If I Were King

The Department of Agriculture has announced its approval for unrestricted commercial cultivation of genetically modified alfalfa, according to “U.S. Approves Genetically Modified Alfalfa” by  Andrew Pollack in The New York Times. Unlike some, I’m not convinced that GM crops are a bad thing. There had been a proposal to restrict the areas in which this crop could be grown to protect traditional strains from contamination from wind-carried pollen. Again, I’m not overwhelmed by the problem. Organic farmers don’t use Roundup (glyphosphate) on their crops and thus don’t need Monsanto’s Roundup-Ready seed, nor would they benefit from it.

What I am convinced of is that there exists a huge problem in Monsanto’s approach to their Roundup-Ready GM seed, specifically the way they have defended their intellectual property. Anyone who uses any of their GM seeds is bound by contract to not save any of the crop to use as seed for the following year. While this seems fundamentally unsound, farmers have traditionally processed a portion of each year’s crop to plant the following year. In every farming community, at least one supplier has operated a seed cleaning operation to process those seeds, presumably treating them with any necessary fungicide and ensuring they were properly dried. It’s a fundamental part of historical farming, the essence of sustainability.

Monsanto is entitled to make a complete replacement of their seed a condition of their sales contracts, and farmers are entitled to sign those contracts. However, Monsanto goes well beyond this. When their crops are grown, pollen blows off those fields into the fields of farmers that have not chosen to grow GM crops, and the resulting seed inevitably contains some that contains the glyphosphate-tolerant gene. Monsanto sends agents out, takes samples, and sues farmers who attempt to plant the seeds they have grown themselves if the gene is found. They have forced hundreds of suppliers to discontinue seed cleaning operations.

Some provision should have been made so that organic-certified farmers would be protected from the encroachment, as selling their crops as “organic” becomes impossible once genes from the GM crop has contaminated it. This is regrettable, one hopes that the farmers themselves will decide to not plant the expensive Monsanto product in enough areas that untainted seed continues to be available. Monsanto should be responsible for the additional expenses needed by farmers who choose to continue with the traditional product.

The very idea of patenting a gene still causes me some difficulty, but it’s currently the law and I don’t resist it. However, the law is running exactly the wrong direction on enforcing this. If I Were King, farmers who innocently ended up with the Monsanto gene in their seed would absolutely have the right to plant it the following spring. I would be tempted to consider Monsanto’s suits against such farmers to be frivolous and malicious and order that the farmers be granted at least three times their legal expenses and lost time spent in defending themselves.

The Department of Energy has announced that the Tevatron at Fermilab late this year. The idea is that the Large Hadron Collider is coming on line and promises more power and greater range of research opportunities. This is, intellectually, on the same plane as eschewing adult supervision of deep-water oil drilling.

Yes, the LHC will run at seven times the power of the Tevatron. Some day. Possibly in 2012, but maybe not. 2012 is the year they’re going to shut the LHC down to address the problems that have kept it from reaching its full potential. This does not necessarily mean that 2012 is the year they’ll turn it back on.

In addition, although there are certainly research projects that really need the higher levels of power, some 1,200 physicists are currently doing experiments on the Tevatron. The LHC is only one collider. Being much larger, it’s very likely that it will actually take longer to switch over from one experiment to another, which means if we only have one collider, while we can do higher-energy research on the LHC we may be stuck with less total research. And of the many projects that don’t require that level of power, it would make far more sense to run the Tevatron flat out while the LHC is running at a higher power level, rather than using the LHC at fractional power levels.

Do I need to mention that with the Tevatron retired and the LHC down for repairs, there will be a period next year in which none of the physicists will be able to do their research? Good.

What about the fact that the LHC consumes so much electrical power that it will not be able to operate year-round? There’s only so much snow in the Alps.

I don’t know what it cost to build the Tevatron, but I doubt that reaching .98 terevolts came cheap. As long as we’ve made the investment, continuing to operate the accelerator as long as maintenance costs are reasonable is the right course. If we have research to do, shutting down what has been the most productive lab in that subject area for the last two decades is simply wrong.

If I Were King, there would be no question of trying to balance the nations huge budget with the nickels and dimes in Fermilab’s piggy bank.

A story in The New York Times, F.D.A and Dairy Industry Spar Over Testing of Milk by William Neuman, discusses a bit of a controversy going on between the FDA and the dairy industry over testing.

Disclosure: My dad grew up at Carnation, Washington, a company town for one of the major dairy companies, so I tend to be on the side of the dairy farmers. I have no use for milk, but there aren’t many cheeses I don’t enjoy, I do like cream in soups, and along with Julia Child, butter is my favorite ingredient. On the flip side, I detest agriculture subsidies, which the dairy industry gets a lot of. I’m also solidly opposed to the prescription drug system in which doctors and pharmacists have the monopoly on deciding what drugs can be taken, but note that if there is one class of drugs where I see a public interest in controlling drug use, that one class would be antibiotics. And I’m always in favor of more information.

So here’s the kerfuffle: The FDA currently tests loads of milk for four to six common antibiotics. If the tests shows that the drugs have entered the milk, the entire load has to be destroyed. The FDA, based on results of testing on dairy cattle sent to slaughter, wants to test for two dozen other antibiotics, as well as flunixin, a common pain killer and anti-inflammatory used in the industry. However, the tests aren’t instant like the current simpler ones are, they can take a week.

The industry is frightened by the prospect of holding that milk until the test results are known (they obviously can’t actually do this, no dairy has the facilities to segregate and safely store that much milk), or that after processing the test results will lead to recalls of the product. At least one cooperative dairy has announced that it will not accept milk that has been sampled for the additional tests, and it’s likely that other processors will take the same stance.

Are these people as smart as the cows? They would clearly prefer to process milk with no idea what the level of drug contamination is than to consider the possibility that there might be a problem to address. I doubt that the FDA is guiltless here, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the rules require destroying the product if those traces are present. Zero-tolerance rules are much beloved by the mindless, a group that is often involved in government.

The question of antibiotics entering the food stream is important, and it would be a most excellent thing to understand the situation, monitor any trends, set standards, develop best practices in the industry, and finally establish go/no-go rules. But none of those things can be done without the result of the tests.

If I Were King I would have no power to increase the intelligence of stubborn farmers and bureaucrats. I could, however, insist that the tests be performed and the information recorded, charted, and analyzed. I could, and obviously would have to, declare that the results of these additional tests would not result in the destruction of any milk until everybody, on both sides of this issue, knew what the hell they were doing.

It’s not always easy to be a devout Christian in an increasingly-secular world, but the worst of it doesn’t come from agnostics, or even the believers who just don’t feel moved to participate regularly in worship. I say grace before eating at McDonald’s and openly cross myself afterward, without attracting hostility. The hard part of it is that those who see me as Christian can’t help trying to reconcile that image with the image of some of the Lord’s spectacular fools. Yesterday, the day after a devastating earthquake in Haiti, the most spectacular fool was one Pat Robertson, who has a show called The 700 Club that appears on CNN.

On his broadcast yesterday, Robertson delivered this absurdity:

And you know Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True story, and so the Devil said OK it’s a deal. And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they’ve been cursed by one thing after the other.”

His broadcasting operation, CBN, doesn’t seem to be bothered by this. They admit it in this release, and they have the video online. (My system wouldn’t play it, but that’s okay, it’s all over the place, including right here.

Now it happens that a voodoo priest named Dutty Boukman performed a ceremony in August of 1791 which precipitated the start of the revolution, which lasted until 1804. I’ve not seen any accounts that include the number of people involved, but as it wasn’t broadcast we can assume that there were a half million Haitian slaves that had nothing to do with this, other than sharing the desire to end their slavery. I’ve not seen any account that suggests that Satan attended, nor that he clearly committed himself to a deal. We do know that Napoleon III was captured in battle, and the monarchy he led was dissolved on 4 September 1870. He was the last Napoleon to have anything to do with the government of France, and he died on 9 January 1873. Robertson’s pact with the devil didn’t take place until over twenty years after the last Napoleon left power.

I suppose it’s a waste of time to point out that earthquakes are the result of tectonic motion in the rigid structure immediately below the surface of this liquid-centered globe we live on. That’s not covered in the only book Robertson really accepts, my telling him the details of how the planet God created works would be lost on him.

It’s hard to admit to being a Christian when there are “Christian” embarrassments of this magnitude spewing their nonsense on national television. I want to make one thing clear: Pat Robertson doesn’t speak for me. I seriously doubt that he speaks for Jesus Christ. If he does, he has managed to find a Jesus that isn’t present in the Gospel I’ve read. Never mind that he has the historical scholarship of a third grader and the intellectual capacity of cauliflower.

In A Pound of Cure, published in the July/August MIT Technology Review, Andy Kessler challenges the possibility of addressing the cost of health care without addressing the motivations of the health-care industry. He references the recent Dartmouth College study that suggests, based on analysis of 4,000 hospitals, that eliminating 30% of the resources committed to Medicare patients contributed nothing at all to the outcomes of the patients. He doubts that the $19 billion for health-care IT projects included in the $787 billion Obama stimulus package can accomplish anything.

Elsewhere I have stated my opinion that fully 50% of all health care spending could be eliminated with a combination of electronic records and diagnostic software. Electronic records would make it easy to use data-mining software to evaluate the success of different treatment regimes for various ailments. (If a patient knew there was an 80% probability of success with a $1,000 treatment and an 80% probability of success with a $1,000,000 treatment, which one would they choose?) Diagnostic software would help focus diagnosis, eliminating billions in wasted tests.

But as Kessler points out, the health-care industry makes more money when it consumes more resources. The bias of practitioners with an economic stake will always be to spend more. There are few, if any, practitioners with no economic stake.

This is, and will remain, a stubborn problem. If I Were King it would be no different. Better health insurance will not help, that just means that each patient has more resources available. The only thing that has a chance is a combination of patient understanding of the costs and benefits of different options, and an economic stake in choosing among them.

Should we spend a million bucks to keep Mom on life support for another six months? What if that means that nobody in the family will see a dentist for the next ten years? Clearly there are times when heroic (read: expensive) efforts are worthwhile, and times when they provide no more benefit than burning the same amount of currency.

We need better understanding of the costs and benefits, which open electronic records will enable, and then we need to empower patients and families, consulting with health-care professionals, to make judgments about the resources to be used. The industry’s motivation will always be towards growth in spending, I see no reason why we can’t cut that spending in half in the next ten years.

Shortly after Wall Street hammered Apple’s stock over health concerns regarding Steve Jobs, the company announced outstanding results for the quarter just ended. Both revenue and net profits were up nicely, at a time when any company turning in improved results is a shock. As always, the stories are mentioning that Apple’s gross profit margin was 34.7 percent, the same as in the prior-year quarter.

This is curious. In fact, this is nonsense. The issue is that the press is constantly comparing Apple to Dell or HP in this regard, but the comparison is silly. What they are overlooking is that Apple’s margin includes both the margin on the hardware, which is probably better than Dell’s but probably not all that much better, and its margin on the operating system, which is probably not as high as Microsoft’s margin on Windows. When Microsoft reports their margin, it’s closer to 85% on Windows. I have no idea what Dell pays Microsoft for an OEM copy of Windows Vista, but though it isn’t anything like the retail price, it isn’t trivial.

On server products, the advantage probably goes to Dell/MS or HP/MS. When a Windows server is sold, the base operating system is in the total to the tune of $500 and up, for five users, on which MS earns their 85%. But there isn’t much reason to buy a real server for five users, so the client buys sets of CALs – Client Access Licenses. Five additional CALs cost about $150, on which the MS margin has to be on the order of 99%.

In other words, the constantly repeated theme that Apple is making dramatically higher margins than their competitors is the result of poor logic and arithmetic skills on the part of the media. As has been said before on these pages, If I Were King, education would be focused on addressing this, and nobody with a high school diploma would be likely to make such an error. We assume that the media would continue to hire only those who have at least that level of education.

A pair of recent articles regarding the performance of the Food and Drug Administration recently came to our attention. The first was a New York Times editorial titled Not What We Call Due Diligence, berating the agency for the way conflicts of interest were identified and dealt with in the approval of medical devices. The second, also from the New York Times, was an article out of Washington City titled Report Criticizes F.D.A. on Device Testing, relating to devices getting approved too easily in testing.

In the first piece, the Times rightly excoriates the FDA for not adequately collecting and auditing information about the financial relationships between the manufacturers and the physicians that contract to do their testing, based on a report from the DSHS inspector general. One bizarre item was that the inspector general suggested that the FDA gather this information before trials began, which the agency opposed. The Times properly considers this to be backwards, far better to disqualify a contractor based on conflicts before the trial rather than attempt to evaluate a report afterwards when a conflict is revealed — which is probably impossible.

The second article covers a Government Accountability Office report dealing with testing of medical equipment. Apparently, a manufacturer of a pace maker, for example, having been through rigorous testing for one model can bring in the next one and get expedited clearance with very little testing based on the similarity. The story quotes Dr Peter B. Bach of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center as saying: “So on the one hand, the manufacturer wheels in their new Ferrari to the FDA and says, ‘Look, it’s a car just like the Model T,’ Then they go out in the marketplace and say to doctors, ‘Why would you drive anything but a Ferrari?’ This drives up the cost of care without any necessary actual improvement in outcomes.”

While both articles raise valid questions about how the FDA does it’s job, both miss the point that the FDA is doing a job that shouldn’t be done by government at all. It makes a certain amount of sense for a government agency to run a new drug or device through a series of trials to make sure it is not generally dangerous, but to put a government stamp of approval on a product, endorsing its efficacy in a certain arena, does not. That information can only rarely be derived from limited tests. The most famous case has to be thalidomide, a powerful drug with good results in treating a range of conditions. Unfortunately, it can cause severe birth defects when taken by pregnant women. When widespread use demonstrated that the drug in its original form could not safely be used during pregnancy, a great hue and cry arose and the drug was pulled off the market around the world in 1961.

In 1964 an Israeli physician found that thalidomide was helpful in treating certain complications of leprosy, so the lightning-fast FDA approved its use in that area a third of a century later (1998). In 2006 the FDA approved the drug for use in treatment of multiple myeloma, and the drug is successfully being used in treatments for AIDS, various cancers, certain skin diseases, and macular degeneration. But for thirty years, the benefits of this powerful drug were unavailable to patients.

What we can learn from this is that clinical trials are not a reliable way to identify problems in specific cases, but that intelligent analysis of results in the general population are. We need to have the FDA take a quick look to make sure that a new drug or product isn’t widely dangerous, then get the hell out of the way. We further need to dramatically accelerate the adoption of computerized medical records so that investigators (and by this we mean scientists, not bureaucrats) can more quickly learn the conditions under which a drug should not be used and the relative benefits of different treatments for different situations. The current system tends to suggest that whichever product the FDA most recently approved for a specific condition must be the most efficacious, despite the fact that even the FDA makes no such claims.

If the FDA has a role, the best use of their energies will be to ensure a transparent marketplace in information, so intelligent patients and dedicated health-care professionals will know what analyses were written by doctors who were beholden to the drug companies, and thus make informed decisions. Federal gatekeepers are not the solution, they’re a large part of the problem. If I Were King, the FDA would be much smaller, and dedicated to a beneficial mission that it could perform instead of a dubious mission that it cannot.

The Seattle Times ran a story yesterday quoting an article in the current issue of Science magazine (it costs money to read the article there) to the effect that global warming will dramatically reduce the agricultural production around the world by the end of this century. “With average growing-season temperatures expected to rise more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit, crop yields will fall 20 to 40 percent, the report estimates.” That’s a very dangerous bit of news.

What’s dangerous about it is that much of the climate-science community, certainly the political parts of it, is convinced that global warming is anthropogenic. Unfortunately, the political part so overwhelms the scientific part that we’re not likely to ever know for sure. The evidence to date is certainly far short of logical certainty, and a lot of time and effort is being spent trying to prove that the temperature swings of the past never happened. The very real possibility is that the warming is caused by the same things that caused the Medieval Climate Optimum or the warm weather that allowed the Roman Empire to thrive, in which case cutting back on our “greenhouse gas” emissions is going to do diddly squat.

If that’s the case, what we really need to do is develop strains of crops that will provide better yield at warmer temperatures. For example, scientists at the University of Washington are working on a project called “Nutritious Rice for the World”. This is a distributed-computing effort to analyze DNA sequences in rice that could lead to rice strains that will better serve a warmer planet. (I have four CPUs here running the program in the background, and tens of thousands of others are contributing CPU power to the cause as well.) That is something that could actually help.

Those who pretend that the cause of the current warming trends are known, and who sneer at those of us who are skeptical, aren’t helping. Pretending that they have a case not only endangers our future directly, it is bringing about an age when obvious logical fallacies go unrecognized and constantly repeated. I’m one who feels that having a populace that can think logically is a boon, even if it would be a real hardship to demagogues like Al Gore.

If I Were King, I would not only have a bully pulpit for pointing out widespread logical errors, but I would support efforts to prepare for changes in the climate. Given the climatic variations over the last few million years, and the fact that we are running close to the high end of the range, I’d support efforts to prepare for a bit more warming as well as the dramatic cooling that is, based on history, rather more likely.

Dr Jacques Stassart runs a fertility clinic at Woodbury, Minnesota. According to Pregnancy from frozen egg is first in state in Saturday’s Star Tribune, one of his patients is now pregnant as a result of the in vitro fertilization of a previously frozen egg. I’m not sure this is a really hot idea. The unnamed patient is now 48, so by the time the kid starts learning to drive, Mom will be 65! The generation gap is bad enough when the parents are 25 years older than the kids, here we’re dealing with a generation gulf, possibly a generation abyss. Assuming she carries to term and delivers, I don’t envy her the parenting experience.

Fertilizing frozen eggs is a recent development, and apparently controversial. You can’t just take mammalian ova and shove them in with the ice cream, crystals form in the cell fluid and destroy the cell walls. By replacing some of the water with sugar or glycerol solutions and freezing either very slowly or very rapidly, lab technicians have been able to avoid that problem, and now have a 20-25% success rate – about half the rate for fertilizing fresh eggs.

In this case, the couple secured donated eggs, but when the eggs were ready it was discovered that the husband’s sperm had been mistakenly destroyed so the clinic froze the eggs until the husband was back in town and could, you know, come up with some more. Seems like a pretty sensible response to the problem.

Apparently not. The story laments that IVF clinics “operate largely without federal oversight”, although all of the procedures they use are governed by standard medical regulations and the doctors can always be sued for malpractice if it occurs. On top of that, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommends that the procedure be used only for cancer patients and research. (Many cancer treatments lead to sterility, or at least reduced fertility, so a young woman diagnosed with cancer could have several ova removed and frozen immediately to protect her future ability to give birth.) Dr Marc Fritz of the ASRM is quoted: “What it boils down to is a clinical investigation of an experimental procedure in patients at their expense. That is what the society feels is not appropriate.”

First, I’m not convinced that federal government oversight has helped the rest of the medical system, and it’s obvious to me that it has made it more expensive, so the lack of federal involvement doesn’t concern me in the slightest. Second, Dr Fritz is on the fritz logically here, there is no “experimental procedure in patients” going on at all. The only experimental aspect is freezing and thawing the eggs, and that happens in the lab, not in the patient. If the eggs are thawed and fertilized successfully, the procedure to transfer the resultant embryo or embryos to the mother’s uterus is exactly the same as in regular IVF.

I may not think that having a kid when you’re nearly fifty is a good idea, but I don’t have to. If there are couples out there that want it, with the scratch to pay for it all, it’s none of my flipping business. It’s fascinating, and I’m glad I can learn the technical details online, but who has it done and why is up to the prospective parents and the doctors they choose. I hope Dr Stassart makes a lot of families happy, and I hope he makes a ton of money doing it. If I Were King, the national government would leave them alone, and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine would be, uh, encouraged to get to work on solving problems, not meddling in the business of my subjects.

That’s how the press normally plays it, but to my surprise the New York Times ran a story this week headlined Efforts to Harvest Ocean’s Energy Open New Debate Front that suggests all may not be well on the green-energy front. It seems that fishermen aren’t wild about running into huge buoys that draw energy from the tides and waves.

Until now, all the press coverage of extracting energy from the tides has seemed to be instant approval. There are no greenhouse gases, no radioactive waste, no smoke in the air; the perfect answer to our energy needs. They almost say, “We love this coastline, where incredible power thrusts waves and tides against the rocks day in and day out. We love the sound of it, the shapes it has carved, the fact that the resurgence of that water keeps everything pristine. But if you want to come along with huge commercial ventures to extract some of that energy that made the coast the way it is today, and diffuse some part of the rest, well, why not? If you’re going to label it green or ecological, of course we’re in favor of it!”

Or rather, they just say they’re in favor of it, with no thought to the concept that the energy in the sea is part of what makes the coast what it is. I’m not sure that they’re wrong, but it sounds about as intelligent as the Russian engineers who built the Aswan Dam without any understanding of how important all that silt in the river was to the communities down stream, or just how rapidly their reservoir would shrink when they stopped the silt from washing to the Med.

The real killer in the debate is almost certain to be the impact on views. Here on Whidbey, the mussel rafts in Penn Cove have led to anger from homeowners who paid tens of thousands of dollars for their unspoiled views. On the Pacific coast of Oregon and Washington, most of the waterfront is public property so we won’t see quite the same fight, you can still expect a stink.

So far, I haven’t seen word one about what the impact of this sort of thing is actually going to be, particularly when scaled up to a meaningful level. And if they don’t scale it up to a meaningful level, what’s the point?

If I were king, I’d just tell them to figure it out in Finland or Korea first, mess with our Pacific coast only after we actually know what we’re doing.