| Monday
December 13, 2004
We can begin with a trenchant comment by Greg Cochran:
Subject: Norman Mineta
Norman Mineta is good for something: he serves as an
existence proof. If an unquenchable desire for freedom burned in every human
breast, he wouldn't exist. We'd already have torn him to pieces.
Gregory Cochran
No comment.
=====================
And here is one that stumps me:
Good Sir,
I'll be teaching a section of introduction to
American Government next semester. Is there, somewhere in cyberspace, a site
or discussion group or something that chats about textbooks.
I was hoping someone like the NAS or Heritage would
have a textbook-comment site. Alas.
Yours Aye, Rod
I do not remember my high school
civics texts, only that they were very good; better, I thought, than
Hugh Bone's text when I took Political Science in college. One needs
both the formal material on just how government is supposed to work, and
some comments on how it does work.
I would for instructors of government
recommend three works: David McCullough's JOHN ADAMS, Chernow's Alexanander
Hamilton, and The SACRED FIRES OF LIBERTY which is a biography of Madison.
Those will arm the instructor with some idea of the intentions of the
framers, and whatever one's views on "the living constitution" and such
matter it cannot harm to know what the people who put things together
thought.
Depending on the level of the course,
I'd strong recommend The Federalist Papers as reading required for an honor
grade (you can get a C without it, but not better). But that's me.
And suggestions are welcome on actual
texts about which I know little.
See below.
===========================
This is being fixed even as I write:
Subject: Ultimate boot cd (Byte article typo)
Hey,
Just an FYI. I tried the URL in your Byte article for
Ult Boot CD.
http://ucbd.sourceforge.net
And it gave me a 404.
Then I thought it might be a transposition, so I
tried...
http://ubcd.sourceforge.net
and found it
also found it here.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ubcd/
-- John Harlow, President BravePoint
And thanks.
=====================
Subject: 70 yr old called up -
70 yr old called up:
Dr. John Caulfield thought it had to be a mistake when
the Army asked him to return to active duty. After all, he's 70 years old
and had already retired - twice. He left the Army in 1980 and private
practice two years ago.
"My first reaction was disbelief," Caulfield said. "It
never occurred to me that they would call a 70-year-old."
http://www.marionstar.com/news/stories/20041211/localnews/1731211.html
Best -J
Now I am worried. But I doubt they need old cannon
cockers of my vintage, given that all I know is towed howitzers and some
recoilless... I doubt the old analog firing tables I know even exist any
longer.
==============
Subject: My vote is 'incompetence' coupled with
'arrogance'.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/cst-edt-novak13.html
--- Roland Dobbins
I wish I had evidence to the contrary. Foolishness
on stilts.
==========
Subject: 10 year old girl arrested, cuffed, for crime
of having scissors in school...
Gee, perhaps she wanted to do some work? How long
before a child is seriously damaged by some such incident and a parent
decides to even the score?
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/10390856.htm?1c
Scott Miller
Scissors get girl in legal trouble
The 10-year-old was handcuffed and taken to a
police station after scissors were found in her book bag.
By Susan Snyder
Inquirer Staff Writer
A 10-year-old fourth-grade girl at Holme
Elementary School in the Far Northeast was pulled out of class, handcuffed,
and taken to the local police station in the back of a police wagon earlier
this week after a pair of 8-inch scissors were found in her book bag,
according to authorities and her angry mother.
School district and police officials said
yesterday that they were following state law and procedures in dealing with
students who have weapons on school property. They say that those rules
demand police be called and that procedures call for handcuffing suspects
regardless of age or crime.
Porsche Brown's mother, Rose Jackson, was
outraged.
"My daughter cried and cried," Jackson said
yesterday. "She had no idea what she did was wrong. I think that was way too
harsh."
Jackson said principal Ethel M. Cabry had known
Porsche for four years and should have called her home.
"I want something done to that principal and
that teacher. They didn't notify me about my baby. They called the police,"
Jackson said.
District spokesman Fernando Gallard
acknowledged that Cabry had not called Jackson but said that school police
called her when they phoned city police.
School district officials acknowledged that the
girl was not using the item as a weapon or threatening anyone with it. The
scissors were found Thursday morning during a search of students' belongings
after something was discovered missing from the teacher's desk area, Gallard
said.
The scissors, however, qualified as a possible
weapon under a long-standing state law, and the school followed proper
procedure by calling city police, he said.
Porsche will be suspended for five days, and
the district will then decide whether to expel her to a disciplinary school
or allow her to return to Holme, he said.
City police, meanwhile, decided not to charge
her with a crime because they determined that she had no intent to use the
scissors as a weapon, said Inspector William Colarulo, a police spokesman.
In fact, police believe she had the scissors to unwrap a new CD, Colarulo
said.
He defended the police officers' decision to
handcuff the child and take her to Eighth Police District headquarters. All
suspects, regardless of age or crime, are handcuffed, he said. "The officers
acted in good faith," he said.
Jackson, who maintained that her daughter had
the scissors for a previous school assignment, said that if the district
acted based on state law, the law must be changed.
"This should be done per case," based on
circumstances. She said her daughter did nothing to warrant police
intervention: "She's like, 'Mom, we use scissors in school.' "
Anarcho-tyranny reigns. Isn't this the city in
which the police dropped a firebomb onto a wooden house? But they have a
nice Rodan exhibit. A dazzling show of culture. The Inspector should have an
exciting new career in dog walking which may be a bit much for his skills,
but they could let him try. Certainly he shouldn't be carrying guns. Nor
should anyone involved in this.
When you let rules take the place of judgment, when
We The People will of course do nothing. But we
were born free.
====================
Eric Schwarz declares war:
Subject: OK, it's clobbering time! (a biologist
responds temperately and rationally
to Bethell)
Jerry,
On the Tom Bethell column:
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=7443
This column has one good point and several bad ones.
The good point: we currently have no convincing
argument to show even moderately skeptical biologists that stem cells will
cure diseases. So supporting this work is a thoroughly speculative effort.
There are caveats I would point out, though.
Some very bright and serious biologists (e.g. Prof.
Doug Melton at Harvard) who sometimes have strong personal stakes in the
outcome (e.g., Melton again, whose daughers have diabetes) are at least
putting their money where their mouth is by getting private funding and
redirecting their own research agendas to seeing what stem cells can do.
That doesn't involve anything except private money and the biologists' own
irreplaceable time and effort. It seems to me that the Meltons of biology
may be mistaken, but they're unlikely to be insincere about hoping that stem
cells can be good for something.
Which takes me on to the bad points and more caveats.
Bethell argues that the human genome project was "wholly hyped", and goes on
to suggest that basic research in biology today is being driven solely by
the urge to pump biotech share prices and sustain a political consensus.
This is grotesquely wrong.
Even if your only goal is to aid physicians by giving
them an efficient way to diagnose and understand hereditary diseases, the
HGP was a huge money-saving win. It cost roughly $100M to map and clone a
single disease gene (for cystic fibrosis) using the old pre-HGP methods.
Conversely, having spent only 30 times what the CF gene alone cost us, we
now have efficient ways to identify disease-causing mutations in over 20,000
human genes, as well as ways to effectively sort human diseases into
clinically different groups by virtue of polymorphic genetic variations
(such as those between racial groups) or by their differences in gene
expression (as can already being done for various tumors).
Moreover, we've also gotten something like 20K new
drug targets for the pharmaceutical companies to try working with, some of
which are starting to get drugs into clinical trials now (e.g.,
www.myriad.com).
About the claim that this research is driven by
venality: it's true that some professors in biology also have interests in
biotech companies (which they often found). This sort of work was made legal
by the Bayh-Dole Act of the early 1980s, and helped expand the U.S.
biotechnology industry to the point where it is acknowledged to lead the
world. I'd suggest that the risk of venality by some professors is
acceptable if it also gives us the possibility of some people taking
academic knowledge and working to turn it into things that can actually be
of use to normal humans in the free market. I also know, first-hand, that at
least some people in academia work hard to keep their academic and corporate
interests in proper balance. Sean Eddy makes no headlines for having
open-sourced HMMER (hmmer.wustl.edu) while selling expanded versions to
corporations, but he's set a fine role model of what's possible, one that
Bethell ignores. Meanwhile, the bulk of biological research is done by grad
students and postdocs who themselves aren't rich, don't expect to get rich,
and (while having plenty of moral flaws) are at least somewhat free from
venality themselves, and quite sincere about believing that their work might
end up mattering (sincere enough to use up their 20s and 30s working in
labs, with very little job security until some of them finally get tenure).
About the claim that, in basic science, "consensus
replaces competition": wrong. Just. Stupidly. Wrong. For details, I suggest
reading about what life in a molecular biology lab is actually like.
Examples of good books are _The Eighth Day of Creation_ by Horace Judson,
_Natural Obsessions_ by Natalie Angier, _The Common Thread_ by John Sulston,
or _The Genome War_ by James Shreeve. Anybody who can read those and then
tell me to my face, with a straight face themselves, that biology's not
"competitive" will get a gold paper star. I don't expect to have to hand out
many.
Finally, Bethell seems to have a flattering sense of
the time scale with which basic science can be made into practical remedies
even with the best intentions in the world by honest scientists taking tax
money from the public. For instance, in the last half-decade, protease
inhibitors have seriously reduced the fatality of HIV infections. The
development of these drugs would have been impossible without a great deal
of basic research into the molecular biology of protein structures and
retroviruses -- both of which were academic topics in molecular biology,
paid for by public tax money, well before anybody even knew AIDS existed,
let alone that we would need a way to make effective drugs to control it.
But when was this basic work funded? Answer: the 1950s through the 1970s.
The payoff came in the late 1980s when various academic professors helped
start biotech companies to try exploiting the basic research and get new
drugs made.
Another example: Gleevec, one of the first effective
drugs to come out of basic research on the molecular biology on cancer. When
was its target gene first observed? In the early 1970s, actually (as a
chromosomal rearrangement) with the cloning coming by the early 1980s. And
when did this finally get us an effective anti-leukemia drug? Twenty years
later. Could that drug possibly have been invented without the basic
research into DNA sequencing and cloning that allowed the ABL protein to be
isolated and studied in a pharmaceutical lab? No. Would Bethell have been
supporting such research in the 1980s? Apparently not, since it didn't
*instantly* produce Gleevec.
Nobody chooses to spend their lives working in
academic laboratories because all they want is a soft, well-funded job.
Trust me on this one! Getting a Ph.D. in molecular biology is only an easy
path to riches in the minds of crazy people. And anybody bright enough to
not only do it well but also ambitious enough to want serious money has the
brains to get out of basic research and do something that *really* brings in
the money -- like, say, emulating John Edwards and becoming a trial
attorney. Perhaps Bethell'd prefer that. For better or worse, though, I
didn't, and neither did a number of other people, and that's what accounts
for such scientists as the United States has left.
If people want a world without government-funded basic
research in the sciences, please, let them at least first think long and
hard about what they imagine they would get in its place. I know too well
that many scientific projects end up being wastes of money that go nowhere.
I also know first-hand that even the best biologists are flawed human
beings. But I also know that if you aren't willing to support the effort to
improve human knowledge and expand human abilities to control nature, what
*are* you going to support?
--Erich Schwarz, Ph.D.
Several points come to mind. First, while people
who spend their lives doing research have one set of goals, those who spend
their lives administering science programs are not often made of the same
stuff; indeed, the temperament for collecting the credentials for doing
management of Big Science while having the desire to run such programs often
results in exactly the kind of person you do not want in the job. Examples
from NASA come to mind instantly.
Second, AIDS research is a terrible example to use
when you talk about public money and science, since the allocation of
resources always goes to those in political favor, to the point where even
tiny amounts to perform experimtum crucii on popular theories are never
available, in theory because doing crucial experiments to confirm or falsify
current theories would take money from running full steam ahead on those
theories; in practice that's nonsense, and everyone knows it. It's not the
cost of doing the crucial experiments that is preventing them: it's the fear
that they might not turn out well, and some fundamental theories would have
to be reexamined and there might be a reallocation of public money.
I am not Tom Bethell and I can't speak for him, but
I didn't read anything in his essay about private investment or contribution
money at all, (other than a desire to cash in, which I found interesting and
I know from experience has happened in the past) and I don't know of any
prohibition on using private investment or contribution funds for any kind
of stem cell research.
California, on the other hand, is about to borrow
$3 billion at a time when the state debt is so high that we will have to
sell bonds with a value of $6 billion to raise that much money: and while we
haven't any notion of how to spend most of that effectively, there is no
question of where and to whom the money will go. I predict there will be
some wide cashouts of investors, and some new chairs in Universities: I will
not predict the miracle cures, which may or may not be coming. I can hope
for them, but throwing money at a scientific, as opposed to an engineering,
problem seldom works. Technology can be created on demand; science theory
may or may not be. Helmholz observed that the most practical thing in the
world is a good theory; and sometimes the Edison approach (try thousands of
things) works (as with light bulbs) and sometimes it does not (as with his
efforts to find anti-gravity or a gravity screening substance).
The allocation of public money and its influence on
science is a topic that would stand a lot more research and effort than I
have time to give it: but from all I have seen, the AIDS research programs
give me a less than laudatory model of the influence of big public money on
science in biology; while Global Warming and Kyoto tell me more than I like
to know about the influence of big public money on environmental science.
I don't say I entirely agree with Tom Bethell; but
I think those views need to be taken seriously when big money allocations
are at stake.
Do note that I am not at all saying there ought not
be public money spent on basic research in areas with no immediate payoffs;
I do question the management of those. Bell Labs was once the advanced
planning department of the human race, but it was an artifact of AT&T being
a regulated public utility and the far sightedness of the regulators.
Bell Labs worked. There was another candidate: Walt
Disney once hired the Pepperdine Desearch Institute (when I was President of
PRI) to look into a research center to be called Experimental Program
Community of Tomorrow in which actual science research was the goal: EPCOT
was to be supported by tourist revenue, with Disneyworld bringing the
tourists to the area, and EPCOT then taking advantage of that to attract
tourists who would spend money that would then be spent on this
self-supporting science community. The staff would live there, work there,
and govern the place, with the revenue coming in allocated by those who
lived in the community and directed its research efforts. Needless to say
none of this plan for EPCOT survived Disney's death, and last time I went to
EPCOT I found the only "research" was a small pool with some starfish in it,
and one Ph.D. scientist on staff. Perhaps that is gone now. Certainly there
are no energy research laboratories or the big biological research
facilities we had planned.
Government labs have sometimes done good work,
sometimes not. Los Alamos was wonderful in its day, but seems to have become
a bit less than that now, with some rather odd management. I don't have a
lot of experience with NIMH and such, but I gather it's not entirely the
best example for science management. And of course we have NASA.
Public money shapes the direction of science
research. Does it always do that in a beneficial manner?
Subject: somewhat more on the issues you raise
Jerry,
Thanks for your reply. For whatever reason, I find
your points fairer than Bethell's.
I agree that public money doesn't always drive science
research in good directions. Ironically, the most successful instance I
personally know of where that money has, by all accounts, gone to reasonably
good use has been the funding of university biological research by NIH.
Initially, Harry Truman was highly skeptical about this idea because he had
a hard time imagining that scientists would be able to peer-review one
another and have the results come out well. But competition for limited
funds and an ethic of scientific integrity managed to keep at least some
money going to genuine merit -- certainly, more so than in almost any other
country funding biological research. Conversely, cases like California's
funding of stem-cell research aren't driven by scientists themselves (a tiny
voting bloc) but by general public sentiment, which can be less reliable.
And, on the third hand, a lot of good biological research with long-term
benefits has been funded on the basis that it might help cure cancer, even
though the connections to cancer were sometimes rather tenuous.
So to anybody who wants to fund biological research, I
guess my advice would be: keep it reasonably abundant; keep it finite and
competitive; keep it peer-reviewed, not because scientists are infallible
but because academic snobs are maybe somewhat less driven by fads than
popular votes like the stem-cell initiative; and require scientists to give
accountings of their work, both to their funding agencies and to the public;
and have a *mixture* of funding agencies, both tax-supported and privately
funded, so that no one ideology can control all the purse strings. Beyond
that, there are no silver bullets. Biological research is as subject to
Sturgeon's Law as any other human activity. But the 10% that beats that law
can almost literally turn lead into gold.
If there is any one of these that I think most
biologists probably don't think enough about, it's the last of those --
popularization. My personal experience is that the American public are
strongly in favor of biological research *if* somebody will bother to
explain to them in normal English prose what it is. My further personal
experience is that biologists tend not to notice the link between tolerating
poor public explanations of science (and poor public education generally) to
their difficulties in making the case for more funding...
As for the management of large publicly funded
projects: this is a fair and good question. I don't know if there's *any*
way to avoid sclerosis of management, except to try like crazy to keep the
field overall in an innovative frame of mind. That in turn may simply mean
not having all the projects be too expensive. Such limited encounters as
I've had with NIH management have made me hopeful that NIH isn't NASA (yet).
But if NIH projects cost as much as Shuttle flights, I'm sure that we'd be
in the same boat. What may have saved NIH (so far) is that funding
individual laboratories for 1-5 year periods comes closer to the spirit of
"X projects" than anything NASA has done in too long.
In the case of the management of the Human Genome
Project, biologists themselves aren't all in agreement, even though they
generally agree that the HGP itself was worth the money. The actual story of
how the HGP was run is a fascinating case study: it turns on the conflict
between two viewpoints of scientific management, that of the academic
biologists running the public project versus that of Craig Venter and his
coworkers at Celera. The two books I cited on the genome project probably
give as good an overview as is currently available, and will probably
convince most readers that there is no one answer to this. Without Celera's
competition, the public HGP might well have dragged on for several more
years before finally adopting the faster methods that let it get a draft
human sequence done by 2001. Yet, without the public HGP's ethic of open
access and perfectionist completion, we'd have neither a freely available
genome nor a gap-free one. That's probably the only test case in history so
far where two different approaches (public vs. private) were tried on a
large-money problem in biology at once. I think it's telling that neither
side was necessarily all right or all wrong.
In the case of California stem cells, I'm afraid you
may be right: this isn't something that a state in a budget deficit should
be spending three billion dollars on. I can only hope that the money ends up
not being squandered and that we don't get too many other cases of such
lump-sum expenditures.
--Erich Schwarz
You will note I said NIMH in my horrible examples,
not NIH; I agree that NIH has done pretty well. So has NSF, which I
sometimes cite as an example of what government can do right, and as one of
the few agencies in government I think may be underfunded.
But if they had got ten billion for a single
project you would be sure that the parasites would attach themselves and the
project would cost $20 billion and never get finished. Too much money simply
attracts parasites. It's a Pournelle/Niven law. Parasite control is the key
to science management.
The Genome Project is a different kettle of fish:
it was valuable, all right, but the hype, much of it coming from people who
wanted more money for their part of it, promised far too much. Bethell is
right in pointing out that what the public has been led to expect seems
awfully slow in coming -- and as you say, there hasn't been a lot of
explanation as to what we did get out of it either.
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