Category: Health

Unlike DNA, RNA Has “Catalytic Power”

(p. 8) In the early 1980s, when I was much younger and most of the promise of RNA was still unimagined, I set up my lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder. After two years of false leads and frustration, my research group discovered that the RNA we’d been studying had catalytic power. This means that the RNA could cut and join biochemical bonds all by itself — the sort of activity that had been thought to be the sole purview of protein enzymes. This gave us a tantalizing glimpse at our deepest origins: If RNA could both hold information and orchestrate the assembly of molecules, it was very likely that the first living things to spring out of the primordial ooze were RNA-based organisms.

. . .

RNA discoveries have led to new therapies, such as the use of antisense RNA to help treat children afflicted with the devastating disease spinal muscular atrophy. The mRNA vaccines, which saved millions of lives during the Covid pandemic, are being reformulated to attack other diseases, including some cancers. RNA research may also be helping us rewrite the future; the genetic scissors that give CRISPR its breathtaking power to edit genes are guided to their sites of action by RNAs.

Although most scientists now agree on RNA’s bright promise, we are still only beginning to unlock its potential. Consider, for instance, that some 75 percent of the human genome consists of dark matter that is copied into RNAs of unknown function. While some researchers have dismissed this dark matter as junk or noise, I expect it will be the source of even more exciting breakthroughs.

For the full essay see:

Thomas Cech. “Move Aside, DNA. RNA Has Arrived.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, June 2, 2024): 8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date May 29, 2024, and has the title “The Long-Overlooked Molecule That Will Define a Generation of Science.”)

The essay quoted above was adapted from the author’s book:

Cech, Thomas R. The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.

A Dollar Spent on Medicaid Yields (at Most) 40 Cents of Value to Recipients

(p. C3) A . . . National Bureau of Economic Research study estimated the value of Medicaid to its recipients at between 20¢ and 40¢ per dollar of expenditure, with the majority of the value going to health-care providers like doctors and hospitals. By comparison, the Earned Income Tax Credit—a cash transfer program designed to enhance the incomes of the working poor—delivers around 90¢ of value to its recipients per dollar of expenditure. Given that more than half of Obamacare’s reduction in the numbers of the uninsured has been from its expansion of Medicaid, this makes the law look more like welfare for the medical-industrial complex than support for the needy.

For the full commentary see:

Daniel P. Kessler. “The Health of Obamacare.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 12, 2015 [sic]): C3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 11, 2015 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

The NBER working paper mentioned above was later published in:

Finkelstein, Amy, Nathaniel Hendren, and Erzo F. P. Luttmer. “The Value of Medicaid: Interpreting Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment.” Journal of Political Economy 127, no. 6 (Dec. 2019): 2836-74.

(Note: my title for this blog entry continues to be supported in the 2019 published version of the earlier NBER working paper.)

Pigeons Can Learn to Accurately Spot Cancerous Breast Cells

(p. C4) . . . researchers at the University of California, Davis, the University of Iowa and Emory University have demonstrated that pigeons are surprisingly good at detecting cancer as well. Using grain as a reward, the scientists managed to train hungry pigeons to reliably spot malignancies in images of human breast cells.

The birds achieved roughly 85% accuracy, which is probably better than beginning medical students, the scientists said, although it doesn’t approach the prowess of seasoned pathologists. On the other hand, the birds’ training only involved 24 slides at four times magnification (and they graduated debt-free). What’s more, when Edward A. Wasserman and his colleagues exploited the “wisdom of flocks” by combining the “votes” of four pigeons on each slide, the birds’ accuracy shot up to an astonishing 99%.

When confronted with mammograms, by contrast, the pigeons were flummoxed. After awhile, they seemed to learn to detect cancer on these images, but when shown new ones, they couldn’t do any better than chance, which implies that they had simply memorized the right calls on the initial images during repeated viewings. By contrast, birds that learned to pick out cancer from tissue samples could carry over their skills to new images.

Why so good with images of actual tissue yet so bad with mammograms? The former consist of breast cells seen under a microscope, while the latter are murkier images of overlapping elements (such as blood vessels) within the breast. Like physicians, pigeons find it easier to make the diagnosis by looking at cells, which is why biopsies are taken.

For the full commentary see:

Daniel Akst. “R&D; Pigeons That Spot Breast Cancer.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 12, 2015 [sic]): C4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 11, 2015 [sic], and has the title “R&D; The Pigeons That Can Spot Breast Cancer.”)

The research summarized in the passages quoted above, was published in the academic article:

Levenson, Richard M., Elizabeth A. Krupinski, Victor M. Navarro, and Edward A. Wasserman. “Pigeons (Columba Livia) as Trainable Observers of Pathology and Radiology Breast Cancer Images.” PLOS ONE 10, no. 11 (2015): e0141357.

Subpoena Emails Between Wuhan Lab and U.S. Partners to Illuminate Origin of Covid

The passages quoted below are a very small part of a much longer essay that took up the space of a full page and a half of the SundayOpinion section of The New York Times.

(p. 6) On Monday [June 3, 2024], Dr. Anthony Fauci returned to the halls of Congress and testified before the House subcommittee investigating the Covid-19 pandemic. He was questioned about several topics related to the government’s handling of Covid-19, including how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he directed until retiring in 2022, supported risky virus work at a Chinese institute whose research may have caused the pandemic.

For more than four years, reflexive partisan politics have derailed the search for the truth about a catastrophe that has touched us all. It has been estimated that at least 25 million people around the world have died because of Covid-19, with over a million of those deaths in the United States.

Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.

. . .

(p. 7) The pandemic could have been caused by any of hundreds of virus species, at any of tens of thousands of wildlife markets, in any of thousands of cities, and in any year. But it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.

While several natural spillover scenarios remain plausible, and we still don’t know enough about the full extent of virus research conducted at the Wuhan institute by Dr. Shi’s team and other researchers, a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.

Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.

Whether the pandemic started on a lab bench or in a market stall, it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them.

. . .

A thorough investigation by the U.S. government could unearth more evidence while spurring whistleblowers to find their courage and seek their moment of opportunity. It would also show the world that U.S. leaders and scientists are not afraid of what the truth behind the pandemic may be.

For the full essay see:

Alina Chan. “Why Covid Probably Started in a Lab.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, June 9, 2024): 6-7.

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

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date June 3, 2024, and has the title “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points.”)

The essay quoted above summarizes and updates her co-authored book:

Chan, Alina, and Matt Ridley. Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. New York: Harper, 2021.

When Hospitals Compete Less, Prices Rise More

(p. B10) If the fries at your local burger joint are soggy or if you’re suddenly charged $25 for ketchup, you’ll probably eat somewhere else next time. That’s the beauty of competition.

Healthcare doesn’t quite work that way. For starters, you don’t always get to choose your medical provider—your insurer often does by contracting with them. And even the insurer can’t easily walk away, either: Giant hospital systems are swallowing up big chunks of the country’s healthcare system through vertical and horizontal integration. That leaves fewer parties with which to negotiate.

If McDonald’s bought Burger King and then Wendy’s, you could always cook at home instead, but nearly everyone needs to go to the doctor or the hospital at some point. Patients also aren’t nearly as cost sensitive as they would be with other purchases because employers and insurers pick up much of the tab. They often don’t even know the price ahead of time.

Hospital executives argue that mergers lead to improved efficiency and better outcomes for patients. But, after years of rampant consolidation between hospitals, most regions in the U.S. are now dominated by a few large players. That has led to higher prices and no significant improvements in patient care.

Rising costs don’t just lead to alarmingly high medical bills—they also make all of us worse off by increasing premiums, the bulk of which are paid by the nation’s employers. That affects even people who rarely visit a doctor. As those premiums soar and employers look to offset the cost, they indirectly eat into people’s paychecks.

Over the past two decades, there have been more than 1,000 mergers among the country’s approximately 5,000 hospitals, according to a forthcoming paper in American Economic Review: Insights.

For the full commentary see:

David Wainer. “As Hospitals Grow, So Does Your Bill.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, June 7, 2024): B10.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 6, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

The paper in American Economic Review: Insights, mentioned above, is:

Brot-Goldberg, Zarek, Zack Cooper, Stuart Craig, and Lev Klarnet. “Is There Too Little Antitrust Enforcement in the U.S. Hospital Sector?” American Economic Review: Insights (forthcoming).

Gates’s TerraPower Breaks Ground on Small Nuclear Reactor

(p. A16) Outside a small coal town in southwest Wyoming, a multibillion-dollar effort to build the first in a new generation of American nuclear power plants is underway.

Workers began construction on Tuesday on a novel type of nuclear reactor meant to be smaller and cheaper than the hulking reactors of old and designed to produce electricity without the carbon dioxide that is rapidly heating the planet.

The reactor being built by TerraPower, a start-up, won’t be finished until 2030 at the earliest and faces daunting obstacles. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission hasn’t yet approved the design, and the company will have to overcome the inevitable delays and cost overruns that have doomed countless nuclear projects before.

What TerraPower does have, however, is an influential and deep-pocketed founder. Bill Gates, currently ranked as the seventh-richest person in the world, has poured more than $1 billion of his fortune into TerraPower, an amount that he expects to increase.

“If you care about climate, there are many, many locations around the world where nuclear has got to work,” Mr. Gates said during an interview near the project site on Monday. “I’m not involved in TerraPower to make more money. I’m involved in TerraPower because we need to build a lot of these reactors.”

Mr. Gates, the former head of Microsoft, said he believed the best way to solve climate change was through innovations that make clean energy competitive with fossil fuels, a philosophy he described in his 2021 book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”

Nationwide, nuclear power is seeing a resurgence of interest, with several start-ups jockeying to build a wave of smaller reactors and the Biden administration offering hefty tax credits for new plants.

. . .

In March [2024], TerraPower submitted a 3,300-page application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a permit to build the reactor, but that will take at least two years to review. The company has to persuade regulators that its sodium-cooled reactor doesn’t need many of the costly safeguards required for traditional light-water reactors.

“That’s going to be challenging,” said Adam Stein, director of nuclear innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, a pro-nuclear research organization.

TerraPower’s plant is designed so that major components, like the steam turbines that generate electricity and the molten salt battery, are physically separate from the reactor, where fission occurs. The company says those parts don’t require regulatory approval and can begin construction sooner.

For the full story see:

Brad Plumer and Benjamin Rasmussen. “Climate-Minded Billionaire Makes a Bet on Nuclear Power.” The New York Times (Thursday, June 13, 2024): A16.

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

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 11, 2024, and has the title “Nuclear Power Is Hard. A Climate-Minded Billionaire Wants to Make It Easier.”)

Gates’s 2021 book, mentioned above, is:

Gates, Bill. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. New York: Knopf, 2021.

Starlink Gives Remote Tribes Voice, Information, and Fast Help in Emergencies

(p. 12) . . . Starlink, . . . has quickly dominated the satellite-internet market worldwide by providing service once unthinkable in . . . remote areas. SpaceX has done so by launching 6,000 low-orbiting Starlink satellites — roughly 60 percent of all active spacecraft — to deliver speeds faster than many home internet connections to just about anywhere on Earth, including the Sahara, the Mongolian grasslands and tiny Pacific islands.

Business is soaring. Mr. Musk recently announced that Starlink had surpassed three million customers across 99 countries. Analysts estimate that annual sales are up roughly 80 percent from last year, to about $6.6 billion.

. . .

. . . perhaps Starlink’s most transformative effect is in areas once largely out of the internet’s reach, like the Amazon. There are now 66,000 active contracts in the Brazilian Amazon, touching 93 percent of the region’s legal municipalities. That has opened new job and education opportunities for those who live in the forest. It has also given illegal loggers and miners in the Amazon a new tool to communicate and evade authorities.

One Marubo leader, Enoque Marubo (all Marubo use the same surname), 40, said he immediately saw Starlink’s potential. After spending years outside the forest, he said he believed the internet could give his people new autonomy. With it, they could communicate better, inform themselves and tell their own stories.

Last year, he and a Brazilian activist recorded a 50-second video seeking help getting Starlink from potential benefactors. He wore his traditional Marubo headdress and sat in the maloca. A toddler wearing a necklace of animal teeth sat nearby.

They sent it off. Days later, they heard back from a woman in Oklahoma.

. . .

Allyson Reneau’s LinkedIn page describes her as a space consultant, keynote speaker, author, pilot, equestrian, humanitarian, chief executive, board director and mother of 11 biological children. In person, she says she makes most of her money coaching gymnastics and renting houses near Norman, Okla.

. . .

Enoque was asking for 20 Starlink antennas, which would cost roughly $15,000, to transform life for his tribe.

. . .

[Allyson Reneau said] “One tool would change everything in their life. Health care, education, communication, protection of the forest.”

Ms. Reneau said she bought the antennas with her own money and donations from her children.

. . .

The internet was an immediate sensation.

. . .

They spend lots of time on WhatsApp. There, leaders coordinate between villages and alert the authorities to health issues and environmental destruction. Marubo teachers share lessons with students in different villages. And everyone is in much closer contact with faraway family and friends.

To Enoque, the biggest benefit has been in emergencies. A venomous snake bite can require swift rescue by helicopter. Before the internet, the Marubo used amateur radio, relaying a message between several villages to reach the authorities. The internet made such calls instantaneous. “It’s already saved lives,” he said.

For the full story see:

Jack Nicas and Victor Moriyama. “The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes of Brazil.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, June 2, 2024): 1 & 12-13.

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

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 21 [sic], 2024, and has the title “The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes.”)

With Metformin Patent Expired, No Firm Has Incentive to Fund $50 Million Randomized Clinical Trial to Show It Aids Longevity

The article quoted below was published eight years ago. Dr. Barzilai and his team are still, even now, trying to raise the (probably higher) funds to conduct the metformin clinical trial. Firms have no incentive to conduct the clinical trial. Since the patent for metformin (originally issued for its efficacy against diabetes) expired in the year 2000, even if the clinical trial succeeded, no firm would be able to recover in revenue the $50 cost of conducting the clinical trial. Clinical trials are so hugely expensive largely due to the large and long Phase 3 component, intended to prove efficacy. That is why I salute Milton Friedman’s suggestion that a step in the right direction would be for the FDA to only mandate the smaller and quicker Phase 1 and Phase 2 components, mainly intended to prove safety. If the total cost of the clinical trial was much lower, it might be easier to find non-profit or academic funding. (It’s hard to raise $50 million on a GoFundMe page!)

The system is set up so that cheap (off-patent) drugs like metformin do not get tested, and so do not get FDA approval for off-label uses. So the system is set up to reduce the use of low cost, but possibly effective, medicines.

(p. D5) “Aging is by far the best predictor of whether people will develop a chronic disease like atherosclerotic heart disease, stroke, cancer, dementia or osteoarthritis,” Dr. James L. Kirkland, director of the Kogod Center on Aging at the Mayo Clinic, said in an interview. “Aging way outstrips all other risk factors.”

He and fellow researchers, who call themselves “geroscientists,” are hardly hucksters hawking magic elixirs to extend life. Rather, they are university scientists joined together by the American Federation for Aging Research to promote a new approach to healthier aging, which may — or may not — be accompanied by a longer life. They plan to test one or more substances that have already been studied in animals, and which show initial promise in people, in hopes of finding one that will keep more of us healthier longer.

As Dr. Kirkland wrote in . . ., “Aging: The Longevity Dividend”: “By targeting fundamental aging processes, it may be possible to delay, prevent, alleviate or treat the major age-related chronic disorders as a group instead of one at a time.”

. . .

The team, which includes Dr. Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in The Bronx, and Steven N. Austad, who heads the biology department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, plans to study one promising compound, a generic drug called metformin already widely used in people with Type 2 diabetes. They will test the drug in a placebo-controlled trial involving 3,000 elderly people to see if it will delay the development or progression of a variety of age-related ailments, including heart disease, cancer and dementia. Their job now is to raise the $50 million or so needed to conduct the study for the five years they expect it will take to determine whether the concept has merit.

. . .

Several studies have . . . found that individuals with exceptional longevity experience a compression of morbidity and spend a smaller percentage of their life being ill, Dr. Barzilai and his colleague Dr. Sofiya Milman wrote in the “Aging” book.

For the full commentary see:

Jane E. Brody. “Pursuing the Dream of Healthy Aging.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 2, 2016 [sic]): D5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date February 1, 2016 [sic], and has the title “Finding a Drug for Healthy Aging.”)

Dr. Kirkland’s co-edited book mentioned above is:

Olshansky, S. Jay, George M. Martin, and James L. Kirkland, eds. Aging: The Longevity Dividend, A Subject Collection from Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2015.

One study that documents that those who live 107 or more years do not have more years of illness and morbidity (the “compression of morbidity hypothesis”) is:

Sebastiani, Paola, and Thomas T. Perls. “The Genetics of Extreme Longevity: Lessons from the New England Centenarian Study.” Frontiers in Genetics 3 (Nov. 30, 2012).

“Extended School Closures Did Not Significantly Stop the Spread of Covid, While the Academic Harms for Children Have Been Large and Long-Lasting”

(p. A13) Four years ago this month, schools nationwide began to shut down, igniting one of the most polarizing and partisan debates of the pandemic.

Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year.

A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.

For the full story see:

Sarah Mervosh, Claire Cain Miller and Francesca Paris. “Pandemic School Closures Came at a Steep Cost to Students, Data Shows.” The New York Times (Friday, March 29, 2024): A13.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated March 19, 2024, and has the title “What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later.”)

Physicians Are Reluctant to Assign Their Patients to a Clinical Trial of a New Therapy That Might Replace the Therapy They Know and Practice

(p. D1) After learning he had early stage prostate cancer, Paul Kolnik knew he wanted that cancer destroyed immediately and with as little disruption as possible to his busy life as the New York City Ballet’s photographer.

So Mr. Kolnik, 65, chose a type of radiation treatment that is raising some eyebrows in the prostate cancer field. It is more intense than standard radiation and takes much less time — five sessions over two weeks instead of 40 sessions over about two months or 28 sessions over five to six weeks.

. . .

The National Cancer Institute has just agreed to fund a clinical trial that researchers hope will settle which treatment is better. It will randomly assign 538 men to have either a short course of five intense radiation sessions over two weeks or 28 treatments over five and a half weeks, comparing outcomes for quality of life as well as disease-free survival.

But it will be at least eight years before the answers are in. In the meantime, men and their doctors are left with uncertainty.

“Ideally, we want to show five treatments (p. D4) is better,” said Dr. Rodney J. Ellis, a radiation oncologist at Case Comprehensive Cancer Center in Cleveland and the principal investigator for the trial.

One reason for the dearth of data is that prostate cancer usually grows slowly, if at all, so it can take many years to see if a treatment saved lives. It is expensive and difficult to follow patients for such a long time, and the treatments given to the men often change over a decade, making doctors wonder if the results are relevant.

Also, researchers who have tried to conduct studies comparing treatments often failed because specialists were already convinced that the method they used was best and were reluctant to assign men to other treatments. Dr. Ian Thompson of the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, said he was involved with several clinical trials that withered for that reason.

. . .

The researchers on the new study think recruitment will not be a major problem because they are comparing different courses of radiation, rather than entirely different approaches — for example, surgical removal of the prostate versus implantation of radioactive seeds in the prostate. A study to investigate those two approaches closed because investigators were able to enroll only 20 patients, Dr. Thompson said.

. . .

A few years ago, Dr. Yu and his colleagues looked at Medicare data and reported that men who had more intense radiation therapy were more likely to have urinary problems after two years than those who had the longer-course therapy.

Dr. Yu noted that his study was not a randomized trial, the gold standard, but he said the results were not reassuring. Now, though, he is not so sure the intense therapy is worse.

“In my own experience, these men have done really well,” he said. “That tells us that techniques improved, or the medical claims we evaluated were not indicative of major toxicity, or the way we and others at high-volume centers deliver radiotherapy is different.”

The lack of solid data bothers Dr. Daniel W. Lin, chief of urologic oncology at the University of Washington. When men ask him about the shorter radiation course, he tells them, “It probably can work but it doesn’t have long-term results and it hasn’t been tested against standard radiation.”

At centers like Sloan Kettering, doctors are relying on their own experience.

Dr. Michael J. Zelefsky, a radiation oncologist who treated Mr. Kolnik there, said that several years ago, 90 percent of his patients had the standard course of treatment. Now 90 percent choose the shorter course. On the basis of Sloan Kettering’s experience with several hundred men who had the intense radiation therapy over the past three years, the treatment, he said, “is emerging as a very exciting form of therapy.”

For the full story see:

Gina Kolata. “Unproven Therapy Gains Ground.” The New York Times (Tuesday, March 21, 2017 [sic]): D1 & D4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 20, 2017 [sic], and has the title “Popular Prostate Cancer Therapy Is Short, Intense and Unproven.”)

Monarch Butterflies Thrive on Poisonous Milkweed

(p. D5) The caterpillar of the monarch butterfly eats only milkweed, a poisonous plant that should kill it. The caterpillars thrive on the plant, even storing its toxins in their bodies as a defense against hungry birds.

For decades, scientists have marveled at this adaptation. On Thursday [Oct. 3, 2019 [sic]), a team of researchers announced they had pinpointed the key evolutionary steps that led to it.

Only three genetic mutations were necessary to turn the butterflies from vulnerable to resistant, the researchers reported in the journal Nature. They were able to introduce these mutations into fruit flies, and suddenly they were able to eat milkweed, too.

Biologists hailed it as a tour-de-force that harnessed gene-editing technology to unscramble a series of mutations evolving in some species and then test them in yet another.

“The gold standard is to directly test mutations in the organism,” said Joseph W. Thornton, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. The new study “finally elevates our standards.”

For the full story see:

Carl Zimmer. “MATTER; How Monarch Butterflies Evolved to Eat Poison.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 8, 2019 [sic]): D5.

(Note: bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 3, 2019 [sic], and has the title “MATTER; These Butterflies Evolved to Eat Poison. How Could That Have Happened?”)

The article in Nature mentioned above is:

Karageorgi, Marianthi, Simon C. Groen, Fidan Sumbul, Julianne N. Pelaez, Kirsten I. Verster, Jessica M. Aguilar, Amy P. Hastings, Susan L. Bernstein, Teruyuki Matsunaga, Michael Astourian, Geno Guerra, Felix Rico, Susanne Dobler, Anurag A. Agrawal, and Noah K. Whiteman. “Genome Editing Retraces the Evolution of Toxin Resistance in the Monarch Butterfly.” Nature 574, no. 7778 (Oct. 2019): 409–12.

The “corresponding author” (often considered the primary author) of the article is Noah K. Whiteman, who has published a book that extensively discusses cases such as the monarch butterfly, where a creature has evolved the ability to consume or make use of chemicals that are poisonous to other creatures:

Whiteman, Noah. Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature’s Toxins―from Spices to Vices. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2023.