LifeItself

Here is a nice followup to my January 6, 2011, post on patents as a measure of U.S. productivity and creativity.  Now Big Pharma is getting ready to throw their towel into the ring and call it quits of sorts.  It seems to me that they were pursuing a wrong paradigm in their research and their colossal blunder was called by the unforgiving Mother Nature.  The mistake they seem to have made is a simplistic belief that one or few unique genes are responsible for each major illness.  Identify the genes and, voila, appropriate therapy presents itself.  Well, hundreds of billions of dollars later, they seem to have discovered that gene expression is context-dependent, and the environmental influences (epigenetics) are stronger than genetics.  This may be the best example of a seriously misguided huge research effort that essentially broke a whole industry.  So now federal government is stepping in with another corporate bailout plan, this time an $1 billion/year government research lab.  

So, we had the WSJ raving about applying good science to evaluate the undeniable benefits of GMOs, and we also had little shreds of evidence to the contrary. In India, for example, they found a couple of tiny, irrelevant problems with a GMO eggplant designed so marvelously  by Monsanto. Nonsense, I say!  But here is what those pesky Indians say. Oops! And Monsanto's Roundup, what a God send it has been for our hard working farmers and consumers! Or is it ?  Is it, really ?! I say, I am getting confused.  But my liver, and heart, and kidneys, and lungs, and hormones seem to know something.  And they all refuse to accept the GMO blessings.  They are wrong, I say! The science I don't like is junk science. And WSJ confirms.  What a relief...

On January 10, 2011 - 11:49am, the Oildrum posted an article by  Luis de Sousa  Peak Coal: the Olduvai perspective . It is an interesting article and we appreciate the author's arguments against the peak of global rate of coal production.  However, here are a few facts on the ground recorded by Greg Croft and me: Last year, China imported 150/690=22% of all seaborne steam coal traded worldwide in 2010, and projections are that China will try to import more this year.  China also has firm plans of of limiting energy use and shutting down 2,000 coal-intensive industrial facilities.  In short, it seems that China's coal production has peaked.  China produces roughly 1/2 of world's coal. The Oildrum article does not seem to address the ever-increasing mine depths that will ultimately curtail and stop coal production from these mines. Mozambique is going to become the second biggest exporter of metallurgical coal, which is not the same as the second largest coal expo

Recently, 1/2 of US patents was granted to foreign residents, whose numbers are at below 1/10 of the US population. This trend has been growing almost monotonically since 1947 and reflects the ever-increasing majority of graduate students in science and engineering, who are foreigners. Foreign graduate students are currently at 80% or so in math and petroleum engineering. The US Patent Office does not count naturalized American patent holders. Given that roughly 50% of engineering and science professors are foreign-born, patents given to foreigners in the US dominate. Fraction of all US patents granted to foreign residents. Note that the total foreign-born fraction of US population has hovered between 5 and 15% of the total population. Also note that since 1947 foreigners have received an almost monotonically growing share of US patents that is now at least 5 times their share of the US population. (I say at least, because I am adding naturalized citizens to the foreign fract

Here is a decomposition into multiple Hubbert cycles of patents granted each year since 1790 by the U.S. Patent Office to 1 million US residents. Note that without a new cycle of inventions in something, the current cycles will expire by 2050.  In other words, the total number of U.S. inventions will decline dramatically in the next 20-30 years.  Some of this decline might be forced by a decline of support for R&D and fundamental research in the US. The fundamental cycle of patented inventions in the US peaked in 1914, when expressed per 1 million of people living in the US. This was the classical science and engineering patent cycle. The first small peak in 1870, was related to the Civil War and the newly acquired technological sophistication in the U.S. The second small peak in 1885, was probably related to the innovators who were born post 1860, coming of age. The third small peak in 1930, was a boost to innovation during the roaring 1920s. Curiously, the next large patent

The December 27, 2010, WSJ Opinion piece, "Ag Department Uproots Science," is full of fantastically uninformed thinking so characteristic of medieval alchemists. The piece takes to task the Ag Secretary and the Obama administration for being insufficiently warm towards the genetically modified (GM) plants and insufficiently lax in regulating them. The nonsensical argument that a genetically modified plant is "substantially equivalent" to an unmodified one, because a few different genes weight almost nothing, flies in the face of the very science the opinionator invokes so often. These modified genes express themselves differently in different circumstances, and may cause significant changes in chemical reaction pathways at cellular level. In other words, the modified plant may, and often does, produce chemicals that disrupt the human endocrinal system or are downright poisonous. A good example are GM potatoes. What irks me more than anything is that this roa