Adolph Gave Good Blurbs (Postscript)

Whitney (with “Fitter Family” promoters)

The most appalling moment in the literary history of Yale occurred in Madison Grant’s Wall Street law office during the thick of the Depression.  The secretary of the American Eugenics Society then was a New Haven veterinarian named Leon F. Whitney, author of The Complete Book of Dog Care and other pet titles; he later worked as a pathology instructor at Yale Medical School, until his retirement in 1964, and his collection of champion dogs ended up at the Peabody Museum, where they are still among the most actively studied specimens.

In 1934, Whitney published a book called The Case for Sterilization, which was not about neutering the family dog.   To the question how many Americans “ought to be sterilized,” he added up “all the various types of less useful social elements,” noting that they tended to occur disproportionately in blacks and immigrants.  Then he concluded that “we should probably be disposing of the lowest fourth of our population”—or roughly 30 million people.  He quickly added that he was not “suggesting that all these be sterilized wholesale, but merely that we make voluntary sterilization available to them.”

One of Hitler’s staff wrote to New Haven requesting a copy of the book, and Hitler himself later followed up with a personal letter of thanks.  Soon after, Whitney went down to New York to meet with his fellow eugenicist Madison Grant, and proudly showed him the letter.  In  the 1994 book The Nazi Connection, historian Stefan Kühl writes:   “Grant only smiled, reached for a folder on his desk,” and gave Whitney his own letter, in which Hitler thanked Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race and called it his “Bible.”

Into the Lion’s Maw (God & White Men–part 4)

Entirely apart from his reputation as an economist, Irving Fisher enjoyed an idyllic American existence. He lived with his wife Margaret and their three children in a big house on the crest of Prospect Street, with a music room, a library, and “a 40-foot living room with a large, sunny bay window,” as their son Irving recalled in his memoir, My Father Irving Fisher. A health enthusiast at home as well as in public, Fisher disdained cane sugar, tea, coffee, alcohol, tobacco, and bleached white flour. He often jogged in shorts around the neighborhood and liked to ride a bicycle to his classes on the Yale campus. One of his books was titled How to Live.

His various crusades required a platoon of busy assistants. So Fisher built out from the basement of the family home onto the sloping ground in back, eventually creating ten work rooms and, young Irving recalled, a “hidden beehive of activity below decks.” The office equipment included one of Fisher’s own inventions, an index card filing system that made the first line of each card visible at a glance. With his wife’s money, he turned it into a thriving business. When the company was bought out—it would become part of the Sperry Rand corporation—Fisher capitalized on his new wealth by buying stock on margin. By the late 1920s, he and Margaret had a fortune of $10 million.

Fisher was the son of a Congregational minister, and his driving impulse was to proselytize. Thus eugenics seemed a natural outgrowth not just of his work as an economist, but of his family heritage. It needed “to be a popular movement with a certain amount of religious flavor in it,” he thought. His role as a leading apostle also seemed like a way for him to make a real mark on the world—as if his economics alone were not enough: “I do want before I die,” he wrote to his wife, “to leave behind me something more than a book on Index Numbers.”

But his eugenic enthusiasms drew him

Blue Ribbons for Human Stock (God and White Men, part 2)

In the early decades of the twentieth century, eugenics “fell squarely in the mainstream of scientific and popular culture,” according to Yale history professor Daniel Kevles, author of the 1985 book In the Name of Eugenics.Theodore Roosevelt popularized the term “race suicide,” for what he saw as the dwindling of the old Anglo-American stock, and the young Winston Churchill advocated sterilization and labor camps for “mental defectives.” Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger decried the proliferation of “human weeds,” while progressive reformer Havelock Ellis thought that getting the reproductive choices right would require the sexual liberation of women.

Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, had coined the word “eugenics” in 1883 from the Greek for “of good birth.” But it really gained currency after 1900, with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work describing how different traits are inherited in pea plants—and particularly after researchers demonstrated in 1907 that Mendelian inheritance plays a role in eye color in humans, too.

Eugenicists inferred—incorrectly, as we now know—that single genes, or “unit characters,” could determine feeblemindedness, insanity, alcoholism, and even broad swaths of behavior like criminality. They also believed that society could now use this knowledge to dramatically improve the species. Huntington, the Yale geographer, described this as the fifth “most momentous” discovery in human history, after tools, speech, fire, and writing. For Fisher, likewise, it was the coming of an epoch: “We could make a new human in a hundred years.”

By the late 1920s,

Nature Isn’t Simple (A Bitter Pill-Part 4)

A plant sample—even something as basic as coffee or tea–may contain thousands of compounds.  In the lab, chemists “fractionated” plant samples, breaking them down into crude extracts.  But they still ended up with hundreds of compounds in each of their 1536 test wells.   “This is where the wheels fell off of this thing,” says Paul Armond, a plant cell biologist who spent 30 years in drug development at Pfizer.  “High-throughput screeners hated these samples.  They didn’t want to have anything to do with them because even if you got a hit in one of these fractionated samples, you didn’t know which of the hundred compounds in the test well was the active one.”  A high-throughput screener’s job is to test as many compounds and get as many hits as possible, and natural compounds just seemed to clog the pipeline.

Even if they managed to isolate an active compound from a plant, says Armond, “it would be, from the organic chemists’ point of view, some ugly compound, this big, giant molecule that no chemist could ever possibly synthesize.   They‘d said, ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’”  When a compound seems promising, the usual next step is to “add things to it, take things away, rearrange things, and find where the important parts of the molecule are and where the not-so-important parts are.”  Through the magic of combinatorial chemistry, researchers can target the molecule more carefully, or weed out unwanted side effects.  But if a compound from a natural product is too complex to synthesize in the first place, “then you can’t do any of those things.”

One final obstacle made natural products problematic: 

Horror Stories and High Tech (A Bitter Pill–Part 3)

So each new negotiation starts from scratch and can entail months or even years of “significant legal and travel expense, all before a single collection is made,” says Miller.  The uncertainty of these negotiations “may be more of an impediment to pharmaceutical companies,” he suggests, “than the actual commitment to share potential profits.”

Horror stories abound:  In the late 1980s, a U.S. National Cancer Institute team was working in the West African nation of Cameroon on a compound that looked like the cure for AIDs.  “This was a plant that was still eating research dollars at an enormous rate, it wasn’t making any money, and, man, the Cameroonians were all wanting to buy themselves new Mercedes.”  Though the researchers had an access agreement with one government ministry, “about five other ministries stood up and said, ‘Oh you should have signed that with us.’”  Then they bickered.  Even if the compound had proved to be the cure (it turned out to be too toxic), “I’m not sure we would have been able to work on it,” says Miller, “because the Cameroonians put such tight clamps on it.”

But drug companies also botched their bioprospecting efforts through a combination of financial and technological hubris, critics say.  The financial side is a familiar story of senior executives focusing on quarterly growth at the expense of science.  Getting a new drug to market, says John C. Vederas, a medicinal chemist at the University of Alberta, “requires a lot of creativity and intellectual input and study and time and money”—on average ten years and $1 billion worth of research.  Boosting revenues by buying up other large drug companies can look like a quicker way to keep Wall Street happy.  And with each round of consolidation, company leaders “basically layoff employees, close research and development units that have a long record of being successful, and buy technologies that look promising from smaller companies.”

Beginning in the late 1980s, big drug companies also increasingly diverted their research dollars from natural products to combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening.  That is, they turned to automated methods to bang out large libraries of closely related synthetic compounds.  Then they sorted out the biologically active ones by running these compounds through a device the size of a hardcover book, with 1536 little plastic wells, each containing a different bioassay.  It’s a “brute force method,” says Vederas, and can take a million tries to produce one promising lead.  But the numbers may still seem to work because automation makes those million tries relatively cheap.

Natural products didn’t fit the new technology.

(to be continued)

Among the One Percent, Look Twice Before Crossing

Shiny Cars, Scary Drivers

For cynics, this might come as unsurprising science.  But a new study shows that as social status rises, so does the propensity to commit unethical acts, like lying in a negotiation, cheating, stealing, and breaking the law while behind the wheel.   The study fits a long line of research by Dacher Keltner at the University of California in Berkeley.

I’ve written in the past about his “Cookie Monster” experiment for The New York Times.  For the new study, published Monday on PNAS:

Observers stood near the intersection, coded the
status of approaching vehicles, and recorded whether the driver
cut off other vehicles by crossing the intersection before waiting
their turn, a behavior that defies the California Vehicle Code. In
the present study, 12.4% of drivers cut in front of other vehicles.

But drivers of top status cars cut off other cars almost 30% of time, versus less than 10% for the lowest-status cars.

It was even worse for pedestrians:  Top status drivers cut off pedestrians 45% of the time, versus close to zero for the lowest-status drivers.

The study attributes the effect to multiple factors:

Upper-class individuals’ relative independence from others and increased privacy in their professions (3) may provide fewer structural constraints and decreased
perceptions of risk associated with committing unethical acts (8). The availability of resources to deal with the downstream costs of unethical behavior may increase the likelihood of such acts among the upper class. In addition, independent self-construals among the upper class (22) may shape feelings of entitlement
and inattention to the consequences of one’s actions on others (23). A reduced concern for others’ evaluations (24) and increased goal-focus (25) could further instigate unethical tendencies among upper-class individuals. Together, these factors may give rise to a set of culturally shared norms among upperclass
individuals that facilitates unethical behavior.

The bottom line:   If there’s a Mercedes or Escalade in the neighborhood, stand back from the curb and pray, while also watching your wallet.

Let’s call it “the Lizzie Grubman effect,” for the wealthy publicist who allegedly yelled “Fuck you, white trash” before backing her Mercedes into a crowd of pedestrians outside a Long Island nightclub.  (And true to the study’s theory about “downstream costs,” she got off with 37 days in jail.)

“High social class predicts increased unethical behavior,” by Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner

Impression Management 101

I watched the news without sound at the gym last night and was impressed by how NBC anchor Brian Williams always manages to keep the inside of his right eyebrow cocked up, to look like an inquiring reporter.  It is almost as good as the real thing.  Does he do exercises for that?

You can read one of my past articles about facial expressions here, and a profile of the founder of the science of facial expressions in my book The Ape in the Corner Office.

 

 

A Race of Docile Copiers

The British biologist Mark Paget has an interesting article about how the evolution of ideas parallels the evolution of biological traits.   Though we like to think of Homo sapiens (and ourselves)  as extraordinarily creative, the truth is that real innovation is rare.   Most of us are just spectacularly good at copying and spreading what seem to be the best new ideas.  We are champions only at social learning.

The money paragraphs suggest that social networking via the Internet tends to make copying even more pervasive, and innovation still more rare:

Putting these two things together has lots of implications for where we’re going as societies. As I say, as our societies get bigger, and rely more and more on the Internet, fewer and fewer of us have to be very good at these creative and imaginative processes. And so, humanity might be moving towards becoming more docile, more oriented towards following, copying others, prone to fads, prone to going down blind alleys, because part of our evolutionary history that we could have never anticipated was leading us towards making use of the small number of other innovations that people come up with, rather than having to produce them ourselves.

The interesting thing with Facebook is that, with 500 to 800 million of us connected around the world, it sort of devalues information and devalues knowledge. And this isn’t the comment of some reactionary who doesn’t like Facebook, but it’s rather the comment of someone who realizes that knowledge and new ideas are extraordinarily hard to come by. And as we’re more and more connected to each other, there’s more and more to copy. We realize the value in copying, and so that’s what we do.

And we seek out that information in cheaper and cheaper ways. We go up on Google, we go up on Facebook, see who’s doing what to whom. We go up on Google and find out the answers to things. And what that’s telling us is that knowledge and new ideas are cheap. And it’s playing into a set of predispositions that we have been selected to have anyway, to be copiers and to be followers. But at no time in history has it been easier to do that than now. And Facebook is encouraging that.

And then, as corporations grow … and we can see corporations as sort of microcosms of societies … as corporations grow and acquire the ability to acquire other corporations, a similar thing is happening, is that, rather than corporations wanting to spend the time and the energy to create new ideas, they want to simply acquire other companies, so that they can have their new ideas. And that just tells us again how precious these ideas are, and the lengths to which people will go to acquire those ideas.

A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.

You can read Paget’s full article here.  But I am wondering if I should suggest that you copy this link to Facebook?  Maybe come up with your own contrarian perspective instead, and demonstrate that innovation lives.

The Luddite Revolution: Birth of a Brand

An early Luddite protester

This is a piece I wrote for the March issue of Smithsonian magazine:

In an essay in 1984—at the dawn of the personal computer era—the novelist Thomas Pynchon wondered if it was “O.K. to be a Luddite,” meaning someone who opposes technological progress. A better question today is whether it’s even possible. Technology is everywhere, and a recent headline at an Internet humor site perfectly captured how difficult it is to resist: “Luddite invents machine to destroy technology quicker.”

Like all good satire, the mock headline comes perilously close to the truth. Modern Luddites do indeed invent “machines”—in the form of computer viruses, cyberworms and other malware—to disrupt the technologies that trouble them. (Recent targets of suspected sabotage include the London Stock Exchange and a nuclear power plant in Iran.) Even off-the-grid extremists find technology irresistible. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, attacked what he called the “industrial-technological system” with increasingly sophisticated mail bombs. Likewise, the cave-dwelling terrorist sometimes derided as “Osama bin Luddite” hijacked aviation technology to bring down skyscrapers.

For the rest of us, our uneasy protests against technology almost inevitably take technological form. We worry about whether violent computer games are warping our children, then decry them by tweet, text or Facebook post. We try to simplify our lives by shopping at the local farmers market—then haul our organic arugula home in a Prius. College students take out their earbuds to discuss how technology dominates their lives. But when a class ends, Loyola University of Chicago professor Steven E. Jones notes, their cellphones all come to life, screens glowing in front of their faces, “and they migrate across the lawns like giant schools of cyborg jellyfish.”

That’s when he turns on his phone, too.

The word “Luddite,” handed down from a British industrial protest that began 200 years ago this month, turns up in our daily language in ways that suggest we’re confused not just about technology, but also about who the original Luddites were and

The Best Rx: Facing Up to Mistakes

A study from Johns Hopkins reveals that the father of successful neurosurgery, Harvey Cushing, a driven, egotistical figure, was nonetheless also routinely frank about admitting his mistakes.  I profiled Cushing recently (see below) and was also struck that, apart from being meticulously careful in his work, he also relied on methodical record-keeping and self-criticism to improve his results.  In the new study, medical student Katherine Latimer and her co-authors

… were surprised by Cushing’s frank and copious documentation of his own shortcomings. His notes acknowledged mistakes that may have resulted in patients’ deaths, as well as those that didn’t seem to harm patients’ outcomes. They said the documentation took place in an era in which malpractice litigation was becoming a growing concern for doctors. Though malpractice penalties were substantially smaller in Cushing’s day, lawsuits presented a serious risk for physicians’ reputations, the authors noted.

The authors also emphasized that Cushing practiced in a time of enormous surgical innovation. For example, patient mortality from surgical treatment of brain tumors fell from 50 percent to 13 percent during his career. While some of this jump ahead was due to improving technology, the authors propose that part of the reason was open documentation of errors, which helped Cushing and other surgeons develop fixes to avoid them.