But this is the 1960′s. Computers are HUGE. Yes, yes, transistors had been invented years before–and are now in wide use. So, at least we’re not talking vacuum tubes. Egads. Tubes! Building computers means wiring a whole bunch of these transistors together. With wire. In other words, the world’s finest computers look a bit like that box of Christmas lights you don’t want to think about in the basement: tangled, ugly, mean and prone to failure if jostled. Not exactly conducive to placement in a rocket.

No biggie, you think. You’ll just have the computer on Earth–nice solid earth–radioing back and forth to the sensors and engines in the rocket. You can even correct for the speed-of-light delays! Problem solved! Light up some Lucky Strikes and call it a day.

But then you think of the return burn. If the Apollo craft are going to get out of lunar orbit and return to Earth, they’re going to need to fire the rocket engine on the far side of the Moon–you know, where radio waves can’t reach. Crap. I guess you’ll have to figure out a way of wiring together all those (4000 or so, egads!) transistors in a way that is small, light and durable enough to survive being rocketed into space. Time to create the first integrated circuit computer–father of every damn computer most of us have used, ever.

Better call MIT.

A landmark Energy Department project to bury carbon dioxide produced by humans has begun as workers sunk a huge drill bit into Illinois ground this week, signaling continued support for a climate change mitigation strategy that has fallen out of favor in many circles.

The start of drilling marks the launch a geological sequestration project that will deposit a million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the ground by 2012.

While that’s nothing compared to the several billion tons of CO2 that humans emit yearly, it’s the geology of the site that makes the development exciting. The CO2 will be piped into a geological formation that underlies parts of Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky that could eventually hold more than 100 billion tons of CO2.

While I find the term ‘clean coal‘ to be absurd, I still think this sort of technical investment is critical for the future health of the climate. Thanks to years of foot-dragging on alternatives, the entire world has gone on a fossil-fueled power plant building spree. Carbon sequestration may never pan out. It’s, sadly, one of our few remaining shots at averting environmental catastrophe.

Take Shell’s move today, as a portent:

Shell will no longer invest in renewable technologies such as wind, solar and hydro power because they are not economic, the Anglo-Dutch oil company said today. It plans to invest more in biofuels which environmental groups blame for driving up food prices and deforestation.
….
The company said it would concentrate on developing other cleaner ways of using fossil fuels, such as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. It hoped to use CCS to reduce emissions from Shell’s controversial and energy-intensive oil sands projects in northern Canada.

Well, what of the alternatives? Wind is going to be a challenge, particularly in the context of climate change. Biofuels–at least fuels from bioengineered organisms–are intriguing, but we’ll have to get around our discomfort of genetic modification of organisms.

And then, there is nuclear power. (For a primer, I suggest my series on nuclear power, written a bit ago.) The Obama administration paused work on the Yucca mountain waste repository, exacerbating the waste problem (perhaps in a good way, for the long term.)

A growing consensus of scientists, however, are recognizing nuclear power as one of our better shots out of this mess:

Nuclear power is safe, affordable, and the waste problems are much more manageable than the public realizes. That was the take-home message from this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago, where a group of experts from the US and EU participated in a session called “Keeping the Lights On: The Revival of Nuclear Energy for Our Future.”

My personal impression is slightly less rosy–with a deeper concern about waste management–but I still believe we should be investing massively in nuclear technologies.

We’re well past the point of being able to consider only the most pleasant energy sources. Looking at the number of people on the planet, and the increasingly dire reports of damage caused by the burning of fossil fuels, we need to be realistic. These steps, by the scientific community and the Obama administration, are heartening steps in what seems the right direction.

The ideal response would be to replace the tissue and cells lost with new, full-functional replacements–regeneration. For the parts of our body that are constantly turning over–skin, blood, and to a lesser extent bone for examples–this is exactly what happens. Since the cells in these tissues are always being replaced anyways, injury is little more than a very bad day.

These tissues have resident adult stem cells. Stem cells, by definition, can divide and either make more copies of themselves or give rise to new functional cells. They do not do much by themselves. It makes inherent sense that a stem cell living in a given tissue can only make cells for that tissue; you don’t want bone to be replaced skin. Tissues that are undergoing constant wear and tear have stem cells.

Run down the leading causes of death in the United States and an interesting pattern emerges. Heart disease. Stroke. Diabetes. These are caused injuries to tissues that do not turn over as a regular matter of life. Heart, brain and insulin-producing cells in the pancreas lack functional adult stem cell populations to replace them when they’re lost. After injury, the body is stuck. It does what you’d do when faced with a broken car window and no replacement glass: duct tape. When no replacement functional cells are available, the body tends to repair itself by scarring over the area–replacing what used to be functional tissue with something tough and durable.

2500 Americans die each day from heart disease. The only way, right now, to replace the heart cells lost after a heart attack (or other injury) is whole-heart transplantation. Only about 2000 transplants can be performed each year–limited mostly by the availability of donor hearts.

Which brings us to the embryonic stem cell. We need replacement cells for these tissues. Embryonic stem cells, a kind of pluripotent stem cell, can become any cell type–including heart and brain cells. Only pluripotent stem cells, to date, have an unquestioned ability to become heart cells.

The generation of an embryonic stem cell line involves the destruction of an about 100-cell pre-implantation embryo. At this stage, the embryo looks like a beach ball filled with sand. The cells making up the hollow sphere are the trophoectoderm and can go on to become all the supporting structures of a pregnancy (placenta, amnion and such). The clump of cells at the bottom of the sphere is the inner cell mass. These are the cells that can go on to become any cell type in the body.

To generate a new embryonic stem cell line, the trophoectodermal cells are removed by immunosurgery, leaving only the inner cell mass cells behind. These cells are then placed in culture conditions that promote their division as pluripotent cells–retaining the ability to become any cell type in the body. From about fifty cells, trillions can be made. This is why most labs doing pluripotent stem cell research never work with embryos. Since the lines can divide (nearly) indefinitely, the overwhelming majority of research involves work with existing lines–not the generation of new ones.

No human embryo, to my knowledge, has been destroyed only to make an embryonic stem cell line. Every single line in existence was created from an excess IVF (in-vitro fertilization) embryo. IVF requires the mixing of human eggs and sperm in a dish. Sperm is easy enough to collect, store, freeze and thaw. Human eggs are another matter. The collection protocol is dangerous to the woman–involving massive dosages of hormones. Worse yet, there hasn’t been a reliable way to store, freeze or thaw unfertilized human eggs. Fortunately, pre-implantation human embryos can be frozen and stored. So when human eggs are collected, all must be fertilized more-or-less immediately. Some of the resultant embryos are implanted immediately, with the rest frozen for future attempts at having children.

When the couple has decided they’re done having children, the left-over excess embryos are generally destroyed. (Nobody wants to pay for their continued cryostorage.) Since IVF is unregulated, it’s hard to know how many frozen human embryos exist in the United States. Estimates hover around a half-million. A tiny number are donated to other couples seeking fertility treatment, with others donated to scientific research–to be used to create embryonic stem cell lines.

This is a key point: If these cells weren’t used to create an embryonic stem cell line, they would be destroyed anyways. And there are hundreds of thousands of embryos in storage today. Every month they spend in stasis lowers their viability.

Are these embryos, being destroyed as a consequence of in-vitro fertilization, human beings? This is, at its core, not a scientific question.

The embryos are undeniably made up of human cells. But, so are the many skin, gut, and other cells you shed or digest every day. Having the right number of human chromosomes seems a poor standard for a human being.

Nor are these embryos an individual yet. If you split a blastocyst in half, you can get identical twins. Mash two together and you can get a chimera. It seems that any standard for a human being would require the entity to be an individual. Blastocysts are not yet individuals.

These embryos, if implanted, have a potential to develop into a human being. But, it’s important to carefully consider how great this potential really is.

We can estimate there are about a half-million embryos stored in freezers around the country. Only 134 of these excess embryos have been ‘adopted’ by other couples. More are being generated every day. So, a given excess IVF embryo only has about a 1: 4,000 chance of being implanted and delivered to birth. About half of embryos attempted for IVF (again this is a very rough estimate) even manage to implant. Of those that implant, even more miscarry.

We finally come to the question of what makes a cell capable of becoming any other cell? The basic science I work on in the lab is somewhat related to this question; how does a single cell manage to become hundreds of distinct cell types–each with a unique pattern of gene expression that is maintained throughout life. It’s a huge question that I narrow by focusing on the path from anything to heart cell.

The answer is tremendously complex–much deeper and interesting than “sperm meets egg.” Part of what’s going on in that first trimester is the establishment of all those hundreds of cell types. Complex three-dimensional geometry, a dozen or so of delicate signals, precise timing and luck itself all play into this process. It often fails–in a lab dish or in the gestation of a baby.

For all these reasons, and more, I find it hard to accept that a human life starts before the end of the first trimester. Humans are not yeast or bacteria. It takes those three months to even get the vague shape of the complex machine of human life.

In fact, it’s not until deep into the third trimester when all of these cell types are formed into organs that function. Until late in gestation, independent human life is not possible; survival takes extraordinary mechanical life support.

Nor does reaching one step, in any way, mean the next is going to succeed. Very little about development is deterministic; much is subject to the whims of chance and environment.

Something else has emerged recently: induced pluripotent cells, or iPS cells. This technique–to turn some committed cells into a cell that resembles an embryonic stem cell–was developed in Japan by Dr. Yamanaka. Japan’s restrictions on embryonic stem cell research were (and are) far more restrictive than the US’s.

This reprogramming technique required, first, extensive study of human embryonic stem cells. Dr. Yamanaka used a list of potential master regulator genes that was generated based on a large amount of work done on embryonic stem cells.

And iPS cells aren’t anywhere close to perfect. My lab–and I specifically–have done experiments to compare these iPS cells to true embryonic stem cells. They aren’t the same–with a significantly hindered abilities. We’re attempting some further reprogramming techniques to make them better–but that’s still years off. For now, the best bet for making iPS cells work well enough to use for therapies is to continue studying them and embryonic stem cells–using what’s learned in the latter to improve the former.

When making an ethical judgment, I believe it’s critical for us to balance the interests of both the excess embryos produced by IVF (that I do not believe to be human beings) with those of the hundreds of millions of adult human beings that are currently suffering from horrible illnesses.

I do not believe human embryonic stem cell research should be a free-for-all. While I do not personally believe that human life starts at the moment when sperm-meets-egg, I do recognize that human blastocysts deserve serious treatment.

I believe that the donation of blastocysts and the distribution of the subsequent embryonic stem cell lines should be strictly decommercialized. The entire process should be like how we handle organ donation from adults–with oversight, and the prohibition of money changing hands in the process.

Obama’s easing of the Federal funding restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research opens the door for such a policy in a way that Bush’s restrictions never did. By preventing public funding, the destruction of human embryos was forced into the private sector. In a horrifying way, Bush’s policies made the destruction of human embryos a matter of private enterprise–a potentially for-profit venture. Anything else would be better.

Dear Science,

Is reading The Stranger online actually any greener than reading the printed-in-Yakima hard copy? Doesn’t it take a shitload of electricity to run the servers and keep them cool? How would one even figure out how to compare the carbon footprint of, say, going to the coffee shop once a week and reading the print version versus reading it online, as well as checking in with Slog on a regular basis? Folks talk about the internet as being green, but part of me suspects that all it does is put its pollution somewhere out of sight.

Usually, when I get a question like this, I do a search to see if anyone else–particularly in the scientific literature–has done an analysis. All I could find was a high-on-sensation, low-on-content article from a Harvard professor touting his company.

It was time to roll up my sleeves and do some real, primary, research on the question. (If you just want the answer, go read the column for the condensed answer.) Allow me to show my work.

For print on paper, I assumed the two major carbon impacts would be the manufacturing of the paper itself, and the physical distribution of the printed copies.

The EPA maintains a fantastic online calculator intended to help manufactures figure out ways of reducing their carbon impact by using recycled materials. Newsprint is one of the categories. Kevin (at The Stranger) was kind enough to tell me the amount of recycled paper (pre- and post-) consumer: 40% pre-consumer, 40% post-consumer recycled and 20% pulp from freshly cut down trees. As my column notes, only the use of post-consumer recycled paper reduces the carbon impact. Both pre-consumer recycled paper and pulp require the cutting down of trees. As I noted in another column, trees actively sequester carbon. Cutting them down, if you’re accounting properly, has a really nastly net impact on the atmosphere.

I independently calculated the tons of paper needed each week by weighing a single copy (150 grams) and multiplying by the total circulation. The total weekly weight was about 13,500 kg (about 30,000 pounds) of paper. Kevin confirmed this was about right. For the mix of recycled paper used, that worked out to 5.2 metric tons of carbon equivalent (MTCE) released into the atmosphere each week for just the paper. If The Stranger used (much more expensive) 100% post-consumer recycled paper, this would drop to a mere 0.30 MTCE per week–17.5 fold less than currently emitted.

For the distribution, I first started with the semi-truck from Yakima to Seattle–140 miles at about 5 miles per gallon, or about 28 gallons of diesel fuel consumed per trip. Burning a gallon of diesel fuel releases about 2.8 kg of carbon into the atmosphere, so 28 gallons is about 0.08 MTCE emitted.

The in-town distribution consumes another 76 gallons of gasoline per week. Burning gasoline releases about 2.4 kg of carbon per gallon, making the total emissions from the in-town distribution 0.19 MTCE per week.

The total for the physical delivery of the paper? 0.26 MTCE per week. The overall total (paper + distribution) carbon impact for the paper each week worked out to about 5.5 MTCE per week, almost all of which coming from the newsprint itself. Divide by the current circulation of The Stranger, and that works out to about 71g of carbon equivalent per printed paper: 67.4 g for the paper itself, 3.4g for distribution.

Were my assumptions valid? I’m ignoring the energy costs of running the printing presses, figuring they are probably predominantly powered by non-carbon emitting hydroelectric and wind power. I’m also ignoring the carbon impact of manufacturing the soy-based ink, assuming it’s a small contributor. That might be dangerous, as farms are massive contributors to atmospheric carbon emissions. I couldn’t find a good source for the MTCE per gallon of soy-based ink. If anyone knows, I’ll be glad to incorporate it into my analysis.

For online, we have a few things to consider: how much energy does it take to serve, deliver and read the content.

A nicely done study figured it takes about 12.5kWh per gigabyte of data served and delivered on the internet. On average in the US, generating one kWh of electricity emits 0.00012 MTCE into the atmosphere.

Anthony was kind enough to provide me with hard numbers for the number of visitors and views on The Stranger‘s website in a week. I measured a bunch of pages to calculate the average pageview on The Stranger‘s website weighs in at about one megabyte. The total weekly carbon imact of serving and delivering the content on The Stranger‘s website is about 1.7 MTCE; interestingly, that’s more than the weekly carbon impact of distributing the physical paper. Per unique visitor, that works out to 9.4 grams of carbon equivalent each just on the delivery.

The carbon impact of reading things on the internet really is dependent upon which computer you are using–and how many watts the computer uses. A relatively modern laptop, consuming 45 watts, emits 5.4 grams of carbon equivalent per hour to operate. A big honking desktop PC, weighing in at 250 watts, emits 30g per hour.

I have no clue how many hours a week people spend reading and commenting on The Stranger‘s website, nor the mixture of computers. So, I cannot make an honest estimate of the total carbon impact of the online presence of the paper. I can tell you about 11.4 hours of online reading on a laptop, per week, has about the same carbon impact as a single paper copy. Reading on a desktop PC? Only two hours equals the carbon impact of the paper.

Want to calculate for your own PC? Here’s the formula:

(Watts of your PC) * 0.00012 * 1000 = your grams of carbon emitted per hour.

For the number of hours until reading online on your PC equals the carbon impact of a single paper:

61.6 / (grams of carbon per hour from your PC) = number of hours.

How are my assumptions here? I’m not considering the carbon impact of manufacturing the laptops and computers. But, I’m not considering the carbon impact of manufacturing the roads, trucks either.

And, as I end my column noting, reading isn’t even close to your biggest carbon impact. A single cheeseburger emits the equivalent of a kilogram of carbon. Driving the average car on the road today one mile emits more carbon equivalent into the atmosphere than a single paper.

Back when I was a fresh and new graduate student, I took a course co-chaired by him and fellow Hutch professor Dan Gottschling—on the chromosome—that propelled me forward to my thesis project. At the time, he was working on a truly funky pair of problems: Why don’t we spontaneously combust? How do some animals hibernate?

In a strange way, these unknowns are related.

Inside each of our cells are mitochondria. These are the reactors powering our bodies. At the core of mitochondria is something called the electron transport chain–in which the energy contained in electrons gleaned by breaking down fats and sugars is first used to pump hydrogen, and later these pumped hydrogen are converted into useful energy stores called ATP. High energy electrons go in, tired electrons come out at the end.

The used up electrons need to go somewhere. The mitochondria stuff them onto a passing oxygen molecule, creating carbon dioxide. Basically, it’s just like when a candle burns; in a living system, it’s called respiration. And like any combustion, it generates heat.

If left unchecked, if nothing slowed down the electron transport chain in this process, we’d probably light on fire. Something has to be putting on the breaks. In other words, if an individual was mutant for this slowing down mechanism, they might burst into flames.

Well, what could it be?

Dr. Roth has a guess: Hydrogen Sulfide. While about one in five molecules in air today–once you’ve stripped out the water–are oxygen, back when life started there was almost no free oxygen in the atmosphere. It took green living things and photosynthesis to produce all of this free oxygen gas. Before our present cycle of photosynthesis and respiring–most living things lived off of chemical sources of energy, things like volcanic vents. Chief among the fuel sources? Sulfur containing compounds.

Where we live–where most creatures live–on the planet, there isn’t much sulfide gas. Yet, our cells all make a small amount of it. What if this gas was the mystery regulator of the electron transport chain?

Mark discovered that when you add hydrogen sulfide to mitochondria, the gas reversibly slows down the electron transport chain. His prediction was right!

Next he considered, if you slow down the chain, and thus the need for oxygen, perhaps you could make an entire animal hibernate just by giving it this gas. In came the mice, and what followed was a groundbreaking paper in the Journal Science, H2S Induces a Suspended Animation–Like State in Mice.

Clinical trials, on humans are ongoing. The implications are staggering–for space travel, for management of traumatic injury, for war and even for immortality.

And here’s what might be most shocking–despite being saddled with the costs and responsibilities of being the largest private pension and health insurance provider in the world, GM has made clever and key investments that deserve fulfillment. Yes, I’m talking about an American car-maker; hear me out.

Nevermind the now-defunct EV-1–the first modern mass-produced electric car. GM’s heavy-duty hybrid technology would be far more revolutionary than Toyota’s.

The Toyota technology can only be applied to smaller, lighter vehicles–topping out at perhaps the Highlander SUV. Such vehicles are only suited to commuting. In contrast, GM’s technology (developed with BMW and Chrysler) can be applied to huge vehicles–pickups, commercial trucks, and buses.

Why is the GM technology superior? The efficiency gains from hybrid technology are vastly larger in big vehicles. A Prius has only about a 20% gain in operating efficiency, compared to a similarly sized and shaped car. In contrast, the improvement for a full-sized pickup is more like 200-250%.

The Prius, in many instances, is replaceable; bicycles for short trips, mass transit for basic travel. Commute-shmommute; abandoning those cars will give us greater gains than switching to slightly better engines. But those larger vehicles, their tasks are still imperative.

Even if you buy into the environmentally clean car commute bullshit, GM’s approach here is objectively better than anyone else. The Chevy Volt drives its wheels only with electric motors, supplementing the energy stored in a modest battery pack with a gasoline-fired electric generator.

Electric motors produce all their torque right from the start–obviating the need for any sort of energy-sapping transmission system, particularly the ornate sort required when both gas and electric motors are driving the wheels. The small battery pack is sufficient in capacity for the vast majority of trips taken by people with these sorts of cars. The vast majority of energy in vehicle is stored as liquid fuel–that is more weight, space and energy efficient than batteries will ever be. And, since the gas-fired motor is only attached to a generator, it can always operate at its optimal speed using only fixed gearing. The whole package uses each part to its maximal advantage, while being overall simpler than the Prius-hybrid approach. If people are going to continue to commute by car, and live in sprawl, this is the better approach.

It’s not as if we’re lacking in problems needing solutions–climate change, energy scarcity, almost every meaningful commodity priced at historical highs. A vast pool of money and a growing list of problems–why wasn’t the connection ever made? Why didn’t at least some of this wealth go toward solving these problems?

We could be riding high on American ingenuity. But we’re not.

Let’s say you and I start a company with the goal of replacing petroleum-based jet fuel. We engineer a bug that spits out something pretty close to kerosene. Excellent. Since we’re a company, we immediately patent the invention.

Now what? While we’ve just figured out a key step, our invention by itself cannot replace jet fuel. We need more pieces–the technology to refine our proto-fuel into something we could put into jets, the bioreactor technology to grow our bugs, a factory and its land, a distribution network, sales to airlines, and so on.

That’s a lot of pieces; we only own one right now. If we raised the money and assembled all of these to the point where we could actually sell an useful product, we’d be first. We don’t want to be first.

If we show it can be done, what would stop someone in China or India or somewhere else in the world from stealing all of this technology and competing with us? (Our present global economy isn’t exactly brimming with respect for intellectual property.) Without the cost of buying up patents—the costs of developing the technology—they’d easily outcompete us. By being first, we end up broke.

We’re better off selling our patent. We could sell this patent to someone who wants to turn it into a product—but they’d run into the same problem we would on that path.

The most likely buyer of our patent would be someone who desires our technology to never be turned into a product—someone who already makes jet fuel from petroleum. Patents, in our post-intellectual-property world, are more valuable as a defensive weapon. To a large extent, this is why all the wonderful scientific knowledge and technical ability pouring out of R&D labs fails to translate to something useful for humanity.

Think of all the companies that would benefit from a competitor to petroleum jet fuel: airlines, airplane manufacturers, hotels, restaurants, theaters… and if it benefits tourism, it benefits governments. For all of these, jet fuel is an economic complement.

The global economy suffers from antiquated complements. Energy sources. Commodities. The markets for many of these tricky complements are highly monopolized. Alternatives require the combination of many different technologies into a chain. By buying up one piece of the chain, the dominant company can prevent the competition from existing.

Broad swaths of the global economy would benefit from the cracking of these monopolized complements–just not the people who would have to be first in actually developing these alternative technologies. So the chains don’t get built. How do we get around this market failure?

I have a crazy idea: Since we’re rapidly socializing our economy–at least the financial industry–we should consider starting a new GSE, the Complement Cooperative.

The co-op would produce financial entities whose goal is to assemble these chains–”alternative to gasoline” or “alternative to jet fuel”–and give the entire chain away. Just like anyone can download Linux and install it for free, anyone could take the technologies in the chain and start a company–secure in the knowledge that someone has already shown that the chain works.

These Complement Co-op funds would take their endowments and contract out to labs to develop the key missing technologies or buy up patents as they enter the market. Throw in some talented patent lawyers, rooting around for prior art to destroy blocking patents. If we want to be really aggressive, the Complement Co-op could be given the right to use eminent domain to forcibly buy blocking patents–paying fair market value for the intellectual property–to promote the public good of new competition.

Combine a government-sponsored Complement Cooperative with a lending agency promoting the formation of new companies based on these given-away technologies, and you have a monopoly-crushing machine.

If the co-op’s entities are giving away the technology, how will they be kept solvent? By raising money from the industries that would benefit from the new technology chain.

In the above jet fuel list of potential beneficiaries, you’d hit them all up. The returns would come not from licensing fees, but from reduced costs on key inputs for their industries. Sovereign funds of governments would be delighted to invest, if the new product could help their economy or serve as a weapon against commodity-based rival nations.

This isn’t “risky.” If you have a sense of the likelihood of success of a given fund–how big are the technological hurdles?–as well as the potential reduction in costs–by breaking up a monopolized commodity market–you could calculate a probable return on investment for these sorts of financial instruments.

It’s a crazy idea, but less crazy than the farce that was our financial industry–the insane financial derivatives that crashed the market this time around. We have to adjust how we think of intellectual property. New inventions are still of use. We need to just help the market feel the value again. Something like the Complement Co-op would do it.

We need to start a new engine behind our economy. One hundred billion dollars–one tenth what we’re contemplating, about on order of what we paid for the tattered remains of AIG–would be more than enough to get something like the Complement Co-op started. We should do it.

For those of you keeping track, we’re not really bailing out US homeowners; we’re bailing out the bondholders of Freddy mac and Fannie Mae. The predominant bondholder? The central banks of Asian nations. How are we financing this bailout? Using US Government Treasury bonds. Who is buying those? The central banks of Asian nations. For now, at least.

If confidence in US Treasury Bonds falters, we’re all doomed. This is not an exaggeration.

The next president, who in turn will set the regulatory environment, really matters. The best, perhaps the only way, to restore investor confidence in US and global financial institutions is through tight regulation. To be blunt: investors are correct. The Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac bonds were far crappier than they were told. Until everyone in convinced things are worth their claimed worth, things are only going to get worse. We need a president who can take on the financial industries, who is above corruption on this issue above all others.

What follows is a cartoon depicting his involvement in the Keating Five scandal–the last big collapse of US financial institutions, that cost taxpayers over $200 billion (in today’s dollars.)

W’s August of 2001 speech on the evils of embryonic stem cells was an early classic of his presidency, one of the first indications of his deciderish, rather than uniter-not-a-divider, tendencies. All his favorite hobbies were covered–simpleminded and peevish sanctimony, rigid adherence to a bizarre and inconsistently absolutist moral code, and disinterest in any sort of logical, thoughtful or informed critique. In short, it was a delightful preview of the following eight years.

Bush’s policy was to deny federal funding for any research on new embryonic stem cell lines created after August of 2001. This wasn’t a ban. Nor was it a system of regulations, well thought out or idiotic. Research involving any embryonic stem cell line created before August of 2001, all requiring the destruction of an embryo? Fine. Dandy. Not murder. Moral, according to Bush. On a line after August 2001? Murder, as it involves the destruction of an embryo–a murder good decent American taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to participate in, even indirectly.

Put another way: Under the Bush policy, if you have money you can do whatever you damn well please. Commission embryos for the sole purpose of destroying them? No problem. Pay women for their eggs? Sure. Create a jello-mold out of human embryo? If you have the cash, you can do it.

Federal funding of contentious research buys you, the public, the right to set rules and demand oversight. Ask the animal rights activists. Instead of banning federal funding for animal research, they focused on demanding massive regulation and oversight. Killing a mouse in a research lab involves a prodigious amount of paperwork, hours of training and going in front of a panel of vets to explain yourself. Even if your research is privately funded, most non-federal grants require you to follow the federal grant rules. Bush’s innovative policy of “do what you want, just not with our dollars” successfully shoved the most ethically contentious work out of the public’s eye and into the shadows.

Well, weren’t some embryos saved? Hundreds of thousands of fertilized embryos are sitting in cryogenic storage at in-vitro fertilization clinics around the country, largely because it is much more difficult to freeze unfertilized human eggs. Therefore, eggs collected for fertility treatment are typically fertilized with sperm, allowed to develop for a few days into a very young embryo and then frozen. The overwhelming majority of these embryos will eventually be destroyed, after the couple has decided they want no more children and the insurance stops paying for storage.

If you really believe that human life begins when the egg fuses with the sperm–as Bush’s new family planning policy asserts–this is the worst imaginable outcome. At least with federally funded embryonic stem cell research, a few of these embryos destined for destruction could be used to generate new embryonic stem cell lines, advancing medical science and potentially improving human health.

(I think calling an embryo at this stage a human being is a serious stretch of even the most generous definition of what makes a human. These embryos have only developed for a few days, to somewhere around 100 cells. They are not yet individuals. If you cut the embryo in half, you get twins; smash two together, and you get a chimera. Not a single organ has developed, not a drop of blood, not the heart, not a blood vessel, not a single brain cell. An embryo at this point is literally an undistinguished clump of two different kinds of cells. The essense of humanity and human life seems more to me than sets of chromosmes coming together.)

The iPS cell breakthrough this fall seemed to change the game. Simply by adding four genes, we could convert most any adult cell into something that resembled an embryonic stem cell. If we can turn skin cells or swabbed cheek cells into something like an embryonic stem cell, we no longer need to bother with destroying embryos. Right? Discussion of stem cell policy quietly dwindled. The president appeared to be a forward thinking visionary, saving thousands of embryos from doom in the name of science.

Well did he? No.

From a social conservative’s point of view, Bush’s policies were and are a total fiasco. Not a single embryo is saved from ultimate destruction, as the IVF industry remains without serious regulation. By delaying research, human health was harmed. An opportunity for a serious discussion and enduring compromise on both fertility treatments and stem cell research was bypassed for political expediency.

The moment was there, and we had some decent models to apply to this ethical quandary. Take the example of German IVF clinics, where the number of embryos generated and stored per couple is strictly regulated, vastly reducing the number of excess embryos to be eventually destroyed. A slightly more liberal position would be to absolutely prohibit the sale or purchase of human embryos, only allowing donation much like we do with solid organ donation today. Nor did we discuss why there is such a need for fertility treatments–environmental degredation and the costs of having a child delaying pregnancy.

Even from a scientist’s point of view, this was a total fiasco—far worse than an outright ban. At least with a complete ban, those with private funding sources, such as endowments, would not be at such an advantage. All efforts could focus on alternatives. Japan had a near total ban on embryonic stem cell research; iPS cells were developed in Japan.

Whatever you think of the status of an early embryo, the Bush policies were a disaster–achieving the neither the desires of the infirmed seeking therapy nor the social conservatives seeking protection of very early embryos. When considering the long lasting societal costs of demonizing scientists, medical research, patient advocates and rational discussion, the whole situation becomes  emblematic of the entire contemptible George W Bush presidency.

Ever since the start of the mortgage crisis–whose origins and effects can be revisited at this post, or on this podcast–I’ve been waiting for the great taxpayer-fueled bailout to begin.

The bailout of Bear Stearns was a mere appetizer to the cliff we’re falling over now:

Government efforts to support mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac drew a restrained response from investors today, with the stock prices of the two companies rising only modestly after last week’s steep collapse, but by midday investors turned to a new target of the credit crisis: banks.

To recap briefly:
1. The investment banks and mortgage markets were effectively deregulated through the 1990′s and 2000′s…

2. …allowing the creation of mortgage backed securities…

3. …that were increasingly backed by shoddier and shoddier mortgages…

4. …making what was once one of the most stable and socially productive investments both incredibly risky and socially catastrophic, with no way for investors really know if and when the transition happened…

5. …leaving the investment banks, mortgage companies, regular banks and even the government sponsored enterprises on the precipice of catastrophic failure in a way not seen since the Depression, when these institutions were last similarly deregulated.

Market theory would tell us the government should not intervene–these institutions should be allowed to fail, the unwise investments allowed to collapse and the money to be lost. At the last height of Laissez-faire economic policy, in the 1920′s, that was the plan. The institutions were allowed to collapse one-by-one, causing the Great Depression.

That didn’t work out so well. In the 1930′s, sifting through the rubble of the US economy, the next plan was regulation. If we think of modern financials as being like junk food–made of many ingredients, intrinsically difficult to discern–knowing the providence of the starting materials really matters. Many of the New Deal regulations did just that–demanding that companies report honestly and completely on their health, that mortgages be attached to information about the borrower indicating an ability to pay and so on.

By making information about investments as honest, comprehensive and accessible, through laws and oversight, investors could avoid the most questionable of financial junk food and thus get fat on the rest. If they did pour money into something obviously dubious, it was far easier to allow the market to do its job, and make the investments as valueless as they had appeared to be. You could easily tell it was crap before you put your money in. You lose it, it’s your loss.

These were the regulations written out of existence, or circumvented, in the years leading up to the present crisis.

Like with junk food, the companies and people doing the processing make most of the profit–making the producers (the investors) and the consumers (the borrowers) pay dearly for participation in the market–all while whining they cannot afford things like complete and honest information about what they are selling. Loan agents eventually stopped checking income, employment, the value of the property or the credit history of the borrower, because the mortgage companies stopped asking the loan agents to collect this information, because the investment banks buying up these loans stopped asking as well. The investors buying from the banks didn’t really care, as the bond agencies gave the blended investments the highest ratings. The rating agencies, increasingly deregulated, didn’t bother asking for this information either. Without it, it was impossible to predict how the loans would perform. They guessed. They were wrong.

Even though only a small percentage of the borrowers failed to make their payments, without information to tell bad from the good investors became spooked. If the rating agencies couldn’t tell the value, how could an investor? The lenders rapidly pulled out of the market. First to fail were the investment banks, stuck with loans they could no longer sell to investors–even if the loans were good. Bear Stearns, such a bank, quickly grabbed a handout from you and I, the taxpayers. Next, the mortgage companies and their related banks start to wobble. Indymac just collapsed, and again the taxpayers are asked to reach into their wallets and pay off the FDIC guarantees.

Which brings us to the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. These are Government Sponsored Enterprises that were created to perform a basic and seemingly unavoidably safe and profitable task: Buy up high quality mortgage loans from banks and package them as securities that can be sold to investors at a profit. In essence, this is the honest version of what all the crooked private companies were doing–in which each loan is carefully vetted and matched to the borrowers ability to pay and the honest valuation of the property. These companies are of vast importance to the entire housing market, allowing banks to make far more mortgages than would be possible if each loan had to stay at the originating bank and not be resold. In the wake of the crooked mortgage-backed securities, investors have stopped buying the Freddie Mac and Fannie May mortgage-backed securities. With no investor money coming in, they can no longer buy up loans. In steps us again, the taxpayers. We’ve now committed our tax dollars to buy up mortgages–money we are ultimately borrowing from the Chinese.

These bailouts aren’t helping homeowners. The dishonest crooks–the loan agents, the investment banks, the rating agencies–are having their asses saved with our tax dollars. And, this is happening without any serious re-regulation, without a strong requirement for honesty and clarity on the financial industry’s part. From any perspective, this is the worst outcome, virtually guaranteeing another huge bailout in a few years. With no concequences, and so many of those well positioned getting filthy rich off the fiasco, why not do it again, and again, and again?

If we force those who demanded deregulation in the financial industry, who took advantage of the deregulation to dupe others, into an honest position, we’d let them all fail, dragging them out of their windows to the hard streets below, to live under overpasses and eat pet food like their parents and grandparents were forced to do during the last time they ran us all off the cliff. We’re too cowardly to do it and will likely pay an even harsher collective price thanks to this cowardice. We’re too frightened to let them fail, and suffer as well. I’m frightened of what the collapse will bring. Our political leadership, long greased with Wall Street money, won’t even demand rules that will truly complicate such thievery in the future. You should be furious.