Feds Impede Consumer Choice by Going Back to Incandescent Ban

(p. A16) In 2019, the Trump administration blocked a rule designed to phase out older incandescent bulbs, calling it unnecessary and an impediment to consumer choice.

With the move, the administration heeded to both industry demands as well as free market proponents who have long railed against tougher efficiency regulations for consumer appliances and goods, like energy-saving bulbs or water-saving dishwashers, as governmental overreach.

“The new bulb is many times more expensive, and I hate to say it, it doesn’t make you look as good,” Donald J. Trump, the former president, quipped at a White House meeting in 2019, referring to an early common complaint that LEDs emit a harsher light, though recent LED lights come in warmer hues. “We’re bringing back the old light bulb,” he later told a rally in Michigan.

The Biden administration has moved to reinstate the standards. But in a letter to the Department of Energy last year, NEMA, the industry group, urged federal rules to allow companies to manufacture and import inefficient bulbs for at least another year, followed by another year or more to sell out stockpiled inventory.

For the full story, see:

Hiroko Tabuchi. “Obsolete Bulbs Fill the Shelves At Dollar Stores.” The New York Times (Monday, January 24, 2022): A1 & A16.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 23, 2022, and has the title “Old-Fashioned, Inefficient Light Bulbs Live On at the Nation’s Dollar Stores.”)

Even in Old Age Miner George Hearst Retained His “Tenacity, Demon Energy and Genius”

(p. A15) George Hearst was famous for discovering metals—copper, silver, gold—but he liked any mineral he could pull out of the earth. New Year’s Eve 1889 found him far from his San Francisco home, in West Virginia’s coal country. “We found the coal veins all right,” said Hearst’s traveling companion, T.J. Clunie, a young California state senator. “The samples were fine, the price was low, and I expected to see Hearst snap at the offer.” But Hearst was hesitant. “I don’t like to buy a pig in a poke,” he said. “We had better crawl up and see that coal for ourselves before we discuss the price.” That meant scaling a 3,000-foot hill.

At the summit Hearst found a vein of coal, hacked out a chunk, and set it on fire. The flame sputtered and died in seconds. He tossed the lump aside and went looking for another. He found a different vein, hacked out another piece and ignited it. This one burned steadily for 10 minutes, Clunie recalled, while Hearst watched it “as a mother does her first-born.” Hearst scrambled back down the hill and bought the vein. He was 69 years old.

Stomach cancer would claim Hearst barely a year later, but as Matthew Bernstein demonstrates in “George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded Age,” the old miner went about his work right to the end with the same tenacity, demon energy and genius for finding what he was after that had made him one of the richest men in the American West.

. . .

Hearst did occasionally interrupt his prospecting. On a visit home to Missouri, the 40-year-old prospector fell for an 18-year-old named Phoebe Apperson, and married her in 1862. It was a happy match—he certainly wasn’t around enough to get on her nerves—and they produced one child, William Randolph Hearst, who would embed himself in the national memory even more deeply than his father.

. . .

. . ., there is a warmth to the man that makes him good company throughout the book, and charm in his downright language, as when he said, “When I was young I had very strong religious views, and was brought up to a thoroughly orthodox way; but after leaving home my ideas got broader, and on studying these things for myself, without any influence from parents, or ministers, I came to the conclusion that I knew just about as much about it as anybody, and I knew nothing.”

For the full review, see:

Richard Snow. “BOOKSHELF; A Head For Metals.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Dec. 13, 2021): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 12, 2021, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘George Hearst’ Review: A Head for Metals.”)

The book under review is:

Bernstein, Matthew. George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded Age. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021.

Instead of Centralizing With C.D.C., the Need for Speed Requires “Clinical and Commercial Labs to Create and Deploy Tests”

(p. A22) The faulty coronavirus testing kits developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the early weeks of the pandemic were not only contaminated but had a basic design flaw, according to an internal review by the agency.

Health officials had already acknowledged that the test kits were contaminated, but the internal report, whose findings were published in PLOS ONE on Wednesday, also documented a design error that caused false positives.

. . .

The C.D.C.’s test was designed to detect three distinct regions, or target sequences, of the virus’s genetic material. The test kits contain a set of what are known as primers, which bind to and make copies of the target sequences, and probes, which produce a fluorescent signal when these copies are made, indicating that genetic material from the virus is present.

The primers and probes need to be carefully designed so that they bind to the target sequences and not to each other. In this case, that did not happen. One of the probes in the kit sometimes bound to one of the primers, producing the fluorescent signal and generating a false positive.

“It’s something that should have been caught in the design phase,” said Susan Butler-Wu, a clinical microbiologist at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. “That’s one thing that you check for.”

. . .

The bigger lesson, Dr. Butler-Wu said, is that the responsibility for developing diagnostic tests should be distributed more widely during a public health emergency. Rather than relying on the C.D.C. to be the sole test developer, officials could also enlist clinical and commercial labs to create and deploy tests.

“It’s great that there’s all these additional checks in place, but what are you going to do when there’s a new emerging pathogen and we need to respond quickly?” she said. “I don’t think that’s a viable model for responding to a pandemic.”

For the full story, see:

Emily Anthes. “C.D.C. Finds Design Error In Testing Kits It Distributed.” The New York Times Thursday, December 16, 2021): A22.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 15, 2021, and has the title “C.D.C. Virus Tests Were Contaminated and Poorly Designed, Agency Says.”)

The PLOS ONE article mentioned above is:

Lee, Justin S., Jason M. Goldstein, Jonathan L. Moon, Owen Herzegh, Dennis A. Bagarozzi, Jr., M. Steven Oberste, Heather Hughes, Kanwar Bedi, Dorothie Gerard, Brenique Cameron, Christopher Benton, Asiya Chida, Ausaf Ahmad, David J. Petway, Jr., Xiaoling Tang, Nicky Sulaiman, Dawit Teklu, Dhwani Batra, Dakota Howard, Mili Sheth, Wendi Kuhnert, Stephanie R. Bialek, Christina L. Hutson, Jan Pohl, and Darin S. Carroll. “Analysis of the Initial Lot of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel.” PLOS ONE 16, no. 12 (Dec. 15, 2021). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0260487.

“Unprecedented” and “Huge” Serendipitous Discovery of 60 Million Icefish Nests

(p. D3) As soon as the remotely operated camera glimpsed the bottom of the Weddell Sea, more than a thousand feet below the icy ceiling at the surface, Lilian Boehringer, a student researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, saw the icefish nests. The sandy craters dimpled the seafloor, each the size of a hula hoop and less than a foot apart. Each crater held a single, stolid icefish, dark pectoral fins outspread like bat wings over a clutch of eggs.

Aptly named icefishes thrive in waters just above freezing with enormous hearts and blood that runs clear as vodka. . . .

The sighting occurred in February 2021 in the camera room aboard a research ship, the Polarstern, which had come to the Weddell Sea to study other things, not icefish. It was 3 a.m. near Antarctica, meaning the sun was out but most of the ship was asleep. To Ms. Boehringer’s surprise, the camera kept transmitting pictures as it moved with the ship, revealing an uninterrupted horizon of icefish nests every 20 seconds.

. . .

The nests persisted for the entire four-hour dive, with a total of 16,160 recorded on camera. After two more dives by the camera, the scientists estimated the colony of Neopagetopsis ionah icefish stretched across 92 square miles of the serene Antarctic sea, totaling 60 million active nests. The researchers described the site — the largest fish breeding colony ever discovered — in a paper published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

“Holy cow,” said C.-H. Christina Cheng, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, who was not involved with the research. “This is really unprecedented,” she said. “It is crazy dense. It is a major discovery.”

. . .

“The seafloor is not just barren and boring,” Dr. Purser said. “Such huge discoveries are still there to be made, even today in the 21st century.”

For the full story, see:

Sabrina Imbler. “Deep in Frigid Waters, Icefish Colonies Thrive.” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 18, 2022): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 13, 2022, and has the title “‘Major Discovery’ Beneath Antarctic Seas: A Giant Icefish Breeding Colony.”)

Due to B Cells, Covid-19 Infection Creates Longer-Lasting Immunity than Does Just Vaccination

(p. D4) . . . among the vaccinated and boosted, getting infected with the Omicron variant also appears to be contributing to a psychological shift, as people realize they have probably gained at least a short-term natural boost to their immune system. Scientists call it “hybrid immunity,” which results from the combined protection of pre-existing vaccine antibodies and natural antibodies from a breakthrough infection.

. . .

A recent study showed that vaccinated health care workers with breakthrough infections had significantly higher levels of antibodies compared to a vaccinated control group that had not had natural infections. Fikadu Tafesse, an immunologist at Oregon Health & Science University who helped conduct the research, said that although the study was done before the Omicron wave, the findings suggest a drastically elevated level of protection after a breakthrough infection.

“Super immunity is maybe an overreach, but we know the most recent studies show there’s hybrid immunity, really due to immune players known as memory B cells,” said Anita Gupta, an adjunct assistant professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “When some of the short-lived immune cells go away, these memory B cells are going to last a while.”

For the full story, see:

Dani Blum. “Your New ‘Hybrid Immunity’ Isn’t a Superpower.” The New York Times (Thursday, January 27, 2022): D4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Jan. 21, 2022, and has the title “I Had Breakthrough Covid. Can I Start Living Like It’s 2019?”)

The “recent study” mentioned above is:

Bates, Timothy A., Savannah K. McBride, Bradie Winders, Devin Schoen, Lydie Trautmann, Marcel E. Curlin, and Fikadu G. Tafesse. “Antibody Response and Variant Cross-Neutralization after Sars-Cov-2 Breakthrough Infection.” JAMA 327, no. 2 (Jan. 11, 2022): 179-81.

Technology Behind the Telephone Was Originally Intended to Aid Transcribing Telegraph Messages

(p. C5) Thomas Alva Edison’s self-proclaimed greatest invention, the phonograph, won him overnight fame.  . . .

In February 1877, the same month that saw Edison turn 30 and show his first streaks of silver hair, he and his fellow inventor Charles Batchelor began a new series of experiments on what they called, variously, the “telephonic telegraph,” the “speaking telegraph” and the “talking telephone.” This confusion of names would last as long as Americans took to adjust to the startling notion that an electrically transmitted message did not necessarily have to be transcribed.

It was beyond even Alexander Graham Bell’s imagination that people might one day use the telephone just to chat. As far as Edison was concerned, Bell’s invention was a device to speed up the process of turning words into pulsations of current, then turning the pulsations back into words at the other end—words intended to be heard only by a receiving operator, who would then (as Edison had done thousands of times as a youth) copy out the message for delivery. Hence the telephone really was, for all its crackly noise, telegraphic in function.

. . .

“Kruesi—make this,” Edison recalled saying to John Kruesi, his Swiss-born master machinist, giving him a drawing of a mounted, foil-wrapped cylinder, with a handle on one side to turn it, and a vibrant mouthpiece projecting a stylus that just touched the surface of the wrap. “I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back,” Edison wrote. “He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted Mary had a little lamb, etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly….I never was so taken aback in my life.”

What awed Edison beyond any other thought was that the moment did not have to be a moment; it could be a century, if the foil and the stylus were preserved; and then in 1977, if some unborn person turned this same handle, the voice of a man long dead would speak to him. No wonder that Kruesi, listening with incredulity to the thing he had made talking with Edison’s voice, exclaimed, “Mein Gott im Himmel!” (My God in heaven).

All those who heard the miraculous machine in the ensuing months, from the president of the U.S. on down, reacted with equal disbelief. Since the dawn of humanity, religions had asserted that the human soul would live on after the body rotted away. The human voice was a thing almost as insubstantial as the soul, but it was a product of the body and therefore must die too—in fact, did die, evaporating like breath the moment each word, each phoneme was sounded. Even the notes of inanimate things—the tree falling in the wood, thunder rumbling, ice cracking—sounded once only, except if they were duplicated in echoes that themselves rapidly faded.

But here now were echoes made hard, resounding as often as anyone wanted to hear them again.

For the full essay, see:

Edmund Morris. “The Making of Thomas Edison’s Miraculous Machine.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, October 19, 2019): C5.

(Note: ellipses at the end or in between paragraphs, added; ellipsis internal to a paragraph, in original.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date October 17, 2019, and has the same title as the print version.)

The essay quoted above is adapted from Morris’s book:

Morris, Edmund. Edison. New York: Random House, 2019.

FDA Only Approves Drugs That Fight Diseases and FDA Does Not See Aging as a Disease

(p. R2) Will people eventually routinely live—and live healthily—longer? That’s the vision of the burgeoning field of aging research, where scientists are trying to extrapolate tantalizing life-prolonging findings from animal experiments into medicines that slow, prevent or even reverse the aging process for humans.

Leading candidates for stanching aging include two familiar drugs—metformin, a front-line diabetes treatment, and rapamycin, long used to prevent transplant patients from rejecting donated organs. Both have been shown to increase longevity in animal studies and both target molecular processes linked to the aging of cells.

Another approach is a new class of drugs called senolytics, which clear the body of so-called senescent cells, old cells that stop dividing but don’t die. They accumulate in tissues throughout the body and secrete factors that damage other cells. They are linked to such aging conditions as frailty, cognitive impairment and lack of physical resilience.

Also in the mix is a strategy called cellular reprogramming in which scientists are seeking to turn back the clock on aging cells, restoring functions characteristic of younger cells.

. . .

. . ., the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t recognize aging as a disease to be treated, meaning there isn’t a clear path to approval for a drug that targets the biology of aging. Researchers instead have to design trials that can quantify whether a drug improves health or extends survival in a specific age-related disease. A pill that a large and generally healthy population would take, perhaps for decades, would have to clear a high safety bar.

. . .

Researchers are working to develop biomarkers in blood or other bodily sources that can quantify the aging process and serve as drug targets or as proxies to indicate a drug is working or not. Without validated biomarkers, it could take 20 or 30 years in some cases to run a randomized trial to prove whether a drug safely extended life.

For the full story, see:

Ron Winslow. “A Pill to Turn Back the Clock.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022): R2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 11, 2022, and has the title “Can You Fight Aging? Scientists Are Testing Drugs to Help.”)

Diamond to Give “How to Cure Cancer” Talk at Gustavus Adolphus College

I appreciate Marta Podemska-Mikluch’s perseverance over the long pandemic in arranging my conversations with Gustavus Adolphus College students on some of my current research on medical entrepreneurship. I am looking forward to my visit!

Economic Growth Reduces the Harms from Global Warming

(p. C3) Long-term economic growth is associated with both rising per capita energy consumption and slower population growth. For this reason, as the world continues to get richer, higher per capita energy consumption is likely to be offset by a lower population.

A richer world will also likely be more technologically advanced, which means that energy consumption should be less carbon-intensive than it would be in a poorer, less technologically advanced future. In fact, a number of the high-emissions scenarios produced by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change involve futures in which the world is relatively poor and populous and less technologically advanced.

Affluent, developed societies are also much better equipped to respond to climate extremes and natural disasters. That’s why natural disasters kill and displace many more people in poor societies than in rich ones. It’s not just seawalls and flood channels that make us resilient; it’s air conditioning and refrigeration, modern transportation and communications networks, early warning systems, first responders and public health bureaucracies.

New research published in the journal Global Environmental Change finds that global economic growth over the last decade has reduced climate mortality by a factor of five, with the greatest benefits documented in the poorest nations. In low-lying Bangladesh, 300,000 people died in Cyclone Bhola in 1970, when 80% of the population lived in extreme poverty. In 2019, with less than 20% of the population living in extreme poverty, Cyclone Fani killed just five people.

Poor nations are most vulnerable to a changing climate. The fastest way to reduce that vulnerability is through economic development.

So while it is true that poor nations are most vulnerable to a changing climate, it is also true that the fastest way to reduce that vulnerability is through economic development, which requires infrastructure and industrialization. Those activities, in turn, require cement, steel, process heat and chemical inputs, all of which are impossible to produce today without fossil fuels.

For the full commentary, see:

Ted Nordhaus. “Ignore the Fake Climate Debate.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, January 25, 2020): C3.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 23, 2020, and has the same title as the print version.)

Nordhaus’s commentary is related to the manifesto that he co-authored with many others:

Asafu-Adjaye, John, Linus Blomqvist, Stewart Brand, Barry Brook, Ruth DeFries, Erle Ellis, Christopher Foreman, David Keith, Martin Lewis, Mark Lynas, Ted Nordhaus, Roger Pielke Jr., Rachel Pritzker, Joyashree Roy, Mark Sagoff, Michael Shellenberger, Robert Stone, and Peter Teague. “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” April 2015.

Technological Progress Helped Create Cosmopolitan Europe

(p. C7) Cultural history is frequently written as if circumscribed by national borders, with each country laying claim to a discrete social and intellectual way of life. Dismayed at this tendency, Orlando Figes, a noted historian of Russia, found himself wondering whether the forces of transnational integration weren’t at least as decisive as those that would drive cultures apart. In his new study “The Europeans” he aims “to approach Europe as a space of cultural transfers, translations and exchanges crossing national boundaries, out of which a ‘European culture’—an international synthesis of artistic forms, ideas and styles—would come into existence and distinguish Europe from the broader world.

. . .

His monumental work is the product of thorough and extensive research, largely in archival sources and in several languages. The author has a remarkable capacity to keep a huge quantity of factual material present in mind, and to bind it moreover into a coherent story. Woven through the biographical narrative is a detailed account of the transformations in technology, mores and law that created the new cosmopolitanism.

Chief among these was the rapid construction of railways, such that in France alone, for example, well more than 8,000 miles of track were laid down between 1850 and 1870. Railway travel gave people the time and comfort to read newspapers and fiction, which they could procure in the dozens of station bookstalls set up by merchants like W.H. Smith. “The train,” Mr. Figes notes, “was smoother than a horse-drawn carriage on a bumpy road, enabling passengers to read a book more easily.” Literacy had increased dramatically, and the rotary press, invented in 1843, facilitated the production of a vast quantity of printed matter, distribution of which deep into the provinces was in turn driven by the ramifying network of trains.

. . .

The spread of gas lighting, invented in the 1790s, made it possible for people to read comfortably in the evening. It also enabled them to play the piano at home, and of course piano technology had kept pace: The instruments became easier to play, and cheaper as well. In 1845, by the author’s estimation, 100,000 people in Paris were playing the piano, of which there were 60,000 in a city of about one million people.

For the full review, see:

Dan Hofstadter. “Engines of Progress.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, October 19, 2019): C7 & C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 18, 2019, and has the title “‘The Europeans’ Review: Engines of Progress.”)

The book under review in the passages quoted above is:

Figes, Orlando. The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019.

Surgical Masks Provide Wearer Modest Protection Against Infection from Covid-19

(p. A17) The first large randomized community-level study, published last month in Science, found that while generic surgical masks provided a modest (about 10%) reduction in the risk of infection from Delta, cloth masks didn’t significantly reduce risk. Masks may be even less protective against an extremely contagious variant like Omicron.

For the full commentary, see:

Daniel Halperin. “Omicron Is Spreading. Resistance Is Futile.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, January 25, 2022): A17.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 24, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

The article in Science mentioned above is:

Abaluck, Jason, Laura H. Kwong, Ashley Styczynski, Ashraful Haque, Md. Alamgir Kabir, Ellen Bates-Jefferys, Emily Crawford, Jade Benjamin-Chung, Shabib Raihan, Shadman Rahman, Salim Benhachmi, Neeti Zaman Bintee, Peter J. Winch, Maqsud Hossain, Hasan Mahmud Reza, Abdullah All Jaber, Shawkee Gulshan Momen, Aura Rahman, Faika Laz Banti, Tahrima Saiha Huq, Stephen P. Luby, and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak. “Impact of Community Masking on Covid-19: A Cluster-Randomized Trial in Bangladesh.” Science 375, no. 6577 (Jan. 14, 2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abi9069.