Science Channel - Is This a Good Idea?

Placebo Surgery?

A pal of mine, medical journalist Kent Steinriede of Outpatient Surgery Magazine, recently tipped me off to the strange phenomenon of sham or placebo surgery, in which medical researchers perform what essentially are fake operations on a portion of the patients in a clinical trial, in order to test the efficacy of a particular surgical procedure.

Here’s an example of how sham surgery works. A few years back, researchers from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Baylor College of Medicine wanted to find out whether arthroscopic surgery, then a common treatment for osteoarthritis of the knee, really did patients any good. A Baylor press release explains how they went about answering the question:

In the study, 180 patients with knee pain were randomized into three groups. One group received debridement, in which worn, torn, or loose cartilage is cut away and removed with the aid of a pencil-thin viewing tube called an arthroscope. The second group underwent arthroscopic lavage, in which the bad cartilage is flushed out. The third group underwent simulated arthroscopic surgery; small incisions were made, but no instruments were inserted and no cartilage removed.

It should be mentioned that when potential subjects for the study were informed beforehand that they might be receiving sham surgery that would have no effect on their condition instead of an actual arthroscopy, 56 percent — more than half — still agreed to participate. But the results were even more startling:

During two years of follow-up, patients in all three groups reported moderate improvements in pain and ability to function. However, neither of the intervention groups reported less pain or better function than the placebo group. Indeed, the placebo patients reported better outcomes than the debridement patients at certain points during follow-up. Throughout the two years, the patients were unaware of whether they had received real or placebo surgery.

This was particularly significant, because previous studies conducted without a sham group had reported that the majority of arthroscopy patients got relief from knee pain. The V.A.-Baylor study showed that it may not have been the surgery that caused their improvement, but rather the Subject Expectancy Effect  — i.e., if a patient thinks that a treatment will work, he or she has a better outcome than a patient who doesn’t really believe it will help.

The effect was even more startingly apparent in a University of Denver study published in 2004 on the effectiveness of transplantation of human embryonic dopamine neurons into the brains of persons with advanced Parkinson's disease. Half the patients were given the transplants, while the others received a phony operation in which small holes were drilled into their skulls for realism. Those who got the real operation experienced measurable improvements in movement, while those who got the sham surgery didn’t. Nevertheless, a year later, patients who believed that they had received a transplant reported a better quality of life than those who believed that they hadn’t gotten one, regardless of whether or not they actually had. Moreover, doctors treating the patients — who didn’t know which of them had the real transplants — reported more improvement in those who believed they’d received the treatment. As Science Daily reported:

One patient, for example, reported that she had not been physically active for several years before surgery, but in the year following surgery she resumed hiking and ice skating. When the double blind was lifted, she was surprised to find that she had received the sham surgery.

You may ask: How could that possibly be? How could patients experience results from a fake operation that doesn’t actually do anything? Are they simply being fooled into thinking that they feel better? Perhaps not. University of Michigan researchers have found that after patients were told that a fake medicine would alleviate their jaw discomfort,  it apparently caused their bodies to produce endorphins, a chemical that reduces pain. As this BBC News story details:

Their brain scans also showed that they had more endorphin activity after simply being told they were about to get the "medicine."

The most pronounced effects were seen in four parts of the brain known to be involved in processing and responding to pain, namely the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the pregenual rostral right anterior cingulate, the right anterior insular cortex and the left nucleus accumbens.

Furthermore, activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was associated with the expectation of pain relief.

Activation of the other brain areas was associated with relief of the intensity of pain, how unpleasant it was and how the individuals felt emotionally during the pain.

This leads me to an extremely bizarre — but nevertheless intriguing — thought: If fake surgery actually helps study subjects, what about using it to treat ordinary patients, particularly ones for whom no other effective treatment seems to be available? To medical ethicists — some of whom object to the use of sham treatments even in clinical trials — this would be total heresy.  On the other hand, as I was surprised to learn, many doctors already occasionally engage in therapeutic deception. According to the American Medical Association AMedNews.com, a recent survey of 231 physicians revealed that nearly half had treated their patients with placebos, and 8 percent had used such fakery more than 10 times in the past year. (Only 4 percent of the doctors had bothered to inform patients that they might be receiving the proverbial sugar pill, despite a 2006 AMA report that condemned the use of placebos without patient consent as a breach of trust.)

So, what do you think? Should doctors use fake operations to tap into the placebo effect and try to help consenting patients who might not see improvement through conventional treatment? Or would sham surgery for therapeutic purposes be utterly wrong? Express your opinion below.

Should China Try to Modify the Weather at the Summer Olympics?

If you’re a fellow conspiracy-theory buff, you’re undoubtedly aware of the suspicions raised on the Internet about so-called chemtrails, which resemble ordinary aircraft exhaust to everyone except those who believe they actually are part of a top-secret U.S. military plot to control the weather. The truly ironic thing about that supposition is that on the other side of the planet, virtually unnoticed by online cabal enthusiasts, somebody else has been engaged for decades in a massive meteorological manipulation effort that vastly outstrips anything ever attempted in this country. I’m talking about the government of China and its half-century-long effort to make it rain — or not rain — wherever it chooses.

It is true that weather manipulation was pioneered in the 1940s by two American scientists, Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut (brother of novelist Kurt). They got the idea of using substances such as silver iodide and frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice) to cause super-cooled liquid water in clouds to form ice crystals, which then fall to Earth as rain or show. But it was the Chinese who embraced the concept and put it to work on a large scale in the mid-1950s, as a way of combating the devastating droughts and water shortages that historically have plagued their country. Communist founding father Mao Zedong gave the effort his personal blessing, opining that “man-made rain is very important … I hope that meteorological professionals put more effort into it.”

And they did. By the 2000s, China’s national Weather Modification Office was spending $100 million annually on its weather modification efforts, which employ 50,000 workers and an arsenal of nearly 7,000 artillery pieces and 4,000 rocket launchers to pummel the clouds with rain-inducing chemicals. By China’s own estimate, its  rainmakers generated an additional 250 billion tons of rain between 1999 and 2007, an amount sufficient to fill the Yellow River four times over. Qin Dahe, director of the China Meteorological Administration, has boasted to the Chinese news agency Xinhua that “China has become the world's number one in its weather modification service scale.”

Western scientists, it should be mentioned, are skeptical about the Chinese claims about their weather-manipulating capability.

In addition to making it rain or snow on command, China’s weather modifiers are now taking on an even more ambitious task — preventing rainfall that might put a damper on this summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing.  A recent article in Technology Review describes their plan:

"To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird's Nest, the city's branch of the national Weather Modification Office — itself a department of the larger China Meteorological Administration — has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.

First, Beijing's Weather Modification Office will track the region's weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer.

Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city's weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.

Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Bird's Nest will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won't fall until those clouds have passed over. Zhang Qian, head of Beijing's Weather Modification Office, explains, 'We use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their average size. As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall, and precipitation can be reduced.' August is part of Northeast Asia's rainy season; chances of precipitation over Beijing on any day that month will approach 50 percent. Still, while tests with clouds bearing heavy rain loads haven't always been successful, Qian claims that 'the results with light rain have been satisfactory.'"

Western scientists have expressed their doubts about whether any of this will actually work. A 2003 National Academy of Sciences report concluded that although seeding clearly caused changes in clouds, there was insufficient data to prove that attempts to manipulate the weather really are effective. “There is no scientific literature available that can substantiate (Chinese) claims,"  Roelof Bruintjes, who leads the weather modification group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, recently told the Denver Post. "Personally, I'm very skeptical about what they're claiming to do."

But let’s suspend that disbelief for a second, and assume that the Chinese weather manipulators can indeed halt Beijing’s summer rains. Tampering with the city’s weather may well exacerbate Beijing’s infamously polluted air, which contains the highest levels of poisonous nitrogen dioxide on the planet. "The only thing that cleans up the pollution is the rain," explains Veerabhadran Ramanathan, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California-San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in a recent interview with USA Today. “And if they are going to suppress rain, my worry is the pollution will be oppressive. It's a Catch-22."  Staging endurance running and cycling events in such conditions could cause athletes to perform wretchedly and possibly even endanger their health — thus tarnishing the luster of China’s big moment on the world stage.

So, what do you think? Should the Chinese try to manipulate the weather during the Olympics? Or should they let nature take its course? Express your opinion below.

Test Tube Burgers?

I’ll be honest. One of the big reasons that I’m a former vegetarian is that, despite my nagging guilt about eating something with a disturbingly cute face and my concerns about the serious environmental problems caused by raising massive numbers of animals for food, I finally just got sick of a steady diet of tofu burgers. You can slather them in mustard, mayonnaise and/or barbecue sauce, top them with a big juicy slice of vine-ripened tomato, and wash them down with a sip of Fosters’ new environmentally-friendly lager, whose brewing process uses a microbial fuel-cell process to generate energy from the byproducts. But despite all that taste bud obfuscation, when it comes down to it, you’re still chewing on bean curd.

But at last, there may be a near-future solution for those of us who are reluctant carnivores. Instead of raising and slaughtering animals for their flesh, what if the muscle cells that make up meat were cultured and grown in big vats in laboratory-factories?

The idea has been around for quite a while. Back in the late 1980s, the late academic and futurist  Michael Hooker went around giving speeches in which he predicted that in vitro meat would be a staple of the 21st century. The actual science to support the notion came along a decade or so later, when Touro College bioengineer Morris Benjaminson and colleagues successfully took chunks of muscle tissue from a goldfish, immersed them in a vat of nutrient-rich liquid, and succeeded in growing miniature fish fillets. As this 2002 New Scientist article details, the Benjaminson and his research team actually went a bit further to test the artificial food’s palatability:

To get some idea whether the new muscle tissue would make acceptable food, they washed it and gave it a quick dip in olive oil flavoured with lemon, garlic and pepper. Then they fried it and showed it to colleagues from other departments. "We wanted to make sure it'd pass for something you could buy in the supermarket," he says. The results look promising, on the surface at least. "They said it looked like fish and smelled like fish, but they didn't go as far as tasting it," says Benjaminson.

Benjaminson envisioned in vitro meat as a potential food source for NASA astronauts on lengthy space voyages, but animal rights activists quickly glommed onto the concept as well. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has offered a $1 million reward to the first scientist who can develop a palatable synthetic meat and sell it to the public by 2012. As part of the contest, PETA proposes holding a taste test, using a cruelty-free fried chicken recipe. 

Others are proposing in vitro meat as the solution for feeding the world’s burgeoning population without further straining the environment. Norway recently hosted the first-ever In Vitro Meat Symposium, at which researchers released a European study projecting that synthetic meat could be produced for a little more than $5,000 a ton, a cost that would make it competitive with meat from animals. Along these lines, Dutch researchers are forging ahead with efforts to grow ersatz pork chops (here’s a Reuters article on that).

In this country, New Harvest, a nonprofit research organization, is working to fund research and development of meat substitutes. (Here’s New Harvest’s FAQ on in vitro meat.) New Harvest co-founder and director, Jason Matheny, thinks that manufactured meat could be in supermarkets within a decade. In an email, he argues that it will be vastly better for us, in a variety of ways:

Cultured meat has the potential to be healthier, safer, less polluting, and more humane than conventional meat. Fat content can be more easily controlled. The incidence of foodborne disease can be significantly reduced, thanks to strict quality control rules that are impossible to introduce in modern animal farms, slaughterhouses, or meat packing plants. Inedible animal structures (bones, respiratory system, digestive system, skin, and the nervous system) need not be grown. As a result, cultured meat production should be more efficient than conventional meat production in its use of energy, land, and water; and it should produce less waste. Since meat production is responsible for even more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector, it's critical that we develop a more efficient alternative.

Perhaps the biggest question: How eager will we all be to pick up a package of synthetic ground sirloin patties and throw them on the grill? Are we willing to eat something that was nurtured in a nutrient-rich solution, rather than on pasture grass? Are we willing to embrace and consume something unnatural, for the sake of the planet? Or does the very idea of synthetic food conjure up unappetizing memories of the late Charlton Heston revealing the actual ingredients of Soylent Green? Express your opinion below.

RFID Tags Tracking Everything (Including You)?

What do graduate students, faculty and staff in the University of Washington’s computer-science and engineering department have in common with cases of air freshener at Wal-Mart? All are being tracked continuously, everywhere they go in the building, by Radio Frequency Identification tags.

In case you’ve been living in a cabin in a remote part of Montana for the past few years, RFID tags are electronic devices that store information and then transmit it whenever they pass within range of one of the receivers in a network. (That’s the simplistic explanation; for all the nuances, check out this RFID primer from HowStuffWorks.com.) RFID has been around for a while; the basic concept, in fact, dates to the “identification friend or foe” transponders developed to protect Allied airplanes from being shot down by their comrades on the ground during World War II. But RFID has mushroomed in recent years, as the devices have become progressively tinier — Japanese electronics manufacturer Hitachi has created “super micro” tags that measure just one-twentieth of a millimeter in length and width — and their applications have become increasingly sophisticated. 

Considering how easily we all misplace our stuff, and how much government and corporate bureaucracies relish the ability to verify who people are and access data on them with instantaneous ease, it’s probably not that surprising that RFID technology is rapidly becoming the 21st-century electronic equivalent of kudzu. RFID tags are showing up on everything from Levi's blue jeans on clothing store shelves to surgical sponges, in an effort to thwart their alarming tendency to remain inside operating-room patients. Retailers and banks clearly are enthralled with the notion of  a cash-free future in which consumers pay for purchases via RFID credit or debit cards, without even having to sign their names to a credit card slip (or even open their wallets, perhaps). The State Department puts them inside U.S. passports. RFID system maker Verichip markets a device that can be attached to newborn babies’ legs  in maternity wards, to avoid accidentally giving a mother the wrong infant. And here’s a YouTube clip in which former Bush administration Health and Human Services secretary and failed presidential aspirant Tommy Thompson, who for a time served on the board of Verichip’s parent company, even touts the advantages of having one of the company’s identification chips imbedded under your skin, in order to make it possible for emergency room doctors anywhere to access your medical records online.

But participants in the University of Washington’s RFID Ecosystem Project are taking the technology even further. They’re voluntarily carrying personal RFID devices that allow them to be tracked by 200 receivers scattered throughout the school’s computer-science building (with the exception of a few off-limits spots, such as the restrooms), and to receive and exchange information as well. The system can track who goes where in the building and who meets with whom, data that the study participants themselves can access and use in a variety of ways. As this video illustrates, it’s possible for an impatient participant to see whether a colleague actually is on the way to a scheduled meeting, or to amass a precise log of all the casual hallway encounters that he or she has in the course of a week. It’s even possible to walk into a room, overhear music that another participant is listening to, and automatically capture a Weblink to the same MP3 file so you can download it later. Here’s a pretty good ZDNet article on the experiment.

Though the project demonstrates innovative uses of RFID, its real purpose is to predict and measure the impact of a future RFID-wired society upon the humans who’ll live in it. As the study’s FAQ explains:

Our hope is that the qualitative and quantitative data we collect in our user studies will help us to: 1) Acquire an in-depth understanding of the blaring privacy issues; 2) Uncover and study more subtle privacy issues; 3) Evaluate and iteratively improve the effectiveness of our feedback and control mechanisms, data privacy techniques, and methods for detection and prevention; and 4) Finally, to inform the wider community (including businesses and policy makers) of the privacy-utility trade-offs inherent in emerging RFID systems before such systems become commonplace.

But we may find out a lot sooner what an RFID culture looks like in reality. In China — which spends $5 billion a year on RFID technology, the most of any nation on the planet — the government is creating what in effect will be the world’s largest RFID network, a milieu in which a projected 900 million Chinese citizens will carry RFID-equipped, personal identity cards by the end of 2008. As the New York Times reported last year, scanning a card would give police officials access to an extensive amount of information on an individual:

… work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

It’s not too hard to imagine how the Chinese government might also utilize RFID to keep a billion people under what would amount to pervasive 24/7 scrutiny, especially if RFID data is synched with the massive video-surveillance networks being built in the high-tech metropolis of Shenzhen and other Chinese cities. But privacy advocates warn that our own government — or the private sector, for that matter — could someday be nearly as invasive. As the Electronic Privacy Center warns:

… the ability to track people, products, vehicles, and even currency would create an Orwellian world where law enforcement officials and nosy retailers could read the contents of a handbag — perhaps without a person's knowledge — simply by installing RFID readers nearby. Such a fear is not unfounded. Currently, some RFID readers have the capacity to read data transmitted by many different RFID tags. This means that if a person enters a store carrying several RFID tags — for example, in articles of clothing or cards carried in a wallet — one RFID reader can read the data emitted by all of the tags, and not simply the signal relayed by in-store products.

In the state of Washington, legislators were so aghast at the prospect of corporate RFID spying on consumers that they recently enacted a law barring the remote collection of personal data without prior consent. Other states are considering similar legislation, though it would take nationwide restrictions to really make a difference. So far, Congress seems a bit slow on the uptake.

But there are other, potentially devastating, RFID-related problems that might arise. Security experts have demonstrated how easy it would be for RFID identity hackers to clone the passports and other documents of unwitting travelers, or for terrorists to program a RFID-enabled explosive device that would wait for an American citizen to walk by before it went off.

And finally, there are those Biblically-minded naysayers who suggest that RFID tags may actually be the mark of the beast prophesied in the Book of Revelation.

No wonder that some people are so nervous about having the various RFID tags they carry around with them hacked that they’re resorting to wrapping them in signal-blocking aluminum foil, though those with more fashion sense are opting for metal-lined designer wallets. Dutch computer-science assistant professor Melanie Rieback, has come up with an even more technologically sophisticated countermeasure — the RFID Guardian, a portable battery-powered personal firewall with the ability to selectively block RFID receivers.

So, what do you think? Should we put aside our skepticism and privacy fears and eagerly embrace the ease and convenience of an RFID-enabled global culture? Or should we all stock up on aluminum foil? Express your opinion below.

Personal Jet Packs?

I’m hearing complaints that I tend to blog too much about bleak, scary hypothetical end of the world  scenarios.  As a result, I’m going to put aside my previously planned topic — the pros and cons of various strategies for dealing with a global onslaught of flesh-eating zombies — and instead focus on a subject that inspires a tad more bonhomie: The personal jet pack.

If your only familiarity with the personal jet pack comes from the James Bond flick Thunderball, in which Agent 007 relies upon the gadget to escape some pistol-wielding bad guys, you may be surprised to discover that the jet pack — or rocket belt, as it’s sometimes called — actually is a real, functioning technology that’s been around for more than 60 years. During World War II, German scientists developed the Himmelstürmer (in English, “sky stormer”), a pair of what essentially were miniature V1 missiles  attached to a harness. The device was designed to enable Wehrmacht combat engineers to leapfrog distances of up to 75 yards over minefields, barbed wire and bombed-out bridges. A prototype was captured by U.S. forces and sent back home for study. After the war, the Pentagon wanted to develop a more powerful version, which it dubbed the Small Rocket Lift Device, for use in reconnaissance and amphibious landings.

The first functional personal flying device was the Bell Rocket Belt, invented by engineer Wendell F. Moore in the 1950s and early 1960s, which used nitrogen and highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide to power twin jet nozzles that sprouted from behind the wearer’s shoulders like angel wings. In 1961, a week after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first orbited Earth, an extremely brave individual named Harold Graham made the first unassisted jet-pack flight at an airport near Niagara Falls. He reached an altitude of just 4 feet and traveled about 30 yards, but it was a start. Eventually, Graham managed to elevate to a height of 30 feet and cover slightly more than the length of a football field. That year, he gave a demonstration for President John F. Kennedy at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

Nevertheless, the military was underwhelmed by the original Rocket Belt, because it had one severe limitation: users could only stay in the air for a maximum of 21 seconds. In the late 1960s, the Pentagon took another stab at the concept, investing $30 million to develop Bell’s Individual Mobility System, which employed a gas-turbine jet engine powered by kerosene fuel. The IMS could stay aloft for 20 minutes and cover much larger distances than the Rocket Belt, but it too had drawbacks. The system weighed a hefty 170 pounds and was loud enough to make it useless for surveillance. The project eventually became a victim of budget cuts.

From then on, other than the jet-pack pilot who made a spectacular landing at the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and an occasional appearance as a prop in science fiction movies, the concept was pretty much relegated to the dusty corner of oblivion occupied by the likes of the Amphibicar, the Dymaxion House and the Picturephone.

That is, until recently, when two companies — U.S.-based Jetpack International and a Mexican competitor, Tecnologia Aeroespacial Mexicana — began marketing personal flying devices to civilian thrill seekers who happen to have $150,000 or so to spend. Both are developing next-generation gadgets that promise to break through the previous time and distance limitations. According to a 2007 story in Popular Mechanics, Jetpack’s upcoming $200,000 T73 model, scheduled for release sometime in 2008, will burn jet fuel instead of using hydrogen peroxide, and will remain aloft for 19 minutes with an 11-mile travel range. Meanwhile, TAM is working to develop its own Jet Belt, whose single titanium jet engine will be capable of delivering 490 pounds of thrust.

So will jet packing become the next hot extreme sport? As this YouTube video suggests, it must be incredible fun. The downside: As the manufacturers readily admit, personal flying devices are pretty dangerous and require lots of careful training. Is the prospect of a careless adrenaline junkie running out of fuel and plummeting to Earth — or crash-landing on the roof of your house — simply too great of a risk? Express your opinion below.

Should We Replace Oil With Switchgrass?

I don’t know about you, but I feel pretty bummed every time I pull my aging, bumper-sticker laden Saturn sedan up to a gas station pump, and not just because I know that filling the tank is going to eat another chunk out of my bank balance. Since I work out of my home, I don’t drive as much as I used to, but even the 6,000 miles that I put on the odometer each year puts about 2.1 tons of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, according to this handy dandy carbon footprint travel calculator that I recently found on the Web. Neither do I much like the idea that I’m contributing to the ongoing American orgy of oil consumption that some critics say finances terrorism and/or props up authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. (Of course, it should be mentioned that according to the U.S. Department of Energy, our biggest foreign oil source is decidedly non-authoritarian, non-terroristic Canada.) But I’m in a bind. I can’t afford right now to trade in my circa-1997 clunker for one of those spiffy Toyota Prius hybrids and then shell out another $6,000 or so for the aftermarket modification that’ll enable it to run primarily on electricity. By the same token, I don’t want to feel all angst-ridden every time I get the urge to roll over to the local American Apparel store and buy some hip-looking '70s retro tube socks.

Finding an alternative fuel to replace gasoline, one that would work in old-fashioned internal combustion engines like the one my Saturn has, would be the ideal short-term fix. For years, agribusiness and Midwestern politicians have been touting corn ethanol as the panacea for our plight — one that, perhaps not coincidentally, would also jack up the market price of the crop from which it is made. But switching to corn ethanol wouldn’t do that much to reduce our energy consumption, since according to this CNN.com article, the fuel yields only 40 percent more energy than it takes to cultivate and distill it. It wouldn’t help much with greenhouse gas emissions, either, because burning it produces only 10 percent to 15 percent less of those emissions than gasoline. Beyond that, corn-based ethanol in some ways might actually exacerbate global warming, because as this article explains, it causes U.S. farmers to grow corn instead of soybeans, creating an economic incentive for Brazilian farmers to slash and burn down more of the Amazon rain forest so the land can be used for soy cultivation.

But there is another possibility. I’m enthused about a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled “Net Energy of Cellulosic Ethanol from Switchgrass.” The study focused upon switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), a hardy plant that covered great stretches of the North American landscape in the days before farmers supplanted it with food crops and pastureland, and its potential as raw material to make cellulosic ethanol fuel. After switchgrass was grown at 10 farms over a five-year period, researchers found that the resulting biomass was capable of generating more than five times as much energy as it took to cultivate it. Moreover, when the fuel made from the switchgrass was burned, the estimated greenhouse gas emissions were 94 percent lower than what would have been emitted by an equivalent amount of gasoline. Furthermore, cellulosic ethanol isn’t going to put a dent into food crop production or endanger the rain forest, because the hardy, fast-growing perennial can be grown in the U.S. on land  that’s unsuitable for other types of farming.

One of the reseachers, U.S. Department of Agriculture geneticist Ken Vogel, explained the switchgrass study’s significance to the Omaha World Herald:

"This clearly demonstrates that switchgrass is not only energy efficient, but can be used in a renewable biofuel economy to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and enhance rural economies," Vogel said.

So what is the downside? Well, critics have argued that cellulosic ethanol would be too expensive to produce in large enough quantities, because turning it into fuel requires enzymes that first have to be slowly and laboriously extracted from organisms such as the fungus Trichoderma reesei, which, unlike our own stomachs, can digest cellulose. That’s why one of corn ethanol’s congressional champions, House Agriculture Committee chairman Colin Peterson of Minnesota, recently predicted that switchgrass is at least a decade away from being a viable alternative to gasoline. "I'm not sure cellulosic ethanol will ever get off the ground,” Reuters quoted him as saying. (Peterson’s home state, it should be mentioned, grows a lot of corn.)

But it turns out that at least two companies, Illinois-based Coskata and the Alternative Energy Technology Center in Texas, are now saying that they can produce cellulosic ethanol for less than $1 a gallon, which would make it significantly cheaper than corn ethanol, and way cheaper than gasoline. And that’s just the start. As this Wired article details, scientists are racing to find cheaper, more efficient methods, such as a genetically engineered microorganism that  would consume cellulose and excrete ethanol, without an intermediate enzyme-extraction process.

Cellulosic ethanol — combined, of course, with the use of other alternative energy sources and increased conservation — seems to me like the obvious way to go. So obvious, in fact, that these days even the ex-oilman currently occupying the White House is talking enthusiastically about using “stalk grass” and wood chips to power our automobiles. But money speaks more truth about priorities, and the actual amount of federal funding for developing cellulosic ethanol technology in the Department of Energy’s FY 2008 budget request is an underwhelming $179 billion. To put things in perspective, the U.S. spends about twice that much each day to fight the war in Iraq. (That’s according to the Iraq Insider blog.)

So here’s my proposal. Instead of aiming to reduce gasoline consumption by 20 percent over the next decade, which is the Bush administration’s target, why don’t we aim higher? After all, JFK set a goal of landing on the moon in 10 years, and American ingenuity made it happen in eight. Let’s ratchet up the research budget by a factor of 10 or 20 — or whatever it takes — and set a goal of completely replacing gasoline with cellulosic ethanol by 2018. Then I finally can drive to the store and buy all the tube socks that I desire, sans remorse. Does that seem reasonable? Feel free to express your opinion below.

Should the Pentagon Develop a Telepathic Ray Gun?

I know some of you may not want to believe this, but the U.S. government may well already have the ability to beam secret commands to you through the fillings in your teeth. Well, not exactly. But close.

A recently declassified 1998 U.S. Army report, “Bioeffects of Selected Nonlethal Weapons,” describes government plans for a microwave weapon that would transmit voice communication that seems to emanate from within a human target’s own brain. (It was obtained and posted on the Web by Freedom From Covert Harassment & Surveillance, a Cincinnati-based organization that advocates on behalf of people who believe they are being stalked and subjected to “electromagnetic harassment.”)

To quote the report:

Because the frequency of the sound heard is dependent upon the pulse characteristics of the RF energy, it seems possible that this technology could be developed to the point where words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken word, except that it could only be heard within a person’s head.

This is possible because of something called the Microwave Auditory Effect, which was first discovered during World War II, when people working in the vicinity of radar transponders complained of hearing strange clicking noises that other people nearby didn’t notice. The effect is caused by thermal expansion of the region around the cochlea. In the 1960s, neuroscientist Allan H. Frey, who was the first to publish research on the effect, was able to induce it in human subjects with pulsed microwaves from a transmitter 100 meters away.

It’s unclear just how far the government’s microwave auditory research and development efforts have progressed since 1993, when the report was written. Another sort of microwave weapon described in the report — the Active Denial System, which causes targets to experience an intense burning sensation on their skin without actual injury, has in fact been developed and may be deployed as soon as 2010. According to New Scientist, the first media outlet to disclose the declassified 1993 report, the U.S. Navy in recent years has funded research on a weapon that would use the Microwave Auditory Effect to disperse crowds.

While the 1993 report notes the technology’s potential as a method of transmitting secret messages, it puts more emphasis on how microwave transmission of words could be used as a nonlethal weapon:

It may be useful to provide a disruptive condition to a person not aware of the technology. Not only might it be disruptive to the sense of hearing, but it could be psychologically devastating if one suddenly heard  “voices within one’s head.”

Blasts from the telepathic ray gun essentially would simulate the auditory hallucinations experienced by people suffering from schizophrenia or mood disorders. As this article by Yale University psychiatry professor Ralph Hoffman explains, those illusions can be both excruciating and debilitating:

… Voices produce a stream of speech, often vulgar or derogatory (“You are a fat whore,” “Go to hell”) or a running commentary on one’s most private thoughts.

The compelling aura of reality about these experiences often produces distress and disrupts thought and behavior. The sound of the voice is sometimes that of a family member or someone from one’s past, or is like that of no known person but has distinct and immediately recognizable features (say, a deep, growling voice). Often certain actual external sounds, such as fans or running water, become transformed into perceived speech.

One patient described the recurrence of voices as akin to being “in a constant state of mental rape.” In the worst cases, voices command the listener to undertake destructive acts such as suicide or assault.

Provided that the technology could be developed to the point where transmissions could be beamed over long distances, microwave voice transmissions might be used on the battlefield to fill enemy soldiers’ heads with a disorienting stream of gibberish, or unnerve them with an authoritative-sounding voice telling them to surrender. But the telepathic ray gun might have even more potential for covert operations. Imagine being able to drive North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il into a state of incoherent delirium in front of his generals, weakening his grip on power. Or giving an unwitting Al Qaeda lieutenant mental orders to assassinate Osama bin Laden, in the fashion of The Manchurian Candidate.

Of course, the potential for abusing such a weapon is also immense. We’re talking hypothetical here, but what if a future U.S. president decides that it doesn’t fit the legal definition of torture and authorizes its use to break terrorism suspects? (Come to think of it, microwave telepathy would have been acceptable under the infamous 2002 memo that a Bush administration lawyer wrote to justify legally questionable interrogation methods used in Guantanamo and other, more secretive prisons.) What if the White House, in cahoots with the Pentagon, used it against political opponents of a war it wanted to wage?

So what do you think? Should the military develop a telepathic ray gun? Or, if it turns out that they’ve already developed such a weapon, should it ever be used? Offer your opinion below.

Should Scientists Create a Doomsday Ark on the Moon?

Just in case you’ve been refusing to believe that this planet is in increasingly dire shape, the Telegraph UK has a story that should rattle your cage a bit. Here’s the gist:

Plans are being made for the first experiments to pave the way for a "doomsday ark" on the moon.

The ark would contain DNA, embryos and all the essentials of life and civilization, to be activated should Earth be devastated by a giant asteroid, a climate flip or nuclear holocaust.

The information bank would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race, said Bernard Foing, the executive director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group.

A basic version of the ark would contain hard discs holding DNA sequences and instructions for metal smelting and planting crops. It would be buried in a vault just under the lunar surface, where it would be tended by robots.

Transmitters would send the data to heavily protected receivers on Earth in the event of a catastrophe. If no receivers survived, the ark would continue transmitting the information until new ones could be built.

The vault could later be extended to include natural material such as microbes, animal embryos and plant seeds, as well as cultural relics such as surplus museum items.

The European Space Agency, of which ILEWG is a part, hopes to lay the scientific groundwork for the doomsday ark over the next decade, starting with experiments to see whether tulips could be grown and maintained in an artificial ecosystem inside a lunar base. They envision placing the first experimental genetic databank on the moon by 2020, and having the full database in place by 2035, roughly a half-century or so before the most devastating effects of global warming might cause serious disruptions in the human food supply and mass extinctions. (Hopefully, we won’t have a collision before then with a killer asteroid, another scenario that might make the ark a crucial part of human survival.)

The doomsday ark would include some actual living humans as well. As Dr. Foing explained to the Telegraph:

But to develop a true Noah's Ark, we eventually would need to bring people to the moon. Only humans could do all the things necessary to successfully operate a genetic laboratory.

On Earth we are already investigating several activities such as genetic sequencing, cloning, and stem cell research. Our lunar scientists could adapt that technology — cultivating cells, storing them, and doing experiments to ensure that embryology works on the moon.

ESA isn’t the only group thinking about the need for a backup strategy to ensure human survival. William Burrows, director and founder of the prestigious Science and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University, is part of an ad hoc group of space futurists who call themselves the Alliance to Rescue Civilization. ARC wants to back up Earth’s collective hard drive, both its ecosystem and human civilization, on either a lunar base or an orbiting space station:

In the event of a major catastrophe, for example worldwide plague, comet impact, nuclear war or social collapse, the staff of ARC will function in a rescue capacity rather than as librarians. They will be prepared to help the survivors reestablish a functioning technological society, or in the worst instance, to repopulate the Earth themselves, and re-introduce the additionally needed biological species here. The primary mission of ARC will be to secure our tenancy of this planet, although it is fully compatible with plans to extend human settlement beyond the Earth-Moon system. ARC will provide our manned space program with the central purpose which it has so sorely lacked, linking it firmly to human survival on our home planet and elsewhere.

That’s comforting, isn’t it? Even if a catastrophe destroys life on our planet — or we destroy it ourselves — our species would have the means in place for a do-over. Of course, archiving the sum total of human knowledge in a single location — a feat that even the fabled Library of Alexandria didn’t come close to achieving, back in the days when there was a lot less information around — is a pretty daunting task; we’re talking about a lunar data storage center vastly larger than that gigantic server farm that Google is perpetually rumored to be building someplace in Asia. But other things about this idea trouble me as well. If we’re already planning for the planet’s destruction, does that mean we’re conceding that it’s going to happen? Wouldn’t we be better off trying to prevent a potential catastrophe? After all, there’s plenty we can do to combat global warming and/or mitigate its impact. It’s not inconceivable that we could someday eliminate nuclear arsenals. I’ve already written about a possible solution for killer asteroids.

So, what do you think? Leave your comments below.

Preventive Detention for Those with Criminal Genes?

If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend “The Minority Report,” a 1956 short story by one of my favorite authors, pre-cyberpunk visionary Philip K. Dick. (Steven Spielberg made a hit movie that was based, albeit loosely, upon Dick’s story in 2002.) In any case, here’s the scenario: A future cop named John Anderton (portrayed by Tom Cruise in the film) heads the police’s Precrime squad, which relies upon the testimony of a panel of clairvoyant mutants (“precogs”) to arrest murderers before they are actually able to commit their crimes. When Alderton himself is accused of a murder that hasn’t yet happened, he undergoes an eye transplant to hide his identity and then goes into hiding, until he can unravel what he can’t believe is anything but a setup. (I’m not going to give away the story’s ending, but suffice to say that it’s more ingeniously perverse and anti-establishment than the one in the movie.)

I doubt that some mutant gene will ever give us the ability to divine the future. But what if genetic information someday enables law enforcement agencies or the courts to identify future criminals?

Since the 19th century, when statistician, fingerprint-analysis pioneer and advocate for selective human breeding Francis Galton proposed that genes were more important than environment in influencing human behavior, many have believed that some people literally are born to commit crimes. In the 1960s, after the XYY syndrome was discovered, a study of mental patients in Scotland and reports that U.S. mass-murderer Richard Speck had the abnormality popularized the notion — since discredited — that males with an extra chromosome had an innate tendency toward violent crimes. (As it turned out, Speck didn’t actually have XYY syndrome, though his autopsy revealed that he had an abnormal amygdala, a part of the brain that influences social behavior and emotions.)

More recently, scientists have focused on monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A). This enzyme regulates several important neurotransmitters, including norepinephrine, which is involved in anger and arousal of the primitive fight-or-flight response. Researchers have linked low levels of MAO-A activity to aggression in both mice and human subjects. A study of New Zealand males who were abused or neglected as children, published in the journal Science in 2002, found that those who had low MAO-A activity were nine times more likely to exhibit antisocial behavior than others with similarly troubled backgrounds but normal MAO-A levels. Moreover, although only 12 percent of the study subjects had low MAO-A levels, they accounted for 44 percent of the crimes committed by the entire group. (Check out the Brainethics blog for additional research substantiating the possible link between MAO-A and violence.)

Now that the human genome has been mapped, some believe that it’s only a matter of time before scientists zero in on a particular part of the blueprint that relates to the potential for doing evil. Legal scholar Steven Friedland, for example, has envisioned a future world in which justice and genetics would be closely intertwined:

The police would create new strategies of investigation based on the genetic propensities of suspects. When pulled over for speeding, an individual could be asked for a driver's license, registration, and genetic propensities card. When a fight at a bar occurred, the investigating officers could run a genetics check on the participants. Discovery of an accused's genetic propensities would be sought in a wide variety of criminal cases and be made available through computer files for fast, nationwide referencing … At sentencing, the length of the defendant's sentence might be affected by his or her "dangerousness quotient." Rehabilitation would be relegated to an official secondary status and would be oriented toward those individuals whose genes indicated they could be most influenced by environmental factors.

But once we know who has a genetic predisposition to committing crimes, count upon a powerful public outcry for those individuals to be locked up as a preventative measure. There is some precedent: After all, numerous states have passed laws keeping sexually violent predators confined even after their sentences have been served, based on the argument that they suffer from a mental disorder that will cause them to commit more crimes if released. Of course, embracing biological determinism to such a degree would require Americans to abandon the constitutional right to due process (though it could also be argued that President Bush already has crossed that Rubicon for us, with a certain executive order that he issued in November 2001.)

So what do you think? If science develops a method for genetically predicting criminal behavior, should potential genetic criminals be confined before they can act?  Or would detaining people with certain genetic makeups be an intolerable breach of civil liberties? Offer your opinion below.

Should the U.S. Navy’s Use of Sonar Be Restricted to Protect Whales and Dolphins?

My guess is that most of us have a soft spot in our hearts for cetaceans, those highly intelligent fellow mammals who have adapted themselves to life in the water. Remember, for example, the tremendous international outpouring of sympathy and support for Keiko, the orca who was rescued from theme-park captivity and rehabilitated — albeit, not quite successfully — to return to the wild. There are probably nearly as many vehicles emblazoned with "Save the Whales" bumper stickers on American highways as minivan bumpers that tout the achievements of honor roll students. And the 1960s TV series Flipper is still on the air in reruns. (It should be mentioned that the aquatic animal star’s trainer subsequently renounced the practice of coaching dolphins to perform for humans, and became an outspoken animal rights activist.)

That’s why it may come as a surprise that the Pentagon has a long and troubled relationship with cetaceans. During the 1980s, for example, the U.S. Navy spent $30 million in an effort to train bottlenose dolphins as underwater sentries, ignoring animal rights and environmentalists’ protests that the animals were being abused. (Here’s a 1989 New York Times article on the ensuing controversy.)  Dolphins also were put to military uses during the Vietnam War, though that effort remains shrouded in secrecy.

More recently, a major controversy has developed over naval vessels’ use of low-frequency active sonar and its possible role in the mass deaths of whales. After 14 beaked whales went aground after a multinational naval exercise in the Canary Islands in 2002, scientists found that sonar may have startled the marine animals and caused them to come to the surface too quickly, causing them to develop fatal decompression sickness (what in human divers is known as “the bends.”) “Our findings suggest that naval sonar could be killing whales," Spanish veterinary pathologist Antonio Fernández told the journal New Scientist. Scientists also suspect U.S. Navy use of sonar in the deaths of 20 dolphins in the Florida Keys in 2005.

The issue came to a head in the U.S. in 2006, when the U.S. Navy submitted plans for training exercises off the southern California coast to the California Coastal Commission, which has regulatory authority under both state and federal law. The commission insisted on safeguards to protect marine mammals from the effects of sonar, but the Navy declined, so the commission and environmental activists filed a federal lawsuit. A federal judge subsequently issued an injunction, banning the Navy from using sonar within 12 nautical miles of the coast and requiring vessels to monitor for marine animals and shut down their sonar equipment if whales or other mammals come within 2,200 yards. President Bush then decided to intervene and exempt the Navy from pertinent environmental laws, on the grounds that the restrictions “undermine the Navy's ability to conduct realistic training exercises that are necessary to ensure the combat effectiveness of carrier and expeditionary strike groups." Sonar opponents called the move an attempt to make an end run around the rule of law, and in February 2008, a federal judge seemed to agree, saying that the Bush order was “constitutionally suspect.” (Here’s a Los Angeles Times article on her ruling.)

So what do you think? Should the Navy’s use of sonar be restricted to protect marine animals? Or does national security in a time of war trump environmental concerns and animal rights? Express your opinion below.