That snowy mountain beckons after 75

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On the needless prolongation of life

Dr Ezekiel J. Emanuel is an American oncologist, bioethicist, and public intellectual who came to prominence through his work on medical ethics and health policy. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he served as a senior health adviser in the Obama administration and has long been a sharp critic of what he calls the American obsession with longevity.

In a widely discussed essay, Why I Hope to Die at 75, published in The Atlantic, Emanuel argued that medical progress has become a kind of trap. By continually extending life through ever more invasive and expensive treatments, he said, modern medicine too often condemns people to long periods of physical decline and cognitive decay.

His proposal was not about suicide or euthanasia, but about choosing to stop aggressive medical intervention once life’s natural arc has passed its peak of creativity, productivity, and vitality. Beyond that point, we are merely adding years without adding life.

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I’m now in my mid-seventies, just the age Dr Emanuel was talking about. Over the last decade or so I have visited many care homes housing the old, the very weak and sick, and the demented - often all three. Some recalled Hieronymus Bosch’s vision of hell, with lounges lined with warehoused old dears nodding and drooling to some rhythm only they could discern. The best ones resembled hotels, with at least some of the residents alert enough to resent the bored and patronising young staff, playing infantile memory games - always in the lounge - to 'stave off dementia'.

I remember my mother in her mid-eighties, a widow living alone in an empty council house north of Bristol, miles from her nearest relatives, confiding to me that she had stashed some of her medication away: she would never, ever go into a home.

Five years later, of course, she was in the home where many months later she died, barely aware that the house she had cried copious tears to be returned to had been handed back to the council and now housed other people.

Let me just state for the record that I feel equally her horror, and would hope that I would choose to ascend that snowy mountain, to watch that last, solitary sunset, and not hasten to descend.

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An honest epitaph

I'm not sure that human beings are intrinsically selfish except in the 'selfish gene' concept, where genes (alleles) inhabit multiple related individuals (and this). But the rest seems spot on. Click on the image to make it larger.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-05-24

Some variant might work on  my headstone, I'm thinking.

Machine intelligence will eat us - right?

Currently reading Absolution Gap (Alastair Reynolds) on the Kindle and Greg Bear's 'The Forge of God' to Clare as her book after dinner. In both cases we're dealing with implacable, malevolent machine intelligences which destroy intelligent biological life. Worry about the existential threat of future AI systems seems very trendy recently.

The Inhibitors - Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space

Greg Bear's 'The Forge of God'

Here's the problem: to build a half-decent robot system currently needs a high-tech society of hundreds of millions of people; to build a person requires only untrained labour in a natural environment.

Everyone knows that living creatures are made up of cells (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen mostly). What is not commonly known is just how intricate a cell is - a tiny object capable of self-construction and self-replication. How does it do that, and how did this marvel of nano-engineering ever get started? I discussed Nick Lane's informed (and jaw-dropping) account a few weeks back.

The alleged dangers of future AIs comes about because of their faster learning, superior computational abilities and more powerful bodies. But does anyone know how to create an artificial analogue of cells with those desirable properties? I don't think so.

Absent that, our future machine overlords are going to look like a totally mechanised version of today's human societies: massive fully-automated fabs, battery factories, steel and aluminium smelters, and all the rest.

Sounds brittle and cumbersome to me - I feel sure we could take them down*.

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* Bomb them back to the stone age and they're toast.

How life got started from nothing at all

Our brains are wired to see life as something special, something fundamentally other than the rocks and stones we see in deserts, on the Moon and on Mars. Yet life is not beyond science, beyond rationality; in essence life is a special kind of chemistry, exploiting the physical properties of membranes, catalysts and energy flows. Yet it's always been hard to see how rocks and oceans on the early Earth could have produced self-replicating biochemical structures with a potential for complexity.

Nick Lane thinks he knows how it happened, written up in his new book "The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?".

Here is part of The Telegraph's review.

"The Vital Question ... consists of four parts: an exploration of the nature of life and living; a deep dive into life's origin and the emergence of cells; an account of how complex, or eukaryotic, cells arose and why sex and death are inevitable; and a final part that entertains some predictions as to life's future possibilities.

There's a well-known saying in biology: "nothing in life makes sense except in the light of evolution". Lane might amend that to "nothing in life makes sense except in the light of energetics". The discoveries of the structure of DNA, the genetic code and all that follows have been vital in building a better understanding of life and how it changes over time. But no less important, Lane argues, is the discovery - once described as "the most counterintuitive idea in biology since Darwin" - that cross-membrane proton gradients power all living cells. This may sound like a technical detail until one considers the power it unleashes: almost incredibly, it is, per gram, a factor of 10,000 more than the sun. Further, the fact that this mechanism is conserved across all life has vital implications for its origins, constraints and possibilities.

Lane works through these implications. He hypothesises that life originated at alkaline vents at the bottom of the ocean as early as four billion years ago. Lane and his colleagues have previously published on this subject in Nature magazine. Here it is set out with compelling clarity for the general reader.

He then explores the evolution of the eukaryotic cells that form all animals, plants, fungi and algae. "I challenge you to look at one of your cells down a microscope and distinguish it from the cells of a mushroom," writes Lane. "They are practically identical. I don't live much like a mushroom so why are my cells so similar?"

The answer, he argues, has a lot to do with our shared dependence on mitochondria, tiny organelles inside each of our cells that act like batteries, and which are descended from a bacterium that was once swallowed but not consumed by an archaeon. Lane argues that this union and subsequent symbiosis was a freak event. It took place only once, giving rise to virtually every living thing we can see.

Lane concludes that complex life is likely to be rare in the universe — "There is no innate tendency in natural selection to give rise to humans or any other forms of complex life," he writes. "It is far more likely to get stuck at the bacterial level of complexity." He adds that he cannot, however, put a statistical probability on that."

I am in two minds about this book. Lane has a compelling and convincing story to tell, and what could be more important than to see how life could emerge from the inanimate through plausible stages?

But that little biochemical nanomachine called a cell is very complex, much more complex than a car engine. You do have to delve into the details of the piece-parts to engage with this subject. For people without any background in cell biology how easy is that? It's the same problem in all areas of fundamental science: understanding isn't a simple extrapolation of everyone's common sense and experience - you really do have to learn something first and to concentrate.

So I doubt that all the people who generically 'would like to know how it is that life can get started on a planet' will actually engage with and complete this book. But with some degree of persistence (and, to be fair, some background) there is no end to the revelations in Nick Lane's analysis. I was reading along while periodically muttering under my breath things like 'Wow! So that's why we age.'

So recommended for those who really do want to know: you will finish the book and the world will be a different place.