Happy Mardi Gras, Y'All!
Go out and have some fun!

Gene editing: A path to "designer babies"?

So, whose DNA do they stick back in the area they cut out? And how did they figure this out? What might this mean for DNA for family research? Would there be another set of DNA in there from another person who was not in the room when the egg was fertilized?

“The era of human gene editing has begun,” said Vivek Wadhwa in Washington​Post.com. In a major biological breakthrough, a team led by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University have successfully modified the DNA of human embryos to replace defective genes that cause a hereditary heart condition. The scientists used CRISPR, a “gene-editing system” that essentially cuts the faulty DNA portion out and replaces it with a healthy version of the gene. This is a monumental breakthrough—one that could eventually lead to the eradication of “all hereditary diseases,” including cystic fibrosis, early-onset Alzheimer’s, and some cancers. But it has sparked an ethics firestorm. Will gene editing also be used to make people taller, stronger, smarter? Where will we “draw the line”? There are already “plenty of people who wouldn’t think twice about dictating their embryo’s IQ,” said Nicole Russell in the Washington Examiner. The CRISPR research moves us a step closer to “designer babies.”

Sorry, but “these fears are closer to science fiction than they are to science,” said Pam Belluck in The New York Times. CRISPR alters just one gene with a harmful mutation; characteristics like intelligence and height are shaped by thousands of genetic variations. To prevent scientists from going too far with genetic modification, society simply needs strict laws, regulation, and oversight. Every advance of this type has produced “hysterical” predictions of engineered superbabies and mutants, said André Picard in The Globe and Mail (Canada). “We saw it when in vitro fertilization was pioneered” and “when Dolly the sheep was cloned.” Yes, there are potential perils, but with 10,000 single-gene disorders plaguing mankind, think of the “hurt, heartache, and premature death” we can prevent.

Be that as it may, there is still “a great deal we don’t know” about gene editing, said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial. Once people start passing edited DNA to their offspring, “minor issues might become major ones.” When scientists first used genetic modification to create “more uniformly red” tomatoes, for example, they inadvertently “turned off the gene that gave tomatoes flavor.” Who knows what might happen when edited embryos grow and develop? Clearly, preventing disease and suffering is a worthwhile aim. But let’s “get human gene editing right rather than just getting it soon.”

Taken from the August 18, 2017 edition of The Week magazine.

Happy New Year!

I hope your year is full of wonderful surprises and new adventures! If you read this, will you leave a comment below?

Where your atoms came from

This is so interesting. I recently re-watched Bill Moyer's PBS interview with Joseph Campbell and what struck me was that Joseph Campbell used the existence of myths as the conduit for understanding our connectedness to the universe. That myths are our way of understanding that everything that we are made up of is in essence the universe. Powerful stuff.

And it brings me to my father... he was also very struck by this realization. He gave me the book The Power of Myth before he died. I wish I had asked my father more questions about what resonated for him - meaning, what in particular it was that struck him so profoundly. I wonder if he used the Hero's Journey to understand some of the aspects of his own life.

It is worth the watching. And now I need to go out and get the book again.

Taken from the Joseph Campbell Foundation web site.

As much as half of all the matter in the Milky Way, including the atoms that make up the human body, may have come from distant galaxies up to 1 million light-years away, reports NBCNews.com. Researchers at Northwestern and other universities used supercomputer simulations to study how galaxies evolve over billions of years. Exploding stars, known as supernovas, eject trillions of tons of atoms into space with such force that they can escape the gravitational pull of their own galaxy. Carried by powerful galactic winds consisting of gas particles from the supernova explosion, these atoms can travel across the universe at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second to another galaxy—which can then “steal” the material. It was previously thought galactic winds weren’t powerful enough to transfer a significant amount of mass from one galaxy to another. But this new analysis finds that the Milky Way absorbs about one sun’s worth of “star stuff” each year. In a very real sense, says co-author Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, “we are extragalactic visitors or immigrants in what we think of as our galaxy.”

Taken from the August 18th edition of The Week magazine.

Wine wards off diabetes

Back to moderation; as always. This was discussed back in August of 2016 on this blog, here. But even then I was late, as the Week magazine had mentioned it in October 2015. Ironically, readers may have noticed that I am doing the same thing again... writing a lot to clear off my desk.

Consuming alcohol every few days may help protect against type 2 diabetes—even more than not drinking at all. A team at Denmark’s National Institute of Public Health analyzed data from more than 70,000 healthy Danish adults who were surveyed about their health and drinking habits between 2007 and 2012. During that period, nearly 1,750 of the participants developed diabetes. The people who drank alcohol at a moderate rate were significantly less likely to develop the disease: Men who consumed 14 drinks a week had a 43 percent lower risk than teetotalers; women who had nine drinks a week had a 58 percent reduced risk. How often the alcohol was consumed made a difference: Participants who drank three to four days a week were about 30 percent less likely to develop diabetes than those who drank less than once a week. And wine, which contains chemicals that help manage blood sugar, appeared to be more beneficial than beer. Lead author Janne Tolstrup cautioned that the possible benefits of moderate drinking may well be outweighed by the potential health risks. “Alcohol is associated with 50 different conditions,” she tells BBC.com. “We’re not saying, ‘Go ahead and drink.’”

Taken from the August 18, 2017 edition of The Week magazine.

New Orleans turns 300 in 2018

Wow. It's going to be a fun year of celebrations in the city of New Orleans.

Happy New Year!

Wishing my readers good health and abundant happiness this year. May our world makes strides towards peace, acceptance and adventure.

Parabens tied to infertility

And here is another way to trim the family tree... the chemicals in our hygiene products are rendering some men infertile or making their children sick. Pretty scary stuff. You'd think Americans would be outraged. Why aren't we outraged?

Unregulated chemicals in everyday items such as toothpaste, soap, and deodorant could be causing fertility problems for men, a new study suggests. Parabens such as methylparaben and propylparaben are preservatives widely used in U.S. grooming products. To examine the effects of these chemicals on fertility, researchers in Poland studied the lab test results of 315 male fertility clinic patients, reports Reuters​.com. They found that those with higher concentrations of parabens in their saliva, blood, urine, and semen had lower testosterone levels and a larger proportion of sperm that was abnormally shaped or slow moving—factors that reduce the likelihood of fertilization. Parabens were also linked to DNA damage in men’s sperm. The researchers remain unsure why the chemicals may affect fertility, or at what levels they can be harmful—but urge caution all the same. Study leader Joanna Jurewicz says avoiding parabens altogether would be “very difficult, because they are widespread,” but suggests checking labels on personal care products to limit consumption where possible.

Taken from the September 8, 2017 The Week magazine.

Disinfectant and superbugs

This is very scary news. It continues to prey on my mind.

Triclosan, a widely used disinfectant, may be contributing to the rise of drug-resistant bacteria, reports LiveScience.com. The antimicrobial agent has been banned from household soaps in the U.S. and European Union over concerns about its safety and effectiveness. But triclosan is still added to hospital soaps and many other household products, including toothpaste, cosmetics, and toys. When researchers at the University of Birmingham in England conducted lab tests on E. coli, they found that when the bacteria mutated to become resistant to powerful quinolone antibiotics, they also became more resistant to triclosan. “We think that bacteria are tricked into thinking they are always under attack and are then primed to deal with other threats, including triclosan,” says researcher Mark Webber. “The worry is that this might happen in reverse and triclosan exposure might encourage growth of antibiotic-resistant strains.”

Taken from the July 21, 2017 edition of The Week Magazine.

Merry Christmas!

Using Viruses to Kill Super-bacteria

I continue to be amazed and horrified by this development in our heath system. And I always think about this wonderful solution found in England using an ancient recipe.

In the intensifying fight against superbugs, researchers are turning to “phage therapy”—a century-old medical technique that predates antibiotics by 25 years. During World War I, microbiologists discovered the existence of viruses that essentially infect and destroy bacteria. While early experiments showed that these “bacteriophages” could be used to treat infections, they were quickly superseded by antibiotics in the 1940s. With the recent rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, however, scientists are giving phage therapy another look. Bacteriophages are ubiquitous—found everywhere from sewage to the human gut—and every type of bacteria is thought to be susceptible to at least one of them. The challenge is finding the right phage-bacteria combination. The process currently involves covering the target bacteria with different viruses, monitoring which parts of the bacteria die, and then cultivating the relevant phage. That currently takes five to 10 days, which would be too long to save many patients—but scientists believe it can be streamlined. The Food and Drug Administration has granted doctors permission to use phage therapy in at least four life-threatening infections. “We desperately need something to treat infections resistant to antibiotics,” bacteriophage expert Carl Merril tells The Washington Post. “We are turning back to these viruses, but with new knowledge and new technology.”

Taken from the July 21, 2017 edition of The Week Magazine.

When the Post Office was Cutting Edge

I have cut and pasted this very long article here because I have two great grandparents who worked for this fine institution. I have more information about Oliver Tree Lee than John Maher. (Here we have some information about one of his daughters Lillian.) The Post Office seems to be the reason that Oliver left NYC and moved to Troy where he met my great grandmother - so I have the post office to thank for my very existence. Eventually I will get back on to family research... I have been distracted recently.

For nearly 200 years, mail service in the United States was a hotbed of new ideas and innovation, said author and researcher Kevin Kosar. Where did it all go wrong?

A pneumatic mail tube in Brooklyn, 1899

In 1897, a year when mail was still largely delivered by horse and wagon, construction began on an innovative scheme beneath the streets of Philadelphia. Using an intricate network of compressors and metal pipes, the new system could shoot a capsule holding a few hundred letters across a city in several minutes, far faster than a postman could get it there. The investor in this new technology wasn’t some kind of delivery startup, the FedEx or UPS of its day. It was the U.S. Post Office.

Behind the experiment was Postmaster General John Wanamaker, who was inspired by Paris, London, and other European cities that were trying out pneumatic posts. It seemed a natural fit for America’s growing metropolises, where mail was hauled by horse cart and carried on foot. Wanamaker had the sense not to try to concoct such a system in-house, since the agency had no such expertise. So he did something clever: He called for private proposals to build pneumatic tube systems.

The Pneumatic Transit Co. of New Jersey was the winning bidder, and a public-private partnership was born. It agreed to pay to build the system, then to charge the Post Office for its use. The first tube could shoot a capsule of mail nearly three-fifths of a mile through a 6.5-inch tube from the city’s main post office to the East Chester Street post office. Soon, similar systems were installed in Boston, St. Louis, and Chicago. New York City’s system, the largest, could move 6 million pieces per day at 30 miles per hour from the Bronx to Manhattan and Brooklyn. Collectively, the Post Office’s pneumatic tube system ran more than 120 miles, with 130 postal “rocketeers” feeding mail into it every 15 seconds.

When Americans think about the most innovative agency in the government, they think about the Pentagon or NASA. But throughout much of its history, that title could just as easily have fallen to the Post Office, which was a hotbed of new, interesting, sometimes crazy ideas as it sought to accomplish a seemingly simple task: deliver mail quickly and cheaply. The Post Office experimented with everything from stagecoaches to airplanes—even pondered sending mail cross-country on a missile. For decades, the agency integrated new technologies and adapted to changing environments, underpinning its ability to deliver billions of pieces of mail every year, from the beaches of Miami to the banks of Alaska, for just cents per letter.

We think a lot about how innovation arises, but not enough about how it gets quashed. And the United States Postal Service is a great example of both. Today, what was once a locus of innovation has become a tired example of bureaucratic inertia and government mismanagement. But its descent into its current state was not foretold. A series of misguided rules and laws have clipped the Post Office’s wings, turning one of the great inventors of the government into yet another clunky bureaucracy.

A mail wagon in Boston around 1895

In a sense, innovation was baked into the Post Office from the beginning. America’s national postal service precedes the founding: It was born in July 1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence was ratified. During the American Revolution, the U.S. postal system’s duty was to deliver communications between Congress and the military commanders fighting the British. And for the first postmaster general, Congress appointed an inveterate tinkerer, Benjamin Franklin. He rigged up a system of contractors to haul mail by horse and on foot. It worked.

From the start, the Post Office Department, as it was called until 1970, had to be innovative. There was little money to fund the startup agency, and its task—delivering mail to anywhere in the country—was immense. In turn, Congress gave the agency a good amount of operational freedom. In 1785, Congress authorized the Post Office to hire private stagecoaches to deliver mail. It was a smart idea that leveraged private-sector investments in transportation but did not commit the agency itself to bearing the great cost of purchasing horses and hiring riders. Later, the Post Office would contract to have mail carried by steamboats, railroads, and private delivery companies.

The agency also had the authority to erect post offices, but at first it licensed tavern owners to provide postal services to thirsty customers instead. That changed during the 19th century, when the postal service expanded massively. In 1790, the nation had 75 post offices; by 1900, there were more than 76,000. Then came home delivery: Mail reached many city dwellers at home by the mid-1860s and expanded to farmhouses and remote houses in the 1880s. Henry Ford built his first car in 1901. Four years later, the Post Office was experimenting with mail delivery by automobile.

The first half of the 20th century was a dynamic time for the Post Office. It immensely improved delivery by adopting innovations from the private sector and abroad. Much like the pneumatic tubes, some of the schemes incorporated new technology we no longer even associate with mail. During World War II, the Post Office adopted V-Mail, an idea pioneered in England. Families wishing to correspond with soldiers overseas would write the letter on a V-Mail form, which was placed in a capsule and shipped to a facility where it was scanned to microfilm. The hundred-foot rolls of film, which could hold 1,700 letters, were carried overseas and unsealed, and then the letters were individually printed and delivered to GI recipients.

Overshadowing all the invention, however, was the creeping sclerosis of the Post Office as an institution. As a monopoly, it was insulated from competitive pressures, allowing inefficiency to creep into its operations and management. Worse, political interests had sunk deep, with Congress setting postage rates too low and too frequently trying to dictate the location of post offices and mail-sorting facilities.

Booming business, however, enabled the postal system to avert a crisis for decades. In 1900, 7 billion pieces of mail were delivered; by 1960, the agency was moving 63 billion letters and parcels. The department often ran a profit, and it sowed those profits into new mail-delivery technologies.

Things began to change in the 1960s. Postal workers unionized, and President John F. Kennedy authorized them to bargain collectively in 1962. Despite growing mail volume, the Post Office ran perennial deficits, and its investment in the guts of the system—mail receipt and sortation—lagged. The system broke down in Chicago in 1966, and 10 million pieces of mail were backlogged for days.

After a wildcat strike broke out in New York City in 1970, Congress abolished the Post Office Department and replaced it with the U.S. Postal Service, an independent agency. The Postal Reform Act removed some of the congressional involvement in its operations. In exchange, policymakers reduced the agency’s dependency on the U.S. Treasury and demanded it become self-sufficient.

This new-look postal system had been conceived by a Nixon-appointed corps of brain trusters and businessmen with the aim of turning the agency into a public corporation with minimal political interference. Instead, the plan infused the new agency’s DNA with some of the same clashing political interests that were hobbling the agency. Big mailers benefit from subsidies written into the law. Postal workers must be unionized and are entitled to bargain collectively. Folks in far-flung Alaska and Hawaii are entitled to the same postage rates and services as everyone else—no matter the cost—and Congress continues to insist that mail be delivered six days per week to appease certain big mailers, postal unions, and some rural residents.

Innovation at the agency flagged. Upgrades in mail-processing machinery were delayed over union objections that jobs would be lost. So, too, were attempts to contract out more postal work to private carriers or delivery companies. USPS operations became increasingly governmental as collaboration with private-sector companies flagged.

At the same time, technology was rapidly catching up to the Postal Service. The first threat was actually a miss: Although the electronic fax arrived in the early 1970s, it did not eat into the USPS’s business. So when cellular-phone technology arrived in the late 1980s and the internet erupted in the mid-1990s, USPS officials mostly shrugged. Annual revenues climbed, and the USPS’s employee cohort rose to nearly 800,000 before the end of the 20th century.

The USPS did upgrade some of its internal technology. Its letter-sorting machines have sensors with optical character recognition. Yet relative to the world around them, these improvements are nothing compared with the Post Office Department’s innovations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of the new sorting machines have not been reliable, and the agency’s parcel logistics lag behind those of private-sector companies like FedEx and UPS. It is as if the agency has given up on innovation and is utterly confident that mail volumes and revenues will grow forever.

Which has been a huge mistake. In 2008, the Great Recession’s teeth hit the mail business. Most mail is sent by big mailers, many of whom slashed their postal budgets and accelerated transferring their communications to less costly online means. Mail volume is down 25 percent since 2008, and the agency has hemorrhaged money. More of what USPS carries is advertising mail, which generates low profits. The mail-volume crash laid bare the cost of the USPS’s loss of innovation mojo. It is a labor-intensive, paper-toting company in a digital age, and USPS leadership has belatedly awakened to the reality that mail is not a growing business.

Private-sector companies may soon eat even more of the USPS’s lunch. Amazon is building a delivery network of its own, with lockers instead of post office boxes, and experimenting with drones. Uber also has nosed into the delivery business, and other companies are experimenting with autonomous delivery vehicles and robots.

USPS so far appears unable to innovate its way out of the mess it is in. The agency has $15 billion in debt and has shown little imagination to fundamentally transform the way it does business.

The agency has piloted a grocery-delivery business, despite the 2006 congressional prohibition on the agency entering new non-postal businesses. To date, the USPS has not released any financial results for this experiment, which seems doomed to fail. Why grocers would rather pay highly compensated letter carriers, rather than less costly bicycle delivery people or Uber drivers, is anything but obvious.

Nothing may sum up the Postal Service’s inability to innovate more than its failed partnership with Staples. A few years ago, the Postal Service agreed with Staples to expand consumer access to its shipping services. Upon entering select locations of the office-supply chain store, shoppers would “find a familiar-looking counter resembling a mini post office containing the most popular postal products and services,” the agency crowed. It was “one-stop shopping and shipping,” and Staples postal counters would be open seven days a week. The agency began piloting the Staples arrangement in November 2013 in Boston. More than 500 Staples stores nationwide had retail postal counters by the end of last year.

At first blush, the USPS-Staples partnership looked like a win-win arrangement. But the American Postal Workers Union did not see it that way. It decried the deal as an effort at union busting, because Staples personnel would man the postal counters.

Earlier this year, the National Labor Relations Board killed the USPS-Staples deal. Too weary to fight or fearful that it could not win in court, the USPS capitulated, and the Staples postal counters are being dismantled.

Pneumatic tubes didn’t survive, either: They became a victim both of their design and the Post Office’s success. Mail volumes grew fantastically over these decades, and the tubes could only carry so much. Ripping them out and replacing them with bigger tubes was deemed too pricey. Moving mail by truck would be more efficient. So the Post Office shut down its pneumatic mail tubes on Dec. 12, 1953.

That was an investment decision—the kind any company would have made, and one that allowed the Post Office to keep growing. The Staples deal, by contrast, drowned in a bureaucratic swamp, tangled up in politics and labor relations. Absent fundamental changes to these kinds of structural obstacles, the odds are long that the USPS will become the innovator it once was.

Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in Politico. Taken from the September 22, 2017 The Week Magazine.