(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — The newly established U.S. Space Force launched its first national security satellite Thursday with a leaner staff because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Nothing stops the space launch mission!” the 45th Space Wing tweeted from Cape Canaveral.
The approximately $1 billion satellite is the sixth and final one in the U.S. military’s Advanced Extremely High Frequency series. Upgraded from the older Milstar satellites, the constellation has provided secure communication from 22,000 miles (35,400 kilometers) up for nearly a decade.
A powerful Atlas V rocket hoisted the 13,600-pound (6,168 kilogram) satellite. The new Space Force seal adorned the United Launch Alliance rocket.
The Space Force officially became a new branch of the U.S. military in December.
With the viewing area closed because of the coronavirus outbreak, fewer people than usual watched the liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
United Launch Alliance chief executive Tory Bruno said non-essential personnel were banned from the launch control room to reduce the size of the crowd.
“Can’t quite get 6 ft everywhere. Surfaces will be cleaned between people, etc.,” tweeted Bruno, who monitored the launch from company headquarters in Denver. He normally travels to the launch site.
Another pandemic effect: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s planned name change to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is on hold.
In the days following Barack Obama’s election as president, incoming chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel made a bold declaration about how the administration would respond to the urgent financial crisis. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” he said, citing a range of challenges, from climate to health care, that might be addressed as part of a response to the Great Recession.
Politicians and policymakers are just beginning to understand how much pain the coronavirus pandemic will inflict, and it goes without saying that policy experts of all stripes universally agree that protecting human life should be the first priority. Even still, leaders are already jockeying about how to keep the crisis from “going to waste.” One area that many are targeting is climate change.
The key climate question raised by this response to coronavirus is whether the trillions of dollars countries will spend to stimulate their economies will help reduce emissions or drive them up. Policy experts say governments may prefer to invest in fossil-fuel-intensive industries because it feels like a safe option in the middle of a pandemic, but doubling down on fossil fuels risks worsening one crisis to deal with another.
“Everybody’s going to be putting safety first right now,” says Matthew McKinnon, an advisor to a group of countries especially vulnerable to climate change. “And whether or not safety first aligns with climate first is going to vary from place to place.”
“Historic opportunity”
The transition away from fossil fuels is happening, with or without coronavirus, but there are a lot of reasons why governments might want to use this moment to double down on measures to address climate change.
Analysis from the International Energy Agency (IEA) describes the moment as a “historic opportunity” for officials to advance clean energy. As governments flood the economy with cash, deep investment in renewable projects would put people to work in the short term and, in the longer term, create decarbonized energy systems better able to compete in the 21st century. “We should not allow today’s crisis to compromise our efforts to tackle the world’s inescapable challenge,” wrote IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol in a web post.
Still, getting government officials to prioritize climate may prove difficult in the face of several headwinds. For one, oil prices have declined precipitously in recent weeks as coronavirus has driven demand for crude lower and Saudi Arabia and Russia ramped up production as part of a fierce price war. Cheap fossil fuels leave governments less likely to look to renewables.
On the other hand, low oil prices offer a great opportunity to eliminate the billions of dollars in government subsidies that support oil and gas, the IEA says, as consumers are less likely to feel the effects.
The big players
The economic response to the coronavirus will play out over months and perhaps years, but we nonetheless see the topic of a “green stimulus” already popping up in capitals across the globe.
Officials in China have promised a massive stimulus to restart the country’s economy, and observers expect that they will largely focus on infrastructure. Some of those projects may be carbon-intensive, but others could ultimately reduce emissions. Expanding electric vehicle infrastructure and transitioning from coal-powered heating to gas-powered heating are among the areas where the country could spend billions, says David Sandalow, an expert on China’s energy and climate policy who serves as a fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
Top officials at the European Commission, the European Union’s executive body, have remained steadfast about the European Green Deal, the program intended to eliminate the bloc’s carbon footprint by 2050, even as some member states have complained about its cost in the face of coronavirus. But that program, which has a price tag that tops $1 trillion, actually creates a “green stimulus” of its own, providing billions to places in Europe that are struggling economically. Many key climate advocates have argued that a Green Deal will serve as the framework for an economic recovery.
Across the Atlantic, Washington D.C. may seem like the least likely place to look for stimulus measures focused on addressing climate change, but the conversation is simmering beneath the headlines. Renewable energy groups with support on both sides of the aisle are asking for relief, given the hit they’ve taken from falling power demand. A group of Senators is pushing to pair any bailout of the airline industry with policies to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint. And progressive lawmakers are pointing to the economic downturn, which has far-reaching implications across society, as an ideal opportunity to implement a Green New Deal.
Of course, any legislation called a Green New Deal will be difficult to pass in this Congress, or realistically any future Congress. But many of the components could easily fit as part of a bigger stimulus package. “If you agree on the size and Democrats and Republicans give each other something,” says Reed Hundt, president of the Coalition for Green Capital, who served on the Obama transition team, “you’ll get it done.”
That’s a lesson from the 2009 stimulus bill that passed under Obama. That measure contained some $90 billion to fund clean energy, supporting some 100,000 projects, while catalyzing the private sector, to spend over $100 billion in addition, according to the Obama White House.
Those figures fall short of what the U.S. will likely need to spend to transition its economy away from fossil fuels, and indeed both Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have called called for trillions in their climate plans. Still, the framework of using economic stimulus to address climate change may be even more relevant now that it was ten years ago.
A version of this article was originally published in TIME’s climate newsletter, One.Five. Click here to sign up to receive these stories early.
(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden, who circled the moon alone in 1971 while his two crewmates test-drove the first lunar rover, has died at age 88, his family said Wednesday.
His family said he died in his sleep in Houston. No cause of death was given.
“Al was an American hero whose achievements in space and on Earth will never be forgotten., said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in a statement. He also praised Worden for his appearances on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” to explain space flight to children.
Worden flew to the moon in 1971 along with David Scott and Jim Irwin. As command module pilot, Worden remained in lunar orbit aboard the Endeavour while Scott and Irwin descended to the surface and tried out NASA’s first moon buggy.
Scott is one of four moonwalkers still alive. Irwin died in 1991.
“‘Line of Grey, Be Thou at Peace!’ Godspeed Al,” tweeted Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, borrowing from their West Point alma mater.
Once his crewmates were back on board and headed home, Worden performed the first deep-space spacewalk — nearly 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) from Earth. He inspected the service module’s science instrument bay and retrieved film. His foray outside lasted just 38 minutes.
Worden said of the mission: “Now I know why I’m here. Not for a closer look at the Moon, but to look back at our home, the Earth.”
Apollo 15 was Worden’s only spaceflight. He was in NASA’s fifth astronaut class, chosen in 1966. He retired from NASA in 1975 and went to work for a few aerospace companies.
Of the 24 men who flew to the moon from 1968 through 1972, only 11 are still alive.
Born and raised on a farm in Jackson, Michigan, Worden graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1955 and was commissioned in the Air Force. He attended test pilot school.
“As I was growing up, aviation was not really something that was foremost in my mind,” Worden said in a 2000 oral history for NASA. “From the age of 12 on, I basically ran the farm, did all the field work, milked the cows, did all that until I left for college.”
While in the Air Force, “I began to realize that flying was kind of my game. It was a thing that I was very attuned to.”
Going to the moon was “like flying an airplane,” Worden said in the NASA oral history. “It’s a skill that you learn. It takes some knowledge. It takes some analytical ability if something goes wrong, but outside of that it’s like driving a car.”
Working as a senior aerospace scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, after the flight was more intellectually stimulating, he noted.
In his 2011 book “Falling to Earth: An Apollo 15 Astronaut’s Journey to the Moon,” Worden wrote that NASA was leery about young children watching a rocket launch and so he called Fred Rogers in Pittsburgh. Worden, the father of three, ended up doing a special show.
”It was so outside of what most astronauts did, many thought I was crazy. Astronauts liked to think they were super jocks who hunted, fished, drank, and chased girls. We didn’t do kiddies’ shows.”
A list of children’s questions eventually led to Worden’s 1974 book for children “I Want to Know about a Flight to the Moon.”
After returning from the moon, all three Apollo 15 astronauts became embroiled in a controversy over a few hundred stamped postal covers that flew with them to the moon. The astronauts planned to sell them to help pay for their children’s education, Worden said in the NASA oral history.
Worden said he assumed the stamped covers were on the official flight manifest, but wasn’t sure now that they ever were. All this resulted in “quite a flap.”
None of the three ever flew in space again. He blamed NASA management.
“Some senator or some congressman asked the question, and they caved under right away and tried to get rid of us,” he said in the oral history. “Nobody stood up for us. Nobody.”
Worden sued the U.S. government in 1983 and got his covers back.
“We probably didn’t do the smartest thing in the world, but we didn’t do anything that was illegal,” he said. “We didn’t do anything that anybody else hadn’t done, but the consequences were rather severe to us.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
The sensations were familiar: my heart rate accelerating, my chest tightening, my focus narrowing. These were feelings I’d had many times before in my life—most often when exposed to heights, climbing a ladder or hiking along a steep trail. I’d felt them during the long, stretched-out moments of a serious car accident, rolling off the highway and into a ditch in a mountain hailstorm, and I’d felt them again for months afterwards whenever I drove on icy pavement or around a sharp curve. I’d felt them in late-night moments of uncertainty, walking home along a dark street with a car idling too close, or waking up alone in my apartment, wondering if that strange sound I’d heard was a dream or reality.
This time, though, I wasn’t doing any of those things. I was standing in the canned-goods aisle of the grocery store, staring at the mostly-empty shelves.Even in the Yukon, a region of northern Canada that had yet to record its first known case of COVID-19, there was only one carton of chicken stock left. I tried to tell myself that the situation was funny, tried to avoid eye contact with the other shoppers as I grabbed that one carton. I could feel our collective unease.
So often, we describe fear in terms of disease—we talk about fear spreading like a virus, racing through a crowd; we talk about beinginfectedby fear. And it might be a cliché, but it turns out studies suggest it’s true: fear really is contagious.
We’ve known for a while now that animals can “smell” fear on each other—although in the popular imagination, we tend to think of predators sniffing out the fear of their prey. That’s a misunderstanding of the phenomenon. What really happens is that prey animals unknowingly emit silent, invisible “alarm pheromones.” These are airborne chemical cues intended to warn other members of their species about nearby dangers.
Until fairly recently, it wasn’t clear if this was an ability that was limited to the wild world, an instinct that humans had lost in our march away from nature. There were studies, based on observed behaviors, that suggested human beings might be capable of emitting and sensing alarm pheromones. But it was only a little over a decade ago that a team of scientists provided clear physiological evidence of the phenomenon.
“We kind of set out to do the first rigorous test of whether human alarm pheromones existed,” Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, the lead researcher onthe 2009 study, told me. Her team used an unorthodox experimental technique: they sent people skydiving. Mujica-Parodi and her colleagues collected sweat samples from 144 people who were about to experience a first-time tandem jump. Then they used those same 144 individuals as their own controls, collecting their sweat after they’d run on a treadmill.
Next, they presented both sets of sweat samples to a new set of test subjects, using fMRI brain scans to view how they reacted to the pheromones in real time. The “fear sweat” triggered activity in the subjects’ amygdalas—the small brain structure that is known to be critical in deploying and managing our fear response. The exercise sweat did not.
In a second phase of the experiment, having already demonstrated amygdala reactivity in response to the fear sweat, the team explored the behavioral component of that amygdala response. They exposed the test subjects to either the fear sweat or the exercise sweat while showing them a range of images of human faces, conveying a spectrum of expressions ranging from blank to angry. Asked to rate each image as either neutral or threatening when inhaling the exercise threat, the subjects rated only the angry faces as potential threats. But when they inhaled the fear sweat, they were significantly more likely to rate the whole range as threatening—suggesting that the fear sweat triggered heightened vigilance in the subjects. We really can “smell” fear on one another, her research suggests. And that chemical alert system may prepare our brains to react to incoming threats.
That might help explain why we sometimes find ourselves walking into a room and suddenly feeling on our guard—that sense of an inexplicable yet clearly threatening vibe or mood. It might also help explain that sense of palpable tension in the air these days when someone coughs nearby or when we realize that the toilet paper aisle is ominously empty.
I’ve thought a lot about Mujica-Parodi’s research in the last few days as I’ve shopped for necessary supplies, canceled plans and scrolled anxiously through endless news stories and social media posts about the spread of the virus. This might sound strange, but thinking of it comforts me. Our alarm pheromones are a vital reminder: Fear is built into us for a reason, and it’s O.K. to feel it.It’s a survival mechanism, and it is designed not only to help us survive as individuals, but to help our communities survive, too.
It’s easy to view the idea of contagious fear, ofinfectiousfear, as a negative. We spend so much time, as a culture, talking about suppressing, ignoring, defeating, overcoming and curing our fears. But our fear is a finely calibrated alarm system, more like a smoke detector than a disease. At this fraught moment, it makes sense to listen to its siren: not to panic, but to heed official medical guidance and prepare.
Since the first case of COVID-19 was identified in central China in December, the illness has spread across the world, leading to an outbreak that the World Health Organization has called a pandemic. The maps and charts below show the extent of the spread, and will be updated daily with data gathered from over a dozen sources by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
Where COVID-19 has spread in the U.S.
Testing for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was slow to roll out in the U.S., but as more and more Americans get tested, it’s becoming clear that the illness is already spreading in the U.S. It has now been confirmed in some three dozen states, with the largest clusters in Washington state, California and New York.
Where COVID-19 has spread around the world
Over 110 countries and territories, representing every corner of the globe, have now reported at least one case of the novel coronavirus. In total, there are now over 110,000 cases and over 4,000 related deaths.
Which countries have the most COVID-19 cases?
China remains the country with the most coronavirus cases and related deaths, by a significant margin. However, in recent weeks, China has seen fewer and fewer new cases per day, while the count in places like Italy, Iran, Germany, France and the U.S. have risen.
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UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Last year was the second warmest on record, the past decade was the hottest in human history and January was the warmest January since 1850, the head of the U.N. weather agency said Tuesday.
Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization also said Europe had a record-warm winter, and “we have also broken records in (emitting) carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide,” three greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
Taalas said at a briefing on the agency’s annual State of the Global Climate 2019 report that carbon dioxide has contributed two-thirds of global warming, “and its lifetime is of several hundreds of years — so it’s a problem that doesn’t go away if you let these concentrations continue.”
Sitting beside Taalas, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said: “Greenhouse gas concentrations are at the highest levels in 3 million years — when the Earth’s temperature was as much as three degrees hotter and sea levels some 15 meters higher.”
He added: “Ocean heat is at a record level, with temperatures rising at the equivalent of five Hiroshima bombs a second.”
Taalas said the warming of the oceans has led to unusual tropical storms, including one in Mozambique in March 2019 that was the strongest in the Southern Hemisphere “at least for the past hundred years.”
He said there is also an estimate “that sea water is the most acid in 25 million years … and that’s going to have negative impacts on the sea ecosystems.”
Taalas also pointed to forest fires causing a lot of emissions, in the Arctic and Australia where “they were, again, record breaking.”
“Smoke and pollutants from damaging fires in Australia circumnavigated the globe, causing a spike in carbon dioxide emissions,” he said.
Guterres said there is no time to lose “if we are to avert climate catastrophe.”
Many scientists say the use of fossil fuels, which are one of the main sources of greenhouse gases, need to end by the middle of the century if average temperatures on Earth are to rise no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, the target set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Guterres said the world is way off track for meeting the target, and “we have to aim high at the next climate conference in Glasgow in November.”
So far, he said, 70 countries have announced they are committed to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, joined by cities, banks, businesses and others, but this still represents only one-quarter of global emissions.
“The largest emitters must commit or our efforts will be in vain,” Guterres said.
He said the Group of 20 major economic powers account for 80% of world emissions.
In the coming months, the U.N. will be very actively engaging Western Europe nations, the U.S., Canada, China, India, Russia and Japan “in order to have as many as possible, ideally all of them, committed to carbon neutrality in 2050,” the secretary-general said.
Guterres pointed to “good news” from the European Union, which unveiled plans last week for its first-ever climate law that would make legally binding its executive arm’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century.
“Let’s hope that this example can be followed by all the others,” he said.
As COVID-19 continues to spread both around the world and in the U.S., two separate efforts to find a medical solution to the virus are moving forward. At the University of Nebraska, the first patients have volunteered to test an experimental drug to treat COVID-19. And at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute, researchers have begun recruiting people to test a possible vaccine.
A number of U.S. passengers aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship were brought to Nebraska for quarantine; two of these passengers have agreed to participate in a trial for remdesivir, an antiviral drug originally developed for Ebola, but which showed encouraging results in animals in fighting SARS and MERS, two other illnesses caused by coronaviruses.
The drug is designed to treat infections that are moderate to severe, and is targeted to those with the most intensive symptoms. In order to qualify for the remdesivir study, run by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), patients must test positive for COVID-19 and have pneumonia. Of the more than two dozen people diagnosed with COVID-19 from the cruise ship who were brought to Nebraska for quarantine, four required hospitalization and two developed pneumonia. Those two patients were asked if they wanted to volunteer for the study, and both agreed, says Dr. Andre Kalil, professor of medicine in the division of infectious disease at University of Nebraska Medical Center.
The study will eventually include 400 patients; initial results won’t be analyzed until the first 100 have completed treatment. Given the relatively low rate of moderately to severely affected patients in the US at this point, Kalil says that NIAID plans to collaborate with health officials from other countries with higher case volumes, including Korea, Japan and Italy. For now, the trial will stay open for three years in order to recruit the needed number of patients.
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This study, says Kalil, is also designed to be more flexible than most drug trials. “This is not just a remdesivir trial,” he says. “It will test as many [COVID-19] therapies as possible, and remdesivir is just the first. Let’s say a couple of months from now, we realize that remdesivir is a good drug, that it works better than placebo…. Then patients receiving the placebo would be offered the drug and we would move on to test another drug. If remdesivir turns out not to be effective, then we would remove it from the study and bring another drug to test against placebo. It’s a dynamic, fast way to run a randomized trial.” The design is a way to accelerate testing of antiviral drugs against COVID-19, since infections are on-going and there is no treatment yet.
Meanwhile, other labs are working on developing vaccines that would provide some protection against the virus in the first place. The vaccine study that is furthest along (and which is also overseen by NIAID) is currently recruiting its first participants at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. Unlike the remdesivir trial, this study will enroll healthy volunteers. Dr. Lisa Jackson, lead investigator on the study, says 45 healthy people will be recruited to test three different doses of the vaccine.
Kaiser is currently getting thousands of daily online requests from people interested in participating. Researchers are contacting the volunteers by phone to assess their eligibility for the study. Once the participants are chosen, they will be given one of the three vaccine doses being tested. The scientists will track patients’ immune responses after that injection, and then give each patient a second injection (of the same dosage). The goal is to figure out which dosage is most effective, and whether one or two shots of that dosage is needed.
They’ll be looking for levels of antibodies that the body’s immune system produces against the so-called spike protein, one of the proteins that stud the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for causing COVID-19. Scientists will analyze antibody levels in the participants a year after their second vaccination, so results won’t be available for at least 12 to 18 months, says NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci. Given that coronaviruses like the one behind COVID-19 seem to be appearing more frequently, however, having a vaccine against this particular virus could be useful in creating future coronavirus vaccines as well.
Please send any tips, leads, and stories to virus@time.com.
“Have you found an article of clothing with a suspicious stain?” asks the website of one Florida-based company called All About Truth DNA Services, which informs readers that “aprrpoximately [sic] 60% of husbands and 40% of wives will have an affair at some point,” and recommends consumers wait for their “suspicious item” to dry and then send it in for testing. Also accepted: cigarette butts, toothpicks, hair.
The landscape of the consumer genomics market now would have been barely recognizable a decade ago. One study by scholar Andelka Phillips, then at the University of Oxford, found that as of January 2016, at least 246 genetics testing companies across the globe were selling their wares directly to customers online. Not all DNA testing companies offer services related to predicting ethnicity and finding relatives; indeed, the spectrum of services they offer is dizzying, and their usefulness and accuracy sometimes dubious. They range from the paternity tests you can pick up at Walgreens to tests that look specifically for African or Native American ancestry to others promising DNA-based matchmaking services. Phillips’s survey placed consumer DNA tests into a long list of categories that included “child talent,” “nutrigenetic” and, most ominously, “surreptitious.” These tests are generally lightly regulated, with the exception of health risk testing such as that offered by 23andMe, which is regulated in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration. The catchiest company names I’ve seen are “She Cheated” and “Who’zTheDaddy?”
While the lion’s share of DNA-testing companies cater to questions of ancestry, health, paternity and relatedness, much of the emerging consumer genomics market falls into lifestyle and fitness categories, encompassing products The Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang has likened to horoscopes: “vague, occasionally informative, sometimes amusing.” Their claims, and the science used to back them up, are of varying quality. Some tests, met with horror by a wide swath of researchers, promise to offer insight into children’s athletic ability. One company offers an “Inborn Talent Genetic Test” for children, to help with career profiling—the better to maximize “the chances of them becoming an elite in life.” Marketing “faux scientific authority,” these kinds of tests aren’t just harmless entertainment, warns a paper by Eric Topol and Emily Spencer of Scripps Research Translational Institute; they threaten to diminish consumer confidence in the clinical genetic tests that doctors order to guide medical decisions.
The landscape is confusing for the average consumer, and it can be hard to tell which genetic tests to take seriously. Large ancestry-testing companies, like AncestryDNA and 23andMe, may be characterized as “recreational,” but they employ teams of scientists and rely on robust data to understand genetic relatedness and to track patterns of ancestral heritage (even if the latter is imperfect and constantly being refined). On the other hand, when 23andMe announced it was teaming up with a health-coaching app and allowing customers to integrate their genetic results to help generate personalized diet and exercise advice — a product that focuses on wellness, so not regulated by the FDA — a number of geneticists were skeptical, concerned the company was getting ahead of research.
What is a consumer to believe? A few years ago, Helix, originally a spin-out of genomics giant Illumina (which makes many of the chips and machines used to analyze DNA), unveiled a “DNA app store” allowing third-party companies to sell products off its DNA testing. While these included the Mayo Clinic GeneGuide, a test that requires the sign-off of a physician and, with the help of Mayo Clinic professionals, interprets your genetic material for insights into things like disease risk and carrier screening, they also included the Vinome “wine explorer,” which claimed your genetic data could help predict what wine you’d like, a concept that University of North Carolina geneticist Jim Evans described to the publication STAT as “completely silly.” Helix has since announced a shift away from this “consumer-initiated” model, but there is still a lot of confusion over what genetic testing can and should be able to tell us.
One spring day, I found myself watching an ad for a special partnership between 23andMe and Lexus, which promised to find cars optimized to people’s genetics. It’s a credit to how out-there some DNA testing claims have become that it took me a few seconds to realize this was an April Fool’s joke. As ludicrous and playful as that ad turned out to be (the driver licks the steering wheel to start the engine), it hit on a deeper message rooted in a suite of cultural messages we get about our genes. Consider the marketing campaigns that consumer genetics companies actually do run. During the 2018 FIFA Men’s World Cup, for which the U.S. team failed to qualify, 23andMe urged people to root for a team “based on your genetic ancestry”—they called this campaign “Root for your Roots.” AncestryDNA has partnered with Spotify to create custom playlists based on the ancestral regions that customers hail from. “Solidify a true connection to the motherland,” suggests one ad by a company called African Ancestry. “Know who you are”—as if DNA might know us better than we know ourselves, might act as a kind of historical id, reminding us of cultural affinities forgotten over generations but remembered in our cells.
These efforts are targeting—and reinforcing—a deep-seated belief that if we peer closely enough, we’ll be able to decipher nearly everything about ourselves, our likes and loves, from the ACGTs along the strands of the double helix of our DNA molecules. It is an idea we’ve held for decades. In The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon, published in 1995, scholars Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee warned of the rise of genetic essentialism. Examining portrayals of the gene in mass culture, they found a tendency to point to genes as the explanation for “obesity, criminality, shyness, directional ability, political leanings, and preferred styles of dressing. There are selfish genes, pleasure-seeking genes, violence genes, celebrity genes . . .” In popular portrayal, good genes and bad genes lead to good and bad traits.
We’re such believers in genes that a recent Stanford University study found that informing people of their genetic predispositions for certain traits—rather, misinforming them, by telling them whether they had certain gene variants associated with exercise capacity and obesity, regardless of their actual results—influenced their actual physiology. Those told they had low-endurance versions of a gene variant did worse on a treadmill test, with poorer endurance and worse lung function (even if they didn’t have that gene variant). Those told they had a variant that made them feel easily sated felt fuller on average after being given a meal, and tests revealed their bodies had produced more of a hormone that correlates with feelings of fullness. By believing they were genetically destined for something, these subjects appear to have made it true.
In their book, Nelkin and Lindee looked back at the eugenics movement earlier in the century and saw thematic links between the 1990s obsession with genetics and those old notions of heredity. Yesterday’s “Better Babies” – showcased through early 20th century baby-rating contests with points deducted for “defects” like scaly skin and delayed teething – were “still a highly desired reproductive commodity.” Yesterday’s “feebleminded” women, forcibly sterilized so as not to pass what eugenicists saw as their problems on to the next generation, had been transformed into contemporary welfare mothers said to be birthing tomorrow’s poor and criminal classes. “Ideas about heredity have as much to do with social meaning as they do with scientific research,” they wrote.
Beneath all this, the authors argued, lay the mystique of the genes: “DNA has assumed a cultural meaning similar to that of the biblical soul. It has become a sacred entity, a way to explore fundamental questions about human life, to define the essence of human existence.” Like the soul, DNA in this reading has a moral meaning and has implications not only for a person’s sense of identity but for her place in society. Twenty-five years after The DNA Mystique came out, we still talk about DNA in quasi-religious terms—“the language,” as Bill Clinton once put it, “in which God created life.” And perhaps there’s something deeply human about this. Cultural psychologist Steven J. Heine has written that “in every society that has been investigated, there is clear evidence to show that we are predisposed to think of the world as emerging from hidden underlying essences”—whether that be blood or chi, humors or souls. Essentialism “is one of the most persistent and widely documented psychological biases.”
Kristen V. Brown, a Bloomberg journalist who covers the intersection of technology, business and health, told me she blamed some of this essentialist thinking on the Human Genome Project, a massive, multinational effort to sequence the more than 3 billion base pairs that make up the genetic blueprint for a human being, which was launched in 1990 and completed in 2003. “Because part of the way that the Human Genome Project was sold to the masses was this idea that your genome explains everything,” Brown says. “And then we decoded most of the important parts and were like, ‘Shit, this still doesn’t explain everything.’ . . . But that was the marketing message and it was a good one, and it stuck.”
So when companies urge people to root for a soccer team based on genetic heritage, or promise an exercise plan based on their DNA, this homes in on an idea that already holds great currency in the popular imagination. We are eager to know more about ourselves, and within the consumer space, ancestry testing (seemingly less fraught than health testing) appears to be driving the market for self-discovery. An Ancestry ad during the 2018 holiday season showed Kelly Ripa ordering biscotti in imperfect Italian, since she had just discovered she was “74% Italian!” What fun! Who wouldn’t want an excuse to expand their diet of baked goods?
The market may change over time, of course. As our understanding of genetics improves, things like pharmacogenomics (the relationship between drugs and genes) and nutrigenomics (the interplay between nutrition and genes) may become much bigger forces. What’s now considered “recreational” health testing may become more clinically relevant, and the genetic health market in general may prove to be bigger than that for ancestry and genealogy. But for now, as University College London researcher and genetic genealogist Debbie Kennett points out, the largest genomic dataset in the world isn’t in the hands of governments, pharmaceutical companies or research organizations. “Instead,” she writes, “it is the ancestry companies which have been accumulating most of the genetic data.”
In many cases, consumers who engage in ancestry testing are making discoveries far more profound than Kelly Ripa made. Over 30 million people have tested through companies like Ancestry and 23andMe, receiving those “ethnicity estimate” pie charts as well as lists of genetic relatives, and sometimes learning that their families aren’t exactly what they thought they were. These revelations can be heartwarming, and they can be heartbreaking. The hundreds of stories of rifts, reunions and reconciliations I’ve heard over the past few years are testament to the power of spitting into a vial. Meanwhile, in the last two years, law enforcement has begun accessing certain quasi-public databases to use genetic information that was gathered for family history purposes to solve cold cases, opening up debates about privacy, civil liberties and consent.
Despite news of a recent slowdown in sales, the number of people in these databases can only get bigger – though how much bigger will depend on many of the human factors at play in the quest for more information. Will growth taper off because the early adopters have already bought spit kits, while more casual consumers are scared off by privacy concerns? Or will an ongoing appetite for self-discovery, for health insights, for greater certainty about the past and the future, drive us to look for more answers within ourselves?
We are only at the beginning of this genetic reckoning.
You know what? Maybe we ought to reconsider this whole thing about looking for life on other worlds. It would be nice to find it, of course. But that doesn’t mean we could handle it—biologically, epidemiologically and most important, emotionally.
We are currently in the midst of a global near-panic over what, in some respects, is its own alien, or at least previously unknown, life-form: the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the disease known as COVID-19. As of this writing, there have been close to 90,000 confirmed cases around the world, in 68 countries, leading to more than 3,000 deaths. Flights have been grounded, international business conventions canceled, the Tokyo Olympics are threatened, and a global recession looms. Last week in the U.S., the Dow Jones Industrial Average had its worst week since the recession of 2008 and 2009, shedding a third of its gains since the 2016 election, most of that due to fears of the impact of COVID-19.
Humanity as a whole is suffering the effects of the disease but the Chinese are taking a particular kind of heat. The virus emerged in Wuhan, China and around the world, an ugly kind of pitchforks and torches behavior has surfaced. An Asian-American 16-year-old was assaulted at a California high school and accused of carrying the virus. In South Korea, latent anti-Chinese sentiment has surfaced, with shops reportedly posting signs reading “No Chinese.” In Vancouver, a Chinese boy on a school playground was taunted with cries of, “Yo, virus-boy! Don’t infect us!”
In a story in Arizona’s Cronkite News, affiliated with the local Public Broadcasting System, Wei Li, a professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at Arizona State University, lamented the history of this kind of bias. “It was happening during SARS and people racialized Asian Americans and during Ebola with Africans and African Americans,” Li said. “People lump an entire group and blame them for contaminating our nation and people.”
COVID-19 is an entirely terrestrial problem, one that has not a lick to do with space, and yet consider that even as the virus rages, NASA is poised to launch a new rover to Mars in July that will look for microbial life and gather up some rock and soil samples, which will be brought back to Earth—potentially containing that microbial life—on a later mission. So: how do you think that’s going to work out?
On the one hand, there is almost no likelihood of any risk of contagion. As a column in Space.com pointed out last week, NASA has a long history of working to protect the Earth from biohazards from other planets and to protect other planets from biohazards from Earth. The space agency even has an entire division dedicated to that goal, formally known as the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA), but more commonly and descriptively known as the Planetary Protection Office.
As OSMA puts it, its mission is to “carefully control forward contamination of other worlds by organisms and organic materials carried by spacecraft” and to “rigorously preclude backward contamination of Earth by extraterrestrial life.” If you have any question about which of those mission statements is the more important one, just consider the difference between a promise to “carefully control” something and to “rigorously preclude” it.
NASA’s most extensive experience with the risk of backward contamination was during the Apollo era when both lunar samples and humans who had been on the moon came back to Earth. For the first three landings, no sooner had the crewmen opened their hatch after splashdown than frogmen handed them biohazard suits to wear for their trip back to the Naval recovery ship. From there they were flown to Houston, where they were kept in three weeks of isolation. The crews were—as might be expected after having visited an airless, waterless world—carrying no lunar pathogens at all, and the quarantine procedure was dropped for the last three lunar missions.
Mars will be a very different matter, because Mars, which was once awash with water, might once have been fairly churning with life too—and some of it may well linger in spots in which the water endures. As the Space.com piece points out, it is possible that Earthly life and potential Martian life are even related: Meteorites from Mars that struck Earth billions of years ago could well have harbored microorganisms that survived the journey within water-bearing pockets in the rocks, giving rise to life here. If that’s the case, not only have we found Martians, we are Martians. But any relationship between current Earthly and Martian life could increase the risk that Martian microbes find us hospitable hosts.
The odds of finding life on Mars are unknown and unknowable. The odds of being able to scoop it up and bring it back to Earth intact add a further degree of uncertainty. And the risk of a pathogen escaping and a pandemic ensuing, while not impossible, feels far more the stuff of a screenplay than a journal paper.
Still, the risk exists. Even in Level 4 labs—the strictest kind of bio-containment facilities—there is always a non-zero chance that something could escape. So, imagine it did and people did become infected. Put aside for a moment the impact on their health, would they not merely be racialized, but extraterrestrialized—as somehow not even fully human anymore?
The search for life on other worlds is a manifestation of our consuming interest in other living things and in some ways our love of other living things. The battle against SARS-CoV-2 is a mark of the unified face we can show when one of those living things threatens us all—a collectivism that is among our highest qualities. The racializing, the othering, directed at people of Chinese descent is a mark of one of our lowest.
A version of this article was originally published in TIME’s Space newsletter. Click here to sign up to receive these stories early.
