Category: Science

Sometimes Indigenous People Know More Than Credentialed Scientists

(p. D4) As a group of European botanists prepared to travel across Borneo by motorboat and four-wheel-drive vehicles, they heard about a species of palm with an extremely rare quirk.

It flowers underground.

The palm, Pinanga subterranea, is one of 74 plants that scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London named as new to science last year, thrilling some in the botany world. The botanists who went plant-hunting in Southeast Asia six years ago were not expecting to find it.

But the plant is not hard to find: It grows abundantly on Borneo, the third-largest island in the world, which includes parts of Indonesia and Malaysia.

. . .

. . ., the “discovery” of Pinanga subterranea is an example of conventional science catching up with Indigenous knowledge.

“We have described this as new to science,” said William J. Baker, the most senior scientist on the trip. “But the preexisting knowledge about this palm is layered, and was already there before we even got anywhere near it.”

Over the past 30 years, non-Indigenous scientists have turned more to Indigenous knowledge to expand or test their research, with varying degrees of sensitivity.

. . .

There have been a number of collaborative studies that credit Indigenous communities with having generations of wisdom on topics that include shellfish productivity, grizzly bear management and raptor behavior. In some cases the communities lead or participate in the research.

For the full story see:

Mike Ives and Hasya Nindita. “‘New to Science’ Plant Wasn’t Such a Secret.” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 30, 2024): D4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 20, 2024, and has the title “A Plant That Flowers Underground Is New to Science, but Not to Borneo.”)

Policy Reform, Such as Smaller Research Teams, Needed for Faster Big Breakthroughs

(p. D3) Miracle vaccines. Videophones in our pockets. Reusable rockets. Our technological bounty and its related blur of scientific progress seem undeniable and unsurpassed. Yet analysts now report that the overall pace of real breakthroughs has fallen dramatically over the past almost three-quarters of a century.

This month in the journal Nature, the report’s researchers told how their study of millions of scientific papers and patents shows that investigators and inventors have made relatively few breakthroughs and innovations compared with the world’s growing mountain of science and technology research. The three analysts found a steady drop from 1945 through 2010 in disruptive finds as a share of the booming venture, suggesting that scientists today are more likely to push ahead incrementally than to make intellectual leaps.

“We should be in a golden age of new discoveries and innovations,” said Michael Park, an author of the paper and a doctoral candidate in entrepreneurship and strategic management at the University of Minnesota.

. . .

The new method looks at citations more deeply to separate everyday work from true breakthroughs more effectively. It tallies citations not only to the analyzed piece of research but to the previous studies it cites. It turns out that the previous work is cited far more often if the finding is routine rather than groundbreaking. The analytic method turns that difference into a new lens on the scientific enterprise.

The measure is called the CD index after its scale, which goes from consolidating to disrupting the body of existing knowledge.

Dr. Funk, who helped to devise the CD index, said the new study was so computationally intense that the team at times used supercomputers to crunch the millions of data sets. “It took a month or so,” he said. “This kind of thing wasn’t possible a decade ago. It’s just now coming within reach.”

The novel technique has aided other investigators, such as Dr. Wang. In 2019, he and his colleagues reported that small teams are more innovative than large ones. The finding was timely because science teams over the decades have shifted in makeup to ever-larger groups of collaborators.

In an interview, James A. Evans, a University of Chicago sociologist who was a co-author of that paper with Dr. Wang, called the new method elegant. “It came up with something important,” he said. Its application to science as a whole, he added, suggests not only a drop in the return on investment but a growing need for policy reform.

“We have extremely ordered science,” Dr. Evans said. “We bet with confidence on where we invest our money. But we’re not betting on fundamentally new things that have the potential to be disruptive. This paper suggests we need a little less order and a bit more chaos.”

For the full story see:

William J. Broad. “What Happened to All of Science’s Big Breakthroughs?” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 24, 2023 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 17, 2023 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

The Nature paper discussed most in the passages quoted above is:

Park, Michael, Erin Leahey, and Russell J. Funk. “Papers and Patents Are Becoming Less Disruptive over Time.” Nature 613, no. 7942 (Jan. 2023): 138-44.

The Nature paper on team size, and co-authored by Wang, is:

Wu, Lingfei, Dashun Wang, and James A. Evans. “Large Teams Develop and Small Teams Disrupt Science and Technology.” Nature 566, no. 7744 (Feb. 2019): 378-82.

Oliver Stone’s “Nuclear Now” Is “a Vital Rejoinder” to “An Inconvenient Truth”

(p. C9) Given Oliver Stone’s track record of diving into political controversies with his work (“Platoon,” “JFK,” “Snowden”), it is perhaps surprising how staid his approach is to his new documentary, All the more surprising is that the film’s measured tone is what lends it its visceral power. With his straightforward proposal — that nuclear energy has been the solution to climate change all along — Stone looks past politics, providing an antidote to the climate doomerism that many viewers have probably felt over the last several years.

The film, a vital rejoinder to the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” considers both the past and future of nuclear power and, by laying out the simple facts of the ever-worsening state of climate change, makes a compelling case for it as the energy source that can most reasonably and realistically help us face the crisis.

For the full review see:

Brandon Yu. “Nuclear Now.” The New York Times (Friday, April 28, 2023 [sic]): C9.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 27, 2023 [sic], and has the title “‘Nuclear Now’ Review: Oliver Stone Makes the Case for Power Plants.”)

Volcanoes Release Enough Carbon Dioxide to Raise the Temperature by 60 Degrees

So an Oxford geologist finds that “volcanoes release vast amounts of carbon dioxide” and that release is mostly a good thing since without it the Earth “would chill by nearly 60 degrees.” Environmentalists are stressing that the temperature of the Earth may go up by a few degrees. Imagine how the environmentalists would stress if the volcanoes stopped releasing carbon dioxide and the temperature started going down by 60 degrees. That would indeed be something to stress about.

(p. 8) Tamsin Mather, a geologist at the University of Oxford, has no such difficulty. She has spent her career visiting volcanoes to understand how they work, and she has come to see Earth not as a peaceful world encased in a stable crust, but a globe of barely contained geological storms.

“Adventures in Volcanoland” is organized around trips Mather has taken throughout her career, starting with Vesuvius, which she first visited as a child on a family vacation. Next comes the Nicaraguan volcano Masaya, which she studied as a graduate student, and then volcanoes on other continents.

. . .

In her own research, Mather has specialized in measuring the gases that volcanoes emit. Even when they’re not erupting, volcanoes release vast amounts of carbon dioxide. Without that heat-trapping gas, an icehouse effect would replace the greenhouse effect, and the planet’s temperature would chill by nearly 60 degrees.

For the most part, Earth is able to keep its climate stable. While volcanoes warm the planet, chemical reactions draw off carbon dioxide from the air, ultimately delivering it deep underground.

This planetary thermostat is not enough to keep volcanoes from periodically unleashing hell, though. Vast eruptions may be responsible for most of the mass extinctions in life’s history.

For the full review see:

Carl Zimmer. “Lava Lamp.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, August 11, 2024): 8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 19, 2024, and has the title “The Eternal Pull of the Fascinating, Deadly Volcano.”)

The book under review is:

Mather, Tamsin. Adventures in Mather, Tamsin. Adventures in Volcanoland: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves. New York: Hanover Square Press, 2024.

Before Co-founding “Colossal” Private For-Profit Firm, George Church “Was Planning on Slogging Along at a Slow Pace” in Academia

Harvard Professor George Church chooses to pursue his bold dream of bringing wooly mammoths back to life through a private firm rather than through a nonprofit organization or an educational institution. Is that because nimble innovation is less constrained in a private for-profit firm?

(p. D3) A team of scientists and entrepreneurs announced on Monday that they have started a new company to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth.

The company, named Colossal, aims to place thousands of these magnificent beasts back on the Siberian tundra, thousands of years after they went extinct.

“This is a major milestone for us,” said George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, who for eight years has been leading a small team of moonlighting researchers developing the tools for reviving mammoths. “It’s going to make all the difference in the world.”

. . .

The idea behind Colossal first emerged into public view in 2013, when Dr. Church sketched it out in a talk at the National Geographic Society.

. . .

Russian ecologists have imported bison and other living species to a preserve in Siberia they’ve dubbed Pleistocene Park, in the hopes of turning the tundra back to grassland. Dr. Church argued that resurrected woolly mammoths would be able to do this more efficiently. The restored grassland would keep the soil from melting and eroding, he argued, and might even lock away heat-trapping carbon dioxide.

Dr. Church’s proposal attracted a lot of attention from the press but little funding beyond $100,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

. . .

“Frankly, I was planning on slogging along at a slow pace,” Dr. Church said. But in 2019, he was contacted by Ben Lamm, the founder of the Texas-based artificial intelligence company Hypergiant, who was intrigued by press reports of the de-extinction idea.

Mr. Lamm visited Dr. Church’s lab, and the two hit it off. “After about a day of being in the lab and spending a lot of time with George, we were pretty passionate on pursuing this,” Mr. Lamm said.

Mr. Lamm began setting up Colossal to support Dr. Church’s work, all the way from tinkering with DNA to eventually placing “a functional mammoth,” as Dr. Hysolli calls it, in the wild.

The company’s initial funding comes from investors ranging from Climate Capital Collective, an investment group that backs efforts to lower carbon emissions, to the Winklevoss twins, known for their battles over Facebook and investments in Bitcoin.

. . .

Heather Browning, a philosopher at the London School of Economics, said that whatever benefits mammoths might have to the tundra will need to be weighed against the possible suffering that they might experience in being brought into existence by scientists.

“You don’t have a mother for a species that — if they are anything like elephants — has extraordinarily strong mother-infant bonds that last for a very long time,” she said. “Once there is a little mammoth or two on the ground, who is making sure that they’re being looked after?”

And Colossal’s investors may have questions of their own: How will these mammoths make any money? Mr. Lamm predicted that the company would be able to spin off new forms of genetic engineering and reproductive technology.

“We are hopeful and confident that there will be technologies that come out of it that we can build individual business units out of,” Mr. Lamm said.

For the full story see:

Carl Zimmer. “MATTER; A Company Aims to Restock the Woolly Mammoth.” The New York Times (Tuesday, September 14, 2021 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Sept. 30 [sic], 2021 [sic], and has the title “MATTER; A New Company With a Wild Mission: Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth.”)

Cloud Brightening Could Counter Global Warming

If the costs of global warming become large enough, we can brighten clouds to reverse global warming.

(p. A1) A little before 9 a.m. on Tuesday [April 2, 2024], an engineer named Matthew Gallelli crouched on the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in San Francisco Bay, pulled on a pair of ear protectors, and flipped a switch.

A few seconds later, a device resembling a snow maker began to rumble, then produced a great and deafening hiss. A fine mist of tiny aerosol particles shot from its mouth, traveling hundreds of feet through the air.

It was the first outdoor test in the United States of technology designed to brighten clouds and bounce some of the sun’s rays back into space, a way of temporarily cooling a planet that is now dangerously overheating. The scientists wanted to see whether the machine that took years to create could consistently spray the right size salt aerosols through the open air, outside of a lab.

If it works, the next stage would be to aim at the heavens and try to change the composition of clouds above the Earth’s oceans.

. . .

(p. A14) Brightening clouds is one of several ideas to push solar energy back into space — sometimes called solar radiation modification, solar geoengineering, or climate intervention. Compared with other options, such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, marine cloud brightening would be localized and use relatively benign sea salt aerosols as opposed to other chemicals.

. . .

“I hope, and I think all my colleagues hope, that we never use these things, that we never have to,” said Sarah Doherty, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington and the manager of its marine cloud brightening program.

. . .

But it’s vital to find out whether and how such technologies could work, Dr. Doherty said, in case society needs them. And no one can say when the world might reach that point.

In 1990, a British physicist named John Latham published a letter in the journal Nature, under the heading “Control of Global Warming?,” in which he introduced the idea that injecting tiny particles into clouds could offset rising temperatures.

Dr. Latham later attributed his idea to a hike with his son in Wales, where they paused to look at clouds over the Irish Sea.

“He asked why clouds were shiny at the top but dark at the bottom,” Dr. Latham told the BBC in 2007. “I explained how they were mirrors for incoming sunlight.”

Dr. Latham had a proposal that may have seemed bizarre: create a fleet of 1,000 unmanned, sail-powered vessels to traverse the world’s oceans and continuously spray tiny droplets of seawater into the air to deflect solar heat away from Earth.

The idea is built on a scientific concept (p. A15) called the Twomey effect: Large numbers of small droplets reflect more sunlight than small numbers of large droplets. Injecting vast quantities of minuscule aerosols, in turn forming many small droplets, could change the composition of clouds.

“If we can increase the reflectivity by about 3 percent, the cooling will balance the global warming caused by increased C02 in the atmosphere,” Dr. Latham, who died in 2021, told the BBC. “Our scheme offers the possibility that we could buy time.”

A version of marine cloud brightening already happens every day, according to Dr. Doherty.

As ships travel the seas, particles from their exhaust can brighten clouds, creating “ship tracks,” behind them. In fact, until recently, the cloud brightening associated with ship tracks offset about 5 percent of climate warming from greenhouse gases, Dr. Doherty said.

Ironically, as better technology and environmental regulations have reduced the pollution emitted by ships, that inadvertent cloud brightening is fading, as well as the cooling that goes along with it.

A deliberate program of marine cloud brightening could be done with sea salts, rather than pollution, Dr. Doherty said.

For the full story see:

Christopher Flavelle. “Salting the Clouds to Cool an Overheating Earth.” The New York Times (Thursday, April 4, 2024): A1 & A14-A15.

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

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 2, 2024, and has the title “Warming Is Getting Worse. So They Just Tested a Way to Deflect the Sun.”)

The article by the physicist John Latham, published in the one of the top two journals in science, and mentioned above, is:

Latham, John. “Control of Global Warming?” Nature 347, no. 6291 (Sept. 27, 1990): 339-40.

The “Innovative Approach” of the Dog Aging Project May Have Hurt Its Odds for Renewed Funding

Veterinary medicine is less regulated than human medicine, and so trial and error experiments may allow faster innovation that would benefit both dogs and humans.

(p. D3) In late 2019, scientists began searching for 10,000 Americans willing to enroll their pets in an ambitious new study of health and longevity in dogs. The researchers planned to track the dogs over the course of their lives, collecting detailed information about their bodies, lifestyles and home environments. Over time, the scientists hoped to identify the biological and environmental factors that kept some dogs healthy in their golden years — and uncover insights about aging that could help both dogs and humans lead longer, healthier lives.

Today, the Dog Aging Project has enrolled 47,000 canines and counting, and the data are starting to stream in. The scientists say that they are just getting started.

“We think of the Dog Aging Project as a forever project, so recruitment is ongoing,” said Daniel Promislow, a biogerontologist at the University of Washington and a co-director of the project. “There will always be new questions to ask. We want to always have dogs of all ages participating.”

But Dr. Promislow and his colleagues are now facing the prospect that the Dog Aging Project might have its own life cut short. About 90 percent of the study’s funding comes from the National Institute on Aging, a part of the National Institutes of Health, which has provided more than $28 million since 2018. But that money will run out in June, and the institute does not seem likely to approve the researchers’ recent application for a five-year grant renewal, the scientists say.

“We have been told informally that the grant is not going to be funded,” said Matt Kaeberlein, the other director of the Dog Aging Project and a former biogerontology researcher at the University of Washington. (Dr. Kaeberlein is now the chief executive of Optispan, a health technology company.)

. . .

Steven Austad, a biogerontologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who is not part of the research team, said he was surprised that the researchers’ grant might not be renewed. “The importance of the things they publish and the depth of detail will increase over time, but I thought they got off to a really good start,” he said. “A large study like this really deserves a chance to mature.”

Dr. Austad’s miniature dachshund, Emmylou, is enrolled in the Dog Aging Project. But at 2 years old, he noted, Emmylou is “not going to teach them a lot about aging for a long time yet.”

The project’s innovative approach might have worked against it, Dr. Austad added. Reviewers accustomed to evaluating short-term research on lab mice and long-term studies of humans may not have known what to make of an enormous epidemiological study of pet dogs.

Whatever the reason, the refusal to commit to more funding is “wrong,” Dr. Kaeberlein said. “It’s just really, really difficult to justify this decision, if you look at the productivity and the impact of the project.”

That impact extends beyond the findings themselves, he added. “This project has engaged almost 50,000 Americans in biomedical scientific research.”

Over the last few years, Shelley Carpenter, of Gulfport, Miss., has provided the researchers with regular updates on and medical records for her Pembroke Welsh corgi, Murfee. (She also collected a cheek swab for genomic sequencing.) Ms. Carpenter, whose previous corgi died from a neurodegenerative disease similar to A.L.S., hoped that the project might produce new medical knowledge that could help both dogs and people.

For the full story see:

Emily Anthes. “Scientists Scramble to Keep Dog Aging Project Alive.” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 16, 2024): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 11, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

Techno-Optimist Claims AI Tools “Will Help Scientists Design Therapies Faster and Better”

(p. A13) It is said that triumphant Roman generals, to ensure that the rapture of victory didn’t go to their heads, would require a companion to whisper in their ear: “Remember, you are only a man.” Jamie Metzl worries that we may have learned all too well such lessons in humility. Given remarkable recent advances in technology—and the promise of more to come—we need to lean into our emerging godlike powers, he believes, and embrace the opportunity to shape the world into a better place. In “Superconvergence,” he sets out to show us how, after first helping us overcome our hesitations.

. . .

. . . the big advances will be in medicine—and indeed are already in evidence. Mr. Metzl points to the blisteringly fast development of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine, from digital file to widespread immunization in less than a year; and to gene-editing technologies like Crispr. He cites the experience of Victoria Gray, a young woman from Mississippi who was suffering from sickle-cell disease until, in 2019, researchers in Nashville, Tenn., reinfused her with her own cells, which had been Crispr-edited; the treatment worked, liberating her from the disease’s tormenting pain and crippling fatigue. For Mr. Metzl, these are just the first intimations of a revolution to come. AI tools like DeepMind’s Alphafold, he says, will help scientists design therapies faster and better.

To get smarter about human health, though, AI will need more information, and here Mr. Metzl’s ebullience edges toward the willful suspension of disbelief. His imagined future of healthcare will require “collecting huge amounts of genetic and systems biology data in massive and searchable databases.” The details will include not only medical records and the results of laboratory tests but data from the sensors he anticipates will be everywhere—“bathrooms, bedrooms, and offices”—as information is hoovered up from “toilets, mirrors, computers, phones and other devices without the people even noticing.” While acknowledging that such a scenario sounds like “an authoritarian’s dream and a free person’s nightmare,” he suggests that the chance to catch disease early may offset the risks. This trade-off promises to be a tough sell.

More than many techno-optimists, Mr. Metzl seems to grasp the intricacy of biological systems; he notes that they are beyond our full understanding right now. Even so, a time will come when “the sophistication of our tools and understanding meets and then exceeds the complexity of biology.”

For the full review, see:

David A. Shaywitz. “Getting Better, Faster.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, July 11, 2024): A13.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 10, 2024, and has the title “‘Superconvergence’ Review: Getting Better, Faster.”)

The book under review is:

Metzl, Jamie. Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World. New York: Timber Press, 2024.

Kahneman’s “Adversarial Collaboration” Might Bring Us More Joy and Better Science

(p. A19) Professor Kahneman, who died . . . at the age of 90, is best known for his pathbreaking explorations of human judgment and decision making and of how people deviate from perfect rationality. He should also be remembered for a living and working philosophy that has never been more relevant: his enthusiasm for collaborating with his intellectual adversaries. This enthusiasm was deeply personal. He experienced real joy working with others to discover the truth, even if he learned that he was wrong (something that often delighted him).

. . .

Professor Kahneman saw . . . “angry science,” which he described as a “nasty world of critiques, replies and rejoinders” and “as a contest, where the aim is to embarrass.” As Professor Kahneman put it, those who live in that nasty world offer “a summary caricature of the target position, refute the weakest argument in that caricature and declare the total destruction of the adversary’s position.” In his account, angry science is “a demeaning experience.”

. . .

Professor Kahneman meant both to encourage better science and to strengthen the better angels of our nature.

For the full commentary see:

Cass R. Sunstein. “The Value of Collaborating With Adversaries.” The New York Times (Wednesday, April 3, 2024): A19.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 1, 2024, and has the title “The Nobel Winner Who Liked to Collaborate With His Adversaries.”)

Since Wood Tools Are Rarely Preserved, “Preservation Bias Distorts Our View of Antiquity”

(p. D3) In 1836, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, a Danish antiquarian, brought the first semblance of order to prehistory, suggesting that the early hominids of Europe had gone through three stages of technological development that were reflected in the production of tools. The basic chronology — Stone Age to Bronze Age to Iron Age — now underpins the archaeology of most of the Old World (and cartoons like “The Flintstones” and “The Croods”).

Thomsen could well have substituted Wood Age for Stone Age, according to Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist and head of research at the Department of Cultural Heritage of Lower Saxony, in Germany.

“We can probably assume that wooden tools have been around just as long as stone ones, that is, two and a half or three million years,“ he said. “But since wood deteriorates and rarely survives, preservation bias distorts our view of antiquity.” Primitive stone implements have traditionally characterized the Lower Paleolithic period, which lasted from about 2.7 million years ago to 200,000 years ago. Of the thousands of archaeological sites that can be traced to the era, wood has been recovered from fewer than 10.

Dr. Terberger was team leader of a study published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that provided the first comprehensive report on the wooden objects excavated from 1994 to 2008 in the peat of an open-pit coal mine near Schöningen, in northern Germany. The rich haul included two dozen complete or fragmented spears (each about as tall as an N.B.A. center) and double-pointed throwing sticks (half the length of a pool cue) but no hominid bones. The objects date from the end of a warm interglacial period 300,000 years ago, about when early Neanderthals were supplanting Homo heidelbergensis, their immediate predecessors in Europe. The projectiles unearthed at the Schöningen site, known as Spear Horizon, are considered the oldest preserved hunting weapons.

For the full story see:

Franz Lidz. “In the Stone Age, Wood Was Pivotal, a Study Says.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 7, 2024): D3.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated May 6, 2024, and has the title “Was the Stone Age Actually the Wood Age?”)

Terberger’s co-authored academic paper mentioned above is:

Leder, Dirk, Jens Lehmann, Annemieke Milks, Tim Koddenberg, Michael Sietz, Matthias Vogel, Utz Böhner, and Thomas Terberger. “The Wooden Artifacts from Schöningen’s Spear Horizon and Their Place in Human Evolution.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121, no. 15 (2024): e2320484121.

Some Variants of One Mitochondrial Gene Double Your Odds of Living to 100

(p. D3) . . . what made the great blooming of biodiversity possible? Dr. Lane, building on ideas developed with the evolutionary biologist William Martin, traces its origins to a freak accident billions of years ago, when one microbe took up residence inside another. This event was not a branching of the evolutionary tree but a fusion with, he argues, profound consequences.

The new tenant provided energy for its host, paying chemical rent in exchange for safe dwelling. With this additional income, the host cell could afford investments in more complex biological amenities. The pairing thrived, replicated and evolved.

Today we call these inner microbes mitochondria; nearly every cell in our body has thousands of these energy factories. Dr. Lane and Dr. Martin have argued that because of mitochondria, complex cells have nearly 200,000 times as much energy per gene, setting the stage for larger genomes and unfettered evolution.

. . .

With age, mitochondrial mutations accumulate. Elsewhere, Dr. Lane has pointed to research showing that variants in a single mitochondrial gene halved the prospect of being hospitalized for age-related disease in patients who have them, and doubled the prospect of living to 100. This finding, Dr. Lane believes, could lead to medical advances if we understood how to protect mitochondrial DNA.

“How can we hope to understand disease,” he asks, “if we have no idea why cells work the way they do?”

. . .

Whether research will bear him out remains to be seen, but Dr. Lane’s many predictions, however incredible they seem, are testable and could keep scientists busy for years. As Sherlock Holmes remarked, “When you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

For the full review see:

Tim Requarth. “Rethinking the Textbook on Life.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 21, 2015 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated July 20, 2015 [sic], and has the title “Book Review: Taking on ‘The Vital Question’ About Life.”)

The book under review is:

Lane, Nick. The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.