A Dangerous Method

There were cameras literally everywhere, in London. So far, he’s managed not to think about them. He remembered Bigend saying they were a symptom of autoimmune disease, the state’s protective mechanisms ‘roiding up into something actively destructive, chronic; watchful eyes, eroding the healthy function of that which they ostensibly protected. –William Gibson (2010)

This summer Ron Fouchier’s lab in the Netherlands conducted an experiment as frightening for its simplicity as for its results. The team produced a human-transmissible version of  highly pathogenic influenza A (H5N1) or bird flu.

Rather than by reverse genetics, wherein a complex round robin of mutations are introduced in an effort to produce a human-specific bird flu, an approach which failed most recently at CDC, the Fouchier group let the virus converge on a solution all on its own. HPAI H5N1 was intranasally inoculated into a group of lab ferrets (whose immune response mimics humans’). Only ten infection generations later the virus went “airborne”—transmitted by respiration—while remaining as deadly as its field cousins (with a 75% case fatality rate). A repeat of the experiment reproduced the result.

The Parallax Pig

Slavoj Žižek on the historical linguistics of  food production and consumption:

“‘Pig” refers to animals whom farmers deal, while “pork” is the meat we consume–and the class dimension is clear here: “pig” is the old Saxon word, since Saxons were the underprivileged farmers, while “pork” comes from French “porque,” used by the privileged Norman conquerors who mostly consumed the pigs raised by farmers.

Such a parallax–dual or dueling perspectives–can be found along other dimensions.  The kinds of social histories symbols and what they represent share can also be found in the mathematical modeling used to characterize these little piggies, their roast beef, and their wee pathogens all the way home.

The epidemiological formalisms deployed grew out of historical trajectories of their own, with all manner of interests–personal and political–shaping their inputs and  outcomes. We’re not talking here about acts of blatant corruption–how gauche!–but the way social presuppositions are built into modeling as ethically practiced.

Setting aside the obvious complications we are likely to encounter, in the interests of bringing the issue to a head, if you’ll excuse the hog pun, let me ask, Is there such a thing as a Norman modeling and its Saxon counterpart? Can we find Robin Hood in Sherwood Formalism?

Occupy Mathematics

I gave the following talk at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City October 17 as part of a Festschrift for my father, and collaborator, Rodrick Wallace. A Festschrift is a symposium held–and a book published–in honor of a scholar, often on his or her 70^th birthday. As opposed to a Gedenkschrft, held in memoriam (though there are some scholars who deserve the latter long before they’ve left for the great e-journal server in the sky).

I’ll start off with an old joke about Rod, in the de rigueur Boston accent. The joke runs like this: Equation 1. Equation 2. Equation 3. “We can see here an apartheid state entrains both oppressor and oppressed into a synergy of plagues.”

Equation 4. Equation 5. Equation 6. “It follows then that public health can be saved from a catastrophic vortex if and only if we smash the apartheid state.”

All kidding aside, we would make a mistake assuming Rod’s conclusions arise from his formalisms alone or—winky wink—vice versa. Instead, we should say they arise “and vice versa” and honestly so. Or better yet, inextricably so.

That’d be shocking if only because it would imply cultural and political precepts underlie mathematical mechanics. That the field’s formalisms are as much historical objects as many of the phenomena they address, as a number of commentators, including Wittgenstein and the ethnomathematicians, have ventured.

Molten Bubble

I stood at the window and watched a house on a hill above Sunset implode, its oxygen sucked out by the force of the fire. –Joan Didion (1989)

This summer’s fires outside Austin reminded me of a recent escape.

One Sunday behind the Orange Curtain in the fall of 2007 I searched for a newspaper on Fashion Island, a hideous high-end mall for the vulgar riche built into the Newport Beach embankment. Like looking for a priest in a whorehouse. Although you can find at least one of whatever you’re looking for eventually, isn’t that right, Father?

Suddenly, my head a moment out of the boosterism, I found myself in an ash downpour. The housing bubbles along the Irvine hills–Foothill Ranch, Modjeska Canyon, Silverado Canyon, Portola Hills–were all Halloween/orange and chimney red. A monstrous black cloud of smoke, spurred seaward by the Santa Anas, blotting out eight-figure views of the ocean, passed judgment on the county in which I found myself jailed 3-5 pending probation.

Inception Deception

In Inception Leonardo DiCaprio plays Christopher Nolan’s postmodern spy-for-hire, extracting real-world corporate secrets out of the phantasmagoria of fitfully sleeping executives, until one day he is himself maneuvered into a trap of his own making: he must implant an idea into one executive’s head for the benefit of another.

But off-camera the real DiCaprio, the actor, the man, the quintessential Hollywood liberal, driven from one sound stage to another even between films, appears caught in a dream within a dream. An active environmentalist and creative force behind a documentary on climate change, DiCaprio serves as a board member for World Wildlife Fund, whose aim ostensibly is to save the biosphere. In reality the conservation NGO is spearheading convoluted efforts to destroy it.

WWF has organized a heinous line-up of agribusiness under the presumption those who own the world’s food value chains are the only ones who can ecologically modernize them.

It turns out merely an effort to greenwash the pith helmet: Environmental crises and threats to biodiversity, of agribusiness’ own making, are laundered inside a declensionist colonial narrative. Agribusiness must take over African farmland or Indonesian rain forest to save it, the argument goes. It’s an environmentalism which serves only as due cause for expanding dispossession, pushing subsistence farmers and the indigenous off their lands. Only another iteration of the neoliberal program, which brought about the environmental crises in the first place.

If only DiCaprio would turn into an old man, filled with regret.  Some  sudden sentience somehow. Two years after Nolan’s set wrapped, DiCaprio’s totem spins on. Like many a bourgeois environmentalist he’s still stuck in capital’s inception.

Make It Your Book!

Twenty-nine thousand hits in a little over two years. Not bad for a microblog. But it hasn’t been about the numbers (let’s hope not!). We here at ‘Farming Pathogens’ have much appreciated your thoughtful comments and questions, as well as your encouragement.

Today we are asking for a touch more.

We’ve just launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for completing a book based on the blog–largely on influenza and agribusiness. We are asking for contributions through our RocketHub site (which works a lot like Kickstarter).  We are also asking that you share the site’s link through your social media: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and–old school–your friends around the lunch table.

Hiatus

‘Farming Pathogens’ will be taking a break while we finish up a book on many of the topics discussed here, including influenza and agribusiness.

Thank you for your support and feedback. We’ll be back soon, promise, and in all likelihood will drop a post now and again. Agriculture, disease and evolution are unlikely to enter any hibernation while we step out for a bite.

Tiger By the Tale

–Landlady…
–My name is Rosenberg.
–I didn’t know there were Jews in Dublin!
She grimaces, palpably, and says,
–Yes, there are Jews in Dublin.
–Well, then, Mrs. O’Rosenberg, what can you tell me about the Celtic Tiger? Has it bitten anybody lately?
–Bitten?
–Yes. Where is this tiger now, and does he bite?
Mrs. O’Rosenberg begins to laugh, softly at first, and then even more softly. –Neal Pollack (2000)

The tiger will see you a hundred times before you see him once. –John Vaillant (2010)

One explanation proposed for Arab Spring, riffing off the work of Emmanuel Todd, is demographic in nature.

Rejecting claims of poverty, inequality, food prices, and unemployment, Andrey Korotayev and Julia Zinkina argue Egypt’s economic transition out of the classic Malthusian trap placed it into another,

Marable’s Malcolm

It’s Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution (and he’ll cry if he wants to). But do he and other lambrusco liberals bandying about the term know what revolution really means, or even care? In the first of several posts on food and revolution over the next couple months, I retweet passing thoughts I posted elsewhere on Manning Marable’s new biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.

Hoards line up for the latest smartphone. Bevies for Justin Beaver tix. Me, I’m gonna run my broke ass downtown for a copy of Manning Marable’s Malcolm X book.

Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review turned Manning Marable’s Malcolm X back into Alex Haley’s.

Kakutani seemed intent on saving Malcolm from his radicalism, as if a service to her Times readership, a position to which Marable was explicitly reacting in the first place.

A Bayesian Market

Found this job posting:

Your research will cover any area of evolutionary biology, including adaptation, phylogenetics, population genetics and environmental genomics. You should be using advanced data acquisition and/or analytical approaches (e.g., high-throughput sequencing or other “omics”, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics).

I have no prima facie quarrel with the omics or the Bayesian, both of which I have used. Nor do I object to an interview process with criteria. No smelly sociopathic ecologists need apply.