Up From Facebook

Years ago, I was visiting Halle in the former East Germany and my host took me to the nearby town of Leipzig. While walking through town, he stopped at the shop window of a coin collecting store that displayed the defunct East German 50- and 100-Mark notes. My host remarked “Now you see why we loved Marx and Engels so much.” Growing up during the Cold War, I’m very conscious of how it shaped the world that shaped me. I’ve read histories of Russia and China and biographies of Stalin and Castro. I was aware of Marx and Marxism, but never read any of Marx’s writing. I just finished reading the the Marx biography “Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life” by Jonathan Sperber. Marx excelled in gymnasium (high school) in all subjects except math. Mathematics, of course, is at the heart of all of modern economics. Throughout his life, Marx did a terrible job of managing his own finances, and yet ironically considered himself an authority on economics. He was usually in financial difficulty throug...

  Facebook has certainly become a popular whipping boy these days. And I have had issues with FB, primarily with the tortured use of "community standards" by the right-leaning moderators who punish those of us who dare criticize the right-wing extremists in government and society. And FB has only recently started cracking down on anti-vax disinformation and on Trump and others who advocate overturning election results. For me personally, mostly FB has been a good thing. I've met new people on FB and keep in touch with friends. I enjoy seeing pictures and funny memes that people share. And even being blocked by those right-wing moderators had a positive dividend: it forced me to start my own blog. FB isn't a source of evil, it is an amplifier of the evil that already exists in American culture. Here's Kevin Drum: " . . . the bulk of the (limited) evidence to date suggests that social media doesn't cause hostility, it merely reflects hostility that's...

  My first mentor was Dr. Stuart Riggsby. After I aced his bacterial genetics course in the spring of 1976, he recruited me to work in his lab for senior research credit. The project itself was doomed, but what was important was that I was given a bench, the opportunity to teach myself and the confidence that I could do research. By that time, I had abandoned the goal of going into medicine, and was interested in the nascent field of molecular biology. He strongly endorsed my choice to pursue Drosophila molecular genetics. One of the grudges that Linda still holds against me was that I asked Dr. Riggsby what he thought of married grad students, since Linda wanted to get married between undergrad and grad school. In the event, he approved, saying that in his experience the married grad students were more mature than the unmarried ones. I saw Dr. Riggsby once after graduation, at a Genetics Society meeting, and shortly after that, he became Dean of the Graduate School. I don't think ...

From Kevin Drum: "Congress is now interested in finding out what really happened in the war room during the early days of January. Republicans are almost unanimously determined to make sure that it stays a secret forever. That's where we stand today." There's about 14 months to do something about it before the Trump Congress is seated after the 2022 election and shuts down any investigation into the truth. Feh. https://jabberwocking.com/a-very-brief-summary-of-donald-trumps-attempted-coup-detat/

  Kevin Drum opines: "In a nutshell, this is why I believe our only real hope is to spend huge amounts of money on R&D in the hope that we discover a genuinely cheaper alternative to fossil fuels." Too late. There's already enough CO2 in the atmosphere to guarantee calamity for humans during the next century. Even with the imagined discovery and implementation of "genuinely cheaper alternatives to fossil fuels," humanity will be engulfed in resource wars in the next 30 years. Our only real hope is some combination of (a) global carbon capture and (b) geoengineering. No amount of solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal, battery storage and molten salt reactor greening can take away the poison already in the atmosphere. And we're not even at the starting gate. I tremble for our children and grandchildren. https://jabberwocking.com/not-one-single-country-on-earth-is-willing-to-stop-extracting-fossil-fuels/

I got the Moderna vaccine as part of the phase III clinical trial back in August and September 2020. Although it was technically a blinded trial, I knew from my symptoms after the second shot that I was in the vaccine arm and not the placebo arm. Nevertheless, I got myself tested for the spike antibody and confirmed it. Indeed, the levels were over eight times the minimum threshold (in arbitrary units) for a positive reaction. Unsurprisingly, a separate test for nucleocapsid antibody was negative, so I came by my spike antibody by vaccine, not prior infection. But how does antibody titer relate to protection from a COVID-19 infection? The short answer is, it doesn’t. In vitro neutralization assays are a proxy for protection that doesn’t actually challenge a person with the virus. In these assays “serum from an infected or vaccinated person is diluted to varying levels, then mixed with a set amount of virus. A dilution of 1:100, for instance, means that 50% of virus was still killed whe...

  A couple of years ago, I led an undergrad class discussion on the ethics of CRISPR genome editing. This required considerable research effort on my part, and I decided to amortize that effort by publishing a manuscript that covered the same content. That paper, "In Our Image: The Ethics of CRISPR Genome Editing," came out last January. Yesterday, a senior biology major at St. Mary's College of Maryland emailed me some questions about the paper as part of his senior project on the ethics of CRISPR human germline editing. While I relish the attention of peers, I also get considerable gratification from engaging with the lay public. Here are his questions and my answers: 1. So in your paper, you describe how CRISPR germline editing right now is not morally urgent because of other safer methods to select embryos with or without certain traits. If CRISPR germline technology advances to the point that it is possible to edit for non-mendelian diseases, so it is able to account...

The chaos fomented by Donald Trump among the trumpenproletariat that manifested in violent fashion on January 6 is still being promoted by Steven Bannon and others. It has evoked comparisons to Nazi Germany, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the American Civil war. What does history actually say about these comparisons? Hitler came to power in Germany at a time when the German people were united in their despair from having lost a major war and suffered a depression, punitive war reparations and hyperinflation. None of these apply in 21st century America. The Bolsheviks came to power to replace the Czar, whose authoritarian government led a largely agrarian society and whose military was bleeding lives and money in WWI. Poverty was rampant and the Russian people were unaccustomed to any government other than a monarchy. None of these apply in 21st century America. By 1860, America was riven by the slavery issue. Billions of dollars (in current value) in investments in humans as...

  Look, regular exercise is an unalloyed good, regardless of your weight loss goals. But unless you are engaged in intense sports, exercise is a slow and frustrating path to losing weight. Most of the calories most of us burn in adulthood come from just being awake and normally active. Accordingly, successful weight loss (and healthy weight maintenance) depends critically on calorie count. Easier said than done. Our bodies react to meals differently, depending on the type of food delivering the calories. Hormonal responses to diet can be our enemies in the weight battle. "The carbohydrate-insulin models proposes that the hormonal and metabolic responses to diet, not simply calorie content, cause the body to store excess fat. After consumption of a high-glycemic load meal with lots of fast-digesting carbohydrates (e.g., processed grains, potato products, refined sugar), insulin levels rise excessively, and glucagon is suppressed. This anabolic hormonal response directs too many inc...

  The MSM calls Sens. Manchin and Sinema "moderates." On the political spectrum redrawn by the GOP, they qualify as "moderates" only because the GOP has rebranded right-wing extremism as "conservative" and they are to the left of the extremists. Juan Cole nails it here: "The horse race du jour is the obstruction by arch-plutocrat Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and wannabe plutocrat Sen. Kirsten Sinema of Arizona of Build Back Better. These two have been dubbed “moderates” by the corporate press owned by a handful of billionaires sympathetic to their obstructionism, hence the moniker “moderate” for a far right wing plot hatched by big Oil and Big Pharma to gut Biden’s bill. "But Manchin and Sinema are not plucky mavericks standing on high personal principle against those spend-and-tax Democrats in their own party. They are mercenaries. The second meaning given by Merriam Webster for mercenary is, “serving merely for pay or sordid advantage: ven...

I was surprised, but only mildly so, that mRNA vaccines didn't get the Nobel Prize this year. Since the maximum number of awardees for any given prize is three, the challenge of selecting only three in such a short period was just too easy to defer. Of course, It won't be easy next year, either. "“I think the mRNA vaccines are obvious candidates,” agrees Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, who notes that the vaccines’ development has deep roots in several disciplines. “I can imagine the committee taking its time to sort out which contributions to recognize since many fields contributed to their deployment.” Working all this out takes time, Hansson says. “We want to give credit to the right people. And for the right discovery,” he says. “So stay tuned.”" https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02754-6?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20211014&utm_source=nature_etoc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2...

  I remember as a graduate student in genetics discussing with fellow grad students the possibility that the human genome would one day be sequenced, and all the benefits that would flow from that achievement. To us at the time, this goal seemed remote, long after we were dead and gone. In the event, we not only have an excellent human reference genome, but whole genome sequencing now costs about $1000 (I paid $199 for mine, since there’s an after market for de-identified genome sequences). One of the many cool consequences of human genomics is testing hypotheses about the peopling of the planet. In this case, the hypothesis was that Native Americans descended from the Jomon people of Japan. Genomics falsified that hypothesis. This tickles my interests in genetics, genomics and history: “These people (the Jomon) who lived in Japan 15,000 years ago are an unlikely source for Indigenous Americans. Neither the skeletal biology or the genetics indicate a connection between Japan and th...

  One of the favorite bleats of the right-wing is "unconstitutional." Folks, the Constitution isn't some computer algorithm where you type in a case and it spits out a constitutional answer. The folks who wrote the Constitution provided ambiguous and incomplete guidance, and lawmakers usually lack the constitutional law training to write legislative language that cannot be challenged on constitutional grounds. Ultimately, the Constitution means what the Supreme Court says it mean. Accordingly, the appearance of objectivity in the SCOTUS matters for our Democratic Republic. The current court membership includes a majority of right-wing justices who were appointed for life not for their balance and objectivity, but to undo decades of jurisprudence. A couple of the current justices have publicly lamented the perception that the court now is dominated by right-wing hacks. A thoughtful response would have been to demonstrate how the SCOTUS majority is pursuing a balanced agend...

 I was just notified that posting the link below violates FB community standards against sharing information. I can't see anything offensive or wrong with this, and have appealed. Based on past experience, I expect my appeal to be ignored. https://www.statista.com/statistics/203247/shares-of-household-income-of-quintiles-in-the-us/?fbclid=IwAR35-OxPwXt67xRQTb-4AjZnt9B-Y9Io1jQ-I0QixqMHYie_TLZuf9VQ7lg

  Actual scientists know that it is much safer to get your protection from the vaccine than from a natural infection. But as for the “far greater” protection from vaccines, the data don’t justify such a strong conclusion: “The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label.” This is one study, the numbers are small, the only vaccine used was the Pfizer vaccine and protection was specifically against the Delta variant.  https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-once-confers-much-greater-immunity-vaccine-vaccination-remains-vital

The data continue to show (1) levels of antibodies gradually fall over time and (2) the vaccines continue to provide a high degree of protection from hospitalization and death. Declining circulating antibodies isn't surprising or new, although the rate of decline may be faster than for some other vaccines. Of course, what matters is protection from disease. Interpreting the data on this is complicated by human behavior: "The waning protection may involve behavior, they noted. "Vaccinated persons presumably have a higher rate of social contact than unvaccinated persons and may also have lower adherence to safety measures," they wrote. "This behavior could reduce real-world effectiveness of the vaccine as compared with its biologic effectiveness, possibly explaining the waning of protection."" https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/06/health/pfizer-vaccine-waning-immunity/index.html

  Last year, I won a bet with my chairman over when the COVID-19 pandemic would peak. In March of 2020, he accepted my bet: “I'll bet a bottle of that Japanese whiskey you picked out for me that the COVID-19 pandemic in the US will not have peaked by 22 April. You bet that it will on or before that date.” In the event, he paid off with a bottle of 16 year-old Lagavulin. His confidence was based on a prediction by Micheal Levitt, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who had begun dabbling in viral epidemiology. Levitt also predicted that Israel would have no more than 10 COVID-related deaths, a prophecy that has proven to be wrong by about two orders of magnitude. What Levitt and my chairman (a biophysical chemist) got wrong is that human behavior, not viral biology or immunology, is rate-limiting in pandemics. Neither Levitt nor my chairman grew up in the US, but I did and have lived here all my life. I know my people, and I knew that far too many wouldn't do the right thing to slow t...

  I first learned about HeLa cells when I was an undergrad majoring in microbiology. Back then, we were told that they were derived from a cervical cancer in a patient named Helen Lane. The cancer was correct but the name was wrong. I don't know if that was deliberate misdirection to preserve the privacy of the long-dead patient or just miscommunication. Years later, I learned that the letters were for Henrietta Lacks. It is impossible to overstate the role these cells have played in biomedical research. They are cancer cells, so chromosomally very abnormal, but they grow readily in culture. I see where Henrietta's relatives are now suing for compensation. Back then, there was no requirement to consent a cancer patient before using their tumor tissue for research. Of course, most cells don't make so much money, and money is what this is about. Mostly money for attorneys. [link may be behind a paywall] https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/10/05/business/lawyers-henrietta-lacks...

  I read Jim Watson's book The Double Helix when I was an undergrad, and Anne Sayre's book Rosalind Franklin and DNA when I was in grad school. There's no doubt that Franklin's X-shaped X-ray diffraction image was key to the success of the UK group in solving the structure of DNA. Over the years, I've read several pieces discussing whether Franklin's data was "stolen" or otherwise expropriated. In the end, she couldn't share the Nobel prize because the prize cannot be awarded posthumously. Just ran across this nuanced discussion. It synthesizes the historical record and, while acknowledging the personal shortcomings of several of the major actors, falls a bit short of the "stolen" data legend. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/rosalind-franklin-and-dna-how-wronged-was-she/?fbclid=IwAR31mVf18DjwPz2DavU9MwFzrwFohiuR2HN4vfs8OfDiNMIxL48F6BElWlo

I enrolled in the COVE study (phase III Moderna vaccine trial) last fall, one of over 30,000. It was a blinded study, but after the second shot, I knew I was in the vaccine arm. A month after the second shot, I had my spike antibody titer measured, and it was over eight times the threshold for a positive result. Here's a recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine summarizing the results of the COVE trial. The number of confirmed COVID-19 infections in the vaccine cohort was over an order of magnitude smaller than in the placebo arm, almost certainly because many vaccinated people had inapparent infections and thus went untested. " Vaccine efficacy in preventing Covid-19 illness was 93.2% (95% confidence interval [CI], 91.0 to 94.8), with 55 confirmed cases in the mRNA-1273 group (9.6 per 1000 person-years; 95% CI, 7.2 to 12.5) and 744 in the placebo group (136.6 per 1000 person-years; 95% CI, 127.0 to 146.8). The efficacy in preventing severe disease was 98.2% (95% CI...

  Fox and the Trumpist GOP (but I repeat myself) have been flogging the "replacement theory" that Democrats favor fewer restrictions on immigration because non-white immigrants are genetically programmed to vote for Democrats, will be granted voting rights as soon as they land, and their children will be able to vote after 6 weeks of gestation. Actually, Breitbart has figured out the real Democratic Party replacement theory plot. It has nothing to do with immigration: "A few weeks ago, Breitbart News — the right-wing, hyperpartisan news site formerly run by Steve Bannon — published a truly galaxy brain column. Editor-at-large John Nolte argued that Democrats have been promoting the COVID-19 vaccine not to save lives but instead to trick Republican voters into not getting the jab. Nolte’s theory concluded that this, in turn, would lead to unvaccinated Republicans getting sick and dying from COVID-19, ultimately helping Democrats electorally." Funniest. Conspiracy. Th...