Saturday, 27 December 2008 by bbbeard.

Well, Aurora Guy seems to think the appointment of John Holdren as Science Advisor is a step in the right direction. I have to say I have my doubts. Several articles have popped up in the last week discussing Holdren’s relation to Paul Ehrlich (of Population Bomb infamy). Now, I wouldn’t want to be held responsible for statements I made thirty-five years ago. But the articles raise some issues that I hope Dr. Holdren will clarify during his confirmation hearings, including recent statements he has made praising Ehrlich’s views.

John Tierney has been pointed in his criticism (”Flawed Science Advice for Obama?“, “Science Adviser’s Unsustainable Bet (and Mine)“). He details the story of the famous Simon-Ehrlich futures wager. In the picture he paints, Holdren is an opinionated ass:

Now, you could argue that anyone’s entitled to a mistake, and that mistakes can be valuable if people learn to become open to ideas that conflict with their preconceptions and ideology. That could be a useful skill in an advisor who’s supposed to be presenting the president with a wide range of views. Someone who’d seen how wrong environmentalists had been in ridiculing Dr. Simon’s predictions could, in theory, become more open to dissent from today’s environmentalist orthodoxy. But I haven’t seen much evidence of such open-mindedness in Dr. Holdren.

Tierney also discusses the shabby jihad against Bjørn Lomborg undertaken — with Holdren’s contribution — in the pages of Scientific American, once a fine publication.

From the pages of the Atlantic, Ross Douthat takes Holdren to task for recent praise of The Population Bomb.

It is, I suppose, possible to find a “key insight” about population growth in Ehrlich’s book that’s anodyne enough to qualify as “elementary” and irrefutable. But there’s a pretty good reason that the book is remembered primarily for its mix of hysteria and moral idiocy: When you kick off your argument by predicting that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” and then proceed to argue for mass sterilization programs, the quarantine and abandonment of countries too overpopulated to save from total collapse, and various other “triage” methods (honestly, The Population Bomb has to be read to be believed), you pretty much forfeit the right to be praised for your prescience forty years down the line.

Maybe Tierney and Douthat qualify as right-wing zealots in someone’s book. But I have a sinking feeling that science has not been liberated from politics by the coming of the Messiah. But scientists with a different political bias may be happy for awhile… fair’s fair.

Now, from my perspective, I associate The Pop Bomb with the Club of Rome and the fiasco of Limits to Growth. Of course, the Club of Rome has ignored its record of failures and moved on to climate change. Is anyone surprised? After all, if you have a perfectly good (pfft) planetary system dynamic model, already shown to exhibit divergent behavior on command, why not apply it to climate?

But seriously, I think that there is much to learn from the efforts to make the World3 model reflect reality. Lesson #1 is that it is relatively easy to generate divergent behavior when stabilizing feedback loops are left out of the model. It is reported, for example, that World3 has no implementation of economic substitution for resources as they become scarcer. Anyone familiar with standard microeconomic theory should understand this is a major defect — and also understand why there is no generalized model for substitution even today. Substitution is really hard to predict. If chestnut blight makes wood more expensive, people use… what, instead? Plastic for ladles, metal for building frames, electrons for newsprint — raising the price of all these goods, pushing consumption (and innovation) in a thousand different directions. None of this is in World3.

Likewise: anyone care to link to a list of flaws in general circulation models?

What do World3 and GCMs have in common? Beautifully complex models, nicely filigreed predictions, none have been validated. I wouldn’t design a car with such a model, much less make macroeconomic decisions with them.

So where does Malthus stand these days? Have I repudiated “Malthus was Right”? No, not so much. The Reverend was a man of great insight. To be continued in a future blog post….

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Friday, 19 December 2008 by aurora_guy.

It’s only natural this time of year to kind of recap recent events in one way or another.  I’d like to know what you think are the most important developments related to science and/or medicine in 2008, and why.

My picks:

#1. The election.  I already get a sense of shifts in policy tones, which will impact alternative energy development and space exploration.  Obama’s energy secretary nominee, Steven Chu, is a physicist for all occasions, demonstrated by his industrial experience (former head of the quantum electronics group at Bell Labs for many years and director at NVIDIA since 2004) as well as running Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since August 2004. I recently discovered Dr. Chu serves as director of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which focuses on educational, social, and environmental issues.  The question remains, of course, about whether or not his leadership can get a seriously dysfunctional agency back on track.  There’s a lot of inertia to overcome.

John Holdren, another physicist, is rumored to be top pick for science advisor.  This clearly strengthens the upcoming administration’s ostensible commitment to alternative energy and reducing human impact on the environment.  Dr. Holdren, a specialist in energy and technology policy and nuclear proliferation, also runs the Woods Hole Research Center, which has a lot to say about climate change.

NASA seems to be sweating the transition, but I have little doubt it’s for good reason.  The back-to-the-moon-and-onto-Mars projects are about to run into major funding problems.  Manned space exploration is all fine and dandy, but it is a hugely expensive endeavor.  In today’s economy, an era when other important (unmanned) space-related projects lack talent and/or money, manned space seems a luxury, a sensible space science policy would cut back on the latter.  We shall see how much.  I predict continued political pressure to fund big manned-space programs in the US, since China made quite a spectacle over their first space walk a few months back.

#2. I have to confess I am torn here.  I get all tingly over exo-planets, Mars polar scrapings, and dark energy.  However, after much teeth-gnashing, I decided to give my vote to Jon Miller, a professor from Michigan State University, who has been tracking scientific literacy for two decades.  Although his work covers quite a long time, he did get a fair amount of press in 2008.  His latest survey placed the US second of 33 countries in rankings of adult scientific literacy. Sweden is first with a rate of 38%, and the US is right around 25%.  By Dr. Miller’s definition, a person considered “scientifically literate” can read and comprehend, at least on a basic level, most of the articles written at a level of, say, the NY Times weekly science section.

The research shows that the strongest single predictor of scientific literacy in the US is having participated in a college science course.  This argues in favor of retaining or strengthening general education requirements that include science courses for non-science majors.

The news is actually a bit depressing to me, since it does mean the vast majority of people in this country are scientifically illiterate.  More and more important policy decisions seem to depend on a basic knowledge of scientific principles, whether it’s climate change or the teaching of creationism in the schools.  Such a disparity in the general population means it’s easy for politicians to handily dismiss scientific arguments inconsistent with their economic or religious interests, and the majority of Americans would have no rational basis to disagree or to demand change.

#3.  I thought there was a lot of interesting medical-related news in 2008, not the least of which were promising results from malaria vaccine trials in Africa.  Malaria is a huge and deadly problem across vast regions of the globe.  Nearly a million people per year die of the disease.

These are just trials on the vaccine, so I’ll have to split my vote here and also go with the body of research related to developing sources of stem cells and therapies derived from them.  While embryonic stem cell research remains somewhat controversial, non-embryonic stem cells were in the news a lot in 2008.  Just a couple of months ago, researchers at University of Tübingen in Germany reported in Nature they harvested samples from testicles to form stem cells.  The team took spermatogonial cells, which normally mature into sperm, and used a series of chemicals to turn them into various cell types like skin, bone, muscle, and neurons.

Scientific American recently featured the work of Shinya Yamanaka .  Dr. Yamanaka “led one of two teams that showed that normal human skin cells can be genetically reprogrammed into the equivalent of stem cells. These so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) seem to be essentially identical to embryonic stem cells and possess the ability to become any cell.”

Multiple methods of creating stem cells — as well as understanding their similarities and differences — go a long way towards developing treatment of serious injuries and illnesses.  Although a bone marrow transplant is a well known stem cell therapy for some cancers and blood disorders, in theory, any condition in which there is tissue degeneration can be a potential candidate for such therapies. Potential applications include treatment of Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury, stroke, burns, heart disease, Type 1 diabetes, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, muscular dystrophies, and liver diseases.  In addition, retinal regeneration with stem cells isolated from the eyes can lead to a possible cure for damaged or diseased eyes and may one day help reverse blindness. This is exciting stuff!

Your turn.

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