Question Technology

Answering Aubrey de Grey

Jason Pontin of Technology Review considers Aubrey de Grey again:

But while some biologists have criticized SENS to me privately, none have been willing to do so in public. I attribute this to their desire to preserve their careers: whilst the science of aging is an interesting and expanding area of scientific research, the field of human life-extension is peopled with crazies. It is not - at least not yet - a respectable field of study. Still, I am increasingly sympathetic with de Grey about this at least: if he is so wrong, why won't any biogerontologists say why he is wrong? If he is totally nuts, it shouldn't be so hard to explain the faults in his science, surely?

I suspect another simple reason is that biologists are busy.  They have better things to do than respond to fringe enthusiasts.  It's the same reason you don't see serious AI researchers wasting their time explaining why Ian Pearson is nuts -- he's the guy who said recently we'll be downloading our brains onto supercomputers by 2050.  (Or maybe they have... I haven't been following that story.)

Link: The New Commonplace - Transcendence Reconsidered.

Brave New Pets

The NY Times has a new article today about cat cloning.  Read it and be disgusted.  There's really no defensible argument for pet cloning.  Excerpt:

Ordinarily it is hard to predict how a kitten will look when it is grown. But not for David Cheng, who plans to buy a clone of his much-loved short-haired black-and-white cat Shadow. After all, the cloning company guarantees that Shadow's successor will bear a close resemblance. [...]

Mr. Hawthorne [CEO of Genetic Savings and Clone] said all clones come with a one-year health guarantee. And, "We give an absolute, money-back guarantee for physical resemblance," he said.

And physical resemblance is all you get.  Contrary to popular misconceptions, a clone doesn't necessarily act anything like the original (at least no more than a sibling would).

Then again, we do already accept pet breeding for appearance and pedigree -- "pet eugenics" (petgenics?) if you will.  So if you accept that, then pet cloning may not be such a leap for you.

To their credit, I guess, Genetic Savings and Clone does host a discussion forum for people to vent against them.

Some links about pet cloning:

• Californians Against Pet Cloning
• Center for Genetics and Society's page on Pet Cloning and Genetic Engineering

Link: Hello Kitty, Hello Clone - New York Times.  (It's interesting that they filed this in the Business section.)

Computers don't solve prescription errors

From Wired News:

Medical errors kill nearly 100,000 American each year, with lethal drug interactions accounting for most of these deaths. Computerization -- which hospitals have been slow to embrace -- was supposed to eliminate most problems, but new research published Wednesday indicates that even the best computer system can’t save you from a doctor’s catastrophic screw-up.

Harmful medication-related mishaps cropped up in a quarter of all patients at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salt Lake City, one of the most high-tech hospitals in the country, according to a study published in Archives of Internal Medicine. ...

TechDirt's take on this (and there's also a hint of this attitude in the Wired story) is that "this doesn't mean the technology doesn't work ... but that humans are still a big part of the process."  There's not enough detail here to know for sure what's going on, but it's naive to think that more technology is necessarily what's needed.  A bad interface design could even introduce errors.

If we assume that the computers are actually helping, that means these doctors have an error rate of over 25% before they even get to the computers, which is a pretty alarming statistic.

Link: Wired News: Computers No Cure for Dumb Docs.

Tagging Sucks!

John C. Dvorak does an amusing grumpy-old-man rant against tagging, "folksonomies" and related buzzwords in his latest column.  I think he makes some good points.  My favorite part:

The utopianism and idealism that exist in the online societies ignore the real problem with tags, metatags, übertags, folksonomies, and the like. This is because they honestly think that most people are goodhearted. The online world, because of its anonymity, encourages bad behavior. "You suck!" is a common post, and it would be the number-one tag if tagging ever became popular.

Link: PC Magazine: To Tag or Not to Tag, That Is the Question.
Via IFTF Future Now.

Human Enhancement Discussion at WorldChanging

WorldChanging.com has a good discussion with James Hughes, Ramez Naam, and Joel Garreau about the future of technologies for "enhancing humans."  It's quite long, but well worth your time to read.

Link: WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Human Changing.

Stem Cell Extremists

The hype from both sides of this debate is irritating... babies on one side, sick people on the other.  The current bill isn't really that controversial, but you wouldn't know it from the tone of the discussion.  It doesn't open up funding for cloning embryos for stem cells, just for using ones created from fertility treatments.  In polls, most people and scientists have said they're okay with this.  Most people and scientists aren't okay with cloning embryos for this research.  (I'm cribbing from Pete Shanks here.  You should buy his book now!)

For some sane discussion of both pros and cons, check out the documents available from the Council for Responsible Genetics, especially "Stem Cell Primer" and "Stem Cell Myths."  Find out why, for example, it's silly to trot out sick celebrities, and why adult stem cells really aren't perfect substitutes for embryonic stem cells in research.

Wanted: A biogerontologist to debunk de Grey

Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief at Technology Review, is looking for a biogerontologist to write a critical response to Aubrey de Grey's program for "defeating aging."  He writes:

Cynthia Kenyon, a biogerontologist at UCSF, has declined to review Aubrey de Grey's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS). De Grey, a computer scientist and theoretical biologist at the University of Cambridge, believes he can defeat human aging within the lifetime of those now living. I asked Dr. Kenyon if she would comment on de Grey's prescriptions almost three months ago; she agreed; and I announced her "By Invitation" column on this blog last week, asking readers what issues they would like her to address. But after a great deal of work, Dr. Kenyon very graciously told me she simply felt she couldn't do an "effective" job. I remain committed to finding a biologist who will criticize SENS: after Technology Review's profile of de Grey, Do You Want to Live Forever?, many of his admirers challenged me to have a working scientist say why de Grey's ideas were impractical--if they were impractical. So far, I have been unable to find one biogerontologist who felt comfortable writing about SENS--which is telling perhaps. But I shan't give up yet.

Link: Jason Pontin: The New Commonplace - Cynthia Kenyon Declines.

Earlier entries about de Grey: Do You Want to Live Forever?, On de Grey's response to the article, Brian Appleyard's critique, Blogger Saint Nate's critique.

Korean Stem Cell Frenzy

The BBC has one of the better stories on the recent news from Korean "stem cell star" Woo-Suk Hwang.  (See this profile in Nature for more background on him.  By the way, do people not find it a little creepy that this guy is a veterinarian, who before this was cloning pigs and cows?)

The BBC story gives a reasonable airing, I think, of the many, many remaining hurdles and questions about this research, for example,

Experts warned that there was a risk the cells could become cancerous.

And the Korean team admits much work is needed before stem cell techniques can be perfected.

The stem cell lines produced by the Koreans from patients with disease will likely also display some of the characteristics of that disease.

In some cases, the cells might need to be manipulated before being used as a treatment ...

Researchers will also need to develop ways to efficiently direct the growth of stem cells into stable cell types ..

It seems like a fairly accurate article, based on my limited knowledge, but they do make a glaring error in one of the sidebars:

Pamela Vack [69], who has motor neurone disease, opposes human cloning research, even though it could potentially save her life.

My understanding is that even optimistic scientists think it will be 50 years before this technique is available, so their suggestion that she could be helped by it is misleading, and maybe downright rude.

US articles (e.g., Wired, AP) seem to devote an unreasonable amount of space to repeating the "Other countries are beating us!" line of argument/fear-mongering from the pro-cloning forces, when they could be providing more information to help people understand the complexities of the science and politics.

Link: BBC NEWS | Health | Stem cells tailored to patients.

Biological Hybrid Dolls

London's Science Learning Center is featuring an art exhibit called "Hybrids: towards a new typology of beings and animal products,"

A collection of educational dolls exploring the emergence of biological hybrids in biotechnologies, and our moral, social, cultural and personal responses to the strange
and different in human biology and also ‘transhuman’ creatures.

We make money not art has more pictures and descriptions of the dolls.

Link: Cities of Science, London - Hybrids: towards a new typology of beings and animal products

In Defense of PowerPoint

It's fashionable to criticize PowerPoint.  Donald Norman recently posted an eminently sane essay about how the naysayers have got it wrong.  Excerpt:

It has become commonplace to rail against the evils of PowerPoint talks; you know, those dull, boring never-ending ordeals where the speaker — or should I say "reader" — displays what appears to be a never-ending progression of slides, each with numerous bulleted points, sometimes coming on to the screen from unexpected directions in unexpected ways, each one being slowly read to the audience. PowerPoint should be banned, cries the crowd. Edward Tufte, the imperious critic of graphic displays has weighed in with a document entitled "The cognitive style of PowerPoint," in which, among other things, he credits poor PowerPoint slides with contributing to disaster with NASA's space shuttle Columbia, January 2003. ...

I respectfully submit that all of this is nonsense. Pure nonsense, accompanied by poor understanding of speech making and of the difference between the requirements for a speech-giver, the speech-listener (the audience), and for the reader of a printed document. These are three different things. Tufte—and other critics—seem to think they are one and the same thing. Nonsense, I say, once again.

... Is PowerPoint bad? No, in fact, it is quite a useful tool. Boring talks are bad. Poorly structured talks are bad. Don't blame the problem on the tool.

Link: Donald Norman, In Defense of PowerPoint.

Better Human Betterment

That blonde haired, blue eyed girl is beckoning you to the new website for BetterHumans, an organization promoting the ethically questionable "transhumanist" agendas of thinkers like Aubrey de Grey, James Hughes, Ray Kurzweil, and Ramez Naam, who want to produce a better species through radical genetic engineering and other technologies.

Of course, don't confuse them with the Human Betterment Foundation, one of the American eugenic organizations in the early 1900s that promoted race enhancement through forced sterilization of "defectives" and other means, and provided much inspiration for Hitler.
 

Internet Phone and 911 Service

Wired today has the latest on the controversy over what type of 911 emergency service should be available through voice-over-internet phone.  From Wired:

Internet phone providers are facing static over alleged public-safety failings, with federal regulators poised to unveil new rules that could drive up prices and crimp growth.

At stake is 911 emergency service, a feature that most people assume is available on any phone. But it's not always supported by so-called voice over internet protocol, or VOIP, services, creating a dangerous misunderstanding, according to industry critics who are pushing for reforms.

... hooking up internet-based phones to the existing 911 emergency services system poses a number of technical problems.

Unlike the traditional telephone network, which uses dedicated circuit-switched lines to terminate and originate calls, VOIP networks use IP addresses that make it more difficult to pinpoint precisely the geographic location of users.

The FCC is expected to issue a decision Thursday.

Link: Wired News: VOIP in Public-Safety Showdown.

Radical Evolution

• The Washington Post ran an excerpt yesterday from Joel Garreau's new book, Radical Evolution : The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human.  Link: Washington Post: Inventing Our Evolution.

• A couple weeks back, MSNBC did a provocative and somewhat bizarre story about what humans might look like in the future.  Link: MSNBC: Human evolution at the crossroads.  The graphics are especially strange.  That handsome fellow pictured is a Numan or Homo Genomicus.  (No relation to Gary Numan, I assume.)  The story is part of a larger Feature called Fast Forward: The Future of Evolution. (Via Minding The Planet.)

Prius Software Problems

From CNN:

A software problem is causing some Toyota Prius gas-electric hybrid cars to stall or shut down while driving at highway speeds, according to a published report.
...
Toyota spokesman Sam Butto told the newspaper the auto manufacturer identified a "programming error" in the computer systems of 23,900 Prius cars last year and sent owners a service notice advising them to bring the cars into dealers for an hour-long software upgrade.

I'm sure this sort of report will become increasingly common as cars get more and more computerized.  And we'll probably see car accidents caused by software failures in the future.  It certainly is possible to design successful failsafe software, as is done for critical applications like air-traffic control and nuclear weapons systems, but this is auto makers we're talking about.  Safety doesn't always win out over profits.  What's scary about software failure as opposed to mechanical failure is that the result is much less predictable and so potentially more dangerous.

Link: CNN: Report: Prius hybrids dogged by software woes - May. 16, 2005.

Human Genetic Engineering

Another interesting new book: Human Genetic Engineering: A Guide for Activists, Skeptics, and the Very Perplexed by Pete Shanks.  This looks like an excellent resource.  The website for the book includes excerpts and links to many articles online.  Here's an excerpt from the first chapter:

The public debate over human biotechnology is just beginning. Experts have been discussing the implications of genetic research for decades, but only in the last few years have these topics begun to reach the political agenda.

Cloning has hit the headlines, and so has the partly related question of embryonic stem cell research. We still don't have a federal law to regulate either of them, and research continues anyway. Meanwhile, some practitioners in the fertility industry are looking to expand the market for their services to include not only sex selection but "designer baby" options. Once again, the political issues remain: Who decides what is acceptable and how should those decisions be enforced?

These developments are occurring against a background of people forgetting — or misrepresenting — the terrible history of eugenics in the twentieth century. Eugenics was not primarily developed by the Nazis, although they used it to justify their prejudices. Eugenics was an appalling idea mostly advocated by well-meaning people. It's coming back, this time as a consumer option, in a high-tech form that has appropriately been dubbed "techno-eugenics."