Month: March 2022

Alan Scott’s Use of Botulism to Fix Eye Muscles Led to Serendipitous Discovery of Botox to Smooth Wrinkles

(p. B11) It is a neurotoxin 100 times more deadly than cyanide and the cause of the food-borne illness known as botulism. During World War II and for some years after, the Department of Defense hoped to develop it as a chemical weapon. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that Alan Scott, an ophthalmologist, turned the botulinum toxin into a pharmaceutical, when he began to investigate it as a medical treatment for serious eye impairments.

. . .

When, in 1978, Dr. Scott first injected the powerful paralytic into the eye muscles of a patient who had undergone retinal detachment surgery that had left his eye pulled to one side, he didn’t know who was more nervous, himself or the patient, he told Scientific American magazine in 2016.

But the procedure succeeded, and Dr. Scott would go on to refine one of the world’s deadliest poisons into a life-altering treatment — he called it Oculinum — for those who suffered from conditions like strabismus, a misalignment of the eyes.

Doctors also began using it to treat migraines and jaw-clenching, among other ailments, and as they did so many of their delighted patients noticed a curious byproduct: The toxin’s ability to paralyze targeted facial muscles smoothed the lines around them, though its effects wore off after a few months.

For the full obituary, see:

Penelope Green. “Alan Scott, 89, Eye Doctor Behind Medical Use of Botox.” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 18, 2022): B11.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Jan. 20, 2022, and has the title “Alan Scott, Doctor Behind the Medical Use of Botox, Dies at 89.”)

DeSantis Upgrades Infrastructure to Mitigate Flooding

(p. A5) The Republican governor, unlike many of his Democratic counterparts, didn’t use the term “climate change” or endorse specific policies aimed at combating factors that most climate scientists say are driving warming, such as greenhouse-gas emissions. He focused on responding to the effects of a warming climate.

“What I’ve found is people, when they start talking about things like global warming, they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things,” said Mr. DeSantis at the event. “We’re not doing any left-wing stuff.”

Governors and lawmakers in several Republican-led states, including Idaho, South Carolina and Texas, are taking a similar approach as concern about climate change increases. After natural disasters that research suggests are becoming more frequent and intense, they are taking measures such as infrastructure upgrades to mitigate flooding, wildfires and severe storms. Such moves are vital to their states’ economic livelihood, they say.

. . .

At the Oldsmar event, Mr. DeSantis outlined a proposal to dedicate more than $270 million to 76 projects aimed at bolstering defenses against rising sea levels and flooding. “We’re a low-lying state, we’re a storm-prone state, and we’re a flood-prone state,” he said.

For the full story, see:

Arian Campo-Flores. “Republicans Adjust Climate Message.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, January 24, 2022): A5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 23, 2022, and has the title “Millions Have Lost a Step Into the Middle Class, Researchers Say.”)

Machiavelli Described the Methods of Tyrants

(p. C12) But anyone who observes politics, business or even the loftiest social institutions will know that the world is rife with backstabbers, hypocrites and ethical ne’er-do-wells all thriving at the highest levels—beyond the reach of law or hashtag.

. . .

Machiavelli’s gift, Mr. Boucheron argues, was “naming with precision that which was happening.” He explains the behavior of tyrants not to excuse them, but to show the rest of us what to look out for, in the clearest terms possible. Machiavelli’s “lucidity,” says Mr. Boucheron, was the “weapon of the despairing.”

Other political thinkers have read Machiavelli this way. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in “The Social Contract” that Machiavelli was not advising tyrants but “instructing the people on what they have to fear.” John Adams credited Machiavelli for helping him think through the likely threats to a young American republic.

For the full review, see:

Philip Delves Broughton. “A Poetics for Tyrants.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, January 25, 2020): C12.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 24, 2020, and has the title “‘Machiavelli’ Review: A Poetics for Tyrants.”)

The book under review is:

Boucheron, Patrick. Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People What to Fear. Translated by Willard Wood. New York: Other Press, 2020.

30 Million Workers May Have the Skills, but Not the Degrees, to Move to Jobs That Pay 70 Percent More

(p. B1) Over the last two decades, workers without four-year college degrees have lost ground in the occupations that used to be ladders to middle-class lives for them and their families.

While the trend has been well known, putting a number on the lost steppingstone jobs has been elusive. A new study, published on Friday, estimates that such workers have been displaced from 7.4 million jobs since 2000.

The research points to the persistent challenge for the nearly two-thirds of American workers who do not have a four-year college degree, even as some employers have dropped the requirement in recent years.

“These workers have been displaced from millions of the precise jobs that offer them upward mobility,” said Papia Debroy, head of research for Opportunity@Work, the nonprofit that published the study. “It represents a stunning loss for workers and their families.”

. . .

(p. B2) A previous study by Opportunity@Work, with academic researchers, dissected skills in different occupations and found that up to 30 million workers had the skills to realistically move to new jobs that paid on average 70 percent more than their current ones.

Some major companies have started to adjust their hiring requirements. Rework America Business Network, an initiative of the Markle Foundation, has pledged to adopt skills-based hiring for many jobs. Companies in the group include Aon, Boeing, McKinsey, Microsoft and Walmart.

. . .

“The country as a whole will benefit from not stranding human capital,” said Erica Groshen, an economist at Cornell University and a former head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For the full story, see:

Steve Lohr. “Requirement For Degrees Curbs Hiring.” The New York Times (Monday, January 17, 2022): B1-B2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 14, 2022, and has the title “Millions Have Lost a Step Into the Middle Class, Researchers Say.”)

Socialist Mayor’s Environmental Bicycles Turn Paris Streets into Risky Chaos

(p. 4) PARIS — On a recent afternoon, the Rue de Rivoli looked like this: Cyclists blowing through red lights in two directions. Delivery bike riders fixating on their cellphones. Electric scooters careening across lanes. Jaywalkers and nervous pedestrians scrambling as if in a video game.

Sarah Famery, a 20-year resident of the Marais neighborhood, braced for the tumult. She looked left, then right, then left and right again before venturing into a crosswalk, only to break into a rant-laden sprint as two cyclists came within inches of grazing her.

“It’s chaos!” exclaimed Ms. Famery, shaking a fist at the swarm of bikes that have displaced cars on the Rue de Rivoli ever since it was remade into a multilane highway for cyclists last year. “Politicians want to make Paris a cycling city, but no one is following any rules,” she said. “It’s becoming risky just to cross the street!”

The mayhem on Rue de Rivoli — a major traffic artery stretching from the Bastille past the Louvre to the Place de la Concorde — is playing out on streets across Paris as the authorities pursue an ambitious goal of making the city a European cycling capital by 2024.

Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who is campaigning for the French presidency, has been burnishing her credentials as an ecologically minded Socialist candidate. She has earned admirers and enemies alike with a bold program to transform greater Paris into the world’s leading environmentally sustainable metropolis, reclaiming vast swaths of the city from cars for parks, pedestrians and a Copenhagen-style cycling revolution.

For the full story, see:

Liz Alderman. “PARIS DISPATCH; Europe’s New Cycling Capital, or a Pedestrian’s Nightmare?” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, Oct. 3, 2021): 4.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 4, 2021, and has the title “PARIS DISPATCH; As Bikers Throng the Streets, ‘It’s Like Paris Is in Anarchy’.”)

FDA Takes “Several Months” to Approve Manufacturers’ “Rapid” Test Applications

(p. A1) As rising Covid-19 infections stoked demand for tests across the U.S. in December, California-based LumiQuick Diagnostics Inc. shipped 100,000 rapid tests to a hospital customer—in Germany.

LumiQuick didn’t receive authorization from the Food and Drug Administration to sell Covid-19 tests domestically after waiting several months for a decision.

Some public-health experts said the relatively strict review process is part of a broader failure by U.S. officials and manufacturers to make and distribute enough rapid tests to track the pandemic adequately. Nearly two years into the pandemic, people have struggled to find tests during the holiday season as infections surge again, fueled by the highly infectious Omicron variant.

. . .

(p. A4) “We’ve never gotten the testing situation well instituted in our country,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, co-director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, and a former member of the Biden administration’s disbanded coronavirus advisory board.

. . .

Some U.S. manufacturers said the FDA’s slow review of new rapid tests discouraged them from making products that they weren’t sure they would be able to sell in the U.S. “Without approval we cannot commit,” said Frank Wang, chief executive officer of BioMedomics Inc., a North Carolina manufacturer that applied for authorization in March. The company has sold some tests outside the U.S.

Another test maker, Kaya17 Inc., said it has been waiting on FDA approval for months. “The FDA has to up their game and move faster,” said Sulatha Dwarakanath, the company’s CEO.

For the full story, see:

Austen Hufford and Brianna Abbott. “Slow Test Approvals Blamed for Shortage.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Dec. 31, 2021): A1 & A4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 30, 2021, and has the title “Covid-19 Rapid Test Shortages Tied to Slow Federal Action.” The online version says that the title of the print version is “Tests in Short Supply as Approvals Lag.” But my print version (probably the Central Edition) has the title “Slow Test Approvals Blamed for Shortage.”)

COVID-19 Vaccines Were Built on “Decades-Long Efforts to Create Other Vaccines”

Gregory Zuckerman’s The Frackers was a great deep dive into the lives of important non-Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. So far I am also enjoying Zuckerman’s new book, reviewed in the brief passages quoted below.

(p. 26) Zuckerman answers a question still circulating among both vaccine fans and skeptics: How could scientists develop the Covid-19 vaccines so quickly?

The answer is that they didn’t. The Covid-19 vaccines were built on the backs of decades-long efforts to create other vaccines, like one for the Zika virus and, in particular, several failures to develop a useful H.I.V. vaccine.

For the full, but short, review, see:

Eve Fairbanks. “THE SHORTLIST; Covid.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, January 9, 2022): 26.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 29, 2021, and has the title “THE SHORTLIST; New Books Explore the Many Ways Covid Has Altered Our Lives.”)

The book under review is:

Zuckerman, Gregory. A Shot to Save the World: The inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a Covid-19. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2021.

Side Gigs Can Lift Mood Enough to Improve Performance in Main Job

(p. R4) Contrary to the popular wisdom, moonlighting doesn’t leave people worn out and unproductive from 9 to 5. Instead, side gigs can make people feel more empowered—and thereby more productive at the office.

Dr. Sessions and his colleagues—whose results were recently published in the Academy of Management Journal—posted ads on large social-media networking groups, asking people to take a series of surveys about the nature of their supplementary work.  . . .

The study showed that supplementary work frequently enables side hustlers to feel empowered by taking ownership of self-directed work—which was especially true for those who were motivated beyond making money, says Dr. Sessions.

. . .

Side hustlers self-reported that they were preoccupied with their after-hours gigs the next morning, due to being deeply engaged in that work.

. . .

But that wasn’t the whole story: The moonlighters’ colleagues rated their co-workers’ performance significantly higher on those same days.

So, the uplift in mood had a statistically stronger positive effect on employee performance than the negative effect of being distracted—even if the moonlighters didn’t see things that way.

For the full story, see:

Heidi Mitchell. “When Two Jobs Can Be Better Than One.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Nov. 4, 2021): R4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 1, 2021 , and has the title “How a Side Hustle Can Boost Performance at Your Regular Job.”)

The comprehensive review by Prof. Stephan mentioned above is:

Stephan, Ute. “Entrepreneurs’ Mental Health and Well-Being: A Review and Research Agenda.” Academy of Management Perspectives 32, no. 3 (Aug. 2018): 290-322.

The recent study co-authored by Dr. Sessions mentioned above is:

Sessions, Hudson, Jennifer D. Nahrgang, Manuel J. Vaulont, Raseana Williams, and Amy L. Bartels. “Do the Hustle! Empowerment from Side-Hustles and Its Effects on Full-Time Work Performance.” Academy of Management Journal 64, no. 1 (Feb. 2021): 235-64.

Testing for Rare DNA Microdeletion Birth Defects Can Result in More False Positives Than True Positives

(p. 12) Between 2011 and 2013, a small California-based biotech company, Sequenom, tripled in size. The key to its success: MaterniT21, a new prenatal screening test that did remarkably well at detecting Down syndrome.

Older screening tests took months and required multiple blood tests. This new one generated fewer false positives with a single blood draw.

The test could also determine the sex of a fetus. It quickly became a hit. “You had people walking in saying, ‘I want this sex test,’” recalled Dr. Anjali Kaimal, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Competitors began launching their own tests. Today, analyst estimates of the market’s size range from $600 million into the billions, and the number of women taking these tests is expected to double by 2025.

As companies began looking for ways to differentiate their products, many decided to start screening for more and rarer disorders. All the screenings could run on the same blood draw, and doctors already order many tests during short prenatal care visits, meaning some probably thought little of tacking on a few more.

For the testing company, however, adding microdeletions can double what an insurer pays — from an average of $695 for the basic tests to $1,349 for the expanded panel, according to the health data company Concert Genetics. (Patients whose insurance didn’t fully cover the tests describe being billed wildly different figures, ranging from a few hundred to thousands of dollars.)

But these conditions were so rare that there were few instances for the tests to find.

Take Natera, which ran 400,000 tests in 2020 for DiGeorge syndrome, a disorder associated with heart defects and intellectual disability.

That number of tests would be expected to identify about 200 cases of the disorder according to a Times analysis of the company’s studies. It would also generate at least an equal number of false positive results.

That is a best-case scenario based on Natera’s recent claim to have improved its algorithm. In clinical trials, its test (p. 13) generated three times as many false positives as true ones. The company’s four other microdeletion screenings, which it said were run at least 24,000 times in 2020, would be expected to find about eight true postitves and bewen 17 and 134 fase ones, according to the analysis.

For the full story, see:

Sarah Kliff and Aatish Bhatia. “Prenatal Tests for Rare Defects Often Produce False Positives.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, January 2, 2022): 1 & 12-13.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 1, 2022, and has the title “When They Warn of Rare Disorders, These Prenatal Tests Are Usually Wrong.” The last three paragraphs above appear in the online version, but not in this form in the print version. In the print version, the information in the last three paragraphs quoted above, appears mostly as part of an extended graphic.)