115 Years Young?

Vannevar Bush, the head of the U. S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, tells the story of how during the war he was trying to gain more funding from Congress for medical research.  Hoping to further his cause, he convinced A. Newton Richards, President Roosevelt's chairman of the Committee on Medical Research, to testify in favor of more funding before a Congressional committee.  As Bush recounts, "It was towards the end of the war, and Richards was feeling tired and a bit old.  One of the congressmen asked him, 'Doctor, will all these researches you are carrying on tend to lengthen the span of human existence?'

'God forbid,' said Richards, smack into the record."

While not every medical researcher shares Dr. Richard's reluctance to lengthen human longevity, Dr. Jan Vijg of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine thinks he has discovered the true limit to how long humans can live.  It's about 115 years, he says.

According to a recent New York Times report, Dr. Vijg and his colleagues studied the mortality records of a number of countries to see which age group experienced the most rapid growth in recent decades.  As the general level of health care in industrialized countries has improved, the average lifespan has increased, but Dr. Vijg guessed that if there was a natural limit, it would show up first in the leveling off of the age of the fastest-growing group of old people.  For example, in the 1920s in France, 85-year-olds were the fastest-growing group, but by the 1990s that honor belonged to 102-year-olds.  In the last decade or so, the trend has stagnated at about 115.  There are exceptions, of course, such as Jean Calment, who before her death in France in 1997 at age 122 was fond of retelling her recollections of meeting Vincent Van Gogh.  But statistically, Dr. Vijg has strong evidence that no matter what specific diseases we conquer, we have a built-in expiration date of about 115 years.

Lots of people disagree with Dr. Vijg, of course.  One of the scientists who collected data used in Dr. Vijg's study deplores his conclusion, calling it a "travesty."  But we should distinguish between a descriptive study, whose purpose is simply to give us insight into what is in fact happening, and a claim of proof.  Not even Dr. Vijg is claiming to have proved nobody can live longer than 115, if for no other reason than the fact of Ms. Calment's achievement.  What he presents is persuasive statistical data that, unless we discover the root causes of aging and get a handle on how to manipulate them, we are unlikely to push the maximum lifespan higher than 115.

It's curious, but a friend of mine has been going around for some time claiming approximately the same thing on the basis of a sermon he heard.  I didn't hear the sermon, but evidently the preacher was looking forward to living to 120 on the basis of a Bible verse in the Old Testament.

He was probably talking about Genesis 6:3, which reads in the King James Version, "And the Lord said, 'My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh:  yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.'"

Now, this passage occurs in the midst of a number of other sayings that are, to say the least, hard to interpret—things about the sons of God marrying the daughters of men, giants in the earth, and so on.  Some interpreters say this passage has nothing to do with a limit on human lifespans; rather, it refers to the time during which God put up with man's increasing misbehavior before he decided to put an end to it with the Flood, which only Noah and his fellow shipmates survived. 

Whatever the meaning of the Genesis passage, it has historically been a truism that everyone's going to die sooner or later, and society has been arranged with that assumption in mind.  Dr. Vijg's claim that we shouldn't expect to live longer than 115 years or so just confirms what nearly everyone assumes, and puts a number on it.

However, these ideas are rejected by a small but vociferous group called transhumanists, who increasingly put their faith in the idea that humanity is shortly going to figure out how to extend useful, fruitful life indefinitely.  They don't always say "forever," but many of them mean that.  One type of transhumanists called "immortalists" in particular seem to think that we can figure out how to live forever.  While I understand why a person, especially one who doesn't believe in God, would get interested in extending human life—it's the only show in town, on their view—the danger in this movement is that in trying to move us toward a glorious paradisacal future, they will unwittingly turn the present into Hell on earth.  This sort of thing went on during the Cold War, and continues in some places today, as millions were subjugated by Communist regimes which promised a wonderful future of abundance at the price of sacrificed freedoms now.  Lest we dismiss the transhumanists as a powerless fringe group, one of their leading lights, Ray Kurzweil, currently holds a high-level position at Google. 

Perhaps the best thing is not to focus just on how long we can live, but how long we can live well.  Dr. Vijg takes this approach, saying that even if there is a natural limit of 115, there's a lot we can still do to prevent diseases such as Alzheimer's, osteoporosis, and other age-related maladies from robbing us of the enjoyment of those later years.  So the news that we can't live past 115 is not a counsel of despair, by any means.  Still, for those who think death is the end, it's not good news either.

However long one lives, the length matters less than what you do with it.  Old paintings of philosophers would sometimes show a human skull prominently displayed in the philosopher's study.  It represents a reminder that life is limited, and every minute is one of a finite number of minutes we will have, so we should make the most of them.  Some of the best advice along these lines, for believers and non-believers alike, is from Psalm 90, which says "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."

Sources:  The New York Times article describing Dr. Vijg's work appeared on Oct. 5, 2016, at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/science/maximum-life-span-study.html.   The quotation from Dr. Richards is from Vannevar Bush's book of memoirs Pieces of the Action (NY:  William Morrow, 1970), p. 130.  The patience-of-God interpretation of Genesis 6:3 can be found at http://www.versebyverseministry.org/bible-answers/are_people_limited_to_120_years_of_life.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on transhumanism and Ray Kurzweil.

Is Bioscience Spinning Its Wheels?

Each year, the U. S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) alone spends over $30 billion on medical research.  The people who decide which scientists get this money are, unsurprisingly, scientists.  Daniel Sarewitz, a professor of science and society at Arizona State University, thinks that we are no longer getting the bangs we should get for all these bucks.  In an article in the spring/summer 2016 issue of The New Atlantis, he explains why.

First off, he admits that spending lots of money on scientific research and development has historically been a great idea.  If you compare how most people in the U. S. lived in 1900 with the way things are done in 2000, most of the good differences—modern medicine, jet aircraft, cars, air conditioning, the Internet, wireless devices, computers, down to electric toothbrushes—are due to technological innovations that grew out of research directed at certain goals.  And Sarewitz has no problem with that.  The federal government was not a big player in research prior to World War II, but the lessons we learned then about how heavy investments in military technologies such as radar and nuclear weapons could pay off led to the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF). 

The NSF was the brainchild of MIT engineer Vannevar Bush, who directed most government-funded research during the war.  Sarewitz says that in order to get his idea enacted, Bush told "a beautiful lie," and summarizes the lie this way:  "Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown."  Sarewitz spends the rest of his article showing just what was wrong about this "lie," and how it has led to inefficient and often simply incorrect research that taxpayers (and corporations too, for that matter) are paying billions for today.

In support of his thesis, he cites studies showing the increasing rate of retractions from peer-reviewed research journal in recent years.  Another source indicates that between 75 and 90 percent of all basic and preclinical biomedical studies are not reproducible. 

These are indicators of a general trend or pattern that goes something like this.  A newly minted Ph. D. in one of the softer sciences (economics, sociology, psychology, biology) gets an academic job and has to produce new and original results that are published in peer-reviewed journals or get fired in five or six years.  (That part I'm very familiar with.)  So he writes tons of proposals to NIH or wherever he can get funding, gets ten to fifteen percent of his proposals funded, and sets to work being novel.  Novel about what?  Well, that almost doesn't matter.  As long as you can show you did something that nobody's done before, and it has some remote tenuous connection with reality, you can find a journal and willing referees to publish it.  There's more Internet-based journals popping up every year, and it's almost to the point that you can get anything published if you send it to enough journals.  Multiply this picture by the thousands of Ph. D.'s we produce every year, and bear in mind that their proposals and papers are being reviewed by people who went through the very same system, and you can see how the situation described by Sarewitz can happen. 

So what should we be doing with all that money?  Sarewitz says it should be spent on highly directed research targeted at specific time-limited goals.  He cites several examples of the way it ought to be done, including a program in the 1990s directed by the U. S. Department of Defense (DOD) to develop a new treatment for breast cancer.  It led to the development of the drug herceptin, one of the most important treatment innovations in years.  The point here is that useful innovations based on science typically happen not when some isolated scientist pursues his or her private dream, but when a team of smart people use both existing and new science and engineering to pursue a specific socially profitable goal. 

Sarewitz congratulates the DOD for its no-nonsense approach to getting such things done, and for including in its project planning people without academic qualifications, but with a strong interest in the goal.  One of the sparkplugs that got the herceptin project going was an activist named Fran Visco, herself a breast cancer survivor, who founded the National Breast Cancer Coalition to do something about better treatments.  She was a lawyer, not a biologist, but the DOD welcomed her as a participant and her vision was essential in getting things done. 

In pointing out that much research today, especially in the biomedical area, doesn't seem to accomplish much more than paying for a lot of expensive professors, postdocs, grad students, and equipment, I think Sarewitz is on the money, so to speak.  However, I disagree with him that Vannevar Bush told "a beautiful lie" to get the NSF going. 

If you genuinely believe that what you say at the time is true, it isn't a lie, morally speaking.  You may be guilty of self-deception or not informing yourself sufficiently, but not of lying.  Bush was a creature of his time, and most of the people he had hired to develop things like radar and nuclear bombs had in fact spent most of their careers indulging the "free play of their free intellects," because that was the main way basic science was pursued before huge amounts of federal dollars showed up after World War II.  Most scientists before 1941 operated more or less in the style of Albert Einstein, who single-handedly revolutionized physics in his spare time that his job at the Swiss patent office provided him.  Back then, the exception was a scientist who did good science while working for industry, such as Irving Langmuir, the first industrial scientist to win a Nobel Prize.  So although the phrase "beautiful lie" is an attention-getting rhetorical device, I think Sarewitz is a little anachronistic in his accusation that Bush was lying at the time.

On the other hand, Sarewitz is probably right in pointing out that the foxes-guarding-the-henhouse pattern of handing money over to scientists who give it to other scientists may not be the right way to do things anymore, at least with the majority of federal research funds.  There's a reason that government funding for science is declining as a percent of GNP, and the public may be right in thinking that their federal research dollars are not being spent as wisely as they could be.  If the powers that are or will be listen to Sarewitz's advice, maybe things will be reorganized so that even fewer dollars can accomplish more, both in the way of pure basic science and in practical applications that improve the lives of millions.

Sources:  Daniel Sarewitz's article "Saving Science" appeared in the Spring/Summer issue of The New Atlantis, and online at http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/saving-science.  For the statistic on NIH spending, I referred to the NIH website at https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/budget.  Full disclosure:  my wife had breast cancer over a decade ago, and is now cancer-free

EPA Accuses VW of Software Cheat in Diesel Autos

Last Friday, Sept. 18, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it had discovered a "defeat device" installed in nearly half a million diesel vehicles made by Volkswagen (VW) and sold in the U. S. from 2009 to 2015.  Specifically, EPA claims that VW engineers have admitted to designing and installing software that implements full emissions controls on their diesel engines only when the software detects that the car is undergoing emissions testing.  The rest of the time, some of the emissions controls are disabled, allowing the vehicle to produce as much as forty times the maximum allowed levels of NOx, a type of pollutant that can lead to respiratory problems and smog.  When queried about the accusations, VW spokespersons declined comment, citing the ongoing investigation.

Until VW has their day in court, or wherever this case ends up, fairness dictates that we give them the benefit of the doubt.  But when both the EPA and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) issue notices that VW is in violation of clean-air ordinances, citing admissions made by VW personnel, it's a fairly safe bet that something is amiss.

In 2014, some researchers at West Virginia University who were working for the International Council on Clean Transportation discovered that certain VW diesels emitted far more pollutants when operating under actual road conditions than one would expect from the fact that they are certified by the EPA for sale in the U. S.  When the researchers notified the EPA about this, EPA asked VW about it, and VW said they would issue a recall to recalibrate the systems involved, which they did in December of 2014.  However, the California Air Resources Board checked some of the supposedly fixed VWs in May of 2015, and found that some of them were still out of compliance—hence, more meetings with VW.  According to a letter from the CARB, its staff and EPA staff held a technical meeting with VW personnel on Sept. 3, 2015.  Reading between the lines, we can surmise that the question they asked was along the lines of, "Okay, guys, what's really going on here?"  Faced with the inevitable, VW admitted that they had deliberately designed the vehicle's software to detect an official emissions test, and to turn on all the pollution controls only during testing.  The rest of the time, some of the controls were inactive. 

Faced with this smoking gun (so to speak), EPA and CARB had no choice but to declare the affected vehicles in violation and to order VW to issue a recall to remove the defeat-device software. 

As it turns out, if the allegations prove true this isn't the first time that regulators have found diesel-engine defeat devices deployed on a massive scale.  Back in 1998, diesels in trucks and construction machinery made by Caterpillar, Renault, and Volvo were found to have two different sets of software.  One set was used when the EPA was running emissions tests on the engines, and adjusted the injection timing for low NOx emissions.  The second set of software used a different injection timing that delivered better fuel economy, but also caused more NOx emissions.  The manufacturers ended up paying about a billion-dollar fine for that infraction. 

There seems to be something about software that tempts engineers to bend the rules.  With hardware, it's relatively easy to dig into the machinery and find the gizmo that's doing its nefarious work—that's the kind of thing that the term "defeat device" brings to mind.  It reminds me of a scene from the autobiography of Vannevar Bush, who was in charge of the U. S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II.  In the 1920s, he was a professor at MIT and got involved with a startup company named Raytheon.  At the time, Raytheon's hot product was a type of rectifier tube that was useful in the rapidly growing production of radios that operated from power-line current (earlier radios used messy and expensive batteries).  In a dispute with rival radio manufacturer Westinghouse, Bush claimed that Westinghouse was using Raytheon's patented tube structure.  The patent attorney for the rival firm rival denied it.  In response, Bush told Westinghouse's patent attorney to pick up a Westinghouse tube (which had an opaque coating on the glass) and crack it over a trash can.  He did so, and there was Raytheon's patented tube structure.  As Bush put it, the patent attorney agreed to advise his client Westinghouse to "keep off the grass."

You can't do that sort of dramatic stunt with software so easily.  If the accessible form of the software involved is in the form of machine code (which it usually is in production systems), often nobody other than the people who wrote it can really tell what it does.  So sneaky evasions such as the one VW engineers are accused of doing with the defeat-device software are hard to pin down, which means that indirect evidence such as performance measurements have to be used instead.  And it's not often that regulatory agencies go to such trouble to track down violations.  Further investigation may reveal exactly who at VW was responsible for the defeat-device software, and how high in the firm the decision was made.  And then, if the charges are proven, VW will have to pay—at least with a recall fixing the problem, and perhaps with fines or other penalties. 

The contrast between the way cars used to pollute before environmental regulations and what comes out the tailpipe today was brought home to me recently when we started working on a 1955 Oldsmobile owned by my late father-in-law.  It now starts up pretty reliably without help, but whenever it does, a blue cloud appears behind it and the sharp tang of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) fills the air.  Exhaust just doesn't smell like that any more, by and large, and that's thanks to catalytic converters, selective catalytic reduction for diesels that uses urea to reduce NOx emissions, and many other measures that make the air cleaner than it would otherwise be.

If the charges against VW prove to be true, that firm will have the opportunity to make the air behind its cars even cleaner.  And we will all be thankful for that.

Sources:  Numerous news outlets carried reports of the EPA's press release of Sept. 18, which can be found on the EPA website at yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/21b8983ffa5d0e4685257dd4006b85e2/dfc8e33b5ab162b985257ec40057813b!OpenDocument.  I referred to reports on the issue by the Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/18/epa-volkswagen-used-defeat-device-to-circumvent-air-pollution-controls/ and a letter from the CARB at http://www.arb.ca.gov/newsrel/in_use_compliance_letter.htm.  I also referred to an article on the 1998 defeat-device actions in the Los Angeles Times for Oct. 23, 1998 at http://articles.latimes.com/1998/oct/23/news/mn-35220.  The patent dispute between Raytheon and Westinghouse is described on p. 198 of Vannevar Bush, Pieces of the Action (William Morrow, 1970).