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Basics: In Hollywood Hives, the Males Rule
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, November 13, 2007
In his new animated film, Jerry Seinfeld plays Barry B. Benson, a wisecracking, moony-eyed, charmingly petulant New York honeybee who doesn’t want to spend his days as a worker bee stuck on the honeymaking assembly line. “You know, Dad, the more I think about it,” Barry says, “maybe the honey field just isn’t right for me.” To which his father, a proud, lifelong “honey stirrer,” snaps: “And you were thinking of, what, making balloon animals? That’s a bad job for a guy with a stinger!”
Swell comeback, Pop, but your son has a point, starting with the posterior one he shouldn’t have in the first place. Isn’t Barry supposed to be a he bee? Well, male honeybees don’t have stingers, for the simple anatomical reason that a bee’s stinger is a modified version of an ovipositor, the distinctly feminine organ through which a female insect lays her eggs.
Barry is absolutely right, however, to doubt his fitness for the honey trade. In the real world, every job on a beehive’s spreadsheet — foraging for nectar and pollen, fanning nectar into honey, fawning over the queen, squirting out wax, battling off bears, tossing out the trash and dead bees — is performed by a cast of workers that is homogeneously female. Sterile, yes, with stingers where their egg-laying tubes should be, but female nonetheless.
By bowdlerizing the basic complexion of a great insect society, Mr. Seinfeld’s “Bee Movie” follows in the well-pheromoned path of Woody Allen as a whiny worker ant in “Antz” and Dave Foley playing a klutzy forager ant in “A Bug’s Life.” Maybe it’s silly to fault cartoons for biological inaccuracies when the insects are already talking like Chris Rock and wearing Phyllis Diller hats. But isn’t it bad enough that in Hollywood’s animated family fare about rats, clownfish, penguins, lions, hyenas and other relatively large animals, the overwhelming majority of characters are male, despite nature’s preferred sex ratio of roughly 50-50? Must even obligately female creatures like worker bees and soldier ants be given sex change surgery, too? Besides, there’s no need to go with the faux: the life of an authentic male social insect is thrilling, poignant and cartoonish enough.
“It’s a pity they tell so much nonsense,” said Bert Hölldobler of Arizona State University, one of the world’s leading ant authorities, “when real insect societies are so full of little dramas.”
For male ants and honeybees, time is brief, their numbers briefer, and the patience of their sisters briefest of all. In a honeybee colony of, say, 40,000 bees, only 200 — half a percent — will be male, while among ant species like the harvesters, males may account for 10 percent or 15 percent of the total. Paradoxically, males are made through the withholding of sperm, hatching from eggs that the queen lays but does not fertilize with any of her stored semen samples, as she will to generate female workers. To compound the paradox, these genetic oddballs, these haploid mama’s boys born of asexual, semen-free means, will mature into what are really great big packets of sperm on the wing.
This is not to make light of the masculine charge. The resident queen may live half a dozen years or more and generate many millions of offspring, but the long-term success of a colony depends on its power to seed more colonies. It must send out young virgin queens to start new nests, and it must send out males to inseminate aspiring queens from other far-flung hymenopteran nations.
If worker bees and ants are thought of as the heart, lungs, liver and brain of a colony — the vital organs that keep the body alive — male bees and maiden queens are the colony’s gonads — the organs that are tuned to tomorrow.
The male honeybee’s form bespeaks his sole function. He has large eyes to help find queens and extra antenna segments to help smell queens, but he is otherwise ill-equipped to survive. On reaching adulthood, he must linger in the hive for a few days until his exoskeleton dries and his wing muscles mature, all the while begging food from his sisters and thus living up to his tainted name, drone.
Come the brief mating season and the entire hive pulses with hope. The males fly out and head far from home, the better to minimize the chance of mating with kin. They seek out “lekking spots” where scores or hundreds of eager drones congregate 20 or 30 feet in the air and await passing maiden queens. Should a queen fly by, she may be mobbed by a dozen or more males, each seeking the chance to love her to death: bee flinging, like bee stinging, is a lethal affair. After a male deposits sperm in the queen, his little “endophallus” snaps off, and he falls to the ground. In her single nuptial flight, the queen will collect and store in her body the sperm offerings of some 20 doomed males, more than enough to fertilize a long life’s worth of eggs.
A successful male is a dead male. A failure lives to stagger home and beg to be fed and to try again tomorrow. After a week or so of lekking, that’s it. The drone is deemed a drain, and if he won’t die for love, he must die for its lack. “The workers will start withholding food, the male gets weakened, and at some point the workers will grasp him and dump him out of the hive,” said Gene E. Robinson, who studies bees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
A heartless ending, perhaps, but what a box office smash. Over 100 million years of evolution, the social insects have come to rule the insect world, forcing solitary species out to the edges and to make do with their scraps. Dr. Hölldobler observes that although ants, bees, termites and other hive-minded tribes account for only 1 percent of known insect species, “this 1 percent makes up 80 percent of all insect biomass.” The dry weight of ants alone, he said, already equals the dry weight of our own. Who knows whether by tomorrow the standard master of our domain won’t have a thorax, six legs and be best addressed as Mistress.
Challenges to Both Left and Right on Global Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, November 13, 2007
For many years, the battle over what to think and do about human-caused climate change and fossil fuels has been waged mostly as a yelling match between the political and environmental left and the right.
The left says global warming is a real-time crisis requiring swift curbs on smokestack and tailpipe gases that trap heat, and that big oil, big coal and antiregulatory conservatives are trashing the planet.
The right says global warming is somewhere between a hoax and a minor irritant, and argues that liberals’ thirst for top-down regulations will drive American wealth to developing countries and turn off the fossil-fueled engine powering the economy.
Some books mirror the divide, like the recent “Field Notes from a Catastrophe,” built on a trio of articles in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert, and “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming” by Chris Horner, a lawyer for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Ms. Kolbert sounds a strong warning call, and Mr. Horner’s book fits with the position of the institute, a libertarian and largely industry-backed group that strongly opposes limits on greenhouse gases.
But in three other recent books, there seems to be a bit of a warming trend between the two camps. Instead of bashing old foes, the authors, all influential voices in the climate debate with roots on the left or the right, tend to chide their own political brethren and urge a move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy.
All have received mixed reviews and generated heated Internet debate — perhaps because they do not bolster any one agenda in a world where energy and environmental policies are still forged mainly in the same way Doctor Dolittle’s two-headed pushmi-pullyu walked. (It didn’t move much.)
One such book comes from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of the most polarizing forces in politics a decade ago.
In “A Contract With the Earth,” Mr. Gingrich, with his co-author Terry L. Maple (a professor of psychology at Georgia Tech and president of the Palm Beach Zoo), has written a manifesto challenging conservatives not just to grudgingly accept, but to embrace, the idea that a healthy environment is necessary for a healthy democracy and economy.
The book invokes concepts like the precautionary principles that are anathema to many in Mr. Gingrich’s party. In a rare stance for those on the right, the authors say curbing carbon dioxide emissions (affordably) is a wise strategy.
They call for America to lead in moving to a world where “fossil fuels have been largely modified for carbon recycling or replaced by carbon-neutral alternatives.”
The book does reveal in spots Mr. Gingrich’s disdain for what he calls liberals’ failed reliance on legislation and litigation in environmental protection. It is all about carrots, like tax incentives, and nowhere about sticks, like binding emissions limits.
But for the most part it is aimed at conservatives, urging them to embrace their inner Teddy Roosevelt and craft a new “entrepreneurial environmentalism.”
The book won over Edward O. Wilson, the prize-winning conservation biologist and author, sufficiently that he wrote a foreword calling the authors “realists and visionaries.”
While Mr. Gingrich is beckoning the right to come to the middle, a similar plea has been sent out to the left by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in “Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.”
This pair of young environmental thinkers, a political strategist and a social scientist, respectively, shook up the green movement in 2004 with an essay called “The Death of Environmentalism,” which provided a launching pad for the book. They say traditional regulatory approaches and dark environmental messages — like the “planetary emergency” at the heart of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the book by former Vice President Al Gore and the subject of a film — will fail if applied to global warming.
Instead they call for an aggressive effort to invest in energy research, while also building societies that can be resilient in the face of the warming that is already unavoidable.
In a recent interview, Mr. Shellenberger reprised a central point of the essay and book. “Martin Luther King didn’t give the ‘I have a nightmare’ speech, he gave an ‘I have a dream’ speech,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “We need a politics that is positive and that inspires people around an exciting and inspiring vision.”
In this same centrist camp sits Bjorn Lomborg. A Danish statistician, Mr. Lomborg has made a career out of challenging the scariest scenarios of environmentalists and argues for a practical calculus weighing problems like poverty, disease and climate against one another to determine how to invest limited resources.
His first book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” put him on Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in 2004 and made him a star among conservative politicians and editorial boards.
In his short new book, “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,” Mr. Lomborg reprises his earlier argument with a tighter focus. He tries to puncture more of what he says are environmental myths, like the imminent demise of polar bears. (Most bear biologists have never said the species is doomed but do see populations shrinking significantly in a melting Arctic.)
Like almost everyone these days, Mr. Lomborg says rich countries should spend far more on basic energy research.
Unlike Mr. Gingrich, who opposes a tax or binding cap on greenhouse gases, Mr. Lomborg supports putting a price on emissions, although he says the right price is a tax of $2 to $14 on a ton of carbon dioxide — about the equivalent of a 2- to 14-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax.
This is much lower than the cost most environmental scientists say would be necessary to induce companies to shift to less-polluting technologies.
In the end, the books overlap most in their embrace of the idea that the human influence on climate requires a concerted response, but that the rhetoric of catastrophe is unlikely to motivate that response.
Mr. Shellenberger and Mr. Nordhaus say one necessary step is to jettison the idea of a sacred nature separate from human affairs. In a line that is bound to inflame as many readers as it inspires, they said: “Whether we like it or not, humans have become the meaning of the earth.”
Essay: Old Story, Updated: Better Living Through Pills
By KEITH WAILOO, The New York Times, November 13, 2007
Athletes taking performance-enhancing drugs. Growing concern about a reliance on pills for relief from pain, stress and anxiety. Medical leaders alarmed about drug fads, calling on doctors to exercise restraint when prescribing.
Headlines from 2007? Try 1957. Today, the drugs are OxyContin, steroids and Ritalin. Fifty years ago, they were tranquilizers, sedatives and amphetamines: America was a Cold War nation in need of both pep and relief.
And while the context is different today (we have a larger and more complex array of drugs), the underlying issues are unchanged: Americans, athletes as well as nonathletes, grappled then as now with the proper role of drugs in their lives.
In 1957, the American Medical Association began an investigation of “pep pills” in sports. In track and field alone, a dozen runners had run the four-minute mile in the three years since Roger Bannister first did it. How could this be possible, the doctors wanted to know, without stimulating drugs? Were athletes using amphetamines to stimulate the nervous system, reduce fatigue and improve performance?
Adding to suspicions, some athletes admitted turning to drugs for extra pep. Bruno Banducci, an offensive lineman for the San Francisco 49ers in the 1950s, acknowledged using the amphetamine Benzedrine to maintain his endurance. “We players did this on our own,” he said, taking team doctors off the hook.
Australian Olympic swimmers were under a similar cloud; even high school athletes were suspected. For others, the goal was relief and tranquillity after the tough performance. Al Aber, a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, and other teammates said their team doctor prescribed tranquilizers to ease muscular and nervous tension.
The problem, of course, was not confined to athletes. Better living through chemistry was a consumer phenomenon of the ’50s. Americans looked to doctors and so-called miracle drugs not only to battle infections, but increasingly to pick them up for the day and calm them down at night. Prescriptions for Benzedrine and its sister drug Dexedrine were given for reasons like depression, fatigue and appetite suppression.
Sales of the pep pills were mushrooming, pushing the boundaries of chemical enhancement and medicated relief. And since being introduced in 1954, tranquilizers had become a $200 million industry. The drugs were promoted by makers, psychiatrists, nurses and psychologists as the true answer to mental illness, psychoses, neuroses, stress and common anxiety.
By 1957, the shortcomings of using drugs to navigate the frustrations of work and life, to pursue both pep and tranquillity, were becoming evident. The Army, which had embraced the use of no-go pills (tranquilizers) for its pilots, was reconsidering the practice.
The four-minute-mile controversy produced no lasting historical scandals — no confessionals akin to the slugger Jose Canseco’s recent tell-all book, and no lingering controversy like the Barry Bonds saga. The cloud over Bannister’s achievement dissipated quickly; he brushed aside the charges as ridiculous and went on to a distinguished medical career. In 1959, the A.M.A. study concluded that there was little evidence to the specific allegations.
Yet the shadow over performance enhancement and drugs would not diminish. The cloud — the use of substances to gain an extra edge, to break through barriers or to merely endure the day or relax and recover at night — lingered not over a particular sport, but over society.
In 1957, the tide was turning on an unregulated age of wonder drugs. There were growing concerns about side effects and prescribing practices, legislative discussions of the need for warning labels and stricter controls on pharmaceutical advertising, and frustrated calls for enhanced federal regulation.
Drug innovation, of course, did not cease. And so the drug scene and its controversies blossomed. Mother’s Little Helper (Valium) was just around the corner, as was the scandal that would lead to more vigorous government oversight — the thalidomide debacle, in which malformed babies were born to pregnant mothers (mostly in Europe) who had taken a new sedative.
The ’60s would become another distinctive drug decade. With its tilt toward psychedelics and experimentation, the younger generation was picking up where many moms and dads had left off. The year 1957 also saw the birth of Ritalin, marketed as an amphetamine-like stimulant. It would take decades for this upstart to find its place in the American drug scene, nurtured in part by the tensions of parents and children over hyperactivity and attention deficit, which was hardly known at the time.
And 1957 produced lucid moments that resonate a half century later. Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney, taking stock of the American prescription scene, pronounced then that “problems of daily living cannot be solved with a pill.” Then as now, many Americans believed and practiced just the opposite.
Dr. Keith Wailoo is a professor of history and health policy at Rutgers and the director of its Center for Race and Ethnicity.
Redesigning a Condom So Women Will Use It
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, November 13, 2007
The female condom has never caught on in the United States. But in the third world, where it was introduced in the late 1990s, public health workers hoped it would overthrow the politics of the bedroom, empower women and stop the AIDS epidemic in its tracks.
It did not. Female condoms never really caught on there, either.
Only about 12 million female condoms are delivered each year in poor countries, compared with about 6 billion male condoms. Couples complained that the female version was awkward, unsightly, noisy and slippery — or, as Mitchell Warren, who was one of its earliest champions, now says, “the yuck factor was a problem.” Many women tried it, but in the end, it was adopted mainly by prostitutes.
Now scientists are trying again. A new design — much the same at one end, different at the other — has been developed, and its makers hope it will succeed where its predecessor failed.
“Over 15 years, there’s been no real competition, no second-generation product,” said Michael J. Free, head of technology at PATH, a nonprofit group based in Seattle that did the redesign. “There’s no lack of interest, but we’ve been stalled.”
However, the new design does not overcome the glaring drawback that doomed the first to be a niche product: it cannot be used secretly. For that reason, married women, now one of the highest risk groups for AIDS in poor countries, rarely use it.
“I don’t want my husband to know that I am wearing a condom,” said Lois B. Chingandu, the director of SAfaids, an anti-AIDS organization in Zimbabwe.
“Condoms are almost undiscussable within a marriage” in Africa, she added. “It is something associated with casual sex. If a wife uses a condom, the message is that you have been unfaithful. If she even initiates the discussion, it tips the power scale. Men resist quite a lot, and it can result in violence.”
But for couples who have agreed on condoms, and for sex workers whose clients cooperate, the new design has several advantages.
The redesigned female condom is made of softer, thinner polyurethane to better transmit warmth. It is easier to insert; one end is bunched up as small as a tampon, an improvement on the old design, which resembled the stiff rubber ring of a diaphragm and had to be folded into a figure 8 for insertion.
During sex, the new female condom also moves more like a vagina than the old design did, according to couples in Seattle, Thailand, Mexico and South Africa who tested a series of prototypes, said Joanie Robertson, project manager for the condom at PATH. The old design hung passively from the rubber ring, which could shift around and sometimes hurt; the new design has dots of adhesive foam that adhere to the vaginal walls, expanding with them during arousal.
According to PATH, more than 90 percent of the couples were satisfied with the ease of use and comfort of the new condom, and 98 percent found the sensation of sex to be “O.K. to very satisfactory.”
Nonetheless, progress is now stalled.
PATH is seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration so the condom can be sold in the United States. And with the drug agency’s approval, it would be much easier to license the condom in poor countries or get a World Health Organization endorsement.
While the F.D.A. designates male condoms as Class 2 medical devices — meaning that a new maker has to pass tests only for leakage and bursting — it puts female condoms in Class 3, the same category as pacemakers, heart valves and silicone breast implants.
That decision was made in 1999 — after much debate, and well after the condom was in use overseas — because there was no clinical data on the effectiveness of female condoms, and failure could be life-threatening if the woman’s partner had AIDS. An advisory panel suggested not even calling it a “condom” and instead labeled it an “intravaginal pouch,” but the agency rejected that advice.
Names notwithstanding, the Class 3 listing means that any new design must pass clinical trials, which would cost $3 million to $6 million.
“That’s a huge, huge impediment, close to a 100 percent block, because no one’s willing to put up that sort of money,” Dr. Free said.
The United States Agency for International Development, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lemelson Foundation and others paid for design costs and prototypes, but they are not willing to pay for clinical trials and the cost of building a factory. Private investors have also balked because the American and European markets for the original design proved smaller than had been predicted.
The failure of the original design — made by the Female Health Company of Chicago and marketed worldwide under names like FC1, Reality, Dominique, Femy and Protectiv — is still galling to AIDS experts.
“Their use has remained frustratingly and tragically low,” said Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of UNAids, the United Nations AIDS agency.
In the 1990s, Mr. Warren, former director of international affairs for the Female Health Company, visited 24 countries trying to get the female condom accepted. Brazil, South Africa and Zimbabwe were the most receptive, said Mr. Warren, who now works on AIDS vaccines.
“It had some elements of success,” he said, “but hasn’t had the blockbuster numbers the company had hoped for.”
But, as Ms. Chingandu noted, even in Zimbabwe, after an initial flurry of excitement from women, the condom settled into a niche: a tool of the sex trade.
Whether the condom did well or poorly in a particular country, Mr. Warren said, was determined mostly by how it was introduced. Brazil’s rollout order was for one million. Bangladesh, by contrast, tried to start with only 20,000. And Uganda bought one million but then did little marketing and no training in how to use it.
“People said, ‘Oh, it failed,’” he said. “Well, it didn’t fail. It just wasn’t available, or its introduction was a bad program. People need to practice with it before it catches on.”
He called the new design “a better mousetrap” but said it still faced another problem it shares with the original: it is expensive compared with male condoms.
While those are made by simply dipping molds in latex, the female one uses complex thin-film polyurethane. The most closely related technology is that used for blood bags, so PATH is visiting companies that make them.
But as Ms. Robertson noted, companies that make blood bags have little expertise in marketing sexual products.
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, November 13, 2007
In his new animated film, Jerry Seinfeld plays Barry B. Benson, a wisecracking, moony-eyed, charmingly petulant New York honeybee who doesn’t want to spend his days as a worker bee stuck on the honeymaking assembly line. “You know, Dad, the more I think about it,” Barry says, “maybe the honey field just isn’t right for me.” To which his father, a proud, lifelong “honey stirrer,” snaps: “And you were thinking of, what, making balloon animals? That’s a bad job for a guy with a stinger!”
Swell comeback, Pop, but your son has a point, starting with the posterior one he shouldn’t have in the first place. Isn’t Barry supposed to be a he bee? Well, male honeybees don’t have stingers, for the simple anatomical reason that a bee’s stinger is a modified version of an ovipositor, the distinctly feminine organ through which a female insect lays her eggs.
Barry is absolutely right, however, to doubt his fitness for the honey trade. In the real world, every job on a beehive’s spreadsheet — foraging for nectar and pollen, fanning nectar into honey, fawning over the queen, squirting out wax, battling off bears, tossing out the trash and dead bees — is performed by a cast of workers that is homogeneously female. Sterile, yes, with stingers where their egg-laying tubes should be, but female nonetheless.
By bowdlerizing the basic complexion of a great insect society, Mr. Seinfeld’s “Bee Movie” follows in the well-pheromoned path of Woody Allen as a whiny worker ant in “Antz” and Dave Foley playing a klutzy forager ant in “A Bug’s Life.” Maybe it’s silly to fault cartoons for biological inaccuracies when the insects are already talking like Chris Rock and wearing Phyllis Diller hats. But isn’t it bad enough that in Hollywood’s animated family fare about rats, clownfish, penguins, lions, hyenas and other relatively large animals, the overwhelming majority of characters are male, despite nature’s preferred sex ratio of roughly 50-50? Must even obligately female creatures like worker bees and soldier ants be given sex change surgery, too? Besides, there’s no need to go with the faux: the life of an authentic male social insect is thrilling, poignant and cartoonish enough.
“It’s a pity they tell so much nonsense,” said Bert Hölldobler of Arizona State University, one of the world’s leading ant authorities, “when real insect societies are so full of little dramas.”
For male ants and honeybees, time is brief, their numbers briefer, and the patience of their sisters briefest of all. In a honeybee colony of, say, 40,000 bees, only 200 — half a percent — will be male, while among ant species like the harvesters, males may account for 10 percent or 15 percent of the total. Paradoxically, males are made through the withholding of sperm, hatching from eggs that the queen lays but does not fertilize with any of her stored semen samples, as she will to generate female workers. To compound the paradox, these genetic oddballs, these haploid mama’s boys born of asexual, semen-free means, will mature into what are really great big packets of sperm on the wing.
This is not to make light of the masculine charge. The resident queen may live half a dozen years or more and generate many millions of offspring, but the long-term success of a colony depends on its power to seed more colonies. It must send out young virgin queens to start new nests, and it must send out males to inseminate aspiring queens from other far-flung hymenopteran nations.
If worker bees and ants are thought of as the heart, lungs, liver and brain of a colony — the vital organs that keep the body alive — male bees and maiden queens are the colony’s gonads — the organs that are tuned to tomorrow.
The male honeybee’s form bespeaks his sole function. He has large eyes to help find queens and extra antenna segments to help smell queens, but he is otherwise ill-equipped to survive. On reaching adulthood, he must linger in the hive for a few days until his exoskeleton dries and his wing muscles mature, all the while begging food from his sisters and thus living up to his tainted name, drone.
Come the brief mating season and the entire hive pulses with hope. The males fly out and head far from home, the better to minimize the chance of mating with kin. They seek out “lekking spots” where scores or hundreds of eager drones congregate 20 or 30 feet in the air and await passing maiden queens. Should a queen fly by, she may be mobbed by a dozen or more males, each seeking the chance to love her to death: bee flinging, like bee stinging, is a lethal affair. After a male deposits sperm in the queen, his little “endophallus” snaps off, and he falls to the ground. In her single nuptial flight, the queen will collect and store in her body the sperm offerings of some 20 doomed males, more than enough to fertilize a long life’s worth of eggs.
A successful male is a dead male. A failure lives to stagger home and beg to be fed and to try again tomorrow. After a week or so of lekking, that’s it. The drone is deemed a drain, and if he won’t die for love, he must die for its lack. “The workers will start withholding food, the male gets weakened, and at some point the workers will grasp him and dump him out of the hive,” said Gene E. Robinson, who studies bees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
A heartless ending, perhaps, but what a box office smash. Over 100 million years of evolution, the social insects have come to rule the insect world, forcing solitary species out to the edges and to make do with their scraps. Dr. Hölldobler observes that although ants, bees, termites and other hive-minded tribes account for only 1 percent of known insect species, “this 1 percent makes up 80 percent of all insect biomass.” The dry weight of ants alone, he said, already equals the dry weight of our own. Who knows whether by tomorrow the standard master of our domain won’t have a thorax, six legs and be best addressed as Mistress.
Challenges to Both Left and Right on Global Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, November 13, 2007
For many years, the battle over what to think and do about human-caused climate change and fossil fuels has been waged mostly as a yelling match between the political and environmental left and the right.
The left says global warming is a real-time crisis requiring swift curbs on smokestack and tailpipe gases that trap heat, and that big oil, big coal and antiregulatory conservatives are trashing the planet.
The right says global warming is somewhere between a hoax and a minor irritant, and argues that liberals’ thirst for top-down regulations will drive American wealth to developing countries and turn off the fossil-fueled engine powering the economy.
Some books mirror the divide, like the recent “Field Notes from a Catastrophe,” built on a trio of articles in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert, and “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming” by Chris Horner, a lawyer for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Ms. Kolbert sounds a strong warning call, and Mr. Horner’s book fits with the position of the institute, a libertarian and largely industry-backed group that strongly opposes limits on greenhouse gases.
But in three other recent books, there seems to be a bit of a warming trend between the two camps. Instead of bashing old foes, the authors, all influential voices in the climate debate with roots on the left or the right, tend to chide their own political brethren and urge a move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy.
All have received mixed reviews and generated heated Internet debate — perhaps because they do not bolster any one agenda in a world where energy and environmental policies are still forged mainly in the same way Doctor Dolittle’s two-headed pushmi-pullyu walked. (It didn’t move much.)
One such book comes from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of the most polarizing forces in politics a decade ago.
In “A Contract With the Earth,” Mr. Gingrich, with his co-author Terry L. Maple (a professor of psychology at Georgia Tech and president of the Palm Beach Zoo), has written a manifesto challenging conservatives not just to grudgingly accept, but to embrace, the idea that a healthy environment is necessary for a healthy democracy and economy.
The book invokes concepts like the precautionary principles that are anathema to many in Mr. Gingrich’s party. In a rare stance for those on the right, the authors say curbing carbon dioxide emissions (affordably) is a wise strategy.
They call for America to lead in moving to a world where “fossil fuels have been largely modified for carbon recycling or replaced by carbon-neutral alternatives.”
The book does reveal in spots Mr. Gingrich’s disdain for what he calls liberals’ failed reliance on legislation and litigation in environmental protection. It is all about carrots, like tax incentives, and nowhere about sticks, like binding emissions limits.
But for the most part it is aimed at conservatives, urging them to embrace their inner Teddy Roosevelt and craft a new “entrepreneurial environmentalism.”
The book won over Edward O. Wilson, the prize-winning conservation biologist and author, sufficiently that he wrote a foreword calling the authors “realists and visionaries.”
While Mr. Gingrich is beckoning the right to come to the middle, a similar plea has been sent out to the left by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in “Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.”
This pair of young environmental thinkers, a political strategist and a social scientist, respectively, shook up the green movement in 2004 with an essay called “The Death of Environmentalism,” which provided a launching pad for the book. They say traditional regulatory approaches and dark environmental messages — like the “planetary emergency” at the heart of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the book by former Vice President Al Gore and the subject of a film — will fail if applied to global warming.
Instead they call for an aggressive effort to invest in energy research, while also building societies that can be resilient in the face of the warming that is already unavoidable.
In a recent interview, Mr. Shellenberger reprised a central point of the essay and book. “Martin Luther King didn’t give the ‘I have a nightmare’ speech, he gave an ‘I have a dream’ speech,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “We need a politics that is positive and that inspires people around an exciting and inspiring vision.”
In this same centrist camp sits Bjorn Lomborg. A Danish statistician, Mr. Lomborg has made a career out of challenging the scariest scenarios of environmentalists and argues for a practical calculus weighing problems like poverty, disease and climate against one another to determine how to invest limited resources.
His first book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” put him on Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in 2004 and made him a star among conservative politicians and editorial boards.
In his short new book, “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,” Mr. Lomborg reprises his earlier argument with a tighter focus. He tries to puncture more of what he says are environmental myths, like the imminent demise of polar bears. (Most bear biologists have never said the species is doomed but do see populations shrinking significantly in a melting Arctic.)
Like almost everyone these days, Mr. Lomborg says rich countries should spend far more on basic energy research.
Unlike Mr. Gingrich, who opposes a tax or binding cap on greenhouse gases, Mr. Lomborg supports putting a price on emissions, although he says the right price is a tax of $2 to $14 on a ton of carbon dioxide — about the equivalent of a 2- to 14-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax.
This is much lower than the cost most environmental scientists say would be necessary to induce companies to shift to less-polluting technologies.
In the end, the books overlap most in their embrace of the idea that the human influence on climate requires a concerted response, but that the rhetoric of catastrophe is unlikely to motivate that response.
Mr. Shellenberger and Mr. Nordhaus say one necessary step is to jettison the idea of a sacred nature separate from human affairs. In a line that is bound to inflame as many readers as it inspires, they said: “Whether we like it or not, humans have become the meaning of the earth.”
Essay: Old Story, Updated: Better Living Through Pills
By KEITH WAILOO, The New York Times, November 13, 2007
Athletes taking performance-enhancing drugs. Growing concern about a reliance on pills for relief from pain, stress and anxiety. Medical leaders alarmed about drug fads, calling on doctors to exercise restraint when prescribing.
Headlines from 2007? Try 1957. Today, the drugs are OxyContin, steroids and Ritalin. Fifty years ago, they were tranquilizers, sedatives and amphetamines: America was a Cold War nation in need of both pep and relief.
And while the context is different today (we have a larger and more complex array of drugs), the underlying issues are unchanged: Americans, athletes as well as nonathletes, grappled then as now with the proper role of drugs in their lives.
In 1957, the American Medical Association began an investigation of “pep pills” in sports. In track and field alone, a dozen runners had run the four-minute mile in the three years since Roger Bannister first did it. How could this be possible, the doctors wanted to know, without stimulating drugs? Were athletes using amphetamines to stimulate the nervous system, reduce fatigue and improve performance?
Adding to suspicions, some athletes admitted turning to drugs for extra pep. Bruno Banducci, an offensive lineman for the San Francisco 49ers in the 1950s, acknowledged using the amphetamine Benzedrine to maintain his endurance. “We players did this on our own,” he said, taking team doctors off the hook.
Australian Olympic swimmers were under a similar cloud; even high school athletes were suspected. For others, the goal was relief and tranquillity after the tough performance. Al Aber, a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, and other teammates said their team doctor prescribed tranquilizers to ease muscular and nervous tension.
The problem, of course, was not confined to athletes. Better living through chemistry was a consumer phenomenon of the ’50s. Americans looked to doctors and so-called miracle drugs not only to battle infections, but increasingly to pick them up for the day and calm them down at night. Prescriptions for Benzedrine and its sister drug Dexedrine were given for reasons like depression, fatigue and appetite suppression.
Sales of the pep pills were mushrooming, pushing the boundaries of chemical enhancement and medicated relief. And since being introduced in 1954, tranquilizers had become a $200 million industry. The drugs were promoted by makers, psychiatrists, nurses and psychologists as the true answer to mental illness, psychoses, neuroses, stress and common anxiety.
By 1957, the shortcomings of using drugs to navigate the frustrations of work and life, to pursue both pep and tranquillity, were becoming evident. The Army, which had embraced the use of no-go pills (tranquilizers) for its pilots, was reconsidering the practice.
The four-minute-mile controversy produced no lasting historical scandals — no confessionals akin to the slugger Jose Canseco’s recent tell-all book, and no lingering controversy like the Barry Bonds saga. The cloud over Bannister’s achievement dissipated quickly; he brushed aside the charges as ridiculous and went on to a distinguished medical career. In 1959, the A.M.A. study concluded that there was little evidence to the specific allegations.
Yet the shadow over performance enhancement and drugs would not diminish. The cloud — the use of substances to gain an extra edge, to break through barriers or to merely endure the day or relax and recover at night — lingered not over a particular sport, but over society.
In 1957, the tide was turning on an unregulated age of wonder drugs. There were growing concerns about side effects and prescribing practices, legislative discussions of the need for warning labels and stricter controls on pharmaceutical advertising, and frustrated calls for enhanced federal regulation.
Drug innovation, of course, did not cease. And so the drug scene and its controversies blossomed. Mother’s Little Helper (Valium) was just around the corner, as was the scandal that would lead to more vigorous government oversight — the thalidomide debacle, in which malformed babies were born to pregnant mothers (mostly in Europe) who had taken a new sedative.
The ’60s would become another distinctive drug decade. With its tilt toward psychedelics and experimentation, the younger generation was picking up where many moms and dads had left off. The year 1957 also saw the birth of Ritalin, marketed as an amphetamine-like stimulant. It would take decades for this upstart to find its place in the American drug scene, nurtured in part by the tensions of parents and children over hyperactivity and attention deficit, which was hardly known at the time.
And 1957 produced lucid moments that resonate a half century later. Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney, taking stock of the American prescription scene, pronounced then that “problems of daily living cannot be solved with a pill.” Then as now, many Americans believed and practiced just the opposite.
Dr. Keith Wailoo is a professor of history and health policy at Rutgers and the director of its Center for Race and Ethnicity.
Redesigning a Condom So Women Will Use It
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, November 13, 2007
The female condom has never caught on in the United States. But in the third world, where it was introduced in the late 1990s, public health workers hoped it would overthrow the politics of the bedroom, empower women and stop the AIDS epidemic in its tracks.
It did not. Female condoms never really caught on there, either.
Only about 12 million female condoms are delivered each year in poor countries, compared with about 6 billion male condoms. Couples complained that the female version was awkward, unsightly, noisy and slippery — or, as Mitchell Warren, who was one of its earliest champions, now says, “the yuck factor was a problem.” Many women tried it, but in the end, it was adopted mainly by prostitutes.
Now scientists are trying again. A new design — much the same at one end, different at the other — has been developed, and its makers hope it will succeed where its predecessor failed.
“Over 15 years, there’s been no real competition, no second-generation product,” said Michael J. Free, head of technology at PATH, a nonprofit group based in Seattle that did the redesign. “There’s no lack of interest, but we’ve been stalled.”
However, the new design does not overcome the glaring drawback that doomed the first to be a niche product: it cannot be used secretly. For that reason, married women, now one of the highest risk groups for AIDS in poor countries, rarely use it.
“I don’t want my husband to know that I am wearing a condom,” said Lois B. Chingandu, the director of SAfaids, an anti-AIDS organization in Zimbabwe.
“Condoms are almost undiscussable within a marriage” in Africa, she added. “It is something associated with casual sex. If a wife uses a condom, the message is that you have been unfaithful. If she even initiates the discussion, it tips the power scale. Men resist quite a lot, and it can result in violence.”
But for couples who have agreed on condoms, and for sex workers whose clients cooperate, the new design has several advantages.
The redesigned female condom is made of softer, thinner polyurethane to better transmit warmth. It is easier to insert; one end is bunched up as small as a tampon, an improvement on the old design, which resembled the stiff rubber ring of a diaphragm and had to be folded into a figure 8 for insertion.
During sex, the new female condom also moves more like a vagina than the old design did, according to couples in Seattle, Thailand, Mexico and South Africa who tested a series of prototypes, said Joanie Robertson, project manager for the condom at PATH. The old design hung passively from the rubber ring, which could shift around and sometimes hurt; the new design has dots of adhesive foam that adhere to the vaginal walls, expanding with them during arousal.
According to PATH, more than 90 percent of the couples were satisfied with the ease of use and comfort of the new condom, and 98 percent found the sensation of sex to be “O.K. to very satisfactory.”
Nonetheless, progress is now stalled.
PATH is seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration so the condom can be sold in the United States. And with the drug agency’s approval, it would be much easier to license the condom in poor countries or get a World Health Organization endorsement.
While the F.D.A. designates male condoms as Class 2 medical devices — meaning that a new maker has to pass tests only for leakage and bursting — it puts female condoms in Class 3, the same category as pacemakers, heart valves and silicone breast implants.
That decision was made in 1999 — after much debate, and well after the condom was in use overseas — because there was no clinical data on the effectiveness of female condoms, and failure could be life-threatening if the woman’s partner had AIDS. An advisory panel suggested not even calling it a “condom” and instead labeled it an “intravaginal pouch,” but the agency rejected that advice.
Names notwithstanding, the Class 3 listing means that any new design must pass clinical trials, which would cost $3 million to $6 million.
“That’s a huge, huge impediment, close to a 100 percent block, because no one’s willing to put up that sort of money,” Dr. Free said.
The United States Agency for International Development, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lemelson Foundation and others paid for design costs and prototypes, but they are not willing to pay for clinical trials and the cost of building a factory. Private investors have also balked because the American and European markets for the original design proved smaller than had been predicted.
The failure of the original design — made by the Female Health Company of Chicago and marketed worldwide under names like FC1, Reality, Dominique, Femy and Protectiv — is still galling to AIDS experts.
“Their use has remained frustratingly and tragically low,” said Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of UNAids, the United Nations AIDS agency.
In the 1990s, Mr. Warren, former director of international affairs for the Female Health Company, visited 24 countries trying to get the female condom accepted. Brazil, South Africa and Zimbabwe were the most receptive, said Mr. Warren, who now works on AIDS vaccines.
“It had some elements of success,” he said, “but hasn’t had the blockbuster numbers the company had hoped for.”
But, as Ms. Chingandu noted, even in Zimbabwe, after an initial flurry of excitement from women, the condom settled into a niche: a tool of the sex trade.
Whether the condom did well or poorly in a particular country, Mr. Warren said, was determined mostly by how it was introduced. Brazil’s rollout order was for one million. Bangladesh, by contrast, tried to start with only 20,000. And Uganda bought one million but then did little marketing and no training in how to use it.
“People said, ‘Oh, it failed,’” he said. “Well, it didn’t fail. It just wasn’t available, or its introduction was a bad program. People need to practice with it before it catches on.”
He called the new design “a better mousetrap” but said it still faced another problem it shares with the original: it is expensive compared with male condoms.
While those are made by simply dipping molds in latex, the female one uses complex thin-film polyurethane. The most closely related technology is that used for blood bags, so PATH is visiting companies that make them.
But as Ms. Robertson noted, companies that make blood bags have little expertise in marketing sexual products.
