Gene Drives Reversible?

NYTimes magazine has an article on gene drives, discussing the positives and negatives.  Lots of concerns about negatives, particularly outside the scientific community.

In reading it I wondered:  if I understand correctly, the gene drive consists of a genetic package which says: "if you find gene A, replace it with gene B and Crispr package X."  So a gene drive spreads a gene throughout the population while also spreading the Crispr package needed to replace A by B.

So what did I wonder?  Whether a gene drive isn't reversible, just do: "if you find gene B, replace it with gene A and Crispr package X"

Of course, it turns out any layman speculation I might have is out-of-date, witness this 2015 piece.

The Growth of "Vertical Farming"

I think the term "vertical farming" has come to mean indoor agriculture under LED lights with lots of technology and automation.  I'm still skeptical about current economics, but, if I'm to be consistent with supporting technology in the case of climate change and self-driving cars, I have to agree that vertical farming will become economical for at least some crops.

But...

As is the case with most innovation and technology, there are trade-offs.  One trade-off which comes to mind is vulnerability.  Transitioning from field agriculture to vertical farming for greens, for example, would increase the demand for electricity. More significantly, if a solar flare of sufficient intensity fried many transformers which would take years to replace, reactivating field agriculture for greens would also take years.

Photo IDs for Voters

I've blogged on this issue before. Today the new KY secretary of state is reviving it.

He and I think that requiring photo ids would be good for public confidence, even though there's no evidence of impersonation voter fraud.  For me at least the key is to ease into the requirement--make photo ids easy-peasy.  I suspect these days most young people get photo ids for driving or traveling.  That leaves one problem area--those on the margins of society--the old, the native Americans, the less fully assimilated (think Amish, Hasidic Jews, or whoever).  I think providing photo ids in these cases is worthwhile simply better to integrate people into society.

Great Advances in Medicine

Saw the doctor today at Kaiser.  (It'd been a couple years so I was overdue.)  Many changes since my last visit

• checking in by entering data at a kiosk, rather than a reception clerk at the waiting area.
• changing the format of the printout summarizing the visit.
• eliminating the weigh-in station--they upgraded the examining table/recliner with one which can register your weight.  It also raises and lowers, so your feet can be on the floor instead of dangling in the air.

I'm sort of mocking the healthcare industry here, but it's worth noting that there's a record decrease in the death rate from cancer.

"Peak Document"

That's a term used in the title of the presidential address at the American Historical Association meeting. What McNeill is talking about is the surge of information coming not from documents but from science--especially genetics.

It's a valid subject, of course, but I admit when I first saw it my thoughts went in another direction; the change in sources in the current and coming eras because of digital media.  An example, when I was hired by ASCS people had improved the document management systems involved. The Commodity Credit Corporation board had a permanent secretary and an assistant, the board made decisions based on "dockets" which were systematically filed.  Most decisions within ASCS generated paper documents, memos and letters, all routed through clearance channels and eventually filed in the Secretary's Records or administrator's.   

As a failed historian I was intrigued by the processes.  The paper files didn't capture everything--there was a lot going on in the agency which wasn't fully  documented (particularly the political maneuvers) where the documents were like an iceberg, only a small part visible

By the time I left FSA, this picture was changing.  Partially it was the result of personnel changeover--the institutional memory of the reasons behind practices had been or was being lost.  Partly it was a change of norms--new people and new problems had new ways of doing things, often resulting in faster action but a diminished historical record.  Much of it had to do with automation, both the problems and processes of implementing policy with compers in the county offices and the new powers of communication conferred by new technology.

One example was the "wire notice".  Urgent messages to field offices would be sent by telegraph, which meant going through the telegraph office, therefore required official authorization, and permitted central filing of the message.  Once email arrived, it was possible for anyone to email anything to anyone with no central file. (Of course, this didn't happen immediately.) And for a number of years there was really no system for recording and filing such messages.  Supposedly after 30 years NARS has enforced systems in the agencies, but I'm dubious. 

The bottom line--in the 1970's a historan could look at the official files in the National Archives and do a reasonable history.  I doubt that's feasible for th 2000-2010 perioc

Poor Elsie, Borden in Bankruptcy

Borden has filed for bankruptcy protection--the second big dairy company after Dean Foods to go bust.

Why "Elsie"--see this .

Iraq and Suleimani

Some thoughts on Suleimani's death 

• last week at this time an optimist like me could look at the Middle East and seen some good signs.

• in Iran there had been recent demonstrations against the government

• in Iraq there were protests against the influence of Iran on Iraqi affairs.

• today there seems to be unity both in Iraq and Iran against the US.  We'll have to see how long it lasts, but it will be a while
• I'd like to think the decision memo presented to our President would have predicted these consequences and he would have weighed them in making his decision, but I doubt it.

Lesson: In Washington Read the Footnotes

Notoriously, the request for the FISA court to approve surveillance of Page etc. included a footnote describing the Steele dossier.  The conservatives and liberals disputed whether a footnote was sufficient notice to the court of the possible bias of the dossier.

Now Just Security has a long description of the to and fro between DOD and OMB on President Trump's withholding aid to Ukraine, which was implemented by footnotes.  It seems that here DOD did read the footnotes, but it's not clear why footnotes were the appropriate vehicle for the notice from OMB to DOD--perhaps because other readers might be expected to ignore them?

I wonder: these days are budding scholars told how to use footnotes and trained to read them?

Slavery in Canada and "Turn"

We've been watching "Turn" on Netflix, which is a 4 season series dealing mainly with Washington's spies, but which touches on, or forces connections to, episodes in the Revolution which are more commonly known. (I think it makes very generous use of "dramatic license".)

Anyhow, in the episode ending season 2, the African-American who was freed by Capt. Simcoe and enlisted in his Queen's Rangers takes the son of the enslaved maid to Major Andre from Setauket into York City to rejoin his mother. (The maid's been doing a little spying for the rebels on the side.) Needless to say, the British soldier loves the maid and urges her to flee with him to Canada so they can both be free.

I wondered about the accuracy of that so I did a little researching on the internet.

Sure enough, slavery in Canada lasted until 1834, when it was abolished throughout the empire.

But wait, it's not that simple.  "Lower Canada" was originally Quebec, founded by the French until the Brits won it by conquest in the French and Indian War. "Upper Canada" became today's Ontario and was mostly settled by the English.

Reading between the lines it seems likely the Brits just kept the old French laws, including those pertaining to slavery at the start.  And in "Lower Canada" they might have kept the laws until 1834. But by 1790's slavery in Upper Canada was being questioned, and a courageous troublemaker  named Chloe Cooley resisted being sold as a slave into New York.  That resulted in an act restricting the importation of slaves and promising freedom to children born after 1793. But the act only applied to Upper Canada.

Based on skimming the second article I linked to, slaves in the thirteen colonies should not have seen Canada as the promised land of freedom before 1793.

The Validity of DNA Testing

Just received the "health" side of an ancestry.com DNA test.

Uniformly bland results, finding nothing which increases risk of anything (which is good, but they didn't cover the most significant area for me--Alzheimers--oh well).

The one correlation they did find is: increased likelihood of drinking coffee.

I'm rolling on the floor, laughing, since I've always drunk a lot of coffee.  These days I'm down to about 5 cups a day, about 2 of which are leaded.  I suspect if I had an obituary drafted by the group of people who have known me over the years, the lead sentence would be:  "Bill drank a lot of coffee..."

(On a more serious note, I'd be curious to see some statistics on the percentage of tests for different things actually show a result exceeding the average.  I suspect it's low, quite low, but because it's us and we worry about the bad stuff, a DNA test is an easy sell.)