Ultraphyte

Day 57: Heath Care Held Hostage

This week NPR aired a wonderful series called Sick in America. The programs present a wealth of statistics and stories of how Americans still need health reform.  Here is just one example of a self-employed freelance writer who can’t pay for his hospitalization:

“I feel awful every single day,” he says. “You know, people saved my life. And more than that — people fed me and bathed me and changed my socks, you know? And they’re not going to get paid — at least they’re not going to get paid by me. And I’m going to be ashamed of that for the rest of my life.”

But wait–there’s good news. Despite the Supremes, and the specter of possible loss of the Affordable Health Care Act, many reforms have already occurred–and won’t be turned back. Surprise–many in the health care industry are embracing the government reforms as good for them. That’s right, cost-saving measures recommended for Medicare are now being adopted by private insurers.

In fact, hospitals and insurers are joining to cut costs. This should surprise no one. It happened under the Clintons, when the scare of Hillary care was enough to make insurers curb their profits. Back then, my employer’s health plan actually ran a surplus. Then Bush got in–and drug makers began saying in public they would price cancer drugs at the highest they could get. Our health costs began double-digit increases.

Whether or not we hostages get out alive, there’s only one conclusion how to vote in November. A vote for Dems is a vote for health care.

What more can be said–the new SpaceX launch includes the ashes of actor James Doohan, who played the beloved engineer on the Enterprise. One of his more memorable moments for me was when Kirk confined him to quarters after a barroom brawl; upon which, Scotty observes, “Thanks, I’ll be catching up on my technical journals!”  Seeing as I have a large pile of technical journals rising next to the living room couch, I need someone to confine me there for a week.

SpaceX really means a commercial breakthrough–people are finding ways to pay for spaceflight that nobody thought up before. Deposit of human remains, who would have thought? Now we’ll find out what else space is good for.

Jonathan asks for a three-question definition of addiction. Most of my books show addictions of one sort or another; the “stonesickness” in A Door into Ocean, the gambling addiction in The Highest Frontier. Addiction is the core of Brain Plague, where the the most addictive thing in the universe is intelligent microbes. “Micros” live in the brain and communicate by colors. For micros, the human brain looks a lot like the brainbow slice above. The brainbow is a genetically engineered mouse that makes distinct fluorescent proteins in different brain neurons, coloring them hundreds of different colors. Why would we do this, Dr. Frankenstein?  Of course–to study medical brain disorders, such as addiction.

Few subjects are the source of greater hypocrisy in our society than addiction. Years ago, we used to distinguish addiction from habituation, which was supposedly non-medical and therefore more OK than addiction. But if you look at this old document I dredged up with its tortuous argument that tobacco smoking is not addictive, you can see that basically society tries to deny that legal socially acceptable substances or practices are addictive. This notion lies behind much of the snarky attitude of Brain Plague. Today the old argument has largely been rejected. Furthermore, we realize that even behaviors not involving pharmaceuticals–such as eating disorders–can interact with the same central brain system or reward pathway.

To get an idea of how drugs interact with the reward pathway, I recommend the interactive demo Mouse Party. While I wish it included nicotine and other legal drugs, the ones it does include are pretty good. Basically, one way or another most addictive drugs or behaviors overload the dopamine pathway that makes pleasure. (Many other neurotransmitters like serotonin are also involved, but dopamine seems to be the most central.) The speed of response, intensity, and duration all contribute to the addiction tendency. Nicotine and cocaine act particularly fast. MDMA (ecstasy) has particularly long-lasting effect.

But the key thing that happens with any stimulus–whether light on your retina, sound on your ear’s hair cells, or something releasing dopamine–is adaptation. Adaptation means that during a stimulus, the body adjusts to lower responsiveness (or increase the threshold for response). So the longer, and the more intense, the stimulus, the sooner you adapt–and feel worse upon removal of the stimulus. That’s why cocaine and nicotine users scrabble around looking for more, as the effect wears off. Prolonged users of a substance may eventually experience permanent adaptation, so they can never recover the ability to “feel good” — with or without the substance. A similar thing happens with dieters–having experienced a higher fat level, one feels permanently starved.

How do you know if you’re “addicted” to something? That’s not easy because the medical profession, and society at large, have no clear definition. In Brain Plague, the characters don’t agree either; and the definition they start with evolves throughout the book. Nevertheless, as a practical matter, I suggest the following three questions:

• Can I stop?
• When I stop, am I a functional person?
• If I don’t stop, am I a functional person?

The Campbell list has led me to reflect on the past winners of this award, in particular Fred Pohl, who won for Gateway in 1978 and for The Years of the City in 1985.

Much has been written about Gateway; I recommend Jo Walton’s reflections on Tor blog. What impresses me most is the complexity of the protagonist and his relationship with people and machines. Pohl was way ahead of his time in foreseeing the problematic effects of humans outsourcing themselves–and the services of fellow humans. Looking back on Gateway also reminds me of a time when, despite all our human problems, people still flung themselves out into space. What has become of that spirit today?

Much has been made of Obama’s “evolving” position on same-sex marriage. In fact, society as a whole has been “evolving” on sex-associated behaviors over the past century.

But this reminds me of another interesting question: What does biological evolution have to do with same-sex behaviors? In my town, the same people seem to oppose both. For example, the middle school teacher who got fired after eleven years of teaching against evolution also taught (in eighth-grade physics class) against homosexuality. And the same group that came to our church to protest our gay-straight-alliance Halloween party also went to Kenyon College to protest evolution.

If some churches have been slow to accept love between people sharing the same karyotype, let’s remember that science was pretty slow too. Bagemihl recounts two hundred years of scientists failing to discover the normality of same-sex behavior among animals. The unmistakable evidence that same-sex behaviors have evolved amongst all creatures. The story of non-discovery is instructive beyond its subject, in that similar obstacles occur every day in science, in every scientific field, even lowly microbiology–there is prejudice wherever there are people. Still…two hundred years?

So how did this discovery take so long?

• When two animals were observed to interact, the active one was recorded as male, the passive one as female.
• When the anatomical sex of the animals was observed, the animals must be making a mistake.
• Or the observer was mistaken, “disturbed,” or “could not account” for the results.
• If the observations were submitted for publication, they were rejected.
• If the observations were published, they had opaque titles such as “On the lowering of moral standards among butterflies.”
• The published works were not cited.

For some reason, things began to change in the 1980s, when an interest developed in the topic. Why that particular decade? As Spock would say, there is no logical reason why scientists would suddenly become more observant at that time.

But there is certainly an argument for science research to include people of the widest range of backgrounds. The more diverse the array of experiences, the more likely that someone in the research group will come up with a fruitful idea–and someone else will bounce it back. Paradoxically, while science is supposed to be “objective,” it makes a big difference who is doing the research.

Could a mockingjay hybrid really work? That’s what I was asked by the NYT for a piece about Suzanne Collins’s intriguing YA adventure.

In Hunger Games, the mockingjay is the product of accidental hybridization of engineered jabberjays, avian informer-drones, with wild mockingbirds. Mockingbirds are real birds capable of extraordinary variety of sound, imitating all kinds of insect, animal and machine sounds as well as human voices. I recommend the Northern Mockingbird link for some lovely recordings.

And all kinds of parrots talk, both in captivity and in the wild. Amazingly, wild parrots in Australia are picking up human words from birds escaped from captivity.

Can different bird species hybridize? Of course it’s possible, even with different chromosome numbers. In my science fiction I’ve often depicted the hypothetical result of human-gorilla hybrids. The role of chromosome number in hybridization is a fascinating story, perhaps for another post some time.

But can parrots actually use “talk” to communicate meaning? This article thoughtfully discusses the question. It seems clear that some birds learn to use “talk” to elicit social responses from humans, although it’s not clear that they understand the meanings of vocabulary in the same way we do. Perhaps we should really ask, can humans communicate by the language of a bird.

It’s inspiring to hear of a conservation program that’s actually working. Rainwater harvesting addresses a dire problem in India and other countries around the globe.

For years, India’s water has been sucked dry by irrigation-intensive agriculture and soft-drink companies. But now, villages in India are replanting trees and building tanks to catch rainwater. Amazingly, the water table can be restored. Large plants are now being built for water and dew collection. These measures remind me of the ingenious Fremen technologies in Herbert’s Dune.

Now in Texas, some people have a similar aim. Water is caught on rooftops. filtered and stored in rainbow-colored tanks. “Tank town” produces bottled rainwater, called “Cloud juice.” Cloud juice is helping Texans get through their drought.

What else can we do to conserve water?

Adam had’em–and so apparently did the dinosaurs. Fossils of giant fleas and flea-like parasites dating to the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods in China are reported by George Poinar, long-time paleoentomologist and fossil DNA researcher; and by Tai-Ping Gao in Beijing. Poinar popularized the idea that fossil insects trapped in amber might have sucked dinosaur blood and could yield dino DNA, a key inspiration for Crichton’s Jurassic Park.

Now we have giant dino fleas, as described on NPR. Poinar thinks the fleas don’t look like jumpers, more like crawlers, with a giant proboscis that could jab through the dinosaur’s scales. We know that dinosaurs had lots of worms and other digestive parasites, whose reproductive forms could have come from the fleas.

Parasites are getting a lot of attention lately, especially since some of them may actually assist their hosts. But more often we hear of the horrific illnesses they cause, such as leishmaniasis and Chagas disease.

How much do you think parasites would have affected the dinosaurs?

Back in 1999, when I first started teaching Biology in Science Fiction, the Weekly World News reported that fully 20% of Americans have been abducted by aliens. (And returned, more or less intact.)

So where have all the aliens gone?  Why are alien abductions falling off lately? And when they do show up, look who they’re reduced to picking off.

Jonathan Cole’s explanation is ingenious. Of course, why should aliens bother to do wet-lab experiments on humans when we’ve uploaded so much data on ourselves? There’s a whole science of bioinformatics based on data mining. Now traditional experimentalists warn about the pitfalls of data mining without “real” experiments (go back and reread Jurassic Park–the original book, not the movie). But really, can you blame the aliens?

Have you ever tried experimenting on a human?  Any idea what a nuisance they can be? Injecting armadillos with tuberculosis is easy by comparison.

As for implants, today’s humans outfit themselves with so many electronic devices that the interference makes it worthless. Just try sorting out your implant signals from here to the mothership, with all those Lolcats cluttering the radiowaves.

So, let’s add to the virtues of NCBI: The ginormous human database (plus that of our relatives, the animals, plants and microbes) serves to distract aliens from abducting our citizens.

What do you think? Where have all the aliens gone?