Writing for UnHerd last month, Tom Chivers urged us not to panic. Since then we’ve had three weeks of further developments, some of them deeply worrying. Entire cities are on lockdown, thousands of people are sick and hundreds have died — including Li Wenliang, one of the brave doctors who alerted the world to the outbreak.

Nevertheless, Tom is probably right — this won’t be the next Black Death.

Further reading

Test article

By Tom Chivers

But even if the danger of the present crisis (or any specific outbreak) is exaggerated by the media — that doesn’t mean we’re over-reacting to the general threat from infectious disease in a globalised world.

Indeed, there are those who believe that we’ve greatly under-appreciated the danger we’re in.

Among them is Nassim Nicholas Taleb — who has done more to expose the holes in our understanding of uncertainty than anyone else in the world today. Though best known for his thinking on risk in the financial system, the fact that he sees many of the same errors at work in our understanding of disease risk is itself a wake-up call.

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So what is it we’re not understanding?

Let’s start with a concept that won’t be familiar to many people, including many scientists. It goes by the forbidding name of ‘non-ergodicity’.

Please, don’t be deterred. There is a reason why we need to get our heads around this one. In fact, our lives may depend on it.

In a complex world, we need to compress numbers so that we can make practical use of them. Averages are a great help, but they can be misleading. As Taleb puts it: “never cross a river if it is on average four feet deep” — i.e. it maybe two feet deep in some places, but a perilous six feet in others.

OK, so the idea that averages can conceal extreme possibilities isn’t too difficult to grasp. However, the specific problem of non-ergodicity isn’t quite so intuitive — if it were, we might have a shorter and less horrible word for it.

The best way to approach the concept is through an example. Taleb provides a great one here. He juxtaposes two scenarios: a casino in which 100 people are gambling at the same time; and the same casino in which one person gambles for 100 days in a row. Now what if you wanted to work out the odds on offer from the casino. One way would be to look at what happened to the hundred gamblers on their night out. Some of them will have done well and some badly. But by averaging out the losses and gain across the entire group, you’d get an idea of the odds on offer. Now here comes the crucial question: is this ‘ensemble probability’ for the large group a good guide to the likely fortunes of the single repeat gambler? One may suspect him of being a professional gambler or a gambling addict, but leave aside any such speculation and focus on the numerical facts alone. All other things being equal, are the 100 people gambling once equivalent to one person gambling a hundred times?

Intuitively, we’d be inclined to answer yes. But we’d be wrong. In calculating probabilities, the parallel experience of the 100 is not equivalent to the sequential experience of the one. In the jargon, they are non-ergodic.

Further reading

Why Antifragile is the perfect read for today's turmoil

By Peter Franklin

Why is that? Well it’s all a matter of time. The risks that the hundred gamblers take with their money exist in parallel to one another. If the unluckiest of the hundred loses so badly that she goes bankrupt, it doesn’t change the fortunes of any of the other 99. It’ll bring down their average performance a bit, but that’s all. Not so with the repeat gambler. The risks that he undertakes are sequential, not parallel. If he goes bankrupt on one of the hundred days, then the impact on the remaining days is profound. That’s because having been ruined, the gambler has no more money to gamble with and thus no chance of making up his losses.

So wherever there’s a small, but persistent risk of ruin from repeated exposures to danger, our risk assessments absolutely have to account for it. Nothing could be more important — not least because repeated exposure to extreme risk turns unthinkable scenarios into certainties over time.

The repeat emergence of new types and strains of infectious microorganism represents just such a persistent exposure to ruin. It doesn’t matter that, on average, epidemics (or even pandemics) aren’t that bad; it only takes one extinction level event and it’s game over. For this reason and others, Taleb, with his colleagues Joe Norman and Yaneer Bar-Yam, argue that we must transform our thinking. When it comes to a novel pathogen like coronavirus, over-reaction is the only rational response.

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But doesn’t the same risk-of-ruin principle apply to, say, the danger posed to our planet by passing asteroids? The danger from individual space rocks may be tiny, but over geological time we’re exposed over-and-over again, meaning that eventually a cataclysmic collision is bound to happen — just ask the dinosaurs. Given that that we accept this reality and just get on with our lives, shouldn’t we do the same as regards the possibility of an extinction level pandemic?

No, we shouldn’t — and not just because nasty diseases come round more often than nasty asteroids. Rather the key distinction is that humanity doesn’t do anything to make the danger from asteroids any worse (and there’s precious little we can do to make it better). However, with the danger from disease, the situation is altogether different.

As a species, we’re doing too many things to shorten the odds on disaster. To begin with, there’s what we’re doing to increase the likelihood of novel pathogens emerging — especially those that jump the species barrier from animals to humans. The disruption of the natural environment, the hunting and consumption of wildlife, the overuse of antibiotics, and various agricultural and food handling practices are all risk factors. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also our reckless enthusiasm for genetic modification — which introduces a whole range of new pathways by which novel pathogens might emerge.

Further reading

Why much of genetic engineering remains a mystery

By Peter Franklin

Our interference is then compounded by everything we’re doing to speed up the spread of new infectious diseases. The key issue is globalisation. Hyper-connectivity and unprecedented mobility facilitate the exchange of ideas, culture, goods, services, tourists, workers and students… but also bugs.

It’s an obvious point, of course. We all know that a new disease that emerges on one side of the planet can spread to the other side within hours. That’s just the way it is, we figure — a downside of globalisation to be managed, and more than offset, by the much bigger upside. Except that this calculus assumes that the downside remains within reasonable bounds — that there is no danger of it ever becoming so extreme as to render the upside irrelevant.

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In life, there are all sorts of risks worth taking. Taleb himself warns against naïve applications of the precautionary principle. We all run repeated dangers from going about our daily business — think traffic accidents. Does that mean we should never leave our homes? Indeed, given the statistics on domestic accidents, should we never get out of bed?

There are many reasons why we shouldn’t live our lives in such fear. Not least among them is that while domestic accidents may kill a small number of people, they’re not going to destroy society, let alone wipe-out the human species. There’s never going to be a uncontrollable plague of people falling off ladders and slipping on banana skins.

That’s why the so-called Bathtub Fallacy — the argument that because more people die from drowning in the bath than from X we shouldn’t worry about X — is so fatuous. If X is a risk with the potential for extreme escalation (like terrorism, for instance) then it is in a completely different class from bathtubs, ladders and banana skins.

There’s no better or more literal example of this kind of multiplicative risk than disease — in particular, new and fast-spreading disease that we haven’t had time to adapt to.

Further reading

The jaw-dropping scale of China’s global ambition

By Peter Franklin

We therefore need to ask very serious questions about a global economy and its propensity for creating the conditions in which new diseases frequently emerge and rapidly spread. In particular — and contra to the predictably woke and patronising takes on ‘not kicking-down’ — we need to talk about China. The People’s Republic is a society that is moving much faster than the West on many fronts (like transport infrastructure), but it is still behind on other things — like healthcare and food safety standards. That’s a potentially dangerous combination, one that prioritises growth and connectivity over precaution and sustainability. Furthermore, with the full complicity of the West, it is reordering the global economy.

I wonder if we will also become complicit in the counter-measures taken by the Chinese state, which have demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for the monitoring and control of entire populations.

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One final thought — and it’s to do with another piece of mathematics: the Drake Equation. This is used to calculate the number of space-faring civilisations in the galaxy given certain conditions (bear with me here). Even on some pretty conservative assumptions, the equation suggests that outer space ought to full of little green men. But if that’s the case, why have our telescopes and satellites found no sign of extraterrestrial intelligence? Why is there no credible evidence of aliens coming to visit us? We know that intelligent life is possible (we wouldn’t be discussing this question if it weren’t). We also know that the universe is easily big enough and old enough for it to have evolved not once but countless times. So where is everybody?

This is the Fermi Paradox — to which various solutions have been proposed. One is that there is some kind of ‘universal filter’ that stops intelligent life from evolving in the first place. The implication is that intelligence, or perhaps life itself, is so unlikely to arise through chance that it takes some kind of one-off miracle for it to happen.

Further reading

Is there anyone else out there?

By Peter Franklin

A more disturbing possibility is that the universal filter comes after the rise of intelligence. The reason why we have no evidence of alien civilisations is that something always happens to them before they get the chance to make it to the stars. Perhaps they nuke themselves back into the stone age. Well, some of them might, but all of them? What about the possibility of aliens who don’t invent nuclear weapons? Or who ban them? Or who aren’t aggressive?

A much more likely candidate for a universal filter is this: beyond a certain stage of globalisation, any civilised species becomes so susceptible to the appearance and spread of new diseases that sooner or later a pandemic wipes them out.

A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.

Not in our world, of course, but in that of Pavane – a novel by the science fiction author Keith Roberts.

Strictly speaking, Pavane isn’t sci-fi, but ‘alt history‘ – a fictional setting in which the course of world events takes a different turn. The best-known examples include Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Phillip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.

Unlike those two novels, which ask ‘what if the Nazis had won the Second World War?’, Pavane asks ‘what if the Catholics had won the Reformation?’ Roberts’ answer is that with an all-powerful church in charge of all of western Europe, the pace of technological and social change would have been much slower. (About a hundred years slower in the novel’s parallel version of the 20th century.)

One could read Pavane as a last gasp of old-fashioned English anti-Catholicism. But there’s a twist [spoilers]: In a coda to the novel it is revealed that the church authorities had fore-knowledge of how the 20th century would turn out if they didn’t act to slow down technological progress. Looking back across the possible timelines, Roberts has one of his characters utter these chilling words:

“Did she [the Church] hang and burn? A little, yes. But there was no Belsen. No Buchenwald. No Passchendaele.”

It’s pure speculation, of course. And, from a serious historical point of view, one can take issue with some or all of its counterfactual logic. Yet it asks a supremely important question: not the ‘what if?’ that is the premise of the novel, but whether civilisations should ever suppress science and technology.

Further reading

Is Europe on the brink of a new Thirty Years' War?

By Peter Franklin

As children of modernity, the very idea strikes us as scandalous – and also ridiculous: something that we shouldn’t and couldn’t do even if we wanted to (which, of course, we wouldn’t).

And yet, as I hope to show, we can and we must.

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Can you guess who wrote this?

“I am convinced that the multiplication of the Feeble-Minded, which is proceeding now at an artificial rate, unchecked by any of the old restraints of nature, and actually fostered by civilised conditions, is a terrible danger to the race.”

Adolf Hitler? Oswald Mosley? No, I’m afraid it was Winston Churchill – in a 1910 letter to HH Asquith.

It’s surprising that the Left-wing Churchill-bashers of our own time haven’t made more of his support for eugenics. But, then, many of their own heroes and heroines from this period were also up to their necks in it. In fact, it’s hard to find many public intellectuals at the time who spoke up against eugenics. GK Chesterton was one of the few exceptions.

The conventional wisdom was that the use of sterilisation to eliminate congenital ‘weaknesses’ from the population was a reasonable, indeed progressive, thing to do. There were some experts who had doubts as to the practicality or effectiveness of such measures, but few with moral qualms. The theories were put into action in many countries including that exemplar of social democracy, Sweden – where something like 15,000 people were sterilised as a condition of release from institutions (with a further 5,000 or more sterilised in other coercive circumstances).

That was, of course, as nothing compared to the horrors of Nazi eugenics. The post-war world was shocked to its senses, and though not all eugenic practices came to an end, the respectability of eugenicism as an intellectual and political movement was destroyed. In the decades since, the taboo has endured even as our knowledge of human genetics has grown – and therefore the theoretical basis for eugenic policies.

Nor is it just theory. We have tools for the manipulation of DNA that the eugenicists of the early 20th century could not imagine. And yet we place strict controls on how we use them – especially in regard to human DNA.

Those controls don’t go as far as some people would like. We license various manipulations of early stage human embryos – including cloning. We use genetic screening to identify foetal abnormalities – which are then eliminated from the human population through abortion. In Nordic countries such as Denmark, the termination rate for Downs Syndrome babies is close to 100%. However, such procedures are presented as a matter of life saving medical research or reproductive rights, not eugenics. The Danish government has explicitly denied that it has a programme to eliminate people with Downs Syndrome from the population (though, in effect, that is what they are very close to ‘achieving’).

The range of traits, both physical and psychological, whose incidence we could interfere with is expanding. Writing for UnHerd this week, Tom Chivers explains just how close we are to making genetic edits to boost IQ. He also suggests that the Chinese government is taking a disturbingly close interest in the technology.

Further reading

Should we edit genes to boost IQ?

By Tom Chivers

Yet despite our growing capabilities, we have yet to use them to re-engineer humanity. We can’t be sure what’s going on in clandestine laboratories, of course – but not a single government anywhere in the world is admitting to a policy of modern day eugenics.

So, yes, we do suppress technology – and the eugenic application of genetics is not the only example. In fact, there is an ever-expanding array of national and international agreements to constrain the development and application of a number of different technologies.

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A key motivation for the actions of the Catholic Church in Pavane was to stifle the development of nuclear technology until mankind was ready for such knowledge. One might argue that the real history of the nuclear age shows that we had no need of a techno-inquisition. After all, we’re still here, aren’t we? Yes, we are, but only through luck (or Providence). Nuclear weapons have been developed, tested, stockpiled and used in anger. We know that there were a number of Cold War incidents in which we came terrifyingly close to an accidental Armageddon.

Further reading

Don’t sweat the small stuff, or why the ‘New Optimists’ are only half right

By Peter Franklin

Nor are we done with this nightmare. Nuclear weapons can’t be uninvented, and, in fits and starts, they continue to proliferate. That things aren’t much, much worse is thanks to the internationally agreed restrictions that we place on nuclear technology – for instance those mandated by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Other treaties restricting military technologies include the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention and the Outer Space Treaty. But it’s not just weapons and potential weapons that we seek to control in this way.

Climate change treaties, most recently, the Paris Agreement, imply far-reaching restrictions on our use of fossil fuels and therefore the technologies that extract, refine and use those fuels. To meet their targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the nations of the Earth have effectively committed themselves to leaving most of world’s hydrocarbons in the ground.

That includes energy sources that we haven’t exploited yet, such as methane hydrates, which could be available in vast quantities if only we had an affordable means of doing so. However, developing the necessary technology would take investment – which climate change treaties effectively disincentivise by sign-posting a future in which it will be illegal to carry on burning fossil fuels at anything like the current level (at least not without carbon carbon capture and storage). This creates a huge political risk for investors who are therefore likely to take their money elsewhere.

This too is tech suppression – and, again, it’s for all the right reasons.

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In mid 1970s, an Iranian-American author called Fereidoun M Esfandiary legally changed his name to FM-2030 (no, that’s not a typo). He regarded traditional naming conventions as a relic of the past – and he was all about the future.  When he died in 2000, he left instructions for his body to be cryogenically preserved in the hope that scientific progress would one day enable his resurrection.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

A more reliable legacy might be the ideas he left behind. One of these was the notion that the politics of Left and Right will be superseded by the politics of Up and Down. ‘Up’ stands the onwards-and-upwards of technological optimism. ‘Down’, I suppose, stands for the downbeat or down-to-earth attitudes of technology pessimists and sceptics. ‘Up-wingers’ are a motley crew including transhumanist libertarians, fully automated luxury communists and believers in the ‘Singularity‘; while ‘down-wingers’ range from religious conservatives to anti-automation trade unionists to deep green environmentalists.

FM-2030’s big idea is proving prophetic. For a start, the old Left-versus-Right political divide has never looked so obsolete. The new politics of Open-versus-Closed may be more about the globalisation enabled by technology than technology itself – but that could soon change. Advances in fields like robotics, artificial intelligence and genetics have such profound implications that it’s difficult not to see technopolitics moving front and centre.

Could we see a political realignment with a radical Up-wing party facing off against their reactionary Down-wing opponents? Well, I’m not sure that the Down-wingers would accept that terminology, which defines the debate according toUp-wing assumptions. So, here’s a different and better way of thinking about these issues: active versus passive. As a democratic society we can either passively accept the technological choices that others would like to make on our behalf – or we take an active part in the decision-making process.

Further reading

The Amish: America's most sophisticated users of technology

By Peter Franklin

Moreover, the real choice is not between progress and no progress, but between different paths of technological development. That’s because in suppressing one technological path we can open up opportunities along another. For instance, while climate change agreements weaken the case for investment in polluting technologies they have the opposite effect on clean technologies. As restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions have tightened, we’ve seen sustained progress across a range of low carbon technologies including renewables, smart grids, energy storage and electric vehicles.

Though we may recoil at the idea of suppressing technology, our horror presupposes that the avenues for technological progress are limited and that the resources we can devote to pursuing them are not. In fact, the opposite is true: there is no shortage of paths to the future, but we lack the means to take all of them. Even if there is no ethical objections to any of them, we would still have to choose.

Taking the time to consider our options – and thinking through the consequences – is anything but regressive.

But is it true? Are we really our own worst enemy? Probably not. Unless there’s a world war on, the animal that kills the most people each year is the mosquito.

In a piece for Quillette, James D Miller lays out the charges:

“Mosquitoes kill around 830,000 people each year mostly by spreading malaria in underdeveloped nations.  Mosquitoes sicken and cause lifelong debilitation in many who don’t die.  By decimating human capital, mosquitoes do much to keep poor people poor.”

If that weren’t enough he adds this cheery thought:

“With their ready access to our blood, mosquitoes may even give future bio-terrorists an easy attack vector.”

But what if we do for them before they do for us? As I’ve written about before, gene drive technology provides us with a possible means of deliberately targeting an entire species for extinction.

Further reading

Return of the genetically modified rats

By Peter Franklin

Do we have the right? Yes, says Miller – indeed, it is our duty:

“To eliminate this menace, we need only exterminate the 100 of the 3,500 or so species of mosquitoes that bite humans.  Given that we very likely have the technology to eliminate human-biting mosquitoes at a relatively low cost, not doing so is Hitler-level evil.  If a new dictator arose and started killing 830,000 people a year, we would all accept the moral value of stopping him. “

No pressure, then!

Miller does admit there may be ecological side effects. These are the subject of an article for the Atlantic by Sarah Zhang:

“To humans, mosquitoes are at best annoying and at worst deadly, but to dozens of other species in the wild, they are competitor, pollinator, or prey. If past malaria-eradication campaigns have taught us anything (see: 1950s, DDT), it is that reshaping the environment can have unintended consequences.”

So what would happen if we were to permanently swat an entire mosquito species? Target Malaria — “a Bill Gates–backed nonprofit research consortium” – is trying to find out:

“In October, a team of Target Malaria scientists from the University of Ghana and the University of Oxford will embark on a four-year study of the ecology of the malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae in Ghana. Ultimately, they hope to understand how fish, bats, flowers, and insects would respond if those mosquito populations were reduced—or even entirely eliminated.”

Worthwhile research, I’m sure. But I wonder if, once again, technology is developing faster than our ability to fully understand its implications. In four years time, another group of researchers might have a gene drive weapon ready for deployment.

Miller makes the very strong point that it would take a awful lot of unforeseen ecological damage to outweigh the benefit of saving of 830,000 human lives each and every year.

The mistake, however is to look at each gene drive weapon in isolation (or even the multiple gene drives that would be required to wipe out the 70 (out of 3,000) mosquito species that can transmit malaria).

Further reading

Why much of genetic engineering remains a mystery

By Peter Franklin

Any individual gene drive – indeed any environmentally released genetic modification of any kind – advances our knowledge of how to make other gene drives and modifications. Thus every advance is one step closer to the step too far: to the genetic manipulation that brings about disaster.

To some extent the same can be said of all technologies. For instance, research on a robot designed to help the disabled potentially contributes to the development of robots designed to kill people.

The special problem with genetic modification, however, is its irreversibility. Once out in the environment it literally has a life of its own. Unlike all other classes of technology it can reproduce and mutate without any further assistance from ourselves (though the same may become true of artificial intelligence).

In the case of a gene drive, the modification is designed to propagate itself through the target population – and if, by some genetic misadventure, it should jump across the species barrier into another population it will continue to propagate. Indeed, when the modification is designed to drive whole populations extinct, the gene drive modifications that persist out in the wild will, by definition, be those that have either failed in their intended purpose or which have an unintended propensity to jump from one population to another.

It’s called survival of the fittest or, in the latter case, the deadliest.

Further reading

Are you on CRISPR? You soon will be...

By Peter Franklin

What you notice is that about a thousand of the workers are indispensable – if any one of them is absent, everything grinds to a halt. As for the other 5,000, well, the company copes – either what they were doing wasn’t that important in the first place, or their colleagues somehow step into the breach.

However, if you start removing the non-essential employees in pairs, then you find that in many cases the dual absence does cause major problems. You also notice that the dual absences that cause the biggest problems are those involving employees who work in the same department. This makes sense, as losing two members of a team is harder to compensate for than one. By removing two employees at a time in all the different combinations (of which there are millions) you painstakingly gain an insight into how the whole company works.

Unsurprisingly, this is an entirely fictional exercise in management consultancy – but one that serves as an analogy for a genetic experiment conducted 20 years ago at the University of Toronto.

The ‘company’, in this parallel, is a species of yeast and the ‘workers’ are the 6,000 genes that make up its genome.

As Veronique Greenwood reports for Quanta Magazine, the researchers created a vast number of modified strains of the yeast by removing genes one at a time and then in pairs, thereby creating single and double mutants.

Further Reading

New gene editing techniques could multiply the dangers of GMOs

By Peter Franklin

She goes on to describe an intriguing twist on the original experiment. This time, the researchers took a number of the double mutant strains and knocked out a third gene (thereby creating triple mutants). The results were both expected and unexpected:

“As the scientists built their new map, several things became clear. For one, in about two-thirds of the triple mutants that showed an additional genetic interaction, knocking out the third gene tended to intensify the problems that the double mutant had.”

Obviously, if losing two members of a team is more disruptive than losing one, then losing three is more disruptive still (this is why well-run companies plan holidays carefully).

But here’s the less expected bit:

“In double mutants, the functional connections between genes tended to be tight: A gene involved in DNA repair usually had links with other genes that are also involved in DNA repair, and genes that had interactions with each other usually interacted with the same other genes. With the triple mutants, however, more far-flung tasks started to get linked together.”

It’s as if our hypothetical management consultants had discovered that the company they were studying isn’t nearly so compartmentalised as they’d first imagined. In fact, the working relationships between different members of different teams are so interwoven that seemingly unimportant changes to one team can have knock-on effects throughout the whole company.

“Joel Bader, a systems biologist at Johns Hopkins University, says that the current work suggests an intriguing connection to an idea in human genetics — that a wide array of genes may be subtly influencing traits that we don’t normally associate with them. ‘[The] closer we are able to look, the more we are able to see that perturbing one gene or pathway has effects that propagate throughout the entire system,’ he said.”

This is something that the boosters of genetic engineering need to take on board. There is, of course, no denying the power of the technology. That we can individually identify and map the genes in an ever-expanding range of species from yeast to Homo sapiens is amazing. That we can knock-out and splice-in genes with ever greater precision is a true wonder of the age.

And yet, though we know how to perform these manipulations, to a very large extent we don’t know what we’re doing.

Given the complexity of the gene machine within every cell, we’re only just beginning to understand the wider effects of each modification. That’s something worth bearing in mind as we re-engineer the global food system and before we re-write the human germline.

Further Reading

A plan to rid New Zealand of rats and other predatory mammals would spread across the world...

By Peter Franklin

His thesis is that hybridising humans and chimpanzees might not just be possible in the near-future, but would also be a “terrific idea”.

Most people would see it as terrifying not terrific – but Barash believes that blurring the distinction between humans and animals would persuade the former to treat the latter more, um, humanely:

“…I propose that generating humanzees or chimphumans would be not only ethical, but profoundly so, even if there were no prospects of enhancing human welfare. How could even the most determinedly homo-centric, animal-denigrating religious fundamentalist maintain that God created us in his image and that we and we alone harbor a spark of the divine, distinct from all other life forms, once confronted with living beings that are indisputably intermediate between human and non-human?”

Barash blames religion for human cruelty to animals, specifically “the nonsensical insistence that human beings are uniquely created in God’s image and endowed with a soul, whereas other living things are mere brutes.”

There are many problems with his argument, but let’s start with Darwin’s theory of evolution which has long overturned old assumptions about the absolute distinction between people and animals. Throughout the western world, most people accept that we too are animals and that, furthermore, we are descended from non-human animals. But has that fundamental change in worldview led to a general improvement in the way we treat our non-human kin? Hardly: we vivisect, factory farm and destroy habitats on a greater scale than ever before – and do so in the name of science and progress.

As for the notion that an intermediate form of life between humans and other animals would transform our thinking, the fact is that intermediates already exist. For instance, the great apes are intermediate between us and the other primates (monkeys, lemurs etc). So does that biological understanding of closer kinship change our behaviour? Again, the results are disappointing:

“Although such recognition has contributed to outrage about abusing chimps—as well as other primates in particular—in circus acts, laboratory experiments, and so forth, it has not generated notable resistance to hunting, imprisoning and eating other animal species, which, along with chimps themselves, are still considered by most people to be ‘other’ and not aspects of ‘ourselves’. (Chimps, moreover, are enthusiastically consumed in parts of equatorial Africa, where they are a prized component of ‘bush meat.’)”

Would an even closer relative in the form of a ‘humanzee’ lead us to change our ways? It seems unlikely, given how people treat other people they consider to be ‘sub-human’. Human-chimp hybrids actually would be sub-human – so I hate to think how they would be used and abused.

Barash notes that the hybridisation of humans and apes has been attempted before – in the early 20th century by the Russian biologist Ilya Ivanov:

“Stalin is believed to have been interested in such efforts, with an eye toward developing the ‘new Soviet man’ (or half-man, or half-woman).”

If true, this doesn’t strike me as the highest recommendation.

Ilyanov’s experiments failed – and the man himself was eventually sent into exile, where he died. However, any would-be successors in the 21st century would be hugely more likely to succeed (given recent advances in the relevant science and technology).

We must, therefore, be on our guard.

In the meantime, we must also strive to improve our treatment of animals – not in spite of any lingering sense of our unique humanity, but because of it.

I had hoped I wouldn’t need to return to the subject so soon, but according to a report by Sarah Knapton in the Telegraph there’s a proposal to use similar methods in the United Kingdom:

“Genetically mutated rats could be released into Britain to help tackle the growing problem with rodents, Edinburgh University has said.

“Scientists have launched a project to find out if genetically editing animals could provide a more humane method of pest control.”

As in New Zealand, the plan revolves around gene drive technology – a special form of genetic modification that would, in this case, achieve the seemingly conflicting goals of rapidly spreading itself through the target population while at the same time causing that population to crash:

“The technique suggested for rodents is known as ‘x-shredding.’ Male mammals have both an ‘x’ and ‘y’ sex chromosome, while females need two ‘x’ chromosomes.

“The scientists want to insert ‘x shredder’ code into the DNA of male rats which would destroy the ‘x’ chromosomes in their sperm, meaning they could only pass on a ‘y’ chromosome, so their offspring would never be female. With fewer and fewer females over time, the population would have to decline.”

This might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but it is just one of the possibilities opened up by the CRISPR gene editing technique. It also helps that the institute behind the project has a history of achieving the impossible:

“Professor Bruce Whitelaw, of the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute, where Dolly the Sheep was created, said: ‘For the first time we have the makings of technology that could reduce or eliminate a pest population in a humane and species-specific manner.

“‘Crispr is perhaps the most exciting tool that has ever hit biology, and it is a fantastic tool for us to pull apart the function of genes and how the animal or plant functions.

“‘It’s time to explore what this technology can do.’”

However, just because we can do something (or at least try to do something), it doesn’t mean that we should:

“…researchers said there was the possibility that genetically modified animals could ‘escape’ the target population and ‘affect extraneous ecosystems’.”

Exploring the technology under laboratory conditions is all well and good. But if its effectiveness is proven, the pressure to deploy it out in the wild could become overwhelming. The ten million rats that inhabit the UK are not best-loved – and they’re becoming increasingly resistant to the poisons we use to control their numbers.

Of course, most of them aren’t ‘out in the wild’ but in our cities, towns and villages: scurrying through sewers, skulking in basements, climbing up through wall cavities – and always looking for a way in to the food stores and the warmth that we produce for our needs, but also, unintentionally, for theirs.

If you’re even vaguely normal, your skin will be crawling by now – and you’ll be able to understand just how tempting it would be to use new genetic weapons against one of mankind’s oldest foes.

Yet this is a true Pandora’s Box. The general release of modified rats could not be limited to areas of human habitation; it would spread out into the natural environment. Nor would it be held back at our political borders; not even those of an island nation.

And would we really stop with rats? We’d surely also target other urban pest species – such as mice and pigeons, and perhaps feral cats and dogs too. Meanwhile, farmers would want to target rural pests including rabbits, foxes, badgers, deer and various birds.

We’d make even more of an ecological desert of the countryside than we have already – and that’s before we get to the unintended consequences of taking entire species out of the food chain.

I don’t doubt the need to keep certain species out of certain areas (especially our homes and workspaces). However, gene drives would be a dangerously uncontrollable form of pest control.

The counter-argument is that if the population becomes smarter, healthier and better looking, then what’s the problem? Very few people would choose to be thick, sick or ugly – so why wish these afflictions on others if they can be avoided?

Writing for Bloomberg, Tyler Cowan develops a deeper argument against genetic choice. Though of a broadly libertarian standpoint, he has profound doubts about the wisdom with which we’d use the coming technology:

“I don’t trust people to take so much control over the future of human nature.”

It’s not just things like propensity to disease that would be discarded or more trivial defects such as shortness of height or weakness of chin. Through genetic testing and abortion, we’re already eliminating people with Down’s Syndrome from entire populations as if they were without value – and that’s just the start of the ‘genetic cleansing’ heading our way.

Cowan’s focus is on personality types:

“If you could directly alter your kids’ genetic profile, what would you want? It’s hard to know how the social debate would turn out after years of back and forth, but I was dismayed to read one recent research paper by psychologists Rachel M. Latham and Sophie von Stumm. The descriptive title of that work, based on survey evidence, is ‘Mothers want extraversion over conscientiousness or intelligence for their children.’ Upon reflection, maybe that isn’t so surprising, because parents presumably want children who are fun to spend time with.”

Introverts might always be in the kitchen at parties, but, being thoughtful types, we do have our uses. Indeed, like Cowan, I think it’s possible you’ll miss us when we’re gone:

“Would a more extroverted human race be desirable, all things considered? I genuinely don’t know, but at the very least I am concerned. The current mix of human personalities and institutions is a delicate balance which, for all of its flaws, has allowed society to survive and progress. I’m not looking to make a big roll of the dice on this one.”

Given the choice, would every parent opt for an outgoing child? Perhaps not exclusively – but you can be sure that some of the more challenging personality traits would be all but eliminated. For instance, any trait labeled as ‘autistic’ would go out the window – so good luck recruiting the next generation of software engineers. As for tendencies that might be described as psychopathic or merely domineering, they’d be out too – and therefore the next generation of leaders.

Note that we’re not talking about a simple menu of genes that you can select or reject to produce your designer baby. Genetics is generally more complicated and inexact than that. Nevertheless, genetic engineering techniques will provide us with an ever increasing ability to shift the odds of a child turning out more one way than another. Given cultural preferences and prejudices this will bring about big shifts across whole societies – and not just biologically:

“Parents’ choices, and their eventual public unveiling, may have harmful effects on social norms. What if it becomes known that a high percentage of parents opted for children with paler skin or straighter hair or a greater chance of being heterosexual? That knowledge could boost stigmas and social divisions, even with stringent anti-discrimination legislation. The parental choices could end up being seen as, in essence, the final court of public opinion.”

Will we legislate to protect some aspects of human diversity, but not others? Moreover, would such legislation be enforceable? Perhaps not:

“The techniques will be available in many different countries, and over time the more lax standards will have greater influence, if only through ‘genetic engineering tourism’…

“In China, these techniques are already about one-third as cheap as in the U.S….”

Some see designer babies as a matter of competitive necessity – in that countries that engineer their way to, say, higher average IQ scores, will overwhelm those that don’t. However, that is to assume that genetically selective societies won’t breed themselves into crippling uniformity.

Within days, President Clinton demanded a report from his ethics gurus. Soon afterwards, the uncomprehending celebrity sheep was staring out from the covers of Time and Newsweek. There were hearings in the US Congress, and dozens of other national legislatures – and then years of anguished debate at the United Nations.

Yet, at the end of the day, cloning is just biological photo-copying. The Dolly technique hasn’t led to cloned human babies. Some wealthy eccentrics have used it to replicate beloved pooches. The only serious application seems to be in cattle breeding.

Meanwhile, fast forward 20 years, and the focus is on genetics, where there have been two huge developments.

Genetics for all

First, genetics has gone retail. The term of art is ‘consumer genomics’. As the cost of analyzing our genes has plummeted, enterprising companies – led by 23andMe – are offering to sell us our genetic secrets. And consumers – from ancestry researchers to health worriers to the plain curious – have been responding in droves. A half-price self-testing kit was recently a top seller in a sale on Amazon.[1. ‘Is 23andMe worth it?’, Huffington Post, July 12, 2017; https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/prime-day-dna- kit_us_59662d40e4b09b587d63dc39]

Second, with little fanfare outside the technical press (the contrast with the cloning brouhaha is astonishing), we’ve come up with a dramatic new technique that actually enables us not just to analyse our genes, but to re-engineer them. It’s been given a curious name, which has no doubt helped keep it obscure. CRISPR-Cas9.[2. An acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” a description of the genetic basis of the method; Cas9 is the name of a protein that makes it work.]

The pros are fascinated. But they have also expressed alarm. At a meeting urgently convened by the US National Academies, America’s top scientists invited their Chinese and British counterparts to help hash out its implications – and they called for a moratorium on most uses of it with humans.[3. International Summit on Human Gene Editing; https://nationalacademies.org/gene-editing/Gene-Edit-Summit/]

The technique is dramatic. According to Harvard’s George Church, this is how it re-engineers the genes:

“It’s the fastest thing I’ve seen yet. It’s like you throw a piston into a car and it finds its way to the right place and swaps out with one of the other pistons – while the motor’s running.”

And we’ve already begun to apply these techniques in many contexts – from ants and mosquitoes to human embryos.[4. Church is quoted in Popular Science, 27 May 2015; https://www.popsci.com/church-george-church#page-3]

There was something simple and visual and haunting about Dolly being cloned. CRISPR-Cas9 is complex and abstract and presented in the context of all manner of advantageous possible applications. How is it being reported?

Clickbait time?

Typical of the enthusiasm with which much of the press has greeted these developments, NBC’s website turns them into a listicle of 11 items under the headline: “11 Amazing Feats the Gene-Editing Tool CRISPR Just Made Possible”[5. NBC News MACH, 8 August 2017; https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/11-amazing-feats-gene-editing-tool-crispr-just-made-possible-ncna790911]. And some of these claims are certainly amazing. Part of the problem with this kind of science reporting, of course, is that the most dramatic and positive and hopeful spin is put on every single item; it’s more marketing hype than reportage. Cancer, superbugs and mosquitos are all listed along with inheritable diseases – for example, experimental work in mice with Huntington’s Chorea. Of this last possibility, the article breathlessly concludes:

“Experts expect this promising technique to be applied to humans in the near future.”

The implication of this sentence is that families with Huntington’s just need to wait around and await the definitive cure.

On the one hand, on the other hand?

More soberly, here is the New York Times[6. New York Times, 2 August 2017; https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/science/gene-editing-human-embryos.html]: “while a long way from clinical use, [CRISPR-Cas9] raises the prospect that gene editing may one day protect babies from a variety of hereditary conditions.” Note the cautions: “long way… raises the prospect… may one day.” Not the stuff of clickbait listicles; reporting rather than hype.

The New York Times’ observation lies in a review of the issue and its challenges sparked by the latest research report – of fixing a heart-defect gene that could cause death in later life. Pulitzer Prize-winner Pam Belluck, while concluding with reassuring words from lawyer and bioethicist Alta Charo who “doubts that a flood of couples will have ‘edited children,’” is prepared to start out by asking some hard questions:

“… the achievement is also an example of human genetic engineering, once feared and unthinkable, and is sure to renew ethical concerns that some might try to design babies with certain traits, like greater intelligence or athleticism.

“Scientists have long feared the unforeseen medical consequences of making inherited changes to human DNA. The cultural implications may be just as disturbing: Some experts have warned that unregulated genetic engineering may lead to a new form of eugenics, in which people with means pay to have children with enhanced traits even as those with disabilities are devalued.”

Charo’s response to such concerns is neatly summarized: “Sex is cheaper and it’s more fun than IVF, so unless you’ve got a real need, you’re not going to use it.” On the other hand, one might ask whether a “flood of couples” will be needed if a handful of wealthy couples decide they want to use technology to give eugenic advantages to their children.

We need a model for reporting controversial science and technology developments that can combine with equal seriousness the science and the ethical questions. The model on display in these pieces from the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph was not that one.

-

In Britain’s Daily Telegraph[7.  Daily Telegraph,  27 July 2017; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/27/first-editing-human-embryos- reportedly-carried-united-states/; There’s actually no such thing as a “National Academy of Scientists,” and it’s surprising to find that the writer does not know that. The institution is the “National Academy of Sciences,” part of the “National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,” usually referred to simply as the National Academies. Also, the 2015 event referred to was a consultation that included the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the (British) Royal Society; notably, it was led by scientists, not (as the Telegraph states) bioethicists.], Henry Bodkin also reports on the latest CRISPR research while noting the ethical context. Somewhat pointedly, he observes that:

“In the last two years, scientific opinion in the US has grown more sympathetic to germline editing, where a genetically modified child can pass on changes to future generations. In 2015, bioethicists at the National Academy of Scientists (NAS) said it would be ‘irresponsible’ to use gene editing technology in human embryos for therapeutic purposes until safety issues were resolved. But earlier this year, NAS and the National Academy of Medicine said scientific advances had made the procedure a ‘realistic possibility that deserves serious consideration’.”

He concludes by quoting Dr. Helen O’Neill of University College, London, who laments that:

“Unfortunately, the news about the potential ability to correct disease has been eclipsed by the fear of so-called ‘designer babies’. The technology to support research into correcting diseases is readily available and is largely limited only by legislative barriers.”

In other words, legal constraints and public fear of ‘designer babies’ are getting in the way of research and clinical applications.

Or is the sky falling?

Writing in The Guardian, biologist and technology critic David King lays out his concern lest “consumer genomics” lead to “consumer eugenics.” Noting that consumer approaches to surgical “enhancement” generally reflect the use of money to adapt our bodies so they conform to conventional notions of perfection, he fears exactly the same tendency with interventions at the gene level:[8. David King, in the Guardian, August 4, 2017; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/04/editing-human-genome-consumer-eugenics-designer-babies]

“Once you start creating a society in which rich people’s children get biological advantages over other children, basic notions of human equality go out the window. Instead, what you get is social inequality written into DNA. Even using low-tech methods, such as those still used in many Asian countries to select out girls (with the result that the world is short of more than 100 million women), the social consequences of allowing prejudices and competitiveness to control which people get born are horrific.

“Most ‘enhancements’ in current use, such as those in cosmetic surgery, are intended to help people conform to expectations created by sexism, racism and ageism. More subtly, but equally profoundly, once we start designing our children to perform the way we want them to, we are erasing the fundamental ethical difference between consumer commodities and human beings. Again, this is not speculation: there is already an international surrogacy market in which babies are bought and sold. The job of parents is to love children unconditionally, however clever/athletic/superficially beautiful they are; not to write our whims and prejudices into their genes.”

On reporting CRISPR-Cas9

There’s no one standard way to report on technological achievements, including controversial ones, though there are better ways and worse ways. Comment/OpEd pages properly give opportunity to those with clear and often strongly-held views. Clickbait listicles can be fun – and also useful to those few readers who go beyond them to review the original articles they collect.

But what about news reporting? This has hardly been a scientific survey of CRISPR-Cas9 reportage; it’s a sampling, but it’s one that will withstand scrutiny, at least in the English language press.

While the New York Times piece is a more serious piece of writing, the NYT and the Daily Telegraph are both examples of a distinctive genre. There’s a pattern. Perhaps they teach this in journalism school.

To report a tech or scientific achievement, the lede needs to focus on the achievement or promise. Then a few paras later note that it “raises questions” about ethics (or safety, or some other external factor). Then carry on with the descriptive material on the research, its potential benefits, the scientists involved, and so on. Then return to the ethics issue, and conclude with a quote, from someone in a position of authority, to reassure the reader that all is well. All those anxieties we raised six column inches earlier can be laid to rest. Serious, smart, expert people aren’t bothered about them. Sex is fun and inexpensive, so why would everyone decide to use in vitro fertilization to get a designer baby (as the NYT quotes bioethicist Alta Charo)? Or, in the Telegraph’s version, all we need is to get moving with curing diseases is getting rid of restrictive laws supported by people with an irrational fear of “designer babies” (as the doctor from UCL tells us).

It’s an effective formula, at least from one perspective. It checks the ethics box, though it then uses the discussion of ethics to dismiss the ethical concerns that have been raised. One problem with this approach is that – as Dr. Helen O’Neill implies – policy choices are fundamentally related to popular opinion. Whether or not we take the view that ethical issues are significant in themselves, they are hugely important in shaping citizens’ perceptions of technology and therefore the frame of reference for policymaking.

Yet the net effect of reporting and then dismissing ethical issues, deliberately or otherwise, is to assist in ‘laundering’ the technology of its ethical questions, and thereby promoting it. At a minimum, a respectful citing of ‘experts’ taking different views would establish that these issues are open and needing to be addressed.

The contrast with the cloning controversy is instructive. Right from the start, most reporting focused on the ‘brave new world’ spectre raised by Dolly’s cloning. Editors plainly decided that cloning – at least, potential cloning of humans – was beyond the pale, and that reporting could focus on the controversy, not the technology itself. A more extended review would examine how the cloning issue soon merged with controversy about human embryonic stem cell research; and also, how the Raelian cult – led by a French-Canadian former racing-car driver, and committed to cloning – succeeded in dominating the news with its outlandish claims of clonal human births.

But this simple point seems clear. We need a model for reporting controversial science and technology developments that can combine with equal seriousness the science and the ethical questions. The model on display in these pieces from the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph was not that one.

A DISCLOSURE

I know David King, Alta Charo, George Church and Greg Stock (see further reading) personally (though not well); none was consulted in the writing of this piece. Also, I served as an advisor to the US delegation to the United Nations General Assembly in the UN cloning process referenced.

***

FURTHER READING

There’s a huge literature on the issue of human “enhancement,” whether biologists and technologists should be free to develop such techniques, and whether people should be free to avail themselves of them. For example:

• Peter Franklin: Are you on CRISPR? You soon will be.
• Engineering the Human Germline: An Exploration of the Science and Ethics of Altering the Genes We Pass to Our Children (2000, Oxford University Press) (Co-editor with John Campbell).
• Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (2002, Houghton Mifflin)
• Also of continuing importance is the short essay by C.S. Lewis, dating from 1943, on the question of making inheritable genetic changes: “The Abolition of Man.” Available here.

“Coverage of Mr Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever.” (1)

A recent review of CNN’s news coverage found 92% of it devoted to Donald J. Trump.

The details are astonishing. Of 13 hours, 27 minutes of actual news coverage on the day chosen, 12 hours, 19 minutes, was devoted to the Trump presidency. Everything else? “A mere 68 minutes – a little more than three minutes per hour” versus nearly 40 for Trump. And while CNN claims just to be doing the right thing (and it has been viciously attacked by Trump for its coverage), doing the right thing is also proving highly profitable. (2)

Taking a different tack, New York Times journalist Farhad Manjoo decided to try and spend a week entirely avoiding everything about Trump, and following other stories instead. “In one way, my experiment failed: I could find almost no Trump-free part of the press.” (3)

Manjoo goes further: “He has taken up semi-permanent residence on every outlet of any kind, political or not. He is no longer just the message. In many cases, he has become the medium, the ether through which all other stories flow.” Trump in sport, reality TV, fictional storylines.

Yet it’s not simply wall-to-wall coverage. The Washington Post newspaper, famed for its role in bringing down Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, has made an unprecedented move. It now has a subtitle, or a “strapline”, to use the British marketing term. It’s a Trump strapline: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” (4) The paper has redefined its identity for the Trump era. Have no fear, there will certainly be no darkness for Trump in the pages of the Post.  On a quick check today, 13 out of the top 14 stories on the paper’s website are on this one subject. If Democracy Dies in Darkness, what dies when the super-trooper shines every day and all day on this one fellow?

If the “Trump rate” is the extraordinary CNN 92%, what are they not reporting?

Five Stories

Here are five stories that have broken since the election in the technology field. Every one of them is important. Enormously important. Every one of them has had far less prominence than is due. Because of the Trump phenomenon.

1. China’s Quantum Quantum Leap

In a move with potentially enormous implications for U.S. and western science and security, China has – according to Scientific American – tested the spooky phenomenon known as “quantum entanglement” at a much greater distance than has been done before. Quantum mechanics is hard for us to grasp as it involves properties of matter that seem to make no sense, including “entanglement” – essentially, that a change made to the state of one particle will immediately affect another, even if it is at a great distance.

The Chinese experiment involved a satellite and stations on the ground more than 1,200km apart. According to Scientific American, the test “firmly establishes China as the front-runner in a burgeoning ‘quantum space race’ to create a secure, quantum-based global communications network – that is, a potentially unhackable ‘quantum internet’ that would be of immense geopolitical importance.”

“China has taken the leadership in quantum communication,” says Nicolas Gisin, a physicist at the University of Geneva. (5)

2. CRISPR: editing our genes

For generations, scientists, ethicists and the public have displayed anxiety as genetics has moved ever nearer to perfecting the methods that would enable us to make changes in humans – including changes that our children will inherit. While the motivation may be to cure disease, once changes can be made we all know that there will be pressure to get rid of features like shortness and fatness and baldness – and engineer in superior looks and intelligence.

Until recently, this has seemed far-fetched as only very limited efforts to make genetic changes have been possible. But fast progress in gene editing has now led to expectation of human use of the technology with the development of CRISPR – and on February 15, 2017, a long-running patent dispute as to who owns the technology was finally decided by the US Patent and Trademark Office. (6) In a clarion call in the May issue of Wired Magazine, futurist Amy Webb calls for a “national biology policy” that encompasses the ethical implications of the revolution in genetics. “The US currently has no co-ordinated biology strategy. As a result, CRISPR, along with other emerging technologies, is developing faster than our government’s ability to address it.” (7)

3. Automation and jobs

The threat of artificial intelligence/robot automation to human jobs keeps getting more serious (and being entirely ignored by governments). The latest worrying report comes not from some Luddite think tank but global consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Their conclusion, as reported in Fortune Magazine, is that “Nearly 40% of US jobs could soon be given to robots… Researchers suggested that automated bots could take nearly four in 10 (38%) jobs in the US, and take 30% of jobs in the United Kingdom, 35% in Germany, and 21% in Japan.” (8)

4. The sex robots are coming

In a July 5 report on USA Today Network, Mary Bowerman writes of latest developments in sex robots, as manufacturers of “anatomically correct” sex dolls add AI features. Retailing for between $5,000 and $15,000, these robots are programmable in complex ways – to shape certain of their features and to understand user wants. Their dissemination at decreasing cost has wide social implications (for example, there are already reports of a Japanese manufacturer selling child models). This dimension of the digital revolution has been creeping up on us with little public discussion or understanding. Is the future one in which we have sex with robots and reproduce through in vitro fertilisation? (9)

5. Cybersecurity . . . or not

Threats to computer security continue to grow. Two new reports show a wide variety of awareness and action around the world – one from a United Nations index to help differentiate countries taking them seriously from others that do not (50% have no formal national strategy in place), and another from IFSEC News. The core problem is that computers and physical equipment are increasingly linked up – “cyber-physical systems” is one term used in the trade. If instead of stealing your credit card details a hacker can bring down your home heating system, or take control of a power grid, the stakes just went up enormously. The “Internet of Things” is about just that: linking things and computers, with potentially enormous benefits in convenience and profitability – and risks just as great. (10)

Trumping the Darkness

The Washington Post’s slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” has (re)defined its mission in terms every reader will associate with the need to challenge the serial dishonesty and “fake news” of the administration and its most committed supporters. The Post is to be commended for its absolute determination to bring the truth to light. Yet there is much more to democracy than politics, and much more to politics than the doings and sayings of the political class.

The irony is plain to see. The Trump administration shows little interest in either science and technology – or indeed the arts – which are all being targeted for big spending cuts; so why play along by making editorial choices that starkly parallel the one-dimensional universe of the White House?

At the heart of Washington’s current tragedy lies the fact that the administration has been able to shape the news-reporting agenda – in disagreement just as in those areas where the press has been supportive. Trump’s absolute dominance of the media focus is the one area where supporters and critics alike are continuing to work together.

We quoted at the start Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times: “Coverage of Mr Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever.” It’s also eclipsed these five vitally important stories – vital, not least, to the greatness of America.