There’s tons of important stuff to cover—the Pennsylvania measles deaths (and RFK Jr’s lawyer’s response to yet more evidence of his malignant impact on American health); great and national-envy inducing news out of the UK about cervical cancer; the coral proxy connecting strengthening El Niños and human-caused climate change; and I’m sure much more to come, as our current misrulers to continue spin up new catastrophes on an almost daily base. And then there’s all the fun, or at least snarky stuff to enjoy.

But for a brief Saturday offering, let’s talk about a sudden glimpse of the pervasiveness and power of public health misinformation as we take a look at a Boston Globe story about [checks notes]…

…a tax dispute between the city of Boston and fallen-from-the-heights celebrity chef Barbara Lynch.

The story itself has nothing to say about anything to do with sickness or health, except a passing mention that she cited “the financial struggle of the post-pandemic restaurant industry” as one of the reasons she shut down all of her eating spots in 2023.

Innocuous, right? It’s no secret that the dining-out industry was hit hard by the pandemic, as patrons gave in to the not-crazy desire to skip the side of coronavirus that might accompany their duet of Rohan duck. And in the event, the downfall of her empire has been well documented and had much more to do with accounts of the gap between Lynch’s undoubted excellence as a chef and her deep issues as a manager of people and money.

As I read the article that line just passed me by—I remembered picking up takeout in 2020 and 2021 and then, less frequently than before, going out to restaurants in 2022. So, yeah…it’s become yet harder to prosper in what was already a damnably difficult business.

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Then I read the comments, and among the earliest reactions, found this one from the aptly nymed “fullofbull”:

“She's lost everything because of Fauci and his enablers.”

Most of the replies to fullofbull slammed them for the overt idiocy…but not all. pgman piled on:

“wuhan lab destroyed so much”

I’m not going to debunk here. What would be the point? fullofbull and pgman are unlikely readers of Inverse Square, and, as plenty of misinformation research has confirmed, would be vanishingly unlikely to be persuaded by mere facts, no matter how well attested.

If it needs to be said: Dr. Fauci’s efforts to protect Americans and promote one of the most remarkable vaccine accomplishments in medical history did not cost Barbara Lynch her restaurants, though I have little doubt that a global infectious disease catastrophe didn’t help her business.

And, no, pace pgman, for all the attempts by grifters and power-seekers on the right to distract from Trump I’s failures responding to the pandemic by fostering the conspiracy theory that Chinese incompetence and or malice (aided, we’re often told, by American mad-scientists eager to test the limits of lethal bioengineering) [takes deep breath]…despite all that, the lab leak story has not advanced since its earliest versions were debunked, while the case for a zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2 has grown steadily stronger.

Nope…leave all that aside and think with me for a moment about what it may signify that a story about Boston trying to make sure Lynch doesn’t hide her assets while the city goes after back taxes evokes an almost immediate COVID-culture-war response.

For me, fullofbull and their sidekick offer a measure of how badly broken our civic culture has become. The old line “everyone’s entitled to their own opinion; they’re not entitled to their own facts” is clearly no longer operative. The willingness to put oneself and everyone else in harms way to maintain a tribal or in-group consensus of belief—is already biting us in the ass. That’s what happens when the need to fix blame for a pandemic on the other guys makes it impossible to defend against the next familiar or emergent pathogen…as in this year’s almost 2,800 confirmed measles cases in the US as of August 20.

Let me close with an analogy. Finance folks have often said something like, “when your barber and your cab driver are talking stocks, you know you’re in a bubble.” Here’s the public health version: when a local story about a tax dispute centered on high-end dining draws COVID denialism and misinformation, you know the Republic is deep in a heap of what comes out of the south end of a north facing cow.

Time for a bit of silly good news, I think. I’ll see what I can come up with for the next installment of thinking about science and our gasping society.

Image: Pieter Breugel the Elder, Peasant Wedding, c. 1568

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So I was genuinely surprised this morning when I learned she had not heard of one of the greatest collections of disdain for incomptence ever assembled: a list of quotes from British armed forces fitness reports that offer a kaleidoscope of ways alleged leaders can fail. That gave me a hint: maybe there are others who haven’t had the pleasure. So let’s take a look, shall we? And maybe, in our present vale of woe, have some fun with them too.

Some of the reports are old enough to have whiskers on them—my uncle, a career officer in the Royal Artillery (who is not represented in that tally) told me that he knew (perhaps at second or third hand) one of those skewered, a Guards officer who’d been cited shortly after the Second World War. The whole list has been around long enough to have become a staple of military humor sites. No matter: some judgements are eternal.

I’ll reproduce all those glorious insults below, but here’s what struck me as my sister howled at them this morning: these assessments translate pretty directly into evaluations of Trump administration officials, including the Orange Felon himself.

So here’s the challenge: assign each quote to the Trumpist it best describes.

I’ll start. The second assessment perfectly captures RFK Jr.: “I would not breed from this officer.”

Now it’s your turn. Have fun, and by all means share your results!

- His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of curiosity.

- I would not breed from this Officer.

- This Officer is really not so much of a has-been, but more of a definitely won't-be.

- When she opens her mouth, it seems that this is only to change whichever foot was previously in there.

- He has carried out each and every one of his duties to his entire satisfaction.

- He would be out of his depth in a car park puddle.

- Technically sound, but socially impossible.

- This Officer reminds me very much of a gyroscope - always spinning around at a frantic pace, but not really going anywhere.

- This young lady has delusions of adequacy.

- When he joined my ship, this Officer was something of a granny; since then he has aged considerably.

- This Medical Officer has used my ship to carry his genitals from port to port, and my officers to carry him from bar to bar.

- Since my last report he has reached rock bottom, and has started to dig.

- She sets low personal standards and then consistently fails to achieve them.

- He has the wisdom of youth, and the energy of old age.

- This Officer should go far - and the sooner he starts, the better.

- In my opinion this pilot should not be authorized to fly below 250 feet.

- This man is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.

- The only ship I would recommend this man for is citizenship.

- Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.

Image: Richard Caton Woodville Jr., Charge of the Light Brigade, 1894

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In that short essay she covers a range of public health atrocities being committed by that part of the Trump administration led by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., among them, inevitably, the baseless assault on vaccination that is in many ways the cornerstone of RFK Jr.’s campaign to Make Microbes Great Again.

Inverse Square readers probably know that this vaccine discussion is something I’ve been trying to advance for some time, using the history of opposition to vaccination to dissect the bad faith on display right now. But there’s a specific point Cox Richardson makes that I think is incredibly important to highlight. That’s her diagnosis of the deadly eugenic impulse that lies at the heart of Kennedy’s anti-vax argument. My new book, A Pox on Fools, traces the idea that the best way to protect oneself from/respond to illness is to live properly: to foster health and the ability to ward off disease by exercising, eating right, cultivating the right attitude.

This approach, offered up as an alternative to scientific medicine, has a long history in the US (and the UK). Walt Whitman, for example, had a little known sideline as a 19th c. health/woo influencer. (He favored a good diet, for example, which he defined as one that inter alia, did not include ketchup. Sic!) He objected to vaccination as a snare introduced by the medical establishment, and favored manly exercise, clean living, that idiosyncratic version of a healthy diet…that kind of thing.

Whitman was wrong, of course: the smallpox virus (the only pathogen for which there was an effective vaccine back then) did not care if you ate beans and rice or two pounds of beef a day, and the same is true for all of the expanded catalogue of dangerous microbes for which vaccines exist today.

Still, unlike current purveyors of such healthcare maladvice Whitman embraced his fellow humans…he contained multitudes!* As Cox Richardson notes, Kennedy and his do not.

Instead, the HHS Secretary (sic and sick!) has made it clear that there is a moral dimension to health and illness. If, as he has said (and Cox Richardson glosses), “the key to health” isn’t getting vaccinated against possible threats, but rather is to be found “through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition”—then there’s an obvious corollary. If you get sick it’s on you. You should have done more pushups. Swallowed fewer Big Gulps. Touched another couple of acres of grass.

And if you didn’t and you die of some vaccine-preventable disease?…

Good riddance! Your immune system wasn’t up to the challenge and the gene pool is improved by your removal from it.

Cox Richardson places this malignant credo into its broader context, tying the Kennedy-led version of survival of the fittest back to the essentially moral arguments for nineteenth century laissez-faire capitalism.

That’s right, I believe; certainly, it’s what I read into the history of anti-vaccine movements. In the present day that morally bankrupt faith shoots through every corner of the current administration’s policy, resting ultimately on the idea that there are the “fittest”—and everyone else. (For just a single example, see the ongoing purge of minorities and women from senior roles in the military.)

To turn back to the argument in my book, the idea that vaccines are unnecessary, that disease is a signal of some failure of will or constitution, leads to an inevitable conclusion. Requiring vaccination as a condition of attending school, enlisting in the armed forces, or any similar mandate, is intolerable, an affront to individual liberty.

If so, then those who believe that must reject the claim that one should vaccinate enough to achieve herd immunity, protecting those who cannot defend themselves against a pathogen. That’s a very clear view of the way we should live now. channeling our inner Maggie Thatcher, society does not exist; there is no tie that binds us to strangers sufficient to compel us to take action on their behalf.

All of which is to say that ISTM Cox Richardson and I are making the same point. The Trump administration bases its policy choices on the belief that there is a hierarchy of human beings, of human potential; that there is nothing that those on top of that hierarchy owe to anyone below; and that, in the end, if you happen to be one of those inferior beings, it’s both your own problem and your own damn fault.

Vaccine opposition as Kennedy frames it is thus not just a terrible idea none domain. It is, rather one example of a much wider pathology that shoots through our political life right now.

One last thought: at the end of A Pox on Fools I write that to accept such a view—that there is no human connection that matters beyond, maybe, one’s own family or small circle—is to be very afraid and terribly lonely.

We don’t have to live that way. We shouldn’t. If there’s a moral core to my politics, it starts here, in a necessity of ties that bind. (That’s the shorthand; for the full argument, complete with a tag from Deuteronomy, check out the book.)

OK. That’s enough. A bit more abstract than my usual fare. I’ll get back to highlighting particular horrors—and victories—over the next week. And somewhere in there, a respite post, as we all need a break sometimes. Catch y’all then.

*Multitudes that included a whole lot of bacteria, resident in his body and integral to his wellbeing…which is true of all of us.

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Georges Seurat, study for Bathers at Asnieres, 1884

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See this gruesome case in point:

A little over a year ago in Idaho, twin eighteen month-old infants were found dead in their cribs. Their mother, Andrea Shaw, now 23, said she knew why. Almost immediately after her babies died, Shaw claimed that they had been killed by the vaccines they’d received a few days before they died.

That story stood more or less unchallenged until this June. That was when a grand jury returned an indictment against her: two counts of murder in the first degree, one for each of her twins.

Flash back to spring 2025.

As soon as Shaw asserted that routine shots had killed her babies, the anti-vaccine noise machine seized upon the tale. Shaw and her husband Nathaniel became poster children in the crusade to end childhood vaccination, as Anna Merlan reported in Mother Jones:

Less than a week after their twin toddlers were discovered lifeless in bed, Andrea and Nathaniel sat for an interview with Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the anti-vaccine organization previously chaired by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They appear to have been connected with CHD via another anti-vaccine activist, registered nurse Angela Marie Wulbrecht, who, according to court documents and public comments she’s given, got involved in the case just days after the twins died.

Such anti-vaccine assertions, amplified across the epistemically closed media landscape in which committed anti-vaxxers use horrific tales of loss and woe to recruit the vaccine hesitant—cannot be undone by mere evidence.

Over the next several months the couple continued to serve as valuable front people for the anti-vax crusade. In January — after her kids were killed but before she was indicted for their murders—Andrea Shaw signed on as lead plaintiff in a signature anti-vax lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics. That suit accuses the academy of “racketeering”—apparently because the group recommends childhood vaccination.

Once the lie is out there, as the saying goes, it travels the world round before truth laces up its boots.

You might think that charges of the double murder of defenseless babies would cool the anti-vaccine movement’s welcome of the alleged child-killer.

You’d be wrong. No mere homicide indictment can be allowed to undermine the cause. mInstead, in the wake of her indictment, anti-vaccine organizations and leaders are reupping their support for Shaw.

Instead, to the leaders of the anti-vaccine (to me, the anti-child-survival) movement, Shaw’s indictment is an opportunity to advance their cause. E.g:

Tech multimillionaire Steve Kirsch, who now runs the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, an anti-vaccine group that Wulbrecht is affiliated with. “This may be the best reason for not vaccinating your kids,” Kirsch commented on X, sharing a story from CHD’s website on Shaw’s case, “to avoid being charged with first-degree murder.”

Returning to the near-present. Following her indictment on June 29, Shaw was jailed, four days after giving birth to a daughter. At first she was held on a $2 million bond, pending a court hearing. That came on July 14. her attorneys asked the judge to reduce bond to $100,00. Instead, Judge Kiley Suchlick revoked Shaw’s bond when the judge revoked that bond. As the Idaho Statesman reported,

With the information she had at the time, Stuchlik said, she didn’t view Shaw as a general threat to the public, but after learning of the baby girl’s birth, she said she was concerned about the risk to her.

You don’t say.

Andrea Shaw’s case will continue through Idaho courts and her attorney will have the opportunity to present the argument that vaccines killed her children. The prosecution will present its own version, and we’ll no doubt get a blow by blow as the two sides contend. I will not presume to predict how that case will turn out.

But the losses associated with it already extend well beyond the immediate tragedy of those two tiny humans, killed so long before her time. No amount of mere medical knowledge will prevent anti-vaccine advocates from using this case as both proof of a mythical vaccine holocaust and a case study in how the medical and legal systems conspire against brave truth tellers. Here’s the head of Children’s Health Defense, the organization RFK Jr. once led, again, quoted in Mother Jones:

Mary Holland, CHD’s CEO and general counsel, tweeted recently that Shaw, “isn’t the first parent whose vaccine concerns were dismissed—and treated as a suspect instead. CHD is standing with her family as this case moves forward.” Holland and the articles that CHD has published about the case have implied that Shaw is being attacked by a corrupt system for suggesting that vaccines harmed her children. And they’ve made it clear that they will treat her case as a major test of whether the legal system and medical establishment take their claims seriously.

To the extent that CHD and the rest of the anti-vaccine network can get that word out—and they can do so pretty damn effectively—that almost certainly means some people will be sufficiently horrified at both the Shaw’s tragic loss and sheer evil of the medical establishment to refuse to immunize their kids. And that means that some of those kids will get sick when they didn’t need to…and, quite possibly, some will die.

I so wish the two Shaw babies hadn’t died. I now wish even more intensely that no more children will be sacrificed to what this indictment alleges is as cynical use of anti-vaccine vibes as could be imagined.

I have no expectation that this wish will be granted.

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Image: Nicais de Keyser, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1855

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That is, of course, bullshit. According to Paul Offit, as paraphrased by Kaia Glickman and Max Kozlov writing in Nature, “one dose of a childhood vaccine such as the MMR shot contains roughly one-tenth of a teaspoon (about half a millilitre) of fluid.” But never mind…

What should replace the MMR shot, Trump and his equally technically qualified Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are two doses of three separate shots for measles, mumps and rubella. This is a terrible idea, which is why it appeals to the anti-vaccine movement.

What makes such a revised schedule so bad? Because it achieves the central goal of anti-vax leadership: not to enhance vaccine safety (they’re already the safest medical intervention available), but to cut the number of people getting shots by any available means. Having to schedule, show up for, pay or co-pay for, and persuade kids to accept six injections instead of two, creates a huge obstacle course in the way of immunizing single children and the population as a whole at high enough levels to ensure herd immunity.

What’s even more enraging than seeing the current child-harming administration find yet another way to ensure that other people’s families will suffer is that there’s nothing new about this stratagem. It’s exactly the same one proposed at the birth of the modern anti-vaccine movement when now-disgraced Dr. Andrew Wakefield asserted, falsely, that he’d identified a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

I wrote about this in my new book [US link], A Pox on Fools [UK link], and rather than gloss that telling, what follows is a brief excerpt that takes us back to, the press conference at which Wakefield first pushed this malign strategy:

There is a brilliant account of how the alleged vaccines-cause-autism connection was manufactured and then metastasized into a broad anti-vaccination movement: Seth Mnookin’s The Panic Virus. Mnookin’s book centers on the tragedies that have flowed from the publication of a single paper by an ambitious, would-be iconoclast physician. Andrew Wakefield had a track record of announcing findings about damage done by the measles vaccine that no one could replicate—which might not have mattered, as Mnookin writes, but for his growing skill in getting publicity for those unsupported conclusions.

Both of those attributes were on display at a press conference on 26 February 1998. Backed by the imprimatur of one of London’s premier medical institutions, the Royal Free Hospital, and a leading medical journal, the Lancet, Wakefield announced his latest finding: he had, he declared, uncovered a suspicious correlation between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) triple vaccine and a sequence of events beginning with gut disorders and ending with devastating permanent brain injury. In an echo of the pertussis-brain damage scare, he drew that conclusion from a simple case series, following a dozen children with developmental difficulties who presented at hospital with a variety of bowel symptoms. The parents of eight of those twelve linked the timing of the vaccine with the onset of the developmental issues that ultimately coalesced into a diagnosis of autism.

So far, there wasn’t much there, just an observational account of a few sad outcomes against a backdrop of hundreds of millions of vaccinations and a worldwide collapse in measles incidence. But then Wakefield went off script to tell the cameras at the press conference that the association he claimed to have found meant that it was necessary to stop using the combination MMR vaccine, and instead offer separate measles, mumps and rubella injections to be delivered at one-year intervals—a move that would triple the number of injections kids would face, which would in turn cut vaccine uptake as each new appointment presented an opportunity to miss a shot. It is perhaps hyperbole [after watching RFK et al. echo Wakefield, I no longer think this is hyperbole—TL] to say that the current burgeoning anti-vaccine campaign was born at that moment, but that was when a doctor with all the trappings of scientific authority—the Lancet! The Royal Free!—told an enormous audience that a routine medical procedure desperately endangered their kids.

The radical peril within Wakefield’s demand was clear in that moment. Five other physicians had been invited to contextualize for the press what one could or could not infer from that tiny list of twelve cases. As reporter Jeremy Laurance, present at the scene, recalled, those doctors had agreed ahead of time on their message: the new research was enough to evoke more systematic inquiry into what these few examples might mean, but nothing more. When Wakefield pre-empted those experts, Arie Zuckerman, a virologist and dean of the Royal Free’s medical school, started to bang on the lectern. He tried to break the flow of press questions about the central claim, saying, accurately, that the triple vaccine had an exemplary safety record in use around the world. His fear: if Wakefield succeeded in scaring enough of the public about the MMR vaccine, “children will start dying of measles.”

Zuckerman had seen the future.

Flash forward twenty-eight years, and Donald Trump has just followed Wakefield’s lead to the letter. Zuckerman’s prediction has already come true—children have died from easily avoidable cases of measles over and over again between 1998 and now. Trump’s order, if implemented (still a big “if,” thankfully), will increase the body count.

But while Trump plays his clown-car part in this exercise in “first time tragedy, second time (fatal) farce,” there’s a larger pathology in play, covered in the same passage from A Pox on Fools:

That afternoon, Wakefield nailed what has become a standard move for the anti-vaccine movement: he bypassed the normal process of science, turning to the mass media, not the research literature, to broadcast an alarm of a vaccine crisis. There was no time to analyze or replicate his initial results, no need to run the math Zuckerman had done in his head on the human cost of falling immunization rates. Instead, Wakefield told the assembled microphones that he rejected the complacency of the typical medical drone. No! He was a truth teller, speaking for damaged children whose voices had been stolen by vaccines. To suggest that vaccination should continue while others examined his story became, in that framing, the arrogance of the healthcare establishment proceeding at its leisurely pace in the face of such a compelling emergency. For shame! “Public-health officials would do well to get their own houses in order before attacking the position of . . . clinical researchers”—the heroic Wakefield himself—“for what we perceive as our respective duties.”

On that day, this rhetorical maneuver worked. The press reveled in the David (Wakefield) vs. Goliath (the medical-vaccine industrial complex) story, and, over time, collected anecdote after anecdote about sick kids that seemed to affirm Wakefield’s story. With that was born the current assertion by the anti-vaccination movement that first the measles shot and ultimately all modern vaccines are irredeemably dangerous, the false belief that is now becoming—to a deadly extent, has become—official policy at the top of the US government. Worse yet: generations of the parents of children facing an autism diagnosis have been persuaded to accept the hollow comfort of something to blame, and with it, the empty hope that the indictment could lead to something that could address a condition alleged to have been caused by a vaccine.

To be as clear as possible: Wakefield’s story isn’t true—it wasn’t then, and it isn’t today. His use of the language and trappings of scientific research—up to persuading a top journal and hospital to promote his work—was effective as the backdrop to his public messages. But behind all that sound and fury was an extended fraud by a doctor eager for both fame and fortune, cloaked in the trappings of professional and ethical research. There was never any causal connection between the measles shot and autism. There isn’t one today.

Substitute “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” for “Wakefield” in those last two paragraphs and nothing else needs to shift. Kennedy, like Wakefield, employs the same rhetorical tactic, appropriating science-sounding language to advance his false narrative. He knows it’s false, or should—he’s repeatedly been shown the now-mountain-high pile of evidence debunking the vaccine-autism connection. But his stance has brought him fame, cash, clout, and power. And here we are, as Kennedy has now managed to persuade his increasingly desperate boss that a spot of light anti-vaxxing will help him out of his current political trouble.

Other people’s kids are going to pay for Kennedy’s and Trump’s self interest. Some of them with their lives.

That’s enough. There’s another vaccine post queued up for the weekend. Then I promise I’ll get to something a little less explicitly depressing.

*That’s a goodness from the microbes’ and the anti-vaxxer’s point of view of course. For those of us who prefer not to see kids suffering, and some dying, from wholly preventable diseases, not so much.

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Image: Aelbert Cuyp, Cattle in the Water, c. 1650

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For now, let’s enjoy a partial but significant win:

Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine has received constrained approval, with the FDA giving it the nod for people fifty years old and older.

This is the same FDA that operates under the directorship of one of Trump/RFK Jr.’s guys, Kyle A. Diamantas, whose extensive research background includes a poly sci undergraduate degree, followed by advanced training in (checks notes) law school.

Which is to say that the FDA is led by someone who isn’t driven by—or capable of grasping at any technical level—the science behind the novel drugs his agency is called upon to regulate.

That’s why even this limited approval is a bit of a surprise, as RFK Jr.’s hostility to mRNA technology is well documented. Among Kennedy’s earliest major anti-vax moves on becoming Health and Human Services Secretary was to do his level best to kill mRNA work in the United States. In July 2025, the administration pulled grants from Moderna worth up to 760 billion dollars, killing the development vaccine against the threat of an epidemic of bird flu that had made the leap to humans—this after the company had already reported positive (very) early test results. Kennedy followed that up the next month by cancelling a half-billion dollars for research on a range of new mRNA vaccines (including one for the flu).

Kennedy claimed, falsely, that mRNA vaccines are “troubled” and that other technologies—either older methods or ones yet to be developed—would be “safer, broader vaccine strategies, like whole-virus vaccines and novel platforms that don’t collapse when viruses mutate.”

That’s a claim that is, to use the term of art, a load of hairy horseshit.

The key advantage of the new technology over the traditional approach—that same whole-virus vaccine that RFK Jr. touts—is that if it turns out that the seasonal flu pathogen in any given year is different from what was anticipated, mRNA vaccines can be altered much more swiftly than the current shots.

Even better, the new mRNA vaccine proved to be more effective than the conventional version across a host of measures—producing a stronger immune reaction, lasting longer, defending against more viral strains—to the point that even the current FDA decision makers were forced to acquiesce to reality.

So that’s good news—and at least somewhat reassuring news as well. RFK Jr. is a die-hard anti-vaxxer who has stacked every post and panel he can with people who share his passion, and yet the plain truth that vaccines are the most potent life-saving tool humans have ever developed keeps on breaking through in the hard facts of illnesses prevented and deaths avoided.

May such revelations continue!

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Image: George Stubbs, Whistlejacket, c. 1762

Throat clearing out of the way, what got my goat today?

That would be today’s column, in which Mr. Douthat dives back into his cultural critic persona. His concept for this column is that The Odyssey in Nolan’s hands is too easy, and hence universal. What he claims is its banality makes it a shape shifter open to any interpretation. Ultimately, this “analysis” suggests, such universality derives from the work’s meaninglessness.

There’s an agenda behind Douthat’s assertion that the movie is “banal, bland, thin and didactic'“— that gets him out of actually engaging with what the film actually contains—but it’s Sunday, so let’s just pause to contemplate the accomplishment that is the second paragraph of the piece:

Nolan’s film is perfectly calibrated for the contemporary culture war. First, because its source material is a story that everybody wants to claim: woke and anti-woke, masculinists and feminists, film bros and classicists, professional defenders of Western civilization and its would-be revisers and subverters. Other classics are similarly claimed and counterclaimed, but not everyone wants ownership of “The Iliad” (too male), Jane Austen (too female), the Greek tragedies (too depressing), the New Testament (too Christian) or the plays of Shakespeare (too hard to follow the dialogue). But in life as in Homer’s epic, everyone wants a piece of Odysseus.

I got to give Douthat credit. It takes some chutzpah to write like that while complaining of anyone else’s banality. But beyond the paint-by-numbers list of faux dichotomies and its painfully glib attempt at characterizing that micro-canon, what strikes me most about this passage is its relentless laziness.

Of all the things Homer’s Odyssey may be, portraying it as a chew toy for modern antagonists is as unilluminating a take as I can imagine.

And with that, I’ll stop. I just deleted a couple of paragraphs as I realized my rant had shifted from mostly to all heat and no light. Thankfully, what a complacent and predictable opinion-haver/propagandist says about an enormously successful popular cultural experience isn’t terribly signficant in the grand scheme of things. It is a reminder, though, that when such pundits weigh in on things of more immediate and practical importance, we all really need to be alert to the assumptions-not-in-evidence that so often align the argument that flows from such hidden foundations with the conclusions their writer had come to long before.

Image: North Ionian neck-amphora, c. 620-520 BCE.

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Every now and then, I have to take a break, and I’m betting I’m not alone.

So, today, I’m thinking we can have a little fun with a moment of perhaps comparable upheaval, not safely distant enough in time to enjoy rather than dread. So let’s head back to the early eighteenth century. The financial revolution is the label economic historians have slapped on what happened in England in roughly fifty years beginning in the late 1600s. In that brief interval much of the basic apparatus of economic life appeared—innovations that we still use today: the stock exchange; marine, fire, and life insurance; the beginnings of the application of mathematics to an increasing number of financial transactions; fractional reserve banking; the idea of a national debt which led directly to the first bond markets; and more.

This period has fascinated me for a long time, not least because the financial revolution came at about the same time as the scientific one—and that’s no accident1 This period first caught my interest when (working on a completely unrelated story) if got sucked down the rabbit hole of research into Isaac Newton’s decade’s long role managing England’s money supply in the most literal sense possible: from 1696 to his death in 1727, he was the boss of the Royal Mint, responsible for the production and security of the nation’s entire coinage. (That is: the cash used in every daily transaction.)

In fact, Newton can be credited as the man who saved England from monetary ruin when he took charge of The Great Recoinage. By the mid 1690s England’s silver coinage was in a state of collapse, wrecked both by arbitrage on the difference in the price of gold (expressed in silver) in Paris vs. London, and by an epidemic of clipping (stealing a bit of silver off the edge of coins) and counterfeiting. In response, in a three year effort beginning in 1696 the mint took in all of then hugely debased silver coinage, melted every groat, sixpence, shilling and the rest, and reissued new coins that were designed to be harder to clip or counterfeit.2

That was one key incident of several in the remaking of England’s money and credit system that took place from roughly 1680 to the 1720s or a bit later. That kind of big event is fairly easy to reconstruct, and it’s possible to follow its implications as they unfold in subsequent financial changes.

It’s much more difficult to get a handle on what it felt like to be someone living through such times—a historical moment when the basic modes of getting and spending underwent radical transformation.

And here, at last, is where our respite comes in. Here’s something to enjoy: Joseph Addison’s “Adventures of a Shilling.”

Addison is best remembered as one of the writers who transformed the essay in English into something less grand and more popularly accessible than prior, more ornate forms had been; his writing in the early English popular press is recognizably one of the ancestors of reportage and persuasive writing in English and American journalism.

This story of a peripatetic shilling is a delightful example of his project, a light touch deployed to serious ends. His hero is nothing less than a witness to the changes in commerce, high finance, and the politics that responded to those pressures. The result is a history very different from the crowned-heads-and-great-men versions that then (and still now, alas) were so common.

Have a taste:

Here’s Addison’s protagonist’s account of his early life:

I was born (says he) on the side of a mountain, near a little village of Peru, and made a voyage to England in an ingot, under the convoy of Sir Francis Drake. I was, soon after my arrival, taken out of my Indian habit, refined, naturalized, and put into the British mode, with the face of Queen Elizabeth on one side, and the arms of the country on the other. Being thus equipped, I found in me a wonderful inclination to ramble, and visit all parts of the new world into which I was brought. The people very much favoured my natural disposition, and shifted me so fast from hand to hand, that before I was five years old, I had travelled into almost every corner of the nation.

Lucky Shilling! Alas, the good times did not last.

I fell into the hands of a miserable old fellow, who clapped me into an iron I chest, where I found five hundred more of my own quality who lay under the same confinement.…After an imprisonment of several years, we heard somebody knocking at our chest, and breaking it open with a hammer.

With that, our hero took flight.

What was the fate of my companions I know not: as for myself, I was sent to the apothecary's shop for a pint of sack. The apothecary gave me to an herb-woman, the herb-woman to a butcher, the butcher to a brewer, and the brewer to his wife, who made a present of me to a nonconformist preacher…I sometimes fetched in a shoulder of mutton, sometimes a play-book, and often had the satisfaction to treat a Templar at a twelvepenny ordinary, or carry him, with three friends, to Westminster Hall.

There followed a much lonelier period, when a careless fellow lost our friend in a crack in the wall. That ill-fortune had a silver lining (sorrynotsorry), as this exile lasted through the Civil War and Oliver Cromwell’s time on top.

But then the catastrophe happened. The shilling got caught up in the piece-by-piece destruction of England’s silver money and almost despaired…until Isaac Newton’s mint saved him:

I fell into the hands of an artist, who conveyed me under ground, and with an unmerciful pair of shears, cut off my titles, clipped my brims, retrenched my shape, rubbed me to my inmost ring, and, in short, so spoiled and pillaged me, that he did not leave me worth a groat. You may think what a confusion I was in, to see myself thus curtailed and disfigured. I should have been ashamed to have shown my head, had not all my old acquaintance been reduced to the same shameful figure, excepting some few that were punched through the belly. In the midst of this general calamity, when everybody thought our misfortune irretrievable, and our case desperate, we were thrown into the furnace together, and (as it often happens with cities rising out of a fire) appeared with greater beauty and lustre than we could ever boast of before.

It’s all there, in a brief, funny, satirical essay (written at the prompting of Jonathan Swift). Commerce, high finance, sectarian politics, bad behavior—all revealed by a tiny, potent lump of metal given voice by an artist. Read the whole thing; squint just right and you’ll discover as much about a crucial passage in our past as one could hope for in a month of lectures.

Back to our usual diet of science and its (current) discontents, plus whatever my magpie brain alights upon, in a day or so. Till then, thanks for reading.

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Image: Quentin Metsys, Two Tax Collectors, between 1625 and ~1630

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This is a story that I hope will make you contact your representatives and tell them to strangle in the crib this latest Trump administration assault on US wealth and power.

Last Tuesday White House Science Advisor Michael Kratsios announced a report called “Unleashing a Golden Age of Science”—a title that evokes Mary McCarthy’s line about Lillian Hellman.1

I’m going to outsource most of the critique of this disastrous document to John Timmer and Derek Lowe, two science writers I greatly admire, but before quoting them and pointing y’all in their direction here are a couple of thoughts.

The first is in agreement with Lowe’s take: if anything like what’s being proposed by Kratios—a Peter Thiel disciple from the VC world, which is to say, conspicuously not a scientist—goes through, the Trumpworld effort to turn the US into a second rate and rapidly declining nation will be well on its way.

That is: the wealth and power America has enjoyed over the last three quarters of a century derive from the scientific research infrastructure built here since WW2. Transistors—invented here. Modern computers, first produced at scale here. Postwar agricultural chemistry, here. Biotechnology, here…and the list goes on. Look across the US economy and its high-tech military might and you see the outcome of the creation, mostly in a university setting, of a robust discovery machine investigating every aspect of the material world, from fundamental curiosity-driven studies to the kind of entrepreneurial translation that is the daily life of my home institution, MIT.

That’s what the Trump administration’s newly announced scheme will destroy.

One failure mode comes in Kratsios’s attempt to pick winners as targets for research. I could be overthinking this one, but in the move to defund “life sciences” and pour more money into robotics, AI, I see the administration’s insecurity about masculinity peeping through: enough of any feminized interest in how the biosphere works! Invest in hard, manly pursuits like murderbots and sentient male-coded silicon thinking machines.2

Whether or not misogyny shaped the administration’s science policy, the effect of walking away from perhaps the most potentially transformative discipline of the next few decades are pretty clear. If we don’t do the work, someone else will, or as Rep. Zoe Lofgren put it in her exchange with Kratsios he should have called his plan “Unleashing the Golden Age of Science in the People’s Republic of China,’.”

So if the proposed reorientation of federal support for science is so likely to undermine the US’s economy and influence, why do it? Well…follow the money. At its core, the plan calls for the dismantling of US university based research and the shifting of the (already shrunken total) of federal science dollars to industry and individuals who can persuade a grant-giving program director that they can do “gold standard science.”

In other words, it’s a grift. An attempt to get control of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds and, with, as Kratsios’s report also proposes, peer review abandoned, make it unbelievably easy to hand that cash over to administration allied businesses, Kennedy’s favorite medical grifters, those companies quick enough on their feet to recruit Trump sons and so on. Who cares if the United States is poorer and more vulnerable…they’ve got theirs, Jack, and Trump gets to dip his beak.

That’s my take, which follows Lowe’s pretty closely:

…let me make something clear right up front. When I talk to people about this subject (and that includes some journalists as well) and say what I'm about to at the end of this paragaph I am sometimes met with disbelief. But I mean what I say and I am trying my best to say what I mean: The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.

Read the whole thing, remembering that Lowe is not some crazed leftist in his mom’s basement, but a serious researcher and long time observer of both the basic science of drug discovery and its translation into industry.

For a take that does Kratsios et al. more honor than they deserve, but for that reason ends up as just as telling an indictment as Lowe’s, read John Timmer’s tracing of the internal contradictions and obvious mischaracterizations of the scientific enterprise. A sample:

The report presents itself as the spiritual successor of “Science, the Endless Frontier,” a policy document that laid out the case for government-funded science in the wake of World War II. The New Golden Age (SNGA) says that, while the concepts promoted by the original remain vital, the circumstances have changed such that we need major revisions to how the government is implementing things.

The result is an odd mix. It completely ignores or glosses over many things that the administration is doing to harm scientific progress. In some cases, it identifies issues that have already been discussed as problems within the scientific community. Elsewhere, it’s a mixture of political grievances, ideas without a solid intellectual foundation, and an injection of Silicon Valley’s perspective on innovation

Timmer is one of the most level headed, measured science journalists out there. He lacks any interest in the kind of primal scream I feel I need to unleash daily. He looks at what’s in front of him and tries to describe and analyze it as clearly as possible. All of which gives his conclusions that much more power…as in this devastating deadpan summary of this terribly dangerous plan:

A New Golden Age, in contrast, is a grab bag of political grievances, half-thought-through justifications for policies the Trump administration was already pursuing, and insinuations that scientific experts are kind of annoying and should learn how to fix car engines.

Again, read the whole thing. Then do as Lowe asks at the end of his short essay: make noise. Contact your representatives. Talk to friends and colleagues. This ain’t over. It has hardly begun.

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Image: Joseph Racknitz, The Turk, [an eighteenth century (fraudulent) chess playing automaton], 1789

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Almost fifty light years from earth a red dwarf shines. Such stars are not impressive; they’re as dim and cool as it’s possible to be and remain on what is called the main sequence of star types in the universe—stars that burn hydrogen as their main fusion feedstock.

Red dwarfs are small, even tiny as stars go: the least of them hold less than ten percent of the mass of our sun. The corollary of their diminutive size and temperature is that they are miserly in consuming their hydrogen fuel, which means they keep going for a quite a while—more than the age of the universe as of this writing.

All of which means that if you happen to be a planet orbiting a red dwarf, you have a very stable neighborhood in which to evolve…with all the time and circumstances, perhaps, for really interesting possibilities to emerge.

Which is where our nearish galactic neighbor comes in. That one red dwarf just fifteen parsecs from us shines on its own stellar system: two planets accompanying the star dubbed, romantically, LHS 1140. One of the two planets, LHS 1140c is a rocky planet about twice the mass of the earth with a “year”—its orbital period, of just 3.77 earth days. That puts it close enough to its star to bake, with a surface temperature that can reach over 500 degrees Kelvin—as in no fun for man, beast, or microbe.

But LHS 1140b, now…that’s a different kettle of interstellar fish.**

LHS 1140b is what exoplanet researchers call a “superearth.” It’s 5.6 times the mass of our third-rock home. Its year lasts almost 25 days—which puts it into what’s called the habitable zone, defined as the area in which a planet is just far enough from the sun to be cool enough to permit the existence of liquid water on its surface, and not so far away as to be permanently icy.

So far, that makes 1140b interesting but not unique; at least 45 of the roughly 6,000 known explanets lie in the habitable zone.

But this week, astronomers announced the discovery of something that takes matters into a new realm: LHS 1140b has an atmosphere. A team of researchers led by the impossibly perfectly named Collin Cherubim reported that over two observing runs with a large near-infrared/optical telescope in Chile, they were able to record absorption spectra—and on one of those runs, the spectroscopic details confirmed that helium was escaping from what this observation confirmed was a planetary atmosphere.

Why does that matter, given that atmospheres have been discovered on other explanets?

Because, as Harvard’s Cherubim told Katrina Miller of the New York Times, this is the first time that a single such planet has been discovered that may possess all the essential preconditions for life (as we know it here at home) the possibility of liquid water on a rocky surface, and the presence of an atmosphere:

“At this point, we have absolutely no evidence for life on the planet,” said Collin Cherubim, a planetary scientist who recently earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University. “But we think all of the really important, essential ingredients are there.”

Cherubim is appropriately cautious. It will take more observing time to confirm the initial finding of a helium atmosphere blanketing LHS 1140b, and the simple existence of the conditions of life is not sufficient to demonstrate that life beyond our solar system is actually there, replicating happily fifty light years away.

But the possibility is there, certainly, with added gusto thanks to earlier work showing that earth-like organisms can survive in conditions like those presumably present on LHS 1140b. Not little green bipeds, but perhaps a better start: yeast, which can survive in a helium atmosphere, could at least in concept underpin the start of a galactic booze trade.

OK…

I admit it. While this post wasn’t built around the hope of getting that clip into circulation, it’s certainly a welcome if unintended consequence of the writing process.

More seriously, this story delights me. Not because we can feel more confident that we are not alone in our galaxy—at best, I’d say this result makes us just a smidge less skeptical of that possibility. No…the joy here is in the demonstration that human capacities—for wonder, for virtuoso investigation, for the extraordinary skill and technical inventiveness needed to make the crucial measurements—can wrest such discoveries from nature. Human senses, extended by such sophisticated machines, reached across fifty light years to extract a picture of a world so unlike our own, and yet just alike enough to offer the chance of kinship.

Nothing about this work affects the price of eggs. It won’t make the T run on time or fix any of the legion of potholes my town just can’t seem to fill. But it is unequivocally the work of civilization. This is work that makes meaning. It locates us in a context far larger than our daily lives. It is, looked at with willing eyes, a kind of landscape art, or better a cosmos-scape vista. If, say, an Ansel Adams photograph takes the viewer out of themselves into connection with a natural world much larger than that one person, so does the graphs and spectra that limn LHS 1140b.

And that’s a bit of Sunday respite for me, and, I hope, for you as well.

*Yup. That line in the original Star Wars movie still gets my goat.

**I know, I know. But I like cheese(-iness)!

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Images: Izaak van Oosten, The Garden of Eden, between 1655 and 1661.

Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River, 1942

The William Faulkner quote above is something of a cliché, but like many such shopworn phrases, it became so because it expresses a kernel of truth.

It came to mind as I read a report on the death of America’s last iron lung patient last week:

Polio was eradicated in the United States in 1979.

However, the effects of the virus have lingered for one Oklahoma woman, the last polio survivor in America, to depend on an iron lung.

Martha Ann Lillard, 78, invited News 4’s Ali Meyer to her home three weeks ago because she was desperate for help with repairs.

She lived more than 70 years at the mercy of that machine.

Lillard remembered the exact day in 1953 she got ill, two years before the Salk vaccine became available:

“I got it on my fifth birthday. I woke up, and it was sunny outside, and I started to sit up, and my neck was killing me,” she said. “I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow.”

After four days, Lillard fell unconscious.

“I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move my arms or legs. I was paralyzed all over.”

The Salk vaccine—the first one that could immunize against polio—was in development by then; the first small-scale tests of the shot had begun in 1952. But the definitive large scale trial wouldn’t start until April 1954 with approval of the vaccine following a year later. All of which is to say that Lillard had redoubled bad luck: first, encountering the polio virus and second doing so at a time so agonizingly close to reaching the safe harbor of the engineered immunity only a vaccine can provide.

Lillard seems an amazing person. She was able to tolerate the iron lung as a young child, while many kids could not. She was also, clearly, enormously determined. In the beginning, she remained in the machine 23 hours a day, but over time and a ton of effort she became able to walk again, and regained partial use of one arm. At the peak of her recovery, she was able to cut her time in iron lung to while she slept. She married twice and lived independently until the pandemic hit. She endured two bouts of the disease, followed by long COVID, which ultimately landed her back in the iron lung twenty-four hours a day. There was no margin for error:

Last year, a tornado knocked out the power to her home. Her generator failed, and Lillard’s husband did mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until help arrived.

By now I hope the drift of this post is clear. I can’t begin to fathom the courage and sheer grit Lillard displayed to live with her mechanical lung for sixty-eight years. Her story should be one of a bygone age. The iron lung is a device so antiquated that (as was the case for Lillard) there are no longer those who knew how to maintain and repair it. Polio itself, like the rest of the vaccine-preventable diseases that were once ubiquitous blights on childhood, has been gone from memory for decades…until now.

In this, the second year of RFK Jr.’s reign of (willed, malicious) error, Lillard’s life and death remind us that a world in which vaccines are rejected is a demon-haunted one—and those demons can take physical form, hard steel, compressors, motors, assembled into a roughly coffin-shaped tube.

That’s the one key lesson to take from Lillard’s long display of bravery and resilience. Yes, we can and should admire that life. But we should, we must remember the miracle that was the polio vaccine on its arrival,* which is what ensured that the kids who followed her just a few years later would not see the inside of an iron lung. That’s the memory that sets the stakes in the war against RFK Jr.'s and his allies’ witch hunt that aims to destroy the greatest life-and-joy preserving invention humankind has ever gifted to itself.**

*Yes…I know. There was the Cutter Incident. Which was tragic and should have been avoided and does not alter the fact that the advent of the Salk and then the Sabin vaccines led directly to the eradication of polio in the US and most of the world. The crux is that without total eradication, a breach in the vaccine wall would allow the virus to make a potentially rapid comeback.

**Self promotion alert: For much more on the vaccine revolution and the history of opposition to it, you can always check out my new book, A Pox on Fools.

Image: US Food and Drug Administration, Iron Lung, likely early 1950s

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I left it late, but finally got my comment in on the OMB’s proposed new rule subjecting science funding to political control from start to finish. (The rule would make it possible not just to deny a grant for any reason, but to terminate one already made whenever the political appointees in charge decided they wanted to.)

If you can add to the huge and growing volume of comments opposing this rule, that would be great. You can express yourself here. It matters because the process of finalizing the rule includes weighing public comment. The more that has to be reviewed, the greater the wait before the new measure can be implemented—which translates into more time to organize against this steaming pile of what comes out of the south end of a north facing bull.

What follows is what I submitted as my view of the proposed change. Steal from any part of it if it helps.

Thanks…

This proposed rule should be rejected, as it threatens the ongoing viability of the US research base; opens up new avenues for financial corruption; would sacrifice the well being of Americans and humankind the world over as non-technically trained appointees shift research priorities away from long term investment in ultimately powerful ideas; and taken all in all amount to a surrender of global leadership and power to first and foremost China and secondarily other allies and potential adversaries. If hostile agents sought to weaken the US over time, they could choose no better, no more subtle and hidden an approach than this proposed rule.

I write this as a science journalist and writer of more than four decades experience and as a senior academic at one of the world’s top science and engineering universities, MIT. What these two careers help me see is that even with the best of intentions, attempting to predict what fundamental or curiosity driven research will yield near or long term applications. No one expected Einstein’s masterwork, general relativity, to matter on human scales—yet its calculations are built into every mobile phone and car GPS system, among much else. A UC Berkeley biology professor and graduate student mucking about in the outflow from a Yellowstone geyser and what they discover there—microbes living at temperature previously thought to be incompatible with life—might seem a curiosity, just another bit of “ain’t the living world cool” natural history. In fact, what was discovered there about how those bacteria survived such hostile conditions led directly to the discovery of the polymerase chain reaction, a crucial tool across the biotech industry.

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A politically-led process choosing what research to support based on short term measures of practicality and/or national interest would have missed such developments. And we would be poorer and sicker for it. Even assuming no partisan or self-interested torquing to the decision making to come under this new rule, it rewards short term and cautious, risk-averse grant making.

Of course, that assumption is not valid, not because of any specific concern about the current administration or its successors but because of what the history of political-led or driven scientific research tells us about the likelihood that non-science based distortions of assessments of the merits of one line of research or another will occur and self-reinforce. Again, drawing on research and reporting across a forty year career as an observer of scientific discovery from the seventeenth century scientific revolution forward, it’s easy to find examples of the erosion of scientific expertise and outright corruption. Great Britain, where the smallpox vaccine was invented in 1796, persisted in using a less safe version of that immunization long after other European nations and the US had made the switch because of a nationalist commitment to the methods used in the original wholly British version. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union planted the seeds of its own decline by rejecting engineering research into possible failure modes of the grandiose projects being undertaken then, and, famously set back Soviet biology for at least two generations by choosing, for political reasons, to elevate Trofim Lysenko’s disproved theories of biological inheritance. Picking lines of research based on ideological commitments leads directly to unproductive scientific inquiry and worse—actual harm as badly-done science tailored to meet the interests of one administration or another creates false “facts” that lead directly to bad outcomes.

The potential for corruption is also enhanced by this rule. If political appointees can make grants as they choose there is nothing to stop funds appropriated for scientific research to be transferred to any entity that purports to do such research; the worst case is that the NSF and NIH budgets become bust-out opportunities delivering funds to well connected private entities.

Last, the rule, if adopted, will have lasting and significantly negative impact on US science as a source of national power. Rather than depend on funding that can be terminated at any time, any researcher with options, which is to say the best ones, will seek out such opportunities—and will be offered those opportunities from by our national rivals. The emigration of such expertise is already under way, with leading scientists and technologists leaving US institutions for new homes in China, Canada, Europe and beyond. This move will accelerate that brain drain.

Since the end of WW 2, the US has been by far the leading center of scientific discovery. Our superpower status was built on the wealth and power that flowed from there. There’s nothing inevitable or necessarily permanent about such leadership. This rule risks giving it up, to our national detriment. It should be rejected.

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Image: Franz Marc, White Bull, 1911

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I’ve promised some fun on this site for a while and now I can deliver, with a gloss on the most enjoyable research paper I’ve encountered in a month of Sundays.

I mean, could you resist a report titled “Underwater Suit-Wearing Cyborg Insect Capable of Hours-Long Diving and Terra-Aqua Travel?”

The first thing I learned in this piece is that cyborg cockroaches exist, which is unsettling enough in its own right. Cyborg insects, the papers authors write, “are hybrid robots that combine a living insect with an electronic controller.” An earlier paper expands on what’s involved in such hybrids: “An insect–computer hybrid robot…is the fusion of a living insect platform and artificial microdevices, including stimulators, sensors, and computers. When compared with the artificial robots, a hybrid robot can be operated as an autonomous mobile machine with low energy consumption and hardware costs.”

Basically, that means that the controllers of such a cyborg can tell the cockroach's legs when and where to move, dictate when it stops and senses and when it travels and so on. These are a burgeoning technology, I learned, to my amused near-horror, “envisioned for use in complex tasks such as search-and-rescue missions, pipeline inspection and object transportation, with cockroach-based ones considered the most promising owing to their robustness and ease of locomotion control.”

So watch out…that roach you saw scuttling beneath your sink may work for the NSA!

But even if such bug-bots are roaming around on land, 70% of the earth’s surface has remained off limits:

Naturally, the inability of terrestrial hosts like cockroaches to absorb aquatic oxygen prevents underwater functions.

That’s a problem, “given that real-world search-and-rescue or infrastructure inspection terrains often include puddles, flooded zones, or other partially submerged areas” which creates a need for “cyborg insects capable of temporary submersion and locomotion underwater while maintaining normal metabolic activity.”

Enter scuba-roach!

Or, as the researchers involved, Zifu Fan as first author, Hirotaka Sato as the corresponding investigator, and colleagues, put it in the formal language of scientific communication, please say hello to “cyborg insects capable of temporary submersion and locomotion underwater while maintaining normal metabolic activity.”

The researchers built a device with several components that together form a wearable diving suit tailored for the Madagascar hissing cockroach. It includes a flexible shell; an oxygen generator that uses manganese dioxide as the catalyst for the reaction that decomposes hydrogen peroxide into breathable oxygen; and tubes that carry that stuff of breath to the insect’s respiratory system.

Thus equipped, experimental bio-machine roaches survived underwater for as long as three hours, remained under the external control for that entire time through to a user-induced emergence from underwater. The test cyborgs were faster than existing amphibious robot designs and performed well in tight or hazardous conditions…all of which implies that someday, possibly quite soon, a cyborg-roach may indeed come to a puddle or a pond near you.

I for one, can only submit to our new diving robot-insect overlords…;-)

Check out the paper for much more detail on how each component in the scuba system works; it’s really a delightful tale of engineering dexterity and enthusiasm.

And don’t let your dreams become overtaken by swarms of besuited roaches suddenly bursting out from your community pool’s drain. It could never happen…

I promise…;-)

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Image: Hieronymous Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights detail: pond with fictional creatures, between 1590 and 1600.

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Maybe the evening before a holiday weekend in the midst of a heatwave isn’t the very best time to do a book event, but last Thursday (July 2) I had a great time talking A Pox on Fools with my friend and science writing colleague Jennifer Ouellette. The event was at DC's legendary bookstore Politics and Prose in front of a lovely audience (who had braved the truly awful heat of that city-on-a-swamp).Now the good folks there have posted the video of the event.

So check it out! [I’m not sure if the video embeds in the email notice of this post, but it works on the site.]

And if you are so moved, maybe buy a book...not just for yourselves but for anyone in your circle of friends and family. It’s my hope that anyone who is wondering if all the noise around vaccines means there really is a problem there can get their hands on a copy. They’ll find there the historical stories that show why vaccines mater—and a tale of how once at least partly reasonable fears about vaccination no longer hold, no matter how vehemently RFK Jr. and his ilk try to frighten us anew.

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This piece is something between another news update and a Sunday respite number. That’s because there’s been some genuinely fine vaccine results lately, and most of this hopefully brief post aims to celebrate these advances in human flourishing.

First up: I was smacked right upside my gob by news of a vaccine that can make a real difference for people with melanoma—if an early trial with 157 patients with advanced cases of the skin cancer pans out in larger sample sizes.

The idea behind the new vaccine, developed by COVID vaccine pioneer Moderna, turns on the fact that every person’s version of the disease is different. Each malignancy accumulates its own mutations that are unique to their tumor cells, and not present in their healthy ones. Genome sequencing has become cheap enough (its own scientific triumph), such changes can be identified patient by patient. With that information in hand, Moderna’s mRNA technology makes it possible to design a vaccine that can teach each person’s immune system to target specific proteins created by such variation in the cancer cell genome.

A phase two trial combined these individualized vaccines with the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab, sold under the relentlessly advertised name Keytruda. This study showed that those who received both that drug and a vaccine after surgery did much better than those who just got the current standard of care, surgery and Keytruda. Five years after diagnosis and initial treatment, 70% of those in the vaccine group were still cancer free, compared to 49% of those in the control cohort.

Again, this is early days. 157 patients does not a confirmed useful therapy make. A large, phase 3 trial will start next year, which means there’s still a fair amount of time before this new vaccine could possibly enter wide clinical practice.

But this is still a necessary and major step forward—and a reminder of the extraordinary power of what almost 150 years ago Louis Pasteur called “the principle of vaccination.” In the intervening century and a half, researchers have learned how to engineer into the immune system the power to guard ourselves against an ever-lengthening catalogue of threats. Many more such defenses will come—especially if RFK Jr.’s fact-free disdain for mRNA science can be flushed out of the federal government.

Next: A study recently published in The Lancet offered one of the clearest pictures yet of the power of vaccines to save lives. Peter Saiseni and Milena Falcaro looked at cervical cancer death rates following human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccination before and after England introduced universal HPV vaccination in 2008.

The TL:DR is that HPV vaccination works incredibly well to eliminate deaths from cervical cancer. Among the cohort with the highest vaccine uptake following the mandate, about 90%, deaths dropped to zero—nada, none, zilch—in between 2020 and 2024, which, in the desiccated language of scientific community, becomes “a reduction in cervical cancer mortality of 100%” — which translates into 23 lives saved compared with historical averages.

This is a purely observational study, but it is still significant evidence that vaccinating against HPV translates directly into a stunning reduction in both the risk of infection for individuals and the danger of transmission from one viral host-human to another. Which means, as Saiseni and Falcaro write, that their results “support the achievability of the WHO goal of eliminating cervical cancer as a public health problem,” and that “efforts should be made to achieve high vaccine uptake among young adolescents globally.”

So far smallpox is the only human disease that has been fully eradicated—thanks to vaccination. A handful of others have been confined to tiny pockets of in-the-field transmission (which means they could still roar back were vaccine vigilance to slip). So we’ll see how soon we achieve what would seem to be the no-brainer goal of vaccinating our way out of the threat of cervical cancer.

One more thing: the CDC still recommends HPV vaccination as part of the childhood immunization schedule, but the new calendar approved by Robert F. Kennedy cutting the HPV vaccine sequence from two shots (or three, depending on age) to one, with an as yet unknown impact on the lasting immune response. We won’t know for decades how many women may die as sacrifices to the anti-vax idol.

One more quick story (So you say—Ed.) that offers a much swifter insight into the effect of vaccine denialism. You may recall that in April Secretary of Defense* Peter Hegseth announced that military recruits would no longer be required to get the flu vaccination, claiming the mandate was part of “an unrelenting war on our warriors” that “weaken[ed] our warfighting capabilities.” In the wake of that policy shift, flu vaccine rates among Air Force recruits dropped to about 40%.

You can guess what happened next. In June, influenza paid a call on the Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, which sees about 700 new trainees per week. So far almost 300 new members of the Air Force have fallen ill, and one has died of the flu.

To no informed person’s surprise, flu vaccines are once again required at every boot camp.

That’s the right response—but consider the cost of discovering, yet again, that microbes do not care how deeply one believes vaccines are a trick played on the virtuous by mere experts in biology and medicine. That young airman, Keon McDaniel did not have to die six weeks into his military career. He shouldn’t have. But he did, a victim of the willed and chosen ignorance of the current leadership of the United States.

I know I don’t have to bang on that drum for this readership. The good news is genuinely good: the technology and the skills exist to discover new ways of reducing human suffering—and more such discoveries are coming all the time.

The sorrow is that right now the movement that would deny us that extraordinary gift is ascendent, and that means that each advance comes more slowly than it should, each delay carrying its own bodycount.

And with that, enough for now. I really will try to make the next post an unalloyed cheerful one. We can all use such pleasures, me most of all.

Image: Berthe Morisot, “On the beach at Fécamp,” 1874

*Not going to dignify that utterly unqualified parody of a military leader’s cosplay renaming of his office and department.

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There has been some contingent good news, for a change. An ingenious natural experiment made possible by a sharp and absolute dividing line between two groups— those in Wales who were granted access to the herpes zoster vaccine and those who were not—revealed that the shot reduced the number of dementia diagnoses for those lucky enough to have born just one week on the right side of the line, compared to those born one week too soon.

Also, last week, JAMA Open Network published yet one more result showing that COVID vaccines provided protection “beyond existing immunity in adults against medically attended COVID-19” — a safeguard that reduced emergency room visits and hospitalization compared with the unvaccinated.

This frankly routine bit of research, which comes on top of multiple studies over the last five years confirming that vaccination helps ward off the worst consequences of a COVID infection, gained more notice than it might have otherwise because vaccine saboteur and CDC director Jay Battacharya blocked what in prior years under honest leadership would have been routine publication in the CDC journal Morbity and Mortality Weekly Report. So that’s the contingent element mentioned above: good news, actively (though not permanently) suppressed by the vandals atop the US public health system.

There’s more stuff out there as well, which I’ll try to get to in a post once my travels slow down a bit. But for now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give us all a moment of schadenfreude—joy tempered, alas, by the cost of the lesson learned.

That lesson would be that microbes don’t give a damn about your ideology. You’ll recall that in April, Secretary of Defense* and devotee of manly-manliness lethality cosplay Peter Hegseth made annual flu vaccines optional for those serving in the US military. The requirement, he said was “not rational” and hence, “if you, an American warrior…believe that the flu vaccine is in your best interest you are free to take it…But we will not force you.”

Unfortunately, the influenza virus is not itself rational; it just is—a highly infectious packet of DNA that thrives on unprotected candidate hosts.

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You can guess what happened next.

In the wake of Hegseth’s decision, vaccine uptake among Air Force recruits dropped to just 40% from close to 100% Then, on June 18, The New York Times published a story reporting on a flu outbreak at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. In that first piece, the number affected was estimated to be close to 200, with one death among those who had fallen ill (though the Times could not confirm that the flu was the cause of that loss). By the following week, the number of those afflicted had risen to at least 222…and Hegseth was compelled to make a rapid about face, with the Air Force once again requiring the flu shot for new recruits and the Army looking to deploy the shot more widely.

So, yeah, we can all point and laugh at yet another demonstration of Hegseth’s manifest unfitness for the office in which he now squats, just as we can bemoan Battacharya’s and Kennedy’s ongoing sabotage, while cheering every small victory that pushes back on their lethal devotion to the anti-vaccine, pro-microbe cause.

But the fate of Keon McDaniel—the brand new airman, dying just six weeks into basic training—along with the wholly preventable deaths of all the kids who won’t get their childhood shots, those who have been scared off COVID jabs and all the rest—all these form a reminder that any joy at the discomfiture of the leaders in this folly is wholly overshadowed by the cost of such decisions.

To paraphrase Ben Franklin: we have the technology to ward off infectious disease…if we can keep it.

Keep cool out there folks, and see you next time.

Image: Woodi Ishmael, Trail-Blazers in the Sky, 1916

I was planning to get back to the vaccine beat today. (Did I mention I’ve got a new book on that subject? Not more than a few dozen times? Well, right…

…Still I find myself saying: I’ve got a new book out, A Pox on Fools—a history of opposition to vaccines—that is far more timely than I’d wish. If that interests you, check it out (US) or take a gander (UK).

In that context, I’m always on the watch for important vaccine news, and as it happens there’s been a bunch lately. I will get to it soon, I promise—but this morning Science broke a story that is at once enraging and a precise case study in the mafia methods through which the Trump administration (perhaps “junta” would be a better description) is breaking US science. Quite possibly beyond repair on anything short of a decades-long campaign of restoration.

You all should read the whole piece. It’s not particularly long, but is nonetheless damning and depressing. Here’s the essential fact from which Jeffrey Mervis’s story begins:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is trimming this year’s budgets for hundreds of its traditional basic science programs by roughly 20% to 30% even though its overall budget is down just 3%, Science has learned. NSF has not publicly explained the drastic cuts. But sources within and outside the agency, who did not want to be named, say they suspect the goal is to free up funds for a new $1.5 billion initiative, launched last month, meant to turn NSF-funded discoveries into new products and industries.

Where is $1.5 billion going? To a series of units innocuously dubbed “X-Labs” that are (we are told) going to foster real world applications of the NSF’s portfolio of curiosity-based research.

The cost of this shift of funds? A drastic cutback in exactly that fundame

ntal research that is the seed corn for the kind of applied work that does indeed foster human flourishing. Here’s one example from Mervis’s reporting:

The 18 June memo, from the head of a unit within NSF’s math and physical sciences directorate, told program managers that the unit’s budget for this fiscal year, which ends on 30 September, has been cut by 30% from its FY 2025 level of approximately $260 million…

In the wake of that budget depredation, NSF grant giving has plummeted — the number of awards is down to one eight of last year’s through June 15. And even if you’re doing brilliant work, acknowledged by your peers on an NSF review panel, don’t count on getting any new money soon:

The memo’s bad news extends beyond the slashed budget. It directs the section’s 15 program managers to stop seeking funding for any proposals, even those that received the highest marks from outside reviewers and program staff, “until we are able to provide more details.” It even suggests staff “pull back any award recommendations in the queue,” another way to lower the number of grants ultimately going out the door this year.

So where is all that money going? Funny you should ask:

NSF will fund the X-Labs through a rarely used mechanism, called Other Transaction Authority, that gives it much greater leeway than usual to choose winners and set funding and goals. For example, it allows NSF to make awards to nontraditional recipients such as a limited partnership or a venture capital firm, some of which might have been created solely for the purpose of receiving the NSF award. It also allows NSF to make additional awards without the need to review a new application.

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Think about the review process that led to Trump’s pool guy getting the contract to turn the Reflecting Pool into an algae farm. That’s what this process seems to allow: Trump’s political appointees can hand sacks of cash to connected buddies who set up some opaque vehicle through which to launder deploy grant funds.

I suppose there’s an outside chance that these grants will go through rigorous review and will indeed serve the American people as the research that will follow yields significant practical applications.

I also believe there’s a non zero possibility the I’ll win the quantum lottery and find myself able to walk through a wall. I’ll just note that the odds on that coming to pass suggest such an event comes to pass at intervals that significantly exceed the span between the Big Bang and the heat death of the universe.

One sign that this looks like a bust out rather than a defensible shift in federal priorities is the timeline. Proposals are due in mid-July with, Mervis writes, the first grant funds to flow as swiftly as the autumn. To go from zero to a plausible, well conceived plan for translational research in less than a month from now?

Again, I suppose it could happen. But I wouldn’t bet even lunch money on it.

By contrast, I am very confident that this latest atrocity from the Trump administration will yield both short and long term harms to the US. Science has been the source of our wealth and power since the Second World War, when we benefited from being the only country left standing and were able to welcome and support scientific talent from all over the world. That’s it. We were here and we were rich, and after the atomic bomb, radar, and all the rest of the obvious applications of modern science to war, we decided it made sense to become a research as well as a military superpower.

And we did…for decades. But there is nothing inevitable about scientific prowess. It isn’t an American birthright. If the conditions that made the US so welcoming of science and scientists change…then we’ll lose our advantage, and with it, one of the greatest engines of American prosperity and both hard and soft power.

That’s the direct and devastating attack across the entire spectrum of federal research programs is doing; the looting of the NSF is just the latest blow to US science. Its most immediate impact will be to disrupt current inquiry. Experiments and ideas that would have happened in the coming months or year or two now won’t. That knowledge will be delayed, and may well be found elsewhere, to some other community’s advantage and not ours.

The longer term impact will be more fundamental: labs that shut down don’t simply reopen if funds reappear. Leading researchers go elsewhere; the students and techs and post docs that do the daily work of science scatter, some leaving the field altogether. Informal knowledge disappears and the pipeline of new researchers shrinks.

The worst of it is that this medium-term loss is closer than it may seem. It doesn’t take a long gap in funding to wreck a research program. Loss of support for some months might or might not be survivable. But if grants don’t flow for the remainign two and half years of the Trump administration?

Katie bar the door.

I’m not sure what to suggest at this point, but calling your House and Senate representatives would be a start—especially as Mervis reports that this redirection of funds is quite possibly illegal, explicitly forbidden in the final FY 2026 appropriation bill approved by Congress.

And with that, I’ve gone on long enough. Thanks for reading this far. And spread the word. More voices pushing back can help. Truly.

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Johannes Vermeer, The Astronomer, c. 1668

But that’s for a weekday, and I seem to recall that in the last post I promised something fun, respite from the weekday reality we all wrestle with.

So here’s something surpassingly cool, and I’ll confess up front that I chose this discovery because it allows me to share with you one of the most elegant and unexpected short science documentaries it’s ever been my good luck to watch.

Earlier this month a team of Chinese scientists led by Xiaotong Peng published a paper in Nature reporting the discovery of a ginormous (a technical term) undersea graveyard—a “whale necropolis” that stretches for 1,200 kilometers, about 750 miles within the Diamantina Fracture Zone off the west coast of Australia, at depths that reach 7,002 meters*—which is to say whale remains have now been observed 23,000 feet down in the abyss.

There are layers and layers of fascination in that observation. To begin with, this is a cemetery with some serious history: out of the 481 sets of whale remains found, five were recently deposited, and the rest are ancient. The oldest fossilized skeleton dates back to 5.3 million YBP.

Nature published a good non-technical story alongside the research paper. Init, marine paleontologist Stephen J. Godfrey focuses first on the records set by these observations:

Various superlatives can be used to describe this necropolis. It is the geographically largest whale graveyard, extending for some 1,200 kilometres along a sea-floor trench. It is also the deepest, with beaked whale skulls preserved to a record-breaking depth of 7,002 metres. It is the oldest known of these sites, with fossils going back to the beginning of the Pliocene epoch.

The necropolis supports many living organisms and the majority of these species are probably new to science. The specialized community at this site includes jellyfish, a variety of worms (including tubeworms and bone-eating worms) crustaceans, molluscs (gastropods and chemosynthesis-based bivalves) and brittle stars, collectively reaching densities of up to 2,840 individuals per square metre. This community would probably cease to exist in its current form without an ongoing supply of dead whales. Somehow, these organisms can find every ‘fresh’ whale fall, presumably through chemical cues that are emitted by the decomposing carcasses and dispersed through water currents.

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Is all this a big deal? Why yes. Yes it is. Godfrey again:

Peng and colleagues’ study has the flavour of other major underwater discoveries, such as one made in December 1938 off the coast of Madagascar: a type of fish, previously thought to have been extinct for more than 70 million years, called the coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) was found alive². Another is the 1977 discovery deep on the ocean floor along the Galápagos Rift in the eastern Pacific Ocean of the first hydrothermal vents³. These structures were unexpectedly found to be teeming with animals sustained in an ecosystem that overcomes the challenges of darkness by using non-photosynthetic energy processes.

Just as the surprising discoveries of the coelacanth and first hydrothermal vents reshaped our view of life in the deep ocean, Peng and colleagues’ encounter with a vast fossil graveyard is a truly unique discovery. Although the site has limited accessibility, it seems likely to hold many other exciting finds, and it will no doubt inspire more submersible dives in similar environments. Peng and colleagues’ paper reminded me of a trailer for the first in a series of epic movies. I hope that there will be many more of these blockbusters to come.

I love everything about this story. The extremes involved just to get into position to make the discovery!—let know one say that the age of exploration is over. The unimaginable possibilities in nature: for one example, that the preservation of ancient remains turns in part on the fact that beaked whales have really thick skulls. And above all, the vision of a kind of immortality to which we all are heir, but which emerges so clearly in this setting. Each whale fall marks not the death of a single creature, but the birth of a strange and seemingly impossibly rich ecosystem. Bodies dissolve, then reappear in an underwater version of Darwin’s tangled bank. There is indeed grandeur in this newly revealed view of life.

And yes, you can visualize exactly that vision in the promised short film by the invaluable duo of Flora Lichtman and Sharon Shattuck:

And with that: happy Sunday; happy Solstice: happy Father’s day. Catch you early in the coming week with writing on one new outrage or another. In the meantime, let’s be good to each other and (something I struggle with) to ourselves.

*I’m not making up that precision. The quoted figure for the depth at that whale fall included that terminal two meters.

Image: Pieter Lastman, Jonah and the Whale, 1621

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One of the ubiquitous phrases of the Trump administration is “gold standard science.” RFK Jr. tells us that his pursuit of the repeatedly debunked claim of a vaccine-autism connection relies on that gold standard of inquiry. In 2025, NIH Director Jay Battacharya laid out his interpretation of the term, listing nine atttributes that properly shiny science would display. And at the end of May, the Office of Management and Budget, headed by the frighteningly effective apparatchik Russell Vought, proposed a new rule to govern federal research funding that would make following the standards of “gold standard science” a requirement for any grant, which sounds anodyne enough until you read the fine print.

I’ll get to the implications of that proposed rule in a moment, but first, there’s something that has long troubled/amused me about the parade of historical illiteracy behind the triumphant crowing about the gold standard as the measure of excellence (and the implication that those annoying scientists and the corrupt and/or inept Democrats who want to defer to their expertise to drive the federal research effort).

Simply: the gold standard was a disaster. For decades now economists have built the case that tying national and global monetary systems to the amount of that bright yellow metal in central bank vaults around the world was a major driver of the crisis that began with the stock market crash of 1929. As Ben Bernanke and Harold James put it in a classic paper, “recent research on the causes of the Great Depression has laid much of the blame for that catastrophe on the doorstep of the international gold standard.”

The net effect of the gold standard in the interwar period was to inject a deflationary bias into national economies—which, in the event of an economic crisis, could push a moment of financial crisis into the lasting contraction of credit, production, and employment that we recall as the worst economic disaster of the 20th century—and worse. As Albert Einstein once said, Adolf Hitler began his rise to power “living on the empty stomach of Germany”—which is to say the Great Depression catapulted Germany into the arms the man who would launch the global human misery machine that was World War II.

For those and other good reasons, no one but crazies (who now include some prominent members of the Republican Party, but I repeat myself) wants to return to the gold standard as the basis for the US or the global economic system. So-called “fiat” currency may have vulnerabilities, but a monetary system backed by the economic life of a country as a whole and governed by a central bank that can respond flexibly to financial events captures the real experience of economic life far better than trying to make it all go with a limited supply of an arbitrarily designated commodity, no matter how pretty and ductile it may be.

To take the analysis down a notch: a system that crashed the global economy and sparked a war that killed an estimated 60-75 million people is probably not the one you want to use as a metaphor for excellence in science.

Just sayin’

Or maybe it is the perfect label, given what the Trump-led attack on US research capabilities has accomplished so far.

On the surface, the administration’s insistence that it is merely asking science to be what scientists have said it is for a long time. When Battacharya formalized the Trumpian definition of gold standard research, the required attributes read benignly enough—more a high school level account of scientific method than anything else. His list demanded that work be reproducible, transparent, unconflicted, and so on.

There were a couple of tells in Battacharya’s blueprint. For one, peer review is supposed to be “unbiased,” which I cynically take to mean “must include vaccine denialists as well as virologists, immunologists, etc.” And requiring that research must be “collaborative and interdisciplinary” is at best odd, given that some problems require a deep dive into a single subdiscplinary framework. But overall, it’s hard to argue with a claim that science should communicate errors and uncertainty and be “skeptical of its findings and assumptions.”

But, as always, it’s vital to look at what this crowd does, not what it says:

On 29 May 2026, the US White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed a rule that directs political appointees to require adherence with “gold standard science” in the awarding of federal grants, including research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation. This process, if finalised, would permit political appointees - officials placed in senior leadership or policy roles through a political appointment process, such as the senate confirmed NIH director - to override or second guess longstanding merit based review processes that historically determined most grant awards.

Thus the actual definition of the gold standard: the only science that need apply for federal support is that which Trump, Kennedy, Vought et al. decide is rightthink. You see the application of this principle already, in actions ranging from last year’s effective ban on federal support for mRNA research to the dismantling of a multi-hundred-million dollar network of ocean instruments whose sin seems to be that its sensors provide evidence of ongoing climate change.

Combine a politburo approach to picking winners and losers in American science with the ongoing decline in federal funding for both curiosity driven and applied research and you have the makings of a disaster, the dismantling of US research capacity that has for the last 80 years been globally dominant. The wealth and power that the US secured after World War 2 rests on that long run at the top. But, to our imminent sorrow, we’re about to discover what happens when we surrender those commanding heights.

See you next time—with a change of pace…actually cool stuff from within the research endeavor. After all, none of us can live on bad news alone.

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Image: Jan Provoost, Death and the Miser, before 1529.

Before getting to the meat (or sushi?) of this story, a housekeeping note. This piece is a prototype for what I hope will become a pretty regular feature of Inverse Square. One of the chief reasons I got into science writing back in the chisel-and-slate era was the simple wonderfulness of what comes out of the systematic and rigorous study of nature. As in, ain’t science cool.

Now flash forward to our present predicaments.

In our intensely political and partisan times, when there is so much at risk for the planet and ourselves, it’s so damn easy (for me) to get well and truly stuck on the daily crisis hamster wheel. So for me, a bit of back to basics offers an antidote, by which I mean it’s good to spend time on a regular basis with results that are, first, simply fun. I won’t promise not to find some social, political, and/or cultural twist in these stories. But the idea is to find and share the excitement of some new knowledge because, while I can’t speak for you, these days I damn sure need that kind of joy when- and wherever it can be found.

Enough throat clearing…let’s get down to it.

Sex is good. But not always necessary.

That is: sexual reproduction is the most common way species make it from one generation to the next. The evolutionary biology argument as to why this should be so is that the mixing of genes from two parents is more robust, less like to fall prey to selection pressures than the asexual alternative.

That’s because when you mix the genes from two parents a species can generate an enormous number of variations in a process that makes it possible for beneficial versions of a gene to spread through a population, while the ones that can trip you up can readily get washed out of the gene pool. Asexual reproduction, in which every offspring is genetically identical to its parent is trickier, because harmful mutations can accumulate leading to what is termed “genomic decline.”

If this is so, then the measure of the disadvantage of the asexual strategy is the survival time of the species. The prediction is that a species whose individuals in essence clone themselves, will go extinct swiftly, or at least sooner than an analogous species that gets busy with each other.

This prediction works out a lot of the time. But not always, as researchers documented in a paper published in March. [A nontechnical account of this research, on which this post depends, can be found here.] The team, led by Edward Ricemeyer at the University of Missouri, wanted to find out why the Amazon molly, an asexual species of fish managed to persist past what conventional evolutionary math would predict for its sell-by date.

The work by Ricemeyer and his colleagues turned on a bit of serendipity: the Amazon molly came into being through a single event, a mating between individuals from two sexually reproducing species of mollies that occurred ~100,000 years ago. Both of those species—Atlantic and sailfin mollies—are still around, which allowed the team to do a detailed comparison of all three genomes, with the goal of seeing how the asexual Amazons managed to keep their genes sufficiently free of harmful variations to keep pace with their sexual ancestors.

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What they found is yet one more illustration of the fact that nature can find a lot more ways to get from there to here than we can imagine a priori. The Amazon mollies do accumulate more mutations than their sexual cousins. But they don’t display more harmful ones.

Why not? Because, as this result and others show, there is more than one way to get rid of damaging mutations than simple selection pressure—killing off the individuals burdened by such genes. The group was able to show that Amazon mollies have used a DNA repair mechanism called “gene conversion” that takes advantage of the fact that chromosomes travel in pairs. Gene conversion copies DNA segments from the unmutated chromosome onto its paired counterpart, writing over the damaged section. And thanks to that, the Amazon molly has managed to hang around as an all-female species with (almost) no need for any masculine intervention. (Male mollies from related species do play a minor role in the process, which is its own story, probably for another post.)

What to make of this seemingly minor curiosity of natural history? At least two things.

First—we are still in the early days of the molecular and genomic revolution in biology. The sequencing and analytical tools needed to confirm that the Amazon mollies are in fact able to police their own DNA are incredibly new. Taken together these techniques form a kind of microscope, penetrating biological mechanisms at scales previously hidden from our view. Every new instrument that extends our senses into realms that had been inaccessible to us reveals much more than simply greater detail; previously unsuspected (or merely dreamt-of) phenomena come into view. In 1945 Vannevar Bush published his famous manifesto for curiosity-driven science, subtitled the Endless Frontier. That was and is no metaphor—and this seemingly little tale of a sorority species of fish is one more example of the frontier journeys Bush had in mind.

And the other theme to draw out of this paper? Well, I did say up top that a bit of politics and culture might find its way into even the most seemingly purely science stories, and here we are. Culture warriors who denounce all the variation in sexual behavior, gender presentation, and expressions of sexuality often make the claim that splitting off from the seeming biological inevitability of two sexes with defined gender roles tied to reproduction is, in a word, unnatural; that the examples of non-human species show that such roles are essential in all the shades of meaning of that word.

That claim has been debunked over and over again, to no rhetorical effect: those who want to claim the sanction of nature for what are at bottom political claims will continue to assert that the proof is there. So this post isn’t an attempt at persuasion.

But Amazon mollies are in fact amazons: they persist in perpetuating themselves unconfined by the binary experienced by their close kin. As noted above in a slightly different context, nature is vastly more open to possibilities than are an awful lot of humans.

That’s enough for now. Have a great weekend, all.

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Image: Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Amazons, 1788