Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world by claiming he had helped make the first gene-edited babies. One year later, mystery surrounds his fate as well as theirs. He has not been seen publicly since January, his work has not been published and nothing is known about the health of the babies.
“That’s the story — it’s all cloaked in secrecy, which is not productive for the advance of understanding,” said Stanford bioethicist Dr. William Hurlbut.
He talked with Hurlbut many times before He revealed at a Hong Kong science conference that he had used a tool called CRISPR to alter a gene in embryos to try to help them resist infection with the AIDS virus. The work, which He discussed in exclusive interviews with The Associated Press, was denounced as medically unnecessary and unethical because of possible harm to other genes and because the DNA changes can pass to future generations.
Since then, many people have called for regulations or a moratorium on similar work, but committees have bogged down over who should set standards and how to enforce them.
“Nothing has changed,” said Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a University of Pennsylvania geneticist who just published a book about gene editing and the CRISPR babies case.
“I think we’re farther from governing this” now than a year ago, said Hurlbut, who disapproves of what He did. However, so much effort has focused on demonizing He that it has distracted from how to move forward, he said.
Here’s what’s known about the situation:
He was last seen in early January in Shenzhen, on the balcony of an apartment at his university, which fired him from its faculty after his work became known. Armed guards were in the hall, leading to speculation he was under house arrest.
A few weeks later, China’s official news agency said an investigation had determined that He acted alone out of a desire for fame and would be punished for any violations of law.
Since then, AP‘s efforts to reach him have been unsuccessful. Ryan Ferrell, a media relations person He hired, declined to comment. Ferrell previously said He’s wife had started paying him, which might mean that He is no longer in a position to do that himself.
Hurlbut, who had been in touch with He early this year, declined to say when he last heard from him.
The Chinese investigation seemed to confirm the existence of twin girls whose DNA He said he altered. The report said the twins and people involved in a second pregnancy using a gene-edited embryo would be monitored by government health departments. Nothing has been revealed about the third baby, which should have been born from that second pregnancy in late summer.
Chinese officials have seized the remaining edited embryos and He’s lab records. “He caused unintended consequences in these twins,” Musunuru said of the gene editing. “We don’t know if it’s harming the kids.”
Rice University in Houston said it is still investigating the role of Michael Deem, whose name was on a paper He sent to a journal and who spoke with the AP about He’s work. Deem was He’s adviser when He attended Rice years ago.
The AP and others have reported on additional scientists in the U.S. and China who knew or strongly suspected what He was doing.
“Many people knew, many people encouraged him. He did not do this in a corner,” Hurlbut said.
Scientists recently have found new ways to alter genes that may be safer than CRISPR. Gene editing also is being tested against diseases in children and adults, which is not controversial because those changes don’t pass to future generations. Some scientists think gene editing will become more widely accepted if it’s proved to work in those situations.
“It’s moving forward slowly because it’s being done responsibly,” Musunuru said.
A forum was held in Berkeley, California, last month to get public views on gene editing — everything from modifying mosquitoes and crops to altering embryos.
The National Academy of Sciences recently pulled a video it made after concern arose about how it portrayed the ethically dicey science and its possible use to make designer babies. The academy has been leading some efforts to set standards for gene editing, and it gets most of its funding from the government, although a private grant paid for the video, a spokeswoman said.
An AP/NORC poll last year found that most Americans say it would be OK to use gene-editing to protect babies against disease, but not to change DNA so children are born smarter, faster or taller.
A moratorium is no longer strong enough, and regulation is needed, CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley recently wrote in a commentary in the journal Science. She noted that the World Health Organization has asked regulators in all countries not to allow such experiments, and that a Russian scientist recently proposed one.
“The temptation to tinker” with the DNA of embryos, eggs or sperm “is not going away,” she wrote.
If the thought of taking part in the annual ritual of Black Friday gives you cold chills rather than a rush of excitement, you’re not alone. For every avid bargain hunter who plans for the day as if training for a marathon, there’s someone else who stays home, secure in the knowledge that no one will trample them, shove them or invade their personal space just to get this season’s hottest deals.
It’s not just a lack of appreciation for bargains that drives this disconnect. Psychology research indicates that several factors determine which side of the shop-‘til-you-drop divide you land on. Some people just aren’t wired to enjoy the more social aspects of shopping.
Task-oriented shoppers typically focus on finding the things they need as quickly as possible and with the least amount of effort. Socially oriented shoppers, on the other hand, enjoy the presence of others while they shop.
There is experimental evidence that task-oriented shoppers are more likely to find even a handful of other shoppers nearby to be a crowd and an obstacle to a successful shopping trip. The same research suggests that social shoppers are actually energized by the presence of other consumers. These folks enjoy the experience more when there are others nearby, even if they don’t directly interact.
Another aspect of this shopping divide comes down to individual expectations regarding personal space. Psychology researchers talk about this preference in what they call field theory. If you’ve ever been bothered by a “close-talker” who leans in too close or touches your arm as they tell you a story, then you are likely someone who requires a little more personal space than that storyteller does.
The presence of other shoppers in a store is psychologically arousing for people on both ends of the personal space spectrum, but in different ways. People who don’t require much personal space feel excitement when others are around. That same arousal feels instead like stress to the person who requires a little more space to call their own. And stress is something everyone tries to minimize. Almost everything we do as consumers is an attempt to reduce stress—from eating when we feel hungry to buying that bigger TV you just have to have.
Taken together, these two theories explain a lot about the way you feel about Black Friday-style shopping.
Survival tips for the reluctant shopper
The five-day period that starts on Thanksgiving Day and ends on Cyber Monday will bring about two-thirds of Americans out to shop. Black Friday remains the busiest shopping day of the year, with roughly half Americans leaving their homes to take part in this consumer ritual.
If you read those statistics and think, “Bring it on!” then you are likely a social shopper who enjoys the thrill of the hunt and finds crowds energizing.
If instead, you react to those numbers by booking a root canal so you don’t have to hit the stores, then you’re more likely a task-oriented shopper who prefers to get in and get out with the items you need. You are also more likely to be annoyed by the physical closeness of strangers that is a hallmark of competitive shopping. But don’t call the dentist just yet – there may still be ways for you to comfortably participate in Black Friday and its bargains.
First, make a list of everyone for whom you would like to find a gift. Then do your research on the sales that might help you achieve your goals. Both of those tasks should appeal to the need for organization that task-oriented shoppers tend to exhibit.
Next, recognize that the majority of Black Friday devotees are going for the big bargains first, and that means that they’ll head for the big box and department stores. Instead make your first stops the local boutiques and smaller shops that won’t get as much traffic early in the day.
By the time you’ve taken care of those items on your list, the larger stores will begin to clear out and you can head in. Try avoiding malls and go where you can park close to the store you actually want to visit. Doing this will allow you to feel some degree of control and alleviate some of the stress you feel when you don’t have direction.
By the end of the day, you can check some things off your shopping list and feel good about the bargains you were able to find, all while maintaining your sanity.
And if you’ve read this far merely to better understand why your significant other doesn’t want to join you on this most special of consumer holidays, just acknowledge your psychological differences. You go ahead and tackle Black Friday with the enthusiasm of a natural-born social shopper. Don’t worry about those who resist—they can always snag Cyber Monday bargains from the comfort of home.
A koala that had received global attention after dramatic video footage emerged of its rescue from Australia’s bushfires by a woman who wrapped it in her shirt has died after suffering extensive burns.
Video footage released on Nov. 19 showed the koala, later named Ellenborough Lewis, as it was rescued by Toni Doherty who plucked him from a tree in New South Wales. Doherty tookthe koala to the Koala Hospital in Port Macquarie but the hospital were unable to save him and put him to sleep today as a result of his severe burns.
“In Ellenborough Lewis’s case, the burns did get worse, and unfortunately would not have gotten better,” the hospitalsaid in a statement. “The Koala Hospital’s number one goal is animal welfare, so it was on those grounds that this decision was made.”
The death comes after Deborah Tabert, chairman of theAustralian Koala Foundation, last week estimated that over1,000koalas have perished in the fires ravaging the country in the last two months.
Tabert fears thatthe fires, which have devastated large areas of Australia since Oct. 20, have drastically impacted the already threatened Koala population and their habitat.
Initiallywildlife charitiesestimated that 350 koalas had been killed in the bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland, butTabart has argued that the figure is much higher.
“If we combine all of the estimated deaths of koalas in the bushfires, there could be 1000 koalas that have been killed in the last two months,” Tabart toldDaily Mail Australiaon Nov. 22.
“The bushfires have had a massive impact on their population,” she added. “Because of deforestation and now the bushfires, there is so little habitat left and trees with eucalyptus take months to grow back.” The Australia Koala Foundation believes that there are 18,000 koalas in New South Wales alone.
Deforestation in Australia has meant that the koalas were already under threat before the bushfires. InMay, Tabart argued that koalas may be “functionally extinct” in Australia and called on Scott Morrison, Australia’s Prime Minister to protect koalas and their habitat by enacting the Koala Protection Act (KPA).
“Functionally extinct” is when a species’ reduced population means that they no longer have enough members to produce future generations or play a significant role in the ecosystem.
The argument that koalas are “functionally extinct” is contested in the scientific field. Whilst their population is falling sharply due to deforestation and climate change, and local populations of koalas are heading towards functional extinction, biologist Christine Adams-Hosking expressed her concern over any general claim on their population status. “Australia is a big country, there are koalas all over the place and some of them are doing fine,” Adams-Hosking toldNew Scientistin May this year. “You can’t just make that statement broad-brush.”
The Rescue Collective, a Brisbane-based wildlife charity,said on Nov. 24that animal rescuers were only just now able to enter fire zones on the East Coast of Australia to witness what they described as “a wildlife apocalypse”.
“Asthe embers cool and the smoke begins to clear, the harsh reality sets in. This is far worse than we could ever have imagined,” they said in a Facebook post.
Amid the bushfire crisis — which haskilled six people, destroyed around 1.7 million hectares in New South Wales alone,shrouded Sydneyin smoke, and killed animals— Morrison has been criticized for his response.
Morrison argued last week that there was no direct link between the severity of the fires burning across Australia at alarming rates and the country’s carbon emissions, which are among thehighest per capitain the world. He toldABC AUduring a radio interview on Nov. 21 that there was no “credible scientific evidence” that cutting carbon emissions could reduce the severity of the fires.
“Climate change is a global phenomenon and we’re doing our bit as part of the response to climate change — we’re taking action on climate change,” he said. “But I think to suggest that at just 1.3% of global emissions, that Australia doing something more or less would change the fire outcome this season — I don’t think that stands up to any credible scientific evidence at all.”
Australia only accounts for 1.3% of global emissions when calculating the carbon dioxide released within the country. But Australia also produces another 3.6% in global emissions as a result of coal, oil and gas exports, according toresearchpublished in July this year by science and policy institute Climate Analytics. The research argues that Australia is in fact contributing to nearly 5% of global emissions.
Among the lesser studied effects of climate change are the social and economic impacts on women.
Nitya Rao, professor of gender and development at University of East Anglia has been studying gender and development for decades; with the recent attention on the profound impact that global temperature changes are having on local and national economies, she decided to analyze the impact of climate change on women specifically. She and her team studied data collected from 25 case studies in 11 hot spot countries in Asia and Africa to document how climate change is influencing women’s status—measured by their ability to make strategic decisions about their livelihoods, take agency over their financial situations, and work to improve their social and economic positions, among other things.
“What we found is that climate change and environmental stress are common factors that intensify pre-existing disadvantages or gender and developmental inequalities,” she says. That’s especially true in poorer parts of the world, where families depend on agriculture and labor jobs to make money, and where male migration, male-dominated labor markets, and patriarchal institutions already put stresses on families, mostly women, that are struggling to survive. Climate change exacerbates those burdens, Rao found.
For example, as warming global temperatures lead to more crop uncertainty—droughts or floods could wipe out a year’s work in a matter of weeks — breadwinners, often male, are more likely to have to move away from the family for months at a time to earn an income. Women are left to care for the children and earn whatever they can, because often the men aren’t able to send their wages home on a regular basis. Even if they can, says Rao, the hard labor in industries which are unfamiliar to them, such as construction or mining, often compromises their health, and many families have to spend an increasing amount on medical costs. “Even if they are bringing money, not all of that is going to the household necessarily,” says Rao.
Labor markets around the world also typically discriminate against women, forcing them to find low-paying jobs, or dangerous, often illegal ones like selling drugs or prostitution. As the climate becomes more unpredictable with changing temperatures, pressures on women in agriculture-based economies deepens.
State regulations governing banking and land ownership also work against them. Only 15% of land around the world is owned by women, for example, and climate hot spots are no different. Since male family members hold the title for land ownership, banks often deny women women seeking loans that would use their land or future crops as collateral. When they can’t seek loans from legitimate institutions, these women are forced to turn to private lenders who charge higher interest rates and can be corrupt, further putting women at financial risk.
“These disadvantages already exist for women, but with the unpredictable climate, women sometimes have to make pre-emptive decisions about whether their crop will survive, or if their livestock will survive the season, and sometimes they are forced to make risky decisions,” says Rao. “So, the uncertainty that comes with climate change is particularly hard on women.”
In many poorer countries, services like childcare, potable water, and affordable food programs are privatized and expensive, putting them out of reach of the families that need them most. Making such services more widely available could significantly alleviate the climate-related burdens on women.
In their analysis, Rao and her team did find some programs starting to address these cultural and institutional burdens on women. In parts of northern India, for example, there are grass-roots efforts to get male family members who find jobs away from home to leave their bank cards to their wives, allowing them to access cash to hire workers when they need funds. “What I see happening on the ground, at the household level, makes me optimistic,” says Rao. “I was even surprised to find that norms in rigid paternalistic societies are turning quite supportive of empowering women more. But unfortunately, in order to implement most climate-based adaptations on a community level, you end up talking to the elite men who are the village leaders, and they ignore the pressures of climate and the need to support women.”
As more and more younger men and women voice their support for changing cultural and financial norms that disadvantage women, that could change though, Rao says. In the course of gathering data for the study, she notes, most of the people who participated were grateful for the opportunity to provide their perspective and to be heard. “They said nobody bothers to talk to them,” says Rao. “These are views that are missing in research and in producing real change.”
As the world has reeled from crisis after crisis in recent years, world leaders have, with only a few exceptions, repeatedly insisted that they remain committed to tackling climate change. But they are failing to keep that promise, says a bleak new United Nations report, and the globe may soon feel the dire effects of inaction—including temperatures that rise to double the target set in the Paris Agreement—without “rapid and transformational action.”
The report, from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), points directly at most of the world’s largest economies as the chief culprits in the global failure to stem greenhouse gas emissions. Only five countries in the G20—a forum representing 20 of the world’s biggest economies—have committed to eliminating their carbon footprints. Seven, including the U.S., Brazil and Canada, are failing to meet even their feeble commitments made under the Paris Agreement four years ago while still others, like Russia and India, are keeping their promises but only because they set low targets at the outset.
Collectively, if countries around the world meet their current commitments, it would still result in more than 3°C of warming over pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, blowing past the “well below” 2°C target set in the Paris Agreement, according to the report, which comes ahead of this year’s U.N. climate conference in Madrid.
Last year, a landmark U.N. report warned that the world would face catastrophic consequences—from the destruction of the world’s coral reefs to the impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people—if temperatures warmed significantly more than 1.5°C. Temperature rise of 4°C would drive a humanitarian calamity, including sea level rise that tops 10 meters (32 ft), frequent droughts and heatwaves that make parts of the world unlivable, and the extinction of half the planet’s species.
“While there’s been progress on policies, there’s been progress on ambition, we still have not seen a peaking of emissions,” says Niklas Hagelberg, UNEP’s climate change coordinator, highlighting the need for aggressive action. “There is much more that needs to be done.”
Most specifically, global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak next year and then almost immediately decline precipitously. To keep temperatures from rising more than 1.5°C by the end of the century, emissions would need to drop more than 7% each year for the next decade, the report says. Over the last decade, worldwide emissions rose on average 1.5% each year. And the longer countries wait to make these necessary changes, the more difficult and expensive they will become to implement in time to stave off more than 1.5°C of warming.
“The bottom line is governments are not where they need to be today. That’s a fact,” says Robert Orr, an advisor to the U.N. secretary general on climate and dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.
UNEP produces this so-called “gap report” annually, but this year’s iteration comes at an especially critical time as the dire scientific reality converges with a thorny political one. Under the Paris Agreement, countries are supposed to announce new and improved plans to reduce emissions before next year’s U.N. climate conference in Glasgow. That process occurs only once every five years, and, because of the urgency outlined in the gap report, climate scientists and policymakers say 2020 may be the last opportunity to prevent a 1.5°C-increase scenario.
Many world leaders remain committed to that process. This year, more than 60 countries across the globe committed to reduce their carbon footprints to zero by 2050, but the majority of those nations are small countries with relatively low per-capita and overall emissions. The G20 economies produce 78% of the world’s emissions, according to the report, and local political and international geopolitical developments have distracted leaders of a number of those large emitters. Internally, the U.S. is dealing with impeachment; China with protesters in Hong Kong; and the European Union with Brexit. Internationally, the world is entangled in a trade war.
But there are some indicators that the reality of climate change may be stark enough to wake up those countries. Protests and youth activism have changed political dynamics, particularly in Europe, and a slew of extreme weather events from the Arctic to Australia are creating pressure on leaders to take bolder steps to reduce emissions. A few specific geopolitical developments may be key in changing the debate. The EU and China are holding a landmark summit in Germany in September, which climate experts say could yield an important bilateral climate deal that cements the two powers as the world’s climate leaders, and the EU has promised to unveil a border carbon tax that imposes a fee on imports from countries that refuse to act on climate.
Whatever happens, the cold, hard truth remains that given today’s current political reality, from China’s commitment to building coal-fired power plants to the continued inaction in the U.S., the aggressive goals needed to stymie catastrophic climate change are very likely out of reach.
But that’s not an excuse to step back, say climate scientists and policymakers. The results of 2°C of warming will be worse than 1.5°C, and the results of 3°C far worse than 2°C. “Every degree, every half a degree counts,” says Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and a key framer of the Paris Agreement. “We don’t have to be more optimistic or pessimistic, we have to be activists; and we have to win every battle.”
Rob Bilott, a corporate lawyer-turned-environmental crusader, doesn’t much care if he’s made enemies over the years. “I’ve been dealing with this for almost three decades,” he says. “I can’t really worry about if the people on the other side like me or not.”
Bilott used to be on the other side. The Todd Haynes-directed movieDark Waters, now playing in theaters, tells the story of how the lawyer, played by Mark Ruffalo, switched allegiances. As happened in real life, the movie depicts Ruffalo’s Bilott as a lawyer who defends large chemical companies before he is approached for help in 1998 by Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), a West Virginia farmer whose land was contaminated by chemical giant DuPont. Inflamed by that injustice, and the complicity of local authorities, the lawyer risks his career as he embarks on a decades-long legal siege of one of America’s most powerful corporations. He works, at first, on Tennant’s behalf, then pursues a class action suit representing around 70,000 people living near a chemical plant that allegedly contaminated drinking water with PFOA, a toxic chemical used in the production of Teflon. In recent years, studies have correlated long-term exposure to PFOA with a number of illnesses, including some types of cancer.
In 2017, Bilott won a $671 million settlement on behalf of more than 3,500 plaintiffs. Those people claimed they had contracted diseases, among them kidney cancer and testicular cancer, from chemicals DuPont allegedly knew may have been dangerous for decades, and allowed to contaminate their drinking water anyway.
In Dark Waters, Haynes emphasizes the seemingly endless fight taken up by Bilott, as DuPont brings its considerable resources to bear to defend itself over the course of two decades. According toone analyst, the film’s potential to raise awareness about these issues could have a serious effect on some chemical companies’ bottom lines. But for the real Rob Bilott, the work of taking the industry to court is far from over.In October 2018, the lawyer filed a new lawsuit against several companies, including 3M, Arkema, and Chemours, a manufacturer spun off from DuPont in 2015. That ongoing case is seeking class action status, and was initially brought on behalf of Kevin Hardwick, a firefighting veteran of 40 years who used fire-suppression foams and firefighting equipment containing a class of chemicals known as PFAS, or polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFOA is one type of PFAS chemical).
PFAS chemicals are used in products rangingfrom waterproof jackets to shaving cream, and they can leach into water supplies in areas where they are disposed of or used in fire suppression (in particular onmilitary bases, where they have been used for years). According to Bilott’s complaint, studies currently suggest that PFAS is present in the blood of around 99% of Americans. The class of chemicals has broadly been linked to immune system disruption, while PFOA specifically has been found to be associated with cancers and other diseases. Bilott’s newest lawsuit, as with his prior cases, alleges that these companies knew for decades that PFAS chemicals, specifically PFOA, could be linked to serious health problems, and that they still assured the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other U.S. government regulators that PFAS exposures were harmless.
“What we’re hearing once again from those companies that put those chemicals out there, knowing that they would get into the environment and into our blood, is that there’s insufficient evidence to show that they present risks to humans who are exposed,” explains Bilott. “These companies are going to sit back and say, we’re entitled to…use you as guinea pigs, yet those of you who are exposed are somehow the ones who are going to have to prove what these [chemicals] do to you.”
Some scientists are particularly worried by the potential health effects of those less-studied PFAS chemicals. Dr. Philippe Grandjean, a professor of environmental health at Harvard, conducted a study that appeared to suggest thatbabies exposed to PFAScould suffer impaired immune-system development. “I fell off the chair,” says Dr. Grandjean. “When I looked at those data it was mind-boggling.”
According to Bilott’s complaint, when his lawsuit’s defendants were asked by the EPA and other agencies to stop producing materials with PFOA, they switched to new “short chain” PFAS molecules. For scientists like Dr. Grandjean, there justisn’t enough informationto know how short chain PFASs interact in the body, or if they’re safe. “Do we really want to keep exposing the population to potentially toxic chemicals and simply wait for the scientists to find statistically convincing evidence that they are toxic?” says Dr. Grandjean. “I would think that prevention would be a much better solution.”
The logic of Bilott’s new suit is to force chemical companies to pay to find answers. Rather than seeking monetary damages for the millions of Americans with PFAS in their blood, the lawsuit demands the Chemours and the other chemical companies pay for an independent science panel to definitively establish the health effects of PFAS.
In a statement, DuPont defended its safety and environmental record, and said that it does not produce PFAS chemicals, though it does use them.“We are leading the industry by supporting federal legislation and science-based regulatory efforts to address these chemicals,” the company wrote in an email. “We also have announced a series of commitments around our limited use of PFAS, including the [sic] eliminating the use of all PFAS-based firefighting foams from our facilities and granting royalty-free licenses to those seeking to use innovative PFAS remediation technologies.” DuPont also questioned the veracity of unspecified events depicted in theDark Watersfilm. The other companies named in the suit — the 3M Company, Dyneon, the Chemours Company, Archroma, Arkema, AGC, Daikin Industries and Solvay Specialty Polymers — did not respond to requests for comment.
In February, those defendants filed a joint motion to dismiss, which the court denied in September, allowing the case to proceed. The next legal step is for the court to decide whether the lawsuit will be permitted to go forward on behalf of a nationwide class. “We’re talking about chemicals that resulted in billions of dollars in profits over many, many years,” says Bilott. “That should be more than sufficient to help pay for whatever studies need to be done.”
The case could take years to resolve, and then years after that for any potential science panel to publish definitive conclusions. (The panel portrayed in the movie took seven years to come to its determination.) Few would have begrudged Bilott a few years to rest on his laurels and enjoy the royalties from hisnew bookbefore embarking on what will inevitably be a long and arduous series of proceedings. But Bilott says he doesn’t have plans to ever stop fighting PFAS exposure.
“If we can’t get where we need to go to protect people through our regulatory channels, through our legislative process, then unfortunately what we have left is our legal process,” says Bilott. “If that’s that it takes to get people the information they need and to protect people, we’re willing to do it.”
Venice is reeling from the worst flooding the city has experienced in 50 years, the city is “on its knees,” Venetian Mayor Luigi Brugnaro tweeted as water submerged much of the the famous historical city. The floods penetrated Saint Mark’s Basilica, a 1,000 year old church that is considered to be one of the finest examples of Byzantine architecture in the world and one of the city’s most famous landmarks.
While floods are a normal part of life in Venice, which is famously built on a lagoon at the edge of the Adriatic Sea, they have never happened with such frequency before. Experts say that climate change is likely to blame. But putting in place protective measures has proven difficult and ironically, the Venetian council voted against a measure to fight climate change just a few moments before their chamber flooded.
Flooding is just one of the many impacts from climate change that is being experienced with more frequency and globally it threatens many vulnerable areas and regions. There is a threat that is not often considered say experts — the damage from climate change to the world’s heritage. Natural and man-made heritage sites throughout the world are in danger of being fundamentally altered, damaged or destroyed by climate change.
Climate change will impact these sites in radically different ways. Some will be hit by flooding, like Venice, others by other extreme weather events or rising temperatures. For instance, George Town, the capital of the Malaysian state Penang faces rising sea levels, landslides and more severe typhoons, whereas the Yellowstone ecosystem in the western United States faces melting snows, more frequent wildfires and a changing ecosystems.
Changes in the ocean will have a profound impact on many of these sites. Warming waters threatens to kill much of the coral in the Great Barrier Reef, while rising sea levels threaten to wash away many of the world’s great archaeological sites — including the Neolithic village Skara Brae in Scotland.
Experts say that the solutions to saving these sites will be varied, although many will be very expensive.
Mechtild Rossler, Director of the World Heritage Centre, tells TIME that countries need to work together to share strategies for protecting heritage sites. UNESCO, for instance, enables countries to “exchange experiences of things that have worked – and things that have not worked.”
Adam Markham, the deputy director of the Climate & Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, tells TIME that if the world wants to save these sites, countries will also need to share financial resources. Although a city as famous as Venice can likely expect massive international support, lesser-known sites may face greater challenges raising money.
“If cities have the engineering structure and the funds available, then they can do a lot to hold it back,” Rossler says. “But particularly in developing much money to manage these cities or these historic sites, they are either dependent on international aid or they’re just not going to be able to adapt.”
To take a closer look at this issue, TIME looked at how the following World Heritage Sites which are in harm’s way because of climate change — and at how scientists, park employees and archaeologists are working to save them.
Venice
Few places in the world are as threatened by climate change as Venice. As the city is built on marshland at the edge of a lagoon, its existence has always required maintaining a careful balance between the city and the natural world. But in recent years, climate change has threatened to throw off the balance.
Marco Bertorello—AFP via Getty ImagesA room in the flooded Gritti Palace is pictured during an exceptional high tide in Venice on Nov. 12, 2019.
Venetians have always lived with flooding, often caused by the phenomenon known as “acqua alta” — high water — which are unusually high tides. However, these types of floods used to be relatively uncommon, because the Mediterranean historically has not had significant tides. However, as sea levels rise, these types of tides — and the flooding they cause—have become more common. This November, Venice experience a record three “acqua alta” events in one week according to the Associated Press.
Chiara Bertolin, an associate professor at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, says that the filthy, salty water can get into the precious materials that make up Venice’s buildings and monuments and cause them to expand, crack – or even bubble and explode.
“When salt permeates the materials of these buildings, it crystallizes, and ascends vertically once the weather gets drier,” architect Kobi Karp told Architectural Digest.
Bertolin says that the historic nature of the buildings means that they cannot just replace them with materials that are more resilient and this can make it difficult to take adaptive measures “You need to clean them slowly—very slowly—and not force it to dry,” says Bertolin.
Markham says that one of the frustrating things about Venice is that it already invested billions of dollars in a project — MOSE — erecting 78 floodgates in the Venice lagoon. But while the project was supposed to have been completed back in 2012, it has been delayed by technical issues, bureaucracy and alleged corruption.
“They need to get their act together and at least try it,” says Markham. He warns that no matter what, Venice is likely to lose some of its historic buildings. Water is getting higher and higher into the buildings, and can compromise their foundations, undermining their structural integrity.
“I think there will always be some degree of flooding in Venice. The question is, does that flooding become catastrophic that you just can’t maintain the buildings as they are now,” says Markham.
Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands
Climate change is also threatening archaeological sites around the world. Some of the most vulnerable sites are those along coasts — such as the Neolithic village Skara Brae in Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The village was inhabited from 3200 to 2200 B.C.E., overlapping with the period when Stonehenge was built.
Markham says what makes Skara Brae special is that while most European villages of its age were made of wood, the village at this particular site was made from stone. That means it’s possible to get a better glimpse of how people actually lived —such as the stone bench where they sat, and the remains of their hearth.
George Sargent—REUTERSNeolithic Buildings are seen at Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands, Scotland on Sep. 25, 2019
Archaeological sites can sometimes be even more vulnerable after they’re discovered because they are open to the elements, Rossler warns. However, in Skara Brae’s case, the biggest danger is that it could be “literally washed away,” she says.
While there’s a sea wall protecting the site, it’s unstable and could eventually be breached; the area not protected by the wall visibly erodes after storms.
“You could wake up one day and it won’t be there,” says Markham.
Scientists are working to measure the extent of the danger to the Skara Brae site. Experts say that some coastal sites could potentially be protected by sea walls, breakwaters and dune restoration. But because there are so many coastal sites just in Scotland, experts warn that it’s protecting them all could be too expensive and take too much time.
Yellowstone
Protecting a large natural space like Yellowstone, which encompasses 12 to 22 million acres (depending on how you measure) in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, is different than protecting a city or historic landmark. Yellowstone isn’t going to be swept into the ocean and vanish, but Markham warns that it could look very different as it is altered by climate change, although the changes may be too slow for most visitors to immediately notice. Over time, the composition of plants and animals that live in the park is expected to change — which may mean the land has less forest and more scrub.
Soeren Stache—picture-alliance/dpa/APBisons grazing near Devils Den in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, on July 5, 2018.
“It’s still going to be an amazing ecosystem, but it’s going to be a slightly different ecosystem,” Markham says. He warns that the scientists and park rangers who want to protect it will have to “go with the flow” as the ecosystem changes.
Changes in the climate can have a domino effect that reaches many aspects of the ecosystem both in the park and in the surrounding region. For instance, changes in snow accumulation and melting rates can reduce the flow of water in rivers that communities outside the region depend on for drinking, agriculture, energy and other purposes. Alterations in the flow can affect fish spawning, and encourage invasive species to expand.
The U.S. Park Service is working to make Yellowstone National Park more resistant to climate change. For instance, as beetles and fungus have damaged the park’s whitebark pine trees, scientists have worked to plant whitebarks which can better resist the fungus. However, whitebark pines are likely to be pushed to higher elevations as temperatures rise, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory.
George Town, the capital of the Malaysian state Penang
As the globe warms, scientists say that unusually strong hurricanes may become more common. In combination with rising sea levels, this is especially threatening to historic neighborhoods in many cities, which were often built low and sit close to the sea.
Oleksandr Rupeta—NurPhoto via Getty ImagesMuslim women enjoy the sunset in one of the Clan Jetties villages, in George Town, Penang Island, Malaysia, in January 2019.
George Town, the capital of the Malaysian state Penang, is in danger because its historic area is low. The city, which was a colonial town and trading hub, was famed for its multicultural heritage, including unique and varied architecture. However, the buildings are made of wood, which means that they’re susceptible to rotting and insect damage if they get wet. Heavy rainfall, as caused by typhoons, can also lead to landslides, which can flow downhill towards historic areas and the people who inhabit them.
To address flooding, Penang has announced plans to implement a “sponge city model,” which aims to absorb water through permeable surfaces. The project proposal would include connecting green spaces to help soak up and clean runoff and constructing water retention areas and rain gardens. China has also announced plans to implement such sponge city technologies in cities across the country.
The Great Barrier Reef
Few world heritage sites are more vulnerable to the affects of climate change than the Great Barrier Reef northeast of Australia. Coral around the world is increasingly undergoing “bleaching” — going white — which can cause mass die-offs. Corals bleach when under stress, especially from higher temperatures. Researchers have found that there has been an 89% decline in the spawning of new coral in the Great Barrier reef and the situation is likely to only get worse.
Gary Farr —GreenpeaceCoral off the Keppel Group of islands in the Southern Great Barrier Reef, in Feb. 2016.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that if the globe warms by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), 70 to 90 percent of the world’s coral would decline—– but if the globe warms 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), more than 99% of coral would be gone.
“Either way, we’re going to lose a lot of coral reefs and much of the Great Barrier Reef will be amongst them,” says Markham.
Australia has launched an effort to help protect the reef, which includes a plan to combat a coral-eating starfish and an initiative to curb runoff. But Markham says that there’s really only one way to actually save it.
“If you talk to the coral reef biologists who are actually there…The only way we can save the Great Barrier Reef is by slowing global warming,” says Markham. “Coral reefs will be totally devastated by climate change. There’s just no doubt about that.”
I tried to kill my father for years. To be fair, I was following his wishes. He’d made it clear that when he no longer recognized me, when he could no longer talk, when the nurses started treating him like a toddler, he didn’t want to live any longer.
My father was 58 years old when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He took the diagnosis with the self-deprecating humor he’d spent a lifetime cultivating, constantly cracking jokes about how he would one day turn into a zombie, a walking corpse. We had a good 10 years with him after the diagnosis. Eventually, his jokes came true.
Seven years before he died, he forgot my name. Three years before his death, he forgot my mother’s existence. His speech devolved into word salad. “Honey, garbage bag synopsis toothbrush Bella potato beetle?” he asked. I replied as though I had understood: “Yes, Gray.” I had taken to calling him by his childhood nickname. He didn’t respond to “Dad”; he no longer realized he was a father.
He started peeing on the plastic plants in his facility, and in other inappropriate places. The nurses dressed him in diapers and a onesie. Sleep eluded him; when he slept at all, it would be on the nearest couch. He could no longer distinguish his room from others. With no pattern I could discern, he would hit me and hit his nurses. He would attack the walls.
In his final months, it took a team of nurses and aides to change him out of his onesie, shower him and put new diapers on him. He needed specialists for shaves, haircuts, dental care and toe and fingernail clipping. By his final days, his care cost $15,000 a month—none of which was covered by Medicare. I used up his pension, my mother’s death benefits, all of my parents’ savings and then my own.
I knew my father didn’t want to be this zombie, but assisted suicide was out of the question for us, for a number of reasons—not the least of which is that it’s illegal in the U.S. for dementia patients (the only country where it is legal for those living with dementia is Belgium). So, “killing” my father involved taking him off his heart, stroke and cancer medications and allowing him to eat whatever he liked, even if that meant 10 Klondike bars a day. Whatever made him happy—so little did at that point.
It seemed the only thing he remembered how to do was walk. He paced until the last week of his life. Shortly after he forgot how to get up, he forgot how to swallow. Inhaling food and spittle, he slowly choked to death—a fate unfortunately common for those living with Alzheimer’s.
A coming spike in Alzheimer’s
Stories like my father’s are about to become much more prevalent. We know of no cure for Alzheimer’s, and there is no treatment in sight (though after a review of initial findings, BioGen just resuscitated an Alzheimer’s drug trial that yielded better results than originally thought). And the number of people living with Alzheimer’s in the U.S. is about to skyrocket, thanks to general increases in life expectancy and the demographic peak of the Baby Boom.
By 2050, about 14 million Americans will have Alzheimer’s.By 2050, about 14 million Americans will have Alzheimer’s, according to Chicago’s Rush Institute for Healthy Aging. That’s compared with some 5.7 million now. Combine the total with other related forms of dementia, and the number rises to almost 30 million people, or about 8% of the country’s total estimated population in 2050.
This epidemic is arriving in a society poorly equipped to cope with it. The U.S. health insurance system is failing those with chronic and degenerative diseases. The country’s economy is structured to make it difficult at best—and in many cases impossible—to give adequate care to adults who cannot get through the day on their own, without help.
There is no easy answer to this problem. We must devise fundamentally new ways to structure the care of Alzheimer’s patients. We must change how dementia is managed in a way that improves the quality of life of those who have the condition and also keeps it from derailing the lives of loved ones who care for them. And we have to think about how to pay for all of it. Many experts are now talking about the idea of “resilience,” giving patients tools outside of medical treatment to prevent dementia and improve the lives of those who are already living with the disease. Even neuroscientists—who are traditionally focused on biochemistry—are talking up the benefits. Neurologist Dr. Grazyna Pomorska and psychologist Judith K. Ockene argued in a 2017 article that it’s just as important to focus on the vitality, resilience and social connectivity of their patients as unraveling the science behind the disease.
A 2010 study of almost 1,000 residents of senior housing in the Chicago area found that giving the elderly a sense of purpose may reduce their risk of developing the disease. Researchers at Ohio State University in 2016 created a pilot program called “Resilient Aging” and found that when adults identified areas of adversity they’d overcome in their lives and discovered commonalities in one another’s struggles, it made them more resilient overall. And all of this may also benefit caregivers, who themselves are more likely to suffer from disease as a result of the stress of looking after loved ones. Some 40% of dementia caregivers die from the stress of caregiving before the death of those for whom they are caring, according to a 2002 Stanford study. And according to a 2017 survey of unpaid family caregivers by EMD Serono (a division of drug maker Merck), 45% skip their own medical appointments because their caregiving responsibilities don’t allow them time for themselves. This is certainly what happened to my mother. She died of a stress-induced brain aneurysm in 2011 after 10 years of caring for my dad. My father died in 2015.
Jay Newton-SmallThe author and her father in the early 1980s.
One of the great misunderstandings about Alzheimer’s is that it is hereditary. My father’s family had no history of Alzheimer’s, for example, and only a tiny portion of dementias overall are thought to be caused by genetics; the vast majority are more likely caused by unknown environmental factors. Scientists are now considering everything from stress to high-sugar diets to chemical toxins as potential contributors.
Without knowing what’s causing the disease, researchers say the basics of good health apply. Exercise and a healthy diet have been shown to help with Alzheimer’s and related dementias. This has prompted a fitness and healthy-eating push for those entering middle age, when scientists now believe the disease first begins to manifest, with the aim of delaying, or maybe even preventing, the development of the disease. Increasingly, organizations like AARP, the Alzheimer’s Association and the World Health Organization, have focused on prevention.
But, of course, all of this comes too late for the majority of the Baby Boomers, the youngest of whom are already 55 years old. The Boomers—the 76.4 million people born between 1946 and 1964—represent a giant bulge in the system that will require significantly greater amounts of care than their parents or their kids.
Experiments in caregiving as a crisis looms
The U.S. is already short more than a million family caregivers. By 2030, the country will be short nearly 4 million family caregivers, and by 2040 an astonishing 11 million, according to the 2017 bookWho Will Care for Us: Long-term Care and the Long-Term Workforce by Paul Osterman, an MIT professor of human resources and management. It’s likely at this rate that the cost of care will rise, and the quality of care will decline just as the nation needs it most.
In Japan, which has reached an elder demographic crisis ahead of the U.S., the government has begun developing robot caregivers. On a functional level this has helped with critical staffing shortages: robots can take blood pressure, wake people up and prompt them to take pills or remember to put on their shoes. They can even warn you when they see signs of physical imbalance. They can be fashioned into furry cats and dogs for company and play your favorite music and movies. But they can’t fully take the place of human interaction, nor are they advanced enough yet to do anything complex like changing an adult diaper or help with bathing, feeding and dressing.
In Europe, which has some of the oldest populations in the world, some governments are trying to tap into the old model of multiple generations living together under one roof. For example, the German government offers discounted housing to young students and to families in senior communities. Such interventions aim to rebuild traditional support systems, in which grandparents help babysit or cook for the kids when the breadwinning generation has to work late, and then the younger generations help when the grandparents grow too old to fully care for themselves. But this model, while successful with seniors without degenerative brain diseases, breaks down when it comes to giving care to those with worsening dementia. What can children do when their grandparents wander off, or grow paranoid and potentially violent?
Outside Weesp, a suburb of Amsterdam, the Dutch government has created a so-called “dementia village.” The residents of Hogewey have no idea that they are watched around the clock. The shop vendors and restaurant waiters are actually care staff, and residents are locked inside the village boundaries. When one comes to an exit, they’re gently redirected to another activity. Similar villages have been created in England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.—where there’s a 1950s-themed adult day-care chain called George G. Glenner—but they aren’t without controversy, with critics saying it’s demeaning to fool those living with the disease with fake realities.
Focusing more on the caregivers
From an Alzheimer’s diagnosis to death usually takes five to seven years. My father’s decline was more protracted; he died 14 years after he was diagnosed. For the first 10 years, he was relatively stable. My mother gave him cues—tell a joke at a certain point, flirt with a waitress at another—but it became increasingly difficult to hide. And her death provoked a steep decline. He was never the same.
My experience matches that of so many caregivers, who face increasingly untenable demands. There are innumerable duties early on, from providing transportation and managing legal affairs to helping loved ones bathe, dress and use the toilet. And then the needs spiral. At first someone with Alzheimer’s may just forgot the occasional appointment or name. Next, they lose their driver’s license and easily get lost in unfamiliar places. Travel became difficult. They stop understanding money, and so become easy prey for scammers. Then they need help doing things like cutting their toenails, dressing and speaking. At the end, they need help with everything from walking to eating.
Yet little money is earmarked for finding caregiving solutions. The vast majority of the nearly $2 billion a year spent on Alzheimer’s disease by the U.S. government and private organizations goes to medical research, which has so far proved fruitless at providing a cure. Meanwhile, Medicare, the principal system of health insurance for the elderly, doesn’t directly cover Alzheimer’s and dementia, and neither does most private health insurance. Long-term care insurance can help, but only 2% of Americans have it.
Medicaid, a public health insurance system for the poor, will pay for a bed in a nursing facility. But it’s also not much of a solution. Only 10% of Americans currently over 65 qualify. And the facilities covered by Medicaid focus on traditional nursing, designed to cure diseases. Faced with the incurable, they can panic. Wandering Alzheimer’s residents often end up in psychiatric wards.
Dementia isn’t something that can be treated and ameliorated. It requires specialized care. Engagement is key to maintaining quality of life for as long as possible. But nursing homes have few activities, and those living with dementia often can’t keep up with the non-cognitively challenged. The sense of being left behind compounds isolation and depression, leading to quicker declines.
Meanwhile, costs for paid care are growing much faster than inflation. The average stay at an assisted living facility is 28 months at a cost of $3,500 a month. For those who need full-time care, that’s close to $100,000—almost all out of pocket for Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Alzheimer’s and related dementia costs Americans $259 billion annually. By 2050, that number will more than quadruple to $1.1 trillionCurrently, Alzheimer’s and related dementia costs Americans $259 billion annually. This estimate includes the amount families pay for home or assisted-living care; spending on accommodations for the disease like senior-proofing homes or buying Velcro shoes and pants when laces and buttons become too complex to master; as well as lost wages by caregivers who quit work to care for loved ones. By 2050, that number will more than quadruple to $1.1 trillion, according to Alzheimer’s Association estimates.
There’s little help available from the government. The 2010 Affordable Care Act had a long-term care provision in it—the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act that created a voluntary and public long-term care insurance option for employees—but the Obama administration deemed the program unsustainably expensive, and it was repealed by Congress in 2013. Though Hawaii and Washington recently passed some versions of long-term care funds to help their citizens pay for senior care, the other 48 states have no plans in place.
The Zombie Apocalypse
Of all the 2020 candidates, only two have comprehensive long-term care plans: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, though they cost $30 trillion and $20.5 trillion respectively. If those numbers are eye-popping, the Urban Institute, an economic policy think tank, estimates that if nothing is done, the government will end up paying $50 trillion as millions of middle-class families spend down their loved one’s assets and dump them into Medicaid.
Currently, Medicare won’t pay for the long-term care of Alzheimer’s and dementia. But it will cover most diseases a patient gets as a result of dementia. So, if you suffer heart failure, have pneumonia or break a hip due to losing your balance—all common side effects—Medicare will pay for your initial treatment and up to 120 days of long-term care per diagnosis. If Medicare covered dementia directly, rather than only the secondary symptoms, overall care would be much better, and likely also cheaper. People with dementia would be less isolated, less depressed, and have a better quality of life.
Jay Newton-SmallThe author and her father, towards the end of his life.
In many ways, I was lucky. My dad needed little extra nursing until the last two years. He could put on his Velcro shoes. He could still walk. For years, he couldn’t tell you who was U.S. president, what decade it was, my name, or his own. But he could feed himself and go to the bathroom unaided. He was, as he called it, a zombie.
In his final days, he had skin lesions, and constant urinary tract and ear infections. I only treated the things that made him uncomfortable. By the end, a lot of things made him uncomfortable. He also developed lymphoma and heart failure—conditions that Medicare would finally have covered but which I chose not to treat.
After all, I was trying to kill him, not prolong his suffering, which was by this point all too clear to me. One day I saw a woman on his hall throwing up in a trash bin. I asked the staff if she had food poisoning. “No,” they told me, her nausea was just a side effect of her chemotherapy. To me, giving cancer treatments to someone with advanced Alzheimer’s seemed like cruel and unusual torture. She had no idea why she was so sick. And the chemo was prolonging her poor quality of life.
For my father, I stuck with the bare minimum. Even that was a huge stress on my finances. I was considering a home-equity loan before his death absolved that need.
But even Medicaid may not be a solution for much longer. As the costs of care skyrocket and states struggle to meet Medicaid budgets, Alzheimer’s and dementia patients like my dad may be released—like other “psychiatric” patients—on to the streets if their families can’t support them. And unless they get arrested and put into jail, they may be doomed to homelessness in their senescence. This spectacle, I imagine, is what my father would have wryly dubbed the “zombie apocalypse”: the living dead wandering America’s streets as their brains are slowly eaten. If nothing is done to overhaul the system, I fear that my father’s fate will be shared by millions, without the care and protection I was able to provide.
The banana has been the subject of Andy Warhol’s cover art for the Velvet Underground’s debut album, can arguably be the most devastating item in the Mario Kart video game franchise and isone of the world’s most consumed fruits. And humanity’s love of bananas may still be on the rise, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. On average, says Chris Barrett, a professor of agriculture at Cornell University, citing that U.N. data, every person on earth chows down on 130 bananas a year, at a rate of nearly three a week.
But the banana as we know it may also be on the verge of extinction. The situation led Colombia—where the economy relies heavily on the crop, as it does in several other countries including Ecuador, Costa Rica and Guatemala—to declare a national state of emergency in August. Banana experts around the world have raised concerns that it may be too late to reverse the damage.
The reason for the problem comes down to a single disease, but it also has far-reaching implications—and the world is watching. Even if the world’s relationship to bananas may never be the same, the lessons of the fruit can still save us from damage that could hit far beyond the produce aisle.
“The story of the banana is really the story of modern agriculture exemplified in a single fruit,” saysDanielBebber, who leads theBananEx research groupat the University of Exeter. “It has all of the ingredients of equitability and sustainability issues, disease pressure, and climate change impact all in one. It’s a very good lesson for us.”
Ninety-nine percentof exported bananas are a variety called the Cavendish—the attractive, golden-yellow fruit seen in the supermarket today.
But that wasn’t always the case. There are many varieties of banana in the world, and until the later half of the 19th century, the dominant one was called the Gros Michel. It was widely considered tastier than the Cavendish, and more difficult to bruise. But in the 1950s, the crop was swept by a strain of Panama disease, also known as banana wilt, brought on by the spread of a noxious, soil-inhabiting fungus.Desperate for a solution, the world’s banana farmers turned to the Cavendish. The Cavendish was resistant to the disease and fit other market needs: it could stay green for several weeks after being harvested (ideal for shipments to Europe), it had a high yield rate and it looked good in stores. Plus, multinational fruit companies had no other disease-resistant variety available that could be ready quickly for mass exportation.
The switched worked. As the Gros Michel was ravaged by disease, the Cavendish banana took over the world’s markets and kitchens. In fact, the entire banana supply chain is now set up to suit the very specific needs of that variety.
To the people who pay attention to such things, it wasn’t long before a case of banana déjà vu set in: the Cavendish had supplanted the Gros Michel, but—even though it had initially been selected for being disease-resistant—it was still at risk. Almost a decade ago, Dan Koeppel, author ofBanana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, warned in anNPR interviewthat Panama Disease would return to the world’s largest banana exporters, and this time with a strain that would hit the Cavendish hard. “[Every] single banana scientist I spoke to—and that was quite a few—says it’s not an ‘if,’ it’s a ‘when,’ and 10 to 30 years,” he said. “It only takes a single clump of contaminated dirt, literally, to get this thing rampaging across entire continents.”
Sure enough, the confirmation of the presence of Tropical Race 4 (TR4), another strain of Panama disease, on banana farms in Colombia, prompted this summer’s declaration of emergency there.
“The situation is very urgent,” says Bebber.
There are any number of ways the problem can spread. When it comes to bananas, everything from truck tires to workers’ boots can be disease carriers. But the bigger problem is how hard it is to stop. Because banana farmers are overwhelmingly growing the same exact crop—the Cavendish—they were all vulnerable to the same diseases.
“A lot of people would agree that we need to move to a more diverse, more sustainable system for bananas and agriculture in general,” says Bebber, “where we don’t put all our hope into a single, genetically identical crop.”
There’s a name for this situation:monoculture, the practice of fostering just one variety of something. Monoculture has its benefits. The entire system is standard, so there’s rarely new production and maintenance processes, and everything is compatible and familiar to users. On the other hand, as banana farmers learned, in a monoculture, all instances are prone to the same set of attacks. If someone or something figures out how to affect just one, the entire system is put at risk.
And as the banana industry has begun to battle the effects of monoculture, someone else has taken notice: the tech world.
The parallel was noticed as early as the late 1990s. Stephanie Forrest, one of the early researchers in this area, commonly cites the banana problem in lectures explaining the importance of diversity in computer systems. Forrest argues that some of the most notorious software attacks in history are comparable to Panama disease’s threat to the Cavendish; uniform software systems lead to uniform vulnerabilities. For example, the 1988 Morris Worm infected an estimated 10% of all computers connected to the Internet within just 24 hours, and, more recently, the 2016 Mirai Botnet, which allowed an outside party to remotely control a network of internet-connected devices, brought down Twitter, Netflix, CNN and more.
“Monocultures are dangerous in almost every facet of life,” echoes Fred B. Schneider, a cybersecurity expert at Cornell University. “With people, of course, populations are stronger and more disease-resistant if there’s more genetic diversity. And with transportation, it’s more effective to have several different options—when a train line is shut down, if you have other choices at your disposal, like a car or another form of transit, you won’t be stuck.”
Schneider points out that software monocultures are common because, without them, using your computer would be a lot harder. Default configuration settings, for example, are the norm to help users who may not be experts in the technology they’re using. Defaults like that can protect people from some problems, but also lead to others, as all the systems using the same default are vulnerable to the same problems.Knowledge of the problem, thanks to understanding of the issues facing crops like bananas, have led technologists to take steps to introduce artificial diversity into their systems. “To make a system artificially diverse, you just rearrange its guts in ways where the differences do not affect functionality in a material way,” Schneider says. Microsoft implemented one of the first large-scale commercial developments of artificial diversity in their Windows OS system, by randomizing the internal locations where important pieces of system data were stored.
For bananas, addressing the problems caused by monoculture may be harder, as market standards and supply chains make it very expensive for fruit companies to cultivate multiple varieties.
Jan Sochor—LatinContent via Getty ImagesA Colombian worker carries crude bananas to a transport car at a banana plantation. (Photo by Jan Sochor/Latincontent/Getty Images)
Existing disease-resistant varieties haven’t made inroads on the international market, but The Honduras Foundation for Agricultural Research (FHIA) has spent more than three years working on developing a disease-resistant variety that is as close as possible to the Cavendish, so that the world’s banana infrastructure doesn’t have to be reshaped from scratch. Still, that’s a process that can take 15 to 20 years, Bebber estimates.
Genetic engineering can lead to the development of new varieties at much faster rates than traditional breeding methods, but it can also turn consumers off. However, it has been the answer to similar problems in the past—for example, when the papaya ringspot virus threatened the papaya supply in the 1990s, “the major supply shock was averted through the development of a transgenic ringspot virus-resistant papaya,” explains Cornell’s Barrett. He believes that consumers’ fears might ease if it becomes one of the only viable answers to the issues created by monoculture production. The UK-based biotech company Tropic Biosciences has received $10 million in funding to use gene-editing technology to research solutions to widespread issues with tropical crops, focusing specially on disease resistance in bananas.
And while even the most Cavendish-like of FHIA’s disease-resistant varieties, a banana known as the FHIA-18, hasn’t yet met the standards of multinational buyers, that may change, according to Adolfo Martinez, director general of FHIA. “It’s still not close enough to the Cavendish,” he says, but he thinks the crisis may convince them. “Maybe now, companies will be more interested in it.”
So, what’s next for the banana? Will it simply disappear from our diets, album covers and video games? Bebber says the banana may change, but hopes are high that it won’t completely vanish. “Science,” he says, “will find a way.” Meanwhile, tech researchers are watching—hoping they can once again learn a lesson from biology, learning how to prevent a crisis before everything goes bananas.
