This Slate piece by David Plotz was pretty enjoyable in my opinion. Plotz highlights possible reasons why South Korea seems to be punching above its weight class in terms of human bioscience. He points to three primary factors:

1. Lack of moral debate in regards to the ethics of the enterprise
2. Brute force work hours
3. A top-down command scientific culture which keeps a focused eye on a specific goal

Plotz notes that 1/4 to 1/3 South Koreans are Christian, and yet there is no strong moral opposition to human bioresearch. This highlights the difficulties in inferring values and actions based on putative belief axioms when an individual is taken out of their social context. In other words, in my experience Korean American Christians are generally pro-life Republicans, and yet the powerful evangelical Christian community in the homeland does not seem particularly focused on bioethical issues. But is that surprising? My exploration of the abortion debate, cursory as it has been, suggests that there was a significant latency in the involvement of evangelical Protestant Christians in the pro-life movement after Roe vs. Wade. In Catholicism and Freedom historian John McGreevy points out that on the religious front only the Roman Catholic Church was moving aggressively toward pro-life activism in the first years after Roe vs. Wade, it just wasn’t that salient to evangelicals. In fact, an article in 1968 was published in Christianity Today, the “house” magazine of American evangelicalism, that was mildly favorable toward expanding “reproductive rights” (this was the era when the governor of California, one Ronald Reagan, was signing legislation liberalizing abortion laws on the state level). Interestingly, Plotz does not point out that the past two presidents of South Korea have been Roman Catholic. But never fear, in South Korea Christians, and in particular Roman Catholics, are in general more liberal than the median individual in the populace, even the 1/2 of the society which is not religious.

As far as work ethic goes I think Plotz has a point about the importance of raw hours in regards to research in the life sciences. But it seems to me that there are many American scientists who put in 7 day-12 hour work weeks. I am not totally convinced that the difference in work ethic can explain the relative prominence of South Koreans, especially since Americans on average put in more hours and are more productive in their labor than workers in most industrialized nations (including South Korea).

Finally, the difference in scientific culture is I think a mixed-bag. From my readings in scientific ethnography what Asian laboratories gain in focus and direction in their top-down culture and deference to superiors, they tend to lose in innovative exploration of the full space of hypothetical possibilities. Funding for cloning research is a viable option today because a few Western scientists continued to push forward in this field even when it wasn’t sexy or fashionable. If you recall, back when Ian Wilmut was on the front page of every newspaper in the world it was reported that his brand of animal science wasn’t popular and was seen by many as a relict of pre-molecular days. Many were skeptical that the sort of cloning he managed was even feasible (the brute force replications necessary for his positive result certainly required a “leap of faith”). If the United Kingdom had a “science czar” who had wide-ranging powers in shifting funding I strongly suspect that all the monies that went to Wilmut would have been diverted to “real” biology, that is, the molecular level work which has been the driver for a multitude of new fields within the past generation.

So overall, it’s a great thing that Asian nations are pushing forward applied research. But I still think that in the near future the cutting edge of paradigm shifting innovation is going to be found in the West, where, not surprisingly, many maverick scientists of Asian origin are now based. Remember, the great theoretical population geneticist Motoo Kimura was inspired to go into the field by an American scientist, Sewall Wright (see Kimura’s chapter in Evolution).

De novo discovery of a tissue-specific gene regulatory module in a chordate. You can read the full paper (you should read the full paper).

Based on Body Size, Bacteria and Elephants Have Similar Metabolism, Ecologists FindUCR-led research team shows that organisms use their biochemical characteristics to overcome limitations arising from their body size

“The researchers’ analysis also shows that the rate of energy consumption per unit body mass declines with growing body size in groups of evolutionarily close organisms, such as mammals. For example, one gram of an elephant’s body uses up 25 times less energy than does one gram of a shrew’s body, accounting for why shrews have to eat more often than elephants. On the other hand, a bacterium, which is not closely related to an elephant in an evolutionary sense, consumes approximately the same energy per unit body mass as the elephant.”

This interests me because it is an attempt to discover meta-knowledge that applies to a much larger set of detailed knowledge in specific domains. I believe such re-organization of information is necessary if there is to be any hope for a human to comprehend even a small fraction of the world’s knowledge. The world has so many stories that a person can only learn a few of the most powerful.Clearly such meta-knowledge has limits. That paragraph could be re-stated to say a shrew burns 25 times as much energy as a bacterium. So the meta-knowledge both captures important information and misses important information.

I wanted to post a rejoinder to the avian flu discussion below. My response is to point out that pandemic flu need not kill very many people to have an enormous impact on our lives.

A Canadian investment firm issued a report on avian flu recently. They argue that the indirect (economic) effects of a pandemic will be devastating over and above any loss of life. Their strongest evidence comes from an analysis of the economic impact of SARS on affected countries. The world-wide death toll from SARS was small (~775 people), but its impact on GDP growth was substantial.

The Bank of Canada estimates that the most severe economic impact was in the second quarter when GDP growth fell from 3% in Q1/03 to -1.2% in Q2/03. Its estimate is that SARS cut second quarter GDP by 0.6 percentage points (Chart 1). Moderate as this estimate sounds, the effect in Toronto was significantly more dramatic, as Toronto represents about 15-–20% of overall Canadian economic activity.

Fear of infection alone will be sufficient to cause economic stagnation, and this is something to be worried about.

Update: Ronald Bailey – Bird Flu: Threat or Menace?

The Geographic Spread of the CCR5 Δ32 HIV-Resistance Allele. A picture is worth a lot of words, so….

Note the appeal to the “wave of advance” model of R.A. Fisher, you’ve seen it before in reference to the possibility of advantageous alleles spreading throughout populations via selection without concomitant wholesale demographic dislocations and migrations. The authors of the above article, which is freely available to all via PLOS, suggest that one possible reason that the Δ32 mutation isn’t more common is that selection hasn’t had enough time to operate. For comparison, consider lactose tolerance, though in Eurasia the allele that confers the ability to adults to easily digest milk products as adults probably has its origins in Northern Europe, in places like Northern India the phenotype has reached ~70% levels of prevalence. Contrary to some Aryan fantasists this does not imply that an ancient influx of Swedes transformed the South Asian demographic landscape, rather, selection knows a good thing.

For a long time now I have been meaning to post my thoughts on what I see as overhyping the avian flu situation. Luckily, a reader of Instapundit beat me to it and summed up nicely a lot of my thoughts.

As a medical researcher, I want to make a gentle but sincere plea to the blogosphere to calm down this flu hysteria just a bit. The main way that flu kills is by predisposing its victims to “superinfection” by bacterial illnesses – in 1918, we had no antibiotics for these superimposed infections, but now we have plenty. Such superinfections, and the transmittal of flu itself, were aided tremendously by the crowded conditions and poor sanitation of the early 20th century – these are currently vastly improved as well. Flu hits the elderly the hardest, but the “elderly” today are healthier, stronger, and better nourished than ever before. Our medical infrastructure is vastly better off, ranging from simple things like oxygen and sterile i.v. fluids, not readily available in 1918, to complex technologies such as respirators and dialysis. Should we be concerned? Sure, better safe than sorry, and concerns about publishing the sequence are worth discussing. Should we panic? No – my apologies to the fearmongers, but we will never see another 1918.

This MD hit almost all of the doubts I had: much better (and more sanitary) medical practices and supplies, the wide-spread use of antibiotics, and better general health of the populace.

But, this made me examine why there is this hysteria, and I think two points need to be raised about this. Researchers and medical doctors who study these diseases become convinced that their disease of interest is much more of a threat than any others. Be it pride, tunnel-vision, or a subconscious desire to attract more publicity or grant money to their area of research, these medical professionals have a general bias towards their particular virus or bacteria. Personally, in the two dozen virologists I have spoken too, I have seen this general propensity. I am not arguing they are wrong or corrupt, just that their dire warnings need to be considered in context.

Another factor to this hysteria concerns the general public and their view of viruses. Today the most talked about and intimidating virus, to laypeople, on the planet is HIV. A virus that people know has been around for at least two decades, is growing in total number of infections, and seems to mutate so fast that therapies become eventually useless against it and infected persons whither and die. But the comparison between HIV and avian flu is a flawed one.

When a virus, any virus, infects the body a “battle” is started between the virus transforming the infected person’s biomatter into duplicates of itself and the bodies’ immune system creating and mobilizing enough of the correct antibodies to combat it. If the virus wins, the immune system is decimated, secondary infections take over, and death is likely; if the body wins, the virus is generally defeated, and an immunity to that virus is set up. Avian flu falls into this model but HIV does not. The insidious nature of HIV is that it can survive the immune assault (by “hiding out” in the eyeballs) and has a high mutation rate, so the body is never rid of it.

This is where all the concern about the avian flu going through so many mutations to make it both transferable from human to human and airborne. Combine with that the previously detailed persistent nature of HIV, and you have a mental model of viral infection in the common person’s mind that leads to hysteria.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing that everything will be perfectly fine, I am not that Pollyannaish, there will be infections. But, either most will recover, or few deaths will happen in segments of the population who are immune-compromised (the already ill, the elderly, the very young) or who do not have adequate access to antibiotics (the very poor). But our society has advanced to a point that these deaths will be few and far between.

If you want to talk about how to reduce even those few deaths, that is something to discuss, but we should stop the over hyping of this microorganism.

Update from Razib: Welcome Corner readers, and thanks for the link John.

The beauty of capitalism is that market niches are always being identified. You know those breast implants woman are getting, well they’re so unitary in purpose just hanging there on display. Wouldn’t it be better to implant an MP3 player into one breast and the music collection into the other?

Computer chips that store music could soon be built into a woman’s breast implants.

One boob could hold an MP3 player and the other the person’s whole music collection.

BT futurology, who have developed the idea, say it could be available within 15 years.

BT Laboratories’ analyst Ian Pearson said flexible plastic electronics would sit inside the breast. A signal would be relayed to headphones, while the device would be controlled by Bluetooth using a panel on the wrist.

According to The Sun he said: “It is now very hard for me to thing of breast implants as just decorative. If a woman has something implanted permanently, it might as well do something useful.”

The sensors around the body linked through the electrical impulses in the chips may also be able to warn wearers about heart murmurs, blood pressure increases, diabetes and breast cancer.

Note the less appealing secondary uses they invision.

The New York Times Magazine queries – is an inch Worth $100,000? (The Short of it). I guess that depends where it goes . . .

Down the toilet is where, apparently, according to the article, which describes the modern trend for parents and doctors to favor expensive Human Growth Hormone treatment for young boys who happen to naturally develop at the extreme left-hand side of the height bell curve – completely normal males who won’t even hit the 5 foot mark. The parents and health professionals are under the reasonable impression that height below the 2nd percentile, must provide these boys with some significant social handicaps – handicaps which could eventually affect their mental health and major life outcomes (ability to acquire mates, wages, job security, etc.). Unfortunately, attempts to empirically verify the assumptions behind this treatment have all failed:

Several years ago, around the time the Food and Drug Administration was considering the use of human growth hormone to treat extremely short but otherwise normal children, researchers were working up the results of a large-scale psychology experiment involving hundreds of middle-school and high-school students in the Buffalo area – including some who were extremely short but otherwise normal. The students didn’t know the study was about height. All they knew was that each of them had been asked to be the director of a class play. They were given thumbnail sketches of various characters in the drama – “a good leader,” “teases others too much,” “gets picked on” and so forth – and were then asked to cast the play by selecting classmates who best fit each role.

If short stature is a ticket to social prejudice and psychological purgatory, which has been the animating idea behind expanded use of growth hormone in the last 20 years, you would have expected the shortest children in the Buffalo study to be lining up to collect their Tonys in victimhood; they would have been nominated by classmates for every beleaguered role: being picked on, behaving shyly, acting withdrawn, being left out. But that, surprisingly, was not the case. A team of psychologists, led by David E. Sandberg at the University at Buffalo, concluded that a child’s stature, whether tall or small, had “minimal detectable impact” on his or her social standing among schoolmates. At least in this setting, even extremely short children (those around the first percentile) made friends and earned the respect of their peers as easily as kids of average size.

Sandberg’s evaluations have found these kids at the 1st percentile to be emotionally, socially, and behaviorally normal, something replicated by similar research in England. This isn’t a trivial find considering that typical treatment runs about $20,000 a year for 4-5 years, and typical gains are only about 1-2 inches. And yet clinical comparisons between an HGH group and a control group found:

. . . no significant differences in the quality of life between young adults who had been treated with growth hormone as children and a control group of adults (equally short as children) who had not – except that adults who had taken the drug as children had a romantic partner less often than those who hadn’t used it.

So the largest scientifically verified benefit of this $100,000 treatment is less sex partners! With treatments like these, as they say, who needs sickness?

I can see why it would be tempting, even prudent, for parents to disregard such results, though. We’ve all heard the one about the taller presidential candidate, and it’s not as if the literature isn’t full of examples of the woes of shortness. Even this article admits:

There is a considerable literature suggesting that taller men receive higher pay than shorter men, and one recent study concluded that economic discrimination against short adult males was equal in magnitude to racial or gender bias in the workplace.

Right, ‘considerable literature’, so then did the paper that followed the HGH “adults” measure things like job security and wages? If it didn’t look at these kinds of things then we have a poor study design (I’d bet subjects are still too young to catch the most important variables), but if it did and didn’t find any difference, we have results that can at least fairly be regarded by concerned parents as anomalous – at odds with the larger literature. Because of a number of safe study designs, like comparing the taller of two identical twins, Steven Landsburg noted that we know height is worth about $1000 per inch per year. Sadly these substantial returns wouldn’t even match the treatment costs after an entire adulthood of working, but shortness appears to be related to more than just money – long term mental health may also suffer in important ways:

In a study of records for nearly 1.3 million Swedish men, the investigators found that for every 2 inches a man gained in height, his suicide risk dipped by 9 percent. Overall, the shortest men in the study were about twice as likely as the tallest men to commit suicide.

So we have $2000 extra dollars a year and 9% less of a chance of killing yourself. On top of this, many other studies show that inches have a significant impact on romantic outcomes, both indirectly through greater income, and directly, as increased male height is considered more attractive. Taller males have more, and more attractive, sexual partners, are less likely to be bachelors or childless, and have more children compared with others who do reproduce. A burden humorously illustrated in this unscientific ABC News pseudo-study by some very heartless, um, ‘size queens’:

” ABCNEWS put together an experiment to test just how willing women are to date shorter men . . . To see if the women would go for short guys who were successful, ABCNEWS’ Lynn Sherr created extraordinary résumés for the shorter men. She told the women that the shorter men included a doctor, a best-selling author, a champion skier, a venture capitalist who’d made millions by the age of 25.

Nothing worked. The women always chose the tall men. Sherr asked whether there’d be anything she could say that would make the shortest of the men, who was 5 feet, irresistible. One of the women replied, “Maybe the only thing you could say is that the other four are murderers.” Another backed her up, saying that had the taller men had a criminal record she might have been swayed to choose a shorter man. Another said she’d have considered the shorter men, if the taller men had been described as “child molesters.”

So given what we know about height, it’s not totally unreasonable for parents (who probably want grandchildren) to continue to want to boost their extremely short children at great expense, despite some of these more direct studies suggesting no pay-off – at least at the time of young adulthood.

A height skeptic might wonder if any of these correlations matter in the ways we assume they do, after all “correlation isn’t causation” and the
precise relationship between height and income or height and suicide may have nothing to do with height by itself. To illustrate, men who are married make more money at sales, presumably because a third skill – influencing people – gave them an advantage at both finding a partner and making more sales. Therefore just because there is a correlation between marriage and sales, doesn’t imply that giving some sales failure a wife (from your harem, in the manner of a grateful Saudi sheik) will improve his sales ability. This sheik wife may be like HGH tallness.

I am not a height skeptic, in part because the path between height and at least some male outcomes (perceived dominance/attractiveness) is not completely mysterious (see the Landsburg link for a clever experiment to find the path from height to income). Still, I can think of reasons to doubt the cost/benefit analysis in favor of HGH treatment.

Even if the drug had some measure of proven benefit, other factors, such as the possibility of untested long-term effects for new treatments, have to be weighed in these decisions. Also most families don’t have $100,000 to blow; perhaps an equal amount of money put towards good college, a decent home, or something bearing interest for this wee lad would be a wiser investment than 1 inch of height.

Related: Tall Tale, How Much Taller?, Taller ~ Richer, On Height, Medieval Height, Asian Height Gaps.

Addendum from Razib: There is book, it is called Worldwide Variation in Human Growth, and it is searchable via Amazon and Google Print. This book has tables, it reports on studies. These tables and reports transmit facts. Facts are important, and many would contend, as would I, that they should precede opinions, rather than being rendered unnecessary by the presence of an opinion. One need not read the book above, one might even make recourse to a website called google, where one can find facts. If one has an allergy to facts, or lacks the cognitive aptitude toward the manipulation and deployment of facts, one should retreat from the plain of discourse. We aren’t here to play Risk, some intellectual stakes are on the table….

Have you ever been stuck in phone-mail hell? If you hit “0” you’ll often bypass the tree, but not always. Here’s a master list, published by Intuit Quickbase, covering many of the largest companies.

Just wanted to pass along some links to what will likely be a controversy when Steven Speilberg releases his film Munich later this year. The film tells the tale of an Israeli covert counter terrorist squad that was tasked with assassinating the Black September terrorists that were still at large. The tale has been told on a number of occassions, first in the book Vengeance by George Jonas. The book formed the basis for the HBO movie Sword of Gideon. Controversy has swirled around “Avner” the main character of Vengeance and many question whether he really ever was a Mossad agent. Here is one take-down published in Haaretz. Others are upset about the moralizing they fear that Speilberg is weaving into his film. The Sunday Times reports:

Spielberg has upset some by appointing a playwright (Tony Kushner) who is to the left of the Israeli left. Many Jews feel betrayed by Spielberg, but the rest of us will wait to see the film before judging.”

For an exhaustive look at the broader issue of counter terrorist actions, I’d recommend Countering Terrorism: The Israeli Response to the 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre and the Development of Independent Covert Action Teams, a Master’s Thesis written by Alexander B. Calahan for his Master of Military Studies degree at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College.