darker times ahead

Every once in a while I write a feature on the ongoing decline and fall of western democracy as it manifests itself in trumpism and various other shades of modern fascism. While this is very depressing to contemplate, it is also very necessary to make clear where we stand and where we may be heading, and it saves me time in turning many hours of doomscrolling into valuable research. The latest instalment was even based on a suggestion from the editorial team, so it's not just me worrying about these things.

The resulting feature is out now:

Beware a new endarkenment

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 8, 24. April 2023, Pages R283-R286

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2023.

I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

Michelangelo’s David, on show at Florence, Italy, has become an issue in the culture wars in Florida’s schools. (Photo: Korido/Wikicommons (CC BY-SA 4.0).)

the counted

I am a huge fan of the Guardian's interactive database "The Counted" which has listed all people who died at the hands of US police since the beginning of 2015. It goes to show what a powerful statement you can make just by compiling data.

No matter if you look at the stats per time (3 people killed every single day) or per population, with vast differences according to skin colour, or if you read individual stories behind the photos. Whichever way you look at it is deeply distressing and very powerful.

Set against the dark mood, I was a tiny little bit cheered to see that the total number of deaths has dropped slightly in 2016 against 2015 (1091 and 1146, respectively). While both numbers are equally horrifying (for comparison, the equivalent number for Germany, with 1/3 of the population, is typically in single digits), I'd like to think that the 5.5 % decline is due to the growing awareness thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement and also perhaps thanks to the monitoring efforts of this database. The relative incidence of deaths among black citizens has also dropped from 7.69 per million to 6.64 (white: 2.95 to 2.9). Still scandalous but at least moving in the right direction. So maybe compiling data can save lives.

On the other hand, Native Americans have suffered a much higher incidence of police killings than the previous year, which might support the argument that historic crimes are allowed to continue under the cover of law enforcement.

screenshot taken on Jan 3rd. Update: checking back on Jan 14th, the count has gone up to 1091. I've updated the figures above, but the conclusions still hold.

Klundt Clan

Migration in my family tree normally works like this – direct ancestors coming in (eg from Wallonia), and aunts/uncles going out (eg to Brazil). There is one married couple of direct ancestors, however, who emigrated to Russia and stayed there for the rest of their lives (to make matters worse, many of their great-grandchildren later emigrated to the US). Fortunately, their firstborn son and his family stayed in Germany, otherwise I wouldn’t be here now and you might be staring at an empty screen. So here comes a story of fearless migrants and wine makers:

Johannes Klundt was born November 2nd 1759 in Wollmesheim, a village near Landau in the Southern Palatinate, a traditional wine growing region, the second of five children of Konrad Klundt and Maria Johanna Bodang (this name appears to be a palatinate distortion of the French name Bonnedame). His parents had a very small vineyard there (just half a hectare), and some 3.5 ha other agricultural land. Splitting this between him and his older brother would have left too little for either party to survive.

Johannes married Eva Hust (1762-1837) in 1781 – she may also have a migration background, as the name Hust is almost non-existent in Germany, but there are lots of them in France and Belgium. They had five sons and a daughter, born between 1782 and 1805.

Moving out

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Russian Tsars actively encouraged settlers from southwest Germany to move to the Odessa area at north coast of the Black Sea, which was then a new addition to the Russian empire and is today part of Ukraine. A village called Rohrbach (today: Новосвітлівка - Novosvitlivka), some 120 km north-northeast of Odessa, was built in 1805 and the first German settlers arrived there in 1806. My ancestors Johannes Klundt and Eva Hust got there in 1809, after a journey of 80 days, most of which was done by ship (specifically, in improvised wooden boxes that were used one-way only) down the Danube.

Source

So who came along and who stayed behind? When Johannes Klundt left, his parents were no longer alive. We know that of his five sons, the first one, Johann Jacob (1782-1853; my four-times-great-grandfather), stayed behind. He had already set up his own family in nearby Godramstein, with his wife Katharina Barbara Müller (1781-1813) from that village and his son Georg Nicolas (1805-1851) who was to become a farmer and wine maker.

The second, Wilhelm (* 1785) was still unmarried and came along. Their only daughter Eva Catharina (* 1792) and two younger sons, Heinrich (1797-1851) and Johann Michael (1801-1876) were still children when the Klundts emigrated, so they came along by default and lived their lives in the German colony near the Black Sea. We don’t know what happened to the other son.

Johannes’s older brother Johann Jacob (1756-XXX) presumably inherited the modest house and land of Konrad Klundt and worked as a cooper and farmer. (There are two family vineyards called Klundt in neighbouring Mörzheim today (led by Sven Klundt and Walter Klundt), but we’re not sure exactly how they are related to this family.)

Intriguingly, one of the many Klundt descendants in Rohrbach, Heinrich’s granddaughter Katherina Klundt (1857-1949) later married a man called Johann Hust, who was also born in Rohrbach, which makes me think that a brother or cousin of our Eva Hust may have emigrated together with the Klundt family. We don't really know much about Eva Hust's family at all, except the names of her parents, so we don't know whom she left behind or may have taken along for the ride.

The four children who came along to Rohrbach between them provided Johannes and Eva with 26 grandchildren, who all (except one) appear to have stayed in the Odessa area all their lives. (Intriguingly the three sons contributed 13 grandsons carrying the name onwards). When Johannes died in 1833, and Eva in 1837, they left behind a healthy and thriving clan that seemed to have established itself in its now environment.

The village economy in general seemed to be doing well in those times, according to this report. Villagers grew large amounts of wheat, but also held sheep and produced some wine. The population of the village grew from 602 in 1816 to 1581 in 1859.

Moving on

From 1871 onwards (with a ten-year transition period), the colonists lost the privileges that they had enjoyed for two generations, and life on the Black Sea suddenly looked a lot less attractive. Apart from the loss of financial incentives, the young men were also facing the obligation of six years service in the Russian army. Thousands of German settlers emigrated again. The population of Rohrbach peaked in 1894, then dropped by a third, mainly as a consequence of migration to the US. Of the more than 60 great-grandchildren of our founding couple, at least 12 emigrated to the US, where they kept the reproduction rate up, so there must be hundreds of descendants of the Klundt families from Rohrbach in the US and also in some other parts of the world. They are listed here by a descendant of Heinrich and here by a descendant of Eva, but I haven't counted.

In 1884, Jacob Klundt (1855-1939), the eldest of Johannes's great-grandchildren, and his wife Maria Lutz (1854-1939) with their children (three were born in Russia, but not sure if all three survived) took the lead and emigrated to Mitchell County, South Dakota. Then they moved to the city of Alexander, South Dakota. Jacob’s mother, Juliana Kulatus (1835-1925), five brothers and one sister, Katherina (the one who married Johann Hust) joined them there in 1889. As the remaining three siblings and their father Heinrich Klundt had died before the emigration, this means the entire surviving clan moved to the US, where Juliana became a proud grandmother of 50. A bunch of Johann Michael’s grandchildren also emigrated to the US between 1893 and 1907, as did a few scattered individuals and families across the board. They had a lucky escape, because the 20th century held disaster in store for those settler families who stayed in Russia.

In 1889, the combined Klundt families moved to Dakem, North Dakota, on three covered wagons. During the years in South and North Dakota, Jacob Klundt and Maria Lutz had another eight children. They tried to establish a farming business there, but found the climate too different from what they were used to on the shores of the Black Sea.

Thus, in 1902, Jacob’s family (with ten children) migrated further west to Franklin County, Washington, where they bought land near the Snake River, north of the town of Walla Walla, from a Mr Page – after whom the location was named in 1903. Conrad’s family followed them, while Katherina and the other brothers stayed in North Dakota.

Until 1919, the Klundts ran a ferry across the river as well as their farm. Jacob’s son Charles Klundt became the first postmaster of Page when a post office was installed in 1903, later to be followed by two of his brothers.

The Klundts also set up a shop, a church, and fisheries. They also established a modest vineyard of two acres and actually produced wine. This makes me think that they probably handed down their wine-making traditions over the generations since they left the palatinate, and also grew vines in Rohrbach. For a more detailed account of their lives in the US, see the historical sketch provided on this page. The village of Page no longer exists, sadly, as it disappeared under water in 1961, when a dam was built on the Snake River. But there are a lot of vines growing on the slopes near the Snake river nowadays, and maybe the Klundts have something to do with that.

So the bottom line is I have every excuse to obsess about wine, it runs in or veins …

Note: Alternative spellings of the name in old records include Clund, Klund, Chlundt.

now and later

Written and directed by French director Philippe Diaz but filmed in Los Angeles and in English, this film juxtaposes a hippie-style, free love and social justice world view to the view of the financial/political/military power. It could have been called “Make love not war”, although the actual title is really quite lovely and clever as you will realise after about 30 minutes.

In principle, we have a chamber piece setting these two world views up against each other. In one corner we have Bill, a disgraced banker, representing the people who think that their money and/or power will let them get away with anything - but, having been ejected from the system he supported, he is now ready to change his views and indeed his life philosophy.

In the other corner, Angela (Shari Solanis), the illegal immigrant offering him shelter for a few days in her gorgeously hippie-styled penthouse flat on top of a derelict hotel, where both the toilet and the shower are completely open-plan and in plain view of everything else, and where part of the neon sign of the hotel serves as lighting for the single room. That room alone is reason enough to watch the movie.

Angela embarks on the re-education of banker Bill, trying to reconvert him into a useful member of society – although it will have to be the society of a different country, as the US authorities want him locked up. With her priorities firmly on her sensual desires, she goes in for the sex first, fitting in the political education later.

To me, as someone who has essentially grown up with the Nicaragua solidarity movement, her political lecturing was a tad over-familiar, although I appreciate that the vast majority of the US audience will not know (or in fact believe, if told) that the CIA sold arms to Iran to finance the removal of a democratically elected government in Nicaragua (it’s called the Iran-Contra affair, look it up). This scandal, which was exposed in November 1986, is kind of hard to reconcile with the prevailing US ideology that “we’re the good guys”, but I can confirm that it is true, I was alive (and young and angry) when it happened. Bill’s response “you read too many novels” was hilarious to me, but probably representative of what a vast number of people would say if confronted with these historical events.

People who don’t like the gospel she preaches may resent the dialogue, but, as washed-up banker Bill proves, Angela’s charm is irresistible, whether or not you share her political opinion. And her roof-top paradise from where she looks down on the social divisions on LA with eagle eyes, is equally seductive.

I’m not exactly sure that the film will convert many Bills to Angela’s views, not least because it is effectively being boycotted and hasn’t been released in the UK at all, neither in cinemas nor on DVD. In the US, it remained unrated and got a review in the New York Times in 2011, when a Manhattan cinema showed it as part of a series of unrated films. Still it remains important to uphold the opposition to the sexual, military and financial oppression of our age, and linking these three may help to broaden the horizons of people who were only aware of one or two.

amazon.com

After the explanations above, it is almost needless to say that the film did not get a release in the UK (and thus joins my fast-growing list of films not shown here). However, it is available on DVD in the US and also in Germany. I’m showing the US edition here, as the German one shows a photo at the top of the cover that isn’t from the film, and I have a nagging suspicion that somebody may have had racist reasons to put Bill’s ex-wife there in her bra (who only appears for 2 minutes in the film, sitting in a café, fully dressed) rather than Angela.

Update October 2024: rewatched the film 11 years later and still love it. A bit worried re what happened to Shari Solanis, she hasn't been in any movies since.

third generation genome sequencers

I have covered the upcoming revolution in genome sequencing, i.e. the development of "third generation" sequencers that can read single molecules and/or use electronic instead of optical base detection a few times now (e.g. this feature in Education in Chemistry and this essay review in C&I), so I'm really excited that we now reach another milestone in this development.

Today, Pacific Biosciences announces the full-scale commercial release of its single molecule sequencer, the PacBio RS.

Without any attempts at false modesty, the company PR declares: "The PacBio RS is a revolutionary DNA sequencing system that incorporates novel, single molecule sequencing techniques and advanced analytics to reveal biology in real time. The system delivers unprecedented sequence readlengths - over a thousand DNA bases on average. And unlike ‘second generation’ systems on the market today that typically take over one week to deliver results, the PacBio RS allows customers to obtain results in less than a day."

Details of how the PacBio machine works are included in my EiC feature, which is openly accessible here.

I have recently written two other features about third generation sequencers (one in English and one in German), which are now in press, so watch this space.

Temple Grandin

trailer of the Temple Grandin biopic, which was shown on UK satellite TV yesterday (and I missed it):



Grandin is a household name for everyone involved with autism, following her memoir Emergence: Labeled Autistic, published in the 90s, but I guess it is a good thing to bring this remarkable life story to a wider audience, which will help raise awareness of autism as well.

There was a feature about Claire Danes, who plays Grandin in the film, in last Saturday's Guardian, which also contained some info about the film and Grandin's story.

Nicole's second debut

Killer love - Nicole Scherzinger

I loved the video releases Heartbeat and Don’t hold your breath (not to mention the first PCD album and all 7 videos from it), so I came to this album with high expectations. It didn’t quite live up to my hopes, but it’s been growing on me after repeated listening. Like the title track and the other single, Poison, both co-written by Nicole, as is Everybody.

The big revelation of the album is the final track, AmenJena, which she co-wrote with Trina Harmon, who is referenced in the acknowledgements as “my teacher and friend.” She recorded this with Harmon playing the piano as the only accompaniment. Finally we get to appreciate Nicole’s voice … Now I have an idea: could the two of them get together and record an unplugged album with the best of PCD and from this album? That could be truly spectacular.



amazon.co.uk

PS: What really annoyed me is the sticky label on the box, saying “Debut solo album from …” Some of us remember that there was a debut solo album called “Her name is Nicole,” which got delayed several times and then disappeared from the radar. I wish record companies were honest about this kind of thing.

mice blend in on Florida's beaches

Love the cover of today's issue of Science - such an intelligent look:



Haven't read the paper yet, but according to the cover caption "beach mice (Peromyscus polionotus) have recently colonized the white sandy beaches of Florida's Gulf Coast, where they have evolved a novel coat color pattern that camouflages them from predators." A paper in this issue shows "how small changes in the level and location of expression of a single gene in the mouse embryo cause large changes in adult color pattern." Photo: Joel Sartore/joelsartore.com

warpaint

there's a feature about the band Warpaint in the Guardian today, so I checked them out on youtube. Loving this track:

Alvin reborn

I was very pleased to hear, last December, that Alvin, the world's oldest active deep sea research vessel, is getting an upgrade rather than being sent into retirement. So I submerged myself in the field of deep sea research once more and had a good look at what's available now, half a century after the bathyscaphe Trieste reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and wrote a news feature about it, which is out in today's issue of Current Biology:

Seabed search boost
Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 3, R94-R95, 8 February 2011
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.01.021
summary and restricted access to pdf file




Photo: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
source

the feminine art

book review

The feminine art
Weam Namou
Hermiz Publishing 2004


The charming characters of this novel are all, like the author, Chaldean migrants (or at least would-be migrants) from Iraq, i.e. members of the Christian minority in the Middle East. According to the blurb, Namou is “the first […] Chaldean American novelist to portray the descendants of ancient Mesopotamia …,” so the book promises a new take on intercultural experiences.

That promise is kept very nicely in the first part (2/5) of the book, while the characters live their ordinary lives in suburban Michigan, and their very oriental values are shown in sharp contrast to the American way of life. For instance, the thorough preparation and consumption of food seems to pervade people’s thoughts so comprehensively that practically every metaphor used comes from cooking, and every relationship is defined in terms of who cooks what for whom. In a way, this is a celebration of “slow food” and as such preferable to the American culture of junk food, but one can’t help feeling that it also stops people from achieving anything else in their lives, as food and family networking seem to take up 100% of their time. Similarly, the quest for an arranged marriage, which drives the plot of the story, contrasts with the sexual freedom that the potential groom has enjoyed in the US so far.

Not knowing (or caring) much about religions, I got the impression that the value system on display here seems to resemble those of Islamic communities from the Middle East more closely than those of European Christians. I only mention this because it suggests, interestingly, that geography and history may have had a stronger influence in shaping it than the actual religion.

Intriguingly, the characters (and their real life models?) don’t seem to appreciate the value of their heritage languages (Arabic and Aramaic) for their cultural identity, as it is mentioned that they randomly speak English, Arabic, or Aramaic to each other throughout the day, and often it appears to be English with Arabic words thrown in, as it is in the novel. As a former agony aunt in all things bilingualism I believe that if one wants to maintain one’s cultural heritage, the first and most obvious thing to do is to speak the heritage language consistently (and unmixed) whenever it is possible without offending outsiders.

To me, the novel lost interest a little bit after the action moved to Amman, the capital of Jordan, where the groom is to meet his prospective bride from Baghdad, and a wedding is to take place, or maybe not. With the geographical side of the culture clash removed from the equation, only the clash between the mildly Americanised Chaldeans and those fresh from Iraq remains. We are left with a claustrophobic circle of people panicking over wedding arrangements, while the underlying emotional conflicts remain veiled (or maybe one needs the "feminine art" to figure out what’s really going on, but I’m afraid as a man I need to have it explained in plain English). Although the beginning of the novel played the contrast of Michigan vs. Baghdad really well, I got absolutely no sense of place from the parts set in Amman.

Also galling the experience is a complete lack of editing – there are homophones and other spelling errors throughout the book (e.g. people waive for taxis and message their legs!), which has clearly never passed the hands of a competent copy-editor. These moans aside, it has been a very interesting insight into a culture that doesn’t get all that much media attention.

bhopal - the disaster continues

Following on from my earlier rant re. the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, there is further depressing news about this in yesterday's Guardian. A trial has come to an end but the disaster continues.

Seven convicted over 1984 Bhopal gas disaster (news report re. the outcome of the trial)

Editorial including an enlightening comparison with the current BP disaster.

Comment by Indra Sinh who says: "The people most responsible for the disaster in Bhopal were not in the courtroom today when the verdict against eight Indian employees of Union Carbide India Limited was announced."

"opportunities to learn from Cuba"

[deutsche Version]

The US trade embargo against Cuba is turning 50 this year, and one should hope that after half a century of watching this policy fail to achieve its goals, even the most blockheaded lobbyists should start to scratch their heads and have a good re-think. But then again, one should have hoped that, too, after a whole century of catastrophic failure in the “war on drugs.”

Anyhow, very subtle signals seem to indicate that the US are slowly but surely beginning to move on this issue. Among the signals is the recent publication of a “Policy Forum” piece by Paul Drain and Michele Barry in Science magazine (vol 328, p 572, 30.4.2010), analysing the effect of the embargo on public health in Cuba and the reasons why Cuba’s health system has been spectacularly successful in spite of it.

One particularly insidious part of the story, I learned from the Science piece, is the “Torricelli Bill” of 1992, which suppressed the export of medical supplies to Cuba and did have a measurable impact on public health in the country. (I really can’t get my head round this – the lobbyists in Miami must have been twisting lots of people’s arms to ensure that their relatives back home don’t get medical supplies when they need them. Does anybody understand this?) Apart from the blip following that law, however, life expectancy in Cuba has risen steeply in the 50 years since the embargo began, and has drawn equal with the US, even though health spending in Cuba is by orders of magnitude less than in the US. It is tempting to cast a cynical eye at the data and conclude that the Torricelli Bill was a desperate attempt to stop Cuba from overtaking the US on health indicators such as life expectancy, and as such it has, just about, worked.

But how could Cuba achieve what has been described as “developed world outcomes at developing world prices”? The article highlights the Cuban emphasis on disease prevention and primary health care. Educating people about health risks is relatively cheap. Letting them run the risk and then trying to cure the diseases with pharmaceuticals, as done in the US, is much more expensive. In terms of access to primary medical care, Cuba has a very large number of physicians per capita, and even in remote rural areas, access to medical care isn’t much of a problem. And, unlike the UK’s NHS, they do believe in checkups. Every Cuban citizen, I learned, is expected to see a physician at least once a year.

Disease prevention also depends on vaccination programs, which in turn depend on the manufacturing and indeed invention of affordable vaccines. When I visited Cuba in 2004, I was fortunate to catch the story of the new, affordable HiB vaccine developed at Havana just before this advance was published in Science. This was an outstanding success, but more generally, the biomedical research institutes in Havana are widely recognised for their world-class research, which directly leads to effective and affordable vaccinations for the Cuban people.

Sensationally for a publication that is kind of a flag carrier for US science, the article concludes that in the wake of the US healthcare reform “there may be opportunities to learn from Cuba valuable lessons about developing a truly universal health care system that emphasizes primary care. Adopting some of Cuba’s successful health-care policies may be the best first step toward normalizing relations.”

Call me crazy, but I am feeling cautiously optimistic that the embargo madness won’t last for another 50 years.

Reference:
Paul K. Drain and Michele Barry
Global Health:
Fifty Years of U.S. Embargo: Cuba's Health Outcomes and Lessons
Science 30 April 2010:
Vol. 328. no. 5978, pp. 572 - 573
DOI: 10.1126/science.1189680
summary and access to PDF file (PDF access may be restricted, not sure)

what's bugging the bees?

I have on various occasions reported on CCD (colony collapse disorder) and other disasters affecting honey bees around the world in recent years, mainly for Current Biology.

Now I've done a major round-up of the bees problems as a full length feature which is out in the Feb issue of Chemistry World. Essentially, I've been looking at the more serious possibilities, including pesticides, stress, environment (i.e.monoculture), and parasites. The emerging picture is that a combination of several factors is causing the problems. I also talked to Mike Edwards, an expert on wild bee species who maintains that their contribution to pollination is underappreciated, and the main problem of honey bees is domestication. He is featured in this month's CW podcast.

What's bugging the bees? (restricted access)

responsibility of chemists

This time of the year, 25 years ago, I was a first term chemistry student, and one morning our inorg. chemistry prof put the periodic table aside to give us a stern lecture on our future responsibility as chemists. That's about the only thing I remember of the Bhopal disaster, which remains to this day (luckily, in a way) the worst industrial accident ever.

Despite being a responsible chemist and all that, I never looked all that closely at what happened and why, until reading this piece on the 25th anniversary.

Bhopal: 25 years of poison, by Indra Sinha

Reading this, you're left wondering whether the event should have been prosecuted as manslaughter, murder, or genocide, but the fact of the matter is that nobody has been prosecuted to this day. (Essentially, an extremely labile and dangerous substance was stored in a large tank, and somebody decided to switch off the cooling for that tank, to save costs, then water accidentally entered the tank and started a reaction -- there are several outrageously wrong decisions in this story that must not be allowed to happen inside a chemical factory.) And people in the area still ingest the poison and get diseases and birth defects from it.

Chemistry aside, what most angers me about these things is the inherent racism assuming that it's no big deal if 20,000 people die in India from negligence of a US-owned factory, while the deaths of 3,000 people in the US are an outrage that can be used as an excuse to invade two countries (again at the cost of tens of thousands less important lives). Clearly, all men are not created equal ...

Dear Mr President

It's more than a year since that "historic vote" that made Barack Obama president, and I was shaken out of my illusion when I read that on October 28th the UN general assembly has for the 18th year running voted to condemn the US trade embargo against Cuba (187 votes for, 3 against lifting the embargo, two abstentions).

So hang on, he's been president for the best part of the year, he's due to pick up a Nobel peace prize next month, and that stupid embargo is still being upheld ? I mean by now even the nice people who financed hundreds of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro (which strangely isn't included in the US definition of terrorism) should have figured out that the embargo isn't getting them any nearer to their goal.

So what's taking Obama so long? This doesn't require him to find or print money, send troups, or twist arms, it only needs a signature. Why can't he just stop it before it turns 50 next October (surely that anniversary would be a nice PR opportunity for the Cuban government). Can't the Norwegians just withhold that Nobel certificate until he's called off the embargo ?

PS, ok, I know it's enshrined in law, but laws can be both changed and bypassed if they are manifestly stupid.

where have all the honeybees gone?

Three years after the first reports of a mysterious phenomenon of bee colonies disappearing without any apparent reason, termed colony collapse disorder (CCD), the causes are still as mysterious as ever. New research from the US, using DNA arrays and the known genome sequence of the honeybee has thrown up more questions than it answers. Meanwhile, UK beekeepers report unacceptably high losses for last winter, even though percentages are a bit less catastrophic than the year before.

Read my news focus in today's issue of Current Biology:

Bee mystery continues
Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 17, R718, 15 September 2009
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.08.036
Abstract and restricted access to PDF file

climate change special

Today's issue of Current Biology is a special issue on "Biology and Climate Change", and very exceptionally I have two pieces back to back in the magazine section at the front.

First there is a news feature on climate change policies and debates in the US, UK, China, and Germany ahead of the climate change summit in Copenhagen:

Climate crunch year
As countries around the world prepare for the crucial climate change conference in December, China tries to boost its green investment, Germany debates the pros and cons of carbon sequestration, the US debate a groundbreaking energy bill, and the UK counts the cost of mitigating climate change in the developing world.
Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 14, R537-R539, 28 July 2009
PDF file (restricted access)

The second is about an Earthwatch industry partnership to investigate how mangroves in Kenya can help mitigate the effects of climate change:

At the frontline
Mangroves are at the frontline in the fight against the consequences of climate change.
Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 14, R539-R540, 28 July 2009
PDF file (restricted access)

legislating life sciences

It is always intriguing to compare and contrast how legislation and public debates on bioethics subjects like stem cells, cloning, etc. differ between countries, even between those that share similar outlooks on other policy issues. On the occasion of the ongoing revision of the groundbreaking Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (1990) in the UK, I've had a look at the state of play in the UK, US, Germany, and Brazil:

Embryonic developments
Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 11, R427-R428, 9 June 2009
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.05.036

abstract and restricted access to pdf file

PS I was about to use the phrase "debates on ethically sensitive issues" but then realised there are lots of things happening which I find unethical but which don't stir much debate in the Western world. Strange that.

return to Titan

Apparently, there is going to be only one major mission to the outer solar system in the next 30 years or so, and NASA are deciding this month whether to visit Jupiter's moon Europa, or Saturn's Titan.

Of course we all want both, and as soon as possible, but looking at the prospects laid out in a special report in this week's Nature (p366), the choice is clear. Europa would get an orbiter, possibly combined with an ESA-sponsored Ganymede orbiter, which is exciting for the physical investigation of the subsurface ocean, but if there is life in that ocean, we won't see it from the orbiter. Plus, can you get the general public excited about orbiters? Earth has hundreds of them! While the Titan proposals include an orbiter along with ESA's contributions, a splasher (i.e. a lander targeted at the hydrocarbon lakes) and a "hot" air balloon that could sail around Titan's atmosphere for six months or longer. (Considering the temperatures on Titan, the air in the balloon would still be way below freezing.)

Now these two elements would be completely new and at least as cool as the Mars Rovers, so, if we have to choose, it's got to be Titan. Mind you, I'll be a pensioner by the time that balloon sails around Titan in 2030.

But can't we have the Europa mission a couple of years after that ? I know it costs three billion dollars, but hey, that's only a week or so operation in Iraq (I'm guessing, so don't start nitpicking over the number), so if the US managed to avoid foreign policy disasters for a while, the money saved could pay for the exploration of the entire outer solar system in our lifetimes. Alternatively, it's 10 bucks a head for the US population(similar calculation holds for the European contribution and the EU population), that's surely affordable if we as a civilisation decide we want to afford it ? It's surely a lot less than people spend on entertainment involving space-travelling civilisations ...