Category: General Thoughts

I go to Arlington on Veterans’ Day when I am in Washington, but in Brazil I have no place like that. I don’t go for the ceremonies anyway, but rather to remind myself of the debt of gratitude we owe to those who defended our freedom, some at the cost of their own lives.  That I can do anywhere.

My father and most of the men of his generation were veterans. My generation contains many fewer.  The all-volunteer military means that service is concentrated, often among families or places with tradition of military service.  Our military resembles U.S. society in general. The poorest groups in society are significantly under-represented in the military, probably because they more often lack the basic qualifications, such as HS diplomas and clean criminal records. The very rich don’t seem to enlist in great numbers, but contrary to popular conceptions, the wealthier 40% of the population is overrepresented.  So the military tends to be middle-America. It is also a little more rural and more southern (the South accounts for 40% of new recruits) than the general population.  Both blacks and non-Hispanic whites are slightly overrepresented; Asians and Hispanics are not represented as many as their numbers would imply.  Some people speculate that it is because these communities contain many immigrants who have not yet fully integrated into U.S. society. Native-Americans (i.e. Indians), although they make up a small percentage of the American population, are well-represented in the U.S. military.  

I didn’t know very much first-hand about military in combat situations until I spend my year with the Marines in Iraq. (I tried to enlist after college, but I was kept out by a diagnosis of an ulcer when I was sixteen. I don’t think it was correct, but it kept me out.)  I spent much of my time talking to senior officers (majors, colonels and generals) and I know that skewed my perceptions. These guys were very intelligent and disciplined. I was proud to be among in their company and to be more or less accepted.  I say “more or less” because Marines have a very strong circle that I don’t believe any non-Marine can enter.    

I also spent a lot of time with ordinary Marines. The thing that was most admirable about them was how they took responsibility. The twenty-year-old in charge of the vehicle commanded it. I put my life in their hands and had confidence in them. When I was their age, I had responsibility for the French fries at McDonald’s and didn’t do such a good job even at that. Young Marines are amazing.   

I heard on the radio that veterans were having trouble finding jobs back home and I have talked to Chrissy about this. The problem evidently is that military job classifications don’t translate well with civilians ones. The guy that saved lives in Iraq lacks the formal certifications to do the same thing in the back home.   

There is a general problem of translating experience. Life was intense in Iraq. We worked as a team and had a feeling of community against shared risk. When you come home, nobody understands what you did and you really cannot explain it to those who have not been there. When I look back, I think it took me a few months, maybe longer, to readjust and I was lucky to have a stable family life and a good job. The scary thing is that at the time I didn’t perceive the problem. When you are in the desert, you idealize coming home. Nothing can live up to that ideal.  Ordinary life is sometimes harder than extraordinary challenges and hardships. 

I was lucky in Iraq. I got there in September 2007, just as the war was winding down. I remember rolling into Haditha soon after I arrived. It was still smoking from the fighting. Within a few months, we could walk in the market-place among friendly people, grateful for the order we had helped establish. It was an unbelievable change. It also meant that fewer people were getting hurt and killed. But still it happened.

When we lost somebody, they would declare “River City Charlie”. Routine communications were cut until the next of kin were contacted. Just writing that phrase chokes me up. I think of the promising young men killed.  I truly dislike the feeling, but I want never to forget.  There was one young man, called Aaron, who I particularly remember. I didn’t know him personally and I didn’t see him killed, but listening to his service and talking to his friends made a deep impression. He was a military policeman working with Iraqi security forces in the town of Hit, about Alex’s age at the time. He liked to lift weights, like Alex too. I think his similarity to Alex is what made it touch me so much. He joined the Army in a time of war, knowing he might be sent in harm’s way, wanting to serve his country and hoping to acquire some skills that would be useful later in life.   

Colonel Malay and I went to Hit to talk with Aaron’s his colleagues. I remember the day, the setting sun, the concrete barriers, the smell of burning garbage, and of course the ubiquitous dust. They were young and upset about what had happened.  They said that Aaron had gotten out of his vehicle and bent down to stretch.  Everybody does that when they get out of the confined space in a HUMVEE or MRAP. Somebody shot him from a down an alley and ran off. The guy got away and we never found out who it was. It was the “odd angry shot,” a surprise. Hit was relatively safe.  It was a war zone, but there was not much war left in it. I felt safe when I walked around on the streets and I am sure Aaron did too.  

I am conflicted about this memory. In some ways, I have no right to it; I have intruded in the grief of others and the one loss has come to symbolize many things to me over a year of my life. Years later I am working to remember a person I never knew. I wrote a note to his mother, sharing my condolences explaining the situation. She told me that it was important not to forget her son and said she appreciated my remembrance. I appreciate her “permission” and I am happy if my very small contribution eases her grief. I am getting a lot more.  It helps me remember things I should not forget. 

A nanometer is a one billionth of a meter. How small is that?  It is so small that a human hair is 100,000 nanometers thick, an average man is 1.7 billion nanometers tall, a strand of DNA is 2-3 nanometers & an atom is 1/10 of a nanometer. You can’t see a nanometer with your naked eye or even with the most powerful optical microscopes.  But we can see them with our electronic microscopes and we can now manipulate matter at the atomic level. This is nanotechnology, one of the most exciting industries of the future.  

I don’t understand the physics, but I am excited by the possibilities. What our expert told me today was that for most of our daily lives, the things we can see with our eyes, Newtonian physics works just fine.  But when things get very small, on the nano level, elements behave in different ways. A nano-particle is not the same as a molecule.  Molecules are stable. Nano-particles are not because they behave according to the rules of quantum physics.

It’s like alchemy. Our experts explained that nanotech cannot turn lead into gold, but it can make an element like lead behave like gold in certain circumstance. For example, gold can be used as a catalyst in some situations. At the nano level, a cheaper material such as copper can be made to perform like gold. This is way beyond my level of understanding, but it has to do with surface areas. The surface areas is the only part that really interacts. This is as far as my science goes. 

One of the interesting uses mentioned was to use nanotechnology to minimize the need for or even replace so-called rare-earth elements.  In recent years, the Chinese have cornered the market on many of these.  We don’t require vast quantities of materials, but they are crucial to the production of many high-tech products.  Nanotech will allow us, once again, to do an end run around a would-be monopolist.  

Nanotech is an enabling technology. For example, nanotechnology is already being used in medicine. A nano-particle can deliver medicine directly to cancer cells and kill them w/o affecting neighboring cells. Some nano-particles can be activated by infrared or magnetism. In that case, a nano-particle could be directed to a cancer cell and then activated to get hot and kill the cancers. These advances have developed only in the last five years.  

We are now familiar with the stain repelling, wrinkle free fabrics, even sox that won’t stink. These were developed using nanotechnology. We also have self-healing paints. For example, a car paint can cover its own scratches. The closest thing to a mass produced commodity product today are carbon nano tubes. They can be stronger than steel but at almost no weight.  

Nanotech can help with the environment, for example, turning seawater into drinking water with reverse osmosis or using nanotechnology in agriculture and food. 

Of course, nothing is free and with any advance comes risk. Nano-particles are so small that they can penetrate deep into your body.  They can breach the blood brain barrier, for example. This is great for delivery of medicines but not so good for potentially harmful substances.

R = E * H – i.e. risk equals exposure times hazard. This is how we need to assess risk.  A shark is very hazardous, but if you are not in the ocean and not exposed to it, there is no risk. On the other hand, constant exposure to a low level hazard can be much more dangerous. To most people, bees are a much bigger threat than sharks. Of course, exposure to some things is not hazardous at all.  

In traditional risk management, dosage or amount makes a big difference. In these cases, the difference between a deadly poison and a harmless substance or even a beneficial medicine is often the dosage, even something as deadly as arsenic in small enough quantities is harmless. With nanotech, we are just not sure if that useful rule applies. Researchers disagree. Another uncertainty is just in the production of nano-materials.  We still don’t understand all the processes so there is great variation from batch to batch, even when made by the same people ostensibly the same way. This is why regulating nanotech is a challenge.  

Nanotechnology has the potential to be a revolutionary process. It changes the very nature of matter that we work with. But we do have to evaluate risks versus benefits on individual basis and do so across the whole product lifecycle, i.e. from material to manufacturing to consumer use to final disposal.  

More information from CRS:

Nanotechnology and Environmental, Health, and Safety: Issues for Consideration

Nanotechnology: A Policy Primer

We should base our regulations and plans on actual risks, not the perceptions of risk. Biotechnology is a lot less radical and a lot less risky in than it is perceived to be. Let’s start with some things that are not problems. You can avoid biotech product if you eat nothing but organic food, but all the rest of us have eaten biotech food, since most of our American corn and soybeans, among other things, are genetically modified. There has never been a case of a documented health problem attributed to biotech food. This is a surprising outcome, given the extreme amount of scrutiny biotech gets. It is likely that biotech is actually SAFER than ordinary products because of all the scrutiny.   

Of course, organic food has recently killed at least 30 people and made another 3000 sick, as we saw with the recent e-coli outbreak in Germany attributed to organically grown bean sprouts. The fact is that no food is perfectly safe all the time. You can be sure that if a biotech product had somehow been in contact with this organic product and got infected by it, the biotech would get the blame. We should not “blame” organic food, but recognize that humanity ate organic food for most of our history and our ancestors were not more robustly healthy than we are.

There have been complaints that biotech firms lock farmers into seeds, since they are not allowed to save seeds for next year. This is a meaningless complaint, since it is nothing new in the seed world. Productivity in American corn fields grew fantastically after the introduction of hybrid seeds in the 1930s. Farmers could save seed, but it wouldn’t work. Hybrid seeds are so productive because they have the hybrid vigor. The hybrids are developed to exhibit the best traits from the parent stock. The next generations lose this and may be even poorer performers than the original stock. They may, in fact, exhibit the worst traits of the parents. It is indeed true that farmers using biotech seeds generally agree not to use the seeds again. But if they want to be most productive, they probably would not want to do it. Like those who use hybrid seeds, they can always choose not to use the biotech seeds. They choose to use the better quality seeds because they believe the harvest will improve enough to justify the costs.

Biotech agriculture is becoming more widespread everywhere except Europe. European firms are active in biotechnology, but activists in the Europe resist wider introduction, which is one reason Europeans pay more for their food. Alternative “natural” food is something that only the rich can afford to choose, since it means lower productivity. This might seem like a bold statement, but it approaches a tautology. If the “alternative” is more productive, it becomes the usual method. The poor have often been forced to be organic, since they couldn’t afford other options, but they make the logical choice when they have a choice.

Biotechnology also increases diversity. With traditional agriculture, farmers have to plant one variety, in order to make harvests practical. Biotechnology creates new varieties. You can still keep the old ones if you want, but you have doubled your choices.

Biotechnology is good for the environment, but creating and using plants and animals suited to their environments. They require fewer chemical treatments and less cultivation. This is one reason it increases farm productivity. They farmer needs to spend much less time in the fields spraying or cultivating.

31% of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases come from agriculture. Biotechnology can reduce that by requiring fewer inputs, everything from herbicides, to fertilizers to the fuel for tractors to deliver these things to the field. No till agriculture, which protects soils, conserves moisture and makes it possible for farmers to cultivate much less often, is very much facilitated by biotechnologies. Overall, the introduction of BT Roundup ready crops is estimated to have been the equivalent of taking 6-8 million cars off the road.

Biotechnology is developed by big firms. This is because only well-financed firms can afford the equipment and trained scientists. But an even bigger consideration is the regulatory environment. Governments require extensive testing and field trials. Only a well-financed firm can afford to comply. However, the biotechnology itself benefits small and big farmers. Biotechnology is scale neutral. The small farmer can get as much benefit as the large one and the relative benefit to small holders is often greater, since they often lack the equipment and expertise to take full advantage of traditional farming technologies.

I personally believe that biotechnology is a necessary tool to protect the environment and keep our world reasonably pleasant. We live in a global world. Even people not very knowledgeable about the environment understand that we face the challenges of climate change. Fewer people are aware of the bigger threat of invasive species or the development of native menaces in the face of changing environments. Everything can catch rides on our modern mobility. This includes plants and animals, but also diseases and bugs. Many of our most treasured plants and trees are threatened, including our oaks, maples, beeches … pretty much everything. Natural systems cannot adapt at the pace of change we humans have created. Biotechnology is the best hope we have to save the ecosystems we love and on which we depend. I am unwilling to accept that my oaks will wilt, my maples will be killed by Chinese beetles; my ashes will all succumb to the emerald borer or my hemlocks will be turned into ghosts by woolly adelgids. We can fight back with chemicals and cultivation, but one of the most potent and ecologically benign tools will be biotechnology

I understand the risks of change. But looking around at what we get w/o biotechnology – the food shortages in developing countries, the widespread death of forest species etc, I don’t think we have a good alternative.

There is no alternative w/o risk. We need to be cautious about what we do, but we also need to adapt to rapidly changing realities. World population growth means we need to increase food production. Climate change will make that productivity growth harder. We need to use all the tools we possess and certainly should not refrain from employing the most exciting innovations recently created by human imaginations. We need to deploy biotechnology. We should be circumspect by not timid. The future belongs to the innovative.