Resisting the barrage

The flood of awful, outrage-inducing, and flat-out insane news lately has made it hard to focus on anything else.

Just in the day prior to my writing this:

• The U.S. Senate confirmed a wildly unqualified Christofascist woman-abusing drunkard to lead the largest and best-funded military in the world
• Trump summarily fired seventeen inspectors-general at the offices of State, Veterans' Affairs, HUD, Interior, Energy, and Defense, effectively removing any capacity for oversight
• ICE raids have begun in earnest, and have included churches, preschools, and schools; among those arrested/harassed have included a military officer who was born in the U.S. but happens to be the wrong color, and, in a height of irony, Native Americans
• The Episcopal bishop of Washington D.C. was called "nasty" by Trump, and has received death threats from his followers (and a threat of deportation by a MAGA congressman) for... of all things... urging mercy, kindness, and empathy toward those who are suffering
• By executive order, Trump removed the $35 cap on medications for people on Medicare and Medicaid, profiting pharmaceuticals companies at the expense of the elderly and poor
• Elon Musk has doubled down on his Nazi salute at the Inauguration by making a series of sick puns about names of prominent Nazi officials, followed by a laugh-till-you-cry emoji
• The GOP has proposed revisions to the budget that include eliminating the mortgage interest deduction, making it harder for working-class people to afford to purchase a house

And those are just the ones that come to mind immediately.

It is unsurprising if we're feeling overwhelmed by all of this.  I've had to limit my time reading the news -- given my capacity for spiraling into depression even in normal times, I can't risk letting all this take a sledgehammer to my mental health.  And keep in mind that this is what Trump and his cronies want; the nuclear bomb of lunacy that has marked the first two weeks of Trump 2.0 is, at least in part, intended to create a Gish gallop of horrors so demoralizing that the opposition simply gives up.

That is exactly what we cannot afford to do.  Instead, let the barrage of bad news stiffen your resolve.  There's a line from the song "Turning Away," by the fantastic Scottish singer/songwriter Dougie MacLean, that applies here: "Words cannot extinguish us, however hard they're thrown."

And this brings me to a documentary I watched last week that you all must make sure you see.

It's called Porcelain War, and was the winner in the documentary category at Sundance last year.  It's about two brilliant Ukrainian porcelain artists, the husband-and-wife team of Slava Leontyev and Anya Stasenko, whose delicate, whimsical, and stunningly decorated animal sculptures charmed me the first time I saw them, in an online ceramics workshop Anya led that I took about four years ago.  I've followed them ever since, and their work never fails to make me smile.

Then came Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and the horror show that followed.

Slava and Anya live in Kharkiv, which has been heavily attacked, but have refused to leave.  Slava volunteered to train infantry, so he's away from home a lot of the time, and has often found himself in the middle of the battles.  In the film, he talks about how much he hates fighting -- and, in fact, hates the guns and other weapons he is training his fellow soldiers to use.  ("They're only for one purpose," he says -- "killing other human beings").  But he is unequivocal that defending his home and his fellow Ukrainians is nothing less than an absolute duty.  The only other choice is to let Putin win, and that is simply not an option.

But then, when he gets leave to come home -- he and Anya go back to creating sweet, beautiful pieces of art.

The juxtaposition of the atrocities of the invasion with the staggering loveliness of Slava and Anya's delicate porcelain work is both inspiring and heartbreaking.  "If the fighting makes us stop creating beautiful things," Slava says, "we've already lost."

So as counterintuitive as it sounds, we need to take inspiration from Slava and Anya, and fight hard against letting despair freeze us into inaction.  That's what Trump and his cadre want.  And not only do we need to push back against the flood of evil that threatens to engulf us, we need to commit ourselves to continuing to create beauty.  As Slava Leontyev points out, the world can still be a beautiful place, if we work to make it so -- despite what is happening around us.

"It's easy to scare people," he says.  "But it's hard to forbid them to live...  Ukraine is like porcelain.  Easy to break, but impossible to destroy."

May we show such resilience, dedication, and spirit in the war we will fight over the next four years.

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CRISPR babies

One of my problems with resolving ethical questions is that I so often have a hard time deciding the difference between moral, ethical, reasonable, and justifiable, and figuring out where an issue lies on the spectrum thereof.

I've always had this problem.  There are things that in my view are always wrong -- harming or endangering a child comes to mind -- but the vast majority of issues lie in that immense field of gray areas.

Which is why I'm having a hard time deciding what to make of the bombshell announcement last week that a Chinese geneticist, He Jiankui, claims to have genetically altered a pair of human embryos -- and it resulted in the birth of twin girls who, if the gene editing was successful, will be resistant to HIV.

The technique involved was CRISPR-Cas9, a protein complex that allows for what amounts to cut-and-paste for your DNA.  What He did was to use CRISPR-Cas9 to selectively delete a gene for a  receptor called CCR5 that allows HIV to attach to cells.  Without that receptor -- He hopes -- the children will be genetically immune.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

When He made his announcement, the scientific community had a collective meltdown.  "The underlying purpose of doing the experiment was obviously to show that they could do gene editing on an embryo, but the purpose for the party involved does not make any sense," said Anthony Fauci, an HIV/AIDS researcher and head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland.  "There are so many ways to adequately, efficiently, and definitively protect yourself against HIV that the thought of editing the genes of an embryo to get to an effect that you could easily do in so many other ways in my mind is unethical."

Okay, I'm not defending He.  The real issue here, in my opinion, is risk.  "Gene editing itself is experimental and is still associated with off-target mutations, capable of causing genetic problems early and later in life, including the development of cancer," said Julian Savulescu, an ethicist at the Oxford University.  "This experiment exposes healthy normal children to risks of gene editing for no real necessary benefit."

But the problem is that at some point, scientists were going to have to take the leap and do something like this.  Ever since Jennifer Doudna of UC-Berkeley developed CRISPR-Cas9 as a gene editing protocol in 2012, it's only been a matter of time.  Once a technique like this becomes possible, it becomes inevitable.

So sooner or later, someone was going to have to accept the risk of trying it on human embryos.  Animal models only get you so far.  The potential for eradicating genetic diseases is nothing short of astonishing; think of a world without cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, Tay-Sachs disease, sickle-cell anemia, hemophilia.  All of that is well within the realm of possibility now.

But.  Once you've started down that road, what's to stop people from altering other traits?  Appearance, personality, behavior... for me, this gets out onto some very thin ice.  When this Pandora's box is opened, there's no telling what dubiously ethical practices will escape.

There's also the problem that if such a technique really becomes capable of (relatively) risk-free editing out of deleterious genes, it's almost certain that it would be available only to the rich, further widening the gap between the privileged and the non-privileged.  The brilliant (and prescient) 1997 film Gattaca dealt with this very issue -- how genetic engineering of children could result in a new lower class, people conceived the old-fashioned way who didn't have the same opportunities for jobs, education, health care, and health insurance as the smarter, stronger, healthier "Valids."

So I'm of two, or more, minds about all of this.  First, the potential of the therapy is mind-boggling.  And the idea that once developed, researchers were going to hold off trying it out on human embryos, is naively optimistic about human nature.

But it comes back once again to the quote from scientist Alan Grant in Jurassic Park -- "You were so busy trying to figure out if you could, you never gave any thought to whether you should."  The thorny ethical issues this technique brings up go way beyond the potential risk to two baby girls in China.

All of which makes me glad that I'm not on the scientific regulatory boards who are wrestling with how to respond to He's announcement.

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Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]