Andrew Sullivan

Not “Designer Babies”, Just Healthy Ones

A recent NYT op-ed by Marcy Darnovsky warning about a procedure that uses donor-supplied mitochondria to allow women with mitochondrial diseases to give birth to healthy children has kicked off a new debate about “designer babies”. Nita Farahany, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, emphasizes that using donated mitochondria doesn’t make the donor a “third parent,” as the scare stories would have it:

Embryos that result from these techniques have genetic material contributed from three different individuals, but the mitochondrial donor is not a parent — genetically, or otherwise. When using mitochondria from a donor egg, the resulting egg (which has the nucleus from the intending mother) has 99.9 percent of its coding DNA from the intending mother. The donor provides the energy necessary for the egg to function normally. When the egg is then fertilized by a sperm cell, the resulting embryo carries less than .1 percent of its DNA from the mitochondrial donor.

Ronald Bailey accuses the NYT of “immoral scaremongering”:

The mitochondrial replacement technique is not at all “deeply problematic.” In fact, the FDA panel has finally gotten around to considering a technique that the agency banned after essentially the same procedure was being successfully deployed by team led by fertility researcher Jacques Cohen 13 years ago. Cohen used the technique to help women to give birth to 20 children before the FDA shut down his work in 2001. At a conference some years later, I asked Cohen how the children were faring and he told me that 19 were healthy and one has an autism disorder. As it happens, some research finds a correlation between mitochondrial dysfunction and some cases of autism.

Jessica Grose also dismisses the fears over designer babies and describes what’s at stake for the pregnant women:

When a woman’s eggs have severe mitochondrial abnormalities, they can have many miscarriages, stillborn children, or extremely sick babies who are unlikely to survive past early childhood. “They will suffer immensely because they can’t get the energy” in order for their brains and hearts to grow, says [Nita] Farahany. They can have extreme pain and difficulty breathing. Fixing this huge amount of suffering for both mother and child seems like a far cry from creating “designer babies,” and paramount to any hyped-up concern about a slippery slope.

Although the mitochondrial procedure may not entail the creation of designer babies, Drum figures we’ll get there eventually:

It’s about time we faced up to this, I think. As the technology for this steadily advances, and designer babies become possible, parents are going to get designer babies. If the United States bans it, they’ll go to Switzerland. If Switzerland bans it, they’ll go to China. If China bans it, they’ll go underground. But one way or another, if this technology exists, the demand for it is going to be irresistible.

The Problem Of American Prisons

Robert A. Ferguson’s new book Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment explores the unusual cruelty and vengefulness in our criminal justice system. Andrew Cohen praises the book for positing “that America needs a fundamentally revised understanding of the concept of punishment itself if it is to save its soul”:

As a matter of law and politics, Ferguson asserts, the concept of retribution clearly has won in America. But what a terrible price to pay for such victory. With a few notable recent exceptions– including New York’s brave new foray into education as a defense against recidivism— we are a nation that seeks to punish, not rehabilitate, our prisoners. In this respect we have gone back in time, back to a dark age in our penological past, back to where in the 21st Century we justify locking away a mentally ill teenager in solitary for 17 years.

Joseph Stromberg looks at the damage wrought by solitary confinement:

A majority of those surveyed [by psychologist Craig Haney] experienced symptoms such as dizziness, heart palpitations, chronic depression, while 41 percent reported hallucinations, and 27 percent had suicidal thoughts—all levels significantly higher than those of the overall prison populations. An unrelated study published last week found that isolated inmates are seven times more likely to hurt or kill themselves than inmates at large. These effects, Haney says, don’t only show how isolation harms inmates—they tell us that it achieves the opposite of the supposed goal of rehabilitating them for re-entry into society.

Helen Vera adds:

Solitary increases the likelihood that a former prisoner, after release, will wind up back in prison. It is extremely expensive, costing as much as two or three times more to hold a prisoner in solitary confinement than in even a traditional maximum-security setting. And it exposes corrections systems to time-consuming and burdensome lawsuits. The commonplace reliance on solitary for prison discipline is a failed experiment, and it’s time for it to end.

Last week there was a glimmer of good news: the NY Department of Corrections decided it will no longer use solitary as a punishment for prisoners younger than 18. Meanwhile, Matt Stroud covers the failures of the private prison industry:

Alex Friedmann, who spent six years as a prisoner in a CCA facility in Clifton, Tennessee, now runs the prisoner rights magazine Prison Legal News. He advocates against private prison companies (and holds stock in CCA so he can speak up at its shareholder meetings). …

Public officials support private prisons because they often need the bed space, regardless if those beds are tied to companies that are “abusive, lead to higher recidivism rates and cost more,” Friedmann says. Second, he continues, public officials are often “ideologically wedded to the concept of privatization in spite of the industry’s abysmal track record,” and third, public officials “receive direct benefits from private prison companies, such as campaign contributions, consulting contracts or the promise of future employment by such firms.”

(Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)

Giving The SAT A Low Score

Taking the revamped test as an adult convinced Elizabeth Kolbert of just how useless it is:

As an adult, I found the test more difficult than I had as a teen and, at the same time, more disappointing. Many of the questions were tricky; some were genuinely hard. But, even at its most challenging, the exercise struck me as superficial. Critical thinking was never called for, let alone curiosity or imagination. Ironically—or was it defensively?—this was most apparent to me while I was blathering on about the Manhattan Project. A study by an instructor at M.I.T. has shown that success on the SAT essay is closely correlated with length: the more words pile up, the higher the score. When, at Advantage Testing, [Debbie] Stier [the author of The Perfect Score Project: Uncovering the Secrets of the SAT] is shown essays that have received top marks, she is horrified. They are, she writes, “terrible.”

Treating Slaves Like Lab Rats

Greg Grandin researches “the way the advancement of medical knowledge was paid for with the lives of slaves”:

The death rate on the trans-Atlantic voyage to the New World was staggeringly high. Slave ships, however, were more than floating tombs. They were floating laboratories, offering researchers a chance to examine the course of diseases in fairly controlled, quarantined environments. Doctors and medical researchers could take advantage of high mortality rates to identify a bewildering number of symptoms, classify them into diseases, and hypothesize about their causes.

Corps of doctors tended to slave ports up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Some of them were committed to relieving suffering; others were simply looking for ways to make the slave system more profitable. In either case, they identified types of fevers, learned how to decrease mortality and increase fertility, experimented with how much water was needed for optimum numbers of slaves to survive on a diet of salted fish and beef jerky, and identified the best ratio of caloric intake to labor hours. Priceless epidemiological information on a range of diseases — malaria, smallpox, yellow fever, dysentery, typhoid, cholera, and so on — was gleaned from the bodies of the dying and the dead.

Update from a reader:

It’s important to note that this experimentation on slaves was an ongoing practice. For example, there is the case of J. Marion Sims, considered the “Father of Modern Gynecology.”

Sims created some of the first basic tools for gynecological examination. But these breakthroughs came through the experimentation of untold, and largely unnamed, slave women (and later in New York City on destitute Irish immigrant women). I learned about Sims a few years ago on a visit to the State Capitol grounds in Columbia, South Carolina which features a beautiful memorial to Sims that presents him as a great hero and pioneer. There have been attempts to “right the record” and include a more complete story of his record along with the heroic inscriptions. These would include the sheer numbers of forced patients and the staggering numbers of surgeries (30 known on one patient). These were all done without anesthetic, which was known and used at that time. In any case it didn’t matter. The pain of the patient wasn’t a consideration. Gynecological problems that impeded their value as bearers of more slaves was what Sims was attempting to solve in these surgeries.

(Illustration: Diagram of a slave ship from the Atlantic slave trade. Via Wikimedia Commons)

What’s The Best Use For Inheritance?

A recent study found that people are reluctant to spend money they inherit from relatives. Eric Horowitz argues that this finding strengthens the case for the estate tax:

Even if individuals draw some emotional benefit by saving inheritance money, from a social standpoint it’s better if people—and wealthy people in particular—spend their money on durable goods or semi-risky investments. Buying a blender or funding a start-up does more to stimulate the economy than leaving your money in a low-risk mutual fund.

It seems that the tendency to save inheritance money is another reason to support a higher estate tax. If mental accounting is preventing inheritance money from being spent in the most efficient way, that strengthens the case for raising estate tax revenues to fund welfare programs (and if you lean right and cringe at that word choice, just replace “welfare programs” with “other tax breaks for the wealthy that are more stimulative.”)

Juan Valdez Can’t Afford His Own Coffee

Colombians are drinking record amounts of coffee, but most of the growth comes from café instantáneo:

Coffee consumption has steadily increased since 2008 in Colombia, and instant coffee sales have jumped by over 150 percent, the second-largest growth rate in the world, according to Euromonitor. Instant is taking up a larger and larger portion of the local Colombian coffee market.

How come? Colombia has been producing and exporting heaps of fine coffee for over a century now, but Colombians haven’t historically been able to afford the quality beans they grow. Most of it has been exported to higher income markets, per Euromonitor.

The tale is not unlike quinoa’s in Peru and Bolivia, where farmers have worked to produce more and more of the newly hip grain, which their fellow countrymen can now scarcely afford. The difference, however, is that in Colombia’s case, the inability to afford strong coffee has stoked the appetite for cheaper and weaker stuff. Without the cash to buy the superior coffee being grown locally, Columbians have embraced milder blends.

(Graph of Colombian coffee consumption via Quartz)

Still Greasy After All These Years

Scientists are still finding oil from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill:

[Gail] Irvine, of the United States Geological Survey, has been monitoring the sound and the coastline of the Shelikof Strait, southwest of the spill, for 20 years, and has just recently discovered these pockets of oil that have persisted behind large boulders along the coastline. What’s more, the oil appears to have broken down very little and has the chemical makeup of oil that is just 11 days old, meaning it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

“Every chemist who has looked at this has been surprised,” Irvine said. ”These are at high wave-energy sites, it’s not the kinds of areas where oil would have been predicted to have persisted, especially because it has barely been weathered.”

The Morning After In Arizona

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[Re-posted from earlier today]

Here’s the money quote from Jan Brewer’s veto statement last night:

Senate Bill 1062 does not address a specific and present concern related to religious liberty in Arizona. I have not heard of one example in Arizona where a business owner’s religious liberty has been violated … Religious liberty is a core American and Arizona value, so is non-discrimination.

As I’ve mulled this over and over, I have a few straggling thoughts. Against the bill: it had two terrible features. The first was the breadth of the religious liberty invoked. The real innovation in Arizona was the extension of religious liberty claims against other citizens, rather than against the government itself. That’s a big leap, and trivializes religious liberty in some ways. No individual can coerce, even with a lawsuit, the way the government can. The second is the environment in which this bill was introduced. In Arizona, gay citizens have no right to marry, and no legal protection against being fired simply for being gay. Indeed, a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim needs no new law to discriminate quite brutally against gay people under the rationale of religious liberty. To argue that the real problem here is the victimization of fundamentalists is therefore bizarre. In fact, it’s a grotesque inversion of reality.

As for the case for allowing fundamentalists to discriminate against anyone associated with what they regard as sin, I’m much more sympathetic. I favor maximal liberty in these cases. The idea that you should respond to a hurtful refusal to bake a wedding cake by suing the bakers is a real stretch to me.

Yes, they may simply be homophobic, rather than attached to a coherent religious worldview. But so what? There are plenty of non-homophobic bakers in Arizona. If we decide that our only response to discrimination is a lawsuit, we gays are ratcheting up a culture war we would do better to leave alone. We run the risk of becoming just as intolerant as the anti-gay bigots, if we seek to coerce people into tolerance. If we value our freedom as gay people in living our lives the way we wish, we should defend that same freedom to sincere religious believers and also, yes, to bigots and haters. You do not conquer intolerance with intolerance. As a gay Christian, I’m particularly horrified by the attempt to force anyone to do anything they really feel violates their conscience, sense of self, or even just comfort.

So I’m with Big Gay Al, and always have been. Let bigots be bigots. Let gays be gays. And when those values conflict, let’s do all we can not to force the issue. We’re living in a time of drastic change with respect to homosexuality. It is perfectly understandable that many traditional-minded people, especially in the older age brackets, are disconcerted, upset and confused. So give them some space; instead of suing them, talk to them. Try seeing things from their point of view. Appeal to their better nature as Christians. And start defusing by your tolerance the paranoia and hysteria Roger Ailes lives off.

“Charm It With The Beauty Of Love”

Another day, another breath of fresh air from Pope Francis:

In a nearly 3,000-word text to the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, Francis tells the office they should not look for bishops based on any “preferences, likes, or trends” and likewise should not seek prelates who are mainly concerned with doctrinal matters.

The church, writes Francis, does not need “guardians of doctrine” but those who “appeal to the world to charm it with the beauty of love [and] to seduce it with the freedom bestowed by the Gospel … The church does not need apologists of its causes nor crusaders of its battles, but sowers humble and confident of the truth, who … trust of its power,” the pontiff continues.

Who did Francis succeed? A theologian who policed orthodoxy as meticulously as he chose his slippers.

(Photo: The hand of Pope Francis is pictured as he waves during his general audience in St Peter’s square at the Vatican on February 26, 2014 . By Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images.)

Marathoners Anonymous?

James McWilliams, an avid long-distance runner, wonders whether he might be addicted to exercise:

Potentially addicted runners will cheat family time to run, sneak in runs without telling people, design vacations around exercise opportunities, will (if injured) count the days since their last run like an alcoholic counts the days since his last drink, and forgo sex to run (we often joke that nobody spends a Saturday morning running 20 miles because they have a great sex life). It seems certain that, if these symptoms are in any way common, running addiction will become an official disorder in due time.

The problem, from the perspective of these symptoms, seems quite real. But then what?

It’s hard to imagine how such “addicts” would be treated in a clinical setting. Would they be pushed to go cold turkey, as many drug and alcohol addicts are advised to do? That option would deny them the real benefits of a healthy activity they had merely taken too far. In the end, quitting could lead to a worse situation than the one the addict was already in. Scaling back, which is becoming an option for substance abusers, seems like it would be a more realistic option. But here, too, it’s hard to see how—given the tendency of the high to diminish for the exercise freak—the temptation to add one more mile could be resisted, especially when acute negative consequences do not result. It’s hard to imagine ever effectively treating this “disorder.”

Stanton Peele asserts that “people can become addicted to anything, whether drugs, alcohol, food, shopping, gambling, love, or sex, if it is the focus of an encapsulating experience that alleviates bad feelings and buttresses their self-esteem”:

Contrary to the common view of addiction as a choice-nullifying disease, this approach holds people accountable for their actions. Addicts are actively involved in building their attachments and can modify their behavior when they have an incentive to do so. Alcoholics drink moderately at home with their parents, for instance, and addicted smokers wait all morning during work until they can smoke outdoors. They might prefer to indulge their addictive impulses instantly, but those impulses can be resisted and ultimately eliminated.

Update from a reader, who happily calls herself an “enabler”:

My husband has to run/bike/swim/burn calories regularly, otherwise I don’t want to be around him. He gets grumpy and unpleasant. So is that the sign of an addiction? Possibly. Endorphins are powerful things. But so what? He’s healthier for it, and in a better mood. He doesn’t spend tons of money on equipment or a gym membership – or expensive cars, electronics, or pharmaceuticals (legal or not) to feel better. He, his sister, and father spend a lot of time bonding over triathlons, mountain bike wrecks, and equipment. He takes our kids out with him on their bicycles, and as soon as the baby is old enough, will take him in the jogging stroller, giving me time to sleep. I’ll happily enable this particular addiction! (And our sex life doesn’t suffer from his exercise. Quite the opposite, I’d argue.)