Matt Ridley's Blog, page 30

How to cure old age itself

My Times column on the possibility that old age might itself be cured now we understand telomeres:

 

Squeezed between falling birth rates and better healthcare, the world population is getting rapidly older. Learning how to deal with that is one of the great challenges of this century. The World Health Organisation has just produced a report on the implications of an ageing population, which — inadvertently — reveals a dismal fatalism we share about the illnesses of old age: that they will always be inevitable.

This could soon be wrong. A new book, The Telomerase Revolution, published in America this week by the doctor and medical researcher Michael Fossel, argues that we now understand enough about the fundamental cause of ageing to be confident that we will eventually be able to reverse it. This would mean curing diseases such as Alzheimer’s, heart disease and osteoporosis, rather than coping with them or treating their symptoms.

Let me show you what I mean about fatalism. The WHO report on ageing and health, for all its talk of the need for “profound changes” to health care for the elderly, actually urges us to stop trying to cure the afflictions of old age and learn to live with them: “The societal response to population ageing will require a transformation of health systems that moves away from disease-based curative models and towards the provision of older-person-centred and integrated care.”

Yet it also subscribes to the somewhat magical hope that illnesses of old age can be “prevented or delayed by engaging in healthy behaviours” and that “physical activity and good nutrition can have powerful benefits for health and wellbeing.” This is largely wishful thinking. There is no evidence that, say, Alzheimer’s can be prevented by a certain diet or activity. A lack of activity and poor nutrition can worsen health at any age, but the underlying chronic diseases of old age are caused by age itself.

When I asked Dr Fossel what he thought of the WHO report, he replied: “In 1950 we could have talked (and did) about ‘active polio’ in the sense of keeping polio victims active rather than giving up, but the very phrase itself implies that one has already given up. I would prefer that we cure the fundamental problem. Why talk about ‘active ageing’, ‘successful ageing’, and ‘healthy ageing’ when we could talk about not ageing?”

Dr Fossel is one of the pioneers of research into the clinical use of telomerase, an enzyme that causes certain kinds of cell to be effectively immortal. These include free-living protozoa, cancer cells and the germ cells that give rise to sperm and eggs. When you think about it, the fertilised egg from which you grew had three billion years of continuous life under its belt when it turned into you, and didn’t look a day over zero.

That’s because of telomerase. It resets the activity level of genes so that each life starts young. Telomerase does this by re-lengthening highly repetitious bursts of DNA sequences called “telomeres” on the tips of chromosomes. The six-letter string TTAGGG is repeated 15,000 times on each chromosome tip in most of your cells when you are a baby but only 8,000 times when you are old. That shortening is the primary cause of ageing.

Apart from your germ cells and some stem cells, all the other cells in your body shut down their telomerase genes, with the result that their telomeres get shorter with each cell division. Age is not the accumulation of wear and tear; it’s the shortening of telomeres, leading — we are still not entirely sure how — to a slowdown in the rate at which damaged molecules are repaired which in turn leads to a greater number of damaged cells.

An analogy may help. My mobile phone currently has a cracked front; I’m living with that till I am next due an upgrade. If upgrades come round quickly, most mobile phones are in good order. If they come round more slowly, more people have damaged mobile phones. As you age, your cells upgrade their molecules more slowly, because their telomeres are shorter. So there are more damaged cells.

What startles me about Dr Fossel’s book is his evidence that this phenomenon explains all the chronic diseases of ageing, even ones such as dementia. Until recently, it was thought that these diseases could not be linked to telomere shortening because they involve cells that do not divide: neurons, for instance. But we now know that other cells called microglia, which do divide, are crucial to the functioning of neurons. A similar argument applies to heart cells and the cells that line arteries.

In 1999 scientists working for Geron, a biotech firm, demonstrated that adding telomerase could reset the clock of ageing and rejuvenate a cell. They went on to show that they could take skin cells from an old person, treat them with telomerase, and grow skin typical of a young person. All it takes now, says Dr Fossel, is to work out how to boost telomerase in our cells in a safe way. Not a trivial problem, but probably not an insuperable one, in the rapidly advancing state of gene therapy.

Dr Fossel has founded a company, Telocyte, to try this approach for people with Alzheimer’s. He may not succeed, but if somebody does, the implications are profound. Suppose people could take a course of pills or injections to reverse dementia, Parkinson’s, heart disease or osteoporosis. Suppose that people in their nineties could live genuinely “healthy” lives, as if they were fifty, not the managed decline that the WHO report recommends.

In such a world, the costs of treating chronic diseases of old age, and of social care for the elderly could fall. The problem of an ever-smaller working population supporting an ever-growing population of the infirm elderly could disappear, as 90-year-olds went back into full-time jobs. On the other hand, the decline in world population growth — with a stable level expected by 2080 or so — might eventually reverse, creating another population boom.

Fanciful? Maybe, but given what we now know about telomeres, and the mechanism that lies behind ageing, it is not as mad as assuming the world will continue as it is. The WHO’s vision of a world in 2050 in which governments are devoting much more money and effort to making people comfortable in nursing homes as they live with chronic dementia, disability and decline may well be even more implausible. The future is not just a straight-line extrapolation of the past.

Perverse regulation will slow the death of smoking

My Times column on the EU's idiotic attack on vaping:

When regulation goes wrong, people call for more regulation. Sometimes, though, regulation is the cause of the original problem. It is steadily becoming clear that the way the European Union does regulation is especially pernicious. It stifles innovation, often favours danger over safety, plays into the hands of vested interests and is inflexible and unaccountable. Volkswagen’s case is the tip of the iceberg.

In a shocking new case about dangerous emissions coming to court this week, the European Commission has passed regulations that are certain — not likely, certain — to hit the cleanest and lowest-emitting products much harder than their dirty competitors. I am not talking about diesel versus (cleaner) petrol engines, though I could be. Nor am I talking about pesticides versus (cleaner) genetically modified crops. Nor wood-burning versus (cleaner) fracking. I am talking about smoking versus (cleaner) vaping.

Egged on two years ago, I am sorry to say, by British ministers and some MEPs, the EU has agreed a tobacco products directive, which has to be implemented into law by next spring. Its Article 20 concerns the regulation of devices for vaping nicotine. And it hits them much harder than it hits cigarettes. On Thursday the vaping manufacturer Totally Wicked goes to the European Court of Justice to challenge Article 20. They have an excellent case.

For a start, it is bizarre to include vaping devices in a “tobacco products” directive at all. It’s like regulating coffee in a hard-drugs law. Remember the evidence is now overwhelmingly strong — and the British government has recently, but belatedly accepted this — that vaping is a really effective way to quit smoking and that, far from being a gateway into smoking, it is a highway out. By some estimates, approaching three million people now vape in this country, nearly all of whom are smoking less or no tobacco as a result.

Gobsmackingly, the directive specifically outlaws the very vaping devices that are most useful to heavy smokers trying to quit: the ones with more than 20 milligrams of nicotine per millilitre. Heavy smokers need high-strength nicotine vapour to quit smoking, so the people with the worst health are going to be denied help. And by insisting that refillable devices are leak free, the directive will effectively kill 90 per cent of the devices sold by independent firms and hand the market back to the struggling non-refillable “cig-alike” ones made mostly by the tobacco firms.

It gets worse. The directive outlaws most vaping advertisements, which will certainly slow vaping’s advance at the expense of smoking — ie, cost lives. It creates a six-month “standstill” period for new vaping products, following notification by the manufacture of an intention to sell a product. This will slow innovation and is asking for a black market to thrive: Chinese websites will be selling new devices into Europe while regulated manufacturers here twiddle their thumbs for 26 weeks.

But all of this pales into insignificance beside the truly shocking idiocy in the directive, which is this. From next spring a manufacturer of a vaping device will have to submit far more information about its emissions than a tobacco company will have to submit about emissions from smoking devices. Cigarette makers have to test for just three things: tar, carbon monoxide and nicotine. There are about 4,000 different chemicals in cigarette smoke, most of which are toxic at some level, but they don’t have to be tested or listed.

Under the new directive, e-cig makers are going to have to measure and list “all ingredients contained in, and emissions resulting from the use of, the product, by brand name and type” — including toxicological data — even though these emissions are far lower and far less toxic than tobacco smoke. Remember, the best evidence suggests that vaping is 20-100 times safer than smoking. But here we have regulation falling far more heavily on the safer product, just as it does with genetically modified crops and petrol engines, and making innovation all but impossible.

The result will be a slowdown in the take-up of vaping and therefore more premature deaths from smoking, just as the policy of favouring diesel over petrol has, we now know, probably killed many thousands of Europeans a year.

There is a way for vaping products to avoid these strangulating regulations, and that is for their makers to apply to have them regulated as medical devices. But that takes years to get approval and ensures that they are expensive, hard to get and ugly. No medicinal e-cig has been approved in five years. One of the advantages of vaping devices as quit aids is that they are attractive and can be bought from ordinary shops without prescriptions.

Now consider how hard it is to challenge Article 20 of the tobacco products directive, or indeed any Euro-regulation. Once passed in Brussels, it’s illegal for Britain not to implement it, and unpicking it would require 28 nations agreeing. It won’t happen. In a parallel case, the transport secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, in a letter to The Times on Saturday, detailed Britain’s futile efforts to get agreement on real-world tests for car emissions this year.

As the Volkswagen scandal has beautifully demonstrated, in the EU we are governed by unelected regulators who are immune to democratic recall, captive chums of the very industries they regulate and tools of the great pressure groups that infest the corridors of the Berlaymont. Greens obsessed with carbon dioxide combined with German carmakers obsessed with diesel to visit more noxious nitrogen oxides and particulates on us all.

These are not isolated cases: European regulation is not fit for purpose. Sir James Dyson last week said that he is taking the European Commission to court because its vacuum cleaner regulations have been influenced by a “strong German lobby [that] wanted to test virgin vacuum cleaners in a sterile laboratory without dust”, because their performance is relatively poor in the real, dusty world. He calls regulations “a form of control which stifles progress” and “an argument for greater independence for Britain”.

That is not an extreme conclusion. If you are one of the country’s three million vapers, or you know somebody who you would like to give up smoking, then you should probably vote to leave the EU in the referendum next year. I cannot see another way to unpick the lethal regulations in Article 20 and instead come up with sensible regulations that protect consumers while encouraging innovation and accelerate switching from tobacco.

 

Some policies to fight climate change have done more harm than good

This is a longer version of an article I published in the Mail on Sunday:

 

The Volkswagen testing scandal exposes rotten corruption at the core of regulation. Far from ushering in a brave new world of cleaner air, the technologies adopted by European car makers, driven by policy makers in Brussels, have been killing thousands of people a year through an obsession with lowering emissions of harmless carbon dioxide, at the expense of creating higher emissions of harmful nitrogen oxides.

 

There is a lesson here that goes much wider than the car industry, the clean-air debate and even the regulation of business. The scandal is a symptom of the political world’s obsession with directing and commanding change, rather than encouraging it to evolve.

 

The great European switch to diesel engines was a top-down decision as a direct result of exaggerated fears about climate change. Convinced that the climate was about to warm rapidly, and extreme weather was about to get much worse, European governments signed the Kyoto protocol in 1997 and committed to reducing emissions of carbon dioxide in the hope that this would help. In the event, the global temperature stopped rising for 18 years, while droughts, floods and storms also showed no increase.

 

But in 1998, urged on by EU transport commissioner Neil Kinnock, welcomed by environment secretary John Prescott and acted on by chancellor Gordon Brown, Britain happily signed up to an EU agreement with car makers that they would cut carbon dioxide emissions by 25% over ten years. This suited German car makers, specialists in Rudolf Diesel’s engine design, because diesel engines have 15% lower CO2 emissions than petrol engines.

 

The EU agreement was “practically an order to switch to diesel”, says one clean-air campaigner. As subjects of Brussels, Britain obediently lowered tax on diesel cars, despite knowing that they produce four times as much nitrogen oxides as petrol, and 20 times as many particulates, both bad for human lungs.

 

The story is almost a textbook case of why top-down regulation can be so dangerous. It lets single-issue pressure groups set targets with no thought to collateral damage, and imposes regulation that inevitably gets captured by those with a vested interest. Regulation also often stifles innovation. We may never know just how much innovation in cleaner petrol engines was prevented.

 

What is more, this is becoming a repetitive story. Almost every policy adopted to fight climate change has been a disaster, doing more harm than good.

 

Diverting agricultural crops into making ethanol or diesel to feed motor cars rather than people forces up the price of food, kills approximate 200,000 extra people a year and increases pressure on the rain forest.

 

Burning wood instead of coal in power stations has devastated forests and actually increased CO2 emissions: wood emits more CO2 per unit of energy generated even than coal and the argument that this does not matter because trees eventually regrow is unpersuasive.

 

Subsidising windmills has raised the price of energy, rewarded the rich, killed eagles and gannets, polluted Chinese waterways with effluent from rare-earth refining, and increased energy poverty – all without making a significant difference to emissions.

 

And now we know that giving tax breaks to diesel cars has made urban air quality worse than it would otherwise have been, killing possibly 5,000 people a year in this country alone. These were all mistakes made by people who thought they knew best.

 

In my new book The Evolution of Everything, I explore and expose the pervasive myth that the human world always requires top-down planning and centralized command and control. To say there is too much dirigisme in the world is not the same as saying there should be none. But we are too ready to reach for top-down solutions, which often have perverse consequences, rather than trusting and encouraging people to evolve solutions among themselves.

 

Vital and sophisticated aspects of human society work beautifully without anybody being in charge. The English language has no director-general. The internet is a wholly unplanned thing, with nobody in charge. The world economy has emerged through trade and innovation, with no central committee. Planned economic systems have been unmitigated catastrophes for ordinary people (though nice for elites) wherever they have been tried.

 

As Frederic Bastiat put it in his 1850 book Economic Harmonies, how would one even contemplate setting out a plan to feed Paris, a city with hordes of people with myriad tastes? It is impossible. Yet it happens, without fail, every day (and Paris has a still vaster population today, with more eclectic taste in food).

 

There is a close parallel with evolution here. The feeding of Paris, the ecosystem of a rain forest and the working of the human eye are equally complex manifestations of order. But in no case is there a central commanding intelligence. The knowledge of how to make it work is dispersed among millions of people, organisms or genes. It is decentralised. Just as creationists insist that the structure of the human eye reveals the intentions of a deity, so many of us are economic and social creationists who think governments run countries.

 

As so often, Adam Smith got there first, saying in The Wealth of Nations, in 1776: ‘The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society.’

 

In Parliament, I regularly see how colleagues in all parties think almost without exception that the purpose of legislation is to command not just the outcome but the means of social and economic change, rather than to create the conditions under which people work out their preferred solutions for themselves.

 

Dirigisme often does real harm. Telling people to eat less fat, based on a few dodgy studies in the 1950s that purported to find a link to heart disease, has probably worsened obesity by encouraging high-carbohydrate food. Discouraging electronic cigarettes, in the demonstrably wrong belief that they increased rather the decreased smoking, is slowing progress in the fight against smoking. Deliberately mandating that banks and government-sponsored enterprises (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) make or purchase sub-prime loans, as Bill Clinton and George Bush both did as a way of trying to raise home ownership among ethnic minorities, was a major contributor to the crash of 2008.

 

Equating order with control retains a powerful intuitive appeal, as the American social theorist Brink Lindsey has pointed out: ‘Despite the obvious successes of unplanned markets, despite the spectacular rise of the Internet’s decentralized order, and despite the well-publicized new science of “complexity” and its study of self-organizing systems, it is still widely assumed that the only alternative to central authority is chaos.’

 

The Paris conference on climate this December will be a perfect example of dirigisme at its worst. Instead of trying to impose on the world a set of top-down targets for reducing emissions, when those targets cannot possibly be achieved with today’s technologies without badly hurting poor people, and when those targets will create perverse incentives that will make the Volkswagen scandal look like a picnic, governments should be supporting bottom-up research into new energy technologies with open minds about what might emerge.

 

Bumper harvests release land for nature

My Times column on farm yields and the prospects for feeding the world in future:

 

This week’s autumn equinox is traditionally the time for the harvest festival. I have just taken a ride on the combine harvester cutting wheat on my farm. It is such a sophisticated threshing machine that long gone are the days when I could be trusted to take the controls during the lunch break. A screen showed how the GPS was steering it, inch-perfect and hands-free, along the edge of the unharvested crop; another screen gave an instant readout of the yield. It was averaging over five tonnes per acre (or 12 tonnes per hectare) — a record.

My farm is not alone in this. Everywhere in Britain this autumn, at least where the August downpours did not flatten and rot the crops, yields have broken records.

In the Lincolnshire Wolds, Tim Lamyman smashed the world record for wheat yield per acre, held for the past five years by a New Zealander. He also set a new world record for oilseed rape yield — he did this last year too, but lost it over the winter to a New Zealander. (Britain and New Zealand have the right combination of day length and soil moisture that breeds big wheat and rape crops.)

Unfortunately for farmers, this extraordinary harvest cannot make up for the steep fall in prices, and farm incomes will be down, not up. Bumper crops elsewhere are the main reason for those low prices. Globally, the cereal harvest this year will be very close to last year’s huge record. The Food and Agriculture Organisation’s food price index is now well below where it was throughout the 1960s and 1970s: that is to say, it’s proving cheaper and easier to feed seven billion today than it was to feed three billion in 1960.

This was not supposed to happen. Food prices rose in 2008 and again sharply in 2011, encouraging those who foresaw a Malthusian breaking point, where population would outstrip food supply. The eco-gloomsters who had talked for decades about a coming food crisis, even while famines faded, thought their day had come at last.

Yet the 2008-13 hump in food prices, which hurt poor people but helped farmers, was largely caused by Europe’s and America’s barmy decision, at the behest of the eco-gloomsters, to feed 5 per cent of the world’s grain crop to motor cars instead of people, in the mistaken belief that this was somehow good for the environment. We are still doing that, but at least we’ve stopped increasing the amount, so each year’s harvest increase can now go into food.

Last week, my fields were yielding 60 or 70 grains (seeds) of wheat for every grain that had been planted a year before. This would astonish our ancestors. A farmer in England in the 1300s was lucky to get four grains for every grain he planted. One of those four had to be saved for next year’s planting, leaving a precarious three to feed not only his own family but the various chiefs, priests and thieves who fed off him.

The truly surprising thing about this bounty is that not only are yields going up and up, in Britain as in the rest of the world, but that the amount of land required to produce that food is going down; and so is the amount of pesticide and fertiliser. Not just in relative terms, but in absolute terms.

The acreage devoted to wheat and barley in Britain has fallen by 25 per cent since the 1980s. Pesticide usage in this country has halved since 1990. Nitrogen consumption in agriculture is now 40 per cent below the level of the 1980s, while mineral phosphorus and potassium use are down by 60 per cent — though that is partly because more sewage and chicken excrement are being treated and recycled for use on farms.

The world cereal harvest grew by 20 per cent in the past ten years (cereals provide 65 per cent of our calories). It needs to grow by another 70 per cent in the next 35 years to feed 2050’s nine billion people, probably with more affluent tastes.

It is on track to do so and to release a huge area from growing food at the same time. That means more nature reserves, more golf courses, more horsey-culture and hobby farming, more forests and wild land.

Jesse Ausubel, of Rockefeller University in New York, has run the numbers. To paraphrase his paper with British examples, if we keep lifting average yields towards the demonstrated levels of Tim Lamyman, stop feeding wheat to cars and rape to lorries, restrain our diets lightly and reduce waste, then an area the size of India could be released globally from agriculture over the next 50 years.

In the 19th century, the world increased its harvest by breaking new ground — in North America, Russia, Argentina and Australia. In the early 20th century it increased the harvest by replacing horses with tractors and releasing the land used to grow hay for horses. In the late 20th century the harvest went up because of synthetic fertiliser, which does not need land to produce it as manure does. Short-strawed wheats, better pesticides and safer storage and transport helped too.

Today, precision farming is driving the harvest up. Satellites tell farmers exactly which parts of each field should get more or fewer seeds, more or less fertiliser. Less wasteful fertilisers that do not escape into weeds or the local water course are coming. Better varieties are arriving all the time, though wheat harvests are now dwarfed, worldwide, by maize, which is benefiting from genetic modification. Pesticides, growth regulators, mineral supplements — all can now be fine-tuned to give the most benefit and do the least collateral harm.

Meanwhile the efficiency with which a chicken turns feed into meat has roughly trebled in the past 50 years, so even meat farming is constantly cutting the size of its ecological footprint.

From the point of view of farmers’ incomes, this is not a happy picture. With population growth slowing all the time, and Africa rapidly joining Asia in using new machinery, better varieties and more fertiliser, the world may be glutted with food for the rest of the century, keeping prices low.

Barring disasters, of course. Luddite greens are determined to prevent genetic and chemical innovations that are good for the planet as well as the harvest. A massive volcanic eruption could cause a global famine. But meanwhile, bountiful harvests mean more space for nature.

Who deserves credit for the double helix?

My Times column on Nicole Kidman's performance as Rosalind Franklin in Photograph 51:

It’s not been a good fortnight for actresses and scientific accuracy. Last week Emma Thompson told the BBC that the world will warm by 4C by 2030 — about 3.5C too high, according to the experts. This week Nicole Kidman, whose performance as the DNA scientist Rosalind Franklin in Anna Ziegler’s play Photograph 51 begins its run on Monday, said she hopes to “put the spotlight” on the “inequality” of Franklin not getting the Nobel prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA. “She was not nominated. That’s not right.”

This is a pernicious myth, no less wrong for being well meant. Franklin was not nominated for the Nobel prize in 1962 because she was dead. The rules of the prizes are clear: they are only granted to the living. Had she lived it is highly likely she would have been nominated. Given that the discovery of the double helix in February 1953 was one of the greatest moments in science — up there with gravity, relativity and natural selection — it is crucial we do not let actresses rewrite the history.

Ziegler’s fascinating play (which I have read but not seen) gets most things right, within the limits of artistic licence, but makes one central mistake to compound Kidman’s.

What actually happened, and who was robbed? The double helix story had a single eureka moment, as dramatic as when Archimedes leapt from his bath: a human suddenly saw that the secret of life is a linear digital code written in a four-letter alphabet and capable of automatic replication.

That human was James Watson and it happened at about 10am on Saturday, February 28, 1953, in Cambridge (the play says it was snowing, in fact it was a fine spring day).

But, of course, Watson was standing on the shoulders of others. He was working on a model rebuilt in the preceding days by Francis Crick, whose realisation that the structure must consist of two chains running in opposite directions had been a crucial breakthrough.

But Crick stood on other shoulders. His “antiparallel” insight was derived from data in a report written by Rosalind Franklin about her X-ray work on DNA, data that she had not interpreted that way. Crick should probably not have been shown the report by his supervisor, Max Perutz (there was a huge debate about this years later between Perutz and John Randall - it ended inconclusively), but Franklin had presented the same data in public.

Franklin was standing on other shoulders as well. Her best X-ray photograph, No 51, the one that screamed “double helix” to Watson when he eventually saw it, had been taken nine months before by her graduate student, Raymond Gosling. True, she had made vital suggestions for improving Gosling’s technique, but he had been photographing DNA, in hydrogen gas, for some time before she even joined the project.

Gosling stood on other shoulders too. He had been hired and trained to make the X-rays by Maurice Wilkins, his first supervisor, and it was under Wilkins that he had first achieved an earlier image that showed DNA to have a regular structure.

Wilkins relied on Rudolf Signer for his DNA sample, and on William Astbury for pioneering x-ray photography of DNA. And so on back down the chain. As with all Nobel prizes there is a terrible unfairness in singling out three individuals to receive all the glory, leaving their sherpas, colleagues and erstwhile friends fuming in the dark.

Of the names above, the Nobel committee chose Watson, Crick and Wilkins. Had Franklin been alive they would have almost certainly chosen — so those protagonists I have spoken to agree — to give the medicine prize to Watson and Crick, the chemistry prize to Wilkins and Franklin.

The person most hard done by remains Raymond Gosling. In those days, the Nobel committee was in the habit of overlooking graduate students. Albert Schatz saw his supervisor get the prize in 1952 for his discovery of streptomycin while Jocelyn Bell, who discovered pulsars, was overlooked in favour of her supervisor in 1974. Unlike those two, who rightly complained, Gosling assured me before his death this year that he never minded.

The reason nobody is writing plays about Gosling’s neglect is, let’s be blunt, because he had a Y chromosome. As the play emphasises, Franklin was a woman in a man’s world. She was also Jewish and from an upper-class background. On all three grounds she felt sensitive and unwelcome, it seems, at King’s College London.

The play correctly identifies that the worst problem was her relationship with Wilkins. He was shy and inscrutable, she prickly and aloof. Their boss John Randall had sown resentment between them from the start by hiring Franklin on the promise that she would take over the DNA project, while telling Wilkins he could work with her. The breakdown of relations between these two brilliant people was a human tragedy, because it gave their Cambridge rivals a chance to seize the prize.

However, it’s not quite that simple. When Crick and Watson first tried to solve the puzzle at the end of 1951, it was a humiliating failure and Franklin told them so, in front of Wilkins, Gosling and others. At which point, Franklin and Gosling became the only scientists in Britain working on the structure of DNA, a most unusual privilege in science. Wilkins, Crick and Watson were told to keep out.

This situation lasted for about a year and only ended when Franklin decided to leave King’s and Randall told her to hand the DNA project back to Wilkins. That was how photograph 51 came to be in Wilkins’s hands — given to him by Franklin via Gosling — when he unwisely showed it to Watson in January 1953.

The play unforgivably omits that Franklin was leaving, implies photograph 51 was new and says Gosling “slipped” it to Wilkins. This is unfair to Gosling and Wilkins. The blunt truth is that Franklin had a unique opportunity to become the most famous scientist in history bar none, for most of 1952. Because she was cautious and disliked speculation or model building, and perhaps because of her reaction to the prejudice of others, she let it slip through her fingers. That’s a tragedy, not a travesty.

 

A Choice Between a Blinding Pessimism and an Illuminating Optimism

Here is a spectacular speech by my good friend June Arunga, on optimism about Africa.

"The broad generalisations that label Africa a continent of failure and business losses are plain wrong. They are part of that same pessimism that insists the only products worth investing in are misery and minerals."

Spectator diary

My recent Spectator diary:

Martin Williams, former head of the government’s air quality science unit, has declared that the reason we have a problem with air pollution now is that ‘policy has been focused on climate change, and reducing CO2 emissions, to the exclusion of much else, for most of the past two decades. Diesel was seen as a good thing because it produces less CO2, so we gave people incentives to buy diesel cars.’ Yet another example of how the global warming obsession has been bad for the environment — like subsidising biofuels, which encourage cutting down rainforests; or windfarms, which kill eagles and spoil landscapes; or denying coal-fired electricity to Africa, where millions die each year from the effects of cooking over smoky wood fires.

Greens are too hard on coal. If much of the world had not switched from wood to coal in the 1800s, we would have deforested the planet almost entirely. By 1860, Britain was getting as much energy from coal as a forest the size of Scotland could yield; today, we’d need a forest the size of South Africa. And coal produces less carbon dioxide than wood per unit of energy. I would say this, wouldn’t I? My ancestors were in coal from about 1700 and I still am, hosting a temporary surface mine on my land. It provides good jobs, lots of tax, a community benefits fund and an income windfall for local residents as well as me. Plus opportunities for spectacular restoration schemes, like Northumberlandia (look it up). It also helps keep electricity affordable.

The Guardian, unhappy that I said last week that its fossil-fuel divestment campaign was likely to hurt the poor, writes to tell me that it intends to have a go at me, rather than tackle my argument, by quoting an unreliable blogger about the amount I make from coal. I don’t own as much land as he thinks I do, nor share as little of the income with other residents, but I am under no obligation to invade others’ privacy by naming the sums. I always declare my interest when relevant. If I were getting similar money from wind or solar power — as I could if I approved of them — I’d be a hero to greens. It’s a strange world where the left likes rich people getting money only if it comes from a tax on poor people’s bills. (Meanwhile, part of the Guardian’s website is sponsored by a coal-mining company.)

Back in January, on the day a Japanese captive was beheaded by Islamic State, the Guardian published its previous attack on me over a picture of a severed zombie’s head. My crime was to write about how I had been furiously denounced merely for presenting the evidence that climate change is real but may not be net harmful — so the Guardian piece rather proved my point. Beneath the article online appeared two comments recommending that I be beheaded, and one revealing the writer of these comments was a Guardian contributor, Gary Evans. Astonishingly, the comment outing Mr Evans was deleted to protect him, while the death threats remained — until I complained.

Although the economy of the North-east is doing better than for many years, Northumberland’s old mining towns are still not prospering. My wife and I fund a charity that supports community projects mainly in Blyth, the port city that was built to export coal and in the 1990s became a drugs hotspot. Visiting one of these projects last week, the Silx Teen Bar, which gives 700 young people a year a place to hang out, a meal to eat and coaching in applying for jobs, I was encouraged. The bar’s been refurbished by volunteers, jobs are more numerous, heroin has faded, but legal highs are the new problem. Over tea and chocolate pizza, Jackie Long, the incredibly dedicated senior youth worker, told me what had happened to a young man I met on my last visit. Orphaned when his parents died from drugs, he relied on Silx from the age of 12 for food and friendship, and lived with his grandmother. Apparently she died recently and he drifted between evictions. Now he has a secure job and was recently named employee of the week. Silx was the family he came to show the certificate to.

The Homosexual Necrophiliac Duck Opera is opening at Kings Place in London in August. Where I sometimes go salmon fishing on the incomparably beautiful Coquet, there’s a mallard ménage-a-trois. For two months now, every time I have visited, two drakes and duck have been together in the mill race or below the dam. They are inseparable. I can tell they are the same birds from their markings. There’s no sexual jealousy, let alone necrophilia. They just keep on working the shallows for fly larvae beneath the tip of my fly rod. The rod is new and expensive. ‘There’s no pockets on a shroud,’ said David, my fishing companion, excusing my extravagance.

Reasons to be cheerful

Happy New Year.

I mean it. 2011 will see horrible things, no doubt, but it will also see a continuing incremental reduction in poverty, hunger, illness and suffering, plus a continuing incremental rise in most measures of human and planetary wellbeing.

Here's a fine blast of optimism from John Tierney in the New York Times. He took a bet with a peak-oiler and won hands down.

It's true that the real price of oil is slightly higher now than it was in 2005, and it's always possible that oil prices will spike again in the future. But the overall energy situation today looks a lot like a Cornucopian feast, as my colleagues  Matt Wald and  Cliff Krauss have recently reported. Giant new oil fields have been discovered off the coasts of Africa and Brazil. The new oil sands projects in Canada now supply more oil to the United States than Saudi Arabia does. Oil production in the United States increased last year, and the Department of Energy projects further increases over the next two decades.

The really good news is the discovery of vast quantities of natural gas. It's now selling for less than half of what it was five years ago. There's so much available that the Energy Department is predicting low prices for gas and electricity for the next quarter-century. Lobbyists for wind farms, once again, have been telling Washington that the "sustainable energy" industry can't sustain itself without further subsidies.

As gas replaces dirtier fossil fuels, the rise in greenhouse gas emissions will be tempered, according to the Department of Energy. It projects that no new coal power plants will be built, and that the level of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States will remain below the rate of 2005 for the next 15 years even if no new restrictions are imposed.

Maybe something unexpected will change these happy trends, but for now I'd say that Julian Simon's advice remains as good as ever. You can always make news with doomsday predictions, but you can usually make money betting against them.

 

I give some reasons for optimism in a Times article last week. Here is a slightly expanded version of it.

With one tenth - well, 11% -- of the twenty-first century now consigned to history, what is the verdict so far? A terrorist mass murder, two long wars, a financial crisis and a deep recession: not great. So perhaps it would surprise you to learn that, according to respectively Steven Pinker of Harvard University and Xavier Sala-i-Martin of Columbia University, the last decade saw the lowest number of global deaths in war since records began in 1945 and the fastest ever reduction in global income inequality.

Britons, who have spent most of this century at war, and the last two years getting poorer, may find these global numbers cold comfort. But they are actually good news for us too. The fact that the world economy grew by more than 5% in 2010 (nearly ten times as fast as it shrank in 2009) means more customers for our exports and more investment elsewhere in things that can improve our lives too - like cancer cures or self-clearing runways.

According to the IMF, away from Europe and North America, the world was booming this year. Asia has grown by 7.9%, South America by 6.3%, Africa by 5% and the Middle-east and North Africa by 4.1%. China and India, with 40% of the world's population, achieved roughly 10% growth between them. Moreover, this boom, because it is happening in poor countries, is rapidly reducing both poverty and inequality.

Despite the Great Recession, the per capita GDP of the average human being - that is to say, the value of goods and services that she consumes in a year - is now just over $11,000, up from about $8,500 (in today's dollars) at the start of the century. If it continues to increase at this rate of just under 3% a year - as it has more than done for 60 years - then by the year 2050 the average citizen of Earth will be earning and spending over $30,000 a year in today's money, roughly the same as the average American spends today. By 2100 she will be spending nearly $150,000 a year, or five times what an American now consumes.

This is almost unimaginable. Try to get your heads round the prospect of Africans and Afghans having the disposable income of today's Americans within the lifetime of your own children, let alone grandchildren. If it seems fanciful, consider this. If my great grandfather had made a similar forecast in 1910, based on the then growth rate of the world economy, then even assuming he would not have predicted two world wars and a Great Depression, he would still have hugely underestimated the average income of today.

What is growth? It means fulfilling more needs and more wants with a smaller amount of work. A kilowatt-hour of electricity cost an hour of work in 1900 for somebody on the average wage; it costs five minutes of work today.

The economic growth of the past decade took a century to achieve in 1810 and took a millennium to achieve in 810. That acceleration shows no signs of stopping, indeed it may be about to redouble. The root cause of economic growth is the mixing of ideas: ideas on how to recombine the atoms and electrons of the world in such a way as to supply people's needs and wants more efficiently. Bring down barriers to the mixing of ideas (barriers in trade, energy, communication and education) and you will cause faster growth whether you want to or not. Nothing has brought down barriers to the mixing of ideas faster than the internet. Today a man in Shanghai and a woman in San Francisco can spark each other's thoughts in seconds, where two decades ago they needed books or aeroplanes to have such mental sex.

Economic growth has a strange and telling feature. While it jumps up and down in individual countries, in the world as a whole it shows an inexorable steadiness. Suppress it in one place and it surges elsewhere. Just as the mandarins who served the Ming emperors once sent prosperity into European exile, by erecting barriers to enterprise, so the Eurocrats who serve Emperor Herman van Rompuy are now returning the favour.

Another symptom of this inexorability is simultaneous discovery. As Kevin Kelly reveals in his remarkable book What Technology Wants, every invention is plagued with disputes between people who perfected rival versions of it at the same moment: from telephones to lightbulbs, from natural selection to Neptune, from vaccines to transistors -synchronous discovery is the rule rather than the exception. That is because each innovation makes the next one `ripe'. And since it is these inventions that raise living standards, the inevitability of discovery means inevitable economic growth.

What is more, this process generates virtue. The essence of virtue is co-operation: pro-social rather than anti-social behaviour. Study after study confirms that immersing people in commerce makes them nicer: le doux commerce, Montesquieu called it. Growth comes about through people working for each other. Self sufficiency is poverty; prosperity is mutual exchange and specialisation. The more you specialise in doing one thing for strangers and they each specialise in doing one thing for you, the better your productivity and the greater your standard of living. Millions of people you will never meet contributed to making for you each of the objects you use in your everyday life. Far from being a selfish creed, economic growth spreads collaboration.

Moreover, with growth come other non-material benefits. As people get richer so they demand that more money and attention be paid to what were once luxuries like clean water, clean air, clean energy and biodiversity. So it is not just child mortality and family size that fall rapidly with wealth; pollution and habitat destruction come tumbling down once incomes pass a level of about $8,000 a head. More and more countries are passing that threshold right now. Watch as India and China get interested in saving tigers and pandas - hopefully just in time. Watch as genetic engineers eventually revive the dodo and the thylacine: that is the kind of luxury great wealth can buy.

Not everything will go right. Because we are human, there will be wars, bubbles, recessions, disasters and superstitions, but just as the recent crisis failed to derail world growth, so it is unlikely that the great existential threats that each generation so warmly clutches to its pessimistic bosom will blow away this inexorable boom. Doom after doom, from eugenic deterioration of the race to the collapse of computers at the millennium, has turned out to be a mirage. Population growth is slowing, and will halt altogether around 2070. Both theoretically and empirically, climate change looks set to continue to happen too slowly to reach a dangerous pace, absent some implausible feedback or tipping point mechanism. Fossil fuels, especially gas, far from running out, will prove sufficiently abundant to fuel even the super-prosperity of this century, before giving way to cheaper forms of energy as scarcity eventually drives up their price. Great plagues, mega-volcanoes, asteroids and vengeful superintelligent computers are all possible, but improbable.

At this dark, cold, austere moment, take a little cheer from the question: what could go right?

Carbon out, carbon in

Here's a sum I just did.

In 2070, population will probably have grown to about 9.0
billion

-- an increase of 35%;

CO2 levels will probably have increased to nearly 700 ppm

-- an increase of about 300ppm.

There have now been 235 studies of what happens to wheat yields when
you increase CO2 levels by 300ppm.

Answer yields increase by 32.1% +/- 1.8% (SE).

There have now been 182 studies of what happens to rice yields when you
increase CO2 levels by 300ppm.

Answer: yields increase by 34.4% +/-1.8%

There have now been 179 studies of what happens to soybean yields when
you increase CO2 levels by 300ppm.

Answer yields increase by 46.5% +/- 2.8% (SE).

There have now been 20 studies of what happens to maize (corn) yields
when you increase CO2 levels by 300ppm.

Answer yields increase by 21.3% +/- 4.9% (SE).

These meta-analyses comes from the excellent CO2
Science website.

These are the four biggest crops in terms of calories.

Therefore the quantity of calories produced to feed people will
-- other things being equal -- keep pace with the growth of
population, entirely because of CO2 emissions. (That's why
commercial greenhouses often use CO2-enriched air.)

Of course, there are lots of reasons people don't believe these
yield increase would be achieved -- chiefly because CO2 is not
always the limiting factor -- but the potential is there.  And
remember these calculations do not even take into account the
longer growing seasons caused by greater warmth or the higher
yields caused by more rainfall. Also a plant growing in a higher
CO2 air loses less water to the air because it does not have to
open as many stomata.

 

 

Reputation, weather and climate

Though I am writing this from Texas, from tomorrow I will be
back in the UK and I have been checking the weather forecast for my
home at the Met Office's excellent website.

By excellent, I mean both clear and accurate. I find the Met
Office's forecasts for a day ahead very good and the ones for up to
five days ahead pretty reliable and the ones for 30 days ahead
mostly not worth reading. That is not a criticism; it's a fair
reflection of the unpredictability of chaotic systems: short-term
certainty rapidly decaying into long-term luck.

Which is why I wonder what the excellent Met Office weather
forecasters feel about the way their organisation's leaders have
got them into dire reputational trouble, by obsessively trying to
pretend they can forecast climate as well as they can forecast
weather. Weather people, are you not getting just a bit disgusted
with your climate collagues? By predicting a "barbecue" summer that
was a washout in between two "mild" winters that were colder than
average, did they not committ the cardinal sin of weather
forecasting -- long term overconfidence? And drag you down with
them?

This reputational trouble is deepening. December was the coldest in the UK since records began in
1910 with an average of -1.7C [-0.7C in England, and the CET series is longer and has a colder December
in 1890.]. The Met Office is now claiming it privately told the
government in October to expect severe cold. Yet at around the same
time it put this image on its website, clearly predicting a mild
winter:

 

 

Was it really saying one thing to government and another to
readers of its website? How very convenient.

Autonomous Mind has this to say:

Ask yourself is this: Does it seem reasonable
or probable that the publicly funded meterology department of the
UK provided the government with a secret forecast about exceptional
cold, at the same time it was publishing the opposite forecast to
the public, but did so because it was previously ridiculed for
getting seasonal forecasts wrong? And that the government conspired
to keep it secret, took no action to prepare to keep the highways
clear and maintain a safe driving environment and let its Winter
Fuel Allowance budget be used up with only a fraction of the winter
gone?

Where is the logic in the Met Office thinking
it would avoid ridicule by telling the public on its own website
that there was a circa 80% probability of a warmer than average
winter if it was actually predicting the exceptional cold as it
claims to have told the government?

If I ran the Met Office, I would tell it to get back to its
knitting: concentrate on short-term weather forecasting and deny
any expertise on climate. The reason it won't is money: the Met Office
gets huge dollops of grants from taxpayers to study climate. And it
is chaired by an ideologue on the subject, Robert Napier.