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Harvard’s All-Male Club Says it Can’t Let in Women Because They’d Be Sexually Assaulted

by Aaron Slot Posted on April 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The elite gentlemen of the Porcellian Club, Harvard’s centuries-old social club that boasts the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and the Winklevoss twins among its alumni, emerged from years of silence on Tuesday to reject the university’s calls for clubs to join the 21st century and include women into its exclusive ranks.

“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time an officer of the PC has granted an on-the-record statement to a newspaper since our founding in 1791,” Charles Storey, a graduate from the class of ’82 and the club’s graduate board president, wrote to Harvard’s student newspaper the Crimson. “This reflects both the PC’s abiding interest in privacy and the importance of the situation.”

Storey goes on to argue that by forcing clubs to invite female members, the change would “potentially increase, not decrease the potential for sexual misconduct”—essentially making the case that instead of broadening women’s access to the benefits of these social clubs, the university’s efforts could actually jeopardize a woman’s safety.

“Given our policies, we are mystified as to why the current administration feels that forcing our club to accept female members would reduce the incidence of sexual assault on campus,” Storey continued.

Storey isn’t alone in his staunch resolve to remain stuck on the wrong side of history. Another Porcellian Club member, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Washington Post that the university’s efforts would disrupt the club’s intention to develop “deep male friendships.”

“We don’t want to be involved in anyone else’s business, we just want to be left alone to carry on our 225-year traditions in peace,” he noted.

Last year, a similar conflict erupted when women fought to perform in Harvard’s Hasty Pudding theatrical group, which has been all-male since its founding in 1795. Despite their attempts, none of the 17 women who auditioned were accepted into the troupe.

“I want to say that it’s unsettling that there will be no women on stage tonight,’’ Amy Poehler said when accepting the group’s “Woman of the Year” award last January. “You know it’s time for a change when the Augusta National Golf Club has lapped you in terms of being progressive.”

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Harvard’s All-Male Club Says it Can’t Let in Women Because They’d Be Sexually Assaulted

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New York lost billions with fossil fuel investments

by Ingrid13L1986 Posted on March 1, 2016

New York lost billions with fossil fuel investments

By on 1 Mar 2016 4:27 pmcommentsShare

Investing in fossil fuels is becoming a liability — not only for the planet, but for the portfolio, too.

The industry garnered a staggering $5 billion loss for the New York State Common Retirement Fund (NYS-CRF) over three years, according to an analyst estimate from the investment research firm Corporate Knights. The state’s $189.4 billion pension fund, the third largest in the country, covers 1.1 million members across the state. The loss equates to $4,500 per person.

In order to measure what sort of impact fossil fuel holdings was having on the New York State Common Retirement Fund’s equity portfolio, Corporate Knights took the 100 biggest companies that the fund has shares in. Of those, the biggest fossil fuel companies, including coal utilities, were removed. Using data about the performance of the top 100 public coal companies provided by Fossil Free Indexes, the fund was then analyzed for how it would fare without these fossil fuel stocks, versus how it fared with them.

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“Our findings…indicate that the Fund would have made an extra $5.3 billion over the past three years had it shifted its investments out of fossil fuel stocks into companies providing climate solutions,” Toby Heaps, CEO and co-founder of Corporate Knights, told Grist.

Corporate Knights, a Toronto-based financial information company, has analyzed the fossil fuel holdings of several large funds in the past, in an effort to promote a message of “clean capitalism,” a market system in which social, economic and ecological costs are incorporated into prices of goods and services. It publishes both information on corporate responsibility, like the annual list of the “Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada,” as well as analyses of corporate sustainability performance, like the annual “North American Sustainable Cities Scorecard.”

Divesting in fossil fuels has been a hot-button issue for years, with pressure on major universities to scrub their portfolios. Right now, it’s unclear exactly what outcome divesting will have. One study, funded by the oil and gas industry, found that universities could lose millions if they cut their cut oil, gas and coal holdings. Harvard, it reported, would lose up to $108 million per year if it divested from fossil fuel companies. But a slew of other studies have contradicted that finding, suggesting that divesting in fossil fuels can save big money. One analysis by the investment firm Trillium Asset Management directly contradicted the industry-funded findings for Harvard, reporting that the university lost an estimated $21 million dollars over three years by ignoring calls to divest. One 2013 analysis commissioned by the Associated Press found that university endowments would have been better off had they divested a decade previous. Last October, after beginning to divest from all fossil fuels a year earlier, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund announced that its $850 million portfolio was not harmed by the decision.

According to one 2015 analysis by MSCI, the world’s leading stock market index company, investors who cut out holdings in fossil fuel companies outperformed those that had stakes in coal, oil and gas over the past five years. The analysis attributed fossil fuel holdings’ poor performance to both the fall in the oil price, as well as investors considering oil and coal to be risky investments in the long run.

The New York pension fund’s investments in fossil fuels have been questioned lately, both by climate advocates and by investors. Last week, Thomas DiNapoli, the New York State Comptroller who manages the pension fund, joined four other Exxon shareholders to demand that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission force the company to address how climate change mitigation policies would impact its bottom line. New York’s retirement system invests directly about $1 billion in Exxon, the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company. Exxon quickly challenged that resolution — but it seems that today, the Comptroller got his answer.

“The era of fossil fuels is coming to an end, and this report demonstrates very clearly why divestment is not only environmentally sound, but financially responsible,” New York State Senator Liz Krueger, co-sponsor of the Fossil Fuel Divestment Act, said in a statement. “By staying invested in fossil fuels over the last three years our state pension fund missed out on over $5 billion in potential returns. Investment in fossil fuels is a sinking ship, and it’s high time we headed for the lifeboats.”

Corporate Knights, working with other climate action groups, has found similar trends for other large shareholders that refuse to divest in fossil fuels. Last November, it launched “The Clean Capitalist Decarbonizer,” a tool to analyze the performance of 14 major funds, including Harvard’s endowment, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the pension plans of Canada and the Netherlands. Put together, these 14 funds would have been $23 billion better off had they divested from fossil fuels just three years earlier, in 2012.

For those looking to not make the same mistakes the state of New York and others have, there are easy ways to divest—but you may have to read the fine print to make sure there are no oil smears left on your money. Like many universities and corporations that have already pulled their stakes out of the grip of Big Oil, it’s an measurable way to contribute to the climate movement. What’s more, it may save you a whole lot of money.

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New York lost billions with fossil fuel investments

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Flavored E-Cigarettes May Be Worse For You Than Nicotine

by YettaSummerfiel Posted on December 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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“An exotic fusion of pineapple and coconut with champagne infused blueberries.”

“Creamy milk chocolate and rich peanut butter flavors.”

No, these are not excerpts from the dessert menu at a fancy hotel. They’re some of the latest offerings from the makers of vape pens and e-cigarettes—which are the same thing, more or less. As e-cigs gain traction (sales are expected to soar 17-fold in the next 15 years), manufacturers are having a heyday concocting flavors that can be inhaled—an estimated 7,000 to date. Public health experts warn of the addictive nicotine in e-cigs and vaping fluids, and their potential to serve as a “gateway” to tobacco, especially for teens. But a new Harvard study instead took a hard look at those tantalizing flavors—and found that a majority, at least of the samples tested, contained chemicals linked to a dangerous lung disease.

Researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health analyzed various e-cig and vape pen liquids for the presence of three related chemicals—diacetyl, 2,3-pentanedione, and acetoin—that are also used in artificial butter flavorings. By the turn of the 21st century, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had deemed diacetyl safe to eat, but little was known about what happened when a person inhales it. Then, in the early 2000s, workers at several plants that manufacture microwave popcorn came down with a nasty lung disease after prolonged exposure to the fake-butter fumes. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigated cases of this so-called popcorn lung, and later released guidelines for dealing with diacetyl in the workplace, along with a list of foods that contain the chemical. “Current evidence points to diacetyl as one agent that can cause flavorings-related lung disease,” notes the CDC’s National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. NIOSH says it is uncertain whether the other two compounds pose health risks, but it points out their chemical similarities to diacetyl.

Now the popcorn-lung chemicals are turning up in vape pens. The Harvard researchers tested 51 e-cigarette flavorings they deemed appealing to youth—think “Cupcake” and “Alien Blood”—and found diacetyl in 37 of them. At least one of the three suspect chemicals was present in 47 of the 51 samples. The researchers could not determine conclusively that using an e-cig flavored with these chemicals is harmful. But they pointed out that “the heating, vaporization, and subsequent inhalation” creates “an exposure pathway” similar to that of the microwave popcorn workers. Two of the flavors tested—”menthol” and “tobacco”—do not appear on OSHA’s list of flavors likely to contain diacetyl.

Since they landed on the market in 2004, e-cigarettes and vape pens have been dogged by controversy. Fans claim they are far less toxic than regular cigarettes and might even help tobacco smokers quit. Public health officials counter that it’s too early to know very much about e-cigs’ health effects, especially on young people. (Their use among teens tripled from 2013 to 2014.) At least 43 states have placed age restrictions on the sale and/or possession of the products.

The FDA does not currently regulate e-cigarettes—it has stalled for years in proceeding with proposed rules that would allow it to regulate the devices as tobacco products. But given the new findings, the agency may want to take a closer look at the sweet flavors that make the nicotine go down.

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Flavored E-Cigarettes May Be Worse For You Than Nicotine

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Science Says: Drink Your Coffee

by ShannonEsh Posted on November 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Coffee is one of the pleasures of existence. It’s also really good for us, an ever-expanding body of research suggests. The latest: an analysis of three large population studies by a team of researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. They concluded that regular consumption of between one and five cups a day is associated with significantly lower risk of dying from from cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and brain disorders like Parkinson’s. (For those who drink more than five cups per day, the association unravels.)

Interestingly, the benefits are roughly the same for regular and decaf coffee—suggesting that something in the beloved beverage besides caffeine is the trigger. “Bioactive compounds in coffee reduce insulin resistance and systematic inflammation,” the study’s lead author, Ming Ding, said in a press release. The authors make clear that their results are consistent with “numerous” previous studies.

Now that coffee’s health-giving value is well-established, we should probably think harder about an always–vexing problem: how to ensure that the people who tend and harvest this tropical crop get their fair share of the profits generated from it.

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Science Says: Drink Your Coffee

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7 Charts Explaining Baltimore’s Economic and Racial Struggles

by SoniaAlarcon Posted on May 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the wake of Baltimore’s upheaval, President Obama, among others, reminded the country that the city’s longstanding economic inequality was beneath the response to Freddie Gray’s death. “This is not new,” Obama said. “This has been going on for decades.”

In a new study published this week, a group of Harvard economists quantified Baltimore’s problem with economic mobility. Of the 100 largest counties in the country, they found, Baltimore was where children in low-income households faced the worst odds in terms of upward mobility, followed by Mencklenburg, North Carolina; Hillsborough, Florida; Orange, Florida; and Cook, Illinois.

Check out The Upshot‘s interactive map of the Harvard study findings.

That’s just one of many sobering measures of life for some in Baltimore, as the Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, and others have pointed out in recent days. Here are a few examples:

Life expectancy in 15 Baltimore neighborhoods, including the one where Freddie Gray lived, is shorter than in North Korea, according to an analysis by the Washington Post. In eight Baltimore neighborhoods, the life expectancy rate is worse than in Syria.

Christopher Ingraham/Wonkblog

Baltimore teens between 15 and 19 years old face poorer health conditions and a bleaker economic outlook than those in economically distressed cities in Nigeria, India, China, and South Africa, according to recent research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Teens in Baltimore, along with Johannesburg, saw the highest prevalence of sexual violence, substance abuse, depression, and PTSD. They were also most likely to report witnessing community violence.

Vocativ

In 2014, Baltimore—a city where the unemployment rate (8.1 percent) is nearly one and a half times than the national rate (5.5 percent)—had one of the largest gaps between the rich and poor in the country, according to the Brookings Institution. The typical Baltimore resident in the bottom fifth of earners made $13,588 in 2013, whereas those in top 5 percent made an average of $166,924 that year.

In 2010, Baltimore had Maryland’s highest rate of arrests for marijuana possession, and Maryland had one of the highest such arrest rates in the country, according to a 2013 report by the American Civil Liberties Union.

American Civil Liberties Union, 2010

Baltimore incarcerates a greater portion of its population than New York City, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles County, according to the Justice Policy Institute. It also has one of the highest inmate populations in the country, according to the latest available Bureau of Justice Statistics data.

Justice Policy Institute

When it comes to income inequality between blacks and whites, Baltimore is not alone. As FiveThirtyEight reported, this racial disparity is common in cities where at least 10 percent of the population is black.

Ben Casselman/FiveThirtyEight

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7 Charts Explaining Baltimore’s Economic and Racial Struggles

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Chart of the Day: Here’s Who’s Defaulting on Student Debt

by MarkoBurhop Posted on February 24, 2015

Mother Jones

Alex Tabarrok passes along the chart on the right, which shows the default rate on student loans. What it shows is surprising at first glance: the highest default rates are among students with the lowest debt, not the highest.

But on second glance, this isn’t surprising at all. I’d suggest several good reasons to expect exactly this result:

The very lowest debt levels are associated with students who drop out after only a year or so. They have the worst of all worlds: only a high school diploma and a low-paying job, but student debt that’s fairly crushing for someone earning a low income.
The next tier of debt is likely associated with students at for-profit trade schools. These schools are notorious for high dropout rates and weak job prospects even for graduates.
The middle tier of debt levels is probably associated with graduates of community colleges and state universities. Graduates of these schools, in general, get lower-paying jobs than graduates of Harvard or Cal.
Conversely, high debt levels are associated with elite universities. Harvard and Cal probably have pretty high proportions of students who earn good incomes after graduation.
The highest debt levels are associated with advanced degrees. The $50,000+ debt levels probably belong mostly to doctors, lawyers, PhDs, and so forth, who command the highest pay upon graduation.

A commenter suggests yet another reason for high default levels at low levels of debt: it’s an artifact of “students” who are already deep in debt and are just looking for a way out: “The word is out if you have bad credit and are desperate for funds just go to a community college where tuition is low and borrow the maximum….Want the defaults to go down — stop lending to students that have a significant number of remedial courses their 1st and 2nd terms at a college where tuition is already low.”

If you’re likely to complete college, student loans are a good investment. But if you’re right on the cusp, you should think twice. There’s a good chance you’ll just end up dropping out and you’ll end up with a pile of student loans to pay back. If you’re in that position, think hard about attending a community college and keeping student loans to the minimum you can manage.

And try majoring in some field related to health care. Occupations in health care appear to have a pretty bright future.

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Chart of the Day: Here’s Who’s Defaulting on Student Debt

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Harvard is Buying Up Vineyards in Drought-Ridden California Wine Country

by SteveYFLwoyxqh Posted on January 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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I recently wrote a piece about growing interest in California farmland by massive investment funds. But almonds and other tree nuts, the main focus of my article, aren’t the only commodities drawing interest from the smart-money crowd. From what I can tell, a successful California farmland investment require these two conditions: 1) a sought-after commodity, preferably one with a booming export market; and 2) access to water for irrigation—increasingly important as California’s drought lurches on.

Harvard University’s famed $36 billion endowment fund, the biggest of any US university, has found just such a sw in California’s coastal Paso Robles wine region, north of Los Angeles. Reuters reports that the Harvard fund “has spent more than $60 million to purchase about 10,000 acres in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties since 2012, making it one of the top 20 growers in Paso Robles.”

The move would seem to meet my two conditions swimmingly. US wine exports (90 percent of which originate in California), are booming, up 16.4 percent in 2013, the most recent year with numbers. And as with almonds, US wine exports to China have been surging for years, as this chart I assembled last year with colleagues Jaeah Lee and Alex Park shows. And wines from grapes grown in Paso Robles should have no trouble finding buyers—Wine Enthusiast deemed Paso Robles the 2013 “Wine Region of the Year,” and rival Wine Spectator has declared that it’s “emerging as most dynamic wine region in California.”

As for water, while making its land buys, Harvard’s investment company “acquired rights to drill 16 water wells of between 700 and 900 feet deep, two or three times deeper than the average residential well, according to county records,” Reuters reports. ‘Deeper wells will continue to give them access to water as shallower wells run dry.”

Obtaining those permits turned out to be a great move. Reuters reports that the fund acquired rights to drill seven of those wells on August 21, 2013, while “local lawmakers were trying to figure out how to deal with the worsening water shortage” in the region. Soon after the Harvard fund got its pumping permits, the county placed a “ban on new pumping from the hardest-hit part of the basin,” Reuters reports.

Reuters adds that “no environmental advocacy group has accused Brodiaea a Harvard-owned investment firm of trying to profit from the drought.”

In an item last year, the veteran analyst Michael Fritz of the Farmland Investor Center noted the timing of Harvard’s move:

Some market observers have wondered if Brodiaea was a well-timed water play in light of the region’s worsening groundwater shortage. Last August, the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors adopted an “urgency” ordinance that prohibits any new development or new irrigated crop production unless the water it uses is offset by an equal amount of conservation. Water levels in the Paso Robles Groundwater Basin have fallen sharply in recent years—two to six feet a year in some areas—causing wells to go dry and forcing many vineyards and rural residents to drill deeper wells, according to local accounts.

Fritz adds that a local investor involved with managing the Harvard wine project told him that “the timing of Brodiaea’s irrigated land purchases in San Luis Obispo County and the subsequent moratorium on new irrigation development was ‘pure coincidence.’”

California isn’t the only region upon which Harvard is placing farmland investment bets, Fritz reported. The fund also has such investments in New Zealand, Romania, Latvia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Panamá, Fritz notes.

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Harvard is Buying Up Vineyards in Drought-Ridden California Wine Country

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Lucy and the Great 10% Myth

by KelleePulido Posted on July 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Andrew Sullivan reminds me of something I was curious about the other day. He quotes Jeffrey Kluger, who writes in Time that he’s annoyed with the movie Lucy because it perpetuates the ridiculous myth that we only use 10 percent of our brains. I sympathize. I was sort of annoyed just by seeing that in the trailer. But it did make me wonder: where did this urban legend come from, anyway? Wikipedia to the rescue:

One possible origin is the reserve energy theories by Harvard psychologists William James and Boris Sidis…William James told audiences that people only meet a fraction of their full mental potential….In 1936, American writer Lowell Thomas summarized this idea….”Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average man develops only ten percent of his latent mental ability.”

In the 1970s, psychologist and educator Georgi Lozanov, proposed the teaching method of suggestopedia believing “that we might be using only five to ten percent of our mental capacity.”….According to a related origin story, the 10% myth most likely arose from a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of neurological research in the late 19th century or early 20th century. For example, the functions of many brain regions (especially in the cerebral cortex) are complex enough that the effects of damage are subtle, leading early neurologists to wonder what these regions did.

Huh. So we don’t really know for sure. That’s disappointing but not surprising. It’s remarkable how often we don’t know where stuff like this comes from.

As for its continuing popular resonance, I have a theory of my own. There are an awful lot of people out there with remarkable—and apparently innate—mental abilities. They can multiply enormous numbers in their heads. They can remember every day of their lives. That kind of thing. And yet, they operate normally in other regards. The fact that they’ve stored, say, distinct memories of the past 15,000 days of their lives doesn’t seem to take up any cerebral space or energy that they needed for anything else. So surely all that storage and retrieval capacity is just sitting around unused in the rest of us?

No, it’s not. But the idea resonates because freakish mental skills seem to be so much further out on the bell curve than freakish physical skills. It makes the whole 10 percent thing seem pretty plausible. And that’s why it sticks around.

POSTSCRIPT: Or does it? I mean, has anyone tried to find out how many people still believe this myth? For all I know, everyone has long been aware that it’s not true. We need a poll!

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Lucy and the Great 10% Myth

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California’s cap-and-trade program will fund environmental justice

by Julienne2739 Posted on June 27, 2014

Please, sir, may I have some more?

California’s cap-and-trade program will fund environmental justice

By

Jason Holmberg

Neighbors of refineries such as this one in Richmond will benefit from California’s cap-and-trade program.

Have poor Californians hit the environmental-health jackpot?

The money raised through the sale of carbon credits under the state’s young carbon-trading program is earmarked for projects that help the climate and the environment. And under a law passed a couple of years ago, SB 535, 25 percent of that money must go to programs that provide benefits to disadvantaged communities, with 10 percent to be spent on projects located directly within those communities. Disadvantaged communities are determined by the state based on pollution levels and socioeconomic factors. They are typically poor neighborhoods of color, where health is compromised and lives are cut short by pollution from the refineries and power plants whose greenhouse gas emissions are being capped.

A $156 billion budget signed recently by Gov. Jerry Brown (D) outlines how the state will spend $872 million expected to be raised over the coming year through the sale of carbon credits. (Note that the $832 million figure in the chart below excludes a $40 million emergency appropriation to help manage the drought.)

California Department of Finance

A quarter of $872 million is $218 million. That money will be spread across projects that benefit disadvantaged communities, such as efforts to reduce pollution from trucks that pass through them. The 10 percent, or $87 million, that must go toward projects inside those communities will help plant trees in cities, provide affordable housing near transit lines, and improve energy efficiency in homes.

Which is great. But, despite its sunny reputation as an environmental and social leader, California remains plagued by income inequality and environmental injustices, and these funds will go only a small way toward addressing those problems. As Vien Truong, an official with the Berkeley-based nonprofit Greenlining Institute, which helped draft the SB 535 bill and implementation plan, notes in a recent Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review article:

Although there is a rising environmental movement — with corresponding social and financial investments in being “green” — the benefits of clean technology have been available and accessible almost entirely to the wealthy few who can afford them. Many in low-income communities are economically locked out of these resources, even though it could be argued that those areas are in greater need of the energy and cost savings from emerging, clean technologies.

As the wealth gap widens, there is a growing disparity between the effects of environmental policies on the ecological haves and have-nots. …

The passage of SB 535 is an example of a policy effort that is paying more attention to the resource gaps and needs of low- income communities. It is a start, but woefully insufficient. Greater efforts must be made to persuade all environmental policymakers and advocates — even those who are “mainstream” and not necessarily representing low-income communities and communities of color — to develop policies that are similarly responsive to the nation’s highest need communities.

So, no, California’s poor have not hit a jackpot. But at least the state’s high-profile carbon-trading program is paying some dividends for those who are hurt the most by polluters.


Source
Calif. Budget to Make Historic Climate Investments in Low-Income Communities, Greenlining Institute
Addressing Poverty and Pollution: California’s SB 535 Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
Calif. Earmarks a Quarter of Its Cap-and-Trade Riches for Environmental Justice, Inside Climate News

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Is It “Madness” to Rebuild a Flu Virus That Wiped Out 50 Million People?

by IvaGabbard Posted on June 12, 2014

Mother Jones

Flu-stricken soldiers at Camp Funston in Kansas. US Army/Wikipedia

Remember the Spanish Flu of 1918? Of course you don’t. That’s the freakishly deadly influenza strain that swept the globe in 1918 and 1919, wiping out 30 million to 50 million people. It infected about one in four Americans and killed about 675,000. It didn’t just kill little kids and the elderly, either, like most flu strains. This one was unusually devastating in young, healthy people—although why the “mother of all pandemics” behaved as it did is not fully understood.

This week, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, an influenza researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (which happens to be my hometown), published a new study—”Circulating Avian Influenza Viruses Closely Related to the 1918 Virus Have Pandemic Potential.” It describes the creation of a highly pathogenic flu virus that varies by just 3 percent from the Spanish Flu. “To assess the risk of emergence of a 1918-like virus and to delineate the amino acid changes that are needed for such a virus to become transmissible via respiratory droplets in mammals, we attempted to generate an influenza virus composed of avian influenza viral segments that encoded proteins with high homology to the 1918 viral proteins,” he and his coauthors wrote.

Needless to say, some of Kawaoka’s scientific peers think he’s insane to do such a thing. As Harvard epidemiologist Mark Lipsitch told the Guardian, “I am worried that this signals a growing trend to make transmissible novel viruses willy-nilly, without strong public health rationale. This is a risky activity, even in the safest labs. Scientists should not take such risks without strong evidence that the work could save lives, which this paper does not provide.”

This isn’t the first time Kawaoka’s work has created a stir. I’ve written previously about how his lab and Ron Fouchier’s came under fire after they created potential pandemic flu strains that could be spread by air between ferrets—a reliable model for human-to-human transmission. Back in 2002, in fact, I telephoned Kawaoka to ask whether, in the wake of 9/11, he felt it might be dangerous to publish techniques for reconstituting killer viruses, as his lab had previously done. His response was prickly. “That has to be published,” he said. “That’s science. If you say you shouldn’t publish this or that, we should say you shouldn’t make knives or guns—or airplanes, because that was used as a weapon in September.”

It would require a high level of expertise to do the work, he argued, and a terrorist would first have to acquire the sequence. When I countered that the sequences were published, he said, “You can do it, but it would take forever.”

Not so long these days, thanks to advances in equipment and methodology. “This is not rocket science,” the Nobel Prize-winning virologist Peter Doherty told me last year. “Anyone with a basic training in molecular virology can do these experiments. People can do it in their garage if they were sophisticated and they had a bit of money.” He added: “We published the sequence of the resurrected 1918 virus with very little controversy around 2000, I think it was. Nobody made much fuss and it’s a deadly virus—anyone could’ve rebuilt that virus.”

It’s been done, actually. And now Kawaoka has come pretty darn close using using gene segments from modern viruses. “It’s madness, folly,” virologist Simon Wain-Hobson told the Guardian. “It shows profound lack of respect for the collective decision-making process we’ve always shown in fighting infections. If society, the intelligent layperson, understood what was going on, they would say ‘What the F are you doing?'”

The debate is no longer even about terrorism. It’s about whether the scientists themselves can keep these things in check. The risk here is accidental infection, perhaps from a laboratory mishap. The scientists who work with these viruses, Doherty assured me, are really top-level people working “under extraordinary security conditions.” And yet, shit happens. In a study published last May in the journal PLOS Medicine, Harvard’s Lipsitch calculated that “a moderate research program of ten laboratories at high safety level standards for a decade would run a nearly 20% risk of resulting in at least one laboratory-acquired infection, which, in turn, may initiate a chain of transmission.”

When the next terrifying flu emerges, we are at least more equipped to deal with it than we were back in 1918. “We’re incredibly better at monitoring it and reacting quickly,” Doherty says. “There’s a great global network of influenza centers, and the technology is infinitely better. A lot of people in 1918 probably died from secondary bacterial infections. We’ve got antibiotics to deal with bacteria, and so we’d do better there. Also, it looks as though we’ll be able to make a lot of flu vaccine very fast. At the moment, it takes us at least six months to get much out there.”

Then again, there’s this.

Clarification: At the suggestion of a reader, a PhD student in virology, I updated the story to note that the actual 1918 flu was reconstituted in a lab in 2005. Kawaoka created a similar virus using modern sequences. “To be honest, even after reading the paper I’m not sure why,” the student noted.

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Is It “Madness” to Rebuild a Flu Virus That Wiped Out 50 Million People?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Is It “Madness” to Rebuild a Flu Virus That Wiped Out 50 Million People?