Risky Business

Who is so dense as to maintain…that all their witchcraft and injuries are phantastic and imaginary, when the contrary is evident to the senses of everybody?

—Malleus Maleficarum, 1487

There is a really excellent paper on risk called Witches, Floods and Wonder Drugs:  Historical Perspectives on Risk Management (pdf) by William C. Clark.  It was written some time ago (1980) but is still highly entertaining and edifying.

In the "witches" part of the paper, Clark discusses how, prior to the 15^th century, being a witch was considered a privatized risk:  "Well, if she wants to skip church, talk to her cats and read chicken entrails, it's her own immortal soul on the line."  It was punishable by, perhaps, a day in the stocks.  With the publication of Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) in 1487, witches became a socialized risk. Witches were responsible for crop failures, bad weather and high crime rates.  Witches were everybody's problem. 

Clark discusses the “stopping rule.”  During the Inquisition, their was only two possible outcomes of an interrogation.  Either the hapless victim confessed and was a witch, or she hadn’t yet confessed.  Guilt could be proven, but not innocence.  If the rack and other engines of torture were applied long enough, it was only a matter of time before confession. There was no “stopping rule.”  Thus, since almost everyone interrogated turned out to be a witch, witches proliferated as did the ruthless arm of the church responsible for hunting them down.

We see the same approach being used today. Torture the data long enough and it'll confess to anything.  It doesn't matter what the chemical, contaminant or drug is, given enough tests eventually some harm will be found.  And even if no harm is found, that doesn't mean it's "safe."  It just means that they haven't found the harm yet.  There's no stopping rule.

The science of risk has exploded: risk assessment, risk management, risk reduction, risk communication.  Risk assessments for sites contaminated with industrial chemicals easily reach thousands of pages.  We tests massive doses of chemicals on animals to infer effects of minuscule doses to human beings.

Environmental impact assessments that are required for new projects such as mines and oil pipelines are supposed to be, in essence, a quantification of risk.  Yet they've morphed into unwieldy behemoths that run for years, have a cast of thousands and cost millions. 

And yet, at the end of it all, the scientific risk, the quantitative risk, is not really what matters.  What matters is the perception of risk by people. 

Marijuana is a good example.  Here is a drug that has been widely used in the west for over fifty years, and in the east for eons, to little overall effect.   Every major study ever conducted on pot has more or less concluded that its use is overwhelmingly a personal risk and not a social one. People don't die from it and they don't kill for it. 

The problem that prohibitionists have with marijuana is a moral one, not a technical one.  Recreational use of a mind altering-substance is abuse.  It's immoral.  It's not good.  But immorality, like witchcraft is a privatized risk, and so, to force action by the state, they have to socialize it.  They have to make it everybody's problem.  They need to blow the risk vastly out of proportion.  Now who would be good at doing that?  Oh, I know—cue the media.  Next thing you know, Walt the postman is getting random urine inspections, and we have an entire industry of professionals whose job it is to watch you pee in a cup.

At one point, if you were dumb enough not to wear a seat belt, then that was social Darwinism at work.  That risk was socialized.  Crime.  Despite ample evidence that violent crime is decreasing and has been for centuries, we have to build a bunch of new prisons in Canada.  And the US, with 5% of the world's population, has 25% of the world's incarcerated population. 

Helmets.  Diving boards.  Alcohol.  Butter.  Trans-fats.  Second-hand smoke. Terrorists.  Carbon dioxide. Saccharine.   And those are just the risks we know about.  With all these deadly risks, most of them unknown to us a generation ago, how is it that we manage to worry our way to a historically high life expectancy of 85 years? 

Kaboom Kabul

You know what's weird.  Watching mortars go off and listening to gunfire in some far off country on CNN, and realizing that you're sitting right in the middle of it all.  Insurgents launched a coordinated attack against a number of targets in Kabul, including NATO headquarters, where I am, to kick off the spring fighting season.  Mostly small arms fire RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and mortars.  Heck, in Kandahar province that would barely rate stopping a gym workout.  It must have been a slow news day, or the middle of the night back home, because there was lots of coverage on CNN, an BBC and Al-Jazeera.  I don't know how many times I've seen similar footage in Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Iraq.  But this time it was like "Hey, there's the market I go to."

CNN was pretty breathless about the whole thing.  You'd think the Taliban had taken Kabul.  But from a military perspective, it was an abysmal effort.  The objective of the mission wasn't really military though.  The insurgents—including primarily the Taliban and the Haqqani network—are basically trying to carry off "spectacular attacks" in Kabul as a propaganda tool.  It's to try to convince people that they are more effective than they actually are, and to degrade the Afghan people's tenuous notion of stability. 

Afghan security forces dealt with the attack and ISAF (NATO) quick reaction forces were not needed.

A big thank you to all those who contacted me to see if I was OK. 

A couple of days earlier myself and a couple of friends were wandering down Chicken Street and Flower Street—the main shopping district in downtown Kabul, and what used to be a tourist hub.  It was  a nice day and I thought there'd be lots of folks perhaps from the embassies and the various non-governmental organizations doing the tourist thing, but we were the only ones.  I think a lot of the Afghans were kind of shocked to see us moseying about actually.  They just stared at us.  Except the kids. We had a gaggle of them dancing around us half the time. 

Anyways, I managed to snap off a couple of shots, but they are quite leery of cameras here.   I put it away after an Afghan soldier got a little irate with me, and counted myself lucky to still have a  camera. 

Chicken Street, Downtown Kabul

Chicken Street Again. 

At the Kabul Bookstore.

Typical "subdivision" in Kabul.

Only a month to go to R&R back in Canada, in mid-May, so I'm looking forward immensely to seeing my family, playing some soccer, and having a beer or three with my mates.  Counting the days.

What if You've Never Made a Decision

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

T.S. Eliot—The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

If you choose not to decide

You still have made a choice.

Neil Peart (Rush)—Free Will

What if you've never made a decision?

That's the conclusion of Sam Harris in his book Free Will. 

Free will—the idea that we can make decisions about what we will do—has always had its philosophical problems. 

For instance, in Christianity, the entire edifice of sin is based upon the idea that we, as humans, have the capability to choose between right and wrong.  But, the Judeo-Christian God is also omniscient.  He knows how everything will turn out.  So how can we truly have free will if God already knows what we are going to choose?  Is our choice not then preordained?  There's no easy answer, and more than one Jesuit was locked up in the medieval equivalent of a cubicle trying to circle that square, let me tell you.

Things didn't get much better when Galileo and Newton came along.   According to science, up to the 20^th century, the universe was mechanistic, deterministic, unfolding like clockwork to its ultimate end.  If you knew, in theory, where every single particle was and where it was going at this instant of time, the entire future would be known to you.  So where is the free will in that?

The turn of the century saw the advent of quantum physics.  Reality was no longer deterministic.  Subatomic particles existed as probability functions—the electron could be here, or it could be over there.  When observed, the probability wave function collapsed.  One probability became equal to 1 (i.e. it happened) and all the others went to 0 (and didn't happen).  There was no way to know for certain, even in theory, which event would transpire.  So now the course of the universe was based on the roll of dice, on mere accident.  There's still no room for free will.

Compound this with some recent studies in brain science indicating that people who think they are exercising free will, have in fact, already made up their mind about issues long before they think they have made a decision, and you can see that the entire concept of free will is on some pretty shaky ground.  We're just a bunch of meat puppets.

This indeed is Harris's conclusion.  Now I admit to a bias up front.  Harris is a founder of this outfit that is called Project Reason that seeks to spread "secular values" in society.   This secular evangelism is just as annoying as Christian evangelism.  More so.  At least the Christians offer everlasting life in Paradise. The secular crowd: You are so incredibly insignificant that words in the English language cannot adequately convey how much you don't matter.  

Not only that the secular evangelist books God is Not Great and The God Delusion, which I've read, we're both, in my opinion, abysmal.  They didn't make their case.  And I'm  Scientist and an Agnostic—I should be an easy sell.

The problem, for me, is that Harris is trying to take science, which is  a useful tool to logically extend our senses to observe and predict nature, and turn it into a value-based philosophy.  But reason itself, as I've explained in the past, is a solid stone castle built in mid-air, held aloft by—you guessed it—faith.  Besides which, science is concerned with what is, not what should be.

Anyways, probably because of that, I was a little more critical of the book than I normally would have been.

We all imagine that we—our "selves"—exist, parked on top of our bodies, peering out through our eyes and instructing the machine we inhabit to make us a cup of tea or whatever, like the drivers of those big Imperial Walkers in Star Wars.

Cup of tea, then?

According to Harris, we may be in the vehicle, but we ain't drivin'.  You did not decide to have Weetabix instead of Corn Flakes this morning.  Your brain chemicals did that.   And even if you decided  that you were going to show those brain chemicals who's boss and go for the Corn Flakes, dammit, it's no good, because your brain chemicals already determined that before you did.

I can certainly go along for the ride and allow for the possibility that free will is an illusion.  After all, why should I think that I can change the course of the universe with but a thought, but a rock can't.  But If I'm going to buy that free will is an illusion, I insist that Harris takes the argument to its logical extent.

The notion that we have free will is intricately woven into our idea of self, of ego, of that feeling of continuity you have that you are you.  Harris takes this vital component of the self—will—and says that it is illusory, but that what is left of the self is still real.  Nonsense.  If free will is an illusion due to a bunch of brain chemicals burbling up to the "conscious mind," then so is the ego, your entire sense of self.  It's all burbling chmcials and dancing neurons.  The self is an epiphenomena induced by trillions of cells working symbiotically. The ego is an emergent property of a complex system.  A "transient landscape of the mind" as David Hume called it. 

So the knowledge that self and free will are an illusion doesn't really get us that far—unless you're a Zen Buddhist, in which case you can consider yourself Enlightened.  Just because you are convinced something is an illusion doesn’t mean it can be dispelled.  Ask a schizophrenic.  Ask a guy whose right foot hurts, even though he lost that foot five years ago.

The self—including the notion of free will—is an illusion that it is simply too difficult, and perhaps too valuable, not to maintain.   


And what is the difference between reality and an illusion that cannot be dispelled, especially when that illusion is being imagined by your self, an illusion?  OK, I just threw that one in to screw you guys up.

Immortality and Cancer

So what if we could just program our cells to be immortal?  after all, that little jellyfish I talked about earlier can manage it.  And they've managed to reverse aging in mice.  And if old age in cells leads to old age in people, then immortality in cells leads to...

Ah, be careful what you wish for.  There are already two kinds of immortal human cells I know of.  One is stem cells (and the jury is out on this, I believe).  Stem cells are cells that have not yet differentiated; have not yet found their purpose in life to see the world and be a retinal cell,  or perhaps help out a bit in the kidneys.  They are common in embryos.  Anyways, we're not here to talk about stem cells.

The other type of immortal cell is a cancer cell.  Cancer is a multifaceted disease of diabolical  sophistication, but all cancers rely on one thing:  a cell somewhere has being given the signal to perpetually divide. 

Most cells in your body don't reproduce, although all have the potential to.  Skin cells reproduce, as do red blood cells, and others.  But for the vast majority, part of the deal of living in a multicellular organism like people is ixnay on the cell division.

Normal human cells will divide about, I think, 50 times and then die of old age.  But not a cancer cell. They go on and on and on.

As a matter of fact one woman, let's call her Mrs. Tibbets, died of a particularly virulent form of cancer years ago.  Researchers were particularly interested in her cells, so they have kept her cell line going for decades in laboratories the world over.  In a way, you could say Mrs. Tibbets is still alive, as a 50 ton tumour dispersed throughout the globe.  Her DNA, albeit with a cancer mutation, is still alive in each of those cells.

So maybe this cell immortality ain't all it's cracked up to be. 

Cancer overcomes the "natural" aging limits on a cell, the genetic programming that leads to cell old age, or senescence.  A lot of things have to go wrong for you to get cancer.  First of all you have to get a mutation in your DNA which instructs the cell to just keep dividing over and over again.  Second of all, the cell's elaborate defence mechanisms that fix mutations or otherwise prevent rampant cell division have to be rendered inert.  And third of all, an obscure little enzyme called telomerase, active when you were an embryo and your cells were dividing like crazy, has to be manufactured by the cell again.  If I understand the theory correctly, anyway.

Telomers are little caps on the end of your chromosomes (DNA villages, if you will) that act as an internal clock for your cell.  Each time the cell divides a little bit is shaved off the cap, and when it is gone your chromosomes start sticking to everything and to each other, all hell breaks loose and the cell dies.  Telomerase creates more telomers, so that the cell can keep dividing without limit. 

A mutation may cause your cell to get, or to think that it is getting, growth signals to divide.  What is supposed to happen is that, when excessive or unscheduled cell reproduction is detected, tumour suppressing proteins like p53, the sentinel, shunt the cell to premature senescence and put a right stop to that.  But if something goes wrong with the gene that make p53 then that defence may be rendered ineffective.  And not just p53; in cancer a host of tumour suppressing genes must be stopped.  Even if the mutation is allowed to drive cell growth, there is still the cell clock—telomers—that will kill the cell after a certain amount of cell divisions.  Unless another mutation has instructed the cell, after all these years, to start manufacturing telomerase again.

Slim chance right?  Well, as stated last time, your average cell DNA probably gets hit by various things that can cause mutations tens of thousands of times a day.  You've got somewhere between ten and a hundred trillion cells.  Do the math.

So, having defeated this elaborate mechanism the cell is free to divide at will which it does.  It has become immortal.  Theoretically anyway.  In reality, of course, it winds up killing the host organism and dies with it.  (Except for Mrs. Tibbetts's tumour, which is still going strong.)

The interesting thing is that this p53 tumour-suppressing gene is believed to have a directing role in cell old age.  When p53 suspects something is wrong it pushes the cell towards old age, as a defence against out-of-control cell division.  From an evolutionary perspective, this is understandable—you don't want sub-standard cells dividing.  Just like old people, old cells have a hard time being active and reproducing.  Over time your DNA accumulate mutations—ones that may not necessarily cause cancer, but mutations nonetheless—and it's thought that perhaps these tumour-suppressing proteins like p53 initiate the old age program.  They prevent the cell from dividing, and perhaps (for cells that don't reproduce) from even from repairing itself properly.  So the cells don't work as well as they should and the overall affect on the body is old age.

From this point of view, aging itself can be seen as a defence mechanism against early cancer.  The tumour-suppression genes are great early on at preventing cancer.  Without them cancer would be very much more prevalent in younger people than it is.  But as the DNA accumulates random damage over time, the tumour-suppessing proteins detect this and institute the genetic senescence program.

Given that aging and cancer may be competing interests, it looks like my hopes of an immortality pill are slim.  I might get cellular immortality, but I'd be ripped apart by tumours soon after.

On the other hand, this is all theory.  Some researchers think that there are programmed "senescence effector" genes that actively initiate aging upon reproductive maturity.  Maybe it's just turning those cells off. 

As for immortality, dammit, if a jellyfish can do it, why can't I?


Incidentally, I should give a nod to William R. Clark's excellent text A Means to an End: The Biological Basis of Aging and Death, which was my primarily resource for this series.