This week…
The storm came. A tree fell. And the power is still out. Apologies if this issue does not show up well-formatted.
Anyway, here’s a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Playing god with pork
Jonathan Grinstein for NEO.LIFE:
As it turns out, genetically engineered pig organs actually cost far more than human organs at the moment—a measure of the fact that experimental xenotransplantation animals are grown in carefully controlled settings. Raising genetically engineered pigs in pristine, quarantined, and secure conditions is expensive. The caretakers for the pigs have to wear what are essentially spacesuits to ensure the animals don’t get an infection, and they have to check the pigs frequently to make sure they’re not carrying diseases.
Harvard geneticist George Church points out that the cost of a heart transplant in the United States is around $1.66 million, according to the most recent estimates, while pig transplants, judging solely on the cost of the pig heart transplants for baboons, are a comparative steal at just $500,000. Human organs themselves are cheaper, largely because the organs are donated free of charge by living or deceased donors, but the cost of transplanting a human organ is more expensive because of the cost associated with keeping a deceased donor’s organs viable during transport and flying out transplant surgeons and other experts on a moment’s notice.
But where the financial scales really get upended is when you start to look at transplant waitlists and the cost in human suffering that stems from having such a limited number of donated organs. With pig organ transplants, people may no longer have to wait in an intensive care unit for three months or more, which is the current average wait time for a donor’s heart—or be on dialysis for seven years or more as they wait for a kidney to come available. And the cost in terms of human lives is even greater. Organ waiting lists are long, and they are tragically withering.
We need to take back our privacy
Zeynep Tufekci for NYT:
Surveillance made possible by minimally-regulated digital technologies could help law enforcement track down women who might seek abortions and medical providers who perform them in places where it would become criminalized. Women are urging one another to delete phone apps like period trackers that can indicate they are pregnant.
But frantic individual efforts to swat away digital intrusions will do too little. What’s needed, for all Americans, is a full legal and political reckoning with the reckless manner in which digital technology has been allowed to invade our lives. The collection, use and manipulation of electronic data must finally be regulated and severely limited. Only then can we comfortably enjoy all the good that can come from these technologies.
And,
When I started saying [that our digital infrastructure has become the infrastructure of authoritarianism] awhile back, many people would tell me that I was conflating the situation in China with that of Western countries where such surveillance is usually undertaken for commercial purposes and we have limits to what governments would want to do. I always thought: If you build it they will come for it. Criminalization of abortion may well be the first wide-scale test of this, but even if that doesn’t come to pass, we’re just biding our time.
Elon Musk’s silence on how he’d moderate the Buffalo shooting livestream is deafening
Corin Faife for The Verge:
On May 14th, social media platforms found themselves scrambling to deal with a livestream video of a white supremacist terror attack. Yet the man who has been the nation’s loudest commentator on content moderation had nothing to say.
Under Elon Musk’s view of content moderation, any restriction on speech beyond what the law proscribes is censorship. And by that standard, the video of the attack in Buffalo — however graphic — should have remained on the platform since videos of graphic violence are not illegal speech. In practice, platforms were criticized for being too slow to remove them, and Musk found no need to weigh in on the debate.
What I read, watch, and listen to…
I’m reading evidence that Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins self-medicate with invertebrates in coral reefs by Gertrud E. Morlock et al. on iScience.
I’m watching, the chuckle that has been heard across the world. Vile.
More stray links:
Opinion: Why Jeff Bezos’ anti-Biden tweets are so dumb by Jack Shafer for POLITICO.
In praise of idleness by Bertrand Russell on Harper’s Magazine.
Kate Eichhorn on the rise of Insta-artists and Insta-poets for LitHub.
Chart of the week
From Anna Fleck’s piece on Statista on global organ donation rates: