Jenna Cavelle wants to correct ‘Chinatown’

If you’ve heard any history of the California desert at all, you’ve likely heard of the Owens Valley Water War.

Here’s the canonical version of that War: The Owens Valley is watered by runoff from the immense snowfall from the Sierra Nevada to its west, much of which runs into the Owens River when it melts. The Owens Valley is an endorrheic basin: it has no outflow. The Owens River never reaches the ocean. Instead, it flows into Owens Lake, in the valley’s lowest point at its south end.

Late in the 19th Century a thriving network of agricultural communities was developing due to the river’s water, growing a vibrant local economy along with their crops. Enter the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, led by engineer William Mulholland. DWP quietly bought up water rights throughout the Owens Valley in a series of deceptive land deals, then built a 223-mile aqueduct to bring Owens River water to Los Angeles. The aqueduct was finished in 1913 — 100 years ago this November — and farms started going out of business in the decade after. Owens Valley farmers dynamited parts of the aqueduct in 1924, but the rebellion was short-lived. Owens Lake, which had been a rich habitat for waterfowl, dried up and is now the single largest point source of particulate matter pollution in the U.S.

As canonical histories go, it’s pretty accurate. Or at least more accurate than the version a lot of people have in their heads due to the film Chinatown, which was based on the Owens Valley story. But it’s a woefully incomplete history nonetheless. The history of the Owens Valley didn’t start in the late 19th Century. Before the first European settlers arrived there were people living in the Owens Valley for thousands of years. The Owens Valley Paiute took advantage of the relatively well-watered landscape by gathering seeds, hunting the Valley’s abundant game, and — though this hardly ever gets mentioned in any of the formal histories — diverting the water of the Owens River and its tributaries to irrigate their crops.

Journalist Jenna Cavelle wants to correct the canonical history to include the Owens Valley Paiute, who are still very much alive and shaping the valley:

This film documents the history of Paiute Native Americans who constructed 60 miles of intricate irrigation systems in Owens Valley for millennia long before LA secured its largest source of water through modern engineering a century ago. After the Indian War of 1863, surviving Paiute returned to the Valley from the Eastern Sierra and White Mountains to find their ancient waterworks taken over by white settlers. Today, over 150-years later, the Paiute continue to fight to save their waterworks, which are remnant in the Owens Valley landscape, along with water rights the city of LA never granted. PAYA (“water” in Paiute) stands to recover both Paiute history and water rights by increasing awareness through the powerful medium of documentary film.

She’s working to put together a set of resources, centering around a documentary film, before the last remaining Paiute elders who have some tenuous personal knowledge of their ancestors’ irrigation systems aren’t around to document anymore.  Here’s Cavelle’s Kickstarter trailer:

She’s halfway to her goal with half her fundraising period left. This project combines history, the California desert environment, and social justice, so you won’t be surprised that I really want to see it happen. I’m scratching together a few bucks to throw Cavelle’s way: maybe you’ll want to as well.

Should we resurrect the Neandertals?

I was reading an interview with George Church, who was discussing that very same question, and somehow I had to rethink some things.

There was the question of technical feasibility, and Church thinks it’s going to be entirely possible in the near future.

The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done. The next step would be to chop this genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then synthesize these. Finally, you would introduce these chunks into a human stem cell. If we do that often enough, then we would generate a stem cell line that would get closer and closer to the corresponding sequence of the Neanderthal. We developed the semi-automated procedure required to do that in my lab. Finally, we assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone.

I agree entirely: no problem. It would be very hard and expensive to do right now, but not impossible. Biotechnology is advancing at such a rapid rate, though, that in 5 years it will be difficult but within the range of what a few well-funded labs could do, in ten years it will look like a straightforward, simple exercise, and in 20 years high school kids will be doing it in their garage.

The technology is not the issue, and it isn’t even a particularly interesting technological problem. The issue is one of ethics. Church takes a reasonable tack on that one: he punts.

I tend to decide on what is desirable based on societal consensus. My role is to determine what’s technologically feasible. All I can do is reduce the risk and increase the benefits.

Fair enough. We will face clear social dictates as the tech becomes more and more readily doable, and that’s ultimately going to determine whether the experiment is done or not.

But I started to think about reasons for and against, and I must confess something terrible: my first thought was that it shouldn’t be done, and to come up with arguments against it. I know, that’s weird…my mad scientist gland must be on the fritz. But my primary concern was that this is science that could create a human being, a human being with significant genetic differences from other human beings, and that should be accompanied by heavy responsibilities — a lifetime of responsibilities. It’s easy to look at it as an exercise in gene-juggling, but this is an experiment you don’t get to dump into the biological waste receptacle when the molecular biology is all done — it has an outcome that is conscious and communicating, damn it. It’s an experiment that at its end makes someone in the lab a parent, with all the obligations associated with that. And that’s a tremendous burden. There’s the cost, the time, the emotional investment…not stuff we usually take into account in the lab.

So I tried to think about what we’d have to do to morally justify Neandertal cloning. As Church also mentions, we couldn’t just do one, we’d have to create a cohort so that these people wouldn’t be alone. The budget would have to include a substantial trust fund for each — you can’t just create a person and then kick them out into the street to fend for themselves.There would have to be adults dedicated to providing for the emotional needs of these children…

Wait a minute. That’s where my brain froze up for a moment. If a scientist is expected to feel that kind of moral responsibility for his children, what about other people? We live in a culture where teenagers carry out a similar experiment every day, with no thought at all except personal need and gratification, and are then compelled to carry the experiment to term and produce a baby they are ill-equipped to care for, because their parents insist that that is what good Christians must do. Single mothers are treated like scum, and on average have the lowest income of any group — they are expected to raise children in poverty. We let children starve to death in this country all the time. Even when they’re fed, we feel no obligation to provide them with a good education — we’re in the process of dismantling the public school system and letting future generations fester in ignorance. There is a societal consensus right now, and it’s nowhere near as demanding as I expected!

And with that, my mad scientist gland was unshackled and grew two sizes larger. We can do the experiment! We should just go ahead and do the molecular biology, produce human stem cells with Neandertal sequences inserted (ooh, even partial sequences — that would be exciting!) and get them implanted and born, do a few preliminary experiments on their behavior, and then wrap them up in a blanket, put ’em in a basket, and have a grad student drop them off at the nearest orphanage. Especially if it’s a Catholic orphanage. Easy! There don’t seem to be any societal constraints against doing that with Homo sapiens sapiens infants, which we supposedly value most highly, so there shouldn’t be any ethical concerns at all in doing it with the mutant lab-born spawn of a test tube and a sequencer.

My mistake was in holding scientists to a higher ethical standard. If all we’ve got to do is match societal norms, we’re suddenly open to doing all kinds of ghastly horrible things to children.

Of course, this grand plan would be short-circuited if society did start expressing higher concerns for children and demanded better of parents. I’m thinking as a developmental biologist, I should start voting Republican, simply to keep the raw material of our work sufficiently devalued and cheap.

Hah! I must be smarter than Stephen Darksyde!

Two years ago, I took a walk and felt a very mild twinge…and chose to go straight to the local clinic to have it checked out. You don’t fool around with a family history of heart disease! As it turns out, I didn’t have a heart attack, but was at risk and did get some preventative cardiac work done.

Now compare this with Darksyde: he felt chest pains, found that they eased with antacids and prilosec, and figured it was just heartburn, and so skipped going in to the doctor. Wrong move! It turns out he actually had a heart attack (a fact that gives Christians and libertarians cause for glee, apparently).

Actually, it doesn’t mean I’m smarter than he is — you know he’s learned a lesson with this event. The real difference between us is that I have very good health insurance and can afford not to hesitate when symptoms strike…while he is less well insured and is more likely to be reluctant at the expense. And that difference can cost someone their life.

There are two lessons here. One is that it is a wasteful injustice that we don’t have reasonable universal health coverage. The other is that you shouldn’t try to second-guess chest pains and other symptoms, you middle-aged and older people!

What I taught today: a little old-school history of embryology

This is an abbreviated summary of my class lecture in developmental biology today. This was the first day of class, so part of the hour was spent on introducing ourselves and going over the syllabus, but then I gave a lightning fast overview of the history of developmental biology.

Classical embryology began with Aristotle, whose work was surprisingly good: he approached the problem of development with relatively few preconceptions and fairly accurately summarized what was going on in the development of the chick. Most of this old school embryology is descriptive and was really a narrow subset of anatomy, but there were a few major conceptual issues that concerned the old investigators, in particular the question of preformation (the plan of the embryo is laid out in the egg) vs. epigenesis (the plan of the embryo emerges progressively). Aristotle, by the way, was on the right side of this debate, favoring epigenesis.

In the 19th century, development was seen as a progressive process that paralleled the hierarchical organization of nature — that is, developmental biology, what there was of it, was coupled to the great ladder of being. This is not an evolutionary idea, but reflects the view that there was a coherent pattern of greater and lesser development that was part of a coherent divine plan for life on earth. The German ‘Natural Philosophers’ pursued this line of reasoning, often to degrees that now look ridiculous in hindsight. In contrast, there were developmental biologists like Karl Ernst von Baer who wanted nothing to do with a cosmic teleology but instead preferred to emphasize observation and data, and simple minimal hypotheses.

In the late 19th century, developmental biology split into two directions. One was a dead end; Ernst Haeckel basically lifted the explanatory framework of the natural philosophers, replaced divinity with evolution, and tried to present development as a parallel process to evolution. Von Baer had already demolished this approach, and despite a few decades of popularity Haeckelian recapitulation died as a credible framework for studying evolution in the early years of the 20th century. The other direction developmental biology took was Wilhelm Roux’s Entwicklungsmechanik, or experimental embryology. This was an approach that largely eschewed larger theoretical frameworks, and focused almost exclusively on observation and experimental manipulation of embryos. It was a successful discipline, but also divorced mainstream developmental biology from the evolutionary biology that was increasingly influential.

As examples of Entwicklungsmechanik, I discussed Roux’s own experiments in which he killed one cell in a two-cell embryo and saw partial embryos result, an observation that fit with a preformationist model, but more specifically a mosaic pattern of development, in which patterns of development were encoded into the cytoplasm or cortex of the egg. Those experiments were seriously flawed, however, because the dead cell was left attached to the embryo, and could have deleteriously affected development. The experiments of Hans Driesch were cleaner; he dissociated embryos at the four cell stage, cultured each blastomere independently, and discovered that each isolated cell developed fully into a complete, miniature larva.

Driesch, unfortunately, interpreted these results to imply that there was an entelechy, or guiding intelligence outside the embryo, and that the only conceivable explanation was the existence of purpose behind embryology. This was also a dead end; the modern explanation for the phenomena is that they regulated, that is, that cells determine their fate by interacting with one another, rather than some kind of cosmic plan. And that’s really going to be a major focus of this course: how do cells communicate with one another, how are genes regulated to set up coherent and consistent patterns of gene expression that produce the organized cell types we find in an adult multicellular plant or animal?

That set up the next lecture. Entwicklungsmechanik, while representing a solid and productive research program, quickly reached its limits, because what we really needed to examine were those patterns of gene expression rather than trying to infer them from observations of morphology. The big breakthrough was the melding of developmental biology and molecular biology — most of the modern developmental biology literature focuses on examining interactions between genes. So on Wednesday we’ll get another fast overview of the molecular genetics research program, and a bit of evo-devo.

Slide thumbnails (PDF)

The death of Aaron Swartz

Many of you already know that Aaron Swartz, an online activist, committed suicide earlier this week. I didn’t know much about him, but now I’ve learned two things.

One, he was a victim of depression. I’ve never experienced this personally — at worst I can say I’ve been sad and stressed at time — but let’s be clear about something: depression is something altogether different. Swartz wrote about his depression, and got across a little bit about what it actually feels like. This is good communication.

Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it’s worth going on. Everything you think about seems bleak – the things you’ve done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either. Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.

At best, you tell yourself that your thinking is irrational, that it is simply a mood disorder, that you should get on with your life. But sometimes that is worse. You feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none.

Two, I’m outraged at the criminal abuse by the justice system that exacerbated his problems. The man was hounded to death, threatened with long prison terms by MIT and JSTOR, the journal archive service.

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

You might be wondering what awful crime he committed that justified arresting him and confronting him with a 50 year prison sentence: he downloaded scientific research articles and then made them available to others (Wait…apparently, he didn’t even share them, but just downloaded them via MIT’s protocols). Uh-oh. I’ve done this…just not on the scale of Swartz’s efforts. Swartz was committed to Open Access.

This is the problem: not that Swartz opened the door to scientific research, but that we’re laboring under an antiquated system of scientific information storage that privileges profit-making over open access to the results of publicly-funded research.

Did you have to remind me?

I wake up this morning to discover Doonesbury telling me stuff I already know.

newsem

Yep, classes start for me tomorrow at 8am. I have a lighter load than the grueling mess last semester, and I also get to teach my fave class, developmental biology. No new paradigms this time, though — I think it worked fairly well the way I did it last time, with a mix of once weekly lectures and lots of class time dedicated to discussion and analysis. I’ll also be compelling my students to set up blogs and write about science publicly, so I’ll occasionally be linking to a lot of student work.

One thing I’m considering doing differently…I might post summaries of lectures and discussion topics here, if time allows. Public exposure of all the stuff that usually goes on behind the doors of the classroom? I don’t know if the world is ready for that.

I’m including the syllabus for my developmental biology course. Just in case you think I’m totally slacking with just one class, I’m also teaching a course called Biological Communications, a writing course that tries to get students to read and write in the style of the scientific literature, and am also doing individual studies with 5 students.