Pacific Standard. Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. |
- Detroit Postmortem
- Should, Ought, and Need: Trayvon Martin’s Life and How We Use Language
- The Most Important Journalism About Rape in the Military
- Quick Study: Women Get More Sleep—and Earn It
- Will the Great U.S. Penal Reform Tip the Balance for Addicts?
- The 4 Things You Need to Know About Detroit’s Bankruptcy
- Eat Your Vegetables
- The Cheaper, Bacteria-Derived Future of Drugs
| Posted: 19 Jul 2013 03:47 PM PDT  Detroit is dead. The bankruptcy filing is the death certificate. After performing the autopsy, I’ve determined upward mobility killed Detroit. I’m not the only coroner on the case. Brad Plummer (Washington Post) with a leading cause, brain drain: “Since 2000, Detroit's population has declined 26 percent. There are now just 706,000 people in the city, way down from 1.85 million during its industrial heyday in 1950.” Demographic decline is like too much salt. We lack a clear link to an existential threat. Indeed, the city’s population has fallen dramatically. Well, many Rust Belt cities have experienced a drop in population. They aren’t dead. Far from it. In 1950, metro (city and suburbs) Detroit’s population was over three million people. Fast forwarding to 2010, suburban Detroit (sans city) had a population over three million people. See this report from Data Driven Detroit. Metro Detroit’s population peaked in 1970, hovering near four million for the last few decades. In other words, it has grown by more than 30 percent since the supposed heyday of the 1950s. How so not Rust Belt. How so not dying. Suburban Detroit is a success story. It’s the greatest suburban success story in the United States. Since 1950, statistically speaking, for every person who “left” the City of Detroit, two people “showed up” in the suburbs in 2010. Per Global Detroit, immigrants overwhelming prefer the suburban to the urban. Metro Detroit is diverse and vibrant, entrepreneurial. Bloomberg View blogger and fellow coroner Evan Soltas didn’t get the memo:
The magic things allowed many people the means to get out. Everyone wanted to leave the magical city. Fortunately for Detroit, people can come into close contact with each other and live in the suburbs. It’s called commuting. As for the supposed density dividend, we’ve already disposed of that nonsense here. Without migration, ideas don’t mix. The quality of network is more important than quantity of connections. Those suburban immigrant neighborhoods are economic dynamos. Magical things are happening there, in Detroit. The residents of the city are isolated from all the action, density be damned. |
| Should, Ought, and Need: Trayvon Martin’s Life and How We Use Language Posted: 19 Jul 2013 02:46 PM PDT 
If you followed the Zimmerman/Martin killing at all, you probably recognized that this is not what the dispatcher said. The correct transcript is:
Nowadays, we don't tell people what to do and what not to do. We don't tell them what they should or should not do or what they ought or ought not to do. Instead, we talk about needs—our needs and their needs. "Clean up your room" has become "I need you to clean up your room." The age of "there are no shoulds," the age of needs, began in the 1970s and accelerated until very recently. Here are Google n-grams for "you need to" and "they need to."
We don't say, "The writers on Mad Men ought to watch out for anachronistic language." We say that they "need to" watch out for it. It was Benjamin Schmidt's Atlantic post about Mad Men that alerted me to this ought/need change. Schmidt created a chart showing the relative use of "ought to" and "need to."
All of the films and television shows in the chart are set in the 1960s. But the scripts that were actually written in the ’60s are more likely to use "ought;" the ’60s scripts written in the 21st century use "need." Real imperatives ("Stop that right now") claim moral authority. So do ought and should. But need is not about general principles of right and wrong. In the language of need, the speaker claims no moral authority over the person being spoken to. It's up to the listener to weigh his own needs against those of the speaker and then make his own decision. No wonder Zimmerman felt free to ignore the implications of the dispatcher's statement. It was not a command ("Don't do that"), it did not assert authority or the rightness of an action ("You should not do that"). It did not even state what the police department needed or wanted. It merely said that Zimmerman's pursuit of Martin was not necessary. Not wrong, not ill-advised, just unnecessary. If the dispatcher had spoken in the language of the 1960s and told Zimmerman that he should not pursue Martin, would Trayvon Martin be alive? We cannot possibly know. But it's reasonable to think it would have increased that probability. Philip Cohen, for what it's worth, tells me that a TV commentator said that dispatchers have a protocol of not giving direct orders. If such an instruction led to a bad outcome, the department might be held accountable. So police departments' efforts to avoid lawsuits may also have contributed to Martin's death or, at least, the not-guilty verdict for Zimmerman. This post originally appeared on Sociological Images, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| The Most Important Journalism About Rape in the Military Posted: 19 Jul 2013 02:00 PM PDT  The Pentagon announced in May that a sergeant working in the military’s sexual assault prevention office had been charged with—you guessed it—sexual assault. This news came just a week after the officer in charge of the Air Force’s rape prevention program was arrested for sexual battery. An estimated 26,000 service members were sexually assaulted in 2012, according to the latest government report. That’s up from 19,000 in 2010, despite recent claims that the military has been focusing more on prevention efforts. Amid the growing controversy, Congress is hurrying to draft new legislation and Obama has called for stricter punishment for sexual offenders. All officers in the sexual assault prevention office will be re-screened and re-trained, the Pentagon announced. As lawmakers and military officials debate what to do next, we’ve rounded up some of the best journalism on sexual assault in the military. An estimated 26,000 service members were sexually assaulted in 2012, according to the latest government report. That’s up from 19,000 in 2010.The Invisible War, June 2012 “Trauma Sets Female Veterans Adrift Back Home,” New York Times, February 2013 “The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer,” Rolling Stone, February 2013 “Rape Victims Say Military Labels Them ‘Crazy,’” CNN, April 2012 “The Enemy Within,” National Journal, September 2012 “Pentagon Grapples With Sex Crimes by Military Recruiters,” Washington Post, May 2013 “Betrayal in the Ranks,” The Denver Post, 2004 This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| Quick Study: Women Get More Sleep—and Earn It Posted: 19 Jul 2013 12:00 PM PDT  University of Michigan sociologist Sarah Burgard examined daily diaries kept by 56,149 people who took part in the Labor Department's American Time Use Survey. Writing in American Sociological Review, she reports that women sleep an average of 11 minutes longer per night than men, a gap that persists throughout life. But it seems women earn those extra z's, and then some. Men spend, on average, 35 more minutes a day than women pursuing leisure activities. Worse, women are more likely to have their sleep interrupted by another person needing their care, such as a sick child. Talk about an exhausting gender gap. |
| Will the Great U.S. Penal Reform Tip the Balance for Addicts? Posted: 19 Jul 2013 10:00 AM PDT  Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on The Fix, a Pacific Standard partner site. Stephen House spent the last few years of his decade in-and-out of California’s prison system addicted to meth and anything else he could get. “I was on everything by the end,” he said. But while in lockup, House never got any treatment. "They might give you GED [training], but that was it,” he said. House, 33, did serve as a fire hazard, though, wedged into a three-man bunk in a tiny prison gymnasium housing 300 other men. He saw conditions only deteriorate since he first went to prison at age 20 on attempted murder charges. He saw men "who never should have been in prison" murdered, and an older inmate denied health care “because they said he wasn’t sick.” The man died of pneumonia in his bed that night. In a state famously bathed in sunshine and surf, an astonishing number of people have spent much of their lives crammed together in concrete cells. Now, after decades of runaway incarceration fueled greatly by the War on Drugs, California is in the midst of what one expert calls "the biggest penal experiment in modern history," diverting tens of thousands of inmates from state prisons to local supervision. California's so-called re-alignment leads a growing pack of sentencing and legal reforms nationwide, all designed to change how the U.S. treats low-level offenders—most of them facing drug charges, and many suffering from addiction. These policy shifts could mean much greater access to substance abuse treatments proven to reduce recidivism. But some advocates of prison reform fear that the new policies will result instead in more of the same—more jails that will require more drug offenders, and more untreated addicts who will fit the bill. PRISON CONDITIONS: “A HUMAN CATTLE CALL” That 2011 ruling responded to unconstitutionally unsafe and overcrowded conditions in the prisons, with inmates denied adequate medical and mental health care. By 2006, California's prisons housed 173,000 prisoners, more than twice as many as the facilities were originally designed to hold. “It’s a human cattle call,” House said. “It’s a joke.” In January, California Governor Jerry Brown declared re-alignment, so far, a success, saying, "The prison emergency is over in California.” But the health care has not improved, and conditions are still unconstitutional, said Kimberly Horiuchi, an attorney with the Northern California ACLU. Critics of re-alignment predicted that diverting offenders from prisons would endanger public safety. “It was a bad policy, and we’re seeing the exact bad results we expected,” said Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice League Foundation, citing increased violent crime. “The state has lowered the consequences for about 500 felonies,” he said. “When you lower the consequences for criminal behavior, you get more criminal behavior.” In early 2012, property and violent crimes went up in 40 of California’s largest cities. Yet those counties receiving most AB 109 offenders actually saw violent crime drop. Overall, 80 percent of Californians supported re-alignment when it passed, according to a Los Angeles Times poll. As bad as California’s conditions became, they merely represented the worst of a 30-year, nationwide trend. Paul Thompson, a former prisoner who served decades in Colorado's prisons since the age of 16, is now a peer counselor in many of the same prisons. He has watched inmate populations balloon in his state, which recently passed comprehensive sentencing reform. On his visits, Thompson now sees two prisoners crowded into his former single-occupant cells, he said. "A lot of people in a small area like that just breeds a lot of insanity and anger," he said. Thompson has worked with inmates on drug rehabilitation for 23 years, but admits that overcrowded prisons are hardly the best place to host treatment. With no private rooms to spare, counseling takes place in view of many other prisoners. "Everybody gets looked over,” he said. “They’re sitting in front of 80 guys, with the others wondering, ‘Is this guy gonna cry?’” House finally got treatment, and an alternative to prison five months ago thanks to re-alignment, which sent him back to his hometown of Bakersfield, in Kern County. He has stayed sober thanks to treatment at local community organizations, and completed job training at the New Life Recovery and Training Center. He now works tying rebar in construction. Most inmates in the California prison system have not had those chances, though. At the same time that the state’s prisons were expanding, rehabilitation programs were gutted. In Kern County, which has the state's highest rate of recidivism, most re-alignment offenders with substance abuse problems had little or no treatment while in prison, said Jan Casteel, a New Life program administrator. “More than 50 percent say they have never had any treatment,” she said. THE GREAT RE-ALIGNMENT: FROM INCARCERATION TO REHABILITATION Such alternative programs would ideally feature addiction treatment, as 60 percent of the nation's inmate population has substance abuse problems, according to a California Mental Health Planning Council study of re-alignment. Those numbers likely underestimate what California’s counties are seeing, with many local officials expressing shock at the extent and severity of re-alignment offenders’ drug issues, the study found. In San Mateo County, over 90 percent of re-alignment offenders arrived with drug problems. The anti-incarceration policies arrive at a time of steadily rising momentum for alternative sentencing and other reforms, said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project. Prison overcrowding nationwide, along with its massive costs, have intensified a decade-long pushback against the Drug War's lock-'em-up strategy, he said. Meanwhile, the Recession’s decimation of state budgets has only accelerated the urgency of cutting costly imprisonments. Last year, 24 states adopted sentencing reforms, according to a Sentencing Project report. “Cost has been an important part of it—the fiscal crisis has governments looking at the price of incarceration,” Mauer said. “But there’s also a growing interest in looking at what actually reduces crime and recidivism.” While addiction is notoriously difficult to treat (only 20 percent of alcoholics recover), substance abuse programs have had some success in slowing the revolving door. A 2012 study showed a 15 percent to 17 percent reduction in recidivism thanks to treatment, and the ACLU notes that addiction programs should play an important role in reducing California’s overall 67 percent recidivism rate. “I meet with guys who, without getting treatment, are going to go through the same ruinous cycles,” Thompson said. "[As an addiction counselor], I’ve got to teach them a different way of living." And incarceration reform has the potential to redirect funding to treatment. Nationally, it costs about $25-grand a year to lock someone up. In California, that cost is $52,000. In many cases, savings from cutting such expensive punishments are partly earmarked for substance abuse treatment and other rehabilitation programs. But the actual effects on treatment can look very different. THE COUNTY CONFLICT: BIGGER JAILS OR BETTER ADDICTION TREATMENT? In most counties, that independence has meant expanding local jails, with little more than lip-service paid to rehabilitation, according to a report by the ACLU of Northern California. In re-alignment's first year, the 25 biggest counties spent a total of $45.1 million in AB 109 funding on jail expansion, the report finds. Separate from AB 109 money, Los Angeles County put aside $1.4 billion for new and bigger lockups. “Re-alignment looks vastly different depending on the part of the state you look at,” Mauer said. “A lot of counties are just putting more people in the local jail.” Counties like Kern, Fresno, and Kings have turned to incarceration largely due to public safety concerns, officials say. Those counties devoting more money to jails and probation typically see AB 109 offenders who have committed more serious crimes, and are more likely to recidivate, Petersilia wrote. In Sacramento County, the sheriff gets the bulk of the AB 109 money because of the cost of increased county jail sentences thanks to AB 109, said Alan Seeber, assistant division chief for the Sacramento County Probation Department. “It’s what the sheriff says he needs, though we’re trying to convince people you get more bang for your buck by sentencing to community supervision,” he said. Rehabilitation programs, including substance abuse services, generally got far less attention. According to a Stanford University analysis, initial county re-alignment plans range from nary a mention of drug and mental health treatment to outright innovative plans. Madera County listed “the most detailed and ambitious substance abuse program for offenders re-entering the community,” according to the Stanford analysis. Madera’s plan includes mental health clinicians and case managers, drug and alcohol counselors, cognitive behavioral treatment, and 24/7 crisis services. Overall, however, only 36 percent of county plans provided any concrete details. As the ACLU has noted, even those counties that state a commitment to evidence-based programs often listed no funding specifically for treatment. Money specifics, of course, typically reveal the true priorities. On average, 12 percent of county AB 109 bucks are designated for programs and services, Petersilia found. The rest is evenly split between sheriff’s departments and probation. Some counties in liberal Northern California excelled at reform, with San Mateo devoting 58 percent of its re-alignment money to services, while building no new jail space. San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Santa Clara invested in sentencing alternatives and pre-sentencing assessments, Horiuchi said. At the other end of the spectrum, and the state, Kings County opted to put 70 percent of its funding into bigger jails, and designated a “paltry 2%” toward health, treatment, and other services, the ACLU reported. “SHOCKED” OFFICIALS ADDRESS SUBSTANCE ABUSE NEEDS … SORTA Other counties have designated their small rehabilitation allocations for low-cost programs unequipped to provide addiction treatment. In Kern County, where officials puts just 15 percent of its AB 109 money into services, the responsibility to treat severe substance abuse problems has fallen on organizations like New Life, a sober-living center intended to serve only clean clients, said Casteel. But 63 percent of the AB 109 people referred to New Life have had “really hard-core substance abuse problems for a really long time,” most often meth addiction, she said. “Sober living environments are substituted for actual drug treatment because treatment is more expensive than transitional housing," Casteel said. New Life, in turn, must send re-alignment clients with addiction to community drug treatment centers. Like New Life, these centers receive nowhere near adequate county funding to address the extent and severity of the drug problems among AB 109 offenders, Casteel said. Kern County did devote significant attention to substance abuse treatment in its re-alignment plan, offering up to seven hours of treatment per week in the first four weeks. The county splits about $4 million in AB 109 substance abuse funding between in-jail and community-based treatment programs. That funding marks the first time Kern County Jail has hosted substance abuse treatment of any kind, said Jim Waterman, director of Kern County Mental Health Department. “That $2 million has been a real shot in the arm for us,” he said, funding several new staff members who conduct treatment in the jail. Yet the county still gives grossly insufficient attention to drug treatments, particularly for a county with the highest rate of recidivism in the state, Casteel said. “Unless we see drug treatment, AB 109 is not going to be successful,” Casteel said. “The underlying problem is drug abuse. We have job training, but if you have a drug problem, all of that is for naught.” In Colorado, funds from sentencing reform bills have similarly ramped up drug treatment from zero to “at least something,” Donner said. And with national health care reform (aka Obamacare) widely expanding insurance coverage for substance abuse treatment, reformers hope that statewide access to treatment can be vastly increased, Donner said. Obamacare gives ex-prisoners access to Medicaid for the first time, and proponents argue that getting drug treatment will help reduce overdoses, the leading cause of death among ex-prisoners. WILL RE-ALIGNMENT REVERSE RECIDIVISM … AND THE WAR ON DRUGS? Even the powerful private prison industry, which feeds on a constant supply of new incarcerations, has recognized that War on Drug-fueled prison expansions are slowing, Mauer said. Industry lobbyists have turned instead to immigration detention. In May, Colorado completed a series of reforms that amount to a complete rewrite of the state’s Controlled Substances Act, said Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition. The scope of the bill reverses Colorado’s fealty to federal War on Drug laws, creating a new system for felony and misdemeanor drug offenses. The bill also makes good on the promise of tying sentencing reform to drug treatment. Altogether, Colorado's suite of reforms will save the state around $25 million in law enforcement costs over four years, and all those savings will go toward treatment, ramping up the state's expenditure on treatment for drug offenders, Donner said. Previously, offenders had to pay for their own treatment—or go without. “These are people coming out of prison,” she said. “They don’t have any money.” Meanwhile, similar, if less sweeping, reforms have occurred in Delaware, Ohio, Kentucky, California, and other states. Sentencing reform also helps convicts restart their lives without felonies on their records, and addresses the scandalous racial disparities of the War on Drugs, Mauer said. With more demonstrated successes, additional reforms will likely occur. Colorado passed its new laws due, in large part, to the successful precedence set in other states, including California’s Prop. 36, which changed the state’s three-strikes law, Donner said. California's re-alignment, together with sentencing reform, have the potential to show the U.S. a new way to treat drug offenders—and to show hundreds of thousands of addicts a new way to live. In Stephen House’s case, this has made all the difference. New Life employment training specialist Pedro Gutierrez said that House has turned his life around due to the rehabilitation programs he has completed. “I’m pretty grateful to have a chance now,” House said. “I’m doing all right. For everyone who says treatment doesn’t work, I’d say I hope someone else gets the chance I did.” Reforms make it more likely that others convicted in the War on Drugs will get that chance. But if California’s great prison experiment just turns into more jails, that opportunity for reform will be squandered. |
| The 4 Things You Need to Know About Detroit’s Bankruptcy Posted: 19 Jul 2013 09:57 AM PDT  I wouldn't be surprised if you thought that yesterday's thundering news about Detroit was … well, old news. "Detroit, bankrupt?" you might say. "When was the last time Detroit wasn't broke?" The city that once brought you the affordable automobile and living wage is also the birthplace of "ruin porn"—those ubiquitous images of looming vacant theaters, blocks of urban prairies, and game pheasants trotting through once-thriving intersections. Here in the heart of a city I love, where about 700,000 of us make our home, the pace of slow-moving and painful transformation feels downright evolutionary. But it is, in fact, a jarring development that yesterday, the city became the largest in the nation to file for municipal bankruptcy. Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and his team filed a complex petition in federal court for Chapter 9 protections, claiming about $18.5 billion in debt. As the Detroit News' David Shephardson has pointed out, the city's bankruptcy petition is more than 4,000 pages—with a 3,386-page list of creditors. At this unusual point of public crisis, here are the four most important things to know. "Detroit Future City" is a groundbreaking urban planning project that aims to do nothing less than transform how decisions are made in Detroit for the next 50 years.1. THERE WAS ANOTHER WAY OUT 2. IT WAS ALL ABOUT THE TIMING 3. WE’RE NOT THERE YET 4. PRACTICAL AND INSPIRING VISIONS OF DETROIT’S FUTURE ARE BEING BUILT RIGHT NOW |
| Posted: 19 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT  Last week President Barack Obama, speaking with a group of schoolchildren at his wife's Kids State dinner, let them know that it was really important to eat their vegetables. He also said that they were delicious. “Food can be fun, it can be healthy,” the president said. “You are setting up habits that are going to be great your entire life." So far so good. But then, as he was leaving the event, someone asked the president what his favorite food was. “Broccoli,” he responded. This is silly, and both supporters and opponents quickly ridiculed it across the media and on Twitter. No one's favorite food is broccoli. It might very well be the president’s favorite vegetable—and vegetables are, of course, crucial to a balanced diet. (According to 2003 study by Rui Hai Liu published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, "Regular consumption of fruit and vegetables is associated with reduced risks of cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, Alzheimer disease, cataracts, and some of the functional declines associated with aging.") But no, there is no way the president prefers it to all other foods on Earth—nobody believes this. In his very revealing 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, he doesn't mention broccoli even once. Our bodies—all human bodies—crave fat, salt, and sugar. Obama’s favorite food is probably something not nearly as healthy. “Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.”Fresh produce advocates often suggest that maybe our ancestors ate better than we do today. And some doctors certainly agree. According one 2007 article about medieval diets: “Their low-fat, vegetable-rich diet—washed down by weak ale—was far better for the heart than today’s starchy, processed foods. And while they consumed more they burnt off calories in a workout of 12 hours’ labour.” But in fact, good produce could be pretty scarce back then, and it took the world a long time to figure out that fruits and vegetables mattered as much as we now know they do. As journalist and food activist Michael Pollan (of whom the first lady is likely a fan) put it: “Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food; stay away from these.” Same goes for your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother. Back then, the peasants—some 90 percent of the population—ate well, right? They didn’t have to worry about Pollan’s foodlike items. Well…. They ate differently, anyway. Today, policymakers worry that the poor don’t eat enough vegetables. But historically the poor ate more vegetables, and the aristocracy didn't eat enough. Both had health problems. It’s not as simple as more or less. For the peasants, most of their diet was based on starch. The average medieval peasant ate nearly two loaves of bread a day. Jeffrey Singman and Will McLean write in Daily Life in Chaucer’s England that: “A prosperous English peasant … would probably consume 2-3 pounds of bread, 8 ounces of meat or fish or other protein and 2-3 pints of ale per day. The bread was usually mean of rye, oats, or barley. Meat was expensive and usually only available on special occasions. Often eggs, butter, or cheese were substituted for meat.” Some 60 to 80 percent of total peasant income went to food and some 68 percent of that was starch. That's similar to today’s average American man spending something like $1,900 a month on bagels. Peasants also had vegetables, and plenty of them—turnips, beets, carrots, and parsnips, as well onions, leeks, lettuce, cabbage, kale, chard, beet greens, turnip greens—but they were mostly salted, pickled, and stewed to the point of nutritional oblivion. The issue is that a civilization can only eat fresh produce frequently if fresh produce is around. And it oftentimes wasn't. Peasants routinely went without basic staples. And the nobles weren't much better off. The aristocracy did eat vegetables, but they were very peculiar about doing so. Alison Weir writes in The Six Wives of Henry VIII, of the early 16th-century English court meals, that:
And, despite the popularity of some fad diets based on historic eating patterns, our ancestors had some pretty serious health problems affiliated with food. Here’s Timothy Hall:
Until recently, there were basic structural problems of even attempting to include fruits and vegetables in the Western diet. Europe, for example, is agriculturally dormant for five months of the year. Vegetables and fruits rot quickly. Britain’s Royal Navy solved the problem for its own by simply not providing fruits and vegetables to sailors. But with long sea voyages, something unfortunate started to happen. "Sailors were away for so many weeks as to deplete the limited body stores of ascorbic acid while they had no fresh foods," according to British physician Jeremy Hugh Baron. They developed scurvy, a horrible disease that shows up initially as lethargy. Later, skin spots and bleeding guns develop as basically the whole body's connective tissue degrades. This was not only bad for sailors' health, it was also difficult for the navy, since dying sailors tend to fight really poorly.  James Lind. (PHOTO: PUBLIC DOMAIN) Royal Navy Captain James Lind conducted the first-ever clinical trial in 1747, and discovered that feeding sailors lemons and oranges caused their health to improve. His diet likely caused the British to win the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, making it unlikely that Napoleon could successfully invade Great Britain. Lind's research lead directly to the discovery of vitamin C, and from there to the power of proper vegetables. In 1955, the Sunkist Growers of Citrus Fruit in California and Arizona honored Lind (and thanked him for ensuring their industry's existence) by presenting a large plaque to the medical college of Edinburgh University suggesting that he was "The Hippocrates of Naval Medicine." Certainly by the Victorian era people knew that fruits and vegetables were an important part of a balanced diet. Long before Michelle Obama came along, American policymakers starting working to promote nutrition, though not necessarily actual vegetables. Since 1941, likely in reaction to the malnutrition of America's poor during the Great Depression, American cereal products have been "fortified" via workers adding vitamins and minerals to starches in the mixing process. We've subsequently become aware that fortification might not be as effective as first thought, since the added nutrients in fortified foods may be harder to absorb than if consumed in their original form. That sort of thing may contribute to Michelle and Barack’s focus on promoting fresh vegetables. According to a 2010 article about the first lady's food initiative, her own family began to "feel better … after she started serving more fresh fruit and vegetables, eliminated processed foods and cut back on sugary drinks." And as she later said herself about the project to bring more fresh vegetables to neighborhoods across America: "Collect some fruits and vegetables; bring by some good healthy food. We can provide this kind of healthy food for communities across the country, and we can do it by each of us lending a hand." That might be true, but if so it will be yet another stage in the development of the Western diet, not a return to any particularly "natural" period. A return to an earlier diet might supposedly be "far better for the heart," but the limited food supply might also mean gout and scurvy. |
| The Cheaper, Bacteria-Derived Future of Drugs Posted: 19 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT  The world is in dire need of cheap drugs to combat malaria. Malaria may seem like a disease from the distant past, but world-wide, it still exacts a large toll. Even worse, today's malaria parasites are often resistant to the standard anti-malarial drugs. Newer and more effective drugs exist, but these drugs are well out of the price range of the patients in the developing world who need them. Part of the problem is that the newer anti-malarial drugs come from plants. For thousands of years, humans have been getting their drugs from plants. While plants make a wide range of pharmacologically active compounds, they are not very practical: they can be difficult to cultivate in large quantities, their chemical yield can be unreliable, and the product we're interested in can be expensive to isolate from other chemicals made by the plant. Add all that up and plant-derived drugs are too expensive for the people who need them. But there may be a solution: drugs made from bacteria (and other microbes). Different versions of the same class of enzyme can carry out a mind-boggling range of chemical reactions.The current source of newer anti-malarial drugs is Sweet Wormwood, a plant used in traditional Chinese medicine. The Chinese have long cultivated Sweet Wormwood, but the current world acreage of this plant is much less than we need. And even if there were enough Sweet Wormwood available, extracting the active ingredient, artemisinin, is an expensive and inefficient process. To tackle this problem, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded a California-based group of industry and academic scientists to build a microbe that can crank out suitably large amounts of artemisinin (or artemisinic acid, a closely related chemical) while fermenting in an industrial-scale vat. The group recently reported success, which they achieved by making a variety of genetic modifications to ordinary baker's yeast. The result is a yeast that makes artemisinic acid while fermenting sugar. In the case of artemisinin-producing yeast, the researchers modified a natural yeast metabolic system, one that converts a chemical called Acetyl-CoA into a steroid. Acetyl-CoA is made by every organism on Earth, and is a precursor of many important biological molecules. The scientists made several genetic hacks to this metabolic system, resulting in a yeast strain whose enzyme levels can be fine-tuned by adding cheap chemicals to the yeasts' nutrient broth. With the enzyme levels set just right, the yeasts' Acetyl-CoA-to-steroid machinery gets highjacked to make large amounts of a chemical that is just a few enzymatic steps away from artemisinic acid. The final genetic modification was to build in new enzymes that finish the job of making artemisinic acid. To do this, the researchers took a set of enzyme genes from Sweet Wormwood and transplanted them into the genome of their engineered yeast strain. The result: a yeast that feeds on sugar and pumps out artemisinic acid, at a fraction of the cost of extracting artemisinin from hectares of Sweet Wormwood. The project involved substantial R&D, but principles can apply broadly. One reason why this kind of Wormwood-to-yeast metabolic engineering is successful is that the Wormwood enzymes involved are not very different from yeast enzymes that have other functions, making it possible for Wormwood enzymes to function in a yeast cell. In nature, there are many variations on a basic enzyme design; different versions of the same class of enzyme can carry out a mind-boggling range of chemical reactions. There is even a strain of bacteria (which evolved naturally in a contaminated military training range) whose enzymes break down explosives for food. The chemical repertoire of the natural world is tremendous. By harnessing that repertoire in microbial factories, we can make drugs, biofuels, and other chemicals in a way that has the potential to be cheaper, safer, and less damaging to the environment. |
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