Fewer Regulations Allow Faster Chinese Cancer Innovation

(p. A1) HANGZHOU, China–In a hospital west of Shanghai, Wu Shixiu since March has been trying to treat cancer patients using a promising new gene-editing tool.
U.S. scientists helped devise the tool, known as Crispr-Cas9, which has captured global attention since a 2012 report said it can be used to edit DNA. Doctors haven’t been allowed to use it in human trials in America. That isn’t the case for Dr. Wu and others in China.
In a quirk of the globalized technology arena, Dr. Wu can forge ahead with the tool because he faces few regulatory hurdles to testing it on humans. His hospital’s review board took just an afternoon to sign off on his trial. He didn’t need national regulators’ approval and has few reporting requirements.
Dr. Wu’s team at Hangzhou Cancer Hospital has been drawing blood from esophageal-cancer patients, shipping it by high-speed rail to a lab that modifies disease-fighting cells using Crispr-Cas9 by deleting a gene that interferes with the immune system’s ability to fight cancer. His team then infuses the cells (p. A10) back into the patients, hoping the reprogrammed DNA will destroy the disease.
In contrast, what’s expected to be the first human Crispr trial outside China has yet to begin. The University of Pennsylvania has spent nearly two years addressing federal and other requirements, including numerous safety checks designed to minimize risks to patients. While Penn hasn’t received final federal clearance to proceed, “we hope to get clearance soon,” a Penn spokeswoman said.
“China shouldn’t have been the first one to do it,” says Dr. Wu, 53, an oncologist and president of Hangzhou Cancer Hospital. “But there are fewer restrictions.”

For the full story, see:
Rana, Preetika, Amy Dockser Marcus and Wenxin Fan. “China Races Ahead In Gene Editing.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, January 22, 2018): A1 & A10.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 21, 2018, and has the title “China, Unhampered by Rules, Races Ahead in Gene-Editing Trials.”)

Canada’s Single-Payer System Causes “Suffering and Deaths of People on Wait Lists”

(p. A17) Canada’s single-payer health-care system, known as Medicare, is notoriously sluggish. But private clinics like Cambie are prohibited from charging most patients for operations that public hospitals provide free. Dr. Day is challenging that prohibition before the provincial Supreme Court.
. . .
People stuck on Medicare waiting lists can only dream of timely care. Last year, the median wait between referral from a general practitioner and treatment from a specialist was 21.2 weeks, or about five months–more than double the wait a quarter-century ago. Worse, the provincial governments lie about the extent of the problem. The official clock starts only when a surgeon books the patient, not when a general practitioner makes the referral. That adds months and sometimes much longer. In November [2017] an Ontario woman learned she’d have to wait 4½ years to see a neurologist.
. . .
Dr. Day’s lawsuit aims to overturn these provisions. It alleges that the government’s legal restrictions on private care are to blame for the needless “suffering and deaths of people on wait lists.” Dr. Day argues that the current system violates citizens’ rights to “life, liberty, and security of the person,” as guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the equivalent of the U.S. Bill of Rights.

For the full commentary, see:
Sally C. Pipes. “Single-Payer Health Care Isn’t Worth Waiting For; An orthopedic surgeon challenges Canada’s ban on most privately funded procedures.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, January 22, 2018): A17.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 21, 2018.)

“NASA as a Bloated and Unimaginative Bureaucracy”

(p. 10) “The Space Barons,” by Christian Davenport, a Washington Post reporter, is an exciting narrative filled with colorful reporting and sharp insights. The book sparkles because of Davenport’s access to the main players and his talent for crisp storytelling.
. . .
One of the first private pioneers was Burt Rutan, a mutton-chopped aircraft designer who regarded NASA as a bloated and unimaginative bureaucracy and in 1982 founded a company called Scaled Composites that designed aircraft so innovative that, as Davenport writes, “it was as if his inspiration came not just from the laws of aerodynamics but from Picasso.” One of his ideas was for a manned aircraft that could reach the edge of space and then fold its wings upward to act as a feather allowing the craft to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere, land on a runway, and be reused. It would become his entry in the Ansari X Prize, which offered $10 million for the first private company that could launch a reusable vehicle to space twice within two weeks.
Rutan attracted two billionaire partners. The first was the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who as a schoolboy in Seattle yearned to become an astronaut but, being nearsighted, realized that was impossible so spent his time coding in the school’s computer room with his friend Bill Gates. Rutan’s second partner was the toothy goldilocked Richard Branson, a thrill-addicted serial adventurer and entrepreneur who was as enthusiastic about publicity as Allen was averse to it. Branson’s personal motto for his company, Virgin, was “Screw it, let’s do it,” which was no longer a guiding principle at NASA, and he created Virgin Galactic with the goal of taking tourists into space. “Paul, isn’t this better than the best sex you ever had?” Branson asked Allen during one test flight as the spaceship climbed higher.
In 2004, Rutan’s craft (with a Virgin logo on its tail) flew twice to space and back to win the X Prize. At the celebration, Rutan took a shot at NASA. “I was thinking a little bit about that other space agency, the big guys,” he said. “I think they’re looking at each other now and saying, ‘We’re screwed.'”
. . .
At the end of 2015, within a month of each other, Musk and Bezos both launched rockets that returned safely to earth and were reusable. For the moment, Musk the hare had darted ahead: His powerful Falcon 9 rocket had lifted a payload into orbit, whereas Bezos’ smaller New Shepard craft had merely gone up into the edge of space and returned. But as happens with scrappy entrepreneurial business competitors, in contrast to government bureaucracies, Bezos and Musk were goading each other on. And unlike the race between the tortoise and the hare, they can both triumph — as can, one hopes, Richard Branson and others.

For the full review, see:
Walter Isaacson. “The Right Stuff.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, April 29, 2018): 10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 24, 2018, and has the title “In This Space Race, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk Are Competing to Take You There.”)

The book under review, is:
Davenport, Christian. The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos. New York: PublicAffairs, 2018.

No Known Maximum Life Span

(p. D3) Since 1900, average life expectancy around the globe has more than doubled, thanks to better public health, sanitation and food supplies. But a new study of long-lived Italians indicates that we have yet to reach the upper bound of human longevity.
“If there’s a fixed biological limit, we are not close to it,” said Elisabetta Barbi, a demographer at the University of Rome. Dr. Barbi and her colleagues published their research Thursday [sic] in the journal Science.
. . .
Dr. Barbi and her colleagues combed through Italy’s records to find every citizen who had reached the age of 105 between 2009 and 2015. To validate their ages, the researchers tracked down their birth certificates.
The team ended up with a database of 3,836 elderly Italians. The researchers tracked down death certificates for those who died in the study period and determined the rate at which various age groups were dying.
It’s long been known that the death rate starts out somewhat high in infancy and falls during the early years of life. It climbs again among people in their thirties, finally skyrocketing among those in their seventies and eighties.
. . .
Among extremely old Italians, they discovered, the death rate stops rising — the curve abruptly flattens into a plateau.
The researchers also found that people who were born in later years have a slightly lower mortality rate when they reach 105.
“The plateau is sinking over time,” said Kenneth W. Wachter, a demographer at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the new study. “Improvements in mortality extend even to these extreme ages.”
“We’re not approaching any maximum life span for humans yet,” he added.

For the full story, see:
Zimmer, Carl. “What Is the Limit of Our Life Span?” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 3, 2018): D3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 28, 2018, and has the title “How Long Can We Live? The Limit Hasn’t Been Reached, Study Finds.” The NYT article says the Science article was published on “Thursday,” but the citation for it that I found says it was published on Fri., June 29, 2018.)

The Science article mentioned above, is:
Barbi, Elisabetta, Francesco Lagona, Marco Marsili, James W. Vaupel, and Kenneth W. Wachter. “The Plateau of Human Mortality: Demography of Longevity Pioneers.” Science 360, no. 6396 (June 29, 2018): 1459-61.

Rats, Mice, and Humans Fail to Ignore Sunk Costs

(p. D6) Suppose that, seeking a fun evening out, you pay $175 for a ticket to a new Broadway musical. Seated in the balcony, you quickly realize that the acting is bad, the sets are ugly and no one, you suspect, will go home humming the melodies.
Do you head out the door at the intermission, or stick it out for the duration?
Studies of human decision-making suggest that most people will stay put, even though money spent in the past logically should have no bearing on the choice.
This “sunk cost fallacy,” as economists call it, is one of many ways that humans allow emotions to affect their choices, sometimes to their own detriment. But the tendency to factor past investments into decision-making is apparently not limited to Homo sapiens.
In a study published on Thursday [July 12, 2018] in the journal Science, investigators at the University of Minnesota reported that mice and rats were just as likely as humans to be influenced by sunk costs.
The more time they invested in waiting for a reward — in the case of the rodents, flavored pellets; in the case of the humans, entertaining videos — the less likely they were to quit the pursuit before the delay ended.
“Whatever is going on in the humans is also going on in the nonhuman animals,” said A. David Redish, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota and an author of the study.
This cross-species consistency, he and others said, suggested that in some decision-making situations, taking account of how much has already been invested might pay off.

For the full story, see:
Erica Goode. “‘Sunk Cost Fallacy’ Claims More Victims.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 17, 2018): D6
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 12, 2018, and has the title “Mice Don’t Know When to Let It Go, Either.”)

New Tools May Have Allowed Hominins to Leave Africa Far Earlier Than Previously Known

(p. D1) The oldest stone tools outside Africa have been discovered in western China, scientists reported on Wednesday [July 11, 2018]. Made by ancient members of the human lineage, called hominins, the chipped rocks are estimated to be as much as 2.1 million years old.
The find may add a new chapter to the story of hominin evolution, suggesting that some of these species left Africa far earlier than once believed and managed to travel over 8,000 miles east of their evolutionary birthplace.
. . .
(p. D3) The trigger for that migration? Maybe it was figuring out how to make sharp stone tools.
“Suddenly you had a primate that could obtain meat from a carcass, and it opened up a new world for them,” Dr. Dennell said. “That simple technology was enough to get them out of Africa and right across Asia.”

For the full story, see:

Zimmer, Carl. “Ancient Tools Provide New Insight.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 17, 2018): D1 & D3.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 11, 2018, and has the title “Archaeologists in China Discover the Oldest Stone Tools Outside Africa.”)

“A Big Step Toward Regenerative Medicine”

(p. C9) Mr. Zimmer, a New York Times science columnist and author, is careful and well-informed. So when he says that research is overturning things you were taught in biology classes, he’s worth heeding. Acquired traits can be inherited. Biological time can turn backward.
. . .
The bigger breakthroughs are more fundamental. One is the development of induced pluripotent stem cells. By adding four proteins to adult cells, scientists have learned how to make them embryonic–“turning back developmental time,” as Mr. Zimmer puts it. This is a big step toward regenerative medicine, which can grow spare parts customized for your body. It also creates new ways of making babies.
. . .
Another breakthrough is gene editing. Through a process called Crispr, which tags DNA segments for deletion, we’re learning how to program cells to make specific changes to their genomes. We’re also learning how to program organisms to pass down these editing instructions to their progeny. Experiments have shown that this technology could, at some point, cure hereditary diseases such as cystic fibrosis. In addition, scientists think it could wipe out destructive rodents and malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

For the full review, see:
William Saletan. “‘Biology’s Strange New World. Acquired traits can be inherited. Biological time can turn backward. And monsters are real.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, June 30, 2018): C9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 28, 2018, and has the title “”She Has Her Mother’s Laugh’ Review: Biology’s Strange New World. Acquired traits can be inherited. Biological time can turn backward. And monsters are real.”)

The book under review, is:
Zimmer, Carl. She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. New York: Dutton, 2018.

China Fears It Can Only Walk Forward by Using Keynes

(p. B1) HONG KONG — Wang Shidong and his two partners were still finishing graduate school two years ago when they raised $45 million in less than two months to start a venture capital fund. His wife, an elementary-school teacher in their home village, was “terrified” that he got to manage so much money, Mr. Wang said.
Things are different this year. After three months and visits with more than 90 potential investors all over China, Mr. Wang and his partners raised only $3 million for a second fund. In June, they shut down the firm.
Their fund, East Zhang Hangzhou Investment Management Ltd., was one of nearly 10,000 founded over the past three years amid a technology gold rush powered in part by China’s government-guided economic growth engine. Now they have become the latest sign (p. B2) that China’s engine is slowing down.
“All industries, institutions and individuals are running short of cash,” said Zhang Kaixing, founder and chief executive of an online asset management company in Shenzhen called Jinfuzi, which means “golden ax.” Jinfuzi, which manages over $4.5 billion in assets, is the type of investor that technology funds court.
“Many investors in private equity and venture capital funds want to take their money back,” Mr. Zhang said.
. . .
“In China we believe in Keynesian economics,” said Mr. Zhang, the Jinfuzi chief executive, referring to the economic theory that favors a bigger role for government. “If what’s going on in China were happening in the U.S., it would have been called a recession. But in China, the government will step in to interfere in significant ways.”
Under President Xi, even economics has become a delicate topic. Many people in China are not willing to speak publicly because even economists aren’t allowed to make downward forecasts.
Yet in private conversations, investors, entrepreneurs and economists admit that with the high debt level and a trade war with the United States, the room for government maneuvering is shrinking. The degrees of pessimism vary, but many of them are bracing for a tough ride ahead.
. . .
Venture funds like East Zhang came into existence in part because, starting in 2014, Beijing made innovation and entrepreneurship top priorities. Leaders hoped that start-ups would help elevate China from a manufacturing power to a technology power. Corporations, banks and wealthy individuals fought to give money to venture funds to invest in start-ups.
“We ended up with a lot of dumb money, managed by inexperienced investors,” said Ran Wang, chief executive of the investment bank CEC Capital Group in Beijing.

For the full story, see:
Li Yuan. “Latest Sign of China’s Slowdown: A Technology Cash Crunch.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 17, 2018): B1 & B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 16, 2018.)

Human Intelligence Helps A.I. Work Better

(p. B3) A recent study at the M.I.T. Media Lab showed how biases in the real world could seep into artificial intelligence. Commercial software is nearly flawless at telling the gender of white men, researchers found, but not so for darker-skinned women.
And Google had to apologize in 2015 after its image-recognition photo app mistakenly labeled photos of black people as “gorillas.”
Professor Nourbakhsh said that A.I.-enhanced security systems could struggle to determine whether a nonwhite person was arriving as a guest, a worker or an intruder.
One way to parse the system’s bias is to make sure humans are still verifying the images before responding.
“When you take the human out of the loop, you lose the empathetic component,” Professor Nourbakhsh said. “If you keep humans in the loop and use these systems, you get the best of all worlds.”

For the full story, see:
Paul Sullivan. “WEALTH MATTERS; Can Artificial Intelligence Keep Your Home Secure?” The New York Times (Saturday, June 30, 2018): B3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 29, 2018.)

The “recent study” mentioned above, is:
Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81 (2018): 1-15.

Earned Income Matters More Than Equal Income

(p. A13) The concept of a universal basic income, or UBI, has become part of the moral armor of Silicon Valley moguls who want a socially conscious defense against the charge that technology is making humanity obsolete.
. . .
We need policies that encourage job creation and working, not policies that pay people not to work.
In the mid-1960s, about 5% of men aged 25 to 54 were jobless. For 40 years that share has risen, and for much of the past decade the rate has remained over 15%. Suicide, divorce and opioid abuse are all associated with nonemployment, and many facts suggest that the misery of joblessness is far worse than that of a low-paying job. According to the most recent data, only 7% of working men in households earning less than $35,000 report being dissatisfied with their lives. But that share soars to 18% among the nonemployed of all incomes. This suggests that promoting employment is more important than reducing inequality.
. . . 50 years of evidence about labor supply in the U.S. suggests that giving people money will lead them to work less.
The Negative Income Tax experiments of the 1970s–when poorer households in a number of states received direct cash payments to keep them at a minimum income–are the closest America has come to a UBI. But they did not show “minimal impact on work,” as Mr. Yang suggests. Rather, they produced a quite significant work-hours reduction of between 5% and 25%, as well as “employment rate reductions . . . from about 1 to 10 percentage points,” according to one capable study.

For the full review, see:

Edward Glaeser. “‘BOOKSHELF; ‘Give People Money’ and ‘The War on Normal People’ Review: The Cure for Poverty? A guaranteed income does nothing to address the misery of joblessness, nor the associated plagues of divorce, opioid abuse and suicide.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, July 10, 2018): A13.
(Note: first two ellipses added; third ellipsis in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 9, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Give People Money’ and ‘The War on Normal People’ Review: The Cure for Poverty? A guaranteed income does nothing to address the misery of joblessness, nor the associated plagues of divorce, opioid abuse and suicide.”)

Entrepreneur Mackay Deserved to Be Dealt Four Aces

(p. C9) One evening sometime in the 1850s, John Mackay, a prospector, was playing poker with his fellow silver miners in Virginia City, Nev. The wagering was furious, and Mackay was playing well. In one hand, he was dealt an improbable three aces. The man next to him was “betting like a cyclone,” when Mackay drew the astonishing fourth ace, whereupon he laid down his cards and walked away without picking up the pot. “Leave me out, boys,” he said. He didn’t need it. At this point in his life, he had more money than he could ever spend.
. . .
With not a cent to his name, Mackay began swinging a pick ax for subsistence wages on other peoples’ claims, eventually working his way up to mine supervisor. “Mackay tried to cast his imagination into the rock,” Mr. Crouch says, “looking for clues that would lead him to a greater understanding of what wealth lay underground.” By 1865 he had acquired enough cash to buy a stake in a promising mine called the Kentuck. At first the investment looked to be another bust, but it suddenly hit big, paying out $1.6 million of the “precious needful,” as miners called valuable ore, over the next two years.
. . .
The author saves for last an account of the delicious comeuppance Mackay delivered to the American businessman Jay Gould –“the most hated man of the age.” Gould had secured a monopoly on trans-Atlantic telegraphy. Without competition, he gouged users, prompting Mackay, a believer in private enterprise, to lay his own undersea cable, thus breaking Gould’s stranglehold and winning public admiration on both sides of the Atlantic.
Mr. Crouch clearly admires his protagonist, at times nearly to distraction. He portrays Mackay throughout this well-written and worthwhile book as a man of high principle–kind, charitable and fair, dependably doing the noble thing. Strong and silent, he is the Gary Cooper of the sagebrush set. It ever so lightly strains credulity, however, to believe that Mackay didn’t harbor a little larceny in his heart, like nearly everybody on the Comstock during the mad rush. But readers may well want to take the author’s word that a man of such humility and generosity was exactly that. Nowhere will you read John Mackay’s name among the robber barons of his era. Some men who are dealt four aces in life deserve them.

For the full review, see:
Patrick Cooke. “‘The Man Who Hit the Mother Lode.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 7, 2018): C9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 5, 2018, and has the title “‘The Bonanza King’ Review: The Man Who Hit the Mother Lode.”)

The book under review, is:
Crouch, Gregory. The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Riches in the American West. New York: Scribner, 2018.