“Endless” Trial-and-Error Experiments Led to Creation of Islet Cells to Cure Type 1 Diabetes

(p. 1) Brian Shelton’s life was ruled by Type 1 diabetes.

. . .

His ex-wife, Cindy Shelton, took him into her home in Elyria, Ohio. “I was afraid to leave him alone all day,” she said.

Early this year, she spotted a call for people with Type 1 diabetes to participate in a clinical trial by Vertex Pharmaceuticals. The company was testing a treatment developed over decades by a scientist who vowed to find a cure after his baby son and then his teenage daughter got the devastating disease.

Mr. Shelton was the first patient. On June 29, [2021] he got an infusion of cells, grown from stem cells but just like the insulin-producing pancreas cells his body lacked.

Now his body automatically controls its insulin and blood sugar levels.

Mr. Shelton, now 64, may be the first person cured of the disease with a new treatment that has experts daring to hope that help may (p. 18) be coming for many of the 1.5 million Americans suffering from Type 1 diabetes.

“It’s a whole new life,” Mr. Shelton said. “It’s like a miracle.”

. . .

One problem was the source of the cells — they came from unused fertilized eggs from a fertility clinic. But in August 2001, President George W. Bush barred using federal money for research with human embryos. Dr. Melton had to sever his stem cell lab from everything else at Harvard. He got private funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard and philanthropists to set up a completely separate lab with an accountant who kept all its expenses separate, down to the light bulbs.

Over the 20 years it took the lab of 15 or so people to successfully convert stem cells into islet cells, Dr. Melton estimates the project cost about $50 million.

The challenge was to figure out what sequence of chemical messages would turn stem cells into insulin-secreting islet cells. The work involved unraveling normal pancreatic development, figuring out how islets are made in the pancreas and conducting endless experiments to steer embryonic stem cells to becoming islets. It was slow going.

. . .

The next step for Dr. Melton, knowing he’d need more resources to make a drug that could get to market, was starting a company.

. . .

His company Semma was founded in 2014, a mix of Sam and Emma’s names.

One challenge was to figure out how to grow islet cells in large quantities with a method others could repeat. That took five years.

The company, led by Bastiano Sanna, a cell and gene therapy expert, tested its cells in mice and rats, showing they functioned well and cured diabetes in rodents.

At that point, the next step — a clinical trial in patients — needed a large, well financed and experienced company with hundreds of employees. Everything had to be done to the exacting standards of the Food and Drug Administration — thousands of pages of documents prepared, and clinical trials planned.

Chance intervened. In April 2019, at a meeting at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Melton ran into a former colleague, Dr. David Altshuler, who had been a professor of genetics and medicine at Harvard and the deputy director of the Broad Institute. Over lunch, Dr. Altshuler, who had become the chief scientific officer at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, asked Dr. Melton what was new.

Dr. Melton took out a small glass vial with a bright purple pellet at the bottom.

“These are islet cells that we made at Semma,” he told Dr. Altshuler.

Vertex focuses on human diseases whose biology is understood. “I think there might be an opportunity,” Dr. Altshuler told him.

Meetings followed and eight weeks later, Vertex acquired Semma for $950 million. With the acquisition, Dr. Sanna became an executive vice president at Vertex.

. . .

Less than two years after Semma was acquired, the F.D.A. allowed Vertex to begin a clinical trial with Mr. Shelton as its initial patient.

For the full story, see:

Gina Kolata. “A Cure for Severe Diabetes? For an Ohio Patient, It Worked.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, November 28, 2021): 1 & 18.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 27, 2021, and has the title “A Cure for Type 1 Diabetes? For One Man, It Seems to Have Worked.”)

Wisconsin Hospitals Increasingly Sue Patients

(p. A8) Hospitals in Wisconsin have sued patients over medical debt at a rate that amounts to one out of every 1,000 residents a year, especially people in low-income areas and who are Black, a new study found.

The study, published Monday [Dec. 6, 2021] in the health-policy journal Health Affairs, found some hospitals were more likely than others to take patients to court and low-income and Black patients were disproportionately sued.

The findings highlight how the financial and legal jeopardy that patients face depends on which hospital they go to. The findings also add to mounting research on the consequences of medical debt, a problem that research shows is more acute among people who are uninsured.

Medical-bill lawsuits “are not a fait accompli,” said Zack Cooper, an economist with the Yale University School of Public Health and an author of the new lawsuit analysis. “This is very much a choice that these hospitals are making.”

. . .

Hospitals were suing people more for unpaid bills, the study also found. The rate increased to 1.53 lawsuits for every 1,000 residents in 2018, up from 1.12 lawsuits per 1,000 residents in 2001.

. . .

Dr. Cooper called for more data to better understand potential factors driving the disproportionate number of lawsuits among Black patients.

“First, Black patients could have a higher burden of unpaid medical bills, which leads them to get sued more on a per-capita basis,” he said. “Second, Black patients could have a similar amount of debt, but were more likely targeted by hospitals.”

For the full story, see:

Melanie Evans and Tom McGinty. “Hospital Debt-Collection Practices Vary.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Dec. 07, 2021): A8.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated December 6, 2021, and has the title “Hospitals in Wisconsin Pursued Medical Debt Collection Widely but Unevenly, Study Finds.” The online version says that the title of the New York print version is “Hospitals Faulted on Medical-Debt Suits.” The title of my National edition of the print version is “Hospital Debt-Collection Practices Vary.”)

The article co-authored by Cooper, and discussed above, is:

Cooper, Zack, James Han, and Neale Mahoney. “Hospital Lawsuits over Unpaid Bills Increased by 37 Percent in Wisconsin from 2001 to 2018.” Health Affairs 40, no. 12 (Dec. 2021): 1830-35.

“Overwhelmed” Volunteers Struggle to Fix Log4j Bug in Open Source Software

In Openness to Creative Destruction, I argue that open source software has severe drawbacks, compared to a system where firms receive higher profits for selling better software. The severe Log4j bug, discussed in the quoted passages below, is an example that strongly supports my argument. Blog entries posted on Dec. 17 and on Dec. 25 also discussed the Log4j bug.

(p. B6) Gary Gregory, a volunteer for the Apache Software Foundation, is spending time off from his day job glued to his computer, striving to help contain the harm from a security flaw in the Log4j tool underpinning much of the digital economy.

. . .

Mr. Gregory, who works from the dining-room table in his Ocala, Fla., home, fueled by black coffee and accompanied by his hound-pit-bull mix, Bella, said he is overwhelmed with hundreds of requests for help from businesses. While Apache is trying to assist companies in updating their systems, he said, the nonprofit’s resources are limited.

“This puts to the forefront the whole issue with open-source [software] and commercial users,” said Mr. Gregory, who is on the Apache Logging Services Project Management Committee of 16 elected members who vote on changes to the software. “The expectations are somewhat out of whack.”

. . .

Many developers rely on the free Log4j framework to help record data such as users’ behavior and applications’ activity in software built with the Java programming language. Cybersecurity experts say the inclusion of the open-source logging tool within so much interconnected software—often embedded without developers’ knowledge—yields a threat that spans economic sectors and national borders.

. . .

Cybersecurity firm Mandiant Inc. said it has observed Chinese government hackers trying to exploit the flaw.

After Apache released its planned patch on Friday, Mr. Gregory said he worked through the weekend on a new update along with other volunteer software developers in Japan, New Zealand, Virginia and Arizona. Unveiled Monday, the new version disabled a problematic software module by default and removed a message-lookup feature that could be used to exploit the flaw.

The Apache volunteers are designing another update to Log4j for users who rely on an older version of the Java programming language, meaning more work for Mr. Gregory while he is on vacation from his day job.

“That translates to me getting five hours of sleep last night,” he said of his time off. “Some of the other guys got two or three.”

For the full story, see:

David Uberti. “Fight Against Bug Relies on Volunteers.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, December 16, 2021): B6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 15, 2021, and has the title “Global Fight Against Log4j Vulnerability Relies on Apache Volunteers.”)

My book, mentioned above, is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

High Inflation Most Hurts the Poor

(p. B2) Inflation has become central to the American zeitgeist in 2021 in a way that it hadn’t been for decades. Google searches are up. Supply chain issues feature into popular Instagram posts. The satire website The Onion warned in a recent headline that “higher prices may force Americans to eat reasonable portions on Thanksgiving.”

Even as inflation hits its highest level since 1982 and inserts itself as a topic of popular discussion, trying to understand it can be a mind-bending task.

. . .

High or unpredictable inflation that isn’t outmatched by wage gains can be especially hard to shoulder for poor people, simply because they have less wiggle room.

Poor households spend a bigger chunk of their budgets on necessities — food, housing and especially gas, which is often a contributor to bouts of high inflation — and less on discretionary expenditures. If rich households face high inflation and their wages do not keep up, they may have to cut back on vacations or dining out. A poor family may be forced to cut back on essentials, like food.

“For lower income households, price increases eat up more of their budget,” said Laura Rosner-Warburton, a senior economist at MacroPolicy Perspectives, pointing out that some research suggests that poor people may even end up paying comparatively more for the same products. That may be partly because they lack the free cash to take advantage of temporary discounts.

Around the world, poor people historically have reported greater concern around inflation, and that is also the case in the United States in the current episode.

For the full story, see:

Jeanna Smialek. “Inflation 101: Stark Facts And Nuance.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 25, 2021): B1-B2.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 24, 2021, and has the title “Inflation Has Arrived. Here’s What You Need to Know.”)

Immuno-Suppressed Patients Take Longer to Clear Covid-19, Allowing Time for More Mutations and New Variants

(p. 14) When people with H.I.V. are prescribed an effective antiretroviral and take it consistently, their bodies almost completely suppress the virus. But if people with H.I.V. aren’t diagnosed, haven’t been prescribed treatment, or don’t, or can’t, take their medicines consistently each day, H.I.V. weakens their immune systems. And then, if they catch the coronavirus, it can take weeks or months before the new virus is cleared from their bodies.

When the coronavirus lives that long in their systems, it has the chance to mutate and mutate and mutate again. And, if they pass the mutated virus on, a new variant is in circulation.

“We have reasons to believe that some of the variants that are emerging in South Africa could potentially be associated directly with H.I.V.,” said Tulio de Oliveira, the principal investigator of the national genetic monitoring network.

In the first days of the pandemic, South Africa’s health authorities were braced for soaring death rates of people with H.I.V. “We were basically creating horror scenarios that Africa was going to be decimated,” said Salim Abdool Karim, an epidemiologist who heads the AIDS institute where KRISP is housed. “But none of that played out.” The main reason is that H.I.V. is most common among young people, while the coronavirus has hit older people hardest.

An H.I.V. infection makes a person about 1.7 times as likely to die of Covid — an elevated risk, but one that pales in comparison with the risk for people with diabetes, who are 30 times more likely to die. “Once we realized that this was the situation, we then began to understand that our real problems with H.I.V. in the midst of Covid was the prospect that severely immunocompromised people would lead to new variants,” Dr. Abdool Karim said.

. . .

. . . a single variant can rattle the world, as Omicron has.

The origin of this variant is still unknown. People with H.I.V. are not the only ones whose systems can inadvertently give the coronavirus the chance to mutate: It can happen in anyone who is immunosuppressed, such as transplant patients and those undergoing cancer treatments.

By the time the KRISP team identified the second case of a person with H.I.V. producing coronavirus variants, there were more than a dozen reports of the same phenomenon in medical literature from other parts of the world.

Viruses mutate in people with healthy immune systems, too. The difference for people with H.I.V., or another immunosuppressing condition, is that because the virus stays in their systems so much longer, the natural selection process has more time to favor mutations that evade immunity. The typical replication period in a healthy person would be just a couple of weeks, instead of many months; fewer replications mean less opportunities for new mutations.

. . .

. . ., South Africa’s efforts to tackle the variant issue, and be transparent about it, have come at a steep price, in the form of flight bans and global isolation.

“As scientists, especially in the kind of forefront, we debate playing down the H.I.V. problem,” Dr. de Oliveira mused in his lab last week. “If we are very vocal, we also risk, again, big discrimination and closing borders and economic measures. But, if you are not very vocal, we have unnecessary deaths.”

For the full story, see:

Stephanie Nolen. “A Variant Hunt on Dirt Roads and in the Lab.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, December 5, 2021): 1 & 14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 6, 2021, and has the title “The Variant Hunters: Inside South Africa’s Effort to Stanch Dangerous Mutations.” The online version says that the New York edition of the print version had the title “A Variant Hunt From the Labs To Dirt Roads.” The title of my National edition of the print version was “A Variant Hunt on Dirt Roads and in the Lab.”)

No Clear Evidence That Tornadoes Are More Frequent or Intense Than 40 to 60 Years Ago

Damage from tornadoes depends on the strength of buildings, which depends on broad economic growth. To reduce harm, the level of economic growth matters as much or more than the frequency and intensity of tornadoes.

(p. A12) Some studies have concluded that as global warming advances, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, favorable conditions for severe storms in the United States will increase this century.

. . .

It remains less certain as to whether those increasingly severe storms might lead to more tornadoes. These complex events are harder to model, and so far there doesn’t appear to be clear evidence that, for instance, tornadoes have changed in frequency or intensity over the past 40 to 60 years.

. . .

“We might not know exactly how climate change is going to affect tornadoes going forward, but we do know that there are lot of things we can do to protect people today,” said Stephen Strader, a disaster scientist at Villanova University.

. . .

“There are always two sides of the coin when it comes to disasters,” Dr. Strader said. “There’s the climate itself, but there’s also society vulnerability. We can work to address climate change, but we shouldn’t lose focus on what we can do today to improve survivability against these extreme events.”

For the full story, see:

Brad Plumer, Winston Choi-Schagrin and Hiroko Tabuchi. “As World Warms, Bracing for More Extreme Weather.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 18, 2021): A12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 17, 2021, and has the title “Examining the Role of Climate Change in a Week of Wild Weather.”)

Hackers from China Seek to Exploit the Open Source Log4j Software Bug

In Openness to Creative Destruction, I argue that open source software has severe drawbacks, compared to a system where firms receive higher profits for selling better software. The severe Log4j bug, discussed in the quoted passages below, is an example that strongly supports my argument. A blog entry posted on Dec. 17 also discussed the Log4j bug.

(p. B1) Hackers linked to China and other governments are among a growing assortment of cyberattackers seeking to exploit a widespread and severe vulnerability in computer server software, according to cybersecurity firms and Microsoft Corp.

The involvement of hackers whom analysts have linked to nation-states underscored the increasing gravity of the flaw in Log4j software, a free bit of code that logs activity in computer networks and applications.

Cybersecurity researchers say it is one of the most dire cybersecurity threats to emerge in years and could enable devastating attacks, including ransomware, in both the immediate and distant future. Government-sponsored hackers are often among the best-resourced and most capable, analysts say.

“The effects of this vulnerability will reverberate for months to come—maybe even years—as we try to close these doors and try to hunt down all the actors who made their way in,” said John Hultquist, vice president of intelligence analysis at the U.S.-based cybersecurity firm Mandiant Inc.

. . .

(p. B6) Researchers find the Log4j flaw particularly worrying because the free Java-based software is used in a broad range of products. It can be found in everything from security software to networking tools to videogame servers. The exact number of users of Log4j is impossible to know, but the software has been downloaded millions of times, according to the organization that builds it, the Apache Software Foundation.

The attack works reliably and is trivial to exploit, security researchers say. Although downloadable patches have already been made available, experts and U.S. officials said they expected the flaw to remain a problem for the long haul because some organizations will be slow to update their systems or might neglect to do so entirely.

“It’s a surprise it’s not more widespread,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence with CrowdStrike, a U.S.-based cybersecurity firm, which said they had detected Iranian actors leveraging the Log4j flaw. “The question that everyone is asking is, ‘What aren’t we seeing?’”

For the full story, see:

Robert McMillan and Dustin Volz. “Hackers Leap on Flaw in Log4j Software.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, December 16, 2021): B1 & B6.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 15, 2021, and has the title “Hackers Backed by China Seen Exploiting Security Flaw in Internet Software.”)

My book, mentioned above, is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

“People Come to This Country to Build Amazing Businesses”

(p. 1) WASHINGTON — ADW Capital Partners would appear to be the kind of hedge fund that Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee would like to tax more heavily: small but growing fast, with $330 million in assets, an incorporation in Delaware but doing business in Florida, and an offshore “feeder” corporation shielding some of its clients from U.S. taxation.

No wonder, then, that its owner, Adam Wyden, has come out as a vocal and vociferous critic of the tax increases being pushed by the committee’s chairman, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon — his father.

. . .

(p. 25) “The issue is bigger than my father. I’m not interested in discussing anything personal,” he said in a brief phone call before declining to go further. He said he was “not a Trumper” and “not an Ocasio” — referring to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, an icon of the Democratic left. He is a libertarian, he said, raised in Washington, D.C., who moved to Florida “to get away from the food fight.”

But he has gone public with his grievances against his father’s proposals, in an appearance last month on CNBC that he recommended for viewing, and in a tweet responding to the elder Mr. Wyden’s assertion that Elon Musk and other billionaires should not get to decide whether to pay taxes based on a Twitter poll.

“Why does he hate us / the American dream so much?!?!?!?!” Adam Wyden said in the Twitter post last month. “Reality is: most legislators have never built anything … so I guess it’s easier to mindlessly and haphazardly try and tear stuff down.”

. . .

“Thankfully, I think I can compound” investment gains “faster than my dad and his cronies can confiscate it,” Adam Wyden wrote.

Lauded on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” he elaborated on air. “Amazon, Netflix, Google, Tesla: I mean, we are the envy of the rest of the world,” he said. “People come to this country to build amazing businesses, and I want that to continue.”

Without referring to his son, the elder Mr. Wyden suggested a possible reason for his stance: “Many millionaires perhaps may consider themselves tomorrow’s billionaires.”

For the full story, see:

Jonathan Weisman. “Rift Between Senator and Son Shows Challenge of Taxing the Ultrarich.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, December 12, 2021): 1 & 25.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 11, 2021, and has the title “Rift Between Senator and Son Shows the Challenge of Taxing the Ultrarich.” The online version says that the article appeared on p. 24 of the New York edition of the print version.)

Taking “Capital Allocation Away From People Who Have Demonstrated Great Skill in Capital Allocation”

(p. 1) The richest people on earth typically devote a share of their vast resources to charity. That is the bargain and the expectation, anyway.

Jeff Bezos, until very recently the world’s richest human, has been applying himself dutifully if a bit cautiously to the task, giving money to food banks and homeless families while pledging $10 billion of the fortune he earned through the online retailer Amazon to fight climate change.

The latest richest human, Elon Musk, has taken a rather different tack. There was the public spat with the director of the World Food Programme on Twitter, for instance, announcing, “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”

. . .

And, of course, there is the ongoing insistence that his moneymaking efforts, running both the electric carmaker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX, are already better-(p. 8)ing humankind, thank you very much.

Mr. Musk is practicing “troll philanthropy.”

That’s what Benjamin Soskis, senior research associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute, has called it, noting that Mr. Musk seems to be having fun with this novel approach.

“He doesn’t seem to care much about using his philanthropy to curry public favor,” Mr. Soskis said. “In fact, he seems to enjoy using his identity as a philanthropist in part to antagonize the public.”

. . .

“The particular barrier for donors from a tech background is they don’t just think their genius has made them good at what they do, they also think what they do commercially also makes society better,” said Rhodri Davies, a philanthropy commentator who wrote a piece on Mr. Musk called “The Edgelord Giveth.”

Mr. Musk, for instance, has said that getting humankind to Mars through SpaceX is an important contribution and has written and spoken acerbically about what he calls “anti-billionaire BS,” including attempts to target taxes at billionaires.

“It does not make sense to take the job of capital allocation away from people who have demonstrated great skill in capital allocation and give it to an entity that has demonstrated very poor skill in capital allocation, which is the government,” Mr. Musk said on Monday at an event hosted by The Wall Street Journal.

At the same time, Mr. Kharas said a more charitable reading of Mr. Musk’s exchange with the World Food Programme is possible. He could just genuinely want to know how the money will be spent and is putting in public, on Twitter, the due diligence work that institutional giving does behind closed doors.

“I think this idea that he was willing to engage was really good,” Mr. Kharas of the Brookings Institution said of Mr. Musk. “I think his response was extremely sensible. It was basically, ‘Show me what you can do. Demonstrate it. Provide me with some evidence. I’ll do it.’”

For the full story, see:

Nicholas Kulish. “Elon Musk, Trolling Away.” The New York Times SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, December 12, 2021): 1 & 8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 10, 2021, and has the title “Elon Musk’s Latest Innovation: Troll Philanthropy.”)

Federal Covid-19 Stimulus Subsidies Reduced Labor Force Participation

(p. A2) . . ., home prices and stocks have soared, in part because of stimulus from the Fed. From the start of 2020 through Sept. 30 this year, U.S. households’ total assets soared 22% to nearly $163 trillion, Fed data show.

At the same time, the labor-force participation rate fell sharply and has remained stubbornly low. At 61.8% in November [2021], it was 1.5 percentage points below its pre-pandemic level. Many older workers retired early. But even among prime-age workers—those between 25 and 54—participation remains down more than a percentage point.

Some economists believe the extra cash is one reason for this. In part, that is based on research showing declines in wealth seem to have had the opposite effect. Falling housing and stock values from 2006 and 2010 led many who otherwise would have fallen out of the labor force to stay in, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The study found that participation was 0.7 percentage point higher than otherwise as a result.

Families that win at least $30,000 in the lottery tend to earn less in the next five years, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper released in July by four University of Chicago scholars. The more a person wins, the bigger the effect that the award has on earnings and employment, the paper found. Upper-income winners are more likely to reduce their hours, while lower-income winners are more likely to drop out of the labor market entirely, the paper found.

In Austria, workers who received severance payments worth two months of pay were far less likely to find a job within 20 weeks compared with those who received no such lump sum, according to a 2006 paper released by the NBER. The researchers also found a similar effect among workers whose unemployment benefits were extended from 20 weeks to 30 weeks.

For the full commentary, see:

Josh Mitchell. ” THE OUTLOOK; New Hope for Easing Labor Shortage.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Dec. 20, 2021): A2.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 19, 2021, and has the title ” THE OUTLOOK; Vast Household Wealth Could Be a Factor Behind U.S. Labor Shortage.”)

The July 2021 NBER working paper mentioned above is:

Golosov, Mikhail, Michael Graber, Magne Mogstad, and David Novgorodsky. “How Americans Respond to Idiosyncratic and Exogenous Changes in Household Wealth and Unearned Income.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper #29000, July 2021.

The published version of the 2006 NBER working paper mentioned above is:

Card, David, Raj Chetty, and Andrea Weber. “Cash-on-Hand and Competing Models of Intertemporal Behavior: New Evidence from the Labor Market.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, no. 4 (Nov. 2007): 1511-60.

Ross Douthat’s Self-Doctoring Was “Intensely Empirical”

(p. 12) The early chapters of “The Deep Places” unfold like the first act of a horror movie. Feeling the pull of home and burned out by life on Capitol Hill, Ross Douthat (a New York Times columnist) and his wife buy a 1790s farmhouse on three acres of Connecticut pasture.

. . .

Something is lurking in those woods. Back in D.C., Douthat has a swollen lymph node, a stiff neck and strange vibrations in his head and mouth. The urgent care doctor he sees first diagnoses him with a harmless boil. A few weeks later, he is in an emergency room at dawn with an alarming full-body shutdown, “as if someone had twisted dials randomly in all my systems.” The E.R. doctor suggests stress as the culprit — as do, in subsequent visits, an internist, neurologist, rheumatologist and gastroenterologist. A psychiatrist, his 11th doctor in 10 weeks, disagrees.

Only after Douthat completes his move north to Connecticut, namesake of Lyme disease, does it seem obvious to local doctors that he is suffering from something tick-borne.

. . .

He makes his case that tick-borne disease needs more research and its sufferers deserve more respect.

The trouble is that Douthat also wants to present his reckless journey as a road map. His revelation: “Given a stockpile of antibiotics, the array of over-the-counter medications available on Amazon and crowdsourced data from hundreds and thousands of Lyme sufferers sharing their experiences online, I could effectively become my own doctor, mixing and matching to gauge my body’s reaction to different combinations, like a Lyme researcher working on a study with a sample size, an ‘N,’ of only 1.”

This self-doctoring, he adds, “was in its own way intensely empirical and materially grounded — the most empirical work, in fact, that I have ever attempted in my life.” (Comparing this approach to Khakpour’s introspective memoir, I kept thinking of the couples-therapy trope that women prefer to talk through their problems while men leap to solve them.)

. . .

A subsequent bout of undiagnosed Covid-19, and scientists’ stumbles as they’ve worked to understand the new virus, have only hardened Douthat’s distrust of institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. “From the beginning of the pandemic to its still unfinished end,” he writes, “there were weirdos on the internet who were more reliable guides to what was happening, what was possible, and what should actually be done than Anthony Fauci or any other official information source.”

For the full review, see:

Sara Austin. “Darkness Invisible.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, November 28, 2021): 12.

(Note: ellipses, added; italics, in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the Updated Oct. 30, 2021, and has the title “A Transporting and Cozy Biography of a Pottery Pioneer.”)

The book under review is:

Douthat, Ross. The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. New York: Convergent Books, 2021.