Matt Ridley's Blog, page 8

Book Review: A Dominant Character by Samanth Subramanian — the stupidity of a brilliant mind

My article for The Times:

When he knew he was dying, the scientist JBS Haldane wrote that he hadn’t walked on the seafloor from England to France, but he had been wounded in war, known the love of two women, tried heroin and bhang, eaten 60g of hexahydrated strontium chloride in an attempt to change the acidity of his blood, and spent 48 hours in a miniature submarine.

His spine was permanently damaged by the convulsions brought on by more than 100 self-experiments, during the Second World War, inside decompression chambers filled with various gases, trying to understand how to save submariners’ lives.

Gassing oneself was the family business. Haldane’s father, John Scott Haldane, was a leading physiologist who, among other things, found out the hard way that excess carbon dioxide, not lack of oxygen, is what causes loss of consciousness in confined spaces. Haldane Sr also worked out how to prevent divers getting the bends, sending his 13-year-old son from the deck of a warship (HMS Spanker!) to the bottom of a Scottish sea loch in a weighted diving suit that leaked before raising him very slowly to the surface just in time. He took his son down a coalmine to make him try, while breathing methane, to recite Mark Antony’s funeral speech from Julius Caesar without blacking out. He got five lines in before fainting.

During the First World War father and son experimented on themselves with poison gas to understand its effects, its antidotes and how to design gas masks. This was after the son’s spell as a Black Watch officer in the trenches, where he became an expert on the design and use of mortar bombs. He thoroughly enjoyed the front line, rather more so than the soldiers whose stretch of front he drew retaliatory fire upon. Later he dodged death in the Spanish Civil War when a woman was killed by a shell sitting on the bench next to him.

Yet all this bonkers courage is a mere footnote to Haldane’s extraordinary life (1892-1964), which was dominated by two obsessions that eventually came into painful conflict: genetics and communism. Haldane was one of three scientists (the others were Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright) who reconciled Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian genetics in the early part of the 20th century, in what became known as the new synthesis. He showed that far from the two theories being in conflict, the discovery of discrete “genes” was essential to explain the process of natural selection.

Haldane has a longer list of genetic insights to his name than probably any other scientist, including genetic linkage in mammals and kin selection (that animals sacrifice themselves for close relatives because of shared genes). He was responsible for calculating mutation rates and how they are faster in men, working out the mathematics of how one version of a gene displaces another during survival of the fittest, suggesting that sickle-cell anaemia genes can prevent malaria, mapping haemophilia and colour blindness to the X chromosome and showing how it is the sex with unequal sex chromosomes that is sterile in hybrids (males in mammals, females in birds and butterflies).

Relentlessly logical, obsessively mathematical and pugnaciously confident, Haldane did not suffer fools. He resisted the prevailing fashion for eugenics better than most biologists. So it is all the more baffling that he chose in the 1940s to defend the Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko, long after everybody else in the West had recognised that this charlatan faked his results and had his rivals arrested and killed.

Lysenko argued, in direct contradiction of many of Haldane’s discoveries, that plants and animals could inherit changes forced on their bodies, not just their germ cells, in their lifetime. So wheat could be trained, rather than bred, to be frost resistant and could even be turned into rye by being cultivated in the “appropriate” way. He ordered sugar beet planted on a massive scale in semi-desert soil and blamed its total failure — which contributed to millions of Russians starving — on Trotskyite sabotage. Nikolai Vavilov, a brilliant geneticist who had hosted Haldane in Moscow, was arrested at Lysenko’s behest and died in jail, yet still Haldane defended Lysenko, most infamously in a BBC broadcast in 1948.

If Stalin thought Lysenko was right, that was good enough for Haldane. His only visit to the Soviet Union, in 1928, had coincided with the highly publicised trial of 53 engineers for supposedly sabotaging the productivity of coalmines in the town of Shakhty, effectively the first of the show trials that purged so many innocent victims throughout society. Yet Haldane “saw only what he cared to see”, his biographer Samanth Subramanian writes. In 1940 he appeared in a Soviet film endorsing the work of another pseudoscientist named Sergei Brukhonenko who claimed to keep alive the heads of decapitated dogs.

In 1942, enraged by fascism, Haldane had joined the British Communist Party, having embarked on a new career as a public speaker and activist, almost inciting a riot at the German embassy in 1938. In 1948 he was under pressure from the party to come to Lysenko’s defence, but this seems, for a man of such humanity, courage and independence of thought, a feeble reason for defending Lysenko. Even Haldane’s estranged wife, Charlotte, who was a party member before him, had by now left the party in protest at the treatment of Vavilov. Eventually, in the 1950s, the contradictions became too much even for Haldane. He resigned quietly from the party and stopped chairing the editorial board of the Daily Worker.

Subramanian’s superb biography of this extraordinary man begins with this troubling episode, arguing that “the Lysenko affair is an oddly perfect way to understand Haldane. A man stepped outside his character, and in so doing, revealed that character to us.” Admitting that he was wrong about Lysenko would mean admitting that he was wrong about Stalin and communism, Subramanian says. It will have to do as an explanation.

Subramanian does a masterly job of summarising a rich and rough life. He uses sharp analogies and arresting images. Haldane’s handwriting was like “ants somersaulting through snow”. His columns for the Daily Worker were like “razor blades in print”. He writes that in his thirties “the various streams of his experience pooled within the basin of his character”. Haldane would have approved. Look for a familiar analogy, he wrote in “How to write a popular scientific article”. But, both illustrating and contradicting the point, he also wrote “an ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument”.

Haldane was nonetheless a prolific and fluent generator of tons of verbal arguments, drawing on his Greats degree and deep draughts of philosophy and poetry in his essays and journalism. Some of his sayings have passed into legend. “The world is not only queerer than anyone has imagined, but queerer than anyone can imagine,” he wrote in a letter to Robert Graves. Whether Haldane actually said that the Creator “has an inordinate fondness for beetles” Subramanian is unable to confirm, disappointingly. But it sounds like him.

In 1956 Haldane emigrated to India, attracted more by Nehru’s socialism than anything else. Also, to avoid wearing socks: “Sixty years in socks is enough.” He soon fell out with the bureaucracy in the Indian Statistical Institute near Calcutta, moving to Bhubaneswar to run his own genetics institute. In 1963, while travelling in London, he was operated on for rectal cancer, writing what is possibly the funniest medical poem in existence, which Subramanian rightly quotes in full (sample rhyme: “My rectum is a serious loss to me/ But I’ve a very neat colostomy”). He died, aged 72, in December 1964.

Subramanian summarises Haldane’s contribution as “an incandescent persona: the man who lifted the arras that hid the work of nature; the man who stepped down, into the everyday world, from his tower of ivory; the man who shrugged away convention and defied authority”. Haldane deserves a biographer who is eloquent, intelligent, fair, but unsparing and as good at explaining science as politics. Not an easy combination, but he has got one.

A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of JBS Haldane by Samanth Subramanian, Atlantic, 384pp; £20

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5 reasons why the coronavirus nightmare may soon be over

My article for The Telegraph:

Like the ancient mariner, the virus refuses to leave us alone. Resurging in Blackburn, Spain, and America, it is still going to be around here when the winter comes. As we head indoors, it will be back for a dreaded second wave, disguised among a host of colds and flus. Yet I am now optimistic that the nightmare will end this year or at least by the spring. Here are five reasons.

First, vaccine trials were promising. Having proved safe and capable of raising both a T-cell response and an antibody response, Oxford University’s vaccine, developed in collaboration with Astrazeneca, is now more likely to succeed than to fail, so long as its side effects are manageable in the elderly. And behind it comes a stream of other vaccines, some of which will surely work.

The second reason for hope is that, as Oxford University’s epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta has argued, herd immunity may be achieved more easily than we first thought. Indeed, from the way that infections have continued to dwindle despite lessening social distancing it seems probable that herd immunity has already been achieved in London at least. Half the population could be immune already because of recent exposure to coronavirus colds, while children seem to resist catching Covid-19, let alone passing it on. As the chief medical officer Chris Whitty has conceded, the epidemic was already in retreat before lockdown began. That is because the virus depends heavily on a few superspreaders, and pre-lockdown measures we were taking in March are remarkably effective: no handshakes, frequent hand washing, no large gatherings and so on.

So the third reason for optimism is that as long as we continue with these measures then this virus will struggle to keep spreading in the community. The one place where the virus did spread with horrible ease was in care homes and hospitals. Why was this? T-cell senescence is an issue, so old people’s immune systems are just not as good at coping with this kind of infection, and there were dreadful policy mistakes made, like stopping testing people, clearing patients out of hospitals to care homes without tests, and assuming no asymptomatic transmission. Healthcare and care home staff were not properly protected and were allowed to go from site to site. Many were infected and became carriers.

The fourth cause for cheer is therefore that now we know about asymptomatic transmission, we have more protective equipment and we have a better, if still imperfect, capacity to test, track and isolate cases, it is likely that the hospital-acquired epidemic of the spring will not be repeated.

My fifth excuse for being hopeful is that we now know better how to treat people who get seriously ill. Ventilation is not necessarily the answer, blood clotting is a real threat, making patients lie face down is helpful, dexamethasone can save lives and some antiviral drugs are showing promise.

These are reasons that even if a lot of people catch the virus this winter, fewer will die. Colds and flu viruses usually peak in mid winter when we are indoors. Viruses survive longer in colder and drier conditions, and centrally heated air dries out our protective mucus membranes. Covid-19 will certainly be hoping to peak then. But Australia offers a glimmer of reassurance. It’s winter there now, and this is proving to be the country’s weakest flu season on record. From January to the end of June, 21,000 Australians were diagnosed with flu. Last year more than 132,000 people were diagnosed in the same period. Social distancing is presumably the main reason. If that is repeated here, then not only will Covid have fewer flus and colds to hide behind, but it too will struggle to mount a seasonal peak. And fewer people will die from flu.

If we can beat this virus, then we can beat most respiratory ones. The ridiculous way in which we tolerate cold-spreaders, mocking them for taking a day off and praising them for trudging into work while feeling miserable, has to stop. It should be socially unacceptable to go to a party with a cold, let alone kiss the host on the cheek when you get there. Our children’s permanently runny noses need not be inevitable.

Ten years from now, I predict that we will not only have defeated Covid-19, but made colds rarer too.

Our bigger challenge this winter will be to tackle the backlog of treating cancer and other medical problems delayed by Covid. And to unleash economic growth to help those who lost their jobs. 

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter!

My new book How Innovation Works is available now in the US, Canada, and UK.

Innovation is the parent of prosperity: Naval Interview Part 2

The second half of my much-anticipated interview with Silicon Valley legend Naval Ravikant in May is now available. We discussed my new book How Innovation Works and more.

It was a wonderful discussion, and I appreciated hearing the perspective of a true entrepreneur and innovator.

You can listen to it via his YouTube page below, or download it on Apple Podcasts, or download it elsewhere or read the transcript on his website.

Listen to Part 1

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter!

My new book How Innovation Works is available now in the US, Canada, and UK.

Against Environmental Pessimism

My article for PERC:

In 1980, the year that PERC was founded, I spent three months in the Himalayas working on a wildlife conservation project. The purpose was to do wildlife surveys on behalf of the Indian government in the stunningly beautiful valleys of the Kulu region in northern India, among forests of deodar cedar and evergreen oak. One species of particular interest was a bird called the western tragopan, a large, spotted gray forest pheasant with red plumage around the neck and bright blue skin on the male’s throat. The bird was found only in a few places and thought to be teetering on the brink of extinction. 

Though we saw other pheasant species, we never saw a tragopan that year, but some of the people we met knew of the bird, and one even handed me the remains of a tragopan that had been shot for food. I feared it might be the last one. I wanted to come back in the spring when the birds’ mating calls might give them away in the deep bamboo thickets they preferred, but work prevented me.

If you had asked me in 1980 to predict what would happen to that bird and its forest ecosystem, I would have been very pessimistic. I could see the effect on the forests of growing human populations, with their guns and flocks of sheep. More generally, I was marinated in gloom by almost everything I read about the environment. The human population explosion was unstoppable; billions were going to die of famine; malaria and other diseases were going to increase; oil, gas, and metals would soon run out, forcing us to return to burning wood; most forests would then be felled; deserts were expanding; half of all species were heading for extinction; the great whales would soon be gone from the oil-stained oceans; sprawling cities and modern farms were going to swallow up the last wild places; and pollution of the air, rivers, sea, and earth was beginning to threaten a planetary ecological breakdown. I don’t remember reading anything remotely optimistic about the future of the planet.

Today, the valleys we worked in are part of the Great Himalayan National Park, a protected area that gained prestigious World Heritage status in 2014. The logo of the park is an image of the western tragopan, a bird you can now go on a trekking holiday specifically to watch. It has not gone extinct, and although it is still rare and hard to spot, the latest population estimate is considerably higher than anybody expected back then. The area remains mostly a wilderness accessible largely on foot, and the forests and alpine meadows have partly recovered from too much grazing, hunting, and logging. Ecotourism is flourishing.

This is just one small example of things going right in the environment. Let me give some bigger ones. Far from starving, the seven billion people who now inhabit the planet are far better fed than the four billion of 1980. Famine has pretty much gone extinct in recent decades. In the 1960s, about two million people died of famine; in the decade that just ended, tens of thousands died—and those were in countries run by callous tyrants. Paul Ehrlich, the ecologist and best-selling author who declared in 1968 that “[t]he battle to feed all of humanity is over” and forecast that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death”—and was given a genius award for it—proved to be very badly wrong.

Remarkably, this feeding of seven billion people has happened without taking much new land under the plow and the cow. Instead, in many places farmland has reverted to wilderness. In 2009, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University calculated that thanks to more farmers getting access to better fertilizers, pesticides, and biotechnology, the area of land needed to produce a given quantity of food—averaged for all crops—was 65 percent less than in 1961. As a result, an area the size of India will be freed up by mid-century. That is an enormous boost for wildlife. National parks and other protected areas have expanded steadily as well.

Nor have these agricultural improvements on the whole brought new problems of pollution in their wake. Quite the reverse. The replacement of pesticides like DDT with much less harmful ones that do not persist in the environment and accumulate up the food chain, in addition to advances in biotechnology, has allowed wildlife to begin to recover. In the part of northern England where I live, otters have returned to the rivers, and hawks, kites, ospreys, and falcons to the skies, largely thanks to the elimination of organochlorine pesticides. Where genetically modified crops are grown—not in the European Union—there has been a 37 percent reduction in the use of insecticides, as shown by a recent study done at Gottingen University.

One of the extraordinary features of the past 40 years has been the reappearance of wildlife that was once seemingly headed for extinction. Bald eagles have bounced back so spectacularly that they have been taken off the endangered list. Deer and beavers have spread into the suburbs of cities, followed by coyotes, bears, and even wolves. The wolf has now recolonized much of Germany, France, and even parts of the heavily populated Netherlands. Estuaries have been cleaned up so that fish and birds have recolonized rivers like the Thames.

Global Greening

Here’s a question I put to school children when I get the chance: Why is the wolf population increasing, the lion decreasing, and the tiger now holding its own? The answer is simple: Wolves live in rich countries, lions in poor countries, and tigers in middle-income countries. It turns out that we conservationists were wrong to fear economic development in the 1980s. Prosperity is the best thing that can happen to a country’s wildlife. As people get richer, they can afford to buy electricity rather than cut wood, buy chicken rather than hunt bushmeat, or get a job in a town rather than try to scratch a living from a patch of land. They can also stop worrying that their children will starve and start to care about the environment. In country after country, first in Asia, then in Latin America, and now increasingly in Africa, that process of development leading to environmental gains has swiftly delivered a turning point in the fortunes of wild ecosystems. 

One way of measuring such progress is to look at forests. Forests are still being cut down in poor countries, but they are expanding in rich ones. It turns out that when a country reaches a certain level of income, around $5,000 per person per year, it starts reforesting. This is because people become wealthy enough to stop relying on wood fires for cooking and to use electricity or gas instead. Bangladesh, for example, was desperately poor in 1980 but is now rich enough to be significantly increasing its forest cover today.

Overall, therefore, the number of trees in the world is steadily increasing. A study published by NASA and the University of Maryland in 2018 examined satellite data and found that global increases in tree cover have more than offset losses in tree cover over the past 35 years. This is not just because of growing plantations of timber crops; most of it is natural regeneration. Nor is this happening only in the cold woods of the North; tropical countries are reforesting as well. If you had told me in 1980 that this would happen, I would not have believed you.

In 2013, I caught wind of an interesting study being done by NASA in conjunction with Boston and Beijing Universities. A team of researchers had found a way of measuring the quantity of green vegetation on the surface of the planet using satellite data. It was increasing: There were more green leaves each year. I published an article on this phenomenon of “global greening” and was immediately vilified for my impertinence in departing from the pessimistic script. But in fact it had been clear for some years that the carbon dioxide levels measured on top of a mountain in Hawaii, though increasing year over year, were also rising and falling with the seasons more than they once did, implying there was more growth of green leaves in the northern hemisphere summers.

In 2016, the same team published a paper confirming that global greening was occurring and speculating about the cause. Although the press release that accompanied the paper preemptively admonished me—by name!—for taking any comfort from this fact, it quoted the lead author, Zaichin Zhu of Beijing University, saying that the greening over the past 30 years was equivalent to adding a new continent covered in green vegetation twice the size of the United States. Global greening is occurring in all ecosystems, including rainforests, tundras, and croplands, and it is particularly strong in the arid areas of the planet.

By analyzing the patterns of this greening, Zhu and his colleagues were able to tease out why it was happening. Some of it was due to the use of fertilizer, some to increased rainfall caused by the slight warming of the seas, and some to reforestation. But the greatest cause, responsible for 70 percent of the greening, was the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is the raw food that plants use, with water, to make carbohydrates and thence proteins and fats.

This CO2-fertilization effect was well known in principle, thanks to thousands of experiments in laboratories, greenhouses, and the open air over many years. Indeed, commercial greenhouses purchase carbon dioxide to pump over tomato plants to encourage them to grow faster. But this was the first time it had been measured on a global scale. Another study published this year confirmed “the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration as the dominant driver” of a 31 percent increase in global terrestrial gross primary production since 1900.

Global greening means that there is more food every year for caterpillars, antelopes, woodpeckers, and countless other species. It also means we need less land to feed ourselves than we would otherwise have needed by now. Of all the things that I did not expect in 1980, this is surely one of the most remarkable.

More From Less

In the ocean, too, though a lot is still going wrong, my younger self in 1980 would be amazed by what has happened. The amount of oil spilled in the seas has fallen by 80 percent since 1980. This is because shipowners got together and agreed to use double-hulled tankers, and GPS navigation soon made shipwrecks less likely. At the same time, the populations of whales have increased in spectacular fashion. Humpback whales, for example, numbered less than 5,000 in the 1960s. Today there are at least 80,000.

The subantarctic island of South Georgia, which I was fortunate to visit in 2016, now has millions of king penguins, millions of fur seals, and almost a million elephant seals crowding its beaches. These species were vanishingly rare in the middle of the 20th century, after whalers and sealers had devastated the island’s wildlife. In the Arctic, the numbers of walrus and polar bear have similarly rebounded to high levels. This is partly because of regulatory protection, but also partly due a change in economic incentives. Just like an African subsistence farmer who gets a job in a town and starts to buy chicken in the shop instead of relying on bushmeat, so we in the West have decided that killing wild seals and whales for their meat or their blubber now makes less economic sense than rearing chickens, growing canola, or drilling for oil.

Indeed, in areas where wildlife populations are declining, it is now often caused by competition from recovering species. Fin whales are gathering in such huge aggregations off Elephant Island near the Antarctic Peninsula that they are eating the krill relied on by chinstrap penguins, causing a fall in the numbers of the latter. Humpback whales are eating the prey of puffins off the coast of Iceland, contributing to breeding failures. Killer whales have driven away great white sharks in South Africa. Hedgehogs have disappeared from much of the British countryside because of predation by badgers, whose populations have blossomed.

If only we could stop relying on wild caught fish, they too could recover to fill the seas again. Fortunately, we are making progress here as well. Today, about half of our seafood now comes from farmed fish and shrimp. But to feed these farmed animals, we still need to catch wild fish, and if we can alter that, perhaps with biotech crops, then maybe we can go back to a time when vast shoals of huge tuna and swordfish roamed the oceans. 

Some worry that reporting good news about the environment makes people complacent. I disagree. It makes people realize that declines are not inevitable, that improvements are possible, and that it is worth trying. Take the case of New Zealand’s determination to rid itself of all mammalian predators by 2050. (Apart from bats and seals, no mammals are native to New Zealand, and introduced alien mammals such as stoats and foxes have devastated native wildlife.) This ludicrously ambitious plan is only being contemplated because of the remarkable achievements of New Zealand conservationists on offshore islands, such as Stewart Island and South Georgia, where poisoned rat bait spread by helicopters has rid large, mountainous islands of rodents altogether.

Despite such efforts, the perils presented by alien species are an example of a trend that is not yet going in the right direction, and it is a reminder not to be Panglossian. Invasive species are the biggest cause of extinction of mammals and birds on islands. The brown tree snake, for example, has caused the extinction of 12 bird species on Guam. One innovation that could help in this fight is gene drive, a technology in which a genetic sequence that makes all offspring male spreads through a population for a set number of generations, driving a local population extinct. This could soon be used, for example, to wipe out the alien mosquitoes that have spread the avian malaria that has caused the decline of native honeyeaters in Hawaii, many species of which have gone extinct.

I therefore venture to predict that in 40 years we will have rid the world’s islands of many of the invasive species that have done such harm, using biotechnology. Indeed, we will have gone further and revived several extinct species. Under the banner of Revive and Restore, Ryan Phelan and Stewart Brand have begun exploring how this could be done. First you need to read the full genome of an extinct species from a museum specimen. In some cases this has already been done. The passenger pigeon, which went extinct in 1914, and the great auk, which went extinct in 1844, have been sequenced in this way. Second you need to make precise edits to the genome of a closely related species. The new base-editing and prime-editing techniques that are being developed promise to make this possible fairly soon. Third, you need to introduce this genome into embryos to grow a population of individuals, and then you need to reintroduce them to the wild. I expect this will happen in my children’s lifetime.

The Next 40

What else might we achieve by the year 2060, when I shall be 102? Even though there will then be more than nine billion people, it is almost certain there will be larger forests, more wildlife, cleaner rivers, and richer seas, because that is what is currently happening. Most people who deny this, and insist things are getting worse, are simply wrong. The latest example is the “insect apocalypse,” a scare that has been widely reported by the media but is based on inadequate data and ridiculous exaggerations from one or two small-scale studies of dubious value.

There is, however, one thing that worries me, and it is this: Some environmentalists, as steeped in pessimism today as I was 40 years ago, are determined to push policies that actually harm the environment. They want us to farm organically, even though that uses more land and does more harm to the soil than farming with chemicals and biotechnology. They want us to get all of the energy we need from the sun or the wind, even if it means covering the landscape in industrial structures to try to extract energy from extremely low-density sources. They want us to turn crops into fuel, via ethanol from corn or diesel from palm oil, even though this means pinching land from wildlife. They want us to reject biotechnology and nuclear power, two practices that reduce humans’ environmental footprint. They want us to recycle plastic, rather than incinerate it, which has resulted in an industry of exporting plastic to Asia where much of it ends up dumped in the ocean. In short, their policies are in many cases actually worse for the environment.

I will end with one further prediction. While climate change is real and man-made, it will not cause catastrophe by 2060. The current rate of warming over the past three decades is about half what scientists predicted in 1990: 0.17ºC per decade compared with 0.30ºC. And, as predicted, the warming is happening more at night, in cold areas, and in winter than in the daytime, in warm areas, and in summer. The effect on the frequency and intensity of storms, droughts, floods, blizzards, and other weather events is still so small that it is hard to detect. These continue to happen, of course. There has probably been a slight decline in droughts, but a slight increase in heat waves. There is less snow cover in the northern hemisphere in spring, more in fall, and no change in winter. Glaciers are retreating, as they have been since the mid-1800s. Most important, deaths from weather events continue to fall steeply as more countries get access to the technology, infrastructure, and information needed to prevent large-scale loss of life in a hurricane, drought, or flood. 

Moreover, if warming continues like this, by 2060 we will still not have reached the sort of temperatures that were standard in the early part of the current interglacial period, when the Arctic Ocean regularly lost all of its ice during the summer. So we are not heading into unprecedented territory. And I suspect that we will ultimately solve the problem by substituting nuclear fusion for fossil fuels long before its consequences turn catastrophic.

I was wrong to be pessimistic about the environment in 1980, and it would be wrong to give young people a counsel of despair today. Much has improved since then, and as PERC’s work has demonstrated for four decades and counting, much improvement from here is not only possible, but likely.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter!

My new book How Innovation Works is available now in the US, Canada, and UK.

 

 

 

Innovation is the child of freedom: Naval Interview Part 1

The first half of my much-anticipated interview with Silicon Valley legend Naval Ravikant in May is now available. We discussed my new book How Innovation Works and more.

It was a wonderful discussion, and I appreciated hearing the perspective of a true entrepreneur and innovator.

You can listen to it on his YouTube page below, download it on Apple Podcasts, or download it elsewhere or read the transcript on his website.

Unfortunately I don't know when the second part will be available, as production is on his side, but it will be shared on my Twitter and the platforms listed below as soon as it's out!

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter!

My new book How Innovation Works is available now in the US, Canada, and UK.

 

Forget the doom and gloom. The retreat of Covid-19 is a great cause for optimism

My article for the Telegraph:

It is now three weeks since thousands of protesters first gathered in Trafalgar Square, and two weeks since London filled with even larger crowds, few of whom wore masks or kept two metres apart, and some of whom got involved in fights, resulting in arrests and injuries: a perfect recipe for spreading the coronavirus. Yet there has been a continuing decline in new cases of the disease and no uptick in calls to 111 or 999 about suspected Covid-19. By now, some effect should have shown up if it was going to. In June, London has seen fewer deaths from all causes than in a normal year. Why is this?

While respiratory viruses nearly always evolve towards lower virulence, essentially because the least sick people go to the most meetings and parties, this one was never very dangerous for most people in the first place. Its ability to kill 80-year-olds in care homes stands in sharp contrast with its inability to kill younger people. Fewer than 40 people under the age of 40 with no underlying conditions have died in Britain. On board the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, 1,100 sailors tested positive, many had no symptoms and only one died.

The summer weather is helping. Viruses are not easily caught outside, where ventilation, high temperatures and strong sunlight kill the virus. In addition, sunlight boosts vitamin D, which is protective against respiratory viruses; average vitamin D levels are especially low in Britons in winter because our public-health service does less than, for example, Germany’s to redress this deficiency.

The assumption expressed in the very term R0 was that everybody would initially be susceptible to catching this virus. But it soon became clear that this could not be the case. Frequent cases of family members not passing it on to each other baffled scientists. It turns out that there is lots of pre-existing immunity to the virus. Some seems to be generic protection conferred by so called innate immunity.

There is growing evidence that live attenuated vaccines such as polio and BCG have protective effects against other viruses by stimulating the production of interferons. More specific T-cell immunity resulting from previous infection with other common-cold coronaviruses is also widespread. Around 70 per cent of children under four show evidence of resistance to such coronaviruses.

This was a big part of the explanation for the vast over-estimates of death rates based on mathematical models. The virus was spreading like wildfire in hospitals and care homes where elderly people were far less resistant than the population at large. The modellers assumed these cases were coming into hospitals from the community when actually many were already in the care system. This wildly distorted their estimates. Outside such settings and large indoor gatherings, as the commentator Hugh Osmond has put it, the tinder was damp.

The influential Imperial College modellers have recently published a justification claiming that compulsory lockdowns are mainly responsible for the death rates being so much lower than they forecast, with other measures including school closure, public event bans, social distancing and self isolation only contributing 5 per cent of the infections averted.

However, they assumed, unrealistically, that all the reduction in coronavirus transmission was due to interventions. In reality people would have changed their behaviour anyway, and variability in people’s susceptibility to infection and number of contacts with others would have slowed its spread, as the pool of uninfected people most likely to become infected diminished.

Moreover, an expert scourge of dubious models, Nic Lewis, has shown that with arguably more realistic assumptions about the time between infection and death and how quickly interventions worked, their own model implies lockdowns did not make the largest contribution towards ending this wave of the pandemic. That is consistent with lockdown-free Sweden having also experienced a big reduction in transmission. Japan has one of the softest lockdowns and lowest death tolls.

Will there be another wave in the autumn? Most medics think so. But if we learn the lessons of the first wave – mainly that shielding the old and vulnerable is key – and we manage at least some effective contact tracing, then the winter wave should be more like a series of small, local outbreaks. A second national lockdown would be a huge mistake, given the harm the first one has done to everything from cancer diagnosis to mental health, let alone employment.

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My new book How Innovation Works is available now in the US, Canada, and UK.

Incentives for Innovation Will Eventually Defeat COVID-19

My article for the Inside Sources network:

It will be an innovation that eventually defeats the virus: a new vaccine, a new antiviral drug — or a new app to help us avoid contact with infected individuals.

So the one thing the world needs more than anything else is an incentive to innovate. Here’s an idea for how to do so.

The problem is that innovation is an uncertain, unpredictable process. I argue in my new book How Innovation Works that you can rarely summon an innovation to order when you need one.

We would love to have flying cars that run on water, or cheap ways to suck carbon dioxide out of the air, but necessity is not the mother of invention after all.

Take vaccines. Some viruses prove impossible to vaccinate against after decades, while others succumb quickly.

“Vaccine development is an expensive, slow and laborious process, costing billions of dollars, taking decades, with less than a 10 percent rate of success,” according to Wayne Koff, president of the Human Vaccines Project, writing just before the pandemic began.

There are lots of different teams working flat out on developing a vaccine for COVID-19. Some are using whole virus particles, killed or attenuated, some are using protein molecules manufactured in bacteria, some are using messenger RNA fragments that instruct human cells to make viral proteins to alert the immune system.

It is impossible to say which will work, if any.

So governments and venture capitalists have a problem: which horse to back? Giving grants and subsidies to those that shout loudest — or have the best connections — is regrettably, all too often the way innovation gets funded. But by trying to pick winners, governments all too often end up picking losers.

Luckily, there is a new idea out there for how to incentivize innovation without trying to pick winners. It’s called the Advance Market Commitment and it is the brainchild of the Nobel-winning economist Michael Kremer.

It is basically a prize, but not in the form of a lump sum, rather in the form of a contract at an attractive price to produce the innovative product once — if — it gets invented.

Earlier this month the global vaccine alliance, known as GAVI, launched an appeal to fund exactly this kind of reward for a vaccine for COVID-19. It aims to raise $2 billion through a financing instrument that would effectively guarantee sales of the new vaccine in developing countries where healthcare systems often cannot afford the costs of new vaccines.

Exactly such a venture, funded by various governments and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, achieved a remarkable breakthrough a few years ago in the search for a vaccine for pneumococcus, a bacterium that kills large numbers of children in the poorer parts of the world.

Hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved. The same idea also helped the development of a vaccine for Ebola, though the epidemic ended before that vaccine could be fully tested.

These Advance Market Commitments are surely the way to go to fund innovation more generally. They have the advantage of being agnostic about the means by which an innovator achieves his or her end.

Indeed, the ancestor of all such schemes, the famous Longitude Prize in 18th century England, demonstrated neatly how solutions to problems can come from unexpected directions.

Mariners were unable to measure longitude while at sea, resulting in a disaster in 1707 when a naval squadron turned out to be farther east than its commander thought and was wrecked on the Scilly Isles. The government offered the huge sum of £20,000 (over £4 million in today’s money, and over $5 million US) for the first person to solve the problem of measuring longitude.

To the consternation of the scientific establishment, it was eventually won not by an astronomer or mathematician, but by a clockmaker from Yorkshire, John Harrison, who pointed out that all you need to know is what time it is back in Greenwich and compare that with local time (by measuring when noon occurs) and you know how far west of Greenwich you are.

So good robust clocks that kept good time even on board ship were the solution, and so it proved.

Let’s solve lots of our problems in this way: not with grants and subsidies, but with prizes.

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My new book How Innovation Works is available now in the US and Canada, and available to pre-order in the UK.

Genome-edited crops help farmers and environment

My article for The Times:

The agriculture bill before the House of Lords today offers a chance for plant breeders to make safer, more productive crops that need fewer chemicals. Britain has a long track record of safe and efficient plant breeding but the industry is unable to use the latest techniques because of a rogue decision by the European Union in 2018.

A proposed amendment to the bill would allow the government to consult on whether to use the same definition of a genetically modified organism (GMO) as most of the rest of the world. Doing so would exempt 90 per cent of crops produced by the new and precise method known as genome editing.

Genome editing does none of the things the opponents of GMOs have objected to. It does not introduce foreign genetic material from another species. It does not produce plants that could not have arisen naturally. It does not require large companies.

Here is how it would work in a real example. British sugar-beet farmers are seeing a decline in yields since the banning of neonicotinoid pesticides. Aphids are increasingly infecting the crops with viruses. Other European countries dealt with this problem by making an exception from the neonic ban for their sugar-beet farmers; we did not. However, researchers have found natural varieties of the plant with natural mutations that make sugar beet virus-resistant. They want to induce these precise mutations in varieties that thrive in British conditions.

Traditional plant breeding, by back-crossing and selection, can achieve this but it will take years. Genome editing could achieve it in weeks. Then farmers could grow sugar beet with no introduced DNA and less need for insecticides.

Almost all European plant scientists are united in bafflement and opposition to a highly political judgment by the European Court of Justice in 2018 that departed from the international definition of GMOs to include genome-edited plants, while exempting the far less predictable process of bombarding seeds with gamma rays to induce mutations. It made no sense, scientifically or economically, and went against the advice of its own advocate-general. Britain has a chance to change that definition once it is outside the EU.

If the government permits itself to consult on making this simple change we may see a gold rush of plant breeding projects to this country, generating employment while making crops more competitive, wildlife-friendly, nutrient-rich and with fewer emissions. If we don’t, our farmers will be stuck with more chemicals, less biodiversity and uncompetitive crops.

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Has the British scientific establishment made its biggest error in history?

My article for The Telegraph:

The scientific establishment in this country has had a bad war. Its mistakes have probably made the Covid-19 epidemic, as well as the economic downturn, worse. Britain entered the pandemic late, with lots of warning, so we should have done better than other countries. Instead we are one of the worst affected in Europe and one of the last to begin to recover.

Not all the mistakes were driven by science. The decisions by Public Health England not to go out to the market for testing, protective equipment and logistics, to cease testing almost completely in March and to send people to care homes from hospitals affected by the virus – these were just bureaucratic bone-headedness. But the obsession with mathematical modelling lies behind other mistakes and continues to this day with the ridiculous fixation on a meaningless generalisation called R.

Expecting a typical flu virus, scientists were surprised by the explosion of cases in hospitals and assumed it signified exponential take-off of the virus in the community. In fact it was mainly the rapid spread of infection within hospitals, some of which probably started with staff returning from holiday in Italy and Spain. It was known in February that the virus is dangerous to the elderly and ill yet could be spread by the young and healthy. Was it therefore not obvious that infection control in hospital wards and care homes was vital? Apparently not if modelling an epidemic in a homogeneous “community” is your guide.

Government advisers became over-reliant on models that were both too complex and too simplistic at the same time, and failed to challenge underlying assumptions. The Imperial College model does not take into account high variability in social connectedness or susceptibility to infection among otherwise similar people. We now know that about 10pc of “superspreaders” cause 80% of infections, primarily because they meet many more people - which also makes them much more likely to become infected.

If you tell the models there is thus a correlation between susceptibility and infectiousness you get much lower forecasts of cases and deaths. Add that we now know that cross-immunity from common colds probably allows 40-60pc of the population to resist Covid-19, and the result is – as the work of Gabriela Gomes at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine indicates -- that herd immunity is probably reached when as little as 15pc of the population is infected, rather than the 50-60pc implied by Imperial’s model. Hence the epidemic is petering out in London despite crowded streets.

True, not all of this was known at the start, but that is exactly why it was a mistake to rely so heavily on models that were bound to have wrong assumptions. Modellers often come to mistake their models for the real world. There was an embarrassing moment in a press conference in April when a scientist was asked whether we could learn anything from Germany’s relative success in containing the epidemic and replied that our contribution was to lead the world in modelling.

We now know that outside the healthcare system the growth of the epidemic had ceased to be exponential before the lockdown. The peak of 3-day average deaths on 10 April implies that the peak of infections occurred around 20 March, before the country locked down, according to Professor Simon Wood of Bristol University. He argues that bans on large gatherings and voluntary social distancing would have been sufficient. The head of the Norway’s Institute of Public Health now says that the country’s lockdown was unnecessary.

The outcome of the epidemic in different countries or American states is pretty much uncorrelated with the severity of lockdown. Sweden, with no lockdown, did no worse than Britain and far better than the models predicted. By now the models say it should have had up to 40,000 deaths with a lockdown; it has had under 5,000 without. Had Sweden managed to keep the virus out of care homes and hospitals, as Germany partly did, it would have done much better than us despite no lockdown.

Reversing these mistakes will not be easy. Britain needs to get out of lockdown quickly, ditching the stable-door-locking policies like 2-metre distancing and travel quarantine before damage to the economy becomes terminal. And science needs to rethink its affair with models rather than data.

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My new book How Innovation Works is available now in the US and Canada, and available to pre-order in the UK.

Could the key to Covid be found in the Russian pandemic?

My article for Spectator:

The killer came from the east in winter: fever, cough, sore throat, aching muscles, headache and sometimes death. It spread quickly to all parts of the globe, from city to city, using new transport networks. In many cities, the streets were empty and shops and schools deserted. A million died. The Russian influenza pandemic of 1889-90 may hold clues to what happens next — not least because the latest thinking is that it, too, may have been caused by a new coronavirus.

In addition to the new diseases of Sars, Mers and Covid-19, there are four other coronaviruses that infect people. They all cause common colds and are responsible for about one in five such sniffles, the rest being rhinoviruses and adenoviruses. As far as we can tell from their genes, two of these coronaviruses came from African bats (one of them bizarrely via alpacas or camels), and two from Asian rodents, one of them via cattle.

This last one, known as OC43, is the commonest of the cold coronaviruses. It comes around every winter and apparently sometimes reinfects people who have had it before. Unlike the other three, its origin is not lost in the mists of time but is known to be comparatively recent. Comparing its genetic sequence with that of its close bovine cousin, Dr Marc van Ranst at Leuven University in Belgium and his colleagues calculated in 2005 that they shared a common ancestor around the year 1890. (There is also a version of the same virus that infects pigs but it is slightly less close to the human and cattle versions than they are to each other.) That date was therefore probably when the virus jumped into the human species for the first time.

The date is intriguing because 1889-90, as previously stated, saw a terrible pandemic, the worst of the 19th century, caused by a respiratory infection. Moreover, it was preceded by a global outbreak of what was thought at the time to be pleuro-pneumonia in cattle. It has always been assumed that the 1889-90 Russian or Asiatic flu was indeed a form of influenza. But direct evidence of this is lacking, and some of the symptoms do not seem quite right for flu. Given how many people fell ill, implying little pre--existing immunity, it seems probable that it was a virus new to the human species, and the dating coincidence with OC43’s species jump is highly suggestive.

The first case is thought to have been in Bukhara, in central Asia in the spring of 1889, but by October, Constantinople and St Petersburg were affected. In December, military hospitals in the Russian capital were overcrowded, factories and workshops closed for lack of workers and ‘whole districts of the city were abandoned by the population’, according to one report. The symptoms were said to include headache, fever, aching bones, facial rash and swollen hands. The illness lasted for five or six days but sometimes left the patient exhausted for weeks.

The virus reached Paris in November. By the turn of the year, with hospitals full, patients were housed in military barracks and tents in the city’s parks. Many schools were closed. In Vienna the schools closed early for Christmas and stayed closed till late January. In Berlin, it was reported that many post-office staff were affected. In London so many lawyers fell ill that the courts were closed for a while. One day in January at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the City of London, Dr Samuel West found more than 1,000 people crowded into the casualty ward, most of them men.

In every country, capitals and port cities were hit first and hardest because they had the busiest rail and ship connections. Celebrities were not immune. The Russian tsar, the young king of Spain, the president of France, the queen of Sweden and Lord Salisbury all fell ill. In Turin, the Duke of Aosta, who had briefly been king of Spain, died, as did Empress Augusta of Germany and Lord Napier. Mass-circulation newspapers engendered widespread alarm.

According to a modern analysis, the death rate peaked in the week ending 1 December 1889 in St Petersburg, 22 December in Germany, 5 January 1890 in Paris, and 12 January in the US. R0 has been estimated at 2.1 and the case fatality rate was somewhere between 0.1 per cent and 0.28 per cent: similar figures to today’s pandemic.

Contemporary newspaper reports say that like today’s epidemic, the Russian flu appeared to attack adults more than children, and in some schools the teachers were all affected but not the pupils. Like today’s virus, it was, intriguingly, reported to affect men much more badly than women. Newspapers were filled with statistics of mortality, anecdotes and reassuring editorials.

In 1890 the germ theory of disease was far from universally accepted, and viruses had yet to be distinguished from bacteria. The ‘miasma’ hypothesis that blamed such pandemics on the air remained popular, and the speed with which the illness had spread around the world seemed to indicate something other than person-to-person contact, though rail travel was in fact the cause. In an echo of today’s 5G fantasies, an editorial in the Lancet noted that there had been earthquakes recently: ‘Why should not this troublesome complaint have been produced by injurious emanations from the earth?’

By March 1890 the pandemic was fading in most places, just as common colds and flu do in spring today. The seasonal pattern displayed by colds and flus is so striking that it cannot be a coincidence that today’s pandemic was also in retreat by May all around the world, irrespective of the policies in place. By the northern summer of 1890 the virus was ensconced in the southern hemisphere, having reached Australia in March. It returned to Europe the following winter and for several years after.

If OC43 was the cause of the 1889-90 pandemic — far from proven, of course — and given that it is the cause of perhaps one in ten colds today, then it has evolved towards lower virulence. It is easy to see how this occurs with respiratory viruses, which are transmitted by people chatting and shaking hands. Mutations that affect the severity of the virus also tend to have an impact on whether people pass it on: if it sends you to bed feeling rotten, you will not give it to so many people. In the inevitable struggle for survival, the milder strains will gradually displace their nastier ones. This is why so many cold viruses affect us but so few kill us, except maybe when new to our species.

Perhaps, too, a degree of immune response in the population helps moderate the effects of the virus, even if not achieving full and permanent immunity. Some cross--immunity seems to exist today, whereby those who have had coronavirus colds do not catch, or do not suffer severely from, Covid-19.

Here is a disturbing thought: is lockdown preventing this evolutionary process, by confining the disease to settings where it can still thrive while being fatal, such as hospitals? Our fate is clear: without a vaccine or a cure, Covid-19 will fade, will be back, but will become less lethal till it is eventually indistinguishable from every other cold.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter!

My new book How Innovation Works is available now in the US and Canada, and available to pre-order in the UK.