Einstein was right again

Advanced S&T Projects from USAID

Some years ago I wrote an article for the USAID Impact Blog, (Unfortunately, the article was labeled "50th Anniversary: The Program of Scientific and Technological Cooperation" and published on its 30th anniversary.) Still, I think the piece is still useful as a history of a U.S. initiative in science and technology. You will find it here: https://blog.usaid.gov/2011/01/50th-anniversary-the-program-of-scientific-and-technological-cooperation/

In 2007, an article was published in IIP Digital about the Middle East Regional Cooperation Program. That program was also managed by my office, and the article draws heavily on the information and comments provided by David O'Brien, who now manages MERC.  You will find the article here: http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2007/10/20071018111900lcnirellep0.2568476.html#axzz3qvJlop9i

Sammy El-Shall discusses nanotechnology, and specifically a nanotechnology project in which his is involved under the MERC program in a transcript published on the State Department website. You will find it here: http://m.state.gov/md212167.htm

90% OF ALL THE SCIENTISTS THAT EVER LIVED ARE ALIVE TODAY

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The Martian | International Official Trailer 2

On Lamar Smith, Chair person of the House Science Committee

Rep. Lamar Smith
Chair of the House Science Committee

Alfred E, Newman
Mad Magazine

You can easily tell the two apart, since Rep. Smith wears glasses and parts his hair on the left.

You should read "The House science committee is worse than the Benghazi committee". The article says that the NSF budget is some $7 billion per year. and that Chairman Smith has asked for complete information on 20 NSF grants with a total value of $26 million; the projects date back to 2005. If my arithmetic is right, the total budget for NSF in a decade (2005 to 2014) would be $70 billion, and the $26 million of projects that interest Rep. Lamar Smith would represent 0.0037 percent of the NSF budget over the period. The article reports:

Four times this past summer, in a spare room on the top floor of the headquarters of the National Science Foundation (NSF) outside of Washington, D.C., two congressional staffers spent hours poring over material relating to 20 research projects that NSF has funded over the past decade. Each folder contained confidential information that included the initial application, reviewer comments on its merit, correspondence between program officers and principal investigators, and any other information that had helped NSF decide to fund the project.

The article also states:

This year, Smith was one of the committee chairs granted sweeping new subpoena powers by his fellow House Republicans, what one staffer called "exporting the Issa model." No longer is the chair required to consult with the ranking member before launching investigations or issuing subpoenas.......No chair has taken to his new role with as much enthusiasm as Smith.

The article also cites a letter from the ranking member on the Science Committee, including the following:

In the past two years and ten months that you have presided as Chairman of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology you have issued more subpoenas (six) than were issued in the prior 54 year history of the Committee. 

Rep. Smith apparently was not on the Science Committee before being appointed to be its chair. He is a member of the Tea Party Caucus.

Smith is skeptical of global warming. Under his leadership, the House Science committee has held hearings that feature the views of skeptics, subpoenaed the records and communications of scientists who published papers that Smith disapproved of, and attempted to cut NASA's earth sciences budget.

And:

Smith has consistently supported restrictions on abortion. In 2009, Smith voted to prohibit federally funded abortions. In 2006, Smith voted for the Abortion Pain Bill, which would “ensure that women seeking an abortion are fully informed regarding the pain experienced by their unborn child”, and the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act, which would “prohibit taking minors across State lines in circumvention of laws requiring the involvement of parents in abortion decisions”.

He graduated from T.M.I.: The Episcopal School of Texas (1965), Yale University (1969), and Southern Methodist University Law School (1975). He is a a Christian Scientist. In 1992, he married Elizabeth Lynn Schaefer, a Christian Science practitioner and teacher, as was his first wife, Jane Shoultz, before her death in 1991.

I don't see anything in that background that prepares him to lead legislation on science.

'Tree of life' for 2.3 million species released

"A first draft of the "tree of life" for the roughly 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes—from platypuses to puffballs—has been released.

"A collaborative effort among eleven institutions, the tree depicts the relationships among living things as they diverged from one another over time, tracing back to the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago.

"Tens of thousands of smaller trees have been published over the years for select branches of the tree of life—some containing upwards of 100,000 species—but this is the first time those results have been combined into a single tree that encompasses all of life. The end result is a digital resource that available free online for anyone to use or edit, much like a "Wikipedia" for evolutionary trees."

You don't need a complete census of species and complete tree with all the millions of species represented to get a pretty good idea of what the complete tree will  look like."



Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-09-tree-life-million-species.html#jCp

The Degree of Politicization of Views on Scientific Issues

There is an interesting (long) report from the Pew Research Center on this topic. For example:

71% of Democrats and independents who lean to the Democratic Party say the Earth
is warming due to human activity, compared with 27% among their Republican counterparts (a difference of 44 percentage points). This report shows that these differences hold even when taking into account the differing characteristics of Democrats and Republicans, such as their different age and racial profiles. 

Democrats and leaning Democrats also are more likely to favor policies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and promote alternative energy sources. Republicans and independents who lean to the GOP are more likely favor some key energy development policies such as offshore oil drilling, fracking and construction of nuclear power plants. In a December 2014 Pew Research survey, fully 75% of Democrats and leaning Democrats said the United States should prioritize alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar power, over expansion of oil, coal and gas production. By contrast, only 43% of Republicans and leaning Republicans expressed support for prioritizing alternative energy production over traditional energy development. 

Here is another finding from the report:

Fully 83% of Democrats and leaning Democrats say government investment in basic scientific research pays off in the long run, and just 12% say such investments are not worth it. A considerably smaller majority of the GOP and independents who lean to the GOP see benefits from government funding of basic science; 62% say government investments pay off in the long run, but 33% say such investments are not worth it.

 I don't think this is a good thing -- that people divide about issues of scientific consensus as they divide by party affiliation, but I don't have anything useful to suggest about it (other perhaps that it is not a good idea to have GOP control of the Congress because that then puts control of government expenditures on science and technology in the hands of the party that campaigns frequently against the scientific consensus). 

Remember the Know Nothing Party? Looks like they are back.

Would you say that you trust, don’t trust, or are unsure about scientists as a source of information about [vaccines/climate change]?

Trust in Scientists by Issue and State

Chris Mooney, in a new article, provides the graphs above noting?

As you can see, while traditional Republicans and Tea Party supporters in these locations trust scientists considerably more on vaccines than they do on climate change, they also trust them on both issues considerably less than Democrats do. 

“The vaccine results were something new, and what was unexpected there was that they followed a very similar pattern to climate change,” says Hamilton. He acknowledges that conducting the survey in two U.S. states is not the same as conducting a nationally representative survey. But he adds that finding a similar result in two quite different parts of the U.S. represents “a fairly broad replication.”

This is quite worrying to me. It is a study done in only two states, but it suggests that only half of Tea Party supporters trust scientists on the findings relating to climate change, and only a small fraction trust scientists on vaccines. Tea Party voters tend to have significant weight in selection of Representatives to Congress from "safe" Republican districts. Thus there is a wing of the members of the lower Chamber of the Congress that don't trust the consensus of scientists on two important issues (and perhaps more issues that were not subjects of this study). Moreover, the Democrats tend to trust scientific consensus more than Republicans, but Republicans are in the majority in both chambers of the Congress.

A New Hope for Control and Eventual Eradication of Malaria

Past and Current Malaria Prevalence Around the World

Source: World Development Report (2009) via Virtual History

I quote from an article in The Guardian:

The world’s first malaria vaccine has been given the green light by European regulators.....The European Medicines Agency (EMA) recommended that RTS,S, or Mosquirix, should be licensed for use in young children in Africa who are at risk of the mosquito-borne disease. The shot has been developed by Britain’s biggest drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and part-funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation..... 

According to the WHO, 627,000 deaths from malaria were reported globally in 2013, of which the vast majority (562,000) occurred in Africa, mostly among children under the age of five (82%).

WHO estimates that there are 198 million cases of malaria a year now.

Apparently this is not an "ideal vaccine" requiring multiple shots over a period of years to protect a child fully. In Africa, getting a child its shots on a regular basis will be very difficult -- perhaps beyond the ability of public health officials to achieve high levels of immunity in the population. Still, if researchers have the knowledge to develop one vaccine, there is hope that they may develop other malaria vaccines that are better tailored for African needs.

The development of DDT and of a basis of scientific knowledge about malaria led to efforts to eradicate the disease in a number of developed countries. It is worth remembering that when the USA was founded as an independent nation, malaria occurred over its entire extent, and that malaria was a problem not only in southern Europe but in England and much of northern Europe. The World Health Organization created its Global Malaria Eradication Program in 1955, based on the then existing successes, but the successes could not be maintained, and in 1969 the Program was abandoned, to be replaced by a less ambitious WHO Malaria Control Program.

Basic Facts

Malaria is caused by any one of four Plasmodia species. It is transmitted from human to human by any of a variety of mosquito species. Thus a mosquito takes a blood meal from a person with malaria, rests for a while, and (after the agent has gone through a transformation in the mosquito, bites another person injecting the agent as it takes blood. If one can eliminate malaria from a human population, eliminate the mosquitoes capable of transmitting the disease, keep the mosquitoes from biting people, and/or cure the patient before he can transmit the infection, then these public health measures can stop a malaria outbreak or end endemic malaria in a region.

Historically a number of approaches have been used to fight malaria:

• Drugs to treat the disease, beginning with Quinine and Chloroquine (1946).
• Use of pesticides, beginning with DDT, to kill mosquitoes.
• Reduction of mosquito breeding sites, by such things as making sure that there are no open bodies of water in which the mosquito eggs may be laid or the larva develop.
• Other ways to keep larva from becoming mosquitoes, from spraying oil on the top of ponds, to use of larvacides, to stocking ponds with larva eating fish.
• Use of window screens and bed nets (including insecticide containing bed nets) to keep mosquitoes from biting people.

Vaccine Development

Dr. Lee Howard, then the Director of the USAID Office of Health, recognized in the mid 1960s that the then current arsenal of means to combat malaria was not adequate for its eradication. True, the disease exists only in man, so if all human cases could be eliminated, the disease would be gone for good. However, getting a human population completely free of malaria was difficult, requiring many approaches to be used simultaneously. Moreover, at least one of the forms of the disease could lie hidden for years, only to reappear and restart a epidemic or become endemic. Moreover, the governments of many of the countries that had the worst malaria problems were weak, and the operation of a large scale public health campaign for a long period with no slip-ups was beyond their capacity. 

Dr. Howard thought that adding a vaccine to the armament of the malaria control workers would be a potential way to get to eradication or at least control. Unfortunately, no one had much of an idea as to how to create a vaccine to an organism as complex as a Plasmodium. Indeed, it was not known how to grow the organism in the laboratory -- a necessary step for all future work. Nonetheless, Dr. Howard convinced his colleagues at the National Institutes of Health to join with USAID and begin basic research toward the development of a vaccine against malaria. Now, half a century later, we finally have a first such practical vaccine. The search has yielded a great deal of fundamental knowledge about the parasite and the immune response, and further research and development can be expected to improve the vaccines against malaria.

So What

If a vaccine can make people immune to malaria (for a period of time) then the prevalence of the disease will be reduced. Indeed, even if the protection is only partial, the danger to a person contracting the disease may be reduced.

Combine the protection of a vaccine (and better protection from future improved vaccines) with improved knowledge of mosquitoes, and full use of the available control techniques (described above) should make control efforts more effective and eradication efforts more possible. The Gates Foundation believes we are now at a point in history when eradication is foreseeable. Certainly governments and public health agencies around the world are generally more capable of managing such efforts well.

The world public health community has eradicated smallpox and Guinea Worm Disease, and is on the verge (I hope) of eradicating polio. Lets hope malaria is next!

Read more....

Without Comment -- How Religious Groups View Evolution and Support Environmental Regulation

Source

American Should Know More About the History of Science and Technology

Last night the book club to which I belong discussed Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 by Nathaniel Philbrick. (I previously posted my thoughts on this book.)

A key point made in the book is that the Exploring Expedition (Ex. Ex.) marked an important point in the emergence of science and technology in the United States. As a direct result of the Ex. Ex., the Smithsonian Institution was instituted to do science and to house scientific collections. Such collections are critical to the development of descriptive sciences such as ethnology, zoology and botany.

Moreover, the the United States Botanical Garden, the United States Hydrographic Office and the Naval Observatory were all created as as a result of the Ex. Ex. For the Ex. Ex. the Congress accepted its role in funding scientific work, and it continued increasingly to so ever since. Philbrick states that while there had been men who did science in the United States before the Ex. Ex., it was only after the Exploring Expedition that it became possible for young men to plan a career as paid scientists.

So What?

Why is the Ex. Ex. not widely known by the American public, and why is it not taught in the schools? The question was asked in several forms by members of our club last night, but I think not fully answered.

The North American colonies of the European imperial powers were quite provincial. Some science was done, and some technology was advanced, but the English colonies were kept dependent on England. Since the Revolutionary War and independence, the United States has grown into the world leader in science and technology. For a while after World War II, at least half of the papers published in scientific and technological journals were produced by U.S. authors. The Ex. Ex. marked an important benchmark in the growth of American science and technology/

Source

The American System of Manufacturing gave the United States a competitive advantage in international commerce, as well as in the manufacture of products for domestic markets. It was developed first in the government armories, starting in the 1820s -- about the same time that the idea for the Ex. Ex. was gaining steam.

Americans went to sea in significant numbers in the 19th century; the U.S. whaling industry was the largest in the world at the time, but there was also a China trade, and extensive coastal trade, and extensive river traffic. As Sea of Glory illuminates, the government assisted in the growth of this industry by charting the areas frequented by the ships. I suppose that the building of iron-clad ships in the Civil War also advanced ship building technology via government support.

Starting very early, the government created West Point to train military engineers. The Naval Academy was established in 1845. In 1862 the federal government passed the Morrill Act which made grants to federal land to create a national system of land grant colleges which were to advance -- among other things --agriculture, mechanical arts and military tactics. In 1887, the Hatch Act led to the creation of agricultural research stations in the land grant colleges and thus to agricultural extension services. This system was instrumental in making U.S. agriculture efficient and a major motor for national growth.

I could go on to identify government roles in the inventions of the telegraph, the electrical light and the supporting electrical infrastructure, automobiles, airplanes, radio, computers, the Internet etc.

One of the members pointed out during the meeting that Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction in England while the Ex. Ex. was conducting its explorations. The great American scientist, Joseph Henry, independently discovered electromagnetic induction at about the same time; Henry of course soon after became the first Secretary of the Smithsonian. Henry will be remembered as long as inductance is measured in a unit called the Henry in his honor. Similarly, some decades later, James Clark Maxwell (from the United Kingdom) clarified the relation between electricity and magnetism, and will be remembered as long as that relationship is described by Maxwell's equations. During our club meeting it was suggested that 1000 years from now, Henry and Maxwell may well be remembered, while people will not be sure exactly who Abraham Lincoln was or what he did.

Why is it that American schools don't teach about the U.S. Exploring Expedition as part of the general curriculum? Indeed, American schools don't teach the history of science and technology. A part of the answer may be a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in American life.

More Generally

Perhaps secondary school children should be prepared to pass the following essay exam to graduate:

1. For most of the human race's time on earth, most people spent a large part of their time getting food, and since in spite of that hunger was common, famine not exceptional. What is the historical sequence of events that explains how it is that a few percent of Americans are able to produce enough food for the whole country, that there is enough food that no one need go hungry, and that famine is unknown in the USA?
2. For most of that time, average life expectancy was much lower than it is today and the population was much smaller. Over history, many diseases have emerged into the human population. What is the historical sequence of events that explains how it is that life expectancy at birth in the United States is now so much longer than it was in the past?
3. For most of that time, people didn't have many possessions; indeed, for a great deal of the race's time on earth people had so few possessions that they could carry them all with them. What is the historical sequence of events that explains how Americans have so many possessions -- homes, cars, clothing, and many other things?
4. The human race today has more knowledge than ever before, indeed, by orders of magnitude more than it had even 500 or 1000 years in the past. Moreover, while mastery of that body of knowledge is widely distributed in a huge population, the average teenager in the USA has more access to knowledge through his/her smart phone than did the greatest monarch a century ago through his government. What is the historical sequence of events by which this situation came tp pass?
5. People today are more able to do what they want than ever before -- on the average they can live more comfortably, move faster and over longer distances (and indeed leave the earth), communicate more quickly and easily over longer distances, overcome disabilities to a greater degree, and entertain themselves with a greater variety of alternatives of better quality. What were the historical sequences of events that so empowered people of today, as compared with those of the past?

The U.S. Exploring Expedition

Source

I have just finished reading Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 by Nathaniel Philbrick. The book is a description of  the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838 to 1842, an exceptional effort for its time. On a scale that dwarfed the journey of Lewis and Clark, five U.S. Navy sailing vessels and a crew of hundreds set out to map island groups of the Pacific Ocean and the Oregon coast. The expedition also mapped a substantial part of the coast of the continent of Antarctica and collected what would become the basis of the Smithsonian Institution -- and much more.

• Here is The New York Times review of the book. 
• Here is a long video with Philbrick discussing the expedition.
• Here is the Harvard University Library open collection of online materials on the expedition.

Science and Technology

The Exploring Expedition (Ex. Ex.) took place at a time when modern science was in its infancy in Europe and was hardly known in the United States. The emphasis of the time was, I think, on learning about the world we live in at a rather practical level -- what were the plants and animals, how did they come to be; where was the land, what was it like, how did it get that way, and how was it changing in real time; what were the other natural resources, how abundant were they, and how could they be used.

From the point of view of many of those who sponsored the Ex. Ex., its primary purpose was charting the reefs and islands of the Pacific. U.S. whalers and sealers roamed the seas in search of their prey; they provided vital raw materials for the industry of the time, were an important economic activity of the nation, and had come to dominate an international industry. However, whalers were being lost in the uncharted waters of the Pacific. The Ex. Ex. would charted the waters off the Oregon Territory -- something important in the dispute between Britain and the USA over the border between Canada and the United States. It would chart San Francisco Bay, and it would chart 1500 miles of the coast of Antarctica. It also appears to have charted parts of the South American coast, notably the dangerous waters of Cape Horn. Apparently the charts were fully state of the art for the time; while the quality of the effort in Antarctica was not fully appreciated until the 20th century, others were widely used for considerable time; the chart of Tarawa, the site of an important battle during World War II, was still the best available in 1943. There were 241 nautical charts made in total.

There were important scientific findings by the small group of scientists included on the expedition. 

• It was observed that volcanic island chains seemed to be located in straight lines, with the most active volcanoes at one end of the line and the most weathered at the other end; this would prove an important clue to the phenomenon of the shifting of tectonic plates.
• Three coral reefs were observed at different geological ages, showing the pattern predicted by Darwin -- as time passed, the land under the island and reef subsided, and the corals grew. Eventually this would lead to a situation in which there was a coral reef surrounding a lagoon, but no island. This was the first and an important confirmation to Darwin's hypothesis.
• And of course, the discovery that Antarctica was a continent -- to which several explorers and expeditions of several countries contributed -- was a significant advance.
• The expedition created a considerable ethnographic collection, including dictionaries of several of the languages of the Pacific Northwest and Micronesia. These I suppose had considerable value as they predated many of the contacts of the native speakers with other cultures,

On return to the United States in 1842, Charles Wilkes, the commander of the Ex. Ex., led a successful effort to gain public attention for the work done during the four year voyage. He began with a talk on the expedition that was attended by some 400 people, including at least one key Senator and one cabinet officer. The collections made by Ex. Ex. far exceeded in volume those of previous expeditions. A major exhibition of objects that had been collected was put on display in the Patent Office, where it remained for 15 years, drawing 100,000 visitors per year. Collected plants were also put on display in a nearby greenhouse, and later in a larger structure near the Capitol. A five volume report of the expedition was published, which went through some 15 editions before the Civil War. Following that, a number of books were published until the Civil War containing individual reports on the scientific and technical findings of the expedition (making the point that it takes time for scientists to fully study the materials and data that they collected before reporting the results).

The U.S. Patent Office (now used as gallery space)

United States Botanical Garden

While Smithson had bequeathed the equivalent of some $11 million to the United States, by 1842 the appropriate use for the funds had not yet been determined. It was decided in the mid 1850s that the funds would be used to create what is now the Smithsonian Institution to serve as a research facility and as a repository and display place for the nation's scientific and other collections. The collections from the Ex. Ex. were moved there, and their display revised. Thus the Ex. Ex. was an important element in the creation of the Smithsonian Institution as well as of the United States Botanical Garden. It was also important to the creation of the United States Hydrographic Office and the Naval Observatory.

Perhaps most important, the Ex. Ex. marked a point at which the federal government recognized that support for science and technology would be a fundamental part of its function, and began to regularly allocate funds for that purpose. The many government sponsored exploring missions that would soon open the west benefited from the legacy of the Ex. Ex., as the Smithsonian and the American scientific community benefited from those expeditions.

Before the Ex. Ex. there were Americans who did science. Benjamin Franklin is perhaps the outstanding example, but Benjamin Thompson was also an important American 18th century scientist, less known here because he was a loyalist who did most of his important work in Europe after having left America as a result of the revolution. Joseph Priestly moved to the United States after the Revolution. William Bartram was an important 18th century American naturalist and botanist. Even John James Audubon can be seen as an ornithologist (although his work was done in the early 19th century). John Bartram was an early but internationally known botanist. Thomas Jefferson, that polymath, certainly had scientific interests. Even Lewis and Clark, and their famous expedition early in the 18th century can be seen as scientific, even if its science was not published and its collections not maintained. However, author Philbrick tells us that before the Ex. Ex. an American could not make a living doing science. After the Ex. Ex. it became possible to earn one's bread and have a career as a scientist.

The Route of the U.S. Exploring Expedition

The Adventure

A strong point of Sea of Glory is its description of the adventure lived by the officers and crews of the ships of the Ex. Ex. It might seem obvious that people who sailed around the world from 1838 to 1842 -- in the small wooden sailing ships of the time -- lived had an adventure. Author Philbrick's book makes it clear that the facts of the journey were more than most of us could have imagined.

Traversing the cape at the southern extreme of South America was perilous for sailing ships, but the Ex. Ex. not only sought to get past the dangerous shores and terrible weather, but also to chart the area. One of the ships of the Ex. Ex., the Sea Gull, was ordered to meet with the remainder of the squadron at Valparaiso after the charting of Cape Horn had been completed. It failed to arrive, and is assumed to have been lost with all hands aboard. This was one of the two smallest ships of the expedition, chosen specifically for its utility in chart making.

Antarctica is completely surrounded by ocean and not only is it very cold, but the topography makes the weather especially fierce. Three ships of the Ex. Ex. were ordered to pass through that ocean in order to seek out land on the Antarctic continent, and if land could be found to chart a significant stretch of that land. In order to do so, the ships had to find a path through a barrier of ice, and when they did so it was through a channel jammed with icebergs of various sizes. The charting then was done with frequent storms that threatened to drive the ships against the lee shores. Think about dealing with a violent storm, at night, with icebergs looming out of the dark, in ships not made for such duty, with the sure knowledge that death would follow for the crew of any wrecked ship -- adventure enough for anyone. The Ex. Ex. charted some 1500 miles of the Antarctic coast under such conditions.

In the Fiji Islands, the charting was done under threat by hostile Fijian natives who were cannibals. In one encounter, members of the crew of the flagship were killed. The men of the Ex. Ex. retaliated brutally, utilizing the superior weapons of their warships.. Still, sailing in uncharted waters with hidden reefs, beset by cannibals again should be adventure enough for anyone.

In Hawaii, it was decided to establish an outpost on the top of the tallest volcano -- more than 13,000 feet in altitude. The snow covered higher altitudes were so cold that the Hawaiian natives helping to carry supplies and the scientific equipment had to be sent back, to be replaced by a significant portion of the ship's crews. The climb up the huge volcano was itself difficult , especially for men who had been at sea for many months and had perhaps lost the physical conditioning appropriate for such exertions, Moreover, the volcanic surface over which they climbed made the climb difficult and tended to destroy shoes (and the feet of the unshod native Hawaiians). Arriving at the top, the explorers built a village to withstand the cold, and stayed for days to complete their measurements. In the process they encountered hurricane force winds that were icy cold. They also braved the dangers of a very active caldera of the volcano as part of the exploration.

As the Ex. Ex. charted the shores of North America, it was decided that the ships should sail some distance up the Colombia River. Where the flow from the huge river meets the sea with its tides and large waves, the channel is especially dangerous. With sand banks and shoals, not to mention very high and violent surf, this is still judged to be one of the three most dangerous river entrances in the world; some 2000 ships have been lost attempting to pass the mouth of the Colombia. One of the larger ships of the Ex. Ex., the USS Peacock, ran aground attempting the channel, and was battered to pieces. One small boat managed to make several trips to the Peacock to remove the crew and carry it so safety.

Starting with five ships (one of which was sent home early in the voyage), two were lost at sea; and one was replaced as untrustworthy for the remainder of the voyage; repairs on ships were made at several ports during the voyage. There was turnover among the members of the expedition, but the company that started with just over 350 men had 28 die during the voyage; many more were injured or ill over the four years.

Discord

Sea of Glory seems to emphasize discord among people involved in the expedition. That discord was evident in the years of negotiations it took to approve and fund the effort, and in the years that followed as high government officials sought to blame rather than praise the members of the expedition. Originally authorized under Andrew Jackson's administration, the expedition returned in 1842 under the Whig administration of John Tyler to a less than friendly reception.

Charles Wilkes

Much of the book seemed to me to be devoted to the discord between Charles Wilkes, the commander of the Ex. Ex. and a group of the officers serving under him. Since Wilkes brought these officers to Courts Martial after the voyage, and since they testified against him in his own Court Martial, the discord is on the record -- more so since it is documented in memoirs of the participants and in letters and journals that the kept at the time.

I found it hard to understand the situation at the time. This seems to have been a time when the discipline considered appropriate for navy ships at sea was changing. Navy discipline had been very brutal in the 18th century, was less so by 1840, but was then still far more brutal than today. Wilkes, quite young and very inexperienced for the magnitude of the command of the Ex. Ex., used his authority forcefully, but was judged not to have exceeded that authority (with one exception) by the senior officers serving as his judges during his Court Martial.

The voyage also took place after a relatively long period of peace since the war of 1812. In 1838, few young men were being accepted as midshipmen and promotions for officers were few and fat between. The officers of the Ex. Ex. were almost without exception young, relatively junior officers; they were worried about their careers. Many would be given responsibility during the Mexican American war, and gain affluence and senior rank in the Civil War when the navy was greatly expanded, but that was in the unknown future as of 1842.

So we have young officers, frustrated by lack of career opportunities, cooped up on sailing ships for years at a time, often under profound stress but also very bored some of the time. While many senior officers had turned down offers to sail with the Ex. Ex., these young men -- often chosen for their unusual experience in marine surveying -- accepted challenges that they may not fully have understood.

While author Philbrick justifies his portrayal of discord among officers in the expedition with notes on his sources, and while there were not and could not have been independent observations of the interpersonal relations, I was unsatisfied by this aspect of the book. It was for me rather like an overlong exposure to the comic strip Dilbert.

The Narrow Leadership Class

I was struck in the book by how many of the principle characters were drawn from what must have been a small aristocratic class. President William Henry Harrison (who died after a month in office in 1841) was not only from a distinguished Virginia family, but was the grandfather of President Benjamin Harrison. Senator Thomas Hart Benton, whose father was wealthy, married into a distinguished Virginia family and was the father-in-law of John C. Fremont; Thomas Hart Benton, the painter was his Great-Nephew.

Charles Wilkes was himself from a well known family. His aunt was Elizabeth Ann Seton, and she took care of him for some time after the death of his mother; known as Mother Seton, she was the first American to be declared a saint by the Catholic Church. Wilkes Henry, a young midshipman on the Ex. Ex., was Charles' nephew; he was killed in the Fiji Islands. James Renwick Jr., another nephew, was the architect who designed the first building of the Smithsonian Institution -- the Castle; hes work is very well known in the nation's capitol as he also designed the Corcoran and Renwick Galeries. Wilkes and his wife eventually became influential members of Washington society, living in the house on Lafayette Square once occupied by Dolly Madison/

Portrait of George Washington
by Charles Wilson Peale

Among the scientists on the expedition. James Dwight Dana came from a distinguished New England family; his cousin, Richard Henry Dana, at roughly the same time as the Ex. Ex., was making a voyage to California that he described in the memoir, Two Years Before the Mast, which is still in print. Titian Peale was a member of the Peale family of artists, the son of  Charles Wilson Peale.

Final Comments

I found this book most interesting. I have a long standing interest in science policy, and this book told me about events in the history of science policy in the United States that I had not even suspected. It strongly makes the case that the Ex. Ex. was a seminal event in the growth of science in what has been for many years the strongest scientific power on earth.

I think almost anyone will enjoy the book. The adventure alone will carry most readers to another time. It is a book in which brave men travel to distant, exotic places.

The book portrays a time in which the history of the United States is little known nor understood. The nation still faced toward the sea, and its population was still concentrated on the Atlantic side of the continent. It was transforming itself from its former colonial status to the international power it would become. Modern institutions were being created. Sea of Glory tells a part of the story, and tells it well!

Vaccines

I saw The Vaccine War on television the other  day. You should know:

• The development of vaccines to prevent communicable diseases has been one of the reasons that life expectancy improved so dramatically in the 20th century. Communicable diseases used to kill children by the millions in Europe and the United States, and no longer do so. The major communicable diseases that continue to kill people by the million worldwide are killers in those areas where modern public health services have not arrived, or for a few diseases -- such as malaria or HIV/AIDS -- where vaccines have not yet been developed.
• As science progresses and more is learned about the immune system and disease agents, vaccines are getting more efficacious and safer. Research and development on vaccines for a communicable disease do not stop simply because a vaccine has been developed -- when people see how a better vaccine is possible, they try to develop it.
• Regulatory agencies work to assure that only the most efficacious, effective and safe vaccines are in use all all times.

Think about immunizing your kids this way:

If your children's school needed some supplies that were not in the school budget, parents might well organize some activity to raise supplementary funds to buy those supplies. If you could participate but chose not to do so, you would be a freeloader. If other parents took up the slack, that supplies might still be bought. If too many parents choose to be freeloaders, the campaign will not work and all the kids will suffer.

If your church needs an expensive repair of the roof, the people who attend the church are likely to organize to raise the needed funds. If you don't participate in the effort, you are freeloading -- after all it is your church. If too many freeloaders are in the congregation, the roof doesn't get fixed, more damage occurs and the bill gets higher to do the necessary repairs.

Say you decide that traffic laws should apply to everyone else but not to you, so you drive after you have had a few drinks. exceed speed limits when you feel like it, and try to beat red lights. You may kill yourself or someone else, but more likely you will be seen driving this way by the police and you will be stopped and ticketed for breaking the law. If your conduct is flagrant enough you will be arrested as a criminal.

Communicable diseases have tipping points that determine what will happen if someone catches the disease in your community. If a high enough fraction of the people are immune, the disease may infect a a few people after it arrives in the community, but will soon die out. If too few people are immune, then an epidemic will occur and a lot of people will get sick from that disease. Sometimes conditions are just right and new vulnerable people will arrive in the community to take the place of those who have died of the disease or achieved immunity, and the disease will stay on as endemic. Public health immunization campaigns are the means by which communities assure that the vulnerability is below the tipping point.

There are some people in almost all communities who can not be immunized -- infants whose immune systems have not yet fully developed, old people whose immune systems no longer function well due to the aging process, and people with some medical conditions. We accept that some people will not allow their children to be immunized because of religious convictions in part because their numbers are small and adequate levels of immunity can still be maintained in the community 

As far as I am concerned, the people who don't have their children immunized due to sloth. or superstitious fear (that is fear of side effects not justified by medical information) are freeloaders. If there are too many such freeloaders, epidemics will take place such as the measles epidemic occurring now in the United States. Some people who get the disease will just be sick for a while, some will be permanently disabled due to the disease, and some will die of it. (I had mumps as an adult, before the MMP vaccine was developed, and I know from personal experience that that was serious enough to hospitalize me for a weak with fever and complications.)

If there continue to be too many freeloaders and periodic epidemics, stricter public health laws will be passed and enforced. Those who then fail to immunize their kids will be criminals.

I have some credentials to write the above message:

• I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on mathematical models in health planning;
• I worked as a health planner in the World Health Organization, the U.S. Office of International Health, USAID, and the White House.
• I managed research programs on the epidemiology of infectious diseases. One of them helped clarify the causes of pneumonia in children in developing nations, helping WHO to revise it standards for treatment of lower respiratory disease in children. Another showed Hepatitis C to be a far more prevalent disease in Egypt than had been believed or even thought possible, leading it to be recognized as a major public health challenge.
• I managed research program on the application of biotechnology in bio-medical research. Eventually I directed the Office of Research of USAID, served as the U.S. Commissioner on the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development, and as a consultant to the World Bank, Brazil and Mexico on programs to strengthen research management.

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Happy Darwin Day

Today is the 206th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. It is also the 206th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, but this post is about American opinion with respect to evolution. It is based on a report from the Pew Research Center.

A solid majority (64%) of white evangelicals in a 2013 poll said that humans and other living things have always existed in their present form, while only 27% said that humans evolved. These views are largely mirrored by the positions of large evangelical churches, such as the Southern Baptist Convention and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which explicitly reject evolutionary theory as being in conflict with what they see as biblical truth.

 Let me distinguish two situations:

1. Someone understands the theory of evolution reasonably well, understands that the vast majority of scientists accept evolution as real, but knows also that the leaders of the religion to which he belongs reject the theory of evolution. That person feels that his faith in his religion requires that he believe its view of creation.
2. Someone does not understand the theory of evolution, has little idea of the evidence that supports the theory, and thinks that scientists are divided on the validity of evolution. The person knows also that the leaders of the religion to which he belongs reject the theory of evolution. That person accepts the view of the leaders of his religion, and believe the religion's dogma on creation.

I much prefer people who correspond to situation one. Such a person has accurate knowledge of the theory and its acceptance by the scientific community and simply chooses not to "believe" in it.

As to the teaching of evolution and its alternatives, I quote again:

In spite of efforts in many American states and localities to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools or to teach alternatives to evolution, courts in recent decades have consistently rejected public school curricula that veer away from evolutionary theory. In Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law requiring public school students to learn both evolution and “creation science” violated the Constitution’s prohibition on the establishment of religion.

Clearly appropriate science courses in the USA should teach evolution. That is the law. It is also the consensus of the vast majority of scientists as to what should be taught as science. Indeed, it is a basis for understanding much of biological science.

Private schools run by religious organizations can of course include courses on the dogma of their religion.

I also see a role to have courses on teaching "information literacy" -- the skill of discerning the credibility of information that one encounters from different sources. The evolution-creationism situation seems tailor made for getting students to think seriously about in what sense scientific theories are credible and in what sense religious teachings are credible. Unfortunately, I doubt that many K-12 teachers are capable of teaching such a complex topic well.

Carl Djerassi, the chemist behind the Pill, died on January 30th, aged 91

Here is the obituary from The Economist for a truly distinguished man.

I met Dr. Djerassi first when he was the Chair of the National Research Council's Board on Science and Technology for International Development (BOSTID), and I began a two decade association with BOSTID as the manager of the grants from USAID that provided a major part of its funding.

Carl Djerassi was I suppose best described as a polymath. His career as a chemist was distinguished: he synthesized the chemical that made the first birth control pill possible.

He developed synthetic juvenile hormone in insects, preventing them becoming adults, for non-toxic control of mosquitoes and fleas, developed corticosteroids for inflammation—steroids had been a passion since the 1940s—and devised a way of detecting opiates in urine, used by the army in Vietnam.

He was a professor of chemistry at Stanford University for many years. As an entrepreneur and expert in research management, he ran two research companies while on the Stanford Faculty. He owned a California winery that produced fine wines. He was an art collector. Later he wrote novels and plays.

I knew him as a man who cared about the poor in poor counties and was willing to devote time and effort to advising the government on how to use science and technology to better the lot of these people; he did so without pay.

I remember others associated with BOSTID, including George Bugliarello, Roger Revelle, Frederick Seitz, E.O. Wilson, Hugh Popenoe, John Gibbons, Joshua Lederberg and Frederick Robbins. Offhand I can think of two Nobel Prizes and two Pulitzer Prizes among these eight people. For those who have thought that leaders in fields of science and technology live in "ivory towers", knowing any one of these men would be a revelation. Each was brilliant in his own field of specialization, each had many skills, and each cared enough about the poor and needy to devote time and effort to their aid. 

New Insights on U.S. Opinions on Science

New Pew Research Center surveys of citizens and a representative sample of scientists connected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) show powerful crosscurrents that both recognize the achievements of scientists and expose stark fissures between scientists and citizens on a range of science, engineering and technology issues. 

A new Pew Research Center report highlights these major findings from its surveys of Americans:

• 79% of adults say that science has made life easier for most people and a majority is positive about science’s impact on the quality of health care, food and the environment.
• 54% of adults consider U.S. scientific achievements to be either the best in the world (15%) or above average (39%) compared with other industrial countries.
• 92% of AAAS scientists say scientific achievements in the U.S. are the best in the world (45%) or above average (47%).
• About seven-in-ten adults say that government investments in engineering and technology (72%) and in basic scientific research (71%) usually pay off in the long run. Some 61% say that government investment is essential for scientific progress, while 34% say private investment is enough to ensure scientific progress is made.

However:

• Only 16% of AAAS scientists and 29% of the general public rank U.S. STEM education for grades K-12 as above average or the best in the world. Fully 46% of AAAS scientists and 29% of the public rank K-12 STEM as “below average.”
• 75% of AAAS scientists say too little STEM education for grades K-12 is a major factor in the public’s limited knowledge about science. An overwhelming majority of scientists see the public’s limited scientific knowledge as a problem for science.

The public's general support for science is reassuring, but the differences between public views and those of the scientific community (shown in the figure above) are sometimes of concern. 

• I have spent time looking at biotechnology, and I know from experience that the scientific community is very careful to assure the safety of foods that are produced from genetically modified crops. The public is I fear unaware of the dangers of traditional breeding, and too fearful of biotechnology. Of course, we need to continue to assure careful vetting of GM research and releases of GM crops, but the public fear is excessive.
• Similarly, while I worked for many years to assure that animals involve in the research programs I managed were treated ethically, I also recognize that their use was necessary. There is no question that ethical use of animals in research is justified by the benefits such research yields for mankind.
• Evolution is central to modern biological science, and the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. I don't mind what people believe, but I do mind when people insist that children's science classes not teach scientific consensus.
• The fear of vaccines is unjustified, and as the current measles epidemic shows, that fear leads to very serious consequences. While the  MMR vaccine is very safe and very effective, the most recent data from the World Health Organization indicated that there were 145,000 deaths from measles in 2013. While measles was eradicated from the USA years ago, if Americans don't immunize their children, the disease can be reintroduced from Africa and Asia, where it is endemic in many poor countries.
• Similarly, the vast majority of scientists are convinced that humans are driving global warming through activities that cause increase in the release of greenhouse gases. I fear that the public has bought a false story from those who profit from businesses releasing those greenhouse gases (and the folk that they fund). Prudence demands that we act globally and quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• It is not having more people in the world that is a problem per se, it is that more people with higher expectations for their lives put more stress on the environment. That makes is harder and harder to feed the billions of people and provide them all with decent lives. Global warming, pollution of land, air and water, deforestation, desertification, loss of biodiversity are only the most worrisome of the problems likely to arrive with the population increases we still expect.

Where do all the scientific paper come from

Source

The number of scientific papers produced by the United States, with its large population, might be compared with the number of papers produced by several European countries which together have a population comparable to that of the USA -- perhaps Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden and Norway,

A thought about knowledge of the past

Hunts will always be remembered in the words of the hunters until lions learn to write.

How do we make sense of the world and its past? Billions of people living over a surface so huge no one will ever see it all, behaving all the time in their billions of individual paths, subject to literal winds of change as well as cultural, economic, political and social forces which we may jointly create but which surpass our understanding.

Homo sapiens evolved from pretty simple minded beings that recognized food from poison well enough to survive, and recognized threats well enough to avoid being eaten before they could reproduce. Biological evolution is about extracting simple messages from the confusion of sensory input, which in turn is an extraction of messages about a local environment.

Homo sapiens is a social species, and we have evolved biologically to behave socially. Our societies have evolved some means of understanding complexity that the simple hunter-gather groups 10,000 years ago did not possess. I suspect that those means involve radical simplification of actors, events, and causal relations.

We are story tellers. We select a point to make, select a situation we think suitable for making the point, select actions and actors relevant to the point, impute causal factors relating events to outcomes, and tell ourselves the story. All to the  good, but perhaps the danger is believing too much in a specific story we have made up about the past. All too often our stories of the past are but retrospective rationalizations based on randomly chosen.

How do Historians Tell Stories About the Past?

I think historians too are story tellers, seeking to make points in their narratives about the past. They too select events, structure them, selecting characters from among many, and impute causality among the events.

Historians are experienced in comparing information from primary sources, recognizing that people do not always recall the past correctly, nor to they always describe what they recall accurately; people perhaps often present themselves in better light than they deserve.

Historians should also be knowledgeable about secondary sources, benefiting from what others have studied and understood about the past. So too, historians should tell stories informed by data and by the other social sciences -- economics, political science, geography, psychology. Indeed, they may be informed by modern medical knowledge.

Finally, historians benefit from peer review. Importantly, they write for an audience of other historians, subjecting their descriptions of past events and actors to the critiques of other historians, allowing their interpretations of causality to be compared with those made by others. Indeed, the lessons that they draw from history are sifted by other historian, with only some surviving into text books or popular history to inform the public.

How does Natural Science Differ from Stories We Usually Tell About the Past?

Taxonomy is the basis of science. Scientists work to assure that things that are judged to be the same are indeed the same. Astronomy separates stars from planets and moons and from galaxies. Systematic biology has developed over centuries to learn to identify species by their genetic makeup, separating different species that have converged to similar appearance and sibling species that have diverged little from common ancestors. Chemists have learned to differentiate elements from compounds, and even isotopes of the same elements; as they have learned to purify compounds from mixtures. Physicists have identified many sub-atomic particles and forces, learning to identify them and to recognize different manifestations of the same forces. Thus science is much more accurate in saying things are the same or different that we are in telling stories about the past.

Science is prospective, not simply retrospective. When possible science advances through the generation of hypotheses from theory, where each hypothesis can be be tested by controlled observations; ideally, data will show the hypothesis to be false, tending to disprove they hypothesis and thus the theory from which it is drawn. Experiments should be controlled to eliminate as many sources of error as possible. Moreover, they should be replicated. Ultimately theory, the way the hypothesis is drawn, the experiments, and the inferences drawn from them should be subject to expert peer review.

Thus strong methods have been institutionalized within the natural sciences to increase the confidence that can be placed in accepted theories and hypotheses. Moreover, the body of controlled experimental data has grown over time, and is increasingly available for use by the scientific community.

Thus the stories that natural scientists tell us tend to be more worthy of confidence than the stories we tell ourselves, or the stories others tell us based on less formal taxonomies, fewer controlled experiments, and the lack of a process focusing on the falsification of hypotheses.

Natural scientists are of course people, and as such capable of false dealing and error. Perhaps, however, working in an institution that has strong mechanisms to increase the confidence in assertions (and sanctions for falsehood and error) they are less likely than some others to make statements from their science that are false or erroneous.

Science's Breakthrough of the Year 2014!

Good year for science. Check out these 2014 technologies from Wired.