Month: December 2013

The End Of DIY DNA Testing? Ctd

Razib Khan doubts that the FDA going after 23andMe will have long-term consequences:

Genotyping whole genome sequencing services are soon going to be as ubiquitous as white bread. The likelihood that the FDA would ban you from reading your raw results seems low. Rather, their concern is when a firm like 23andMe interprets those results. The glaring weakness in an aggressive strategy against interpretative services is that there will always be firms such as 23andMe, and there’s no reason that they need to be based out of the United States. Not only that, but there are open-source desktop applications, such as Promethease, that provide many of the same results by combining individual raw data with public peer-reviewed literature, if less slickly than 23andMe. To truly eliminate the public health threat that the FDA is concerned about, the U.S. government would have to constrict and regulate the whole information ecology, not just a strategic portion of it, from scientists distributing research about genetic variants, to international genome sequencing firms returning raw results on the cheap.

In hindsight I suspect that the FDA targeting 23andMe is going to seem rather like the RIAA shutting down Napster. The data is coming. The institutions designed to protect the public from fraud need to think more about empowerment rather than engaging in fiat paternalism.

He fleshes out his argument in a more recent post:

Dan MacArthur is probably right that personal genomics enthusiasts overestimated how involved the average person on the street was going to want to get in terms of their own interpretations of returned results. The reality is that even genetic counselors can barely keep up. Someday the field will stabilize, but this is not that day. But overall the information overload is going to get worse and worse, not better, and where the real upside, and game-changer, will be is in the domain of computational tools which helps us make decisions with a minimum of effort. A cartoon model of this might be an artificial intelligence which talks to you through an ear-bud all day, and takes your genomic, epigenomic, and biomarker status into account when advising you on whether you should pass on the dessert. But to get from here to there is going to require innovation. The end point is inevitable, barring a collapse of post-industrial civilization. The question is where it is going to happen. Here in the United States we have the technology, but we also have cultural and institutional road-blocks to this sort of future. If those road-blocks are onerous enough it doesn’t take a genius to predict that high-tech lifestyle advisement firms, whose aims are to replace the whole gamut of self-help sectors with rationally designed applications and appliances, will simply decamp to Singapore or Dubai.

Personal genomics is a small piece of that. And 23andMe is a small piece of personal genomics. But they are not trivial pieces.

Holocaust Hero Or Collaborator?

http://youtu.be/eX3FVgjxSh8

Mark Lilla reviews the latest film from Claude Lanzmann, The Last of the Unjust, which is based on extended interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein. Murmelstein was the infamous head of the Judenrat, or council of Jewish elders, who worked with Nazi leaders in running the Theresienstadt concentration camp. One fascinating feature of the documentary is that Murmelstein eventually wins Lanzmann over, arguing that his actions “were intended to beat the Nazis at their own game”:

If Eichmann’s strategy was to create in Theresienstadt a model ghetto that would distract world attention from the mass murders committed elsewhere, Murmelstein’s was to maintain that illusion so the camp and its inmates could not be destroyed without setting off an alarm.

If one accepts the soundness of this strategy, his actions appear in a different light. Rules had to be strictly, even brutally enforced to ensure that the Nazis did not transform the ghetto into an extermination camp. To keep the place from succumbing to a typhus epidemic he secretly had all the inmates forcibly vaccinated, denying food to those who refused, so the place appeared healthy. The seventy-hour work week was essential because, at the time he instituted it, the Nazis were worried more about shortages than about world opinion, and Murmelstein wanted the ghetto to appear economically indispensible. “Survival through work,” he says, was his version of the Nazi camp motto “Freedom through work.”

Lilla doesn’t quite buy the defense:

Keeping his camp running efficiently and in the public eye saved it as an institution, but also meant that victims could be processed more efficiently on their way to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other places east. Murmelstein, like everyone in the camp, did not learn about Auschwitz until 1944, but no one was ignorant of the fact that transport nach Osten meant unspeakable suffering and nearly certain death. At times, he speaks as if preserving the ghetto was an end in itself, never considering, as Hannah Arendt had suggested, that less efficiency might have meant fewer deaths overall. In the judgment of Holocaust historian Saul Friedländer, “objectively the Judenrat was probably an instrument in the destruction of European Jewry.” “But,” he added, “subjectively the actors were not aware of this function.”

Google’s Mysterious Maps

Jerry Brotton, author of A History of the World in 12 Maps, worries that Google is harming the field of cartography:

Though he concedes that Google Earth and Google Maps are useful and impressive tools, Brotton says that the company’s mapmaking projects are uniquely secretive. For as long as cartographers have been making maps, they’ve demonstrated how they arrived at their conclusions, forging a path for future mapmakers to follow. But Google, he says, has taken a less collegial approach: “(T)here is a crucial difference between what Google is doing and what went before, which is not simply about scale: it concerns the computerized source code used to build its geospatial applications. … For obvious commercial reasons, Google does not disclose the specific details of its code, which means that for the first time in recorded history, a world view is being constructed according to information which is not publicly and freely available.”

Likening the situation to the debate over the company’s push to digitize as many books as possible, which would “arguably give Google a monopoly on the book search market,” Brotton suggests that there’s reason to be alarmed by this state of affairs. “The history of maps,” he writes, “has never previously known the possibility of a monopoly of valuable geographic information falling into the hands of one company.”

How Long Would You Sleep In A World Without Clocks?

Jessa Gamble does some research:

[Jürgen Aschoff’s] experiments in a disused Munich bunker in the 1960s were the first to reveal the body’s independent sleep-wake cycle in its naked state. For several weeks, Aschoff’s subjects lived in isolation, collecting their own urine and monitoring their body temperatures. Dim lights were entirely under their control, but no time information from the outside world was allowed, and when Acshoff’s staff arrived with supplies, they even randomized the stubble-length on their faces so as not to give away clues.

Out of that gloom emerged the first proof of the body’s independent clock, cementing Aschoff’s standing as a founder of chronobiology. With no sunrise to provide external calibration, his subjects still tended to sleep for about eight hours. However, their waking period stretched slightly beyond 16 hours, revealing an internal clock that ran 20 minutes slower than the 24-hour day. Their days settled into a pattern of about 24.3 hours. And so with each passing day, the bunker residents went to sleep later and later until they were entirely out of sync with the rhythms of German life bustling above their heads.

The Best Of The Dish Today

I was struck by a blog-post by Erick Erickson today. I wasn’t struck by its nihilist extremism – that’s completely unsurprising. I was struck by a simple phrase in it. Here’s the full quote:

Conservatives need to keep their focus on the [ACA] overall. The website is a reflection of a terrible law. The law is causing millions to lose insurance, millions more to pay more for insurance, and the best the Democrats can do is claim it’d work well if the GOP didn’t think nasty thoughts about it. As we all get back to business today, we must remember the law itself is the problem — not the website. The website they can fix. We must deny them the opportunity to fix the law itself. Let the American people see big government in all its glory. Then offer a repeal.

My italics. Leave the facts aside for a moment (this is from RedState). Am I crazy to infer from these words that Erick Erickson is not actually in favor of people losing their health insurance? Am I mad to conclude that he is also against people losing health insurance when they get sick, or when they lose their job, or if they have a pre-existing condition that bars them from real health insurance for life in the free market? I wouldn’t go so far as to infer that Erickson regrets the fact that tens of millions of Americans have never had any health insurance to lose – let’s not get carried away here – but the general principle of being against the loss of health insurance might allow for such a thing.

Which leads me to an obvious question. What would Erickson actually do to prevent people losing insurance if Obamacare were repealed? It has happened to millions before Obamacare and would happen even more after repeal. The answer, so far as I can tell, is: nothing. So none of this has anything to do with healthcare or health insurance at all. It’s just about ideology. The GOP has no interest in practically reforming the system to improve access or seriously cut costs or address the huge free-rider problem. It even seems to imply most of the time that the health of a citizenry should be of no interest to the government at all (even as it is bankrupting the government and punishing business). The GOP is, in this sense, a sect, not a party. Its goal is to advance and reiterate an eternal ideological doctrine – “the evil of big government” – rather than proposing anything to address contingent and obvious problems in our post-Reagan socialized healthcare system.

This is the reason behind the frenzied in-fighting about who is the most ardent defender of orthodoxy rather than about who might actually have the best policy proposals for our mess of a healthcare sector. Norm Ornstein, once a totem of middle-ground consensus at AEI and now a startled Cassandra on Republican nihilism, puts it this way:

I’ve not seen anything like this before. It is just such an interesting phenomenon — call it anthropological or sociological or pathological. An obsessive hatred with all things Obamacare that has infected everybody on the Republican side. They can’t say anything positive about any element of a law that is based on their own fundamental ideas. It means that when anybody says something that could in any way be construed as positive regarding Obamacare it becomes fodder for attacks. … Conservatives are eating their own.

And they think this is the way back to the White House! They seem to have forgotten that a party that is much more interested in punishing heretics than winning converts is doomed to failure or narcissism or both. Right now, they are breathing the fumes of spite. That is not the same as political oxygen.

Meanwhile, on the Dish today, I spoke of my deepening love of my native land, England, fresh from a trip to London and Sussex. I lamented what seems to be the intensifying death-spiral of magazines. I pondered how deep a challenge to the American right Pope Francis now presents.

If you have vertigo, people are not so awesome. Yes, there is such a movement as lucid dreaming. Some great fine artists became what they became because of lead poisoning – in their paint. And yes, there is also such a thing as passive-aggressive punctuation in social media.

The most popular posts were The Pope and the American Right, followed by Home And Wet.

Good to be back in the USA. See you in the morning.

The White House Press Room, Then And Now

President Obama Delivers Remarks To Mark World AIDS Day

The Dish nine years ago posted the following exchange between a reporter and Reagan spokesman Larry Speakes, but it’s still a useful reminder of how far the country has come since October 15, 1982:

Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?
MR. SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?
Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)
Q: No, I don’t.
MR. SPEAKES: You didn’t answer my question.
Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President …
MR. SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.)
Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I don’t know anything about it, Lester.
Q: Does the President, does anyone in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any …
Q: Nobody knows?
MR. SPEAKES: There has been no personal experience here, Lester.
Q: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping …
MR. SPEAKES: I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he’s had no – (laughter) – no patients suffering from AIDS or whatever it is.
Q: The President doesn’t have gay plague, is that what you’re saying or what?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I didn’t say that.
Q: Didn’t say that?
MR. SPEAKES: I thought I heard you on the State Department over there. Why didn’t you stay there? (Laughter.)
Q: Because I love you Larry, that’s why (Laughter.)
MR. SPEAKES: Oh I see. Just don’t put it in those terms, Lester. (Laughter.)
Q: Oh, I retract that.
MR. SPEAKES: I hope so.
Q: It’s too late.

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama speaks about AIDS during a World AIDS Day event in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on December 2, 2013. On the 25th anniversary of World AIDS Day, President Obama announced that funding to prevent AIDS will be increased by 100 million dollars. By Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

“Come Spring This Year, My Life Changed. Massively.”

Diving - 15th FINA World Championships: Day Eight

The British Olympic diver, Tom Daley, a national hero, fell in love earlier this year. With another man. He went public today. And what’s so stirring about the Youtube is not just how social media gives people such astonishing control over their public face, but how Daley, who qualified for the Beijing Olympics at fourteen and won the gold, places love at the center of what happened to him. Love. Money quote:

It makes me feel safe.

That’s how you know it’s real.

Update from a reader:

I also enjoyed the way in which Tom Daley framed his coming out. But you’ve attributed to him the achievement of a different openly gay Olympic-caliber diver – Australia’s Matthew Mitcham – in claiming that he medaled in Beijing. Daley made the finals in Beijing but did not medal. It was Mitcham whose record-setting final dive led to the stunning upset of China’s Zhou Luxin, securing the gold in the 10m platform and preventing China from sweeping the gold in every diving category. Daley did win the bronze in the 10m platform at the 2012 games in London.

(Photo: Tom Daley of Great Britain competes in the Men’s 10m Platform Diving preliminary round of the 15th FINA World Championships at Piscina Municipal de Montjuic in Barcelona, Spain on July 27, 2013. By Clive Rose/Getty Images.)

The Bell Keeps Tolling

magazine-storefront

The news that New York Magazine will go bi-weekly is a bit of a stunner. I know I shouldn’t be faintly surprised given the broader trends in the industry formerly known as journalism, but this is different. It’s different because New York is, to my mind, the best weekly magazine in America. It has a clear identity, an established mission, a devoted readership, a unique sensibility, great writing, a legendary past, and the best editor of my generation in Adam Moss. Adam, more to the point, is a genius when it comes to what print can do: the combination of graphics, photography, text, and writing that is very hard to replicate online. If New York cannot hack it as a weekly, no magazine can. And most won’t, given the collapse in ad revenues over the last four years.

But of course it would be foolish to count New York or Adam Moss out. Perhaps a biweekly can work; if any magazine can pull that off, New York can. But it’s a very different rhythm, and magazines are a little like TV shows. When they don’t appear regularly and often, they can lose traction and identity. There are, alas, some asinine gloaters. Prominent among whom is the writer of the following grace note:

The worst thing about it is the loss of jobs that will hit the print lifers who were unlucky enough to be too old to get rehired elsewhere (though those jobs will be replaced, to some extent, by jobs online). The second-worst thing about it is all the dewy paeans to print that we will all be forced to endure by nostalgic media people. None of these should be read, or written. The best thing about it is the satisfaction of knowing that Adam Moss is now basically a website editor.

Really? Are we in the business of finding ways to generate an informed and intelligent conversation about the world – or in the business of mindless online triumphalism and gratuitous swipes at journalism that isn’t, well, up to Gawker’s lofty standards? You can be neck-deep in online journalism as I’ve been for a long time now and still value the legacy and continued excellence of New York. And of print.

I’ve long believed that the survivors of this mass media death will be monthlies (and yet The Atlantic seems much more focused on digital than print and Harpers is as willfully obscure as ever) or a few weeklies like The Economist or The New Yorker. But I’m beginning to wonder how a handful of magazines can really sustain an ecology of reading habits alone. At some point the landscape they make sense in evaporates. They become a novelty rather than a central part of a reading public’s life.

I don’t find that satisfying. I find it terribly worrying if we care about sustaining the kind of informed discourse a democracy needs (and, sorry, but listicles and copy-writing disguised as journalism doesn’t count). Hence our attempt to build out and up from a blog and its readership. Will it work in the end? I don’t know. All I know is that it’s a duty to try. And try. And try again. And it’s good to know that as we struggle and improvise in the coming months and years, Adam Moss will be the proof of principle if print can survive at all.

Can You Eat So Much Your Stomach Bursts?

Yes:

[I]f the stomach’s emergency venting and emptying systems are out of commission – because the person is in a narcotic stupor, say, or dead—the organ will typically rupture at three to four liters, around a gallon. If you pour slowly, with less force, it may hold out for six or seven liters.

Very, very occasionally, the stomach of a live, fully conscious individual will give way. In 1929, Annals of Surgery published a review of cases of spontaneous rupture – stomachs that surrendered without forceful impact or underlying weakness. Here were 14 people who managed, despite the body’s emergency ditching system, to eat themselves to death. The riskiest item in these people’s stomachs was often the last to go in: bicarbonate of soda (aka, baking soda, and the key ingredient in Alka-Seltzer). Bicarbonate of soda brings relief two ways: by neutralizing stomach acid and by creating gas, which forces the TLESR [Transient Lower Esophageal Sphincter Relaxation, or burping]. (Less often, the stomach-inflating gas comes from actively fermenting food or drink. The Annals roundup includes a man killed by “much young beer full of yeast,” and two deaths by sauerkraut.)

Update from a reader:

You should google the genetic disorder called Prader-Willi Syndrome. People with this disorder do not get the normal signals to their brain that their stomach is full after eating. Eating until one’s stomach ruptures is one of the common dangers for PWS sufferers, and they occasionally die from it.