and served as a snack or main dish. During dry season, white ants stay inside their hills–these elaborate nests are often palatial palaces up to 26 feet tall. When rainy season comes, usually in April and May, the ants head from the hills and on to plates.

Sometimes they need coaxing to come out, so people will drum on the ground to mimic the sounds of rain. Of course, this would be Andrew Zimmern’s experience. In his quest for Bizarre Foods, Zimmern ‘spends time with a remote Ugandan tribe and is amazed by the ways they hunt for white ants.’:

My own experience was decidedly less exotic; the white ants pretty much just showed up for a backyard Mexican fiesta:

Images:, top: author; bottom: Erwin Soo.

Related articles by the author:

Food Fights: Reconsidering Famine and War in the Horn of Africa
Talk “Dirty” to Me: Blood, Purity and Cuisine
When Sparks Fly: Aphrodisiacs and the Fruit Fly
Viral Videos and Infectious Disease–Healing in Northern Uganda
Fava–the Magic Bean
Exploring the DromeDairy: Camels and Their Milk
Second Helpings: Recycling Cairo’s Food Waste

The court ordered a halt to field trials of eggplant bioengineered to increase productivity and reduce the use of industrial pesticides. This genetic modification, inserting a gene from a common soil bacterium (Baccillus thuringiensis or Bt) that produces a naturally occurring pesticide, has been in use globally for more than a decade and is used in a quarter of the corn and half the cotton grown worldwide. It has been extensively researched, and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that it poses no threat to human health, and no more of a threat to the environment than any method of hybridization to create new traits in plants, which humans have been doing since the dawn of agriculture.

The court heard plenty of testimony about that research. But it also heard from Greenpeace and other opponents of this modern form of hybridization who, short on evidence of any actual danger from GMO foods, relied more on well-established emotional arguments to make their case. They warned that scientists still don’t know for sure whether there might be a risk, that human or environmental safety can’t be absolutely guaranteed. And they appealed to the universal moral cause of protecting nature, arguing that the Bt eggplant filed trials were nothing less than a threat to Filipino’s constitutional rights to ‘a balanced and healthy ecology’. The court bought the whole emotional case, using logic and language that could bring modern society to a screeching halt.

The ruling said GMO foods are “…an alteration of an otherwise natural state of affairs in our ecology.” Which is true, but a dangerously extreme basis for their ruling, given that the human species interacts with and alters the ‘otherwise natural state’ of our environment with pretty much everything we do. The idea that a ‘natural state of affairs in our ecology’ somehow exists free of the impacts of the human animal, or ever did, or ever could, has Thoreauvian appeal, but it’s a naïve McKibben-esque environmentalist utopianism that comes right out of the Deep Ecology playbook. Imagine what society would have to forego if this standard was consistently applied across all of what modern human life involves.

The court made another astonishing leap beyond reason. It found that the field trials of Bt eggplants “could not be declared…safe to human health and to our ecology with full scientific certainty (my emphasis).” That adopts a preposterously severe version of the Precautionary Principle (PP) – the idea that we shouldn’t approve products or processes until their proponents prove with reasonable certainty that they aren’t dangerous. Precaution – better safe than sorry – makes a lot of sense, and many regulations (though not all) are built on this principle. But the court’s extreme version of the PP enshrines in law that anything someone is worried about is assumed guilty (dangerous) until proven innocent (safe) beyond any doubt. Again, imagine what that appealing but ludicrous standard – absolute scientific proof of safety – would do if applied against most of how we live our modern lives.

The court also seemed swayed by an important emotional/psychological characteristic that makes some risks scarier than others. In general people worry more about human-made risks than natural ones, regardless of what actual evidence of possible danger may say. The court acted to ban the field trials in part because they ‘involve the willful and deliberate alteration (my emphasis) of the genetic traits of a living element of the ecosystem…” While it is true that genetic engineering makes this form of hybridization more human-made than natural (which is also true for other industrial hybridization techniques we’ve been using for decades, including blasting plants with mutagenic radiation), what does the fact that a human-made process created it have to do with whether the stuff is safe?

This common emotional ‘fear factor’ lies at the very heart of environmentalist rejection of not only genetically modified organisms but many modern technologies. So does an egalitarian cultural worldview common among environmentalists that society should be fair and flexible and afford equal opportunity for all, a worldview that rejects the power, and the products and profits, of the One Percent and Big Corporations that limit that flexibility and opportunity. This explains why resistance to GM food is so woven with venom for Monsanto, a deep passion that also has nothing to do with whether the technology itself is safe.

There is some danger that the Filipino ruling might serve as precedent for courts elsewhere that are considering GMO technology. But a very real danger exists that this ruling might inform other actions by the judiciary in the Phillipines, and that has direct implications for ‘Golden Rice’, a species of rice modified to include beta carotene, which could help supply vitamin A to the 190 million children and 19 million pregnant women in 122 countries who suffer vitamin A deficiency (VAD), a type of malnutrition that kills 1–2 million people a year and causes 500,000 cases of irreversible blindness. An estimated four and a half million Filipinos suffer VAD.

The International Rice Research Institute, based in the Phillipines, has been conducting field trials of Golden Rice, in part to determine its safety both to humans and the environment. By enshrining in law the anti-GMO arguments of environmentalists about Bt eggplant, and rejecting science and reason in the process, the Phillipine Court of Appeals has placed in real jeopardy one of the most important potential advances in agriculture and human health since the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 70s.

It is one thing for you and I to share the common desire to protect nature from the too-often dramatically real harms of modern technology, and anger at the greedy selfish corporations that profit by these harms. It is quite another for policy makers, including judges, to be so taken by similar passions that they ignore scientific evidence and adopt an approach to risk management that is more idealistic than realistic, more naïve than achievable, and enshrine in law a Deep Ecology utopianism about nature that denies society all the solutions that modern science and technology have to offer. As emotionally appealing as such an approach may feel, it carries profound risks for us all.

Image: Edd Gumban, Philstar.com

Invasion

This is from Number Poems, a book by Irving Weiss I used my one-man outfit, the Runaway Spoon Press, to publish in 1997. I liked it so much, I had it on the cover, title-page and as the first poem in the book!

As those who have been reading this blog for a while will know, I take its mandate Very Seriousfully to be a concern with Real Mathematics, preferably mathematics in operation, if on non-mathematical material. That which is mathematics, as opposed to that which is about mathematics. Not that I have wholly neglected poetry about mathematics. Indeed, I hope to have more of that here in the future, for I do consider it as valuable as poetry that is mathematics (in my view), just different from it.

Which brings me to Irving’s book. The works in it are not real mathematics by any stretch of the imagination. (Some of them aren’t poems, either!) But I really like them. What’s more, he’s a good friend of mine—not to mention over ninety now which means that featuring him will win me a bunch of anti-gerontophobia brownie points. Ergo, I had to find a way to get them into this entry. Finally (after many weeks of thought, I assure you), I came up with the concept of something I termed “matheconceptuality.” This I defined as mathematical thinking about non-mathematical subjects. Or: a way of treating reality that is not, strictly speaking, mathematical but is more mathematical than anything else.

To clarify, my impression is that strictly mathematical thinking is used in just two ways: to measure (i.e., applied math), and to perform number theory (i.e., pure math). What Irving’s matheconceptuality results in is not quite either of those, nor is it a kind of discussion of mathematics (like Rita Dove’s poem in my previous entry about the joy of geometry). It’s closest to the use of simple analogies like equating a boulder’s height to some friend’s. The latter, however, seems to me more the use of a kind of “ur-math,” or the application of math at its most primitive.

Perhaps the best way to get near what Irving’s matheconceptuality is, is to work out what his “Invasion” does . . . if I can. If only intuitively, and confusingly . . .

First impression: the piece is minimally “polluted” by sensory reality. As number theory is.

No, it is emphatically involved with the real—with real numeral ones, with the more real hand-printed numerals (because conveying a sense of the person who made them) . . . the color black. But these material elements are employed primarily in a mathematical manner . . .

The apeiron!1 It just occurred to me that a word I got from a piece by Irving coming up may be just what I need here. It is the Greek philosopher Anaximander’s term for what “space” used to mean before Einstein: the essential nothingness everything in reality is “in.” I suggest that—at least as a start—we take what Irving has done in “Invasion” as apeironian number theory.

The premise for the piece (make that my premise for it) is that the universe was once nothing but ones. This, for me, is the first bit of its mathaesthetic magic, for it presents an arresting archetypal locus that is almost minimally complex, yet capable of dropping someone into fascinating questions. Like how a universe can be all ones. It could not be! Or so I was convinced by my belief in the Eternal Dichotomization of Reality (i.e., that nothing exists that lacks an opposite2). I’d love to be hit with any sane, or even insane, argument against that.

In any case, as I see it, Irving’s poem begins in a pre-mathematical apeiron. The introduction of his ones did not begin an exercise in number theory, but began something prior to the possibility of number theory. What followed was a depiction of an “invasion” by hand-printed numerals—commanded by a zero, it would seem–of the pre-math of a universe of nothing but ones and absences of ones. A binary universe, actually. The hand-printing is not mathematically important but poetically important, for it suggests that the white numerals are giving this too-purely symbolical binary universe life—even personality.

Note, too, the size of the mouthful of invaded universe, and the distance between its numerals compared with the distance between the invaded universe’s ones. That the complicating elements of the invading forces are white is interesting, as well. Light climbing into numbers and leaving nothing behind for the numeral ones to contrast into meaningfulness against. . .

What seems to me the most important result depicted by the poem is that the numerals needed for fullest, uncumbersome number theory—i.e., real mathematics—become available. The poem, a mathematical way of dealing with the universe just short of doing math, has carried pre-math up to but not into math. Numbers not doing anything, but ready to.3 Or so my thoughts about it go. That the work can make such thoughts possible, regardless of how loony they may be, is—I contend–what gives it the high aesthetic—mathaesthetic–value it seems to me vibrantly to have.4

“Invasion” leads smoothly into the next two pieces from Irving’s Number Poems that I’ve chosen. “Ones,” is the name I’ve given to the first of these:

Ones

This puts us back before the time of “Invasion.” To what may be a contradiction of the universe depicted in it, in a way, because it strongly suggests that ones actually are all that are needed for maximal explanatory complexity—just a final simplicity of ones, black or white, can represent any universe, however complex. A pre-mathematical picture of a binary universe. Also a fascinating maze/wilderness (in spite of being about as linear as possible) to wander in . . .

“One More Is One Less” may be a different part of the universe:

One More Is One Less

The idea behind it, I think, is that each another of the dots enters the word, “ONE,” the less ones over-all there are. We are leaving the chaos of a universe of individuals for a final deadness of the single ONE. Entropy.

From this point on Irving’s pieces here are less clearly matheconceptual, but continuing to remind us how inescapable present mathematics is in everything. I think Irving himself best describes them in the preface he wrote for Number Poems, which begins: “Numbering is inseparable from living. The numbers are there waiting for us in our bodies and in the world of other people and things-the alphabet and ideographic numerals may belong to the educated but everyone can mark and count.-

“The numbers are in the centrality of nose, navel, penis, and vagina; in the symmetry of eyes, ears, hands, and feet; and in all further combinations of odd and even. The decimal system lies in our fingers and toes. And, all peoples invent some kind of calendar to manage the cosmos with.”

An excellent example of how the above translated into texts is Irving’s following musing from his book. It seems mathematical to me only in that it consists of five sets of observations and is placed in a section of Number Poems called “Fives.” But how entertainingly unusual its wry slants into what it is to be a human being!

Observations Concerning the Human Being

“Number Poems,” Irving goes on to write, “is a sequence of visual poems and word-only poems based on our familiar numbering system. Since numbers are an integral part of symbolic thinking, everyone everywhere has some if not many relations to numbers long before a few among us become tabulators, accountants, mathematicians, or numerologists. I, myself, can’t do more than ordinary arithmetic, but my ignorance doesn’t prevent me from having feelings about and attachments to numbers and even from thinking about their mathematical, historical, mystic, mythic, and familiar uses or accidental significance.

“Number Poems originates in my own sense of number experience. The number words used as the page-titles of my poems represent various ways in which a number came into mind as an emblem or marked an occasion or turned up by chance and became fixed without reason in my memory: I construct the poems as imaginative forms or as abstract ideas.”

“Number experience,” as Irving seems to have undergone it, may be quite close to an engagement with apeironian number theory. My thinking here is definitely fuzzy, but I stand by my main point, which is that in his “number poems,” Irving is generally working out of his mathematical brain as significantly as he is working out of his verbal brain, and that in the process, he provides us with aesthetic pleasure neither alone is capable of providing.

Instant proof of this is one of Irving’s cartoons, with a genuine mathematical poem in it. Unless it’s a mathematical joke. But surely it can be both.

Snoopy-Math

It is from a larger work:

Where

I think a full philosophy could by developed from this diagram of what may be the interior that consciousness is inside the exterior that feeds it. Or of a quest for knowledge sleeping into the essential understandings of reality both maximally and minimally mundane. Or simply of “where” as both place and question . . . Or even a satire on people who would react to it as I now am.

Okay, you’re on your own, now, mine readers. I hope those of my bumbles into Irving’s works I’ve tried to describe will help you to your own at least partially profitable bumbling into the three pieces that follow–which I say have to do with geometry! I hope, that you will later return for new bumbles into the previous ones, too!

Lines

Line-Square

Risk Grid

* * * *

1 Apeiron: in the philosophy of Anaximander (610-c.547 B.C.), a limitless, incommensurable, and boundless primary substance; that which precedes everything else.

Here’s more, which is translated from a 1973 Soviet Encyclopedia of all things: “Anaximander’s concept was a step forward in developing the concept of matter compared to the theories prevailing at that time. These were propounded by Thales and Anaximenes, who held that the primary substance was one ‘element’ (water or air). Anaximander’s concept was interpreted by Alexander of Aphrodisias as something between water and air or between fire and water or air. The Pythagoreans viewed it as the limitless, formless principle, which with its opposing ‘limit’ constituted the basic grounds of being.”

2 Or that the structure of our brains makes it impossible for us to imagine anything without an opposite.

3 There is a nice suggestion of Roman Numerals changing to Arabic Numerals, too.

4 I really do try to make sense of the works I write about. Here I only hope I’ve made interesting half-sense.

Previously in this series:

M@h*(pOet)?ica
M@h*(pOet)?ica: Summerthings
M@h*(pOet)?ica–Louis Zukofsky’s Integral
M@h*(pOet)?ica—Scott Helmes
M@h*(pOet)?ica—of Pi and the Circle, Part 1
M@h*(pOet)?ica – Happy Holidays!
M@h*(pOet)?ica—Circles, Part 3
M@h*(pOet)?ica-–Karl Kempton
M@h*(pOet)?ica – Mathematics and Love
M@h*(pOet)?ica–Mathekphrastic Poetry
M@h*(pOet)?ica–Mathekphrastic Poetry, Part 2

Yet life will endure, says Annalee Newitz, and so will humanity.  In her new book, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, Newitz surveys billions of years of history and five previous mass extinctions to draw lessons about how catastrophe comes and how – and why – life abides.

The breadth of the book is truly astounding, ranging from the planet’s first mass extinction – as cyanobacteria exhaled massive amounts of oxygen into the Earth’s atmosphere, poisoning most other life even as they paved the way for the ecosystem we see today – to the techniques that grey whales, Jewish communities, and plague survivors have used to ensure their survival. In between we see the Earth freeze over then then thaw again. We watch as dinosaurs rise and fall, mammals come to dominate the world, and primates evolve into hominids and eventually modern humanity with all its varied challenges. The scale starts at billions of years, then zooms down to millions, then thousands, and then into the present day, before zipping ahead into the future.

Newitz came to this topic with a pessimistic outlook, she writes, believing that humanity was doomed, and intent on producing a book with that slant. Yet her research convinced her that the opposite is true – that while global risks abound, and while we humans ourselves are potentially the greatest threat to both our own species and other life on Earth – we will nevertheless (probably) find ways to survive and bounce back from even the worse catastrophes.

In the introduction she tells us that disaster, whether human created or not, is inevitable – but doom is not.   How can she believe this?  In her words:

Because the world has been almost completely destroyed half a dozen times. [..] Earth has been shattered by asteroid impacts, choked by extreme greenhouse gases, locked up in ice, bombarded with cosmic radiation, and ripped open by megavolcanoes so massive they are almost unimaginable.  Each of these disasters caused mass extinctions, during which more than 75% of the species on Earth died out.  And yet every single time, living creatures carried on, adapting to survive under the harshest of conditions.

Humans, Newitz says, have also adapted: to past episodes of climate change, to new locales, to new diets, and to persecution at the hands of other humans. That repeated pattern of survival and adaptation – of life as a whole and of humanity in particular – convinces Newitz that we can do it again.

That optimistic theme makes the book a delightfully fun and engaging read. 263 pages crammed full of ecosystem collapse, extinctions, pandemics, wars, and existential threats would, in the hands of another writer, been a bleak and exhausting affair.  Instead, it’s a witty whirlwind tour of survival and renewal even in the face of horrific calamity.

Newitz is the editor in chief of the science and science fiction site io9.com, and it shows.  Not content to look only at the past, she sprinkles the text with the forward-looking views of some of the world’s most insightful science fiction authors (along with a dash of pop culture), and closes the book with a glimpse of the million year future – the necessity that humanity diversifies beyond this one planet and moves some of its eggs out of this single fragile basket if we want to maximize our odds of truly long-term survival.

Newitz’s work at io9 is also on display in the pace of the book.  Each chapter reads like an extended article, often on a topic about which whole books have been written.  That brevity means that scientific controversies cannot be handled at length, though Newitz does take care to state where such controversies exist, and to sketch out the opposing viewpoints. My only frustration as a reader was in frequently wanting to pause the book and drill down deeper into the topic at hand, with a longer chapter than the one I’d just read, rather than moving on to a new topic post-haste.  The flip side is that the book never wears out its welcome.  Upon turning the final page, I only wanted more.

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, by Annalee Newitz, Doubleday.

Sickle Cell Disease is a strictly genetic disorder of African origins that rigidifies red blood cells.

These would seem to be worlds apart in more ways than one.

Yet I was reminded this week that one of the delights of science is the discovery of the connections between things that seem totally unrelated:  A recent breakthrough in understanding Alzheimer’s, described in the current Early Edition issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is based on advances my colleagues and I made some 30 years ago in understanding sickle cell.

What these maladies have in common is the association of molecules that were never intended to come together in healthy processes.  When the Alzheimer’s molecule, known as amyloid-β, congregates in the brain, it forms the tangles and plaques that are a well-known visual signature found post-mortem in the brains of those who have suffered from the disease.

Those tangles are a type of molecule known as polymers, which are strings of molecules stuck end to end in an intricate but pathological braid.

Sickle cell too has its deadly braided molecules—this time, of the oxygen carrier hemoglobin.   These long structures distort cells, but more seriously, stiffen them, and impede their vital passage through the circulation.   In both cases, there is a premium on preventing these polymeric strings from initiating.

What turns out to be particularly insidious is that both assemblies can use their surfaces to recruit even more molecules to their pathogenic cause.  Called heterogeneous nucleation, the mechanism entails new polymers spontaneously beginning on the surfaces of old one.

It was this discovery, that I made with colleagues James Hofrichter and William Eaton of the National Institutes of Health (published in 1985), that proved to be the Rosetta Stone for understanding sickle hemoglobin polymerization.  It explained how so many polymers could form so rapidly, and was a process that was previously unknown in the realm of biological polymerization.

This same idea has now been adapted to the formation of Alzheimer’s polymers by Knowles et al. of Cambridge University.  Previous thinking was that those polymers of Aβ somehow snapped, thereby increasing their number.  Knowles et al showed by careful experimentation that when solutions were stirred, fibers indeed broke, but as the stirring was progressively reduced, the hidden process of heterogeneous nucleation emerged.

The two diseases, disparate in manifestation, obey the same fundamental rules.  This is what Biophysics is all about,the discovery of fundamental physical laws that govern the behavior of diverse biological systems.

Image: adapted from: F. A. Ferrone, J. Hofrichter and W. A. Eaton, 1985, “Kinetics of Sickle Hemoglobin Polymerization  II.  A Double Nucleation Mechanism”, J. Mol. Biol.  183: 611-631

A healthy farm practices sustainable agriculture, which means it must do three things well:

Productivity. A healthy farm produces food in abundance.

Economic viability. A healthy farm is a thriving business that provides a good living and fair working conditions to those who work on it, and contributes to a robust local and regional economy.

Environmental stewardship. A healthy farm maintains the fertility of the soil and the health of the surrounding landscape for future generations.

Current industrial farming practices in the US accomplish the first and second goals quite well, but these practices tend to be unsustainable and fail the “Environmental Stewardship” plank pretty miserably. The UCS’s concern about the dire state of our food system is well-founded, and I applaud their efforts to get out in front of the policy debate. There’s just one problem: they oppose using all of our technology to help combat this problem. Specifically, I’m talking about genetic engineering (GE) and genetically modified organisms (GMO).

Conversations of this sort inevitably devolve into ad hominem attacks on the GMO supporter’s credibility, so before going further, let me state clearly and for the record that I do not now, nor have I ever, nor do I ever plan to work for any company that produces GMOs. Neither have I ever received any form of compensation from any such company.

Nevertheless, I think that using genetic engineering to improve our crops can help move us towards more productive, healthier, and yes, more sustainable farming practices. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misinformation standing in the way of public acceptance of this technology. Since I’m an immunologist, today I’m just going to address a single piece of that misinformation. From UCS:

[GE crops] may produce new allergens and toxins[...]

This statement is at best wildly misleading and at worse an all-out fabrication. For an organization dedicated to informing citizens about science, I’m a bit appalled that they got this one so wrong. But in order to explain why, I first need to explain a bit about genes, proteins and how these things interact with the immune system.

From Genes to Proteins

If you’re already well acquainted with the Central Dogma of molecular biology, feel free to skip ahead. For the rest of you, your memories of genetics may be a foggy recollection of a monk and his peas. But don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to draw any punnett squares. The key thing to know is that your genetic information, encoded in your DNA, is a blueprint for the production of proteins*.

Proteins are the things that do work in the cell. They can do everything from providing structure and support, to communicating information between cells, to sensing the outside world, to catalyzing chemical reactions. Basically, if there’s a job to be done in a cell, it’s a protein that’s doing it. Proteins are fundamentally a linear sequence of small units called “amino acids.” In the same way that you can take a finite set of lego blocks and build almost any shape, evolution has selected for a finite set of about 20 amino acids, but these 20 blocks can be fit together in many different ways to make many different shapes of protein. Those different shapes determine the multitude of different functions that proteins have in a cell.

Because of the molecular biology revolution, we now have a pretty firm understanding of how a cell reads a particular sequence of nucleic acid (that’s the “NA” in DNA), and translates the code into a sequence of amino acids that becomes a protein of a certain shape and function. And one of the most amazing features of this process is that the language is the same regardless of the sort of cell you’re talking about, be it plant, bacteria, virus or mammal**. This is all very neat in theory, but it has profound consequences in practice.

For example, the insulin that diabetics need to stay alive is just a protein. Before genetic engineering, the vast majority of insulin was isolated from the blood of cows or pigs – these sources were not particularly reliable, and insulin from animals is not exactly the same as human insulin, leading to potential adverse reactions. In the 1980′s, scientists realized that they could use genetic engineering to make actual human insulin in bacteria. They isolated the DNA sequence code for the human version of the protein and inserted it into the genome of E. coli bacteria. The bacteria don’t know the difference between a human gene and a bacterial gene – it’s all just DNA! The bacteria read the code, and turned it into protein – the exact same protein that your own β-islet cells make in your own pancreas; it’s identical.

This is the same process used in genetic engineering of crops – moving a gene code for a protein or group of proteins from one organism into another. More on that later.

Proteins and Allergies

An allergy is essentially an immune response to something that’s not normally dangerous. Those pollen grains that are the source of so much misery don’t actually pose a threat, but your immune system may react as if it is. Your immune system makes particular antibodies called IgE that are able to bind some protein from the pollen. Those IgE antibodies coat the surface of mast cells, which are filled with a bunch of reactive molecules like histamines that make your immune system freak out. Mast cells evolved to combat parasitic worms and other infections, and when the immune response is directed appropriately, it’s a good defense – a little bit of inflammation is better than an infection.

When it’s directed against something abundant and harmless though, that’s when suffering ensues. Immune responses to all sorts of things have been reported, from the relatively common seasonal allergies to different types of pollen, to dust mites, to semen. Though these allergies can be quite unpleasant for the afflicted, but are usually not life threatening. Allergies to food, on the other hand, can be significantly more severe.

Because food allergies can lead to anaphylaxis and death, it’s perhaps understandable that people are worried about manipulation of food. But remember – allergies are a response to a particular protein. Our immune systems can distinguish between different proteins quite well, but is completely unaware of the source of that protein.

Case Studies on GMOs and Allergies

The Premise

Before getting started, let’s go back to the statement from UCS that I find so objectionable:

[GE crops] may produce new allergens and toxins [emphasis mine]

This is patently false – genetic engineering techniques allow us to precisely add genes of known structure and function to crops. It would in principle be possible to engineer corn that expresses anthrax toxin, or introduce peanut allergens into soybeans, but this would have to be by malicious intent of the scientists, not some accident. We know how genes work, and we know what kind of protein an individual gene will make.

Contrast this with a common tool of breeding in organic and non-GMO farming: Mutation Breeding. This is a technique whereby farmers expose seeds to large doses of radiation or chemical mutagens, and then selectively breed the seeds that have useful traits. This process may introduce hundreds or thousands of mutations into the genomes, and breeders cannot know where those mutations are. These mutations will change the shape and functions of proteins, and could, in principle produce new allergens. Despite the fact that this process is manipulating the genome, it’s not considered genetic engineering, and is allowed to be called organic.

Now, some examples of the most common types of GE crops.

Bt Corn

Different strains of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) can produce proteins that are toxic to various invertebrates. These proteins, called “Cry toxins,” have been used in agriculture for almost 100 years – bacteria cultured in a certain way can be induced to create these proteins, and then sprayed onto crops. Certain types of insects are susceptible to eating these toxins and will die upon ingesting them. Bt Cry proteins are among the safest insecticides that can be used in agriculture, and there are many varieties that target different types of insect pests. Since Cry toxins are proteins, that means they are coded for by genes, and scientists realized that they could do away with the bacterium entirely.

In much the same way we can produce human insulin in bacteria, we can get corn (and other plants) to produce bacterial Cry proteins – and scientists did. The protein is produced predominantly in the leaves of the corn, and insects attempting to feed on the leaves ingest the Cry proteins at the same time and die. The protein isn’t expressed much in the corn kernels themselves, which is actually a problem for farmers wanting to use these crops to stave off insects that attack the ear, but it also means that humans enjoying that corn-on-the-cob are not going to be ingesting much either.

So, Cry proteins are safe to consume, they’re expressed in very low levels in the food we eat, and they’re sprayed on organic crops in huge quantities (and have been for almost a hundred years). There’s no reason to assume that Cry produced by corn is any different than Cry made by bacteria – it’s the same gene, so it’s the same protein.

Fishy Tomatoes

One of the horror stories often trotted out by GMO opponents is a tomato plant that was genetically engineered to resist frost. The winter flounder fish has “antifreeze” in its blood to allow it to survive in extremely cold waters. Scientists realized that antifreeze in plants would be incredibly useful – frost damage costs farmers hundreds of millions of dollars every year in lost crops or decreased productivity.

Now, I can understand why antifreeze in your food might sound scary, but this isn’t the stuff you put in your car. The antifreeze in the fish is just a protein called AFA3, and as you’ve probably gathered by now, that means it’s coded for by a gene. Unfortunately, when this gene was put into tomatoes, it didn’t actually provide much frost resistance, and these tomatoes were never brought to market, but I think this is an instructive example – if you could eat flounder without an allergic reaction, you could eat these tomatoes.

Potential for Harm

There are many examples of new GMO varieties that are using genes for proteins that don’t have a 100 year history like Bt, or aren’t usually ingested the way that flounder is. But there’s nothing magical about genetic engineering – it’s just about proteins. Most proteins are readily destroyed in our stomach and small intestine, broken down into their constituent amino acids and absorbed into our bloodstream, regardless of whether that protein comes from a cow or a tomato or a bacterium. Our digestive systems and our immune systems are oblivious to their origin.

It’s impossible to claim that there’s zero risk from using GMO technology in our food, and it’s worth testing the safety of anything new that we put into our mouths. Safety tests are done of course, but it would be impossible to eliminate all risk.

But a possibility of risk alone is not a valid reason to avoid a technology. As I mentioned above, mutation breeding is at least as likely to generate new allergens, if not more so. At least with GE, we know what genes are being changed, and we have better tools for testing the proteins that they code for. We’ve embraced many technologies that have risks, from microwave ovens to cell phones, and there’s more at stake here than quick meals or communication. In order to feed the billions of people on our planet without doing (more) irreparable harm to the environment, we need to be thinking about all of our options.

It’s also worth noting as Pamela Ronald did in this space two years ago:

There is broad scientific consensus that genetically engineered crops currently on the market are safe to eat. After 14 years of cultivation and a cumulative total of 2 billion acres planted, no adverse health or environmental effects have resulted from commercialization of genetically engineered crops.

Please note: I will not address comments here related to the myriad other complaints about GMOs – this is a post about allergens, but there are a number of other resources to check out:

GMOs do not cause cancer.
GMO’s have not driven Indian farmers to suicide
Herbicide resistant weeds are a problem, but not one unique to GMO
A Survey of Long Term GM Food Studies (collected papers)

—————

* Not all genes code for protein. There are also gene products like microRNAs, but these largely have an effect by regulating the expression of proteins.

** Not exactly the same, it turns out. Some species have slight modifications to the code, but it’s more like having different dialects rather than a different language.

Images: top: by author; Jessica Reuter; Dcastor; United States Department of Agriculture.

UPDATE (6/1/13): The UCS believes I have misrepresented their position here. They do not oppose GE technology per se, but (I’m paraphrasing here) think that it is under-regulated and that funding and research should be focused on other technologies. See comments below and also their website.

Christopher Boehm in Moral Origins concludes, after intensive analysis of 50 representative hunter-gatherer cultures, that our ancestors likely experienced a “radical political change,” evolving from a hierarchic “apelike ‘might is right’…social order,” to become more egalitarian. About 250,000 years ago, their survival became a team sport because chasing big-game toward teammates was much more productive than solo hunting. But only if profit-sharing was sustainable. Even with fit teammates hunting needs luck (e.g. 4% success today). Then, as now, the logic of social insurance solved team problems by sharing profits and risks. Productivity gains in interdependent teams radically changed our evolution. Cooperators thrived. As did teams with the best adapted sharing rules, provided they were well enforced.

Boehm says all surviving hunter-gatherers enforce law-like social rules to prevent excessive egoism, nepotism, and cronyism. They use rebukes, ridicule, shame, shunning, exile and execution (typically delegated to close male kin of the condemned, to avoid inter-family feuding). For example, meat isn’t distributed by the successful hunter but by neutral stakeholders. Excessively dominant alpha-male behavior—like hogging more than a fair share of meat—is punished by “counterdominant coalitions.” If the strong abused their power they were eliminated, in a sort of inverted eugenics. Resisting injustice and tyranny are universal traits in today’s hunter-gatherers. They likely run 10,000 generations deep in our prehistory.

Social punishment created powerful selection pressures. Self-control becomes the lowest-cost strategy for avoiding social penalties. Shame and guilt likely evolved as mechanisms for internalizing the logic of team rules—a social contract written into our biology. We intuitively recognize what is considered punishable. And often punish ourselves. Cultures configure shame and guilt system triggers differently. But rules balancing short term individual selfish gain with longer-term or team interests are more evolutionarily productive. Thinking of our evolved urges as irresistible is a deep error, since self-control, especially relative to social rules, has long been needed for survival (see “evo-irresistible error”)

Our ancestors bred themselves to be team players. They used intelligently directed artificial selection of good cooperators as mates (“auto-domestication”). Bad cooperators were less likely to be selected for, or successful at, the hugely costly and highly collaborative business of raising long helpless offspring.

Justice, wrote Hesiod, poet of the ancient Greek masses and Homer’s rival, was “Zeus’s greatest gift” to us. Greatest or not, without it human nature wouldn’t be what it is. And we wouldn’t exist.

Illustration by Julia Suits, The New Yorker Cartoonist & author of The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions.

Previously in this series:

It Is in Our Nature to Be Self-Deficient
Inheriting Second Natures
Our Ruly Nature
It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories
Tools Are in Our Nature
We Fit Nature To Us: Evolutions two way street

Health, disease, and “the doctor” are constructions peculiar to a particular culture at a particular time. Each is supported by pronouncements, theories, claims, and recriminations. The difference today is the availability of a body of scientific information that can question, even discard, whatever in the din has been shown to be fatuous. What remains after the paring are the iterations of health, disease and “the doctor” that are defensible and sensible today. They may be only a way station in the evolution of the role of medicine in our culture, but they offer a foundation for rational health care reform today. The following are the guideposts that patients need in demanding rational reform:

Health

What do we mean by “health”? One can enjoy “good health” or suffer “bad health”. Is “bad health” no more than the absence of “good health”? Is there a continuum between “good” and “bad health”? Health is not the absence of symptoms; all of us will suffer symptoms repeatedly, symptoms which give us pause without compromising our belief that we are basically well. Episodes of backache, headache, heartache, heartburn, “colds”, “flu” and much more are predicaments of life for which most are a match most of the time. Despite such predicaments, we remain in “good health.”

“Health” is a reflection of the degree to which we feel complete in our bodies tempered by the degree to which we perceive that sense to be threatened. These threats test our coping skills. We are no match for some, such as crushing chest pain or fractured hips. But for many of us, most of the time, the threats just give us pause. We mobilize resilience to maintain a sense of invincibility even in the face of countervailing advice. The more strident this advice, the more our resilience is tested.

People have as much a need to understand the breadth of experience encompassed by the notion of health as to understand the boundaries that indicate its absence. It follows that medicine is as duty bound to forewarn the public about the best and latest efforts to medicalize experiences of normal life as to inform the public about the utility of the best and latest efforts to treat the abnormal. There is a robust science that can promote informed decisions about health just as it can about disease. The degree to which medicine fails in this aspect of “health promotion” is the degree to which it facilitates the marketing of health as a commodity.2

Disease

The terms illness and disease are synonymous in parlance, but not always in literature. I follow the precedent set forth by Edward Huth, editor emeritus of the Annals of Internal Medicine, who defined illness as the symptoms that brought one to the doctor and disease as what one has “on the way home from the doctor’s office. Disease is something that an organ has; illness is something that a man has.”3 Hence, any challenge to our sense of invincibility remains a predicament of life unless we feel compelled to consult a physician. Then the person becomes a patient, the predicament becomes an illness, and the expectation is that the physician will identify the causal disease, smite it a mighty blow thereby converting the patient back into a person.

This paradigm is the pride of modern scientific medicine. The patient expects the physician to engage this challenge at all cost and at all risk; the physician is rewarded for the exercise even if it fails. In that event neither the physician nor the exercise is considered culpable. Rather the victim is blamed for having a disease that was either too elusive or too severe to yield to modern medical miracles.

However, no patient would embark on a diagnostic Odyssey unless they presumed that a salutary reward was likely. Medicine has a robust science that can inform this decision node. No matter how theoretically promising, technically demanding, expensive, novel, dangerous, or well marketed, would any patient accept treatment if they understood that attempts to demonstrate meaningful efficacy have come up short? Choosing to abort the cure-at-all-cost paradigm is not a failure of initiative on the part of the patient or the physician. It is the clarion calling for caring for the person who opted to be a patient. It is helping the patient reframe illness in a format that suggests a higher yield, or at least avoids iatrogenesis.4The degree to which patients are encouraged to pursue the futile and the unnecessary is the degree to which disease is turned into a product line.

The Doctor

An effective doctor-patient interaction commences with the intertwining of 3 strands of interpretation in order to arrive at mutual understanding: the context that engendered the consultation, the nature of the complaint, and the limitations of causal inferences. The interpretations are always laden with presupposition and prejudice by both parties. Until very recently, there was little about this interaction that was equitable. Earlier generations of patients were largely in awe of the rituals, ignorant of the details of the clinical process, and desirous of pronouncements. That is no longer the rule.

No patient enters the office without having undertaken his or her own exercise in diagnosis. As a corollary, rare is the patient who is not burdened with preconceptions as to appropriate therapies. Information and misinformation of this nature abound thanks to pronouncements from all sorts of media and marketing outlets. Judgment as to health options is limited by the validity of the information describing the value of the options.

One might hope that indemnity schemes would champion cost-effectiveness. However, health insurance schemes are pummeled by realpolitik; providers and purveyors have an investment in their offerings that does not yield readily to notions of cost-effectiveness. The physician who attempts to lead patients out of this vortex by objectively considering clinical options with them is in for time-consuming buffeting by patients and peers – and seldom for applause. Some persevere but not enough to alter the clinical landscape.

As a result, pervasive medicalization hides under the rubric of “health promotion, disease prevention”. Under the banner of “medical miracles” hides a range of interventions that have failed scientific testing for meaningful efficacy. Under the banner of “access to care” hides leveraged institutions that treat people as a marketplace. Under the banner of “economy of scale” hides a burgeoning bureaucracy. As recently as a generation ago, medicine was a profession that would have found such labels as “industry”, “business” or “enterprise” anathema if anyone had the temerity to suggest such. Now such descriptors are accepted, even sought after, so that “health care” now supports stakeholders with vast equity positions. Physicians are part of a team that is expected to serve the needs of the enterprise as the overriding goal with the presumption that is so doing, “health care” is a result.

The Evidentiary Basis for Salutary Patienthood

However, the same elements that were harnessed to create today’s notions of health, disease and “the doctor” can be harnessed to another that considers health its sole raison d’être. Defining disease is but an aspect. Some of the elements that are prerequisite to health are in the purview of the patient-physician relationship. No longer does an imperious pronouncement by a physician suffice nor should “common practice” prevail. Rather, the patient should occupy the driver’s seat with the physician as navigator. There are 2 prerequisites to this level of collaboration:

Trust must be established. That requires time and proclivities on the part of both patient and physician. Without trust it is impossible to decide if the pursuit of disease is a rational approach to the maintenance of health. Otherwise, when appropriate, a patient with backache cannot countenance the likelihood that the illness might better be framed as a surrogate complaint for challenges at home or work that thwart coping. Likewise, a patient with persistent fatigue or widespread pain will balk at the possibility that the symptoms are “in their mind” and merit reframing rather than pharmaceuticals.

For each option in diagnosis and intervention, the patient must be encouraged to ask, “Based on the available science, what is the best I can expect?” And then actively and with comprehension, listen to the answer. For some options, there is no informative science to hone the therapeutic relationship. For some options, the science is compelling. For many, the science may be robust but demonstrations of efficacy have proved elusive, inconsistent or marginal. Examples of the latter include interventions for occlusive atherosclerotic disease; elective procedures on backs, shoulders and knees; pharmaceutical management of cognitive impairment situational affective disorders, type 2 diabetes and essential hypertension; and many screening protocols. The therapeutic decision hinges on how the patient values the remote possibility of benefit and the probability of harm. If the patient finds the decision imponderable, the fall back no longer is “What would you do, doctor?” The 21st Century fall back is “If you were me, what would you do, doctor?” The answer hinges on the trusting nature of the therapeutic relationship.

This is not an argument for denigrating the physician or the profession of medicine. It is an argument for the physician and the medical profession to assume an enlightened and enlightening role in contemporary society, one based on collaboration as to the limits of certainty and a proclivity to negotiate options whenever those limits are exceeded. It is a call for medicine to be truly a service profession. It is a call for placing any predicament, illness, or disease in the broad context of the course of life. It is a call for people and for patients to understand these goals and make them their own.

References:

Hadler NM. Citizen patient. Reforming health care for the sake of the patient, not the system. UNC Press, 2013.
Hadler NM. Worried sick. A prescription for health in an overtreated America. UNC Press, 2012.
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John Palting, a Ph.D. candidate in entomology at the University of Arizona, has collected moths with Ray Nagle for over 30 years. In March of 2013, Palting and Nagle collected moths at Biosphere 2 near Oracle, Ariz. Photograph by Susan E. Swanberg

Bathed in violet light, two men search the white expanse of cloth, oblivious to their surroundings. Disoriented insects of various shapes and sizes swoop around the men’s heads. Many of the insects eventually land on the sheet. With a deft motion, one of the men captures a specimen and examines the vial in which a pale-colored moth flutters.

Ray Nagle and John Palting have collected moths together for more than 30 years. As a young boy, Palting developed an interest in entomology. His mother, a biochemist in the University of Arizona’s Pharmacology Department, was determined to nurture her son’s budding hobby. She heard through the university grapevine that Nagle, a highly respected pathologist at the School of Medicine, collected insects as a hobby.

Palting’s mother arranged for her 11-year-old son to meet Nagle. The 30-year-old professor and the young boy hit it off. They have been collecting together ever since.

Ray Nagle, M.D., Ph.D., is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona as well as a medical director at Ventana Medical Systems in Tucson, Ariz. Nagle is also a highly respected amateur entomologist. Photograph by Susan E. Swanberg

Now in his 50s, Palting works for Roche Pharmaceuticals in Oro Valley, Ariz. He recently returned to school to study for a Ph.D. in entomology. Nagle, in his 70s, is still active in his profession.

Nagle and Palting are particularly interested in moths—the largely nocturnal, seemingly drab cousins of the butterfly. “It’s really fun,” Palting says, “because there’s such a diversity of moths that even after 30 years of collecting, you can still go out and see new things.”

According to Palting, moths are not necessarily drab. Their wings can be white, brown, yellow, pink, blue or even clear. The patterns on bodies and wings are fascinating in their detail, and the antennae are feathery marvels.

An unusual experiment

In March 2013 the two collectors set up shop on the grounds of Biosphere 2, near Oracle, Ariz. They were there to conduct an unusual experiment.

Biosphere 2 is home to many exotic plants. In March of 2013, John Palting and Ray Nagle set up traps to determine whether any exotic moths fed on the plants living within the Biosphere 2 dome. Photograph by Susan E. Swanberg

Biosphere 2 has been a laboratory for many unusual experiments. Built to accommodate groups of scientists and explorers learning how to survive in a closed, self-supporting ecosystem such as would be experienced by space travelers, Biosphere 2 is now a center for scientific research and public outreach.

Under the glass dome of Biosphere 2 are five biomes, many containing the exotic plants imported and planted years ago by the original Biospherians and their colleagues. Palting and Nagle are curious about the insect life in Biosphere 2. They think it might be possible that moths hitchhiked a ride with the plants, shrubs and trees brought from faraway places so many years ago. The descendants of these hitchhikers might still live under the dome.

Nagle and Palting install insect traps inside Biosphere 2 and set up collection sites outside as scientific comparisons or controls. After a night of collecting, they’ll compare the specimens trapped under the dome with the specimens caught outside.

Dr. Dragos Zaharescu, a postdoctoral researcher, spends many hours every week at Biosphere 2. He has observed small caterpillars, ants and a few moths under the dome. Mostly, though, he sees cockroaches. The cockroaches “seem to have taken over the whole Biosphere,” he says. “There’s not much [insect] diversity in the Biosphere.”

Mutual admiration

Back at the collection sites, Nagle and Palting move in unison as they assemble their equipment. They’ve become very close over the years.

Ray Nagle examines one of John Palting's insect collections. Nagle mentored the young Palting and taught him how to collect and preserve insects. Photograph by Susan E. Swanberg

Nagle takes a few minutes to examine a framed display of insects that Palting collected. With a smile, Nagle acknowledges the beauty of Palting’s work. Nagle and Palting are a mutual admiration society, reveling in each other’s entomological accomplishments

Nagle is recognized by collectors all over the world for his expertise as an amateur entomologist. He once had an impressive collection of moths and other insects that he kept in his cabin in Summerhaven on Mount Lemmon, just north of Tucson, Ariz. Some of those moths had not previously been identified.

John Palting collected moths in Oro Valley and Tucson, Ariz. in 2012. His collection illustrates the subtle beauty of moths. Photograph by Susan E. Swanberg

In June 2003, the Aspen Fire burned hundreds of homes in Summerhaven. From a distance, Palting saw the fire engulf the top of the mountain. “It was an explosion like a mushroom cloud of smoke,” he says. “I knew that collection was in there.” Palting drove up the mountain, but was turned away by fire officials.  To this day, Palting regrets not being able to save his friend’s collection. “It’s very much like losing a library when one of these collections gets destroyed.”

At the time Nagle was in Ireland with his wife. For a while he kept a memento of what he’d lost. The memento was a melted pile of metal and glass, all that remained of the old microscope he kept in the cabin.

Undaunted, Nagle soon began to collect again. He has almost replicated his old collection. There are a few species he might not find again, but he is eager to continue his hobby.

A night of collecting

Back at the Biosphere, Palting carries two bucket-traps. The traps are simple: a bucket containing ammonia, a UV light to hang above the trap and attract unsuspecting insects and a funnel to direct the creatures into the bucket. He places one trap in the rainforest biome and the other in the savanna biome. He’ll return at dusk to turn on the lights.

A close-up of John Palting’s moth collection shows the colorful orange of moths that feed on the desert marigold. Palting collected these moths in 2012 in Oro Valley, Ariz. Photograph by Susan E. Swanberg

Just outside the Biosphere’s entrance, Nagle and Palting begin to assemble their outdoor collecting stations. It’s daylight, so they can see the surrounding vegetation. Nagle chooses a spot on the edge of the parking lot. He’s scheduled for orthopedic surgery in a few days, but that doesn’t stop him from collecting. His only accommodation is to find a flat spot on the pavement for a chair. Nagle spreads a white sheet and hangs a UV light close by. He’ll run the light off a battery.

A hundred feet away, Palting assembles his equipment. He’ll use a mercury light, running it off a generator. He hopes to collect moths from the shrubs and trees surrounding the parking lot as well as from the mesquite-covered hills across the valley.

John Palting sets up a bucket trap within Biosphere 2, hoping to collect moth species feeding on exotic plants under the dome. A UV light attracts insects, which then fall through a funnel into the bucket. Photograph by Susan E. Swanberg

After dinner, Nagle and Palting return to the sheets and fire up their light sources. Nagle’s UV light is soundless, while the generator driving Palting’s mercury lamp putt-putts like an anemic lawnmower. The moths don’t seem to mind, though. It only takes a few minutes for insects to be drawn to each “flame.”

Then the collecting starts in earnest. Nagle and Palting work at their own stations for a while, then Palting joins Nagle.

Vials are filled and labeled carefully. Nagle and Palting speak about past collecting trips, their favorite specimens and what they’re finding on the sheet. Latin names trip off their tongues—Sphingidae, Noctuidae and others.

Nagle and Palting collect representatives of about 30 moth taxa living outside the Biosphere dome. Eventually they shut down their lamps and call it a night.

Adventures ahead

Ray Nagle and John Palting examine moths at their collection site outside Biosphere 2 near Oracle, Ariz. in March of 2013. A UV light attracted moths to a sheet where the two men collected the specimens. Photograph by Susan E. Swanberg

After breakfast the next morning, Palting returns to the dome to collect the two indoor traps. The rainforest trap is empty. “I was really surprised,” he says. “There’s this profusion of plants, and I thought something has to be eating those plants. But oddly, in the jungle I didn’t have a single insect. Not even a leafhopper or anything came in.”

The trap in the savanna contains a number of insects that Palting will preserve and identify.

Within Biosphere 2, John Palting found representatives of 9 moth taxa native to Arizona, but he found no exotic moths feeding on the exotic plants under the dome. Photograph by Susan E. Swanberg

Several weeks later, he shows us these moths, mounted in a small box. He found nine separate taxa of moths in the savanna, all of them local species, mostly legume feeders. “It looks like they secondarily colonized that savanna habitat,” he says. “There’s a lot of acacia trees in there from Africa and South America, and [the moths] are probably using those just like they use the native acacia trees…. It seems like Biosphere 2, after 20 years, has reached equilibrium with the environment.”

This might not be the end of the story, however. This is just preliminary data. For the study to be definitive, more collecting is necessary.

Maybe Nagle and Palting’s pilot study will inspire future graduate student to follow up with more research. Then again, maybe the two friends will return to Biosphere 2 themselves. Nagle is recovering from his surgery, and hopefully he’ll be back on his feet soon. When that day comes, Palting and Nagle will be off again on a new adventure.

5.16.13 The Moth Hunters from Susan Swanberg on Vimeo.