Southwest 1380 crew speaks at Oshkosh

by philg

During lunch at EAA AirVenture, I encouraged my companions to accompany me to a talk by the crew of Southwest 1380 regarding their emergency landing following an uncontained engine failure during a flight from New York to Dallas. “So what,” was one GA pilot’s response. “They ran a checklist.”

It is Labor Day, however. Maybe we can celebrate people who simply show up to work and do whatever it is they were trained to do in the sim.

Was the Southwest 1380 incident truly just like an engine failure in a sim, with the remaining working components of the airliner adding up to a much better aircraft than 99 percent of the planes parked at Oshkosh?

The question was answered by Tammie Jo Shults and Darren Ellisor, captain and first officer appearing side-by-side on stage (see “Captain Tammie is the anti-Sully”).

First officer Darren was the pilot flying when the incident began. He described the autopilot quitting and the airplane rolling to roughly 41 degrees left. He responded by grabbing the yoke and pulling back thrust levers to stop the asymmetric thrust. “I knew we had some kind of engine problem and that we had to start down.”

Captain Tammie said that she remembered the Air France 447 crash in which two pilots gave the plane opposite inputs. The roaring noise from the decompression prevented oral communication, but once she saw that Darren was on the controls, she used hand signals to show that she was taking her hands off. Both pilots described vibration severe enough to make it difficult to read instruments or checklists.

Tammie continued to display her anti-Sully personality by explaining that the only reason she took over the controls was that Southwest requires captains to land emergency aircraft. She credited Darren with being perfectly competent to fly the plane and also with identifying Philadelphia as the best destination. She took over after most of the descent was complete and that left her to fly and handle radio calls while he ran the checklists.

The pilots noted that tasks in the cockpit kept them too busy to contact the flight attendants and explain what was going to happen. “Our first contact with the flight attendants was at 8,000’ [after coming down from 32,500’].” That meant roughly 15 minutes in which folks in the back had no idea whether they were going to walk down stairs at an airport or land in a cornfield. (See “Southwest 1380: think about the flight attendants”)

In addition to highlighting the efforts of the cabin crew, Captain Tammie recognized two passengers for heroism. “These guys left their oxygen masks and families to try to try to pull Jennifer [Riordan] back into the plane,” she said. “They took the risk of being pulled out themselves in the event of additional structural failure, which they had no way of predicting.”

(The passengers were able to get Ms. Riordan back into the plane after the airliner had slowed down and turned base, but unfortunately she died from her injuries.)

Once the oxygen masks were on and the plane was slowed down, did it fly like the sim then? No. There was a lot of extra drag on the left side. Darren explained that the failed engine’s cowling had spread out “like a thrust reverse” and that fragments had damaged the leading edge of the wing. It was difficult to make right turns and he later said that he wasn’t sure if the plane could have held altitude on one engine, even at 200 knots.

Partly due to the circumstances and partly due to Air Traffic Control’s repeated requests for the same information after every frequency change (e.g., souls and fuel on board), the crew finished only 1 checklist (“severe damage”) out of 7 that Darren thought should have been run.

The landing was uneventful despite the fueled-for-Dallas plane being 10,000 lbs over max landing weight. In keeping with the U.S. love for security and bureaucracy, Tammie said “the first person to come onboard the aircraft was FBI.” (i.e., the first people to enter the landed plane were not EMTs to help Jennifer Riordan).

Asked by an audience member why they didn’t ignore ATC’s requests for information after the first answered one, Tammie explained that they were afraid being intercepted by fighters.

There was continued confusion after landing regarding which frequencies to use to talk to the fire and rescue personnel at the Philadelphia airport.

Sidenote: both pilots are huge fans of Boeing and consider the 737 MAX to be perfectly safe. “I’d put him on it any time,” said Darren regarding the young son who’d accompanied him to Oshkosh. Boeing desperately needs to hire these two!

Both pilots are back at Southwest. Darren has completed the upgrade to captain that had been scheduled for shortly after the 1380 incident. Captain Tammie went back to work 3.5 weeks after the engine failure “because I wanted a little slice of normal. Getting back and getting to fly again was great.” She hand flies to 18,000’ for proficiency.

Jeff Skiles, first officer of “Miracle on the Hudson” US Airways 1549, was in the audience, attending Oshkosh mostly for the same reasons as everyone else.

Related:

  • Nerves of Steel (remember that publishers choose the title, not authors!) comes out in October. Darren Ellisor is mentioned even in the Amazon blurb on the book, so I don’t think this can be said to be an attempt to turn this into a single-pilot incident.
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Ten years since Deepwater Horizon set a depth record

by philg

This month marks the 10th anniversary of Deepwater Horizon setting a record by drilling a 35,000′-deep hole (a few months later, of course, we got to see the unfortunate flip side of the edge of engineering success).

I’ll use the occasion to relate some notes from reading The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea, a book that isn’t a single narrative story, but contains some interesting facts across a range of domains.

The Gulf is the origin of the Gulf Stream:

The Stream builds from a vigorous loop current in the Gulf, formed from the heat and energy of the Yucatán and Caribbean currents and the sun. … “Christopher Columbus found the way to the New World, but Ponce de León found the way back.”

Florida is named for a Spanish “feast of flowers”:

Present-day Floridians prefer to think of the Spaniard as coming upon a land that spoke to him with the colors, fragrance, and, indeed, flowers of subtropical exuberance. It’s a quaint notion that says less about a conquistador’s inclinations than about a contemporary people who use the orderly landscaping around their homes and in their parks to picture early Florida, and know little of the harsh wildness that the Spanish often engaged in North America. Ponce de León’s view of the shore would have taken in dune grass, vine-tangled forests, and long stretches of scrubland of virtually impassable saw palmettos. There would have been few flowers. As devout Roman Catholics, the Spanish often named a place for the religious day on which they discovered it. If the expedition had made landfall farther north, then Delaware or New Jersey, still waiting for spring flowers, might be known today as Florida.

Native Americans knew about the invaders, but apparently could not get organized to stop them, even though the Spanish were generally clueless (they did not find the mouth of the Mississippi River for many decades after one would have expected them to).

Thousands of natives lived on the Gulf coast at the time, with strong defenses and effective communication networks that reached great distances across land and water. Seafaring people, they did not live in primitive isolation, as the Spanish assumed. Their world reached beyond horizons. Indeed, they knew of the Spanish before the Spanish knew of them. They were aware of the enslaving and killing of Indians in the Bahamas, Hispaniola, and Cuba. Shipwrecks, too, so common in the age, gave away the presence of others. Flotsam had been washing onto Indian shores around the Gulf since the early days of European exploration, and the “gear of foreign dead men,” to quote T. S. Eliot, sometimes included dead men themselves, their faces oddly covered with hair and their bodies weighted with clothing. On occasion, a live one crawled onto the beach, revealing even more about the foreigners. The first time Ponce de León met the Calusa, whom he knew nothing about, a native greeted his expedition with Spanish words.

The natives, fed on oysters, were taller and healthier than the Spanish, who initially starved on the Gulf coast due to their inability to harvest the resources. (Watermelon was among the crops being grown by Indians.) Industrial fishing by Europeans peaked circa 1900 and the fish population has never recovered. Rich men and women (no other gender IDs are mentioned) came down from the Northeast on the new railroads and hunted for 200+ lb. tarpon in the Gulf. These fish were becoming “scarce and shy” by 1895.

Between 1880 and 1933, Louisiana surrendered 3.5 million alligators to the market; Florida, twice as many. The alligator and egret populations went into tailspins simultaneously. The difference was that hardly anyone cared about the welfare of alligators; their one salvation was the plume market. … The Great War between nations redirected resources away from civilian markets and fashion. Women’s outfits shed several yards of cloth, and hats grew smaller, in part to complement the latest bobbed hairstyle and accommodate new enclosed automobile designs. When women working the red-light districts, which were booming around military installations, took a fancy to feather-wear, women of proper society boxed up their plume hats for fear of mistaken identity. Vanity once again succeeded where moral persuasion had not.

The origins of modern beachfront high-rise development on the Gulf dates to the 1928 opening of the Don CeSar Hotel on “deep-set concrete pyramid footings” in St. Pete Beach, Florida. The wind-filled enemies of these buildings are named after the Mayan god Huracan. (Hurricane Ike did $50 billion of damage to Galveston and surrounding areas in 2008.) Despite the hurricanes, the population of Florida has grown from 3 million in 1950 to more than 20 million today. The author says that mosquito control, notably from DDT, was critical for this expansion.

How did the practice of flying into hurricanes originate?

Airborne weather chasers were invaluable for tracking hurricanes. The first storm cowboy in history lifted off from Bryan Field in Texas during World War II. His name was Joseph Duckworth, a flight instructor in the US Army Air Corps. The storm that earned him recognition as the original hurricane hunter was another Gulf native. It organized on a July day in 1943, one hundred miles south of the Mississippi coast. At the time, Duckworth was training British airmen in instrument flight using the AT-6 Texan single-engine trainer. Experienced combat pilots, the Brits hated the Texan, a decrepit airplane beneath their expertise. When the July hurricane prompted an order to evacuate the planes from Bryan Field, their disdain for the aircraft deepened. The AT-6 wasn’t worth saving at the risk of British lives, the trainees said. Coming to its defense, Duckworth set out to prove both the plane’s sturdiness and the merits of instrument navigation. He wagered a highball with the Brits that he could fly the AT-6 into the hurricane and live to tell about it. Without official permission, he and a navigator, Lieutenant Colonel Ralph O’Hair, belted in, took off, and bored into the black wall of the storm, where, O’Hair later said, they were “tossed about like a stick in a dog’s mouth.” They discovered the eye—calm and quiet, ten miles across—and saw the ground below. After circling inside, they plunged back through the wild darkness.

It was Lyndon Johnson who transferred responsibility for dealing with the Mississippi and the New Orleans levees from the state to the Federal government:

When Katrina hurled its way through New Orleans forty years from the day Betsy was identified as a hurricane, bureaucracy, scandals, and insufficient funds had left the Corps’s levee project a work still in progress.

Shipwreck was a constant hazard:

The Coast Survey’s Ferdinand Gerdes reported bitterly that within fifteen minutes of a ship’s running up on a reef, “five or six vessels under the denomination of wreckers” would converge on it like ants at a June picnic. In turn, making navigation safer jeopardized the wreckers’ lucrative vocation. Legend has it that these “honest-looking men” tore down the Survey’s beacons and markers, and lit phony lighthouse signals to abet disaster.

Thanks to the miracle of immigration (from other U.S. states as well as from foreign countries), Floridians today live in Puerto Ricans of the 1950s:

As buildings, modern-day condominiums became attractive in places where the population had outgrown the availability of land, … Puerto Rico, where condominiums had served the crowded island commonwealth since the 1950s, exported its building ideas to south Florida. When Congress allowed the Federal Housing Administration to insure mortgages on condominiums, construction took off. By the late 1960s, so-called supertowers were stacking humanity as high as fifty stories. To Florida developers, condominiums were an ingenious way to sell a single waterfront lot to fifty, a hundred, or more buyers. … At the millennium, Cape Coral was the fastest growing US city, with a population of 100,000 or more. Pricey Sanibel had an untaxing population density of 356 people per square mile, allowing the coexistence of human and wildlife habitation. Affordable Fort Myers had 2,065 people per square mile and Sarasota 3,540, allowing little more than the coexistence of humans and concrete.

I had hoped to get a definitive explanation of the red tide phenomenon that renders Gulf Coast beaches noxious for quite a few weeks per year. Red tide seems to be fueled by human discharges, but the precise mechanism does not seem to be understood.

A map in the 1954 Gulf study conducted by the US Public Health Service uses building-shaped icons to show the placement of wastewater treatment plants in the region. They’re all on bays and rivers. Black icons indicate plants dumping poorly treated waste, and from Corpus Christi to Naples, they are bunched up like flies on an outhouse.17 The study also mentions red tides, natural warm-water algal blooms that discolor the surface with a veneer of red, brown, or green. In that pivotal decade of the 1950s, scientists were noticing more of these noxious events in the Gulf. Red tides irritate people’s eyes and lungs and leave heaps of dead sea life on the beach. Manatees are especially hard-hit. Cabeza de Vaca may have seen outbreaks in Texas, and Diego Lopez de Collogudo, a Franciscan monk, chronicled what was likely a red tide striking Yucatán in 1648: a “foul odor” and “mountain of dead fish.” Experts regard an 1844 event on the Florida panhandle, near where Leonard Destin fished, as the first documented red tide, although no one knew what it was. “Poison water,” people called the events. A 1935 outbreak off South Padre Island that killed two-inch mullet, eight-foot tarpon, and everything in between left researchers flummoxed.18 Then, after a 1947 red tide devastated most of the sponge beds, from which Tarpon Springs never fully recovered, microscope-peering scientists determined that the malicious rafts of algae discharge a toxin that paralyzes the respiratory system of marine life. But they didn’t know how or why, or from where exactly the red tides originate. To control red tides, scientists tried dousing a few with copper sulfate. This only killed more fish. In the 1980s and ’90s, off the south Florida and south Texas coasts, red tides bloomed in higher numbers. As it happened, ranchers in Texas were raising more cattle than ever, and slaughterhouse capacity doubled. In Florida, the exploding residential population ignited a chain reaction in lawn fertilizer use, facilitated by ambrosial garden centers at big-box stores like Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Wal-Mart and monthly lawn treatment service provided by companies like TruGreen and Scotts. Some scientists were connecting the intensity of red tides to green grass, purgative cows, and gushing sewer pipes, vexing some of their colleagues, who claimed that evidence didn’t exist to confirm the connections. The press reported algal blooms as one of nature’s cruel mysteries, and sometimes falsely identified pollution-induced fish kills as red tide, incriminating nature instead of the actual offender.

The author characterizes humans as generally trashing the Gulf. The author says that a Proctor & Gamble (owners of Gillette!) diaper factory in Florida has done far more damage to the Gulf than Deepwater Horizon, but nobody seems to care. In addition to the obvious pollution, agricultural runoff from the Midwest creates massive dead zones within the gulf.

TIME’S 1988 “FILTHY SEAS” cover story noted what it called dead zones. There were a few in nearshore waters around the US, all modest in size compared with one, which was three hundred miles long and ten wide and “adrift in the Gulf of Mexico.” Over the next few years, this lifeless region, fronting the coast of Louisiana, reaching to eastern Texas in one direction and to Alabama in the other, would grow to the size of New Jersey. It lingered as more or less a giant underwater vacuum chamber sucked clean of dissolved oxygen.

All manner of sea life that didn’t get out when conditions turned stale met the same suffocating fate. The bottom was littered with the dead—a tragic wasteland of crab, mollusk, and sea worm remains. It was

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Northwest Passage fairly open this year

by philg

Two of the passengers on Roald Amundsen were on a voyage last year on Fram that had to turn back due to ice in the Northwest Passage. This year we found enough ice to prevent driving through the Bellot Strait as planned, but Amundsen’s 1903 route down through Peel Sound was passable, especially with the assistance of Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Terry Fox (thank you, Canadian taxpayers!).

We stopped at Beechey Island, the lonely site of some Franklin Expedition graves:

Then it was time to head south, following a Canadian cruise ship that was following the icebreaker.

Wildlife sightings so far: a few fin whales, five polar bear, perhaps 30 seals, many seabirds.

Weather today in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut: right around freezing with a 40-knot wind. Thanks to Bell Canada for the LTE service:

Regarding the proper term for the locals, one said “Eskimo is a Cree or Algonquin word meaning ‘eater of raw meat.’ That’s not who I am. Though of course I do love to eat raw meat.”

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Science says that success cannot be inherited genetically

by philg

An enduring source of amusement is watching people who have a scientific perspective (and oftentimes actual training in science) throw rocks at the religious for being irrationally dogmatic.

Part of the dogma of the politically righteous today in the U.S. is that success cannot be inherited genetically. The children of the rich tend to be rich, but that is because they got cash from their parents (Exhibit A: Donald Trump!), not because they have personal characteristics that resembles their successful parents’ personal characteristics.

When this has been carefully studied, e.g., in The Son Also Rises, it turns out that success does behave like other genetically inherited characteristics. The child of successful parents has roughly the same chance of becoming successful regardless of the number of siblings who are present to dilute any financial inheritance.

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer is a great illustration of this dogma. The book goes on at length regarding things that can be inherited genetically. But then we get an economics lesson on inequality:

Raj Chetty, a Stanford economist, has estimated that Americans born in 1940 had a 90 percent chance of making more money than their parents at age thirty. But Chetty and his colleagues have found that those odds then steadily dropped. Americans born in 1984 had only a 50 percent chance of making more than their parents. The shift was not the result of the United States suddenly running out of money. It’s just that wealthy Americans have been taking much of the extra money the economy has generated in recent decades. Chetty’s research suggests that if the recent economic growth in the United States was distributed more broadly, most of the fading he has found would disappear. “The rise in inequality and the decline in absolute mobility are closely linked,” he and his colleagues reported in 2017. Inheritance has helped push open that gulf. About two-thirds of parental income differences among Americans persist into the next generation. Economists have found that American children who are born to parents in the ninetieth percentile of earners will grow up to make three times more than children of the tenth percentile. This inheritance is not simply what parents leave in their wills but the things that they can buy for their children as they grow up. In the United States, affluent parents can afford a house in a good public school district, or even private school tuition. They can pay for college test prep classes to increase the odds their children will get into good colleges. And if they do get in, their parents can cover more of their college tuitions. Poor parents have fewer means to prepare their children to get into college. Even if their children do get accepted, they have fewer funds, and they’re more vulnerable to layoffs or medical bankruptcy. Their children may graduate saddled with steep college debts or drop out before getting a degree. The gifts that children inherit can keep coming well into adulthood. Parents may help cover the cost of law school, or write a check to help out with a septic tank that failed just after their children bought their first house. Protected from catastrophes that can wipe out bank accounts, young adults from affluent families can get started sooner on building their own wealth. Inheritance also goes a long way to explain the gap in wealth between races in the United States. In 2013, the median white American household had thirteen times the wealth of the median black household, and ten times that of the median Latino household.

Whites are five times as likely to receive major gifts from relatives, and when they do, their value is much greater. These gifts can, among other things, allow white college students to graduate with much less debt than blacks or Latinos. And the effects of these inheritances have compounded through the generations as blacks and Latinos were left outside the wealth feedback loop that benefited white families.

In looking at how the children of those in the top 10 percent do, the author does not consider the possibility that the parents reached the top 10 percent due to genetic fitness for the current economic environment. (e.g., a fondness for sitting at a desk looking at numbers on a computer screen!). So it is our cruel economic system alone that dooms children of the least successful parents to mediocre incomes. If a third generation of a family whose first and second generations were on welfare (public housing, Medicaid, food stamps, and Obamaphone) elects to continue the welfare lifestyle, this is because the parents and grandparents couldn’t provide an inheritance.

It is not the beliefs that are interesting so much as the fact that the author can’t see this dogma conflicts with all of the science that he presented in the previous pages. Perhaps the UC Davis econ professor who did The Son Also Rises got it wrong, but what’s interesting is that apparently nobody can dare to consider the possibility that he got it right.

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Kate Atkinson on modern romance and marriage

by philg

Indulging in a mystery for this cruise… From Big Sky by Kate Atkinson:

She was good at what she did—acrylics, gels, shellac, nail art—and was proud of the attention she gave to her job, even if trade was sparse. It was the first thing she’d ever done that didn’t involve selling her body in one way or another. Marriage to Tommy was a financial transaction too, of course, but to Crystal’s way of thinking, you could be lap dancing for the fat sweaty patron of a so-called gentlemen’s club or you could be greeting Tommy Holroyd with a peck on the cheek and hanging his jacket up before laying his dinner before him. It was all part of the same spectrum as far as Crystal was concerned, but she knew which end of it she preferred. And, to quote Tina Turner, what does love have to do with it? Fig all, that was what. There was no shame in marrying for money—money meant security. Women had been doing it since time began. You saw it on all the nature programs on TV—build me the best nest, do the most impressive dance for me, bring me shells and shiny things. And Tommy was more than happy with the arrangement—she cooked for him, she had sex with him, she kept house for him. And in return she woke up every morning and felt one step further away from her old self. History, in Crystal’s opinion, was something that was best left behind where it belonged.

Modern physical appearance?

Crystal was hovering around thirty-nine years old and it took a lot of work to stay in this holding pattern. She was a construction, made from artificial materials—the acrylic nails, the silicone breasts, the polymer eyelashes. A continually renewed fake tan and a hairpiece fixed into her bleached-blond hair completed the synthetic that was Crystal.

A man whose daughter has just finished high school…

He was grinding toward fifty and for the last three months he had been living in a one-bedroom flat behind a fish-and-chip shop, ever since Wendy turned to him one morning over his breakfast muesli—he’d been on a short-lived health kick—and said, “Enough’s enough, don’t you think, Vince?,” leaving him slack-mouthed with astonishment over his Tesco Finest Berry and Cherry. Ashley had just set off on her gap year, backpacking around Southeast Asia with her surfer boyfriend. As far as Vince could tell, “gap year” meant the lull between him funding her expensive private school and funding her expensive university, a remission that was nonetheless still costing him her airfares and a monthly allowance.

As soon as Ashley had fledged, on an Emirates flight to Hanoi, Wendy reported to Vince that their marriage was dead. Its corpse wasn’t even cold before she was internet dating like a rabbit on speed, leaving him to dine off fish and chips most nights and wonder where it all went wrong. (Tenerife, three years ago, apparently.) “I got you some cardboard boxes from Costcutter to put your stuff in,” she said as he stared uncomprehendingly at her. “Don’t forget to clear out your dirty clothes from the basket in the utility room. I’m not doing any more laundry for you, Vince. Twenty-one years a slave. It’s enough.” This, then, was the return on sacrifice. You worked all the hours God gave, driving hundreds of miles a week in your company car, hardly any time for yourself, so your daughter could take endless selfies in Angkor Wat or wherever and your wife could report that for the last year she had been sneaking around with a local café owner who was also one of the lifeboat crew, which seemed to sanction the liaison in her eyes. (“Craig risks his life every time he goes out on a shout. Do you, Vince?” Yes, in his own way.) It clipped at your soul, clip, clip, clip.

He had trudged through his life for his wife and daughter, more heroically than they could imagine, and this was the thanks he received. Couldn’t be a coincidence that “trudge” rhymed with “drudge.” He had presumed that there was a goal to be reached at the end of all the trudging, but it turned out that there was nothing—just more trudging.

Despite being 67, Atkinson is familiar with Internet app culture:

Craig, the lifeboat man, had been jettisoned apparently in favor of the smorgasbord of Tinder.

The book is consistent with the Real World Divorce section on England:

“If only I’d listened to my poor mother,” Wendy said as she itemized the belongings he was allowed to take with him. Wendy who was getting so much money in the settlement that Vince barely had enough left for his golf-club fees. “Best I can do, Vince,” Steve Mellors said, shaking his head sadly. “Matrimonial law, it’s a minefield.” Steve was handling Vince’s divorce for him for free, as a favor, for which Vince was more than grateful. Steve was a corporate lawyer over in Leeds, and didn’t usually “dabble in divorce.” Neither do I, Vince thought, neither do I.

Now that regular novels are mostly about LGBTQIA characters and people with glamorous urban jobs, maybe mystery novels will end up being the best record of cisgender heterosexual working class life in the 21st century? Certainly they have always covered people in social classes ignored by writers of typical literary novels.

More: Read Big Sky (or start with the first book in the series, Case Histories)

Related:

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In 20 years, will anyone roll the dice on a naturally conceived child?

by philg

A human parent’s biggest fear is having a child with a genetic disorder (though the most commonly expressed fear on Facebook is of Donald Trump winning a second term!).

Technology is bringing us pretty close to eliminating this fear and giving us a bewildering array of options.

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer reminds the reader of the diversity in sperm and egg cells due to meiosis:

In men, meiosis takes place within a labyrinth of tubes coiled within the testicles. The tube walls are lined with sperm precursor cells, each carrying two copies of each chromosome—one from the man’s mother, the other from his father. When these cells divide, they copy all their DNA, so that now they have four copies of each chromosome. Rather than drawing apart from each other, however, the chromosomes stay together. A maternal and paternal copy of each chromosome line up alongside each other. Proteins descend on them and slice the chromosomes, making cuts at precisely the same spots. As the cell repairs these self-inflicted wounds, a remarkable exchange can take place. A piece of DNA from one chromosome may get moved to the same position in the other, its own place taken by its counterpart. This molecular surgery cannot be rushed. All told, a cell may need three weeks to finish meiosis. Once it’s done, its chromosomes pull away from each other. The cell then divides twice, to make four new sperm cells. Each of the four cells inherits a single copy of all twenty-three chromosomes. But each sperm cell contains a different assembly of DNA. One source of this difference comes from how the pairs of chromosomes get separated. A sperm might contain the version of chromosome 1 that a man inherited from his father, chromosome 2 from his mother, and so on. Another sperm might have a different combination. At the same time, some chromosomes in a sperm are hybrids. Thanks to meiosis, a sperm cell’s copy of chromosome 1 might be a combination of DNA from both his mother and father.

A particular child of two parents, therefore, is just one choice from a near-infinite array of genetic possibilities assembled from the four grandparents. That’s what comes out when a baby is conceived naturally. What if parents were given the opportunity to choose from hundreds of possible outcomes?

In 2012, the Japanese biologist Katsuhiko Hayashi managed to coax induced pluripotent stem cells to develop into the progenitors of eggs. If he implanted them in the ovaries of female mice, they could finish maturing. Over the next few years, Hayashi perfected the procedure, transforming mouse skin cells into eggs entirely in a dish. When he fertilized the eggs, some of them developed into healthy mouse pups. Other researchers have figured out how to make sperm from skin cells taken from adult mice.

Nevertheless, the success that Yamanaka and other researchers have had with animals is grounds for optimism—or worry, depending on what you think about how we might make use of this technology. It’s entirely possible that, before long, scientists will learn how to swab the inside of people’s cheeks and transform their cells into sperm or eggs, ready for in vitro fertilization. If scientists can perfect this process—called in vitro gametogenesis—it will probably be snapped up by fertility doctors. Harvesting mature eggs from women remains a difficult, painful undertaking. It would be far easier for women to reprogram one of their skin cells into an egg. It would also mean that both women and men who can’t make any sex cells at all wouldn’t need a donor to have a child.

Today, parents who use in vitro fertilization can choose from about half a dozen embryos. In vitro gametogenesis might offer them a hundred or more. Shuffling combinations of genes together so many times could produce a much bigger range of possibilities.

But the implications of in vitro gametogenesis go far beyond these familiar scenarios—to ones that Hermann Muller never would have thought of. Induced pluripotent stem cells have depths of possibilities that scientists have just started to investigate. Men, for instance, might be able to produce eggs. A homosexual couple might someday be able to combine gametes, producing children who inherited DNA from both of them. One man might produce both eggs and sperm, combining them to produce a family—not a family of clones, but one in which each child draws a different combination of alleles. It would give the term single-parent family a whole new meaning.

Here’s a yet more science fiction-y possibility… The highest fertility among Americans is in the lowest income mothers, i.e., those who are on welfare. The government will be paying for 100 percent of the costs of any children produced by these mothers: housing, health care, food, education, etc. Once grown up, these children are likely to be low earners and therefore on welfare themselves (see The Son Also Rises). What if the government begins to run out of borrowing capacity and decides that it needs to fund future taxpayers, not future welfare recipients? The tendency to work and pay taxes is as heritable as anything else. So the government offers financial inducements to mothers who agree to abort children conceived with low-income men and instead incubate embryos provided by the government. Said embryos to be carefully screened such that the moms are almost guaranteed to have a physically and mentally healthy child and the government is almost guaranteed to get an adult that enjoys working and paying taxes.

Readers: What do you think? In 2040 or 2050 will there be anyone willing to roll the genetic dice by having sex and seeing what kind of baby comes out?

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Adventures in the U.S. health care system

by philg

In case of crazy weather on our Greenland-to-Alaska cruise (through what used to be called the “Northwest Passage” and is now the “Trump Global Warming (TM) Passage”), I decided to fortify myself with some scopolamine patches. A physician friend wrote me a prescription for 8 patches, each of which can last for three days, but sometimes they come off in the shower, etc.

Wikipedia dates the medication to 1881. The brand name patches were about $340. Thanks to the patent (presumably on the delivery mechanism) having expired, the generics are available for only… $275.

We pay the big $$ for Blue Cross/Blue Shield coverage, so I had the pharmacy run my card. Coverage was denied due to a mismatch in name/gender/relationship that could not be further explained. It was a Saturday, so calling Member Services was unsuccessful.

On Monday, I invested some time in calling Blue Cross, which invested some money in paying a woman to deal with me. She explained that the pharmacy had “rung me in” with two Ls in my first name and with a gender of “female” (of course I asked how many additional gender options there were and she was familiar with only “male” and “female”; where is the LGBTQIA enthusiasm?) It should be a $10 co-pay for a 30-day supply.

After visiting four different pharmacies, I found one that had two packages of the patches in stock. They said that the insurance company would pay them $154, which means that the total price would be $165 (a 40% discount off the $275 that would have been charged to the struggling uninsured person!).

To me this is a great example of how the 18 percent of GDP that is purportedly for “health care” is illusory in terms of benefits to Americans. Absent FDA regulation, the generic patches would have cost $20-40 (8 cost about $60 in the Canadian regulatory environment). It took a week and the efforts of multiple people to get this organized. As soon as the doc wrote the prescription, why didn’t the patches show up a few days later via a standard ecommerce retail process?

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