artdiamondblog.com – Page 53 – Art Diamond's web log

Medical Research Focuses More on Antibiotics Than on Phages Partly Because Antibiotics Are Easier to Patent

(p. 13) While recent events have provided a painful reminder of the very bad viruses that prey on us, Tom Ireland’s “The Good Virus” is a colorful redemption story for the oft-neglected yet incredibly abundant phage, and its potential for quelling the existential threat of antibiotic resistance, which scientists estimate might cause up to 10 million deaths per year by 2050. Ireland, an award-winning science journalist, approaches the subject of his first book with curiosity and passion, delivering a deft narrative that is rich and approachable.

In the hands of d’Herelle and others, the phage became a potent tool in the fight against cholera. But, in the 1940s, when the discovery of the methods to produce penicillin at an industrial scale led to the “antibiotic era,” phage therapy came to be seen as quackery in Europe and America, in part, Ireland suggests, because antibiotics, unlike phages, fit the mold of capitalist society.

Capitalists love patents. A funny quirk of the patent system is that you cannot patent entire natural things, but you can sometimes patent the way you extract their byproducts. The first antibiotics, being the secretions of fungi, were easier to patent in the United States than phages, which were whole viruses.

For the full review, see:

Alex Johnson. “Going Viral.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, September 17, 2023): 13.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 15, 2023, and has the title “A Reason to Cheer for Cells and the Viruses That Feed on Them.”)

The book under review is:

Ireland, Tom. The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.

Musk’s $48 Billion Pay Deal Showed that the Entrepreneurs Is Not Obsolete

(p. B3) WILMINGTON, Del.—The scale of concern among Tesla Inc. board members about how to keep Elon Musk‘s attention trained on the electric-vehicle maker loomed large during a weeklong trial over the chief executive’s pay package.

A desire to motivate Mr. Musk to focus on Tesla triggered a monthslong pay negotiation that culminated in the shareholders’ approval of a 2018 CEO equity grant valued at roughly $48 billion at recent stock prices.

That deal—and the process under which it was put together—have been the subject of the trial in Delaware’s business-law court, where testimony has underscored that current and former Tesla board members have long viewed Mr. Musk as irreplaceable.

For the full story, see:

Rebecca Elliott and Meghan Bobrowsky. “Pay Trial Shines Light on Tesla’s View of Musk as Irreplaceable.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, November 21, 2022): B3.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated November 19, 2022, and has the title “Tesla Board View That Elon Musk Is Irreplaceable Emerged in Pay Trial.”)

Octopus Eggs Thrive in Hot Ocean Water of “Octopus Garden”

(p. 14) In 2018, Amanda Kahn, an invertebrate biologist at San Jose State University, joined an ocean expedition to scout the base of Davidson Seamount, an inactive underwater volcano off the coast of central California. She came for the sponges and corals.

But she and her colleagues stumbled across something much more astounding. As their remotely operated vehicle, which was probing the seafloor and streaming video back to their ship, rose from behind a rock, the crew gasped. In shimmering waters, they saw scores of upside-down octopuses nestled in rocky crevices with their arms clutched around their frames. A closer look revealed that they were protecting eggs, similar to the way that birds brood in a nest.

“Sometimes you recognize immediately the magnitude of something special that you’ve found,” Dr. Kahn said. “And I think that was one of those really special moments.”

When James Barry, a marine ecologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, got a glimpse on a later expedition, he instantly wondered why so many octopuses were here. “And so we set about to figure out,” he said.

. . .

The team’s findings, detailed in a new paper published Wednesday in Science Advances, suggest that this hot spot makes the octopuses’ eggs hatch faster, which improves reproductive success.

. . .

“That’s a big deal for these eggs, because in the deep sea, one of the really big challenges is that it’s cold,” Dr. Barry said. Chilly temperatures slow down the metabolism of coldblooded animals, including rates of embryonic growth. For this species of octopus, it could have taken anywhere from five to 10 years for the eggs to fully develop in ambient waters — but in this nursery, the scientists found that they were hatching in less than two years on average.

The earlier the better, the team reasoned, when it comes to reproductive success. Less time spent as an embryo reduces the risks of being eaten by predators, or suffering infections or injuries that lead to death. Because octopuses don’t eat while brooding — and die after reproducing — they also suspect that quicker egg hatchings might make for a higher chance of survival, since the mother is less likely to lose the energy needed to sustain them.

It’s the mothers’ last hurrah, Dr. Kahn said: “They go all out in protecting those eggs.” She added that brooding near a hot spring helps ensure the mothers’ final acts are a success.

The findings make sense to Michael Vecchione, a deep-sea cephalopod biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was not involved in the study. Dr. Vecchione, who had seen the discovery of the garden back in 2018, had also speculated that the octopuses were using the heat to speed up embryo growth. “I’m not surprised that the warm temperature was beneficial to them,” he said. “And apparently, it’s starting to look like it’s a pretty widespread phenomenon, even though nobody had ever seen it until just a few years ago.”

For the full story, see:

Katrina Miller. “Under the Sea, an ‘Octopus Garden’ Thrives in the Shade of a Hot Spring.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, Aug. 27, 2023): 14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 23, 2023, and has the title “Atop an Underwater Hot Spring, an ‘Octopus Garden’ Thrives.” The online version says that the print version appears on p. 12. My national edition of the print version had the article on p. 14.)

Bankrupt Yellow Trucking Firm Got $700 Million Covid “Rescue Loan” from Taxpayers

(p. B2) Trucking company Yellow is preparing to file for bankruptcy, according to people familiar with the matter, heightening the threat that one of the nation’s largest freight carriers will shut down as customers abandon it amid a cash crunch and union negotiations.

. . .

A bankruptcy filing would again spotlight the $700 million Covid-19 rescue loan that Yellow received from U.S. taxpayers in 2020. A congressional probe later concluded that the Treasury Department erred in giving the loan on national-security grounds when Yellow didn’t meet the standards for that designation.

For the full story, see:

Soma Biswas, Paul Page and Alexander Gladstone. “Trucker Yellow Prepares To File for Bankruptcy.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, July 27, 2023): B2.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 26, 2023, and has the title “Trucker Yellow Prepares to File for Bankruptcy as Customers Flee.”)

The “Woke-Mind” Is “Anti-Science, Anti-Merit and Anti-Human”

(p. 9) At various moments in “Elon Musk,” Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the world’s richest person, the author tries to make sense of the billionaire entrepreneur he has shadowed for two years — sitting in on meetings, getting a peek at emails and texts, engaging in “scores of interviews and late-night conversations.” Musk is a mercurial “man-child,” Isaacson writes, who was bullied relentlessly as a kid in South Africa until he grew big enough to beat up his bullies. Musk talks about having Asperger’s, which makes him “bad at picking up social cues.”

. . .

At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual, has to dial it up to 11. “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general, is stopped,” he declares, “civilization will never become multiplanetary.”

. . .

The musician Grimes, the mother of three of Musk’s children (. . .), calls his roiling anger “demon mode” — a mind-set that “causes a lot of chaos.” She also insists that it allows him to get stuff done.

. . .

He is mostly preoccupied with his businesses, where he expects his staff to abide by “the algorithm,” his workplace creed, which commands them to “question every requirement” from a department, including “the legal department” and “the safety department”; and to “delete any part or process” they can. “Comradery is dangerous,” is one of the corollaries. So is this: “The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”

Still, Musk has accrued enough power to dictate his own rules. In one of the book’s biggest scoops, Isaacson describes Musk secretly instructing his engineers to “turn off” Starlink satellite internet coverage to prevent Ukraine from launching a surprise drone attack on Russian forces in Crimea. (Isaacson has since posted on X that contrary to what he writes in the book, Musk didn’t shut down coverage but denied a request to extend the network’s range.)

. . .

Isaacson believes that Musk wanted to buy Twitter because he had been so bullied as a kid and “now he could own the playground.” . . . Owning a playground won’t stop you from getting bullied.

For the full review, see:

Jennifer Szalai. “Self-Driving Czar.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, September 24, 2023): 9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Sept. 11, 2023, and has the title “Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People.”)

The book under review is:

Isaacson, Walter. Elon Musk. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.

California Regulations Raise Costs to Repair Damaged Homes and Mandate Insurance Firms to Charge Below-Cost Rates

(p. B10) Allstate has stopped offering new home-insurance policies in California, saying it has become too expensive to insure new homes in the wildfire-prone state.

. . .

“The cost to insure new home customers in California is far higher than the price they would pay for policies due to wildfires, higher costs for repairing homes, and higher reinsurance premiums,” Allstate said.

It has become increasingly expensive for companies like Allstate and State Farm to insure properties in California. Wildfires in recent years have burned down thousands of homes, driving up costs for insurers who pay for homes to be rebuilt or repaired. High inflation has also made construction more expensive.

. . .

State regulators in recent years have struck down attempts by insurance companies to raise property rates that would offset their inflation costs. The state last year required insurers to drop prices for owners who have fireproofed their buildings. The insurers must set home-insurance rates in California based on their historical loss experience, not future loss projections.

For the full story, see:

Alyssa Lukpat. “Allstate Halts New California Home Policies Over Fire Risk.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, June 6, 2023): B10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 5, 2023, and has the title “Allstate Stops Selling New Home-Insurance Policies in California, Citing Wildfire Risks.”)

In Xi’s Communist China: “Our Speech Is Not Free”

(p. B1) Many innocent lives were lost to tragic events in China in the past month. So far we haven’t learned a single name of any of them from China’s government or its official media. Nor have we seen news interviews of family members talking about their loved ones.

Those victims would include a coach and 10 members of a middle-school girls volleyball team who were killed in late July when the roof caved in on a gymnasium near the Siberian border. Despite an outpouring of public grief and anger around the country, the government never released their names. Social media posts sharing their names and tributes to their lives were censored.

Then there were the people — probably dozens, possibly hundreds — who died in severe flooding in northern and northeastern China in recent weeks. It was the most serious flooding in the country in decades. Posts about the casualties, and the hardships people endured, were censored.

. . .

(p. B4) “Xi Jinping has made control of history one of his signature policies — because he sees counter-history as an existential threat,” Ian Johnson, an author who has covered China for decades, wrote in his new book, “Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future.”

Mr. Xi has turned the screws extra tight since the Covid pandemic. In April 2020, relatives of Wuhan residents who died were followed by minders when they picked up the ashes of their loved ones.

The government ignored a citizen demand to make Feb. 6 a nationwide day of mourning to mark the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistle-blower who had warned the public of the coronavirus.

“We have always known that our speech is not free, our voice is not free. Yet we do not realize until today that even sorrow and mourning do not belong to us,” Ms. Zhang, the independent journalist, wrote in an article that was widely circulated on WeChat and other social media platforms before it was censored.

A recent video of the bereaved father of a volleyball player killed in the gymnasium collapse in Qiqihar highlighted the cruel reality faced by family members in public tragedies: Their grief, in the eyes of the government, makes them potential threats to social stability.

In the six-minute video, the father remained preternaturally composed as he tried to reason with the police, doctors and government officials at a hospital. He and other family members wanted to be allowed to identify the bodies of their daughters.

The father said he understood why the police were at the hospital. “We didn’t cause any troubles,” he said. He said he understood why no officials bothered to talk to them. “That’s fine,” he said.

Many people said online and in interviews that they cried watching the video because they recognized his “heart-wrenching restraint” and knew why he behaved that way.

“What happens if he didn’t hold back his anger?” asked an author in an article posted on social media. “As a father who has suffered such immense pain, why did he have to reason with such restraint and humility?”

As usual, the censorship machine went into high gear. Social media posts containing names of the victims and celebrating their lives and friendships were deleted. So were photos and videos showing the entrance of their school, where the public sent numerous flower bouquets, yogurt, milk tea and canned peaches, which is a comfort food for children in northeastern China.

For the full story, see:

Li Yuan. “When Tragedy Strikes in China, The Government Represses Grief.” The New York Times (Monday, August 3, 2023): B1 & B4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story also has the date Aug. 14, 2023, and has the title “When Tragedy Strikes in China, the Government Cracks Down on Grief.”)

Insulin Makers Said High Prices Mainly Went to Pay Higher Rebates to Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM) Firms

(p. A3) Novo Nordisk A/S is set to cut the U.S. list prices for several insulin drugs by up to 75%, the latest big drugmaker to make steep price reductions amid pressure to curb diabetes-treatment costs.

. . .

Novo’s price cuts follow Eli Lilly & Co.’s decision earlier this month to reduce list prices for its most commonly prescribed insulin products by 70%, effective in the fourth quarter of 2023.

. . .

Lilly, Novo and Sanofi SA are the leading sellers of insulins in the U.S. and worldwide. They had substantially raised the prices for their insulin products in the U.S. during the 2010s. The companies have said they didn’t make much from the higher list prices, because they had to pay larger rebates to the companies that manage drug benefits.

For the full story, see:

Peter Loftus. “Insulin Maker Plans Sharp Price Cut.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, March 15, 2023): A3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated March 14, 2023, and has the title “Novo Nordisk to Slash Insulin Prices by Up to 75%.”)

Shrinking Black-White Wage Gap Mainly Due to “Tight Labor Market”

A tight labor market is a key feature of what I call a “robustly redundant labor market” in my Openness to Creative Destruction book.

(p. A13) In the early 2000s, the wage gap between Black and white workers in the U.S. was as large as it had been in 1950.

. . .

The wage gap, though still enormous, has shrunk.

. . .

There appear to be three main causes of the recent trend, and the most significant is the country’s tight labor market. The unemployment rate has been falling for most of the past decade and has recently been near its lowest levels since the 1960s.

Tight labor markets help almost all workers, and they tend to help disadvantaged workers the most. As Gould put it, “When employers can’t be quite as choosy — when employers have to look beyond their network — that can provide more opportunities for historically marginalized groups.”

This dynamic helps close the Black-white wage gap because Black workers are overrepresented among low-wage workers. The Hispanic-white wage gap has also declined recently.

For the full commentary, see:

David Leonhardt. “The Morning; Why There’s Progress, Finally, on Closing the Black-White Pay Gap.” The New York Times (Monday, June 19, 2023): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary also has the date June 15, 2023, and has the title “The Morning; The Racial Wage Gap Is Shrinking.” The online version of the passages quoted above includes an illustrative parenthetical sentence that I do not include above.)

Chinese Communists Detain Entrepreneur Who Exhorted Staff to “Go Forward Boldly”

(p. B1) In mid-January [2023], star Chinese investment banker Fan Bao, architect of the deals that created some of China’s most dominant technology companies, appeared at his bank’s annual party in Beijing. . . . He exhorted the hundreds of staffers in attendance to “Go Forward Boldly.”

A few weeks later, he disappeared.

For the past month, the 52-year-old banker—who set out to build the JPMorgan of China and successfully straddled the divide between China and the West—has been held incommunicado in a detention system run by the Communist Party’s anticorruption agency.

. . .

(p. B6) Privately, close associates of Mr. Bao have been dismayed by his detention. China Renaissance Holdings Ltd., the boutique investment bank he founded and ran, is a relatively small firm, making it unusual that it would draw this manner of government scrutiny. Colleagues, business partners, friends and acquaintances of Mr. Bao are worried about his safety and are hoping he will soon resurface publicly. “I feel utterly disillusioned,” said a person close to Mr. Bao.

The jolt to business people’s confidence also comes as anxiety over China’s direction, its curtailing of people’s rights, and the way it managed the Covid-19 pandemic is leading more middle-class and wealthy Chinese citizens to relocate to other countries. Global investors have been rethinking their exposure to the world’s second-largest economy following a selloff over the past two years that was largely caused by Beijing’s regulatory crackdowns and policy decisions.

. . .

Some Chinese entrepreneurs who previously went missing have reappeared quickly. Guo Guangchang, the billionaire chairman of Shanghai-based conglomerate Fosun Group, emerged days after a mysterious detention by authorities in late 2015. He continues to run Fosun and was never charged with any wrongdoing.

Xiao Jianhua, a Chinese financier who ran a conglomerate called the Tomorrow Group, was taken from Hong Kong in 2017 and didn’t reappear for five years. He turned up in a Shanghai court last year to face corruption charges and was sentenced to 13 years in prison.

. . .

Mr. Bao believed China was on the cusp of a new-economy revolution and connected early on with young entrepreneurs who were trying to get their internet-technology startups off the ground.

. . .

Mr. Bao tried to adapt to the new environment, shifting his attention to pursuing deals in industries like semiconductors that remained in Beijing’s good graces.

. . .

Mr. Bao’s last post on Chinese social media WeChat was on Jan. 9 [2023], a few days before the China Renaissance party. He congratulated Fenbi Ltd., a vocational training provider and a portfolio company in his firm’s fund, on its Hong Kong listing. Under his personal status, Mr. Bao had written: “Dream as if u’ll live forever, live as if u’ll die today.”

For the full story, see:

Jing Yang and Rebecca Feng. “China’s M&A Star Vanishing Spurs Alarm.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, March 20, 2023): B1 & B6.

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

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 18, 2023, was listed with the title “China’s M&A Star Tells Staff to Be Bold—Then He Disappears,” and had the title “China’s M&A Star Told His Employees to Be Bold—Then He Disappeared” at the top of the story.)

Progressives Now Argue that F.D.R.’s Liberal New Deal “Rested on a Jim Crow Foundation”

(p. C1) In October 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had his administration send letters to thousands of clergy across the country, asking if the New Deal was helping their communities.

Even from admirers, the news wasn’t always good. Local administrators did not “carry out your will and purpose,” J.H. Ellis, a Black pastor in Hot Springs, Ark., wrote, “especially as it relates to the Negro group.” J.W. Hairston, an African American minister in Asheville, N.C., lamented that in the South “there are two states and two cities, one white — one black.”

The Northern Black press, meanwhile, was more blunt. The New Deal, more than one newspaper proclaimed, was also a “Raw Deal.”

Eight decades later, that charge still hangs in the air. Conservatives have long assailed the New Deal, which radically expanded the government’s involvement in the economy, as the epitome of big-government overreach. But in recent years, progressives have increasingly argued that this pillar of 20th-century liberalism rested on a Jim Crow foundation, and laid the groundwork for the yawning Black wealth gap that persists today.

Now, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, N.Y., is entering the fray. “Black Americans, Civil Rights and the Roosevelts, 1932-1962,” on view through December 2024, takes a frank, deeply researched view of what it calls Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s “mixed” record on race, from their personal attitudes to the policies they championed.

. . .

(p. C3) . . . , the title of the opening wall text makes the central question plain: “A New Deal for All Americans?”

While a mainstay of scholarship for decades, that question has recently reached a broader public, thanks to books like Ira Katznelson’s “When Affirmative Action Was White” and Richard Rothstein’s “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.”

On a recent afternoon, a docent directed visitors toward what she called “the most amazing thing” — a 1937 Home Owners Loan Corporation map of the nearby city of Poughkeepsie, labeling predominantly Black areas as “hazardous” for lenders.

In 1935, the newly created Federal Housing Administration issued a manual for lenders, endorsing redlining (so named for the pink shading of “hazardous” areas) and warning that Black families should not be approved for mortgages in white areas. “Incompatible racial groups,” it noted, “should not be permitted to live in the same communities.”

Housing policy is widely seen by historians as one of the New Deal’s most consequential failures, one which over time dramatically deepened residential segregation. But while the exhibition deals bluntly with the issue, it also avoids any simplified counternarrative of the New Deal writ large as inherently, and intentionally, racist at its core.

. . .

The exhibition deals directly with what the library calls the “greatest stain” on Roosevelt’s racial record: his refusal to publicly support federal anti-lynching legislation, out of fear it would alienate the Southern Democrats who dominated Congress and imperil the New Deal.