University cracks down on predation in the lab, more like it

Predators object. David Adam has written an article about a policy change at Princeton University. I’m not too impressed with it.

Romantic relationships between university professors and their students are becoming less and less acceptable.

Hang on there, Mr Adam. When were they ever acceptable? Not in my day. They were always recognized as creepy. The terrible professor who slept around with his students has been a stock figure of contempt in literature and movies for a long time.

But OK, on with the specific news.

Many of the new university policies that have emerged in the last few years have focused on undergraduates and how to better protect them, typically with a campus-wide ban on staff dating undergrads. But a number of universities also demand that faculty members do not start relationships with graduate students they supervise. This month, Princeton University went further and declared that faculty members were no longer allowed to date any graduate student—even if the couple works in different departments. Pre-existing relationships are exempt from the new rule.

Announcing the policy after it was approved by a faculty vote on April 1, Dean of the Faculty Sanjeev Kulkarni said in an email to faculty members that the rule would “create a safe, respectful and equitable learning environment for everyone on campus.”

“I think it’s practical and I think it’s prudent,” Rebecca Burdine, an associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton who voted on the measure along with the rest of the faculty in attendance, tells The Scientist. Most importantly, she says, the graduate students asked for it, because faculty members often have huge power over a graduate student’s career and this can create an unequal and unhealthy power dynamic in personal relationships that emerge.

So, the group at the lower end of the power differential is asking for this behavior to end, making quite clear that this has never been about real love and partnerships.

And how does The Scientist title this article? Universities Crack Down on Love in the Lab. Well, that makes their bias crystal clear, anyway.

Then, of course, they have to include criticisms of the policy. The two men claim that there is no asymmetry of power and object to a decision that might shrink the dating pool. The one woman argues that it might mean a person in computer science might not be able to take a course in art history, because they’re dating an art history professor? What an odd concern.

Meanwhile, the people who are breathing a sigh of relief that one more pressure has been removed from their student career are not interviewed, and probably don’t want to be, because that might involve exposing the unpleasantness of some of the faculty they’re depending on to get the heck out of there.

Holy crap. The guy who thought prohibiting professors dating students would be too costly is…the Director of the Program on Ethics and Public Life at Cornell.

Dueling irrelevancies

What is Trump fretting over now?

On Tuesday, President Trump hosted Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in the Oval Office for a closed-door meeting, during which the leader of the free world spent an inordinate amount of time complaining about lost Twitter followers, according to a source familiar with the conversation.

There’s a big problem with Twitter right there — you know weird ol’ @jack really cares about keeping his buddy @realDonaldTrump happy, and @realDonaldTrump really cares about the big number of followers. So much so that this must sting:

Yep, 59.9 million vs 106 million. Don’t tell Donald that at least half his followers are hate-reading him.

Relax, there aren’t going to be any zombie pigs

I’m catching up on my dramatic reading, so of course I had to dig into the latest mad science, a paper in Nature on the Restoration of brain circulation and cellular functions hours post-mortem. This is classic mad science: pig brains were collected from a slaughterhouse, hooked up to a carefully designed perfusion apparatus, and then flooded with an appropriate physiological solution to examine how well the tissue held up. The authors aren’t trying to raise the dead, though. Rather, it’s more of a quantitative study of what happens to the tissue in the hours after death.

The results are interesting, but not surprising. After all, no one expects that the brain immediately slumps into grey, gooey oatmeal at the instant of loss of brain activity — once metabolic support at the organismal level is lost, and once integrated overall activity in the functional networks of the brain fail, it’s going to take time for death at the cellular level to occur. This paper was looking at the progression of cellular loss, and also examining how their perfusion protocol could slow that decay, making some of the cells available for laboratory research. That should be clear from their conclusion.

These findings show that, with appropriate interventions, the large mammalian brain retains an underappreciated capacity for normothermic restoration of microcirculation and certain molecular and cellular functions multiple hours after circulatory arrest. In addition, this platform could offer investigators the opportunity to conduct prospective, functional ex vivo studies in intact brains that would otherwise be limited to static histological, biochemical, or structural investigation.

So what did they find? That the plumbing of the brain, the major arteries and veins and even portions of the capillary network, were still patent hours after death, and that the walls of the circulatory system were still responsive to pharmacological agents. That the general cytoarchitecture of the brain, that is, the major pathways and grey and white matter of the brain, remained largely intact for hours, although there were also scattered areas that dropped out. That individual neurons retained normal morphology, even to the level of synapse structure, and that their perfusion protocol reduced the swelling and apoptosis of individual cells. That glia persisted and retained some of their inflammatory properties. That when perfused, the brain as a whole still metabolized, taking up glucose and oxygen and producing carbon dioxide, and maintaining the pH of the fluid.

One thing they did not see was restoration of overall activity of the brain — consciousness, even at its most primitive level, is a property of a network of interactions, and that property was gone. That’s what death is to a multicellular organism, a loss of coordination and integration between its components, and finding that bits and pieces still retain functionality at a cellular level doesn’t mean that the whole has been restored.

The observed restoration of molecular and cellular processes following 4 h of global anoxia or ischaemia should not be extrapolated to signify resurgence of normal brain function. Quite the opposite: at no point did we observe the kind of organized global electrical activity associated with awareness, perception, or other higher-order brain functions.

A crude analogy: take a hammer to your computer. You open it up and find broken circuits and cracked connections. You can still pull out an IC and hook it up to an oscilloscope and find that the transistors and resistors and various subcomponents can operate to spec, but you know, that computer ain’t gonna be playing Fortnite no more, and isn’t even going to boot up.

And that’s how I see this study. It’s a useful exercise in salvaging components that could be useful in research, but this isn’t a resurrection protocol. The pig is irreversibly dead with wholesale damage across its nervous system, but some pig cells take longer to die. There’s an important distinction here between global meta-properties of the whole brain, and single cell properties, and you shouldn’t confuse the two. The authors don’t.

But then there’s all this foofaraw from people invited to comment on the study, where I’m not so sure that they see the distinction.

For example, “Pig experiment challenges assumptions around brain damage in people:The restoration of some structures and cellular functions in pig brains hours after death could intensify debates about when human organs should be removed for transplantation, warn Stuart Youngner and Insoo Hyun.” They report the important point that these brains are dead, but still seem to think that there’s hope.

Electrophysiological monitoring did not detect any kind of neural activity thought to signal consciousness, such as any evidence of signalling between brain regions. Nonetheless, the study challenges the long-held assumption that large mammalian brains are irreversibly damaged a few minutes after blood stops circulating. It also raises the possibility that researchers could get better at salvaging a person’s brain even after the heart and lungs have stopped working.

Except that it doesn’t challenge the assumption that large mammalian brains are irreversibly damaged by the loss of circulation. They saw zero evidence of brain function — the brains were dead. That pig wasn’t thinking, dreaming, or rising up in a blood-soaked orgy of zombie violence. It was a non-pig. Even when the researchers clearly saw a reduction of cellular damage with their perfusion technique, there was no claim that they had reversed death.

I also don’t see any offer of hope for clinical situations. What does it mean to “salvage a person’s brain”? If overall function has stopped, there’s no sign of electrical activity, that there’s been a loss of oxygen to the brain to the extent that signaling has been disrupted and lost, to say that some cells aren’t dead just yet does not hold out help for resuscitation.

This certainly does have ethical implications, though. I’m more concerned that some people might misuse this information to argue that resuscitation efforts were suspended prematurely — that a dying patient might cross that threshold into death, and someone will argue that because pyramidal neurons in the cortex of a decapitated pig could show electrical activity 10 hours after death, that’s cause to demand life support be maintained even longer.

And then there’s this one: “Part-revived pig brains raise slew of ethical quandaries: Researchers need guidance on animal use and the many issues opened up by a new study on whole-brain restoration, argue Nita A. Farahany, Henry T. Greely and Charles M. Giattino.” They also point out the obvious — these brains were dead — but they want to express reservations.

The work also raises a host of ethical issues. There was no evidence of any global electrical activity — the kind of higher-order brain functioning associated with consciousness. Nor was there any sign of the capacity to perceive the environment and experience sensations. Even so, because of the possibilities it opens up, the BrainEx study highlights potential limitations in the current regulations for animals used in research.

Most fundamentally, in our view, it throws into question long-standing assumptions about what makes an animal — or a human — alive.

Does it, though? Is this more dramatic than Luigi Galvani’s demonstration that a dead frog’s muscles would still twitch when an electrical current was applied? I’m sure it stirred up deep concerns in the 18th century, and could contribute to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but does it really change our understanding of life in the 21st? I know I’m untroubled. My sense of self isn’t cellular. When my brain can’t perceive the environment or experience sensations or think, I’ll be dead and gone, even if my cerebral vasculature can still dilate.

I am also unsure what changes in regulations are required. They bring up the fact that none of this research would be judged unethical, so they’d like to change the rules so that it becomes unethical? I don’t get it.

The pigs, having been raised as livestock, were exempt from animal welfare laws and were killed before the study started. In the United States, the 1966 Animal Welfare Act is the only federal law that regulates how animals are treated in research, and applies to either living or dead animals. It explicitly excludes animals raised for food. Meanwhile, the policies and regulations of the US Public Health Service, which funds most US research involving animals — mainly through the NIH — do not specify any protections for animals after their death.

I’d really like to know what protections for animals after their death ought to be implemented, when the majority of these animals are being killed in order to suffer the indignity of being eaten. That’s the greater ethical question, not whether we should be working harder to shelter a few fading cells inside an animal that has just had its throat slit, been gutted, and chopped up into little bits that are then packaged in styrofoam and plastic at the grocery store. This study doesn’t raise any ethical concerns that aren’t amplified a million-fold times in our farms and meat-packing industries and kitchens.

The authoritarian, profit-seeking people who want to seize the commons are the problem

I confess that I’ve never really thought deeply about the Tragedy of the Commons — it’s a story that we are all told early, and superficially, it seems to make a lot of sense. Sure, we have to worry that a shared resource might be exploited by selfish individuals. We have to be concerned about free riders. But do we really? And why is it that somehow the blame always falls on the weakest, poorest members of society? So I read Garrett Hardin’s original essay from 1968, and realized…it’s dreck. Why has this thing been so influential? It’s entirely about population control, nudging around the edges of eugenics, and yuck, I realized that the people who think this is great stuff tend to be the wealthy and deluded Libertarians. Look at this:

If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own “punishment” to the germ line–then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state, and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement? To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.

Unfortunately this is just the course of action that is being pursued by the United Nations. In late 1967, some 30 nations agreed to the following: “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.”

Oooh, ‘ware the improvident. They might use overbreeding to aggrandize themselves! I’ve never felt that way. It seems to me that those gigantic families are harming themselves, perpetuating self-destructive myths at best, and reducing resources to their own children. Those children aren’t cows, property that they can use to seize an unfair share of the commons; they are independent, educable individuals who, if given the opportunity, could learn to be cooperative members of society and who would see that their own self-interest is not served by dropping a baby every year.

Hardin’s own example of herdsmen overgrazing a shared pasture is full of limiting assumptions — his herdsmen not only fail to cooperate in managing a shared resource, they don’t even talk to each other. And this is a shared myth used to justify privatization and control of basically everything in the world?

What prompted me to dig into the source material was an excellent article on Hardin and his “tragedy” by Matto Mildenberger. Humans actually do not lack cooperative management tools; we don’t need authoritarian intervention to save us from ourselves.

But the facts are not on Hardin’s side. For one, he got the history of the commons wrong. As Susan Cox pointed out, early pastures were well regulated by local institutions. They were not free-for-all grazing sites where people took and took at the expense of everyone else.

Many global commons have been similarly sustained through community institutions. This striking finding was the life’s work of Elinor Ostrom, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics (technically called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). Using the tools of science—rather than the tools of hatred—Ostrom showed the diversity of institutions humans have created to manage our shared environment.

Of course, humans can deplete finite resources. This often happens when we lack appropriate institutions to manage them. But let’s not credit Hardin for that common insight. Hardin wasn’t making an informed scientific case. Instead, he was using concerns about environmental scarcity to justify racial discrimination.

About that last bit — yeah, Hardin was a nasty character, but his nastiness isn’t the reason we should reject his myth. It’s because he was wrong.

Hardin was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamophobe. He is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a known white nationalist. His writings and political activism helped inspire the anti-immigrant hatred spilling across America today.

And he promoted an idea he called “lifeboat ethics”: since global resources are finite, Hardin believed the rich should throw poor people overboard to keep their boat above water.
…
People who revisit Hardin’s original essay are in for a surprise. Its six pages are filled with fear-mongering. Subheadings proclaim that “freedom to breed is intolerable.” It opines at length about the benefits if “children of improvident parents starve to death.” A few paragraphs later Hardin writes: “If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” And on and on. Hardin practically calls for a fascist state to snuff out unwanted gene pools.

Or build a wall to keep immigrants out. Hardin was a virulent nativist whose ideas inspired some of today’s ugliest anti-immigrant sentiment. He believed that only racially homogenous societies could survive. He was also involved with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a hate group that now cheers President Trump’s racist policies. Today, American neo-Nazis cite Hardin’s theories to justify racial violence.

It’s always useful to the powers-that-be to claim that a crisis is inevitable, and that it’s all due to unavoidable Human Nature, because that obscures where the blame really lies: in the hands of a corrupt, rich few who have used their power and wealth to override the potential of the many.

…rejecting Hardin’s diagnosis requires us to name the true culprit for the climate crisis we now face. Thirty years ago, a different future was available. Gradual climate policies could have slowly steered our economy towards gently declining carbon pollution levels. The costs to most Americans would have been imperceptible.

But that future was stolen from us. It was stolen by powerful, carbon-polluting interests who blocked policy reforms at every turn to preserve their short-term profits. They locked each of us into an economy where fossil fuel consumption continues to be a necessity, not a choice.

You can find more on that anti-corporate perspective in this video from Mexie:

We’re not going to solve climate change or any of the other global problems harming humanity until we claw down the billionaires from their perches and enact laws that control their greed.

Why is Ross Douthat still privileged with a column in the NY Times?

Didn’t I just say one of our priorities has to be burying the Republican party? Case in point of how contemptible conservatives have become, Ross Douthat, who has a counter-proposal to Elizabeth Warren’s idea of free college and debt forgiveness:

I guess the only favored people in Douthat’s America are the Quiverfull and their priests. May your loins be bountiful and your church be wealthy.

American politics has become a sham

There were a bunch of town hall meetings with Democratic presidential candidates last night. I didn’t watch a single one of them, instead retiring to my bed with a book. My wife tuned in to all of them, I think, because I don’t believe she came to bed at all (she’s the fiercely political one in the family nowadays, and I can’t blame her.) I look at the swarm of Democrats that are buzzing around during this premature election cycle, and I’m just tired. All I want is sound policy and coherence at this point. So I detest the young, brash ones like Mayor Pete who has no policy and openly says he’s avoiding it because he’s all about “values” (but what if your values are all about having a rational, sane, competent government?) I detest the old neo-liberal party hacks — I can’t believe that Uncle Joe is going to be running. Do you think he’ll get Anita Hill’s vote?

But worst of all, I detest the Republican party. They’re doing nothing. At a time when eleventy-seven thousand Democrats are plunging madly to the starting gate because they see our current president as weak and hateful and a necessary target for removal, the Republicans cower in fear and none are suggesting that they’ll run against him. Why? Because even the ones who express reservations about the Deplorable-In-Chief know that he is the current apotheosis of Republican policy, and they can’t run against him without repudiating everything the Rethuglican machine and Fox News has built since Reagan. Charles Pierce puts it well.

That there are not at least five Republican candidates challenging El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago not only is a fine metric for judging the deep internal rot in that political party, but also a good measure of the limits of the Never Trumpers as allies in an election year. Let us stipulate the following two points: 1) It is the responsibility of the Democratic Party to do everything in its power to protect the institutions of our republic, and 2) it is distinctly not the Democratic Party’s responsibility to save the Republican Party from itself, and from the political monster it has created over the past 40 years. For four decades, the party has flattered, and begged, and truckled to the very forces of which it is now terrified. Save yourselves, gang.

But that isn’t happening because, for all their brave talk, the Never Trumpers want to keep the political power that base gave them while distancing themselves from its obvious and inevitable product. So, instead of gathering forces behind a primary challenge, many of the Never Trumpers seem to be content with advising the Democratic Party on who it should nominate and what policies it should pursue. This, I believe, in preparation for a campaign to blame the Democratic nominee if the country determines that it wants to live six more years in the current gale-force dungwind.

Let us be clear: if the country re-elects this president*, it’s because modern movement conservatism prepared the ground for it and used the Republican Party to do it. It hangs on all of them like a historical deadweight. They should disenthrall themselves from the policies and tactics that hung it from their necks before presuming to beg the other political party save them from their own monster.

So here I am, disgusted. I am going to vote for whoever wins the Democratic party nomination, and I will say it loud and clear ahead of time, even if it’s a Mayor Pete or an Uncle Joe, because the number one priority for the country is to first get rid of that asshole in the White House, and number two priority is to bury the Republican party. Yet I hate that I’m trapped in this two-party system, and I do not trust the Democratic party to fight for anything other than corporate sponsorship. That means I cannot bear to pay attention to the process, because the process is the problem.

I’ll walk into the primaries and vote my conscience (which at this point whispers “Warren” in my brain; could change), and then when the actual election roles around after a goddamn year and a half of misery, I’ll mark the ballot for whoever is opposite Trump, which means the Democrats could nominate a chimpanzee and they’ll get my vote. Which does not make me happy.

Slap me in the face harder

People who can’t imagine doing good for people are the worst kind of people. Philip Klein is resentful that Elizabeth Warren’s plans might benefit people.

Aside from the cost, which, like her child care proposal, she claims would be covered by her ultra-millionaires tax, the plan would be tremendously unfair to those who have been struggling for years to pay off their student loans.

Yes. It was tremendously unfair to hit a generation of students with excessive costs and dreadful loans. So where were you when those were imposed? Have you been crying out for decades about the unfairness of student debt? Looking at Klein’s usual pro-rich, conservative Republican op-eds, I rather doubt it. But now he’s crying for them.

There are those who may have taken higher-paying jobs they didn’t necessarily want to pay off loans.

Wait, what? They were forced to suffer by taking higher-paying jobs? I don’t think that’s a common problem.

And there are those who have cut expenses to the bare bones to pay off loans while watching their friends with similar salaries eat out and travel and de-prioritize paying off loans. Those who were more responsible will feel justifiably enraged at the idea that those who may have been more profligate will now get a bailout from the government.

Boy, I think this is called projection. Philip Klein is very concerned that slackers and deadbeats might beat the unfairness of the existing system, so we ought to keep that system to punish them. This is how bad systems persist, isn’t it? By this argument that “I suffered through it, so you have to suffer, too” which only perpetuates suffering.

Earth Day!

I’m going to be at this event, up north in Alexandria, Minnesota.

I’m one of the speakers on the list. My wife and I are going to lead the kids in an owl pellet dissection, and let them identify the bones they find therein. Then, naturally, I’m going to talk about spiders and hand out vials with totally harmless little spiders (jumping spiders and cellar spiders) and hand lenses, so then can get close up with our arachnid friends. For the more bloodthirsty among them, I’ll also have a bottle of flies and we can feed them and watch guts getting sucked out.

It’ll be a totally wholesome afternoon.

Hey, I guess my vote can be bought

I’m going to vote for a candidate with this plan:

The first step in addressing this crisis is to deal head-on with the outstanding debt that is weighing down millions of families and should never have been required in the first place. That’s why I’m calling for something truly transformational — the cancellation of up to $50,000 in student loan debt for 42 million Americans.

My plan for broad student debt cancellation will:

  • Cancel debt for more than 95% of the nearly 45 million Americans with student loan debt;
  • Wipe out student loan debt entirely for more than 75% of the Americans with that debt;
  • Substantially increase wealth for Black and Latinx families and reduce both the Black-White and Latinx-White wealth gaps; and
  • Provide an enormous middle-class stimulus that will boost economic growth, increase home purchases, and fuel a new wave of small business formation.

Once we’ve cleared out the debt that’s holding down an entire generation of Americans, we must ensure that we never have another student debt crisis again. We can do that by recognizing that a public college education is like a public K-12 education — a basic public good that should be available to everyone with free tuition and zero debt at graduation. My plan for universal free college will:

  • Give every American the opportunity to attend a two-year or four-year public college without paying a dime in tuition or fees;
  • Make free college truly universal — not just in theory, but in practice — by making higher education of all kinds more inclusive and available to every single American, especially lower-income, Black, and Latinx students, without the need to take on debt to cover costs.

Some people will say we can’t afford this plan. That’s nonsense. The entire cost of my broad debt cancellation plan and universal free college is more than covered by my Ultra-Millionaire Tax — a 2% annual tax on the 75,000 families with $50 million or more in wealth. For decades, we’ve allowed the wealthy to pay less while burying tens of millions of working Americans in education debt. It’s time to make different choices.

Right now that candidate is Elizabeth Warren, but I’m open to others adopting this idea. In fact, I think it ought to be on the Democratic party platform, and that any candidate who wants to represent the will of the American people ought to be promoting it.

Note: I have no student loan debt — I only had a small debt to begin with, and paid it off years ago — I’m not planning to attend college in the future, and my kids have all completed undergraduate education, and I’m not really going to acquire any personal gain from this (although I sure wish somebody’d put this in place round about 2000, before my trio of offspring started marching off to university and broke us). So I’m not really being “bought”. This is a change that would be good for the country. Let’s build up our human infrastructure!

Also note that her plan specifically covers 2-year public colleges, which is just as important as our ivory tower institutions, and that she has specific plans for HBCUs and MSIs. Warren knows her stuff.

Why isn’t every candidate immediately recognizing a good idea and jumping on the bandwagon? Even the Republicans should be able to see the virtues.