Posts Tagged ‘pollution’
“The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress”*…
The obligations of a multi-day meeting (and the travel involved) mean that, from this issue, (R)D will be on pause until February 12 or 13 (depending on how connections play out…)
… and indeed the evolutionary progress of others species. But, Deputy Co-chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Melanie Challenger asks, have we been sufficiently thoughful about the implications of this power?…
In 2016, Klaus Schwab announced that we had entered the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This is the era of the industrialization of biology, the leveraging of technologies to modify biological materials to meet human goals. While the first two Industrial Revolutions exploited energy and materials and the Third exploited digital information, the current revolution is a direct manipulation of life-forms and life’s substances.
The signature invention of this new era is CRISPR, dubbed “genetic scissors.” CRISPR is a ground-breaking method of making precise changes to DNA for a wide range of possible uses from disease reduction and elimination to the eradication of “pest” species and increases in the productivity of farmed animals. CRISPRs (the best-known system being CRISPR-Cas9) originate in RNA-based bacterial defense systems. Naturally occurring in species of bacteria, the Cas9 enzyme cuts the genomes of bacteriophages (viruses that will attack a bacterium), saving a record for defense against future infections. Scientists realized that this immunological strategy could be coopted to innovate a general tool for cutting DNA.
The optimism among those that seek to utilize these tools has been palpable for some time. As noted by the researchers at The Roslin Institute, creators of Dolly the Sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal: “Until recently, we have only been able to dream of…the ability to induce precise insertions or deletions easily and efficiently in the germline of livestock. With the advent of genome editors this is now possible.”
But the technologies of this new industrial era present ethical dilemmas and unknown consequences. What will it take to ensure that this revolution avoids worsening the enormous challenges we already face, especially from biodiversity loss and climate change? How can we get the balance right between the benefits and risks of human inventiveness?
In the 1980s, tech theorist David Collingridge presented his eponymous dilemma for those seeking to control potentially disruptive technologies. First, there is an “information problem” in which significant impacts are often invisible until the technology is already in use. Second, there is a “power problem” in which the technology becomes difficult to shape, regulate or scale back once it has become integrated in our lives. If we are going to navigate the Fourth Industrial Revolution successfully, we need to examine our use of CRISPR through the Collingridge dilemma.
The investors and engineers of the first industrial revolutions in the nineteenth century provide a vivid example of the information problem. They hoped that innovations like the combustion engine would unlock efficiency across multiple human sectors, from transportation to logistics to tourism. Such optimism was not unwarranted. Yet, as Collingridge’s dilemma suggests, it is easier to picture gains than to predict trouble. Building road systems and infrastructure carved capital movements into the landscape, symbolising freedom and the flow of wealth and creativity. Yet the striking visual parallels with our circulatory system did not stimulate anyone to forecast the ninety per cent of people today who are exposed to unsafe pollution levels from traffic or the associated health burdens from heart and lung disease to asthma. Nobody then foresaw the yearly deaths of two billion or so non-human vertebrates on our roads today, or that high traffic areas would cause localised declines in insect abundance of at least a quarter and, in some studies, as much as eighty per cent.
And, of course, most calamitous of all, there is climate change. Traffic emissions account for a fifth of all contributions to global warming. Yet the idea that a profitable and efficient machine like the combustion engine might precede devastating shifts in temperature and weather patterns was scarcely conceivable at the time. Now, it is a near ubiquitous feature of our understanding of the world.
When it comes to the engineering of biology, a similar information problem abounds. Not only is our understanding of biological life incomplete, but we know little about what the industrial processes that we are advancing inside the cells of organisms will do. The changes are both physically and ethically occluded. The ramifications of this and other related biotechnologies are not only rendered uncertain by the inherently complex nature of biological systems but are largely inaccessible to our imaginations.
We must struggle with the radical character of the industrialization of biology. Gene drives (a tool to increase the likelihood of passing on a gene) can weaponize the bodies and reproductive strategies of organisms to bias evolution in a directed way. Artificial chimeric organisms (those composed of cells from more than one species) mix and match biological traits and functions to bring about beings that wouldn’t occur otherwise, transforming autonomous organisms into useful parts for plug and play. But while evolutionary processes will sift those forms and strategies that most benefit future organisms, our acts of creation primarily benefit us alone. Survival of the fittest gives way to the contrivance of the functional.
Yet, despite the disruptive nature of these technologies, CRISPR is already entrenched in our research and economic landscape: here is the power problem of our new technology. The efficiency of modern versions of CRISPR has allowed the technology to pick up users fast. It is now a commonplace tool in labs around the world – with uses amplified during the pandemic – and continues to be utilized in ethically provocative trials, including the cloning of mammal species. CRISPR has been normalised by stealth.
This largely uncontested rollout has been enabled by biases in the evaluation of who is at risk. Put bluntly, humans worry about humans, and take risks to non-humans less seriously. As such, there are vastly different acceptance thresholds for certain kinds of uses and these can be exploited by those that seek to deregulate or profit from the technologies…
… This discrepancy is evident in the anxieties of Jennifer Doudna, one of the Nobel-winning scientists who made the CRISPR breakthrough. In her book, A Crack in Creation, she writes of a dream in which Hitler appears to her with the face of a pig and questions her excitedly about the power she has unleashed. Doudna’s anxieties relate not to the pigs of her dream (who are subject to a wide range of CRISPR applications) but to the potential of eugenics re-emerging in human societies. Her dream reflects not only the inevitability that any technology such as this will be equal parts destruction to rewards, but also that we must confront uncomfortable ideas about what it is to be a creature as much as a creator. Recognizing that these technologies work in the bodies of all biological beings, including humans, is a continual assault on the reasoning behind a hard moral border between us and them.
At present, the lives of non-human animals are the experimental landscape for our technologies. Their powerlessness to protest the uses of their bodies, wombs, physical materials, or futures leaves them vulnerable to being the test sites for a wide range of possible human applications. As a direct consequence of the serviceability of the bodies of organisms, CRISPR has been integrated into our world with little fanfare, directly facilitating the power problem that will, eventually, impact us too. Given Collingridge’s dilemma, what concepts and strategies could help us reduce the risks from CRISPR?
The first thing we need is a new definition of pollution. When it comes to combustion engines and other technologies of the first industrial revolutions, pollution is by far the most consequential harm. Direct impacts include the release of particulate matter or chemical compounds like nitrogen oxides or carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Pollution from traffic has an immediate impact, especially fifty to one hundred metres from the roadside, with effects that we can measure, such as reduced growth rates or leaf damage in plants, or changes to soil chemistry and nutrient availability. On the other hand, long term effects of emissions, such as global warming, or the sustained impacts of waste on organisms and ecosystems, have proven tricky to anticipate and even harder to hold in mind…
…What is curious about the Fourth Industrial Revolution is that while several branches of science are arming us with the evidence that justifies an expansion of the moral circle to encompass a larger range of organisms, other branches are cranking up the objectification and exploitation of life-forms. As a result, there’s an obvious gap. Without addressing this, most concepts of pollution will remain anthropocentric. This may prove a critical misstep…
A provocative argument that “Gene Editing is Pollution,” from @TheIdeasLetter. Eminently worth reading in full.
See also: “The Ethics and Security Challenge of Gene Editing” and “The great gene editing debate: can it be safe and ethical?“
* Isaac Asimov
###
As we ponder permuted progeny, we might send microbiological birthday greetings to Jacques Lucien Monod; he was born on this date in 1910. A biochemist, he shared (with with François Jacob and André Lwoff) the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, “for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis.”
But Monod, who became the director of the Pasteur Institute, also made significant contributions to the philosophy of science– in particular via his 1971 book (based on a series of his lectures) Chance and Necessity, in which he examined the philosophical implications of modern biology. The importance of Monod’s work as a bridge between the chance and necessity of evolution and biochemistry on the one hand, and the human realm of choice and ethics on the other, can be seen in his influence on philosophers, biologists, and computer scientists including Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, and Richard Dawkins… and as a context setter for the deliberations suggested above…
“Most things are never meant”*…
Protein-packed diets add excess nitrogen to the environment through urine, rivaling pollution from agricultural fertilizers…
In the U.S., people eat more protein than they need to. And though it might not be bad for human health, this excess does pose a problem for the country’s waterways. The nation’s wastewater is laden with the leftovers from protein digestion: nitrogen compounds that can feed toxic algal blooms and pollute the air and drinking water. This source of nitrogen pollution even rivals that from fertilizers washed off of fields growing food crops, new research suggests.
When we overconsume protein—whether it comes from lentils, supplements or steak—our body breaks the excess down into urea, a nitrogen-containing compound that exits the body via urine and ultimately ends up in sewage… the majority of nitrogen pollution present in wastewater—some 67 to 100 percent—is a by-product of what people consume…
Once it enters the environment, the nitrogen in urea can trigger a spectrum of ecological impacts known as the “nitrogen cascade.” Under certain chemical conditions, and in the presence of particular microbes, urea can break down to form gases of oxidized nitrogen. These gases reach the atmosphere, where nitrous oxide (N2O) can contribute to warming via the greenhouse effect and nitrogen oxides (NOx) can cause acid rain. Other times, algae and cyanobacteria, photosynthetic bacteria also called blue-green algae, feed on urea directly. The nitrogen helps them grow much faster than they would normally, clogging vital water supplies with blooms that can produce toxins that are harmful to humans, other animals and plants. And when the algae eventually die, the problem is not over. Microorganisms that feast on dead algae use up oxygen in the water, leading to “dead zones,” where many aquatic species simply cannot survive, in rivers, lakes and oceans. Blooms from Puget Sound to Tampa, Fla., have caused large fish die-offs…
If it’s not one thing, it’s another: “Eating Too Much Protein Makes Pee a Problem Pollutant in the U.S.,” from Sasha Warren (@space_for_sasha) in @sciam.
* Philip Larkin, “Going, Going” (in High Windows)
###
As we deliberate on our diets, we might recall that it was on this date in 1888 that Theophilus Van Kannel received a patent for the revolving door, a design that came to characterize the entrances of (then-proliferating) skyscrapers and that earned him induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. But lest we think him “all work,” his other notable invention was the popular (at least in the early 20th century) amusement park ride “Witching Waves.”
“Person, woman, man, camera, TV”*…
In a reversal of trends, American baby boomers scored lower on a test of cognitive functioning than did members of previous generations, according to a new nationwide study.
Findings showed that average cognition scores of adults aged 50 and older increased from generation to generation, beginning with the greatest generation (born 1890-1923) and peaking among war babies (born 1942-1947).
Scores began to decline in the early baby boomers (born 1948-1953) and decreased further in the mid baby boomers (born 1954-1959).
While the prevalence of dementia has declined recently in the United States, these results suggest those trends may reverse in the coming decades, according to study author Hui Zheng, professor of sociology at The Ohio State University… “what was most surprising to me is that this decline is seen in all groups: men and women, across all races and ethnicities and across all education, income and wealth levels.”…
Baby boomers’ childhood health was as good as or better than previous generations and they came from families that had higher socioeconomic status. They also had higher levels of education and better occupations.
“The decline in cognitive functioning that we’re seeing does not come from poorer childhood conditions,” Zheng said…
Reversing of a trend that has spanned decades: “Baby boomers show concerning decline in cognitive functioning.”
On a different, but quite possibly related note, these examples from Patrick Collison‘s recent post on the effects of pollution:
• Chess players make more mistakes on polluted days: “We find that an increase of 10 µg/m³ raises the probability of making an error by 1.5 percentage points, and increases the magnitude of the errors by 9.4%. The impact of pollution is exacerbated by time pressure. When players approach the time control of games, an increase of 10 µg/m³, corresponding to about one standard deviation, increases the probability of making a meaningful error by 3.2 percentage points, and errors being 17.3% larger.” – Künn et al 2019…
• “Utilizing variations in transitory and cumulative air pollution exposures for the same individuals over time in China, we provide evidence that polluted air may impede cognitive ability as people become older, especially for less educated men. Cutting annual mean concentration of particulate matter smaller than 10 µm (PM10) in China to the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard (50 µg/m³) would move people from the median to the 63rd percentile (verbal test scores) and the 58th percentile (math test scores), respectively.” – Zhang et al 2018…
• Politicians use less complex speech on polluted days. “We apply textual analysis to convert over 100,000 verbal statements made by Canadian MPs from 2006 through 2011 into—among other metrics—speech-specific Flesch-Kincaid grade-level indices. This index measures the complexity of an MP’s speech by the number of years of education needed to accurately understand it. Conditioning on individual fixed effects and other controls, we show that elevated levels of airborne fine particulate matter reduce the complexity of MPs’s speeches. A high-pollution day, defined as daily average PM2.5 concentrations greater than 15 µg/m³, causes a 2.3% reduction in same-day speech quality. To put this into perspective, this is equivalent to the removal of 2.6 months of education.” Heyes et al 2019…
• “Exposure to CO2 and VOCs at levels found in conventional office buildings was associated with lower cognitive scores than those associated with levels of these compounds found in a Green building.” – Allen et al 2016. The effect seems to kick in at around 1,000 ppm of CO2.
The entire (chilling) piece is eminently worth reading.
And on another related note– one going not to the quality, but to the quantity of life– this characteristically-great set of infographics from Flowing Data exploring the demographic reality that underlies our (directionally-accurate) contention that “40 is the new 30 [or whatever]”: “Finding the New Age, for Your Age.”
* President Trump, recounting the memory test he took (not to establish his mental acuity, as he seemed to suggest, but rather as part of a screening for senile dementia)
###
As we agonize over aging, we might recall that it was on this date in 1909, off the coast of Cape Hatteras, that telegraph operator Theodore Haubner called for help from the steamship, S. S. Arapahoe. He was momentarily confused because a new telegraph code “SOS” had recently been ratified by the Berlin Radiotelegraphic Conference to replace the old “CQD” distress call, and he wondered which signal he should send. He sent both. Haubner’s transmission was the first recorded American use of “SOS” to call for help.
Clyde steamer Araphoe. Image from the Library of Congress.
“A good rule of thumb is to assume that everything matters”*…
Every few months, a news outlet will write a story heralding the next financial crisis, with an assumed assuredness that we should all view as suspect. Predicting the next crisis has become a sport, one that typically magnifies risks and displays an unreasonable degree of certainty. But if you had to choose a looming event that’s most likely to produce a negative shock to the financial system, it would almost certainly be the climate emergency.
That’s the takeaway from a fascinating issue brief… from the Center for American Progress’s Gregg Gelzinis and Graham Steele from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Both worked for the Senate Banking Committee for many years, and they make a compelling case, not only that headline risks to financial stability will flow from a warming planet and the efforts to mitigate that, but that federal banking regulators have gone almost completely AWOL in monitoring or even assessing this legitimate threat.
Worse, to the extent that any financial regulators in Washington are paying attention to the climate crisis, they’re seeking to dismiss it. A subcommittee formed at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to look at climate-related market risk is stacked with fossil fuel industry representatives, including several executives from climate-polluting agribusiness, banks with significant carbon-intensive portfolios, and fossil fuel giants BP and ConocoPhillips.
The committee’s clear intent is to examine the climate risks to polluting companies’ core business, not from their polluting. As one critic—Paddy McCully, the climate and energy director at the Rainforest Action Network—notes, “We should recognize that there’s risk from the climate to the economy, and that the corporate sector needs to assess their contributions to climate change and then deal with it.”
The report explains that global economic losses from a rise in temperatures of 4 degrees Celsius have been estimated at $23 trillion per year. This would pose two kinds of risk to the financial system: physical risk from natural disasters, and a more indirect risks from transitioning away from fossil fuels…
A new paper makes the case that financial regulators are ignoring the significant risks from a warming planet and even from efforts to green the economy. The fascinating– and chilling– analysis in full at “The Biggest Threat to Financial Stability Is the Climate.”
* Richard Thaler
###
As we internalize externalities, we might recall that it was on this date in 1952 that the Great Smog of London began, A period of cold weather, combined with an anticyclone and windless conditions, collected airborne pollutants—mostly arising from the use of coal—to form a thick layer of smog over the city. It caused far more severe disruptions than “pea-soupers” of the past, reducing visibility and even penetrating indoor areas. While the Underground maintained service, bus service was virtually shut down (as visibility was so severely and reduced; and thus, the the roads, congested). Most flights into London Airport were diverted to Hurn, near Bournemouth and linked by train with Waterloo Station.
Government medical reports in the following weeks estimated that 4,000 people had died as a direct result of the smog; and 100,000 more, made ill by the smog’s effects on their respiratory tracts. More recent research suggests that the total number of fatalities may have been considerably greater, one paper suggesting about 6,000 more died in the following months as a result of the event.
The disaster had huge effects on environmental research, government regulation, and public awareness of the relationship between air quality and health. It led quickly to several changes in practices and regulations– perhaps most notably, the Clean Air Act 1956.
Nelson’s Column during the Great Smog
“On the geological time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about deep time”*…
The official history of Earth has a new chapter – and we are in it.
Geologists have classified the last 4,200 years as being a distinct age in the story of our planet.
They are calling it the Meghalayan Age, the onset of which was marked by a mega-drought that crushed a number of civilisations worldwide.
The International Chronostratigraphic Chart, the famous diagram depicting the timeline for Earth’s history (seen on many classroom walls) will be updated [as above]…
More at “Welcome to the Meghalayan Age – a new phase in history.”
But lest one think that a move like this is without controversy, consider this professional reaction:
“What the fuck is the Meghalayan?” asked Ben van der Pluijm, a geologist.
Whatever the Meghalayan is, we live in it now…
More at “Geology’s Timekeepers Are Feuding.”
* John McPhee
###
As we take sides, we might recall that it was exactly 75 years ago today, on this date in 1943, that Los Angeles had it’s first major attack of smog:
On July 26, 1943 a “gas attack” hit the city of Los Angeles.
Here’s how Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly described this dark day in Angeleno history in the first line of their essential book, “Smogtown“: “The beast you couldn’t stab fanned its poison across the waking downtown.” The “beast” was smog… [source]
The L.A. Civic Center in a 40’s smog cloud
You must be logged in to post a comment.