Three book review clips from the Washington Post Book World, from articles I read today. The full articles are, of course, at the Post's site for a limited time.
Some thoughts on isolationism versus cooperation with Europe and the UN, in review of Will Huttons Declaration of Interdependence [author - William Easterly]:
I'm not sure how much the United States can trust the United Nations after incidents such as the notorious vote that left the United States off the U.N. Commission for Human Rights in 2002 but included Algeria, Burundi, China, Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Hutton complains that the United States did not do enough to support the U.N. Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, but there is not much that can be done with a summit that had 185 separate action recommendations drafted by U.N. bureaucrats -- including more efficient use of cow dung. And Hutton complains America doesn't supply enough foreign aid to the poor nations, yet foreign aid -- weighed down by the same ponderous bureaucracies that plague the United Nations -- has not exactly covered itself with glory lately.
Even Europe's own European Union bureaucracy is notorious for petty squabbles and politicized appointments strictly apportioned by nationality. And European generosity toward the poor nations should be put in perspective: The French support ugly characters in their former colonies, and the average EU cow gets about as much in annual farm subsidies as the average African earns in a year. In the long-running "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus" debate, Europeans always complain about Americans' excessive individualism. Well, okay, but individualism saved the United States from Europe's disastrous detours into fascism and communism. That counts, too, as long as we are keeping score.
Hutton attributes the woeful American record on helping the poor to the cowboy refusal to do anything other than let individuals lift themselves by their own spurs. He calls the alleged higher upward mobility (today) of American society a myth. I don't know about his numbers for today, but America's historical success at absorbing wave after wave of penniless immigrants into the middle class is built on far more than fairy tales. And America is far more open even today to immigrants than major European nations such as France or Italy. America's lamentable underclass probably has more to do with race and the legacy of slavery than with individualism.
Having said all this, I should stress that Hutton is often right to appeal to the better angels of our American natures. Should we really arrogate to ourselves the right to invade whomever we feel like? Hutton is right that America can't seem to decide how to match its values with its enormous power -- should it topple all tyrants (an inexhaustible list) or prop up tyrants who are friendly to the United States or do both at the same time? Can't our diplomats do better than meddle in other peoples' quarrels in a way that leaves everyone enraged at us? Can't we find a way to spread prosperity to inner cities as well as to upscale suburbs? We could probably learn a few lessons from post-World War II European societies on some of these questions, as Hutton argues.
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Issues with pharmaceuticals, from a review of The Big Fix by Katharine Grieder [author - David Brown]:
...many new medicines are developed with the help of basic, and sometimes also clinical, research financed by American taxpayers. In HIV disease, this was true with both AZT, the first antiretroviral drug, and enfuvirtide (Fuzeon), one of the newest -- and with several in between.) The federal government doesn't influence the pricing of, or share in the profits from, drugs that arise from its role as chief bankroller of biomedical research. This leads to some ironic states of affairs, Greider says. "The tamoxifen [a drug used in treatment of breast cancer] that costs Canadians about $34 per treatment sets back an American cash-paying patient more than $240 -- and was the product of 140 clinical trials sponsored by our government."
Although many of the more objectionable practices have been stopped in the last decade, the marketing of drugs has been unusually aggressive by any standards. The industry has exploited the naivet of physicians by providing consulting fees, educational grants and other blandishments that are little short of bribes. Some companies have created office-based clinical trials whose purpose was to get patients on new drugs, not to generate scientifically valid data. Increasingly, drug makers are going directly to the consumer, giving medicines (and to some extent even medical conditions) the branded cachet normally associated with tennis shoes.
What keeps this enormous machine working? Profits that equaled 18.5 percent of revenues in 2001, and more lobbyists than there are members of Congress, Greider says. Unfortunately, she doesn't offer a lot of suggestions on how to change things. (A shorter period of patent protection for drugs and a government-financed agency that does cost-effectiveness analyses are among the ideas mentioned.) But the truth is that it is easier to pose questions than come up with answers. "As consumers, as workers, as taxpayers, Americans have subsidized the growth of the global pharmaceutical industry, with virtually no strings attached," she writes. "Sure, we want the new medicines. But are we really to believe that growing the pharmaceuticals business is synonymous with 'growing' the health of our children and elderly? Don't we, as keepers of the industry, even get to ask that question?"
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Merchants of Immortality by Stephen S. Hall looks at the medical tests in longevity research, most being based on stem-cell research and thus dragging in the abortion issue [author - Shannon Brownlee]:
...as a former student of biology, I knew that there is, in fact, an answer to part of his question -- why do people age and die? The answer is the "Hayflick limit," the biological law that says cells reproduce themselves only a certain number of times before falling into senescence.
Leonard Hayflick, the brilliant and irascible cell biologist for whom the law is named, discovered that the cells of creatures great and small begin to disintegrate after a set number of divisions, largely because they are no longer able to carry out such housekeeping tasks as exporting wastes and accurately copying the DNA inside their nuclei. Human cells, he found, will divide about 50 times in a Petri dish before running out of gas. This discovery suggested that body parts lose the capacity to repair themselves when the cells reach their allotted span.
Before Hayflick's seminal finding in the 1970s, biologists believed that cells could go on replenishing themselves indefinitely. The Hayflick limit sparked insights not only into the question of why we decline and die, but also into cancer, whose cells somehow escape the limit and continue reproducing ad infinitum. It has also helped spawn the branch of biotechnology devoted to life extension. Few if any serious scientists actually believe that human beings can live forever, but this hasn't stopped biotechnology companies with names like Elixer, Osiris and Geron (short for gerontology) from capitalizing on the possibility that tinkering with the genetic and metabolic machinery controlling cellular senescence will one day allow doctors to slow the inexorable march toward death.
Leading one's readers from the science of the Hayflick limit to the politics of stem cells takes some deft and thoughtful writing. Author Stephen Hall manages to traverse this bumpy and varied terrain with the help of his central character, Michael West, a former antiabortionist and creationist who converted to the church of molecular biology. West has an uncanny ability to see into the future of science. He believes it is his mission to find the means to extend life, and nothing, including ethics or legislation, is going to get in his way. After making a pilgrimage to visit Hayflick in the 1980s, West founded Geron Corporation, which was devoted to life-extension. By the time his own board had booted him from the company, he had already moved on to stem cells and begun raising private funds for academic researchers who were at the earliest stages of finding and understanding them.
West's story makes for compelling reading, but there would be little reason to care about him if not for his Zelig-like knack for being at the center of some of the most troubling controversies surrounding biotechnology and medicine. It was West's second company, Advanced Cell Technologies, that grabbed headlines two years ago with the announcement that it had created a cloned hybrid embryo made from a cow egg and human DNA. He made the nightly news again last year when ACT ballyhooed the creation of a cloned human embryo. West and his company promised they had no interest in creating cloned babies; they simply wanted to be able to harvest embryonic stem cells. The announcement naturally sparked a worldwide furor. Several groups on the fringes of reality responded by vowing to produce a cloned human child. The Vatican condemned the science, and Congress launched another round of hearings to consider banning both human cloning and embryonic stem cell research.
Some thoughts on isolationism versus cooperation with Europe and the UN, in review of Will Huttons Declaration of Interdependence [author - William Easterly]:
I'm not sure how much the United States can trust the United Nations after incidents such as the notorious vote that left the United States off the U.N. Commission for Human Rights in 2002 but included Algeria, Burundi, China, Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Hutton complains that the United States did not do enough to support the U.N. Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, but there is not much that can be done with a summit that had 185 separate action recommendations drafted by U.N. bureaucrats -- including more efficient use of cow dung. And Hutton complains America doesn't supply enough foreign aid to the poor nations, yet foreign aid -- weighed down by the same ponderous bureaucracies that plague the United Nations -- has not exactly covered itself with glory lately.
Even Europe's own European Union bureaucracy is notorious for petty squabbles and politicized appointments strictly apportioned by nationality. And European generosity toward the poor nations should be put in perspective: The French support ugly characters in their former colonies, and the average EU cow gets about as much in annual farm subsidies as the average African earns in a year. In the long-running "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus" debate, Europeans always complain about Americans' excessive individualism. Well, okay, but individualism saved the United States from Europe's disastrous detours into fascism and communism. That counts, too, as long as we are keeping score.
Hutton attributes the woeful American record on helping the poor to the cowboy refusal to do anything other than let individuals lift themselves by their own spurs. He calls the alleged higher upward mobility (today) of American society a myth. I don't know about his numbers for today, but America's historical success at absorbing wave after wave of penniless immigrants into the middle class is built on far more than fairy tales. And America is far more open even today to immigrants than major European nations such as France or Italy. America's lamentable underclass probably has more to do with race and the legacy of slavery than with individualism.
Having said all this, I should stress that Hutton is often right to appeal to the better angels of our American natures. Should we really arrogate to ourselves the right to invade whomever we feel like? Hutton is right that America can't seem to decide how to match its values with its enormous power -- should it topple all tyrants (an inexhaustible list) or prop up tyrants who are friendly to the United States or do both at the same time? Can't our diplomats do better than meddle in other peoples' quarrels in a way that leaves everyone enraged at us? Can't we find a way to spread prosperity to inner cities as well as to upscale suburbs? We could probably learn a few lessons from post-World War II European societies on some of these questions, as Hutton argues.
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Issues with pharmaceuticals, from a review of The Big Fix by Katharine Grieder [author - David Brown]:
...many new medicines are developed with the help of basic, and sometimes also clinical, research financed by American taxpayers. In HIV disease, this was true with both AZT, the first antiretroviral drug, and enfuvirtide (Fuzeon), one of the newest -- and with several in between.) The federal government doesn't influence the pricing of, or share in the profits from, drugs that arise from its role as chief bankroller of biomedical research. This leads to some ironic states of affairs, Greider says. "The tamoxifen [a drug used in treatment of breast cancer] that costs Canadians about $34 per treatment sets back an American cash-paying patient more than $240 -- and was the product of 140 clinical trials sponsored by our government."
Although many of the more objectionable practices have been stopped in the last decade, the marketing of drugs has been unusually aggressive by any standards. The industry has exploited the naivet of physicians by providing consulting fees, educational grants and other blandishments that are little short of bribes. Some companies have created office-based clinical trials whose purpose was to get patients on new drugs, not to generate scientifically valid data. Increasingly, drug makers are going directly to the consumer, giving medicines (and to some extent even medical conditions) the branded cachet normally associated with tennis shoes.
What keeps this enormous machine working? Profits that equaled 18.5 percent of revenues in 2001, and more lobbyists than there are members of Congress, Greider says. Unfortunately, she doesn't offer a lot of suggestions on how to change things. (A shorter period of patent protection for drugs and a government-financed agency that does cost-effectiveness analyses are among the ideas mentioned.) But the truth is that it is easier to pose questions than come up with answers. "As consumers, as workers, as taxpayers, Americans have subsidized the growth of the global pharmaceutical industry, with virtually no strings attached," she writes. "Sure, we want the new medicines. But are we really to believe that growing the pharmaceuticals business is synonymous with 'growing' the health of our children and elderly? Don't we, as keepers of the industry, even get to ask that question?"
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Merchants of Immortality by Stephen S. Hall looks at the medical tests in longevity research, most being based on stem-cell research and thus dragging in the abortion issue [author - Shannon Brownlee]:
...as a former student of biology, I knew that there is, in fact, an answer to part of his question -- why do people age and die? The answer is the "Hayflick limit," the biological law that says cells reproduce themselves only a certain number of times before falling into senescence.
Leonard Hayflick, the brilliant and irascible cell biologist for whom the law is named, discovered that the cells of creatures great and small begin to disintegrate after a set number of divisions, largely because they are no longer able to carry out such housekeeping tasks as exporting wastes and accurately copying the DNA inside their nuclei. Human cells, he found, will divide about 50 times in a Petri dish before running out of gas. This discovery suggested that body parts lose the capacity to repair themselves when the cells reach their allotted span.
Before Hayflick's seminal finding in the 1970s, biologists believed that cells could go on replenishing themselves indefinitely. The Hayflick limit sparked insights not only into the question of why we decline and die, but also into cancer, whose cells somehow escape the limit and continue reproducing ad infinitum. It has also helped spawn the branch of biotechnology devoted to life extension. Few if any serious scientists actually believe that human beings can live forever, but this hasn't stopped biotechnology companies with names like Elixer, Osiris and Geron (short for gerontology) from capitalizing on the possibility that tinkering with the genetic and metabolic machinery controlling cellular senescence will one day allow doctors to slow the inexorable march toward death.
Leading one's readers from the science of the Hayflick limit to the politics of stem cells takes some deft and thoughtful writing. Author Stephen Hall manages to traverse this bumpy and varied terrain with the help of his central character, Michael West, a former antiabortionist and creationist who converted to the church of molecular biology. West has an uncanny ability to see into the future of science. He believes it is his mission to find the means to extend life, and nothing, including ethics or legislation, is going to get in his way. After making a pilgrimage to visit Hayflick in the 1980s, West founded Geron Corporation, which was devoted to life-extension. By the time his own board had booted him from the company, he had already moved on to stem cells and begun raising private funds for academic researchers who were at the earliest stages of finding and understanding them.
West's story makes for compelling reading, but there would be little reason to care about him if not for his Zelig-like knack for being at the center of some of the most troubling controversies surrounding biotechnology and medicine. It was West's second company, Advanced Cell Technologies, that grabbed headlines two years ago with the announcement that it had created a cloned hybrid embryo made from a cow egg and human DNA. He made the nightly news again last year when ACT ballyhooed the creation of a cloned human embryo. West and his company promised they had no interest in creating cloned babies; they simply wanted to be able to harvest embryonic stem cells. The announcement naturally sparked a worldwide furor. Several groups on the fringes of reality responded by vowing to produce a cloned human child. The Vatican condemned the science, and Congress launched another round of hearings to consider banning both human cloning and embryonic stem cell research.
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I'm gonna have to pick up that zine, if I can dig it up somewhere (no pun intended.) I have been in some of the tunnels beneath the U of M, which were kinda interesting compared to the Madison ones. No sewage in either, by the way!