If the only news you follow is the 24/7 cable blather or the talk radio hysterics, you may think the most pressing issues confronting the nation are Trump tweets, the Mueller investigation, terrorists in cars killing pedestrians or the horror du jour — chauvinist pig bosses, kneeling footballers, you name it.
These aren’t fake news, but they are the day’s shiny objects. Look a little deeper and there are plenty of real reports on more alarming issues. But looming catastrophes that are in slow motion or unphotogenic get short shrift. Still, here’s a week’s worth of things worth worrying about.
The country that pioneered big, inventive science at places like Menlo Park and Bell Labs is now a laggard. Those kinds of pure and commercial research labs are vanishing. The government versions that led to the internet and satellite navigation are shrinking away. An iarticle in “The Atlantic” by Derek Thompson provides the following alarming facts.
R&D as a percent of the federal budget has declined by two-thirds since the 1960s. The proposed White House budget aims to make the situation worse, slashing research funding at NIH by 18% and imposing even more Draconian cuts on ARPA-E at the Energy Department, on climate science at EPA and Agriculture and health spending at CDC among many others.
The reasons for the neglect of our future safety, prosperity and competitive edge are varied. When Bell Labs was a colossus it could afford to take a long view since it was working for a virtual monopoly, free from competitive pressure and the tyranny of the quarterly report and the whims of investors.
Similarly, when we were locked in a decades long twilight struggle to beat a communist menace to the next weapon, a trip to the moon, advanced spy capabilities, the government under both Republicans and Democrats was afraid not to spend lavishly to stay one jump ahead. And since cutting edge innovations had won World War II and would no doubt win the next one, science was not a dirty word. Spending on it was good for business and for re-election. Excelling in science in the years after Sputnik was actually a patriotic duty.
Now, in a more technological age than ever, with wonders emerging in computing, robotics, genomics, we are behaving like primitive peoples confronted with scary change. We refuse to believe in it or in the science that proves it. Rather than accept rapid, innovative, disruptive change as inevitable, we seek to protect the status quo. Rather than increase spending on innovation and the taxes to pay for it, we long to cut taxes or hand out voter pleasing entitlements. Perhaps, therefore, it is no surprise that when MIT decided to identify the landmark scientific achievements of the previous year it discovered that they had all come from Europe or China.
In a sign of the times, on a single day last week we could read how an EPA now in the employ of the climate-denying, backward-looking fossil fuel industry decreed that henceforth no scientists who previously had received grants from EPA for research would be invited to serve on the agency’s Science Advisory Board. Instead, scientists with obvious conflicts of interest due to their connections with the companies and industries EPA regulates would be welcome.
This at a time when a report in the venerable British medical journal, “The Lancet,” warns that climate change is creating effects that are “unequivocal and potentially irreversible.” This is of more than intellectual interest since “The Lancet” argues climate change is a “threat multiplier” that can kill or sicken us by many means.
Extreme floods and other weather disasters increased by 46 percent between the period 1990-1999 and 2007-2016. In the last 27 years, 500,000 lives have been lost due to weather disasters. And this does not begin to address the larger problems of soil erosion, drought, changing crop patterns, water scarcity, increasing loss of species on land and sea, and emerging epidemic diseases.
And speaking of disease, a trio of articles in “Smithsonian” zero in on the odds of a coming plague. The former head of the CDC, Tom Frieden, when asked what scared him most said, “The biggest concern is always for an influenza pandemic.” The last big one in 1918 lasted just 15 months. It started in Kansas where the confluence of pig farming and the flyway for 17 bird species seems to have spawned a new flu strain. By the time it burned itself out 50 million people were dead worldwide. “More people in a year than AIDS has killed in 40 years, more than the bubonic plague killed in a century.”
In America, a quarter of the population was infected in 1918, 20 percent of the deaths were children under the age of five and 50% of American World War I deaths were from the flu. Worldwide the mortality rate was about 2%, but in less developed countries it could be much higher — 7% died in Russia and Iran, and in 16 days 14% of Fiji islanders were gone.
If a new flu as virulent as the 1918 version killed the same two percent, America could lose 6 million people, and worldwide the death toll might be 200 million. And that’s not a worse case scenario. A Chinese strain of H7N9 recently killed 616 of 1,589 people infected. With admirable understatement the CDC chief influenza officer remarked, “Anytime you have a virus with a 40 percent mortality rate that’s very, very serious.”
If such a virus were to become more infective, the cataclysm would be unprecedented. Due to modern air travel a pandemic can spread far faster than in 1918. The public health services were quickly overwhelmed then, and in very few places is the health infrastructure now strong enough to respond on such a scale. And though we now have the ability to create vaccines, the time required often is measured in years while a pandemic can be around the world in months or weeks. Even more frightening is the notion of a terror group deliberately weaponizing a flu strain. Once this sort of suicidal behavior would have been unthinkable. Now it is entirely thinkable.
No wonder we would rather focus on today’s tweet than the possible shape of things to come.