House of Cards

One of my buddies asked me tonight what I want to do with my degree. I said all I wanted was to get paid by someone to do something that mattered.

"Oh, is that all?" he laughed.

"Well, it just needs to matter a little..."

Many people you talk to in academia (especially those most invested in the system) will answer this question with a detailed description of their theoretical interests. I was reassured tonight to hear a couple of my friends echo my disillusionment with the professional pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake.

Plant pathology is one of those rare academic disciplines that continually justifies its existence with the promise of solving real-world problems. Plant pathologists often pride themselves on keeping "one foot in the furrow," of not pursuing theoretical knowledge purely out of curiosity. My buddy talked about how all studies in plant pathology seemed to be advocated as "if only we knew more about [some phenomenon], then we could reduce plant disease."

Although I could probably write a tediously long post on the practical benefits of plant pathology, on many days it seems that 90% of growers dealing with disease boils down to buying resistant cultivars and spraying with pesticides when things get out of control...

He told me about how he had signed up for a class in my department. About half way through the professor's lecture one day, it occurred to him: "I don't care!!" "Why does any of this matter?!" Every protein and gene was chased down and characterized with the hope of one day preventing plant disease, but none of the examples ever seemed to lead to any new ways to control diseases. He questioned "how many decades are we going to have to study these things before we actually get anything practical?"

The best part of the story is that he went to the professor's office afterwards to get his perspective. Interestingly, the professor kinda agreed. He said that as he approached retirement, he was reflecting more and more on his legacy. When he started his education, he had big dreams of really making a difference but was increasingly coming to believe that, in a way, it was all for nothing. He described much of plant pathology as a house of cards and wondered how much longer it could continue before people caught on.

Most disciplines don't worry about justifying every little experiment with the promise of concrete results. As my friend pointed out, theoretical physicists don't appear compelled to make promises about practical results of their work. Discovering the Higgs boson probably won't make my car go faster.

It's a shame that some of the people in my field feel ineffective if they fail to transfer technology to society. I think it must take a unique personality to make basic science your vocation, and many people without this inclination are attracted to disciplines like plant pathology. Although all applied science is limited by the foundation of basic science that underpins it, I know that I love science when it allows people (hopefully me!) to create new products and paradigms that make the world a quantitatively better place.

I just don't want to wave my hands anymore to justify what I'm doing to the taxpayers.

Giant spitting earthworms, Batman!

Wow, here's a charismatic invertebrate that I didn't know existed.

Driloleirus americanus is a 3 foot long earthworm that lives in deep, permanent burrows in the prairies of eastern Washington state. Apparently, it spits at those who approach and smells like a lily. I was skeptical that it even existed but it's listed on government sites!

There's a lot more to the story of earthworms in the states. Invasive species of earthworms are currently creeping through North American soils, driving out local soil inhabitants and changing ecosystems. I'm feeling frustrated that I can't find any federal fact sheets on the topic, but here's a page on the effect that invasive earthworms are having on Minnesotan forests.

T minus zero to a private space industry

Wow, we're closer than I thought.

Virgin's ready to start testing their spaceship this year, and expects to break even by 2014!

Signing away my copyrights

I completed the final step today to publish my first peer-reviewed, first-author paper. It's very much a minor paper, but it's kinda cool to go through the whole peer-review experience for the first time. After I okay'd the proofs, the last task was to fill out and fax off the copyright transfer agreement.

It's funny to think i have something worth copyrighting to give away.

Genetic engineering taking off

Most commercial releases of GMOs so far have been more or less simple plug and play transgene additions, e.g. herbicide resistance. A new soybean cultivar, on track for release in 2009, appears to involve more sophisticated metabolic engineering. Most vegetable oils have to be modified by hydrogenation in order to make them stable against chemical breakdown, with negative health side effects (the production of trans fats). This new soybean cultivar has oils that are already stable and won't require hydrogenation. I expect we'll see increasingly complex biochemical engineering in the near future.

Just in time to adapt to global warming! or cooling... or whatever...

Washing your hands with endocrine disruptors

A new study came out of UC Davis this week titled: "Triclocarban enhances testosterone action: A new type of endocrine disruptor?" This article, published in the journal Endocrinology, describes new evidence that triclocarbon, one of the primary active ingredients in "anti-bacterial" household products, acts as an endocrine disruptor. The authors found that triclocarban increased expression of genes normally responsive to testosterone (in human cells) and increased the size of testosterone-responsive organs such as the prostate (in mice).

Studies like this often rely on unrealistically high doses of their drug of choice in order to elicit such dramatic effects. These authors assert that their dosage was no more than 3 times higher than a human would receive from washing with a triclocarban-containing body wash product, which is remarkable. Considering how trivial the inclusion of these compounds in personal products is, I see no reason to continue using them.

I already avoid these anti-bacterial products because they're a crass marketing ploy that plays on one of the many paralyzing fears that control Americans. Washing with warm water and soap is already extremely effective at decontaminating skin from bacteria and viruses. Most of the microbes out there are harmless in the first place. In the meantime, these anti-bacterial chemicals contribute to antibiotic resistance and distract people from the truly important tactics in public health. Anti-bacterial chemicals have also been found to accumulate in agricultural fields, as they're not broken down in water treatment. It's anybody's guess what consequence that could have...

The science is still out on whether there's any real danger from casual exposure to these chemicals, but like the putative endocrine disruptors that leach from microwaved plastic, I see no reason to take the chance. These aren't game-changing technologies and I can easily do without them. It's little inconvenience for me to drink my coffee out of a cup made of something besides polycarbonate. Something, incidentally, that won't make my coffee taste weird.

How meat and GMC FlexFuel are starving the 3rd world

The current issue of The Economist has some interesting articles on damage done to global economies and the rural poor by 1st world subsidies.

"The end of cheap food" sums it up pretty well and "Cheap no more" elaborates.

The facts and chain of logic square with what I know about ag systems. I especially appreciate their repeated point that if you want to subsidize the poor (e.g. by making sure the poor in the US can afford food), you should do it directly, not by monkeying with the market. Coincidentally, an ad on NPR today remarked that US subsidies are focused on food that aren't especially healthy either, which is true. I think Talk of the Nation tomorrow is actually focusing on the Farm Bill, so I'll likely write more then.

At any rate, I've heard multiple arguments against our ag subsidies but only two for them. I think I can pretty much discount the first; that we need subsidies to keep food affordable. Americans use to spend a much greater proportion of their income on food than they do today, and our middle class rose all the same. The second argument, that we need subsidies to ensure a domestic food supply, I doubt strongly. North America has pretty remarkable ag resources (good soils and climates) and already dominates world markets in many non-subsidized "specialty crops," e.g. almonds. The US does a lot more with ag than grain.