California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

The Code Breaker

by John Lawrence, March26, 2021

The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson is an exciting new book which details the efforts and the knowledge to edit genes known as CRISPR. That means cutting into the DNA genome and removing "sick" genes and/or replacing them with the correct genes. The book details the quest to discover the mechanism by which this is possible. The book focuses on Jennifer Doudna but many researchers, many of them recent immigrants or workers at foreign universities, are involved. The fundamental insights can be explained in a few sentences. They noticed that bacteria have been fighting off viruses successfully for billions of years, and they were doing this by incorporating the virus DNA into the data base of their own genome. Upon encountering a new virus the bacteria knew how to encode that virus's DNA so that they could identify it in an attack in the future. Secondly, the bacteria knew how to dispatch a portion of RNA that would travel to the site of the virus and encode an enzyme that would then destroy the virus. The messenger RNA knew precisely where to point the enzyme which then cut the virus DNA thereby destroying it. So the e. coli bacterium has known how to edit genes for billions of years. The trick is to figure out exactly how the bacterium does this.

So Jennifer Doudna and cohorts did just that: They figured out how a bacterium cuts a virus's DNA precisely in a certain location. That's what the book is about. That's what gene editing is about. Gene editing is in its infancy, but it has already been used to correct the genetic mutation which causes sickle cell anemia which is caused by the mutation in one gene. Experimentally, it has been shown that if this gene can be cut out and replaced by one that contains the correct genetic information, the disease can be cured. If this can be done early in the development of an embryo, the correct gene can even be transmitted to succeeding generations. An estimated 8 million children are born each year with severe genetic disorders or birth defects. Gene editing can possibly correct some or all of these defects. In order to do this the enzyme which cuts the gene out of the DNA must be told precisely where to cut, and the correct gene must somehow be implanted precisely at this location and the DNA reconnected. In theory the whole idea is very simple. Figuring out how to do this either in the laboratory or in actual animals, much less in humans, is the hard part.

Whether or not this research will lead to an understanding of the origins of life is an open question. Perhaps there is a sub-atomic entity sort of like a neutrino which is massless and ubiquitous in the universe which is the progenitor of life wherever conditions are propitious. Perhaps it is able to generate an organism with the minimal genome, something which has never been discovered in nature. Even a virus which has the simplest known genomic structure has three thousand base pairs, compared to the three billion base pairs in human genomes. A base pair consists of the 4 nucleotides called A, C, G, T   which comprise one rung of the DNA ladder. So a successful gene edit would have to identify the precise rung of the DNA ladder where the mutation had occurred which means at least one of the 4 letters of the base pair was incorrect and correct it.

So I theorize that a life progenitor would have to be something that is ubiquitous in the universe and capable of starting life with a minimal genome which consists of only a few base pairs. This is a mystery but certainly not the only one. Gravity is an every day phenomenon but no one has detected a graviton which is thought to be the physical entity that distorts space time according to Einstein's theory of relativity. No one understands the "dark energy" which is thought to be responsible for the fact that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating. No one understands what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" which has been demonstrated to be a reality in quantum theory. Just as the line is blurred between what is material and what is massless energy, the line is blurred between what is spiritual and what is material. Is the creation of life in the universe a physical, material phenomenon or a spiritual one?

Off the Top of My Head

Inflation Probably Not a Problem If Biden Programs Are Carefully Targeted

by John Lawrence, March 14, 2021

Critics have said, "Oh, My your children and grandchildren are going to have to pay back all these trillions of dollars that have been spent by both the Trump and Biden administrations on COVID relief and to get the economy going again." Not True! Modern Monetary Theory has shown that the Federal Reserve can just create the money and the Treasury Department can just spend it without ever worrying about paying it back. Finance is not the problem. The problem is potentially inflation which economist Larry Summers has sounded the alarm about. Most of Biden's relief bill is targeted at the poor which means that that money will be sucked up to pay past due rent and mortgage bills as well as providing a decent lifestyle which should not be inflationary except if you believe the nonsense of the neoliberal Phillips curve which supposedly proves that a certain segment of the population has to live in poverty and penury in order to fight inflation. That has also been debunked by Modern Monetary Theory although most politicians are still on the wavelength of neoliberal economics which has been shown to be fallacious in this and many other regards.

State and local governments likewise will just suck up the money in the relief bill to bail themselves out of debt and provide an adequate level of social services. This also is not inflationary because the money will not be just sloshing around in the economy with nowhere to go. What is inflationary is tax breaks for the rich, but this money can be sucked out of the economy by taxing the rich. What Larry Summers fails to take into account is that the US and much of the rest of the world has a two tier economy. The rich and upper middle class are doing very well, thank you, while the lower middle class and the poor are suffering. The COVID pandemic illustrated this in even starker terms with the so-called K-shaped recovery. The upper classes made money; the lower classes are on the verge of losing whatever financial gains they had made during the Trump economy. Inflation is caused by too much money sloshing around in the economic system. Most of that inflationary money is held by the rich in assets like stocks and real estate. Money injected into the economic system targeted at the poor is immediately sucked out of the system to pay debts and to provide basic necessities. There is enough physical and material capacity in the system to provide basic necessities so this money is not inflationary.

Inflation is caused when there is too much money chasing too few goods. As long as there is the material and human capacity, money directed at those sectors of the economy will not cause inflation. The real problem in future Biden administration bills involving infrastructure and the Green New Deal is that the materials to build out infrastructure, namely, steel, cement and plastics, require fossil fuels to manufacture and the manufacturing processes themselves are inherently carbon dioxide emitting. This comes about from basic chemistry which involves the carbon and oxygen atoms every step of the way. Most basic materials are composed of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, and the chemistry involved in manufacturing releases large amounts of carbon dioxide. The manufacture of solar panels requires mining high quality quartz and combining it with coal. It's hard to get away from fossil fuels as the Michael Moore movie, Planet of the Humans, pointed out. For this reason spending large amounts of money on infrastructure involving cement, steel, plastics and other materials could actually produce more global warming rather than preventing it. The finances are available; the proper materials are not. The manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels require the release of large amounts of greenhouse gasses.

Because of these fundamental limitations regarding materials, it doesn't make sense to throw trillions of dollars at either infrastructure or global warming mitigation. That would be either inflationary or misguided in the sense that large projects in these areas could produce even more global warming. As Bill Gates has pointed out, money should be invested in promising startups and research that can solve these basic problems and into digital nuclear which is the only renewable energy source that won't result in a lot of greenhouse gasses being created in the first place. Advanced nuclear is the most promising source of clean energy. Gates has invested in a company TerraPower which does research on advanced nuclear reactors. Their mission statement reads:

"TerraPower was founded by Bill Gates and a group of like-minded visionaries that decided the private sector needed to take action in developing advanced nuclear energy to meet growing electricity needs, mitigate climate change and lift billions out of poverty. Advanced reactors and other isotopic applications are now possible with technology and enhanced computing capabilities that were unimaginable a few decades ago. At TerraPower, we are innovating in nuclear to improve the lives of people everywhere and to build the clean energy of tomorrow – today."

So when the Biden administration gets around to their initiatives on infrastructure and global warming, they need to heed Bill Gates' warning about traditional manufacturing methods involving cement, steel and plastic. Energy from solar and wind are inadequate to solve the problem for many reasons. Large scale demonstration and build out of nuclear energy reactors should be the order of the day, They are the only clean energy source that has the potential for diminishing the world's reliance on fossil fuels.

Off the Top of My Head

Bill Gates Needs to Get Up To Speed on Modern Monetary Theory

by John Lawrence, February, 28, 2021

Bill Gates is a smart guy. He has singlehandedly been the most influential person on pandemics and now on climate change with his book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. In this book the most important thing he points out in my opinion is that it is not enough to put electric cars on the road and to use renewables to power electricity generating plants. There is also much carbon dioxide emission coming from manufacturing and agriculture. In particular the manufacture of cement, steel and plastic produce as much or more carbon dioxide ton for ton as those products themselves. In addition beef and dairy cows produce a lot of methane due to the fact that they are ruminants with a certain kind of digestive system. Gates believes that much innovation, research and development is needed to come up with substitute products in all these areas as well as electrifying everything and running it all with renewables including a new digitized nuclear system.

The one thing that this polymath doesn't seem up to speed on is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) which is important because all this innovation, research and development requires vast amounts of money. He personally can't provide it all although he has used his fortune in very constructive ways in terms of health care around the world and also seeding promising startups. The Gates Foundation is concerned with all these problems on a world wide basis and not only in the US. He is a globalist and not an America First type of guy which is altogether appropriate because pandemics and particularly global warming are universal problems affecting every country and all people on earth, and their solutions require a world wide approach.

Bill Gates like some economists is somewhat concerned about inflation after all these trillions of dollars are spent by the US government first on COVID relief and then on infrastructure and a Green New Deal. If they study MMT they would know that MMT shares that concern, but addresses it in terms of the amount of idle resources there are in the economy. For instance, if there is 5% unemployment (what is considered full employment by conventional economists), there are still over 15 million people available for work. If there are material resources available such as cement, steel and glass, the price of these items is not likely to be bid up causing inflation. However, while some material resources are readily available, their substitutes which don't cause carbon dioxide emissions in the manufacturing process are not. A large infrastructure project which requires huge amounts of concrete with rebar such as is necessary in constructing a bridge, for example, will also cause large amounts of carbon dioxide to be emitted into the atmosphere. As Gates points out, making things which require cement, steel and plastic adds about 31% of the total of greenhouse gasses which are emitted annually. For every ton of steel produced we emit 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide. For every ton of plastic, the figure is 1.3 tons of carbon dioxide, and for every ton of cement, we emit a ton of carbon dioxide.

With figures like that how is the US going to do a $4 trillion (which is the amount our infrastructure is in deficit) infrastructure project without producing even more billions of tons of greenhouse gasses (GHGs)? We need huge R&D projects funded by the government first before we can scale up the production of carbon free products which replace these traditional construction materials. Financing the R&D is not a problem as these human resources are widely considered to be available. This would cause no inflation. Getting the material resources when little or none of them is available would cause inflation. Nevertheless, the US ramped up production of ships and airplanes for World War II without causing much inflation. To deal with global warming or climate change is a thornier problem. If money is just poured into the economy on a non-targeted basis, it will cause inflation so it makes sense at least initially to pour the money into R&D as Bill Gates suggests. Doing a large infrastructure project without using the proper materials could make global warming even worse.

Open Science And The Econoblogosphere

by Paul Krugman

from the New York Times, January 17, 2012

Interesting article in the Times about the push for “open science”, bypassing the traditional structure of refereed journals in favor of a sort of fluid, self-policing online community. I can’t and won’t weigh in on this issue with regards to hard science, but I think there are some interesting parallels with what has been happening in economics.

This is also, by the way, a chance for me to maunder on about what it was like when I was younger. You kids get off my lawn!

So, the starting point for me, when thinking about how economics works as a discipline, is to realize that the traditional model of submit, get refereed, publish, and then people will read your work broke down a long time ago. In fact, it had more or less fallen apart by the early 80s.Even then, nobody at a top school learned stuff by reading the journals; it was all working papers, with the journals serving as tombstones.

And how did you know which working papers to read? In the fields I worked in, NBER Working Papers — yellowjackets — became the principal outlet for new research. If you were an associate, you got those papers in the mail, and at least checked out the abstracts — and if you were in the loop, you got to put out your own work the same way.

And who was in the loop? Well, there were groups of people in each subfield that were the real centers of information and reputation. I was part of two such groups, one in real trade, one in international money. I referred at the time to the “floating crap game”, hence the video above — there would be various conferences around the world, but the same 30 or so people would show up at each conference, like Nathan Detroit’s gamblers finding different hideouts each night.

You got provisional entree to such a group through connections — basically, being a student of someone who mattered, and being tagged as having potential. You got permanent membership by doing enough clever stuff; the informal rule was three good papers, one to get noticed, one to show that the first wasn’t a fluke, one to show that you had staying power.

And journal publication? Well, tenure committees needed that, but it was so slow relative to the pace of ongoing work that it no longer acted as an information conduit. I presented my paper on target zones at a 1988 conference; by the time it was formally published, in 1991, I had to add a section on the subsequent literature, because there were around 150 derivative papers already out there.

The whole thing was informal — and also deeply undemocratic, offering very little way for outsiders to enter the debate.

So now we have rapid-fire exchange via blogs and online working papers — and I think it’s all good. Work circulates even faster than it did then, there are quick exchanges that can advance understanding, and while it’s still hard to break in, connections aren’t as important as they once were and the system is much more open.

But, you say, doesn’t this allow a lot of really bad economics to circulate? Yes, but is it really any worse than it used to be? As I’ve tried to explain, the notion of journals as gatekeepers was largely fictional even 25 years ago. And I have a somewhat jaundiced view of how the whole refereeing/publication system has ever worked; all too often, it seems to act as a way for entrenched doctrines to blockade new ideas, or at least to keep people with new ideas from getting tenure at a good school.

The major problem I see now is the disconnect between promotion and the real nature of intellectual discourse in the Internet age. But the quality of the discussion, it seems to me, is if anything higher than it was in the good old days.