Legos hurt when you step on them

Legos are wonderful toys because snapping just a few little pieces together can, with a little imagination, turn simple bricks into almost anything. It's a powerful analogy for synthetic biology, where not only do Legos provide us with the idea that common biological parts can be easily snapped together to create something completely new and amazing, the analogy gives us a license to play with biology

(from Oscillator)

I remember how my little brother loved playing with his Legos. He'd make the most amazing spaceships and robots with them and had whole tubs of them. But woe be unto the unwary person who walked into the playroom while it was dark, because a minefield of them would be the most painful thing one could step on.

This is a dangerous analogy for synthetic biology because it inaccurately frames it as a simple, passive toy rather than as a pursuit that could easily ambush the unwary. I foresee some unfortunately consequences down the road resulting from scientists' complacency on this issue.

The Return of Refusal

(to skip the background info and go directly to the new decision by the Washington State Board of Pharmacy, click here)

Back in 2007, pharmacists in Washington State brought a case to court asking that they be allowed to refuse to fill prescriptions or dispense medications they found morally objectionable based on their religious beliefs. Although Plan B (the "morning after pill") is the primary target of this ideology, there have been reports of other medications pharmacists have refused to dispense, including prescriptions for post-abortion antibiotics and birth control pills for hormonal (not contraceptive) reasons.

Despite substantive evidence that Plan B rarely if ever induces an abortion (the removal of an implanted embryo from the uterine lining) and instead acts to prevent implantation of the fertilized egg (blastocyst), prevent fertilization of the egg, and/or to suppress ovulation, these pharmacists insisted that they had a right to act or refuse to act in accordance with their religiously-inspired moral views.

Although Plan B is available without a prescription for adults (minors need a prescription still), a customer still has to go to the pharmacy counter to obtain it, making it a "behind-the-counter drug". The other most prominent behind-the-counter drug is pseudoephedrine, controlled because large amounts can be used to synthesize methamphetamine.

In the end, the injunction was lifted by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and pharmacies were required to have someone on duty who was willing and able to dispense the medication. (PDF download of WSBP publication here) I posted my thoughts on the issue here.

~---end of backstory---~

But this issue, after being laid to rest for three years, has resurfaced like a stealthy viral infection, generating heated discussion once more.

At the end of June, the Board of Pharmacy (allegedly at a meeting) changed their position on this issue and quietly altered the rules governing these pharmacists and is now allowing them to refuse to fill these prescriptions. According to The Redheaded Pharmacist, the Board decided to do this to avoid a lengthy court battle.

The updated rules are posted here:

• WAC 246-869-010: Pharmacies' responsibilities
  
• WAC 246-863-095: Pharmacist's professional responsibilities

I'm still researching this issue and have some questions about the changes and the significance. One question that is still open (I am asking around) is that it appears that Plan B does not require a prescription to be dispensed, but all the sources I see currently talk about it as if it needs one.

While substantively there may not be a huge difference (pharmacists still decide whether the patient gets it), it could change some details of the debate since we're not longer talking about prescribed medications. Not only does this remove the prescribing physician as one gatekeeper, leaving the pharmacist as sole decider, but it also changes the classification of the medication and possibly distinguishes it from other medications like birth control pills and antibiotics.

Technobiology: coining a new term for an old activity

I've been musing for a few years about an activity I have seen that does not seem to have a descriptive name. This type of activity involves using organisms, usually animals, to assist us in tasks. While we have done this for millennia in some form or other, such as in domesticating dogs or using beasts of burden to carry loads, the activity I'm specifically referencing doesn't just use animals, but it allows them to do what they naturally do while guided by us.

One example of this is maggot therapy. You may take this opportunity to retch and scream in horror.

Feel better? Good. I admit to being a little squicked when I first heard about it myself, but compared to the other stuff I looked at last night (search for "monster inside me" on youtube... or don't). But there is undeniable benefit to using fly larvae (the polite term for "maggots") in some medical cases involving severe skin infections and necrosis because they are able to work with more precision than human surgeons and bring other benefits that exceed our capabilities (namely antimicrobial properties). The supremely awesome "Gladiator" even referenced the benefits of letting maggots do the dirty work for us in cleaning wounds.

On to the thrust of my argument. If we were to replace the squishy fly larvae with nanobots, we would be talking about a technology. But because common perception equates "technology" with artificiality, we would hesitate at labeling these organisms as such. What is the key aspect of the concept of technology, however, is that we are using something to accomplish a task that we cannot do with our own hands (or other native capacities). A stick lying on the ground is not a technology, but if it's picked up and poked into a termite mound, it is now an assisted eating tool, a technology.

But an organism used in this fashion is not used in the way a stick is used. We put the little guys on the wound, but other than placing a dressing on them to keep them in place, they go about their business the way they've done for eons (I'll spare you the details). In some ways, it is imprecise to say "used," because we're seeing a type of symbiosis reminiscent of doctor fish, where one creature turns to another to help clean those "hard to reach" places, with the implication that the assisting creature is actively participating in the activity.

Thus I come to the need for a term to specifically recognize this type of activity, and both for its recognition of the union of techne and organic life and because it's a cute inversion of the term, "biotechnology," I have settled on "technobiology." ("Technebiology" would be a bit more accurate, but it doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well)

I'm working on a standard definition for this still, but I want to include the following elements:

• Involves conscious recruitment of another organism (only the recruiter must be conscious)
  
• Helper organism gets to act as it normally does (ie: not oxen pulling a plow)
  
• Helper organism is not destroyed as part of the intrinsic process (ie: eating them)
  
• The work or process of the organism is used, not their products (ie: manure)
  

Other examples of this include:

• Pollination of crops by bees
  
• Caddis fly jewelry
  
• Ladybird beetles eating aphids on farms
  
• Bacteria sent to clean up oil spills
  
• Goats clearing brush

There are several borderline cases I'm still mulling over, like fermentation (we end up consuming the microorganisms, or they die in their own sewage), sheep herding using dogs (or the rare pig), and genetically modified organisms as a whole (is it cheating?). My inner ethicist wants to enforce the caveat that harming the organism must not be an inherent part of the activity because there is something appealing about focusing on our roles as stewards in the world, where through our wise guidance we can work with other creatures to do more than we could do ourselves.

This is a topic I plan to write on regularly because it not only is intellectually and ethically appealing, but it holds a great deal of promise for future developments in technologies born not of our pride, but of our humility.

Book Review: Green Metropolis

Like many ecologically conscientious people today, I have sought out numerous books discussing the new environmentally-friendly buzzwords of the day: "sustainability", "open spaces," green development". I do my part (probably more than most) by living in the city, walking or bussing everywhere (I have never owned a car), shopping at the farmer's market and local co-op (and subsequently cooking most of my food), carrying a commuter cup for tea, and by recycling/composting. It's comfortable for me to pat myself on the back for "doing my part to keep the Earth green," and to indulge occasionally in lamenting the lack of effort other individuals put into this full-time ethical occupation.

Then I stumbled onto Green Metropolis, by David Owen. On the cover is a tree formed from the iconic rainbow of subway lines, familiar to anyone who has travelled in New York City, Washington D.C., or in other countries with advanced fixed rail transit systems like Japan. It's a friendly, happy picture for a transit fan like me who has longed for our long overdue light rail system to be completed in Seattle. Little did I know that this lovely cover concealed a story that would threaten my comforting illusions of world-saving and challenge me to shift my perspective to an even larger systemic picture. If this book were written by Malcolm Gladwell, it would probably have been titled, "Counterintuitive: How Green Measures and Carpool Lanes Hurt The Planet." You've been warned.

Quick links:

Chapter 1: More Like Manhattan
Chapter 2: Liquid Civilization
Chapter 3: There and Back
Chapter 4: The Great Outdoors
Chapter 5: Embodied Efficiency
Chapter 6: The Shape of Things to Come

My conclusion

Main concepts:

• Urban density is the best way, per capita, to limit human environmental damage.
  
• Cars and sprawl are linked in a vicious cycle that creates more demand for resources.
  
• Adding "green technology" to buildings and cars is a highly overrated bandage.
  
• Our perceptions are skewed in comparing damage and benefit and in valuing optimization.
  
• Traffic improvements to promote better traffic flow are bad.
  
• The greenest corporate "campuses" are in no way as sustainable as college campuses.

The first chapter serves as an approachable warmup to the brainbending paradigm challenges you'll encounter throughout this book. The author sets the stage for the rest of the book, describing Manhattan both from an historical developmental perspective and by a modern evaluation of environmental impact. The main idea is that the geographical and aesthetic limitations at the time of the area's founding have translated into a situation where city density is valued and where people have developed logical behaviors in response: they walk to most destinations, using the subway where needed to access distant locations. It is uncomfortable and inconvenient to drive around, and because it is unnecessary due to the high density of stores, social venues, and employment locations around people's living areas, most people in the city don't bother with driving, or even owning, a car. The chapter closes with the author's three main points, reminiscent of Michael Pollan's food guidance ("Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants."):

• Live Closer.
  
• Live Smaller.
  
• Drive Less.

The second chapter is much less friendly. Titled, "Liquid Civilization," it painted such a bleak picture of our future relationship with fossil fuels that I had to stop reading for a few weeks because it brought me to the edge of despair. Not only is Peak Oil either here or nearly here, but modern civilization CANNOT stop using it because there is simply no other way to leverage the massive amount of energy we need to sustain our activities. This was the most distressing part of the book for me because even though I personally go as far as a modern American could reasonably be expected to go while maintaining an involved lifestyle through the Internet, even my activities require an immense amount of energy that necessitates the use of fossil fuels.

This chapter was the most painful but most impactful piece of reading I have seen in years because of its humbling and eye-opening brutal honesty. Everyone should read it while keeping a kitten or puppy within reach to soothe one's nerves afterwards.

After that part, the rest of the book was much easier because it reinforced my growing dislike of suburban culture and expansion.

Chapter 3,"There and Back," discusses how suburban expansion directly followed the development of the automobile, a symbol of freedom and independence championed by Henry Ford. The excellent systemic analysis continues in this chapter as we see a series of rational cost-benefit choices made by people contributing to the problems we see today. A key concept here is that cars serve a viral function by promoting sprawl which then promotes more car usage. This vicious cycle traps many of us, and escape is impossible until we recognize how this cycle works.

Additionally, Owen critiques the focus on efficiency in traffic planning systems that counterintuitively makes the sprawl problem worse by improving driving conditions rather than letting them devolve into misery. As an example, he explains how HOV and toll lanes exacerbate the long-term traffic volume because it improves the flow of traffic for everyone as a "reward" for only modest behavioral changes (which aren't very impactful anyway). Traffic calming measures, like speed bumps, and Old World examples of urban planning that narrow streets with parking and wider sidewalks are also discussed for their utility in reducing the number of drivers.

Another idea he confronts is the seductive call of cute cars - mini-cars, high-efficiency hybrids, stackable vehicles - all the models of automobiles that are being designed to woo non-drivers (like me) into driving. These are also bad because they are targeted at city dwellers who don't own a car by mitigating common complaints about them. I admit to feeling tempted, in a hypothetical sense, to consider one of these "smart cars" on occasion, which shows the power of these creative geniuses in their design. Owen does acknowledge that if a suburban-living, SUV/Hummer-driving owner swapped to one of these, there would be a small improvement in environmental impact, but it would still be nowhere as good as if that person just moved to the city and stopped driving altogether.

At least I feel more righteous in my refusal to get a driver's license to prevent myself from a lapse of judgment one of these days.

Chapter 4, "The Great Outdoors," examines how our illusions about living and working in pastoral settings actually destroys the very thing we claim to value. E. O. Wilson's concept of "Biophilia" springs to mind as a reason for this irrational desire to be "closer to nature." It's a bittersweet chapter because most of us harbor the idealistic dream of looking out the window to see old growth forest and deer frolicking and babbling natural brooks, and the cold reality of this chapter crushes it into concrete wastelands and spiraling cul de sac housing developments. Owen also points out with brutal realism the fact that on average, suburban dwellers spend as little time as possible in their spacious yards and walking through green spaces; mostly their time outside is spent taking out the trash, walking the dog, or taking care of that lawn that serves only an ornamental function.

The following quote (pg. 199, hardcover ed.) is haunting in its truth and sadness:

"We all tend to think of ourselves as the last unsinning inhabitants of whatever place we live in. We don't usually recognize ourselves as participants in its destruction."

But wait! The destruction and pillaging of the environment doesn't stop there! "Embodied Efficiency," Chapter 5, critiques the rat's maze of standards we have created to allow us to build more while retaining a sense of self-righteous sustainability. "You can't save if you don't spend," and you can't be sustainable if you don't build, according to these standards. For example, a new development out in the countryside that uses efficient watering systems for their landscaping is eligible for credits through LEED. But a building in the middle of a city that has no landscaping, arguably a less wasteful site overall, is not eligible for landscaping-related efficiency credits. At this point in the book, it's a truism that not building out in pristine wilderness is always going to be better than building there, not just for the creation of new energy and resource sinks, but for the systemic impact in aggravating the sprawl and commute problem.

The last chapter, "The Shape of Things to Come," departs from the rest of the book's theme to look at societies outside the United States. Owen compares Chinese slums to Dubai's city in the desert and describes how China's urban areas demonstrate factors friendly to urban density while Dubai's sprawl beats even Las Vegas for its environmental damages.

Although individual concepts in this book - "urban density good, sprawl bad" - were familiar to me already, the sharp presentation and argumentation of counterintuitive ideas critiquing the growing common wisdom about urban planning, traffic management, and "green" incentives struck me in a disconcertingly powerful way. I consider myself well-informed on sustainability issues, but realized that I let myself get lulled into a false sense of security along with everyone else that optimization in general is a good thing. This discomfort is very good, and I highly recommend that anyone truly interested in sustainability and environmental issues read this book as a check on "green complacency." Here's a complimentary box of tissues made from 100% post-consumer content to help you through the read.

On Science, Religion, and Policy

When discussing interdisciplinary issues, I often will separate out portions of ideas into different "thought buckets" and assign different mental toolkits to each. I also will reject the application of certain toolkits to some issues because they don't fit, just as using a hammer to put in screws, or a screwdriver to put in nails simply won't produce the desired results.

What are these "mental toolkits"? They are what we see as academic disciplines and branches of thought - philosophy, economics, sociology, statistics, etc. Science and religion are two more valuable sets of ideas with which to evaluate issues. However, I have observed that human nature tends to drive us to cast our lots solely with one mode of thought or another, just as someone may become attached to one particular hammer.

The problem with this is that just as specialized schools of thought are useful because they were designed by human minds to accomplish tasks that human minds see, so too does this specialization blind us to "irrelevant" information so we can focus on the task at hand. Unfortunately, as we see in most current events today, problems are like the proverbial elephant felt by the group of blind men; each person feels a different part of the animal and deduces his own idea about what it is.

With this in mind, let's take a look at science and religion, because they come up very often when talking about policy and lead to conflicting conclusions.

Science, in a simple working definition, is meant to help us see what is there, from the infinitesimal atom to large-beyond-belief stellar bodies, from simple bacteria to complex environmental systems. This is called "naturalistic" thinking, and answers questions like "what?", "where?", and "how?"

Religion, in my conception, answers two questions for each person: "Where do I fit into the universe?" and "What ought I do?". A religion with a deity answers the first question by placing a person into a relationship with said deity, and it answers the second by introducing prohibitions ("Thou shalt not...") and prescriptions ("Thou shalt..."). This is "normative" thinking that informs us as to what we should do, why we should do it, and sometimes how.

To make a really geeky comparison, when talking about units of measurement, you have scalar and vector units. Scalar units just ARE: mass, size, count. Vector units have a quantity, but also a direction: velocity/speed, acceleration, force. Science is like a scalar unit - it just IS. Religion is like a vector unit - it IS, but it also points you to a SHOULD.

Why is this important? Because policy is based on value judgments. It also is based on facts and evidence of some sort, but in the end, someone somewhere makes a decision based on what SHOULD happen or what OUGHT to be done. Therefore, while I believe that science should contribute to policy, it is insufficient to fully inform it because science has no value or normative axis. This does not necessarily mean that religion ought to be used, but it explains why religion informs so many policy decisions for people. Also, by insisting on keeping the "taint" of subjectiveness out of policy decisions, those choices are not kept pure, but are invisibly influenced by some source of values that rushes to fill the "values vacuum." It is this invisible influence that is the most dangerous, because citizens don't know why decisions are being made the way they are.

How can this be addressed? In the bigger picture, we must recognize the place for values in policy decisions and openly discuss values from all sources, religious and secular. We must also constantly critique data we see - placing numbers on things like lives, health, happiness always will leave something out of the equation.

Does this mean that scientists should talk more values and religious advocates more science? Probably, but I'll save the admonitions for another time.

Open for Discussion and Thinking

I have been sitting on this blog address for a while now, trying to decide what I wanted to use it for. I coined the term "bioethical synthesis" as a tribute to Theodosius Dobzhansky, a great writer who initiated the "biological synthesis" to bring evolutionary biologists and naturalists together in harmony at a time when they threatened to fracture the field with their differing paradigms. I believe the same must be done for all fields of bioethics - medical, environmental, food/agricultural, and beyond. All concern biology and ethics, and all are connected - what we eat affects our health, and how and where food is grown affects how healthful it is to us, both in body and values. Therefore, I will focus on approaching issues with this perspective in mind.

What is my field? I have no one field, because I believe that what we need today are integrators, people who cross the arbitrary disciplinary lines to bring specialists together.

I currently consider myself with fluent understanding of these fields, able to read academic-level papers and discuss topics with experts with little preparation: biology, philosophy (Utilitarian, Deontology, Ethics), nutrition, political science (domestic), government/civics, medical ethics, medical technologies, biotechnologies.

I am either teaching myself or have a passing understanding of: virtue ethics, economics, sociology, feminist critique, chemistry, physics, history, globalization, international economics.

My inspirations are other multidisciplinarians like Van Rennselaer Potter, Thomas Friedman, Jared Diamond.

Currently, I intend to write entries analyzing and discussing various news in the policy and science arenas with an eye towards engaging multiple disciplines and highlighting areas of overlap between modes of thought. This will certainly evolve over time, and I am open to suggestions and requests for topics to cover.

Welcome!