Category Archives: Immortality Medicine

This pigment-producing molecule displays some almost unfathomable properties in other species

Could the melanin found in our bodies and in foods like mushrooms help to mitigate the increasingly dire quantities of radiation we are exposed to daily?

Over the course of the past decade, one of the most interesting concepts I have run into while scouring the biomedical literature is the possibility thatmelanins biological role in the human body may extend far beyond simply protecting us against UV radiation.

In fact,one recent and highly controversial paperproposes that melanin is responsible for generating the majority of the bodys energy, effectively challenging the ATP-focused and glucose-centric view of cellular bioenergetics that has dominated biology for the past half century.

Research is now emerging indicating that melanin may function in a manner analogous to energy harvesting pigments such as chlorophyll. While melanins proposed ability to convert sunlight into metabolic energy has amazing implications (one of which is thetaxonomical reclassification of our species from heterotrophic to photoheterotrophic), what may have even more spectacular implications is the prospect that melanin may actually both protect us against ionizing radiationandtransform some of it into metabolically useful energy.

Radioisotopes are increasingly accumulating in the environment, food chain, and our bodies, as a result of nuclear weapons testing,routine releases from the nuclear industry,fracking,coal-fired powerindustriesand more recently, global fallout from the Chernobyl andFukushima meltdowns.Add in the unavoidable onslaught of radiation exposures from medical use,cell phone communications and WiFi technology, andair travel, and you can virtually guarantee your body burden of radiation exposure is significant and represents a health risk.

For these reasons reducing radiotoxicity and/or enhancing detoxification mechanisms should be a universal concern.

Melanin is, indeed, one of the most interesting biomolecules yet identified.The first known organic semiconductor, it is capable of absorbing a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum (which is why it appears black), most notably, converting and dissipating potentially harmful ultraviolet radiation into heat. It serves a wide range of physiological roles, including free radical scavenging, toxicant chelation, DNA protection, to name but a few. It is also believed to have been one of the essentialingredients for life on this planet. Beyond itspotential in converting sunlight into metabolic energy, it may also convert ionizing gamma radiation into useful energy. Outside the realm of comic book heroes, who would have ever thought such a thing possible?

The first time I found this possibility in the scientific literature was a 2001 Russian report on the discovery of a melanin-rich species of fungi colonizing and apparently thriving within the walls of the still hot Chernobyl meltdown reactor site.In 2004, the same observation was made for the surrounding soils of the Chernobyl site.We also know that, based on a 2008 report, pyomelanin-producing bacteria have been found in thriving colonies within uranium-contaminated soils. There is also a 1961 study that found, amazingly, melanin-rich fungi from soils of a Nevada nuclear test site survived radiation exposure doses of up to 6400 Grays (about 2,000 times a human lethal dose).Clearly, something about melanin in these species not only enables them to survive radiation exposures that are normally lethal to most forms of life, but actually attracts them to it. Could the fungi actually be using melanin to feast on the free lunch of anthropogenic radioactivity ?

Remarkably, back in 2007, a study published in PLoS titled, Ionizing Radiation Changes the Electronic Properties of Melanin and Enhances the Growth of Melanized Fungi, revealed that fungal cellsmanifested increased growthrelative to non-melanized cells after exposure to ionizing radiation. In other words, the fungi grew better after being exposed to radiation. The irradiated melanin from these fungi also changed its electronic properties, which the authors noted, raised intriguing questions about a potential role for melanin in energy capture and utilization.

For more on this groundbreaking study, take a look at a 2007 report in theMIT Technology Reviewtitled,Eating Radiation: A New Form of Energy?

The question arises, could the consumption of melanin from fungi protect those higher on the food chain (like humans) from radiation exposure?

This question appears to have been answered affirmatively by a 2012 study published in the journalToxicology and Applied Pharmacology, titled, Melanin, a promising radioprotector: mechanisms of actions in a mice model, which found that when melanin isolated from the fungus Gliocephalotrichum simplex was administered at a dose of 50 mg/kg body weight in BALB/c mice before exposure to 6-7 Grays of gamma radiation, it increased their 30-day survival by 100 percent. The study also noted that melanin up to a dosage of 100 mg/kg (i.p.) did not cause adverse effects on the health of the mice.

In the study conclusion, the authors stated: The observed mitigative effects of melanin in the present study gain a lot of significance especially in nuclear emergencies but need to be validated in humans by more detailed experiments. Prior to these confirmations and based on current investigations, it can be concluded that during such emergencies,diets rich in melanin may be beneficial to overcome radiation toxicity in humans.

Another study published in 2012 inCancer Biotherapy & Radiopharmaceuticalstitled, Compton Scattering by Internal Shields Based on Melanin-Containing Mushrooms Provides Protection of Gastrointestinal Tract from Ionizing Radiation, confirmed the remarkable radioprotective properties of the melanized mushrooms was actually melanin-specific and due to other well-known therapeutic compounds within the fungi.

As succinctly summarized on theSmall Things Considered website: The authors fed mice a mushroom used in East Asian cuisine, called Judas ear, tree, or jelly ear (Auricularia auricula-judae) an hour before giving them a powerful 9 Gy dose with the beta emitter Cesium137. For perspective, anything over ~0.1 Gy is considered a dangerously high dose for humans. All the control mice died in 13 days while ~90 percent of the mushroom-fed ones survived. Mice fed a white mushroom (porcini) died almost as fast as the controls, but those fed white mushrooms supplemented with melanin also survived.

So, how does melanin perform this trick?

One clue was provided by a study published in 2011 inBioelectrochemistrytitled, Gamma radiation interacts with melanin to alter its oxidationreduction potential and results in electric current production, where ionizing radiation was found to alter melanins oxidation-reduction potential.

Unlike most other biomolecules, which experience a destructive form of oxidative damage as a result of radiation exposure, melanin remained structurally and functionally intact, appearing capable of producing a continuous electric current. This current, theoretically, could be used to produce chemical/metabolic energy in living systems. This would explain the increased growth rate, even under low nutrient conditions, in certain kinds of gamma irradiated fungi.

So, you may be wondering, what is a good source of supplemental melanin for those interested in its radioprotective and radiotrophic (radiation eating) properties? I believe chaga (Inonotus obliquus) is one of the most promising candidates. Not only is it one of the nutritionally dense mushrooms, containing an immense amount of melanin, but it was known by the Siberians as the gift from God and the mushroom of immortality, by the Japanese as the diamond of the forest, and by the Chinese as the king of plants. There is also an increasingly compelling body of scientific information demonstrating its health benefits for conditions as serious as cancer.

It should be noted that there is a profound toxicological difference between the type of radiation exposures that come from the outside in, e.g. being irradiated at a distance by radioactive material outside of us, and from the inside out, e.g. low-dose radioisotope uptake. The latter can be orders of magnitude more dangerous, as radioisotopes like uranium-238, cesium-137, and plutonium-239, can be taken into the tissues and remain there for a lifetime, wreaking havoc on a moment-to-moment basis.

Due to a phenomenon known as thephotoelectric effect, low-dose radionuclides like uranium-238, which are technically weak emitters of alpha radiation, can be tens of thousands times more damaging to our DNA than present-day radiological risk assessment models account for.

We bring this up in order to properly qualify the aforementioned information, as it could be highly misleading to those who interpret it to mean that one can simply supplement with an edible melanin product to reduce and even benefit from radiation exposure. Nothing can effectively reduce the radiotoxicity of incorporated radionuclides beyond removing them from the body.

That said, apple pectin, was successfully used post-Chernobyl to dramatically reduce the bodily burden of absorbed radionuclides in thousands of Russian children. Moreover, once we grasp the genocidal implications of the widespread contamination of the biosphere with the routine and accidental releases of radio-toxicants that maintain their toxicity for thousands, and in some cases, millions of years (e.g plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years and Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.4 billion years), we realize the solution (if there is one) is to phase out and try to mitigate the planet-wide fallout from the nuclear industrys activities over the course of the 75 years.

Go here to see the original:
Melanin: The Holy Grail of Radioprotective Food Compounds - The Epoch Times

It was a little awkward in January 1899 when the Son of God died near Bridgwater, considering he was supposed to be immortal. Several soul brides and his daughter, the Child of the Devil, succeeded him.

And he was buried standing up just so he was ready for action when the resurrection occurred - but if you believe the rumours, hed had more than enough action during his lifetime.

This is the story of the Agapemonites, a mid-1800s sex cult centred in the heart of, of all places, Spaxton, that scandalised Victorian Society.

The Reverend Henry Prince was the youngest child of a West Indian plantation owner, born in Bath in 1811. He underwent a religious conversion in 1834, and the following year, he gave up a career in medicine for his spiritual calling.

In March 1836, he entered St David's College, Lampeter, but soon got himself something of a reputation for his beliefs. His first curacy was at Charlinch, where he proved himself to be a charismatic and popular preacher - although one with some unorthodox views about sex.

When he began flinging himself around the room and prophesying, word reached The Bishop of Bath and Wells, who asked the Rector to reign in his curate. This didnt go according to plan - instead, the rector converted and became Princes follower, prompting the Bishop to revoke both mens licence to preach.

In 1842 Prince obtained a temporary curacy in Suffolk but with the words in me you see Christ in the flesh, he proclaimed himself to be The Messiah, and The Church of England promptly defrocked him.

Undeterred, Prince continued to gain followers, especially in Brighton and Weymouth. His gospel also attracted many young unmarried women and older widows. One day, Prince gathered them all in a large house in Weymouth and solemnly informed them the end of the world was nigh.

They were told that all possessions - including money - would be meaningless in the face of oblivion, so they should share them for the common good.

And just like that, The Agapeomone - abode of love - became a reality. Using the money, the group bought a 200-acre estate in Spaxton, complete with a great house with some eighteen bedrooms, sitting rooms, dining rooms and servants' quarters.

Spacious grounds and gardens, known as Eden, were dotted with outhouses, stables, conservatories, gazebos and cottages. It had its own chapel in one corner with easy chairs, settees and a billiard table. And the estate was surrounded by a high brick wall to keep prying eyes out and the faithful in. Enormous bloodhounds guarded the gates.

But it was his practise of keeping spiritual wives - and accusations of theft, kidnapping and brainwashing - that finally brought the cult to the attention of the newspapers.

In 1845 three of the Nottidge sisters travelled to Somerset - along with Prince - to reside in the new community. During the journey, Prince persuaded Harriet, Agnes and Clara Nottidge to marry three leading clergymen from the Agapemone.

Harriet married Rev. Lewis Price, Agnes married Rev George Thomas, and Clara married Rev. William Cobbe. They all wed in Swansea on 9th July 1845. Clara and Harriet would live happily in the Abode of Love with their spiritual husbands for many years. But after becoming with no right to remove her cash - after angering Prince a pregnant, Agnes was later banished from the church and branded a fallen woman.

When Agnes realised Prince had set his sights on another sister, Louisa, she wrote to her, telling her not to come to Spaxton.

So, Louisa came to Agapemone to live. Alarmed, her outside family decided to free her.

Late one night, drinkers at the Lamb Inn, next door to the Agapemone, heard frantic screaming. They rushed out to see a young woman being bundled into a coach, which clattered noisily off into the night.

Louisa remained utterly convinced that Henry Prince was God, and her mother had her committed to a lunatic asylum. She managed to escape, only to be recaptured and recommitted, but her friends in the sect alerted the Commissioners in Lunacy, who investigated and released her in May 1848.

After her release, Louisa sued her family for abduction and false imprisonment and won, remaining at the Agapemone for the rest of her life.

The case of Louisa Nottige was the first time that the general public, via the newspapers, had heard of the Agapemonists, but it wouldnt be the last.

The incident which would forever fix them in the imagination as an evil sex cult came in 1856 when Prince announced something he called the Divine Purification.

Prince said he would carry out the sacrificial deflowering of a young girl to prove that he was the Son of God. Before long, a selection of suitable girls was made available in the chapel so he could choose the one to be 'favoured.

In front of a large congregation of his followers, dressed in flowing red velvet, he had full sexual intercourse with a 16-year-old follower on a billiard table. The girl was violated to the sound of the chapel organ and the singing of hymns. He assured his followers the girl would not become physically pregnant but who would give birth to the spirit of the new Messiah.

So eyebrows were raised among even the most devout followers when it became apparent the girl was pregnant. The resulting child that was born nine months later was called Eve.

She was condemned and denied by Prince as a devil child and was not recognised by him as his flesh and blood.

Their blinkers were finally removed, many of the congregation left and at the same time, the walls were built higher, and no one allowed in obviously, this just meant gossip and speculation went into overload.

Rumours escalated, tales became taller and more and more journalists dropped in, using the Lamb Inn as a base to gather gossip and buzz from the locals.

A favourite tale was how Mr Prince would choose his next female companion by sitting on a revolving stage and seeing who was in front of him when it stopped turning. The young ladies were said to have then stripped naked to bathe him.

Prince outlived many of his 'followers, ' giving further credence to his claim that he was immortal. In 1896 aged 85, he emerged from behind the walls of Spaxton to initiate the building of an ornate church in Clapton in North London, complete with a 155ft tower of Portland stone, oak hammer-beam roof and stained glass windows depicting the submission of womankind to man.

The church was dedicated to the Ark of the Covenant, and one of the first preachers appointed was the Reverend John Hugh Smyth-Pigott.

In 1899, Prince finally died at the age of 88. His followers were confused and hurriedly buried him in the grounds of the chapel, with his coffin positioned vertically so that he would be standing on the day of his resurrection.

Rev John Hugh Smyth-Pigott succeeded him as leader of the sect, and he immediately recruited 50 more girls. Rev Smyth-Pigott died in 1927, and two years later, Agapemone had dwindled to 37 members.

The Spaxton property was finally sold off in 1958. The complex of buildings became known as Barford Gables, and the chapel where Prince is said to have selected his sex slaves was later used as a studio for the production of BBC animated children's television programmes in the 1960s - including the classic Trumpton and Camberwick Green.

Who would have guessed that the grand building, which still stands today, has been home to the Son of God, the spawn of the devil and Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb?

Originally posted here:
The mid-1800s sex cult in the heart of Spaxton - Bridgwater Mercury

By Olusegun Adeniyi

In a pinned tweet posted six years ago, precisely 7th November 2016, Oluwatobiloba (Tobi) Amusan wrote what has turned out to be prophetic:Unknown now, butI will be unforgettableI will persist until I succeed. On Sunday night in Oregon, United States, Tobi Amusan wrote her name into sporting immortality. I took that phrase from Tim Hutchings, a former English athlete who ran the commentary at the World Athletics Championship Oregon22 alongside American athletic legend, Gail Devers. Amusanhas not only become the first Nigerian to win a Gold medal at the World Championship but also the first athlete to break the global record on the track twice within one night!

This perhaps is one of the most depressing periods in the history of our country. Our public universities have been under lock and key for almost six months with marooned students effectively having lost an academic season as a result of the strike by lecturers. The prevailing climate of general insecurity has reached Abuja where school authorities are asking parents to collect their children/wards and soldiers of the Guards Brigade are being ambushed by terrorists who appear to have infiltrated the Federal Capital Territory. The Naira is dancing Buga in the exchange rate market almost every day as prices of goods and services skyrocket. The energy sector has practically collapsed along with the power grids and oil thieves have hijacked the oil and gas sub-sector. Since we now spend far above what we earn as we continue borrowing to stay afloat, the macro-economic indices are, to put it mildly, frightening. Sadly, there is hardly anything to cheer in our country today.

To worsen matters, those who seek to become our next president are busy fighting dirty in the marketplace over inanities. Many of these politicians over whom Nigerians squabble and take sides as Christians and Muslims, according to a Twitter post, actually meet at secret fraternities. In any case, despite our profession of Christianity or Islam, we should all feel a sense of shame as to what Nigeria has become. That of course does not discount the issue of inclusivity in a plural state that a religiously balanced presidential ticket suggests. Or the provocation of some politicians hiring unknown godmen almost as if Christianity is about wearing ridiculous regalia. But these are issues that can wait. Today, I want to stand up for the champion, our own Tobi Amusan!

For Nigerians who may not fully understand or appreciate what happened at the World Athletics competition in Oregon, let me take them through the commentary that followed the amazing 100 metre hurdles race. Hutchings started it: Tobi Amusan looks at the clock. I cannot believe it; shes done it again. Two world records in one night and she makes history by becoming Nigerias first world champion. What a way to do it and what a stage on which to discover sporting immortality! Records can be broken; titles will stand the test of time and tonight shes done both two world records: 12.06. Tonight will never, never be forgotten by anyone lucky enough to be here. That was utterly extraordinary. We doubted she could do it again. How dare we? How dare we? Nigeria, a proud African nation, are on top of the world tonight. And Amusan has delivered an evening of unprecedented glory and speed. That was utterly, utterly incredible.

After describing the line-up of the eight athletes as the fastest in a World Championship final according to records posted by each of the contestants, Hutchings turned to his colleague in the commentary box: Gail Devers, I know that you have scaled the heights but surely, surely, we never would have expected two world records on one night. Surely, Amusan should have gone tired there, but she was even better.

Devers, an American two-time Olympic champion in the 100 meters and only the second woman in history to have successfully defended that title (with three Olympics Gold medals to her name), responded: I am going to tell you what I wrote. I wrote that let me put myself in her shoes Devers then went on to describe the difficulty that faces any athlete who breaks the record in the qualifying heats and the challenge before Amusan barely an hour later when she had to compete for Gold medal in the final: They are thinking that she cannot repeat (what she just did) but you got to believe in yourself. Its not what other people believe about you. Its what you believe about yourself and what you are willing to do. And on this night, she had to execute. And she did!

Hutchings was back: That was absolutely incredible. When you think, Gail, how long it took Kendra Harrison to break (Bulgarian Yordanka) Donkovas world record and she did it by a hundredth of a second. And suddenly, in the space of one evening, the record tumbled by a further 0.14 of a second which, for this event, is a colossal drop.

Devers took over, again: I mean, it is unbelievable like you said. I was there (in 1988) when Donkova made that world record and to see it come down twice. This is one of those days when people are going to be like where were you when that happened? And I am going to say I was right here watching. Hutchings interjected: And so am I. Toby Amusan is making history, the first Nigerian to win a world title and two world records in one evening. Unprecedented!

My friend, Chris Adetayo who shared one of the screenshots from Amusans twitter page believes that the story of Amusan is going to be a subject of attention by many motivational speakers. I feel inclined to join that crowd today. On 18th September 2016 when the (now former) World record holder, Kendal Harrison turned 24, Amusan tweeted a photograph she had taken with her and this message, Happy birthday @KeniUSATF. 100MHurdles World Record holderWatch out, Im gonna break it soon which she ended with a laughter emoji. And now, she has done it!

The story of Amusan is indeed incredible but there is also an unfortunate Nigerian angle to it. At the Rio Olympics trial in Lagos in June last year, Amusan posted what could have been a new African record of 12.3 seconds, but the timer failed her. About 80 meters into the race, as I approached the home stretch, from the corner of my eye, I couldnt help but notice that the display clock stayed at Zero the whole time. I had never experienced that before, Amusan wrote as she reflected on what might have been. the timer not working, happening during one of the biggest races of my career? Hell no! So, it was quite astonishing seeing all that effort come down to an important moment of just simply timing the final

That disappointment is now no longer important. When Amosun took the podium on Sunday night and the Nigerian national anthem was being played, she could not hold back her tears of joy. As expected, many have given their own interpretation. I am aware that we live in a country where the whole is less than the sum of its parts and we can spend a whole day lamenting about Nigeria. But the lesson from Amusan is that nothing comes easy and that you must work for your success. And as it is for individuals, so it is for nations. That is one take-away from Amusans story. Even with all her past disappointments, she set a goal for herself, put in the shift, and realized her dream. We can say the same for Ese Brume who won bronze at the 2019 championship in Doha but won silver at Oregon. She has already set her sight on an individual Gold medal at the next Olympics and I believe nothing can stop her.

There is a commercial that Globacom used to air of the British World Heavyweight boxing champion, Anthony Joshua speaking about the Nigerian spirit of resilience. Since I have elected to play the role of a motivational speaker, it is most fitting to repeat it here: There has always been a big piece of my heart as a Nigerian and I do believe that it is that piece that sets me apart. It always says to me, never give up, dream big! We have that same tenacity, that Nigerian fighting spirit that makes us game changers! We are relentless. We dont just face our challenges; we step into the ring to win again and again and again. If you believe in yourself, there is no limit to what you can achieve. Yeah, I used to be a bricklayer in England but now I am heavyweight champion of the world! he declared before he added: You need strength? Yeah, that comes from the hard knocks that life throws at us. And we are Nigerians, we know all about that. And finally: Its like when we are up against the rope. You dont stay down; youve got to fight. You have to dig deep to be a world champion.

So much for motivation. Now to the reality. In many different ways, Tobi Amusans breathtaking epic success captures the Nigerian dilemma. Here is a nation imbued with some of the most exceptional citizens with incredible world class talents from aerospace, cutting edge medicine to sports. Yet, despite a lack of preparation for anything, our talented citizens continue winning laurels to the utter astonishment of an embarrassingly incompetent officialdom. Here is a nation defined by a tragic mismatch between Africas most enlightened and refined civil society and one of the worlds worst performing states. Caught between the pride and optimism of our citizens and the tragedy of governmental failures, Nigeria is kept alive by the stubborn hope among the majority of our citizens that one day, bad times and atrocious leaders shall pass.

I join millions of Nigerians in offering my congratulations to both Tobi Amusan and Ese Brume.

Another Organised Waste of Time

I dont understand what point the House of Representatives wants to make with its proposed investigation of the fuel subsidy regime under President Goodluck Jonathan. For me, the so-called Special Ad hoc Committee to Investigate the Petroleum Products Subsidy Regime established on 29th June is no more than another organised waste of time. It is an admission that our lawmakers do not read their own reports. If they do, they will realise the futility of another probe of the oil and gas industry, after what they did a decade ago. Except of course there is something they are not telling Nigerians.

In 2012, following the crisis that followed the unsuccessful attempt by President Jonathan to fully deregulate the petroleum sector, the House of Representatives set up a similar ad-hoc committee to probe the subsidy regime. The current Speaker, Hon Femi Gbajabiamila was a prominent leader in that House. Chaired by Hon Farouk Lawan, who would later be jailed for taking a bribe from Mr. Femi Otedola, the committee conducted its sessions in public (beamed live on television) and received memorandum and testimonies from major stakeholders in the oil industry.

With the authority of the then Speaker, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal (current Governor of Sokoto State), Mr Boniface Emenalo (secretary of the committee who would later be a prosecution witness against Lawan in his court case) availed me all reports, audio tapes and raw transcripts from the committee secretariat and provided clarification whenever needed. It took me two years before I eventually completed the work in June 2014 but given the political environment at the time, I deferred its publication till after the 2015 general election.

Principal testimonies include that of the then Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; then Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs Diezani Alison-Madueke; then Attorney General of the Federation, Mohammed Bello Adoke, SAN; two Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Deputy Governors at the time, (Dr Kingsley Moghalu and Mr Tunde Lemo); then Chair of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Mrs Ifueko Omougui-Okauru; then Director General, Budget Office of the Federation, Dr Bright Okogu; then Chairman of the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission, Mr Elias Nban; and the then Group Managing Director of the Nigeria National Petroleum Commission (NNPC), Mr Austin Oniwon.

Also captured in the report were testimonies from 93 oil marketers and importers, heads of relevant institutions (NPA, Customs, PPPRA, PPMC, PEF etc.), senior officials from the Nigerian Navy, auditors appointed by the Ministry of Finance to verify subsidy claims, members of the professional bodies in the downstream oil sector, foreign oil traders, as well as the managing directors of the Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna refineries.

Although I began the effort with a mind to put the resultant book up for sale, the end product was too voluminous. I ended up putting the 857-page book, The Verbatim Report: The Inside Story of the Fuel Subsidy Scam on my web portal for free download. So, if our lawmakers are interested in what transpired regarding subsidy payments, especially under President Jonathan, they should access the publication on http://bit.ly/1EY9s80.

Leadership and the Teens

And let me repeat: You are never too young to lead and never too old to learn. So, I call on the young generation to put its remarkable energy, insight and passion in the service of reconciliation and peace. The path is yours to construct and pursue.

The foregoing statement by the former United Nations Secretary-General, the late Kofi Annan, is the anchor for the 2022 edition of the annual Teens Career Conference of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), The Everlasting Arms Parish (TEAP). Speakers include Samson Itodo, Executive Director, YIAGA-Africa and member of the Kofi Annan Foundation Board, Linda Ejiofor-Suleiman, an award-winning actress and model, as well as Seun Onigbinde, a social entrepreneur, open data analyst and co-founder/CEO of BudgIT. The conference holds on 20th August, but participation is by online registration at http://www.rccgteapteens.ng

You can follow me on my Twitter handle, @Olusegunverdict and on http://www.olusegunadeniyi.com

View post:
A Moment of Sporting Immortality - The Heritage Times

Ive combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Bitcoin traders dont care about a recessionDebate over the definition of a recession, and whether were in one, feels like a distraction. (CoinDesk)+ Technically the US may now be in recession, but much of the economy remains strong. (The Guardian)+ Heres why the popular definition of a recession isnt official. (The Atlantic $)+ Bitcoins value is heading towards its best month since 2021. (Bloomberg $)

2 Iran is ramping up its drone productionIt wants to sell them to overseas buyers, reportedly including Russia. (NYT $)+ Why business is booming for military AI startups. (MIT Technology Review)

3 The CHIPS Act isnt going to fix the semiconductor shortagePartly because the shortage seems to be easing anyway. (Recode)+ The multi-billion package must be invested wisely. (Wired $)+ Chipmakers say they urgently need the subsidies promised by the bill. (FT $)

4 The Democrats did not release a deepfake video of Joe BidenDespite conspiracy theorists best efforts to convince the internet. (BBC)+ The biggest threat of deepfakes isnt the deepfakes themselves. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Online outrage is performative and fleetingRefusing to stoop to their level can make the whole thing less annoying to deal with. (The Atlantic $)

6 Sticky patches could revolutionize how we take ultrasoundsPatients could wear them at home, instead of attending hospital appointments. (The Guardian)

7 Chinas virtual idols are burnt outTheir adoring fans dont always consider the humans behind the animations. (Rest of World)+ How Chinas biggest online influencers fell from their thrones. (MIT Technology Review)

8 TikTok is driven by strangers, not friendsThe platform rejected the social model championed by Facebook, with great success. (New Yorker $)+ Instagram has sheepishly (and only temporarily) retracted some of its much-hated recent changes. (NYT $)+ Facebook has vowed to double the amount of AI-recommended feed content. (Motherboard)+ Snap and TikTok offer richer, more interesting recommendations than Google. (Slate)

9 This aging research institute wants to help you live better, not longerBut the shadow of the promise of immortality looms large. (Neo.Life)+ Saudi Arabia plans to spend $1 billion a year discovering treatments to slow aging. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Meet the humans keeping the cloud online Often under incredibly punishing conditions. (Aeon)

Quote of the day

"What frustrates me most is when I'm accused of twisting the truth. As meteorologists, we report facts. There is no conspiracy."

Meteorologist and weather presenter Tomasz Schafernaker tells his employer, the BBC, about his frustration at the online abuse he received from climate change deniers during the UKs recent severe heatwave.

The big story

Meet the wounded veteran who got a penis transplant

October 2019

Read the original post:
The Download: a breakthrough climate bill, and Twitters terrible trends - MIT Technology Review

Austin Duffy, 47, was born in Dundalk and lives in Howth, north of Dublin, where he works as an oncologist at the citys Mater hospital. His two previous novels, This Living and Immortal Thing, shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish novel of the year, and Ten Days, about early dementia, were both set in New York, where Duffy met his wife, the painter Naomi Taitz Duffy, after winning a research fellowship to work at the Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer centre in Manhattan in 2006. His new novel, The Night Interns, follows three trainee medics on a Dublin surgical ward.

What led you to write The Night Interns?Its not a memoir, but I still have vivid memories of my intern year when I was doing medicine [at Trinity College Dublin in the 90s] and always knew I wanted to write about the experience at some point. Youre thrust into this world where you quickly find out the inadequacy of the theoretical knowledge youre relying on from your studies. I wanted to immerse the reader in the terror maybe thats too strong a word, maybe it isnt of being on call and being asked to be the first person to figure things out for people who are sick. The structure, with no chapters, no real breaks, is meant to make you feel like you cant come up for air.

Were you inspired by other hospital novels?No. While I was working on the book I reread Elena Ferrantes The Days of Abandonment, which has that very intense type of claustrophobic first-person narration I wanted. And this is going to sound very odd, but what really inspired me was coming across Hubert Mingarellis A Meal in Winter four or five years ago. Im stunned he doesnt get more attention; hes a bloody genius. Its this short novel humanising the experience of these three SS officers in a death camp in Poland, wandering around the forest at night, trying to keep warm and cook a meal, trying everything they can to get out of their horrific duties. Obviously Im not comparing theyre working in a death camp, and as an intern youre trying to help people, even though it doesnt feel like that some of the time but something just struck me about the group dynamic of these three recognisably human characters able to do nothing, really, but try to get through the night. I remember thinking, I need to set this in a hospital, I need to make these people interns [laughs].

Does knowing youre a novelist make colleagues wary?Not at all, but I can set their minds at ease: my characters are all fictional. People do sometimes sidle up to you saying, oh, I know who your man was [in previous novels]. Im sure Ill get that a lot with this, because there is a sort of villain in the book, but hes a total construct, not anyone I ever worked with. If he reminds me of anyone, its a particular non-medical person, but hes fiction.

How do you write?Ive a short train commute into Dublin from where I live. Thats 25 minutes writing. If I get to the station early, I get another 10 or 15 minutes, the same if I take a slightly earlier train at the other end. Add it all up and its the guts of an hour. If Im bringing my son to soccer practice, Ill be the oddball sat in the car with a laptop, but thats another 45 minutes or an hour of writing. By necessity its very focused: youre not staring out the window, you know?

Which came first for you, medicine or literature?Medicine. It wasnt that I had a passion for it, but back then [growing up in Dundalk] there didnt seem to be a huge amount of opportunities generally and it seemed like something that would be fairly open. I only got properly emotionally invested in being a doctor when I was a few years down the track. Ironically, the intern year was a help: maybe you wouldnt get that impression from the book, but it was good to feel part of the hospital, because as a medical student I hadnt felt like that at all and found it difficult to engage. I didnt really write properly until I found myself in New York in 2006. My hospital accommodation was like a box: no internet, no television, and at that point it was like, if youre serious [about writing], do it. I joined the Writers Studio in Greenwich Village, a weekly craft class that got me into the flow of writing every day. My first book took seven years but it grew out of an exercise from that class.

What novels have you enjoyed lately?Fernanda Melchor just blew my head off. On the jacket of Hurricane Season, Ben Lerner says she makes all other fiction seem anaemic by comparison, and when I read the book, I knew exactly what he meant. It made me feel the same way I felt when I first read Denis Johnsons Jesus Son. I remember picking that up randomly while waiting to meet someone in a bookshop, and they came up to me like: Are you OK? Whats wrong with your face?

Which writers made you want to write fiction?At college I read the same things everyone else was reading Camus, Dostoevsky but I was too young to get them. It was in New York that I really started reading as a writer. I remember being amazed by a Roberto Bolao story in the New Yorker. I read pretty much all his books after that. Hes brilliant, but he loses the run of himself in his bigger novels; I find him one of the funniest writers, and hes more able to sustain that humour in his short stories. Javier Maras was another one I first read in the New Yorker. I think it was a story where someone was sunbathing and it was just their observations around the pool... brilliant. Ive read all his books too but I had to stop because I was beginning to imitate him, and hes not someone you can imitate; youll just sound like an eejit.

Read the original:
Austin Duffy: I wanted to immerse the reader in the terror of being on call - The Guardian

We have all heard of organ transplantations in medicine, notably in relation to the kidney or liver. But many may not have heard of transplanting the head of one person on to the body of another person who has been declared dead.

The whole-body/head transplantation procedure is under development by a team led by Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero and Chinese surgeon Xiaoping Ren, in a project called the Head Anastomosis Venture (HEAVEN). This project raises a host of philosophical, bioethical, social and political issues not encountered in conventional organ transplantations. This is discussed by M Cherry and R Fan in Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Vol 7, Issue 2, April 2022.

A whole-body/head transplantation involves severing the volunteers spinal chord and removing the head while preserving the blood vessels. The head is then attached to the donor body, whose head has been removed, fusing and stimulating the two spinal chords to create new functional nerve connections. Muscles and blood supply are also connected. The body and head must be cooled during the operation to prevent cellular damage from oxygen deprivation.

Some limited success in animal experiments has been reported using this procedure. A successful grafting of a monkey head on to a monkeys body was reported. Canavero and Ren also carried out a head transplant on a corpse in China in 2021. A full head swap between brain-dead organ donors is the next step. A Russian, Valery Spiridonov, who suffers from a muscle-wasting disease, volunteered to have his head transferred on to a healthy donor body, hoping this would provide a new lease of life. He recently opted out of the programme and the HEAVEN team is now seeking new volunteers.

A key philosophical question is who survives a whole-body/head transplantation, the donor of the head or the donor of the body? It would commonly be assumed, since the brain is the site of our thoughts and memories, that it is the donor of the head who survives. But surely the body plays some part in shaping personality? Also, we dont know how well the head would integrate with the new body or how long the post-transplant individual could maintain the identity of the head. That the question of who survives this procedure is philosophically undecided means that ethical criteria to guide research in this area cannot be drawn up.

Things get more complicated if, say, a mans head is transplanted on to a womans body. Is the new individual a man or a woman? And suppose he/she decides to have children, whose children are they? The male head will have decided to procreate but the children will be genetically related only to the female donor of the body. And, suppose the head donor and the body donor were each married (not to each other) at the time the transplantation was carried out, two individuals can now claim to be married to the post-transplant survivor.

Dr Sergio Canavero claims that modern medicine has solved problems that have traditionally dogged head transplant operations

Whole-body/head transplantations may be seen to offer a pathway to immortality. Say my head is transplanted on to a healthy young body that maintains my head until the body grows old and ineffective, at which time my head is transplanted on to a fresh young body, and this process continues indefinitely. One obvious problem is how to maintain my head in a healthy state over the long term. As we all know, the brain deteriorates with age, just like the rest of the body.

Canavero and Ren propose three reasons why the transplantation would be a good development life extension, cosmetic body swaps and gender reassignment. But swapping your body for cosmetic reasons is a flimsy justification for such a fraught procedure and there is no evidence that whole-body head/transplantation would reverse gender dysphoria.

Surgeons Canavero and Ren arrogantly dismiss bioethical objections to the HEAVEN project as mere opinion and seem to work on the crude utilitarian philosophical basis that if something can be made to work, its ethical. As the old surgeon joke goes: Whats the difference between God and a surgeon? Answer: God doesnt think hes a surgeon. Anyway, if you think whole-body/head transplantations will be widely available anytime soon, you are, I would think, getting ahead of yourself.

William Reville is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC

Go here to read the rest:
Could head transplantation be a path to immortality? - The Irish Times

By Lt. Gen. Dr. Subrata Saha (retd)

New Delhi, Jul 13: The Amarnath shrine, located to the north of Pahalgam in Kashmir, and south of the Zojila Pass, gateway to Ladakh, is believed to be the holy spot where Lord Shiva took Samadhi (deep meditative contemplation leading to higher consciousness), before narrating the story of eternity and immortality to Goddess Parvati, hence the name Amarnath. The remote mountainous cave, tucked away from living beings, is at an altitude of 5,486 metres (13,000 ft).

According to legend, as Lord Shiva undertook the ascent, he progressively detached himself from the world around him. He left his Nandi (Sacred Bull) at Pahalgam (Bail gaon); at Chandanwari, he released the Moon from his Jata (hair); at the banks of Lake Sheshnag, he released the snakes; and at Mahagunas Parvat (Mahaganesh Hill), he chose to leave his son Ganesha behind. Finally, at Panjtarni, he detached himself from the five elements of Nature - Earth, Water, Air, Fire and Sky.

Having foregone all worldly attachments, Lord Shiva took Samadhi at the Amarnath Cave.

There are stories on the discovery of the Holy Cave. A shepherd named Buta Malik of Batkote village near Pahalgam, strayed into the area while grazing his sheep, where a Sadhu gave him a sack of coal. Upon reaching home, he discovered that the sack, in fact, contained gold. Overjoyed with his discovery, Buta Malik rushed back to thank the Sadhu, only to discover the cave at their meeting site. Yet another mythological legend has it that when Kashyap Rishi drained the water out of Kashmir valley, which was a vast lake, the cave and the lingam were discovered by Bhrigu Rishi.

Shri Amarnathji Yatra - mammoth administrative and security exercise

Legends arouse human imagination and the desire to seek blessings of Lord Shiva, driving many to undertake the arduous journey to the holy shrine of Shri Amarnathji. The number of pilgrims vary from 3 to 4 lakhs each year.

The Amarnath Cave can be accessed through two routes. The traditional one is from Pahalgam, touching holy places where Lord Shiva is believed to have detached from various elements of life - Chandanwari, Sheshnag, Mahagunas Parvat, Panjtarni. The Pahalgam route is 33 kms long, with a journey time of five days to and fro. The second route from Baltal is new and shorter, 18 kms from the roadhead, and the Yatra can be done in a day. The two routes meet at Sangam, for the final 3 km trek up to the Holy Cave.

The Amarnath cave is also accessible by helicopter from Neelgrath in the North and Pahalgam in the South to the helipad at Panjtarni, approximately 5 kms from the Holy Cave. This year (in 2022), helicopter services have been introduced from Srinagar to Neelgrath and Pahalgam, enabling pilgrims to finish the Yatra in one day.

Management of the yatra is done by the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board (SASB) that was constituted by an Act of J&K State Legislature in 2000, with the Governor of J&K as its ex-officio Chairman.

The duration and schedule of the Shri Amarnathji Yatra is decided each year, keeping in view the extent of snow fall in the preceding winter, and the date of Raksha Bandhan, on which the Yatra traditionally concludes.

In earlier times the Yatra would last for around two weeks, with persistent demand to increase the duration. After the constitution of the SASB, this was streamlined to a period to 60 days, which continued up to 2009. Since then, a regular scaling down has taken place with the duration being curtailed to 55 days in 2010, 45 days in 2011 and 39 days in 2012. This year the Amarnath Yatra has resumed after a hiatus, interruption in 2019 due to repeal of Article 370, and Covid in 2020 and 2021. This year the Yatra is scheduled for 43 days - 30 June to 11 August.

The Yatra is a colossal security and administrative exercise involving multiple agencies. The base camps, staging areas, porters, ponies, palanquins, medical facilities, langars (community kitchens), security and communications are put in place every year and dismantled at the end of the Yatra.

Shri Amarnathji Yatra encourages economic activity providing livelihood to many. Every year thousands of Kashmiri locals join the Yatra, offering their services with ponies, palanquins, motor transport, hospitality, and associated logistics. Similarly transport and hospitality services providers in Jammu, and airlines from all over the country benefit from the Yatra.

Terrorist threat to the Yatra is however significant. In 1993, Pakistan-based Harkat-ul-Ansar had announced a ban on the Yatra for two years. In 1998, Harkatul Mujaheedin declared a ban on the Yatra, two days after it began. The Yatra, however, continued under heavy security arrangements. Major terrorist attacks on Yatris in the past, include Pahalgam in 2000, Sheshnag in 2001 and Nunwan Camp in 2002. In 2003 and 2006, terrorists hurled grenades at vehicles carrying pilgrims in Srinagar and Ganderbal respectively. In July 2017, a bus carrying pilgrims was attacked in Anantnag District, killing seven people, and injuring nineteen. In response to a question in the Parliament on July 25, 2017, Minister of Home Affairs stated that from 1990 to 2017, 36 terrorist attacks had been reported on Shri Amarnathji Yatris, in which 53 Yatris were killed and 167 Yatris were injured.

An extensive security grid is deployed for the Yatra every year. The Indian Army, Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) and J&K Police provide a 3-tier counter terrorist security structure. Additionally, State Disaster Response Force (SDRF), National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), Mountain Rescue Teams (MRT) are deployed to deal with natural disasters. The first tier creates a secure envelope with the Forces dominating the mountain heights in and around the area. The second tier does route opening and security to provide safe passage for the yatris. The third tier provides security at camps enroute, including frisking of yatris and their baggage. In addition, yatri convoys moving from Jammu to Nunwan (Pahalgam) and Baltal and back, are accompanied by armed police personnel.

This year The Resistance Front (TRF), a terrorist outfit that came up after August 2019, a proxy of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, has threatened to "spill blood" during the yatra. Notwithstanding the threat, because of the two years gap in the Yatra, higher numbers of pilgrims are expected. Therefore, additional provisions in terms of numbers of security forces and technologies to improve intelligence, surveillance and administration have been incorporated in the scheme of things.

The Challenges of Natural Disasters

Shri Amarnathji Yatra has been affected by natural disasters on numerous occasions. In 1996 heavy rains, snowstorms and avalanches resulted in about 60,000 yatris being stranded at different points. 243 people were reported dead, and hundreds of people were severely affected by exposure to the cold, high altitude problems, and accidents caused by the stampede due to widespread panic among the yatris. In fact, the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board (SASB) was constituted as a corrective measures post the 1996 disaster.

In 2015, three people died in the multiple mudslides in Kulan, Gagangir and Sonamarg villages. The Srinagar - Leh National Highway, which leads to the Baltal base camp, remained closed for three days. In 2018, five people died and four were injured after a landslide triggered by flash floods hit pilgrims near Brarimarg, on the Baltal route. Almost every year the Yatra is suspended for short durations and sometimes pilgrims are diverted from one route to another to keep the flow going.

On 8 July this year, severe rainfall at the higher reaches of The Cave, triggered high-speed muddy slush that washed away 25 to 30 tents and five 'Langars' from the base camp near the Cave. 16 people have died, and 40 injured, even as some are still missing. 15,000 pilgrims have been evacuated.

Threat of natural disasters are not unique to Amarnath or Kashmir, it is the fragility of the Himalayas, and the associated complex processes like deforestation, soil erosion, global warming, weakening glaciers and severe localised rainfall. Even when there have been no natural disasters, the ice Shiva Lingam had melted well before the close of Yatra due to environmental factors.

Clearly losses due to natural disasters far exceed terrorist attacks on the Yatra. Nonetheless, in Kashmir, terrorist threat and natural disasters are often concomitant and need to be dealt with deftly. In September 2014, even as Kashmir was enduring the worst floods, with South Kashmir and Srinagar fully inundated, Indian Army undertook disaster rescue and relief, while simultaneously eliminating infiltration bids from Pakistan across the line of control.

The Past and the Future meet in the Present - responsibility and sensitivity essential

The long spell of terrorist incident-free Yatra between 2006 and 2017, can be attributed to lessons learnt and year on year strengthening of the security grid. Similar strategies need to be applied to mitigate natural disasters and deal with the aftermath.

Management of the Yatra in terms of duration, number of pilgrims, modes of transportation, siting of base camps and staging areas have to factor the fragile ecology and environment. Well formulated plans must go hand in hand with effective implementation.

The makeshift camps must be replaced by permanent assets sited carefully keeping in mind potential threats, natural disasters, and terrorists.

The number of Yatris must be determined based on the capacities established, and no ad hoc and makeshift arrangements should be permitted.

The stretch between Sangam and the Holy Cave should be a 'restricted zone', with only medical facilities and essential security. Langars and other administrative paraphernalia must remain outside this zone.

Use of helicopters for Yatra has to be controlled keeping in mind ecological factors. Eco-friendly disposal of waste should be high priority.

In 2015, the Army undertook a well-planned extensive plantation drive along the Yatra route in collaboration with the Govt of J&K. The idea was to help nature renew, even as humans sought spiritual blessings and livelihood from its benevolence. Responsibility and sensitivity for the sake of eternity is essential in our actions.

(The author was the Kashmir Corps Commander in 2014-15, former Member, National Security Advisory Board and Deputy Chief of Army Staff)

Continue reading here:
Amarnath Yatrawhere spirituality and endurance overpower terror - Daijiworld.com

Topics Column

Our expert columnists offer opinion and analysis on important issues facing modern businesses and managers.

Jackie Robinson syndrome is the condition where, as a member of an underrepresented group, you are the first in something, the One and Only, and there is a perception that you must be both exceptional and perform at a higher standard than others. (This syndrome is named for the American superstar athlete who, in 1947, became the first Black player invited into Major League Baseball.) Many who operate with this status are often seen as anomalies.

Although embracing these anomalous qualities can cause isolation, especially at the beginning, as anomalies continue to survive, over time they set new baselines for normal. One and Onlys are often seen as trailblazers because they show us what is possible. They instinctively understand this human peculiarity: They work hard to embrace their differences, to stand out and not blend in. When a One and Only lives their life always being different, it means they inherently have learned to think outside the box.

Providing support for unique employees doesnt come naturally in most organizations. There can be bias against embracing the exceptions, even when they are exceptional. But One and Onlys have the power to lead change, which organizations should embrace and provide scaffolds to amplify.

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In the engineering world, we are typically encouraged to get rid of anomalies. Since they can negatively impact our data analysis or how we design a normative solution, anomalies are often discarded.

This bias against outliers and difficult-to-measure data can get baked into processes in extremely detrimental ways. In 1977, for instance, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration policy recommended excluding women of childbearing age from early drug trials following the discovery that a drug used to prevent morning sickness could cause severe birth defects, such as missing limbs. Many absurdities ensued, including a trial that studied whether hormone therapy was an effective treatment for mitigating heart disease after menopause that had 8,341 men enrolled and zero women. It wasnt until 1993 that the FDA explicitly reversed the recommendations from its 1977 policy. The damage they caused has yet to be fully resolved, because most of the advances the medical sciences have made are still rooted in original studies involving the male body. A 2020 study based on data from over 2 million patients revealed that women with heart disease are less likely than men to receive the recommended medication.

A similar bias to test with the male as the norm has plagued the auto industry. Since the 1970s, most crash tests designed to assess car safety designs have used crash test dummies that are standardized to the average American male body. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an agency of the U.S. federal government that has oversight of automobile safety, didnt begin to make wider use of female dummies in crash tests until 2003. The consequences are sobering: A 2019 University of Virginia study provided evidence that a female car occupant has a 73% greater chance of being seriously injured in a frontal car crash compared with a male occupant.

These are two real-world examples of what can happen when the experiences and voices of those outside the defined normal become muted during the innovation process.

Sometimes scientists choose to deal with anomalies not by discarding them from the data set but by analyzing them to figure out why they exist. How is it that a few metastatic breast cancer patients survive when most do not? How is it that, when an entire community contracts COVID-19, one or two people fly through with no symptoms? How is it that most people die before the age of 100, but a select few live to be centenarians? These are questions that are obviously worth embracing.

We dont need to look far to find proof that when anomalies are not discarded but treated as royalty, they can change the world. Just think about the story of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman who was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer in 1951. After her cancer cells were collected and cultivated, they were found to be unusually resilient in the lab, and they were used to unlock some of the biggest advances in medical science. They were the first immortal cells to live outside the human body, and for the past 60 years, Lackss cells, called HeLa cells, have been essential to marvelous medical advances ranging from the polio vaccine to chemotherapy and gene mapping. Of course, her cells were taken without her explicit permission , which is counter to the practices that organizations should follow when they encounter anomalies.

Anomalies have the ability to make a big difference, both in laboratories, like with Lackss cells, and in the professional world, the way Jackie Robinson did.

For organizations, anomalies can be seen as that talent that lies within their own ranks people who stand out from their peers and whom many might consider an unexpected success.

To maximize their competitiveness, businesses should not only lean into cultivating One and Onlys but also create a supportive environment where they can thrive even before they are identifiable as that rare anomalous gem.

Here are three ways businesses can utilize differences to lead in change:

Put anomalies in positions of leadership. The fact that One and Onlys are present in worlds where they stand alone in the first place means theyve navigated tougher challenges than most. One study, for instance, found that while the number of women-owned businesses grew nationally by 21% from 2014 to 2019, the numbers for African American/Black women grew even faster, by 50%. When One and Onlys are put in positions of leadership, they must be actively supported by management especially as many are less likely to receive help from organizational structures, be openly provided the resources they need to succeed, or have their accomplishments promoted.

Support bravery. It can take a huge amount of courage for One and Onlys to speak up, especially if their opinions are different from whats being voiced by everyone around them. Leaders have an important role in creating an environment that encourages divergent viewpoints. Leaders must explicitly ask for everyones opinion during team meetings to encourage that anomalous discovery. Dont shut down any ideas, even if they make you uncomfortable. Just like when working with neurodiverse talent, giving feedback that is tailored in response to the individuals diverse viewpoint can help create a more inclusive work environment.

Go back to the well. Companies should revisit the sourcing pipelines that got them to a broader range of job candidates. There are other One and Onlys who may be in the same place where the first one was found. Once Jackie Robinson broke through into the mainstream major leagues, the baseball world realized there was an entire group of players in the Negro Leagues who could be tapped. It changed the normative for the entire sport.

Our expert columnists offer opinion and analysis on important issues facing modern businesses and managers.

Ayanna Howard (@robotsmarts) is dean of the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University.

Link:
Unleash the Superpowers of Your One and Only Employees - MIT Sloan

Some editors, like Lucas, are trying to figure out how to do the same for the vast swaths of America that big publishers have mostly ignored. Its an effort that is complicated by a long history of neglect, which itself is bound up with publishers failure to take diversity in their own professional ranks seriously until recently. In interviews with more than 50 current and former book professionals and authors, I heard about the previous unsuccessful attempts to cultivate Black audiences and about an industry culture that still struggles to overcome the clubby, white elitism it was born in. As Lucas sees it, the future of book publishing will be determined not only by its recent hires but also by how it answers this question: Instead of fighting over slices of a shrinking pie, can publishers work to make the readership bigger for everyone?

When I entered the world of book publishing where I spent two years as an assistant and another 16 as a book-review editor, critic and reporter Barbara Epler, now the publisher of New Directions, warned me that the entry-level pay was abysmal, in large part because publishers assumed that few of their entry-level hires would actually have to survive on it: Historically, salaries were considered dress money. She said it with an outraged laugh, and I thought it was a joke, but I soon learned that she was right. When I was hired at Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1997, I made $25,000 a year for a job that required a college degree, industry experience and often more than 60 hours a week. I could have earned more money temping. Over the years, publishers remained reluctant to raise wages. In 2018, according to a Publishers Weekly industry survey, the median salary for an editorial assistant was $38,000.

For much of its history, book publishing, especially literary book publishing, was an industry built and run by rich, white men. One of the founders of Farrar, Straus & Giroux was Roger Straus Jr., whose mother was an heir to the Guggenheim fortune and whose fathers family ran Macys department store. Grove Press was owned by Barney Rosset, whose father owned banks in Chicago. When Bennett Cerf, the son of a tobacco-distribution heiress, bought the Modern Library, which would be renamed Random House in 1927, he and his partner, Donald Klopfer, each ponied up $100,000 roughly the equivalent of $1.7 million today.

Until the 1960s, American literature was shaped by the fact that Black authors needed white publishers to achieve national recognition. In her recent article for Publishers Weekly, Black Publishing in High Cotton, Tracy Sherrod, an executive editor at Little, Brown who was the editorial director of the Black-themed imprint Amistad Press for nine years notes that both the poet Langston Hughes and the novelist Nella Larsen got book deals in the 1920s with the help of Blanche Knopf, an editor at the prestigious publishing house Alfred A. Knopf. After that, you could always point to a few great Black authors published by New York houses. Yet white editors didnt necessarily think of themselves as serving Black readers.

There is a subgenre of essay in the African American literary tradition, that can loosely be called What White Publishers Wont Print, Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor of English at Harvard, said. Both James Weldon Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston wrote essays with that title, more or less. Gates said, There is a consciousness from almost 100 years ago among Black writers about the racial limitations and biases of the American publishing industry. Richard Wright, whose 1940 novel Native Son sold 215,000 copies in three weeks, for example, still saw half of his 1945 memoir Black Boy expurgated to please the Book-of-the-Month Club, which catered to an audience of white middle-class readers.

Under pressure from the civil rights movement, Americas big publishing houses embarked on their first effort to serve a more diverse market in the 1960s. Teachers and school boards in cities like Chicago and New York were demanding schoolbooks that recognized the histories and experiences of nonwhite Americans. On Capitol Hill, Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Democrat of New York, investigated the portrayal of minorities in classroom writings as part of the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on De Facto Segregation in 1966. His hearings revealed that there was only a single Black editor leading any of the new schoolbook series that publishers had established: Doubleday and Companys Charles F. Harris. In response to this revelation, many publishers began recruiting Black editors into their education divisions, and a few of these editors later moved to the companies general trade-book divisions as well. Those were the glory days, Marie Brown, who was hired by Doubleday in 1967, told me. We were invited in. Among the ranks of these new hires was the future Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, who worked in a scholastic division of Random House while writing her first novel, The Bluest Eye.

Link:
Inside the Push to Diversify the Book Business - The New York Times

Reprinted from RealClearMarkets

The late J.R. Richard was a Major League Baseball phenomenon of the 1970s for the Houston Astros. If the radar guns were accurate, no ones fastball traveled faster than Richards.

Where it perhaps gets interesting is that no one since has thrown faster than Richard. While records are made to be broken, the speed of the fastball apparently isnt. The explanation that Ive always heard is that the human arm quite simply isnt designed, or hasnt evolved, to throw the ball faster. Which is apparently why Richard was and remains the fastball standard.

This came to mind while reading Peter Wards new book,The Price of Immortality: The Race To Live Forever. While Wards book proved a disappointment, his subject isnt. Though fastballs remain fast, but arent getting any faster, Ward writes with arguably not enough optimism that Medicine has extended average life expectancy significantly in the past century, and scientists now turn their expertise to more extreme measures to stop people from dying.

With life expectancy rising, the people Ward describes as immortalists are in search of ways to make life a forever concept. Wards book is about the most literal take on mortality: to live forever physically in the world as we know it. And to understand this literal approach to immortality better, Ward plunged into the world of immortalists, hoping to unravel what was real and what was false. Which, in a very real sense was the biggest problem withThe Price of Immortality.

What should have been a reporters account of the not unreasonable desire to improve health and subsequently extend life very quickly morphed into a stage for the author to take potshots at rich people, the U.S. health system, and seemingly capitalism in general. Billionaires in particular are criticized, which speaks loudly to how Wards politics blinded him to the source of rising life expectancy.

Seemingly lost on the author is that in the late 19th century Johns Hopkins, a billionaire-equivalent for his time, gave away $7 million of his Baltimore-Ohio Railroad fortune to what became Johns Hopkins University. It was the largest donation ever of its kind at the time, and the funds made it possible for a real medical school to be formed. Before then, U.S. medical schools were largely of the night variety, and research didnt define their missions. If you were sick, there were realistically no cures. As the late Dr. Lawrence D. Dorr (one of the worlds most prominent orthopedic surgeons) observed in his 2011 historical fiction book about medicine,Die Once Live Twice, when you were born in the 19th century you had as good of a chance of dying as you did living. A broken femur came with roughly 33% odds of dying, and if you lived your lone option was amputation at a time when painkillers were less than modern.A broken hip was a death sentence. Cancer? Forget about it. Except that as Dorr reminded readers, cancer was low on the list of killers simply because pneumonia, tuberculosis and other every day diseases put you in an early grave well before cancer did. Even by the early 20th century, Dorr reported that cancer was still a distant eighth among American killers. How things have changed.

Indeed, as Ward reports Americans have a one in six chance of dying from heart disease, one in seven chance of succumbing to cancer, and one in twenty-seven chance of chronic lower respiratory disease ushering in their downfall. About Wards stats, notice how he doesnt even mention pneumonia, tuberculosis, yellow and scarlet fever, etc. Which is the point. As Ward himself acknowledges, and as was previously quoted, Medicine has extended average life expectancy significantly in the past century. Cruel as cancer is, along with heart disease and diabetes, its paradoxically a sign of progress that per Ward, those are the maladies that get us thankfully later and later in life.

Okay, so why the remarkable progress? Previously mentioned was Johns Hopkins, at which point its essential to bring up John D. Rockefeller, by many miles the richest man of his time. As Ron Chernow reported in his biography of the great industrialist, Rockefeller gave away $530 million in his lifetime alone; $450 million of it to medical pursuits. Think how crucial this was. Rockefellers preternatural business skills that lit up formerly dark houses (kerosene) at night and powered an economy more and more reliant on fuel (refined oil) funded immense, life-extending leaps. Rather than taking care of the soon-to-be-dead, doctors and scientists would increasingly find cures for that which used to kill us with ease; thus explaining the title of Dorrs novel. People would live, and better yet, avoid death thanks to medical advances born of profits that were increasingly being matched with the creative in thought such that people were surviving formerly ruthless diseases that so cruelly stalked us not too long ago.

All of this rates mention given Wards disdainful treatment of billionaires. His dislike is plain early on. Hes clear that the immortalist movement is particularly popular among billionaires presumably bored of ways to flaunt their wealth, and relentlessly pursuing the goal of everlasting life. Wait, what? Has he no understanding of how brutal and short life would be absent the superrich? Has he ever heard of the Silicon Valley-based corporation, Grail? Funded by billionaires with names like Gates and Bezos, it will enable early detection of cancer well before it begins to spread, thus potentially extending life for quite some time.

Assuming the billionaires of today even partially achieve their goal of everlasting life, history is clear that well all be beneficiaries of this progress; progress that Ward sneeringly shrinks to a way to flaunt wealth after having allegedly exhausted all other avenues. And of course the U.S. healthcare system naturally is swiped at too as one supposedly built for the profiting few. Oh please. As of the mid-20th century, the biggest line item on U.S. hospital budgets was linens. Nowadays these profit-focused hospitals are marvels of technological advance. The latter is obvious to anyone who visits them, but its also obvious from reading Ward himself. As he once again acknowledges in contradictory fashion, Medicine has extended average life expectancy significantly in the past century, and scientists now turn their expertise to more extreme measures to stop people from dying. All true. The problem for the authors book is that rather than draw the clear connection between profits, abundant fortunes and remarkable advances in life expectancy, Ward plays politics. Billionaires are bad, Americans with their focus on profits are bad. No, such a view isnt serious. Which means its difficult to take Wards book seriously.

Worse for readers legitimately interested in medical advances meant to extend life, Ward hasnt written a book for you. Instead, hes written one heavily focused on the wacko side of life extension. As opposed to a serious look at advancing medicines inevitably funded by the superrich, and that improve the length and quality of life for more and more of us, Ward spends many chapters and pages on thecryonicsmovement. For those who dont know, cryonics is the art of freezing the dead. Will it prove beneficial over time? Perhaps yes. Who knows? Its hard to get an answer from Ward in that his attention is directed more at the eccentrics in the movement, as opposed to the possibility that theres something valid about the art.

According to Ward, the movement was long defined by backstabbing, jealousy, and outright fraud. Groups formed in concert with the movements rise included the Life Extension Society, and a magazine meant to chronicle the doings of those in and around the Society, Freeze-Wait-Reanimate.

Ward tells readers about cryonics original Robert Ettinger, who wrote a sci-fi novelThe Penultimate Trump, which was inspired by the thinking of a French biologist Jean Rostand, who had explored the possibility of using low temperatures to affect the properties of living things in the 1940s. Yet even there, and arguably unsurprisingly, Ward used the novels title to remind readers of his politics. Ward writes that Ettingers novel thankfully was not a prophetic warning of what the world would endure decades later. Oh please. How very unoriginal, as is his oh-so-predictable assertion later in the book that the lies of Fox News helped put Trump in the White House. And if this critique of Wards politics has you the reviewer assuming its the stuff of a loud Trump partisan, just Google your reviewers name and Donald Trump. The titles of opinion pieces alone will quickly set you straight.

With Ettinger discredited (if thats how it can be put), Ward tacks to Mike Darwin who, among other things, wrote an open letter to the body of James Bedford The chapter about Darwin is titled The Curious Case of the Missing Frozen Head. Its just a reminder that as opposed to writing about serious attempts to improve life as we know it, Wards aim is to largely mock the very notion.

Darwin ultimately founded Alcor, which seemingly to this day is the biggest name in cryonics. By 1990, the organization had grown to three hundred members and was fast outgrowing its Riverside headquarters. Supposedly Californias vulnerability to earthquakes was the impetus for the company moving its headquarters to Scottsdale, AZ in 1993. About Alcor, if the name rings a bell, particularly to sports fans, theres a reason why. The offspring of baseball legend Ted Williams famously engaged in legal wrangling about Alcors freezing of Williamss body after his death in 2002. Yes, its that kind of book.

Rather comically, Ward writes that a major problem for the industry is that cryonics is unregulated, and because it is, there is no way of going to a government agency and checking whether the company freezing your body has a history of malpractice. About stem-cell therapy, the good clinics are, according to Ward, impossible to distinguish from those which are fraudulent and dangerous due to a lack of regulation. Yes, thats it. Without regulation businesses would actively aim to gyp their customers because, you know, businesses apparently arent reliant on reputation to grow. After which, who in government would have the knowledge to call balls and strikes in a nascent industry that, assuming it proves worthy in time, will be defined by relentless failure on the way to worthiness? Investors trying to shape the future routinely hit and miss with capital commitments, yet were supposed to believe those in the governments employ can see what the worlds greatest venture capitalists routinely do not? Instead of making these kinds of points, Ward avoids seriousness, he mocks, he shoots fish in crowded barrels, plus he pretends that his reporting skills had rendered him fit to unravel what was read and what was false about the desire for immortality. See the commentary about venture capitalists once again to understand why Ward cant be what he aims to be. But that presumes the author wants to go deep into the question of life extension. Its hard to make that case after reading Wards book.

Instead of digging deep into serious attempts to extend life, he keeps tacking toward faith. His book is full of characters, as opposed to committed thinkers eager to bring a different, healthier world into the present. Readers are treated to Mormon immortalist Lincoln Cannons assertion that eventually humanity would overcome death, to Neal VanDeRees assertion to Ward that I know Im going to live for five hundred, one thousand, ten thousand years, to Alexei Turcon of the Longevity Party in Moscow, along with RAADfest, the immortalist version of Coachella. Eventually the author acknowledges that immortalists make a soft target for mockery, sneering, and condemnation, yet its Ward himself whos doing the mocking, sneering, and condemning. This critique isnt made as a defense of immortalists as much as its a yearning to know better if theres a serious side to what Ward portrays as nuts.

Of course, when he tacks toward serious, he so often does so in order to be political. Healthcare, in Wards eyes, is Americas most broken, and profitable, institution. Such an assertion contradicts. And having mocked Donald Trump, it will no doubt not surprise readers that Peter Thiel similarly wins the authors obloquy. Ward writes that if ever there was a powerful reason to abandon life extension research, it might be the thought of Peter Thiel living forever. Except that Thiels risk-taking has vastly improved the world as we know it, whereas his critic in Ward hasReturning to stem-cell therapy, Ward notes that the treatments can cost up to and beyond $1 million. One would think the previous truth would bring on introspection in the author about the superrich as venture buyers of sorts, whose risks taken on whats unproven provide crucial information? Naaah. Rich people are bad, dont you know? Theyre show-offs. But the challenge with being so political is that it causes Ward to be unwittingly contradictory of himself at seemingly all turns. And this includes his critiques of the rich. Alas, toward books end, Ward writes Perhaps, ultimately, the race to live forever is best run by the billionaires and corporations. You think?

Indeed, while the rich are known to invest in life extension concepts when not allegedly flaunting their wealth, Ward cites Silicon Valley gadfly and immortalist bigwig Aubrey De Grey as believing that the Valleys forgiving attitude toward failure is the secret to its success. Absolutely. At the same time, failure is expensive. Very expensive. Thank goodness for billionaires, right? Ward never quite makes the connection, if at all. Again, he goes back and forth, but usually backwards. At one point he laments the possibility of long life since it would supposedly cause the rich to hoard resources, and in doing so, they would reduce opportunities for younger generations. Thick books could be written about the previous point, which is beyond divorced from reality. With brevity in mind, assuming the billionaires of the world are hoarding when theyre not flaunting (Ward seemingly cant decide what he hates more), the simple, basic economic truth is that in hoarding the rich will by definition be creating major opportunity for future generations. Savings are what create corporations, theyre what enable remarkable technological leaps (including life extension style leaps), but as always Ward has his politics.

Which is too bad. Again, I chose to read and review this book based on a very real desire to understand better the possibilities of longer life. Also, there was a desire just to learn in general, and to be fair to Ward, occasionally he delivers. He writes of a French woman named Jeanne Calment who lived until she was 122, or did she? It turns out theres some speculation that the Calment who died at 122 was in fact her daughter; her daughter maintaining the fiction in order to escape estate taxes. He tells us aboutturritopsis dohrnii, a small sea creature that apparently is immortal. It turns out Sponges live for thousands of years. Who knew? I was and am interested. I was a supporter or Right to Try a few years ago, and Ward points out that the FDA rarely blocks requests to try as is. Interesting. Though people should still be free to try whatever they want, and very crucially without seeking permission from the FDA, Ward forced me to see the other side. Good. The problem was that Ward again seemed consumed by the wacko side of the immortalist movement, and then as always politics come into play.

Eager to let his readers know how very seriously he took the rapidly spreading coronavirus in 2020, and how much he still takes it seriously, Ward makes sure to let readers know early on that he started researching and writing the book just months before the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the world as we knew it. According to Ward, the latter forced the rest of us to confront death in a way each generation believes it never will. Readers no doubt know where this is going. Having established himself as allegedly serious about the virus, Ward heaps scorn on virus statistics [that] came with the caveat that a significant percentage of deaths were made up of either the elderly or people with pre-existing conditions. According to Ward, the previous qualification reassured the lockdown skeptics that death was something that happened to other people. The analysis is utter nonsense.

The statistics were valuable as a way of understanding who was at risk. You see, every action in life is a tradeoff. While Ward self-righteously tells the reader about the thankfully very few who died with the virus, others less emotive in thought recognized that it would be tragic to put so much of the worlds population out of work and in desperate poverty in response to a virus that by Wards own admission was largely lethal to a very small percentage of the elderly population. While Wards wraps himself in deep concern for the very old, others like your reviewer pointed out that as the developed world took a break from reality, the U.N.s World Food Program reported that 135 million around the world were rushing toward starvation as a consequence of the lockdowns that halted so much economic activity that so much of the world is reliant on in order to live. Notable about the previous number is that theNew York Times(surely no friend of the lockdown skeptics) upped the number facing starvation to 285 million. Yet Ward is the saint? Is he serious?

Back to the contradictory nature of his questionable analysis, we can return to the immortalists on whom Ward heaps such ridicule. Without defending some of their fringe members for even a second, Ward notes that Many of them went underground in response to the spreading virus, which was a necessary measure to increase their chances of living forever. Ward adds that Meetups [of immortalists] were canceled, in-person conferences moved online, which was and is the point. Its the one lockdown skeptics have made from day one: People do not need to be forced to avoid sickness or death. Theyre wired to strive mightily to avoid what might hurt them. In Wards words, survival is one of humanitys strongest instincts.Precisely. Force from the political class was superfluous.

All of which speaks to just how much the always political Ward wrote a book that has sadly not enough to do with its title. Readers expecting actual reporting on real attempts to improve medicine should look elsewhere. Though the title of Wards book gives the impression of major efforts to achieve impressive medical leaps, politics always gets in the way. Ward has views about the coronavirus, about billionaires, about wealth in general, and about the kind of people on the fringe of the immortalist movement. Thats what his book is largely about.

Which meansThe Price of Immortalityis in so many ways a deceptive title. Peter Wards readers deserve better, his subject deservesmuchbetter, plus the publisher should respect his readers more.

John Tamny, research fellow of AIER, is editor of RealClearMarkets.

His book on current ideological trends is: They Are Both Wrong (AIER, 2019)

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Book Review: Peter Wards The Price of Immortality | AIER