Perseverence Has Landed - Mars, Here We Come!

 Perseverence Has Landed

Marian L. Tupy: Ten Global Trends that Every Smart Person Needs to Know

 

Interview With A Professional Optimist: Marian Tupy

Sam HillFormer Contributor

Leadership Strategy

I use analytics to explain big trends in business and culture.

circa 1945: Arms of a man drawing an upward line on a graph. (Photo by Hirz/Getty Images)

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Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and co‐author of The Simon Project. He is the co‐author of the recent book, Ten Global Trends that Every Smart Person Needs to Know: And Many Other Trends You Will Find Interesting. Tupy is best known for arguing that when viewed over the long term, things are getting better, better all the time. Here are three questions:

Q: Are things really getting better? It seems like 2020 has been a pretty rough year—COVID, racial injustice and the retreat of democracy around the globe.

A: Progress doesn’t go on a smooth line upward. It’s jagged. There are ups and downs. Look at the first half of the twentieth century. There was a pandemic, a global depression, and two world wars. Still, by the end of the twentieth century the world was better off than it was at the start of the century. To see the progress, it’s necessary to take a longer view.

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Covid is a similar event, but as I pointed out in a recent article in Quillette, we’ve even made progress with diseases. Coronavirus is deadly, but the bubonic plague had a mortality rate of 50 percent [Covid is 0.6%—Ed.] It took 3500 years to eradicate smallpox, 15 years to learn how to treat HIV/AIDS, and five years to come up with an Ebola vaccine. The new Covid vaccines were developed in under a year.

Still, I understand people’s unease. I think we are going through a period of great upheaval. Many of the old truths are no longer being accepted. We don’t know where this will end. I don’t think humanity has any appetite for outright autocracy or war, but things could always get out of hand. People no longer have a sense of where things could go wrong. Our education system has failed us. We don’t teach history and civics. And our elites have failed us. Covid is a good example. Direction from our scientists and leaders has been all over the place—wear masks, don’t wear masks, masks do more harm than good, and so forth.

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Q: If things are getting better, why is everyone’s inbox full of emails every day explaining how the world (and the U.S.) is going to hell in a handbasket?

A: Basically it boils down to natural selection. Humans have been around for about 300,000 years or so. For most of that time, life has been incredibly difficult. If one of our ancestors was walking past a bush and thought he heard it rustle, he could either figure it was nothing and keep going or he could run away. Maybe it was nothing, but then again, maybe it was a lion. There’s no penalty for overreacting, but there’s an extreme penalty for underreacting. The genes of underreactors got weeded out of the gene pool. That’s left us with a vast array of negativity biases. The human brain craves bad news. It’s always on the lookout for threats and dangers. And of course, if that’s what people want, the market will provide it.

Q: So does that mean we should all relax, that everything’s going to be all right?

A: I would never say that everything’s going to be all right, that we’re steadily marching toward some sort of utopia. If we solved every problem in the world, new ones would arise. And there are a lot of ways for things to go wrong—more than there are for things to go right. Progress isn’t inexorable. Even if it were, an asteroid could strike tomorrow morning. But there are reasons to be optimistic. There’s only one animal that generates ideas, us. Ideas are the raw material of  progress. In my next book I talk about the formula for progress. People times freedom. The more people we have, the more likely we’ll come up with geniuses. It’s probably not coincidental that progress has come as the world’s population has grown. People are instrumental, but that’s not enough—they need freedom. If they have the freedom to think and act on their ideas, the more likely we’ll come up with solutions.

Hope for Progeria - -Juvenile Rapid-Aging

 Hope for Progeria

Scientists have achieved a potential breakthrough in the fight against progeria, demonstrating that gene editing can fix a key mutation, effectively doubling the life span of diseased mice. The rare and incurable disease, which affects about one in 20 million people, causes children to rapidly age, with most dying from an associated condition in their teens.

The approach relies on a technique similar to CRISPR known as base editing (see the difference), which can modify pieces of genetic code without breaking the DNA backbone. In progeria patients, a single error in the genetic code limits production of a key protein that normally helps shape the cell nucleus. By fixing the error, normal production of the protein—known as lamin A—resumed and many progeria symptoms were alleviated. The achievement, which must be tested in humans, is a key advancement for similar genetic conditions where full CRISPR editing is not feasible. 

Brush up on DNA and nucleotides here.

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis:

 NY MAG: 

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis:

We need to hear from the people who for years have contended that certain types of virus experimentation might lead to a disastrous pandemic like this one. And we need to stop hunting for new exotic diseases in the wild, shipping them back to laboratories, and hot-wiring their genomes to prove how dangerous to human life they might become.

Over the past few decades, scientists have developed ingenious methods of evolutionary acceleration and recombination, and they’ve learned how to trick viruses, coronaviruses in particular, those spiky hairballs of protein we now know so well, into moving quickly from one species of animal to another or from one type of cell culture to another. They’ve made machines that mix and mingle the viral code for bat diseases with the code for human diseases — diseases like SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, for example, which arose in China in 2003, and MERS, Middle East respiratory syndrome, which broke out a decade later and has to do with bats and camels. Some of the experiments — “gain of function” experiments — aimed to create new, more virulent, or more infectious strains of diseases in an effort to predict and therefore defend against threats that might conceivably arise in nature. The term gain of function is itself a euphemism; the Obama White House more accurately described this work as “experiments that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.” The virologists who carried out these experiments have accomplished amazing feats of genetic transmutation, no question, and there have been very few publicized accidents over the years. But there have been some.

And we were warned, repeatedly.

Related: 

The Wuhan Lab-Leak Hypothesis Goes Mainstream.

60Posted at 8:31 am by Glenn Reynolds   

S

EFA Endless Fro tier Act

POLICY The Limit Does Not Exist

Francis Scialabba

This week, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) unveiled the Endless Frontier Act (EFA).  I’m normally not in the business of covering laws, much less proposed ones. But EFA is an exception since it seeks to turbocharge American “discovery, creation, and commercialization of critical tech.” By that, the lawmakers mean every technology you read about in this newsletter.  EFA’s core proposals Restructure the National Science Foundation into the National Science and Technology Foundation (NSTF) In the NSTF, stand up a Technology Directorate that receives $100 billion over five years and operates like DARPA Hand the Commerce Department $10 billion to invest across 10-15 regional tech hubs over five years This is great news for U.S. universities and businesses, because EFA would pad R&D budgets, establish new scholarships, and create cutting-edge labs and fabrication plants.  What’s driving the frontier mindset? As I wrote in the fall, the private sector overtook Washington in R&D investment four decades ago. EFA’s sponsors want to expand the pool of capital so that all of Washington’s tech priorities are advanced in the U.S. The other reason for EFA, which its sponsors explicitly call out: China. While Beijing’s bid for tech supremacy is better described as a “slow burn” rather than a “Sputnik moment,” the country’s tech industrial base is now a true contender with the U.S. There’s more to come:  China plans to invest $1.4 trillion in emerging tech over the next six years.  Chinese chipmaker SMIC recently announced a $2 billion investment from state-backed funds.  Tencent will spend $70 billion on tech infrastructure over the next five years.  "The U.S. needs to pursue with all-of-the-above strategy and intensify efforts," a person familiar with the legislation told Emerging Tech Brew. Bottom line: As Bill of Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill” could tell you, EFA may never see the light of day. But adding $$$ to tech R&D and accelerating the U.S.-China tech decoupling are bipartisan priorities.

POLICY The Limit Does Not Exist

Francis Scialabba

This week, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) unveiled the Endless Frontier Act (EFA). I’m normally not in the business of covering laws, much less proposed ones. But EFA is an exception since it seeks to turbocharge American “discovery, creation, and commercialization of critical tech.” By that, the lawmakers mean every technology you read about in this newsletter.  EFA’s core proposals Restructure the National Science Foundation into the National Science and Technology Foundation (NSTF) In the NSTF, stand up a Technology Directorate that receives $100 billion over five years and operates like DARPA Hand the Commerce Department $10 billion to invest across 10-15 regional tech hubs over five years This is great news for U.S. universities and businesses, because EFA would pad R&D budgets, establish new scholarships, and create cutting-edge labs and fabrication plants.  What’s driving the frontier mindset? As I wrote in the fall, the private sector overtook Washington in R&D investment four decades ago. EFA’s sponsors want to expand the pool of capital so that all of Washington’s tech priorities are advanced in the U.S. The other reason for EFA, which its sponsors explicitly call out: China. While Beijing’s bid for tech supremacy is better described as a “slow burn” rather than a “Sputnik moment,” the country’s tech industrial base is now a true contender with the U.S. There’s more to come:  China plans to invest $1.4 trillion in emerging tech over the next six years.  Chinese chipmaker SMIC recently announced a $2 billion investment from state-backed funds.  Tencent will spend $70 billion on tech infrastructure over the next five years.  "The U.S. needs to pursue with all-of-the-above strategy and intensify efforts," a person familiar with the legislation told Emerging Tech Brew. Bottom line: As Bill of Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill” could tell you, EFA may never see the light of day. But adding $$$ to tech R&D and accelerating the U.S.-China tech decoupling are bipartisan priorities.

There is a Plan of Action in Chaotic Times

There's a reason the swabs were flown to Memphis.

Gen. Dave Goldfein, the Air Force chief of staff, confirmed that military cargo planes were moving coronavirus testing kits, but did not give specific details during a Wednesday briefing at the Pentagon. The general acknowledged that “we’ve just made a pretty significant movement into Memphis.”

The mission was flown by a C-17 cargo plane using the call “Reach 911,” which landed early Tuesday morning at Memphis International Airport, a major FedEx hub. Shipping the kits to Memphis allows them to be quickly transferred to commercial aircraft and distributed around the country, according to people familiar with the mission.

Esper was echoing the president when he said there wasn't that much the military could do during the crisis. But whatever can be done, they will do.

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Nano News - Morning Brew 7/16/19

Nano News In a perfect world, humans will be able to regrow lost organs and limbs, instantly cure diseases that cause years of pain today, and move away from intrusive methods of treatment. These possibilities hinge on the power to manipulate the human body at a level even deeper than the cell. Well, there's actually a term for that: nanomedicine. But first, we have to define nanotechnology, which is the manipulation of atoms and molecules up to 100 nanometers in size. For scale, a hydrogen atom is 0.1 nanometers; the width of a human hair is about 100,000; the diameter of Jupiter is—not even gonna go there.  Nanomedicine = nanotech + clinical applications, such as tissue engineering, drug delivery, diagnosis, and medical devices. After slow and steady research progress over the last few decades, nanomedicine is getting ready for its opening night. In the next decade, a wave of applications will allow doctors to provide personalized medicine, deliver drugs more effectively, limit harmful side effects, and potentially cure some of the most deadly afflictions.  By 2025, the field is expected to be worth $350.8 billion, mainly driven by therapeutics and diagnostics.  But there are still hurdles. Researchers are facing difficulties reproducing lab results in human patients, and the technology hasn't started scaling yet. Boil it down The promise: Targeted, personalized healthcare that will change diagnosis, drug delivery, and the overall patient experience.  The roadblocks: Nanomedicine still has to pay its dues in clinical trials and scale up its development and manufacturing pipelines.  The projected timeline: Early applications are already on the market. In the next decade, nanomedicine will be used to treat more serious medical conditions.  The major players: Most nanomedicine work is still being conducted in labs across academia and pharma, but it will soon graduate to doctors’ offices near you. You've been a great audience, so here's a bonus chart Can't say we never told you the length of an ant in nanometers.  Francis Scialabba

NANOMEDICINE Kiss Those Side Effects Goodbye

For patients, nanomedicine will usher in an era of care more personal than a sponge bath.  Take cancer, for example. Nanomedicine could help with early diagnosis and the delivery of more effective, localized treatment. It’s auditioning for the roles of... The smoke alarm: Nanomedicine can measure nanoparticles released by cancer cells in the bloodstream to figure out if the cancer is likely to spread.  The detective: It will test dozens (or hundreds) of cancer treatments on cultured cell samples to pinpoint the best course of treatment for an individual patient. The cruise missile: By injecting chemotherapy into nanoparticles that will only release their payload after reaching the cancer cells, you can spare other organs from damage.  The Trojan horse: Drugs masked with nanoparticles can slip past biological barriers into hard-to-reach areas of the body, like the brain.  But it’s not just cancer. Nanomedicine will allow doctors to treat a variety of serious medical conditions, potentially on an expedited timeline. There’s no question it will change the healthcare industry by increasing efficiency, cutting costs, and reshaping how drugs and devices are developed.

NANOMEDICINE Take the Leap

Sometimes the smallest things do pack the biggest punches. Check out our full write-up about how nanomedicine can transform your relationship with your doctor here.  If you’re excited and ready to learn more, check out these resources:  The Marvel Cinematic Universe has featured nanotechnology across its films, from shrinking Ant-Man and the Wasp to building super suits featured in Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Black Panther.  The AMA Journal of Ethics recently examined some of the ethical issues surrounding nanomedicine, including trackable pill technology and the right way to inform patients about nano-based medicines.  After entering a victim’s bloodstream, nanoprobes in Star Trek were used to take over host cell functions. A chemist and a venom expert (solid job title) are working together on hydrogel nanoparticles that could bind to and neutralize snake poison, according to the NYT.