Climate change nearing "tipping point": report

I normally like to keep things light, but the week’s climate –change news is beyond levity. The New York Times detailed a litany of effects, including melting glaciers, rising sea levels and increased weather events. 

The piece, based on a report from the World Meteorological Organization,  includes a great collection of links, which, unless you are a climate-change-denier, and therefore, beyond hope, are well work clicking. One of them is a call to action, from my former employer, Nature, which calls the current situation a “tipping point." In other words, the world needs to get off fossil fuel soon, or risk catastrophic consequences, which we are already seeing hints of in increased flooding, droughts, and more frequent and intense hurricanes.

I’ve not done much climate change reporting in my career, but still remember talking to NASA climate scientists James Hansen in either 1999 or 2000. Hansen deserves credit for pushing the climate change issue from the margins of science into the public eye. During my conversation, he said that immediately pausing emission levels to ‘90s levels would still take the Earth about 100 years to reach equilibrium.  

CNN seems to agree that this issue is worthy of attention. Its website put up a special section that is, alas, as depressing as the NY Times report, but equally worth reading.

All this bad news begs the question—what can one do on an individual level to mitigate climate change? There are probably lots of little things one can do—drive less, go solar, eat less meat, etc etc. But the biggest change must come from a multinational policy level. And for that to happen, people must vote with the Earth in mind.

CRISPR takes on cancer

A word processor for genes was tried for the first time to treat cancer, it was reported this month. A molecular tool, known as CRISPR, finds and replaces individual genes. In this case, genes were altered to boost immune response to fight cancer—another cancer-fighting method that is still in its early years.

So how excited and optimistic should we be? Well, although the concept of CRISPR was discovered in 1993, it wasn’t fully realized as a tool until 2013. Since then, it has been hailed as a revolution in molecular biology, for its ability to select and modify single genes easily. The fact that it’s gone from a research lab tool to a potential treatment in six years—the blink of an eye in science—is remarkable.

But important caveats exist. The test reported this month was ONLY for safety, not to see whether the treatment actually works. This is known as a Phase 1 clinical trial. The next step is to try it in a larger group of people, once again only looking for safety. If that Phase II trial goes well, the treatment will enter the final stage, where it will be tried in a larger group. If the treatment is succeeds in this Phase III trial, it could go to market. That whole process will take a minimum of five years.

Caution should perhaps prevail over optimism, though. Gene therapy—using viruses to replace individual letters in the human genome—was, in the late ‘90s considered a promising approach to treating many disease. But the death of one young man in a clinical trial revealed that what was thought to be a safe, targeted approach was anything but. It took the field 20 years to recover. The technique is only now being using in a very limited amount of diseases.

If CRISPR can overcome the safety concerns that hurt the early days of gene therapy, excitement that this is a viable medical technique will grow. Perhaps the most interesting glimpse out of this study is how CRISPR can be coupled with other techniques to affect change in the body—in this case tweaking the immune system. Immunotherapy in cancer is a young, but promising field. Finding a targeted way to harness the immune system is no small task. It will be interesting to see if CRISPR can deliver.

Happy Halloween Science

There’s plenty of spooky stories this Halloween from multiple media outlets.

The New York Times has two in its great science section. One is about a fungus that turns ants into zombies—then makes them explode. Another features blood-sucking creatures—the real vampires.

Discover provides facts about bats—distancing them from vampire lore.

And, finally, CNN posted a piece about a nebula that looks like a jack-o-lantern.

In all these cases, science shows that the real world can be scarier than the supernatural.

Two cultural events converged this month. The 2019 Nobel Prizes in science were awarded. And the identity of The Masked Singer was revealed. Of the two, the show that hid celebrities under bulbous paper mache heads, feathers and sequins perhaps attracted more attention; it was the highest rated  show of the week. The Nobels fared less well in terms of media exposure. The winners made headlines in the national dailies, but faded within days.

Something clearly should be done to reverse this situation. Perhaps the Nobel recipients could appear on the show. One can imagine a laureate disguised as a bedazzled bumble bee. But that could prove problematic, since it’s doubtful anyone would be able to guess their identity. Then there is the issue of singing. Not many scientists are known for their vocal skills. Until then, the laureates will have to settle with sharing a $900,000 check, a medal and respect from within the scientific community.

Perhaps the least difficult award to explain is the chemistry prize. The laureates were credited with developing the lithium ion battery, which now powers everything from cell phones to electric  cars. The winners are: M. Stanley Whittingham, a professor at Binghamton University, State University of New York; John B. Goodenough,  a professor at the University of Texas at Austin; and Akira Yoshino, an honorary fellow for the Asahi Kasei Corporation in Tokyo and a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan.

The award for physiology or medicine centered on new insights into how cells react to different levels of oxygen. Those winners are: William G. Kaelin Jr., professor of medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham & Women’s Hospital Harvard Medical School; Gregg L. Semenza, professor of genetic medicine at Johns Hopkins; and Peter J. Ratcliffe, the director of clinical research at the Francis Crick Institute in London and director of the Target Discovery Institute at Oxford.

And finally, physics. This year the award was split between two findings, both of which introduce new ideas about the universe. James Peebles, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, developed theories of how the universe has changed over almost 14 billion years, while Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist and professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Geneva.   and Didier Queloz, University of Geneva , discovered a planet orbiting a sun-like star.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Science administers the physics and chemistry prizes, which are worth about $900,000. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded by the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet.

This week, a host of outlets published a buffet of stories that seemed to say red meat was now officially healthy. There was rejoicing throughout the land—as well as, presumably, a big run on steaks. But the backlash was fast and furious. The New York Times ran a series of stories about why this was not exactly so.

 The study was flawed for a variety of reasons, a bit wonky to go into (methodology, sample size etc). So what’s my take? It’s not uncommon for entities to seek attention by telling people what they want to hear, even if its not exactly true.

There’s a name for that, but I’ll let The Hidden Brain go into that. First, consider the source. The study wasn’t from a good, not great journal and its authors were from good, not great institutions. If this was a large, well-controlled study (the wonky stuff), published in JAMA or the New England Journal of Medicine, that would have been something. But it wasn’t, so it isn’t-much. The research’s claims are also not very specific—they don’t recommend portions or frequencies of meat and they don’t comment much on a host of earlier literature that disputes their claims. So, the real takeaway is that some meat, sometime, might be OK.

Not exactly revolutionary stuff. My own dabbling with on-again, off-again vegetarianism and veganism have come up with some data—albeit of a small sample size. The less meat I ate, the better my cholesterol and blood sugar numbers. A year after my veganism lapsed, my numbers shot up. Despite the “news” I am thinking of, not eliminating meat from my diet (unless my numbers climb), but reducing its frequency and portions in my diet.