Today’s weight loss tip: Use superglue as lip gloss
Monthly Archives: February 2014
New MSFT chief on hiring approach
Q.How do you hire? What questions do you ask?
A. I do a kind of 360 review. I will ask the individual to tell me what their manager would say about them, what their peers would say about them, what their direct reports would say about them, and in some cases what their customers or partners may say about them. That particular line of questioning leads into fantastic threads, and I’ve found that to be a great one for understanding their self-awareness.
I also ask: What are you most proud of? Tell me where you feel you’ve set some standard, and you look back on it and say, “Wow, I really did that.” And then, what’s the thing that you regret the most, where you felt like you didn’t do your best work? How do you reflect on it?
Those two lines of questioning help me a lot in terms of being able to figure people out. I fundamentally believe that if you are not self-aware, you’re not learning. And if you’re not learning, you’re not going to do useful things in the future.
http://www.afr.com/p/technology/new_microsoft_chief_nadella_ballmer_gUITsRltFlFjLxRUERKKwN
New Microsoft chief Nadella on Gates, leadership and replacing Steve Ballmer
PUBLISHED: 21 FEB 2014 07:45:19 | UPDATED: 22 FEB 2014
Satya Nadella (centre) says he has learned lots for lessons from Bill Gates (l) and Steve Ballmer (r) as he settles into the top job at Microsoft Photo: Reuters
ADAM BRYANT
This interview with Satya Nadella, the new chief executive of Microsoft, was conducted and condensed by the New York Times.
Q.What leadership lessons have you learned from your predecessor, Steve Ballmer?
A. The most important one I learned from Steve happened two or three annual reviews ago. I sat down with him, and I remember asking him: “What do you think? How am I doing?” Then he said: “Look, you will know it, I will know it, and it will be in the air. So you don’t have to ask me, ‘How am I doing?’ At your level, it’s going to be fairly implicit.”
I went on to ask him, “How do I compare to the people who had my role before me?” And Steve said: “Who cares? The context is so different. The only thing that matters to me is what you do with the cards you’ve been dealt now. I want you to stay focused on that, versus trying to do this comparative benchmark.” The lesson was that you have to stay grounded, and to be brutally honest with yourself on where you stand.
Q.And what about Bill Gates?
A. Bill is the most analytically rigorous person. He’s always very well prepared, and in the first five seconds of a meeting he’ll find some logical flaw in something I’ve shown him. I’ll wonder, how can it be that I pour in all this energy and still I didn’t see something? In the beginning, I used to say, “I’m really intimidated by him.” But he’s actually quite grounded. You can push back on him. He’ll argue with you vigorously for a couple of minutes, and then he’ll be the first person to say, “Oh, you’re right.” Both Bill and Steve share this. They pressure-test you. They test your conviction.
Q.There’s a lot of curiosity around what kind of role Bill is going to play with you.
A. The outside world looks at it and says, “Whoa, this is some new thing.” But we’ve worked closely for about nine years now. So I’m very comfortable with this, and I asked for a real allocation of his time. He is in fact making some pretty hard trade-offs to say, “O.K., I’ll put more energy into this.” And one of the fantastic things that only Bill can do inside this campus is to get everybody energised to bring their “A” game. It’s just a gift.
Q. What were some early leadership lessons for you?
A. I played on my school’s cricket team, and there was one incident that just was very stunning to me. I was a bowler; like a pitcher in baseball — and I was throwing very ordinary stuff one day. So the captain took over from me and got the team a breakthrough, and then he let me take over again.
I never asked him why he did that, but my impression is that he knew he would destroy my confidence if he didn’t put me back in. And I went on to take a lot more wickets after that. It was a subtle, important leadership lesson about when to intervene and when to build the confidence of the team. I think that is perhaps the number one thing that leaders have to do: to bolster the confidence of the people you’re leading.
Q.Tell me about your management approach in your new role.
A. The thing I’m most focused on today is, how am I maximising the effectiveness of the leadership team, and what am I doing to nurture it? A lot of people on the team were my peers, and I worked for some of them in the past. The framing for me is all about getting people to commit and engage in an authentic way, and for us to feel that energy as a team.
I’m not evaluating them on what they say individually. None of them would be on this team if they didn’t have some fantastic attributes. I’m only evaluating us collectively as a team. Are we able to authentically communicate, and are we able to build on each person’s capabilities to the benefit of our organisation?
Q. Your company has acknowledged that it needs to create much more of a unified “one Microsoft” culture. How are you going to do that?
A. One thing we’ve talked a lot about, even in the first leadership meeting, was, what’s the purpose of our leadership team? The framework we came up with is the notion that our purpose is to bring clarity, alignment and intensity. What is it that we want to get done? Are we aligned in order to be able to get it done? And are we pursuing that with intensity? That’s really the job.
Culturally, I think we have operated as if we had the formula figured out, and it was all about optimising, in its various constituent parts, the formula. Now it is about discovering the new formula. So the question is: How do we take the intellectual capital of 130,000 people and innovate where none of the category definitions of the past will matter? Any organisational structure you have today is irrelevant because no competition or innovation is going to respect those boundaries. Everything now is going to have to be much more compressed in terms of both cycle times and response times.
So how do you create that self-organising capability to drive innovation and be focused? And the high-tech business is perhaps one of the toughest ones, because something can be a real failure until it’s not. It’s just an absolute dud until it’s a hit. So you have to be able to sense those early indicators of success, and the leadership has to really lean in and not let things die on the vine. When you have a $US70 billion business, something that’s $US1 million can feel irrelevant. But that $US1 million business might be the most relevant thing we are doing.
To me, that is perhaps the big culture change — recognising innovation and fostering its growth. It’s not going to come because of an org chart or the organisational boundaries. Most people have a very strong sense of organisational ownership, but I think what people have to own is an innovation agenda, and everything is shared in terms of the implementation.
Q.How do you hire? What questions do you ask?
A. I do a kind of 360 review. I will ask the individual to tell me what their manager would say about them, what their peers would say about them, what their direct reports would say about them, and in some cases what their customers or partners may say about them. That particular line of questioning leads into fantastic threads, and I’ve found that to be a great one for understanding their self-awareness.
I also ask: What are you most proud of? Tell me where you feel you’ve set some standard, and you look back on it and say, “Wow, I really did that.” And then, what’s the thing that you regret the most, where you felt like you didn’t do your best work? How do you reflect on it?
Those two lines of questioning help me a lot in terms of being able to figure people out. I fundamentally believe that if you are not self-aware, you’re not learning. And if you’re not learning, you’re not going to do useful things in the future.
Q.What might somebody say in a meeting that, to you, sounds like nails on a chalkboard?
A. One of the things that drives me crazy is anyone who comes in from the outside and says, “This is how we used to do it.” Or if somebody who’s been here for a while says, “This is how we do it.” Both of them are such dangerous traps. The question is: How do you take all of that valuable experience and apply it to the current context and raise standards?
Q.Any final big-picture thoughts on how you’re going to approach your new role, and how you want to make your mark?
A. Longevity in this business is about being able to reinvent yourself or invent the future. In our case, given 39 years of success, it’s more about reinvention. We’ve had great successes, but our future is not about our past success. It’s going to be about whether we will invent things that are really going to drive our future.
One of the things that I’m fascinated about generally is the rise and fall of everything, from civilisations to families to companies. We all know the mortality of companies is less than human beings. There are very few examples of even 100-year old companies. For us to be a 100-year old company where people find deep meaning at work, that’s the quest.
stealth sugar reduction is best!!??
“Stealth reduction for foods is the best way for manufacturers to retain their consumer base as consumers are for the most part unaware the recipe has changed – particularly as better-for-you products are less appealing due to the fact they are considered to have less flavor.”
Katharine Jenner, campaign director for Action on Sugar and CASH, told this site that the health world would recognize the strategy as “unobtrusive reductions for the betterment of health”.
“The salt reduction campaign has, however, been so successful because the salt has been unobtrusively removed, meaning customers don’t have to read the labels and make a choice to eat less salt. Our view has always been these if people don’t like their food with less salt, they can always add it back in – whereas they can’t take it out.”
http://www.foodnavigator.com/Market-Trends/Stealth-reduction-the-best-option-for-sugar-in-confectionery-Euromonitor/
‘Stealth reduction’ the best option for sugar in confectionery: Euromonitor
A spoonful of sugar less could aid public health, but might it also put consumers off? Better not to tell them, says Euromonitor
Confectioners should keep quiet about sugar reduction or risk irritating consumers, according to analysts at Euromonitor International.
In a recent podcast , the research organization said that it expected confectionery to be one of the main targets for calls to reduce sugar as it was widely associated with high levels among consumers.
Low-profile reduction
Lauren Bandy, ingredients analyst at Euromonitor, said: “It seems unlikely that manufacturers will launch low sugar variants again, simply because consumer demand would be low.”
She pointed to reduced sugar products launched by Cadbury’s, Kit Kat and Haribo in the UK several years ago that were pulled due to low sales.
“Stealth reduction might be a better option for confectionery players,” she said.
Sugar in Confectionery
2.3m metric tons of sugar and bulk sweeteners were consumed in confectionery in 2013. The average consumer in Western Europe spent $120 on confectionery, equating to around 7.5 kilos of sugar, more than half of which was chocolate confectionery. Source: Euromonitor International.
Diana Cowland, health and wellness analyst at Euromonitor, added: “Stealth reduction for foods is the best way for manufacturers to retain their consumer base as consumers are for the most part unaware the recipe has changed – particularly as better-for-you products are less appealing due to the fact they are considered to have less flavor.”
Is ‘stealth reduction’ underhanded?
Sugar came under the spotlight at the start of the year after the group behind Consensus Action on Salt and Health (CASH) setup Action on Sugar, a group urging manufacturers to reduce sugar in products by 30-40% in the next three to five years.
‘Stealth’ is not a term favored by the campaign as it says it has negative connotations. Katharine Jenner, campaign director for Action on Sugar and CASH, told this site that the health world would recognize the strategy as “unobtrusive reductions for the betterment of health”.
“In our view, it is up to manufacturers to decide how to communicate any improvements to their food, they know their customers better than we do. “
Industry View
The US National Confectionery Association (NCA) argues that sugar is being unfairly demonized. The industry body recently said that its members would not reformulate products en mass as confections could fit into a healthy lifestyle. It aims to educate consumers how to enjoy confectionery in moderation.
“The salt reduction campaign has, however, been so successful because the salt has been unobtrusively removed, meaning customers don’t have to read the labels and make a choice to eat less salt. Our view has always been these if people don’t like their food with less salt, they can always add it back in – whereas they can’t take it out.”
Euromonitor: Better-for-you switches off most consumers
Euromonitor analyst Diana Cowland said that if the UK’s salt reduction strategies were used as a reference, then products communicating reduced content put off consumers. Reduced salt packaged food in the UK recorded a constant value compound annual growth rate (CAGR) decline of 1.8% from 2008 to 2013 – equivalent to a £7m ($11.7m) loss.
Bandy said: “The problem with removing sugar from confectionery is that it can lose its taste and texture, the factors that make the product indulgent and the ultimate reason why consumers buy confectionery in the first place.”
Katz on breast cancer
Good, solid advice on appropriate screening, prevention and detection of breast cancer.
>> check the credentials of the radiologist reviewing the films!
Can We Unmuddle Mammography?
February 20, 2014
A new study of mammography, showing lack of survival benefit, has once again muddied these waters and muddled the relevant messaging. The study, generating considerable controversy, as has much prior research on the topic, looked at breast cancer mortality over a 25 year period in nearly 90,000 Canadian women assigned to mammography or usual medical care without mammography during the initial 5 years of the study period. There was no appreciable difference between groups.
Perhaps you see a major problem already. To study the effects of mammography, or any cancer screening, on mortality over time requires…time. Time goes by at its customary pace no matter the research goals. So, if it takes 25 years to get the desired data, the intervention needed to take place 25 years ago. And so, inescapably, this study is entirely blind to any advances in mammography technique, technology, or interpretation over the last 20 years at least. In medicine, two decades is just about forever.
Perhaps the value of mammography is perennially muddled- if just a bit less so than prostate cancer screening– for the most obvious of reasons. The truth is in the middle, between slam-dunk and fuhggeddaboudit. With the apparent exception of titillating (if not salacious) novels, we don’t tend to like shades of gray. But that’s where mammography falls; it’s pretty close to a toss-up.
There is a long history of research on the topic, and conclusions have been anything but consistent. Some studies suggest clear potential benefit for women who would not otherwise be screened. But, of course, women who would not be screened are apt to differ in a variety of ways from those who would- including, perhaps, their access to, and the quality of, primary medical care. Unbundling such influences is nearly impossible.
But, if, instead, you attempt to study women who would be screened anyway, how do you randomize them to a control group? What woman, inclined to get mammograms, would go without for 20 years for the sake of a clinical trial? Not very many I know.
Enrollment in a trial itself can exert an influence. Regardless of assignment to mammogram or control, there may be more attention to breast health and a greater likelihood of finding breast cancer early among all women participating in a study. This effect obscures any real world, and potentially important differences between intervention and control arms.
We are, as well, dependent on an imperfect technology. Even if finding breast cancer early through imaging is decisively beneficial, studies will produce variable results based on flawed imaging, variable performance of the same technology in different women, and variation in the quality of interpretation of mammograms. That much more so when today’s data are the product of mammography done 20 to 25 years ago. There have been improvements in scans, scanners, and the training of radiologists during that span.
And complicating things further, mammography is a source of radiation, and may be doing some direct harm as well as good.
The false positive error rate of mammography is notoriously high, and unavoidably so if we want to avoid false negatives. False positives occur when we think we’ve found cancer that isn’t there. It can be avoided by raising the bar, but then there is a risk of missing cancers that are there. We tend to favor the former error over the latter, and in the absence of perfect tests, are forced to choose.
We may have failed to translate good evidence into practice. Pre-menopausal mammography would likely be more useful if performed more than once a year. Breast cancer tends to be more aggressive and progress faster in younger women. Post-menopausal mammography might be just as useful done every other year. A one-size-fits-all approach may attenuate benefit and raise the rates of harm to both groups.
And then, perhaps most important: not all the trouble we find through screening deserves the attention it gets. Some tiny breast cancers, like the majority of prostate cancers, are destined to do nothing if just left alone. These are cases where cure is very likely to be worse than disease- but we are not good yet at differentiating. Doing so requires analysis at the level of histopathology (i.e., tissue and cell analysis), and molecular genetics. This can be done, but it’s not routine and our abilities in this space remain limited.
One very important issue routinely ignored when parsing the benefits of any cancer screening modality, mammography included, is that screening does not prevent cancer. The goal of screening is to find cancer early- which is generally much better than finding it late. But it’s not nearly as good as not getting it in the first place. The evidence is strong that optimal lifestyle practices can slash risk for all major chronic diseases, cancer included. Related evidence shows that lifestyle as medicine can modify gene expression in a manner projected to protect against cancer development, and progression. DNA is not destiny; dinner may be! There isinteresting literature on the relevant timing as well. It may be the best way to improve breast cancer in women is to focus on healthy living in childhood. That we could dramatically lower rates of cancer overall by living well across the life span is all but undisputed.
There are many reasons why decisive evidence that mammography confers net survival benefit at the population level, or that it lacks benefit and should be abandoned – is elusive. The result is something of a muddle for epidemiology. Until technology, interpretation, application, and histopathological confirmation all rise to consistently high standards, we can’t unmuddle mammography for populations.
But by combining what we know about the test with what you and your doctor know about you, a basis for a good decision should be at hand. Inquire about the technology, making sure it is state of the art. Ask about the training of the radiologist reading the film. Ask as well about plans for immediate next steps if the mammogram is abnormal. Good breast care centers follow up right away with additional testing to differentiate false from true positives. Ask whether screening has been personalized- taking into account your age, breast density, family history, and risk profile.
Evidence-based recommendations about mammography for the population at large where one size must fit all are, for now, ineluctably muddled. By personalizing the decision, as good clinical medicine always should, we can, I believe, unmuddle things for you.
-fin
2014 Premier Report
Premier reports that hospitals are saving lives and money by improving quality of care:
over the past five years, 350 hospitals have saved more than $11 billion and nearly 150,000 lives by following best practices like how to treat pneumonia and hospital acquired infections.
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/health-care/hospitals-are-sharing-data-save-lives
Hospitals are sharing data to save lives
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
by Dan Gorenstein
February 14, 2014
A new report shows over the past five years, 350 hospitals have saved more than $11 billion and nearly 150,000 lives by following best practices like how to treat pneumonia and hospital acquired infections.
Five years ago, the firm Premier launched a national quality improvement project for hospitals. The firm’s Blair Childs says through sharing data and adhering to best practices health systems have seen dramatic changes.
Take for example, when bacteria in the hospital leads to the potentially lethal illness, sepsis. “It was the number one driver of mortality in hospitals when we started this project,” says Childs.
Now it’s the 14th leading cause of mortality in the participating hospitals. Hospitals also reported improvements in patient safety and satisfaction.
Leapfrog’s Leah Binder says in the last decade the healthcare industry has made real strides in figuring out the best ways to treat certain conditions. The trouble, she says, is that it can be hard to get hospitals and staff to implement the new protocols.
“To get everybody to follow the rules actually takes a lot of effort and energy. And unfortunately, sometimes organizations don’t invest in that kind of attention and that’s the problem,” she says.
Binder says the Affordable Care Act puts in place what she considers modest incentives to improve quality. She says bigger carrots and sticks are needed to get hospitals attention.
Big Data needs Big Processing
http://www.medgadget.com/2014/02/beagle-sniffs-out-240-genomes-in-two-days.html
Beagle Sniffs Out 240 Genomes in Two Days
by GAVIN CORLEY on Feb 20, 2014 • 5:53 pm
Whole genome sequencing holds great potential for enriching diagnoses and understanding hereditary risk factors for specific diseases. However, the sheer volume of data involved poses major technical challenges, which limits the utility of this approach. For this reason many clinical geneticists have turned to exome sequencing which looks at a small portion of the genome that codes for proteins.A team from the University of Chicago have managed to turn the spotlight back on whole genome sequencing by analyzing 240 full genomes in two days by recruiting the computational muscle of Beagle, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Beagle is a Cray XE6 supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, and is used for computation, simulation, and data analysis for the biomedical research community.
The architecture of the Beagle is such that it allows highly efficient and rapid processing of parallel data streams. To give you some idea of just how powerful the Beagle is, the researchers estimate that the equivalent task carried out by a single 2.1 GHz CPU would take approximately 47.2 years to complete.
According to one of the lead investigators, Professor Elizabeth McNally:
Improving analysis through both speed and accuracy reduces the price per genome, with this approach, the price for analyzing an entire genome is less than the cost of the looking at just a fraction of genome. New technology promises to bring the costs of sequencing down to around $1,000 per genome. Our goal is get the cost of analysis down into that range.
The team have published their results, in great technical depth, in the journalBioinformatics and while we won’t see this kind of technology in clinics anytime soon, it should certainly enhance the pace and clinical utility of whole genome sequencing.
Journal of Bioinformatics: Supercomputing for the parallelization of whole genome analysis
Press release: Whole Genome Analysis, STAT
Lethal but Legal
Thanks Marion. Another book to chase up…
Reading for the weekend: Lethal But Legal
Nick Freudenberg. Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health. Oxford, 2014.
I spoke last night on a panel celebrating the release of this book. I gave it a rave blurb:
Lethal But Legal is a superb, magnificently written, courageous, and thoroughly compelling exposé of how corporations selling cigarettes, guns, cars, drugs, booze, and food and beverages enrich themselves at the expense of public health. Even more important, Freudenberg tells us how we can organize to counter corporate power and achieve a healthier and more sustainable environment. This book should be required reading for anyone who cares about promoting health, protecting democratic institutions, and achieving a more equitable and just society.
I will be using this one in classes. Congratulations to Nick Freudenberg, director of Hunter College’s Food Policy Center, for producing this distinguished work of scholarship.
Partnership for a Healthier America Innovation Challenge
Nicholas Gruen put me on to this effort… so impressed to see these efforts emerge in such a can do endeavour and with the first lady giving the welcoming address.
http://govfresh.com/event/partnership-healthier-america-innovation-challenge/
Partnership for a Healthier America Innovation Challenge
Event Navigation
A gathering of business, government and non-profit visionaries, the Building a Healthier Future Summit focuses on action over talk. The PHA Innovation Challenge offers a unique opportunity to realize the event’s mission of creating bold, tangible and actionable solutions using the most powerful tool available – technology. This year, Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) is working with The Feast to engage the most talented innovators and makers in technology and design to help solve the childhood obesity epidemic.
PHA is hosting a hackathon in the lead-up to the conference, when participants will prototype and build working solutions focused on the theme of Childhood Obesity. The hackathon will explore two opportunities within the challenge of Childhood Obesity:
- To help teachers empower students to make healthy choices about the food they consume, whether at home or at school.
- To create an information avenue that shows families the healthy food options and physical activity opportunities available locally.
PHA and The Feast are recruiting a group of the best designers, developers, stakeholders and entrepreneurs to create solutions that will help make the healthy choice the easy choice. Over two dedicated workdays the weekend prior to the Summit, participants will form teams to work on one of the two opportunities. Participants will receive support from subject matter experts and mentors in crafting their solutions while partaking in exciting activities and enjoying healthy meals. The following week, all the participating hackers will receive free admission and full access to PHA’s Building a Healthier Future Summit, with the opportunity to engage with innovators in the health sector. Two winning teams will then take the stage at Summit to present their work to an audience of 1,000 industry leaders, with one team winning an audience choice award.
PHA believes that change happens when anyone is empowered to re-imagine how something might be better and seizes the opportunity to realize that vision.
Details
- Start:
- End:
- March 9, 2014 5:00 pm
- Event Category:
- Hackathon
- Event Tags:
- Partnership for a Healthier America, PHA Innovation Challenge
- Website:
- http://ahealthieramerica.org/summit/innovation/
Organizer
- Partnership for a Healthier America
- Website:
- http://ahealthieramerica.org
Venue
- Partnership for a Healthier America
- 2001 Pennsylvania Ave. NW Suite 900,Washington, DC, 20006 United States
- Website:
- http://http://ahealthieramerica.org/
if we approached drowning like obesity, we would go looking for those genes
It is equally true that the sinking of the Titanic did not affect all passengers equally. More generally, falling into water does not affect all human beings equally. Some of us know how to swim, and some do not. Some of us can hold our breath longer than others.
==
Imagine that these pioneers were intrigued by the sea, and therefore boldly wandered in. Having no experience with matters maritime, and knowing nothing about swimming, several of them drowned. Several others nearly drowned, but managed to climb out in the nick of time.
And then imagine, rather than reaching any fundamental conclusions about the interactions of their kind with large bodies of water, these sagacious people scratched their extra-terrestrial heads and said something like (in whatever language they speak): “When we wander into that enormous puddle, some of us die and some of us don’t. Clearly, then, there must be variation in our go-forth-into-enormous-puddle genes. Let us study our genes and look for that variation so we may better understand what happened here today. Then, perhaps, we might find a way to fix the go-not-into-great-puddles-or-you-will-surely-drown genes, as those must be defective. After all, a few of us went into the big puddle and lived. Surely there must be some way for us all to have those wonderful you-will-only-almost-die-if-you-go-into-great-puddle genes. ”
==
Human beings don’t have gills, and there are genes to blame. But the right response looks like swimming lessons, and lifeguards, and fences around pools- not studying genes while pushing kids into the surf. Not a new pill to fix an age-old part of who we are that was never really broken.
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140219143107-23027997-gills-pills-and-obesity-genes
Gills, Pills, and Obesity Genes
Two new studies, just published on-line in JAMA Pediatrics, may have us fired up yet again about the genetic variation to blame for obesity. But then again, is that really the problem?
One of the studies examined variation in food and satiety responses, which we may summarize as appetite, in roughly 400 pairs of 3-month-old twins in the U.K., and tracked growth and development over time. There are always lots of important details in biomedical research, but the perhaps predictable punch line was this: the babies with the heartier appetites gained the more weight.
The second study was directed at the same basic issue, but went a bit deeper. Investigators again examined the association between appetite and weight gain in a group of over 2000 twin children in the U.K., but this team included an assessment of genes associated with variation in satiety responses, essentially how much eating it takes to feel full. Once again, more appetite meant more weight gain. But this time, more genes for more appetite was identified as the real culprit.
Finally, an accompanying editorial noted the importance of this kind of genetic research because the obesigenic environment “does not affect all children equally.”
That is undeniably true. It is equally true that the sinking of the Titanic did not affect all passengers equally. More generally, falling into water does not affect all human beings equally. Some of us know how to swim, and some do not. Some of us can hold our breath longer than others.
And while there is, I am quite confident, genetic variability we could find and associate with variation in how long we can hold our breath, I am not sure how illuminating that would truly be about the risk of drowning.
Human beings are vulnerable to drowning because we don’t have gills, and the reason absolutely resides in our genes. We have Homo sapien genes that include the recipe for lungs, and exclude the recipe for gills. In contrast, blue fin tuna and guppy genes reliably include the recipe for gills and exclude the recipe for lungs. Blue fin tuna and guppies have just the kind of trouble out of water that we are prone to have in it. We don’t have gills because we aren’t fish- and fish don’t have lungs because they aren’t people. And in both cases, the reason we aren’t them and they aren’t us resides in our respective genes.
Given that, if we approached drowning like obesity, we would go looking for those genes. We would, readily, find the divergences between human and guppy genes. And we might, I suppose, declare that a genetic basis for drowning had been identified. And once genes were indicted for drowning, we could head off down the path of drug development or genetic engineering to deal with the problem.
Hold that thought, if not your breath, and let’s probe the corresponding depths.
Imagine a people on some imaginary world that lived on a great landmass, far from any body of water, evolving and adapting accordingly throughout their long history. Then imagine that, after however many eons in their native land-locked state, and for reasons we may ignore or guess at, these people set off on an excursion, and encounter the sea for the first time. They knew water, of course-because they drank it like we do; but they had never before seen any body of water larger than a puddle.
Imagine that these pioneers were intrigued by the sea, and therefore boldly wandered in. Having no experience with matters maritime, and knowing nothing about swimming, several of them drowned. Several others nearly drowned, but managed to climb out in the nick of time.
And then imagine, rather than reaching any fundamental conclusions about the interactions of their kind with large bodies of water, these sagacious people scratched their extra-terrestrial heads and said something like (in whatever language they speak): “When we wander into that enormous puddle, some of us die and some of us don’t. Clearly, then, there must be variation in our go-forth-into-enormous-puddle genes. Let us study our genes and look for that variation so we may better understand what happened here today. Then, perhaps, we might find a way to fix the go-not-into-great-puddles-or-you-will-surely-drown genes, as those must be defective. After all, a few of us went into the big puddle and lived. Surely there must be some way for us all to have those wonderful you-will-only-almost-die-if-you-go-into-great-puddle genes. ”
Gazing at these counterparts across the cosmos, they look rather like nincompoops, don’t they?
I am not refuting the value in these new studies. The editorialist very appropriately notes that early identification of genetic vulnerability to weight gain might allow for very early implementation of prevention strategies, so that obesity does not develop in the first place.
I like that- but do we really need maps of our kids’ genomes to take such action? We havepandemic childhood obesity right now-meaning legions of kids around the world are vulnerable to weight gain, whatever their genes. And yet, we routinely feed them junk. We routinely jettison physical activity from their daily routines. We peddle to them foods willfully designed to be irresistible if not addictive, and to maximize the number of calories it takes to feel full. Can we really justify the lunacy of a culture that studies genes looking for variation in satiety responses, while engineering foods to undermine satiety responses?
Yes, our genetic vulnerability to obesity is variable- much, I bet, like our genetic vulnerability to drowning. But I don’t think that invites a genetic study of the drowning victims of the Titanic. I think the bigger issue was the obvious one: the ship went down.
We are all in the same boat, and it’s sinking, too- as evidence by a global rise in bariatric surgery for ever younger children. The genes underlying vulnerability to obesity in all their variation were there a generation or two or twenty ago, too- when childhood obesity was rare. Those same genes are there now that it is rampant. Knowledge of them may be put to good use, but not if it distracts us from the sinking ship. What has changed is not within our children, but all around them. And we don’t need to wait for a genetic map of each child to fix it.
Human beings don’t have gills, and there are genes to blame. But the right response looks like swimming lessons, and lifeguards, and fences around pools- not studying genes while pushing kids into the surf. Not a new pill to fix an age-old part of who we are that was never really broken.
-fin
Google gunning for the end of death…
Terrific summary of the state of play.
British gerontologist Aubrey de Grey believes achieving human immortality is inevitable. Last October de Grey told the audience at a US technology conference that they could expect to live 1000 years, maybe longer.
http://thenewdaily.com.au/life/2014/02/11/medical-science-close-curing-death/
Could medical science be close to curing death?
8:49pm, Feb 11
MICHELLE HAMER
MICHELLE HAMER
If you were given the chance, would you choose to live forever, or another few hundred years? It may sound like the stuff of fantasy, but some very smart people are working to make death a thing of the past.
Scientists are working to stop the ageing process, and extend the living… Photo: Shutterstock
Nanobots in your blood stream, backing up your brain to a computer, swapping your fallible human form for a sophisticated holographic avatar – it might sound like science fiction, but these are just some of the ways that science is hoping to extend human life and inch us closer to living forever.
US futurist, inventor and Google’s head of engineering, Ray Kurzweil has predicted that by the end of the century humans and machines will merge to create super humans who may never face the prospect of death. And Kurzweil, 65, hopes to be among those kicking mortality to the curb.
Ray Kurzweil: Working to bring an end to death. Photo: Getty
“Twenty years from now, we will be adding more time than is going by to your remaining life expectancy,” Kurzweil told Forbes Magazine. “We’ve quadrupled life expectancy in the past 1000 years and doubled it in the past 200 years. We’re now able to reprogram health and medicine as software, and so that pace is only going to continue to accelerate.”
Kurzweil is no slouch when it comes to accurate predictions. In the 1980s he predicted the incredible rise of the internet, foresaw the fall of the Soviet Union and identified the year when computers would beat humans at chess.
His next predictions include the programming of nanobots to work from within the body to augment the immune system and fight pathogens. By 2045 he sees us backing up our minds to the cloud and downloading ourselves into robotic forms.
And he’s not the only scientist hoping to blow out hundreds of candles in the future.
Immortality: Not if, when
British gerontologist Aubrey de Grey believes achieving human immortality is inevitable. Last October de Grey told the audience at a US technology conference that they could expect to live 1000 years, maybe longer.
Ageing, he says, is a simple case of bad engineering, and once the human body’s kinks are ironed out we’ll be able to reverse its effects and put death on the back burner.
“My approach is to start from the straightforward principle that our body is a machine. A very complicated machine, but nonetheless a machine, and it can be subjected to maintenance and repair in the same way as a simple machine, like a car,” de Grey has said. “What I’m after is not living to 1000. I’m after letting people avoid death for as long as they want to.”
Google is on board
It’s a goal that even tech giant Google thinks is worth pursuing.
When Google entered the anti-ageing business last year, with the launch of its new biotechnology company Calico, it brought a new level of interest, respectability and crucially – funding – to the field.
Calico has poached some of the leading anti-ageing researchers from across the world to work on the challenge of extending life.
“I think that if Google succeeds, this would be their greatest gift to humanity,” said David Sinclair, an Australian professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.
Professor Sinclair led a research team which last year announced it had reversed muscle ageing in mice, the results of which exceeded his expectations.
“We want immortality so badly that we’re always ready to be swept away into unthinkingness … Half in love with the impossible we’ve always wanted to conquer death.”
“I’ve been studying ageing at the molecular level now for nearly 20 years and I didn’t think I’d see a day when ageing could be reversed. I thought we’d be lucky to slow it down a little bit,” he was quoted as saying.
“There’s clearly much more work to be done here, but if those results stand, then aging may be a reversible condition, if it is caught early,” he said.
The research involved improving communication between a cell’s mitochondria and nucleus. Mitochondria are like a battery within a cell, powering important biological functions. When communication breaks down between this and the nucleus, the effects of ageing accelerate.
Human trials of the groundbreaking process are expected to start this year.
Buying life
It’s the sort of breakthrough that can’t come soon enough for several billionaires across the globe who are pouring their fortunes and hopes into immortality research.
Russian entrepreneur, Dmitry Itskov founded the 2045 Initiative in 2011 with the aim of thwarting human death within three decades. Itskov envisages ‘neo-humans’ who will relinquish clunky human forms and adopt sophisticated machine bodies. He claims humans will eventually download their minds into artificial brains, which will then be connected to humanoid robots he calls Avatars.
According to 2045.com: “Substance independent minds will receive new bodies with capabilities far exceeding those of ordinary humans … Humanity will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species.”
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel donated $US3.5 million to Aubrey de Grey’s not-for-profit research foundation, telling the New Yorker at the time that: “Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead”.
Clearly Thiel would prefer to remain among the living and he’s prepared to pay for his pitch at immortality, most recently making a large donation to the Singularity Institute, which focuses on creating artificial intelligence that could see the rise of cyborgs (merged humans and machines).
Maximising life, minimising death
US entrepreneur turned science innovator, David Kekich, dedicated his life and impressive bank balance to reversing ageing after he was paralysed from a spinal cord injury in 1978. Kekich initially raised money for paralysis research but then switched to anti-ageing research. He founded the Maximum Life Foundation in 1999 and aims to reverse human ageing by 2033.
On his website Kekich writes: “We are moving from an era in which nothing could be done to defeat ageing into an era in which advancing biotechnology will give us the tools to do overcome it … Now, at the dawn of the biotechnology era, the inevitable is no longer inevitable. The research establishment – if sufficiently funded and motivated – could make spectacular inroads into repairing and preventing the root causes of ageing within our lifetime.”
But given that there are yet to be any proven means for extending human life, these billionaires may be motivated more by ego than altruism.
As US author Adam Leith Gollner writes in The Book of Immortality: the Science Belief and Magic Behind Living Forever (Sribner 2013): “We want immortality so badly that we’re always ready to be swept away into unthinkingness … Half in love with the impossible we’ve always wanted to conquer death.”
Yet he says all humans can really do to live longer is to eat well and exercise.
“We all have to go … whether dying in battle, tumbling off a horse, succumbing to pneumonia or being shivved by a lover. Maybe one day we just don’t wake up. However it happens, we enter the mystery.”