A New Kind of Biofuel?

Like many people, I have been very worried about the diversion of arable land and edible crops into the production of biofuel. It may be fine for the elite rich countries to think about, but as a species we have to think about how we're going to be feeding 9-10 billion by the middle of this century. Matthew Wald of the New York Times reported this week that research into what is called cellulosic biofuels seems about to pay off.

Officials at two companies that have built multimillion-dollar factories say they are very close to beginning large-scale, commercial production of these so-called cellulosic biofuels, and others are predicting success in the months to come. 

In Columbus, Miss., KiOR has spent more than $200 million on a plant that is supposed to mix shredded wood waste with a patented catalyst, powdered to talcumlike consistency. Its process does in a few seconds what takes nature millions of years: removes the oxygen from the biomass and converts the other main ingredients, hydrogen and carbon, into molecules that can then be processed into gasoline and diesel fuel.

At such plants, the goal is sometimes to make ethanol and sometimes gasoline or diesel fuel or their ingredients. The pathways to make the biofuels are varied. But the feedstocks have something in common: they are derived from plants and trees, but not from food crops like corn kernels, which are the basis of most of the biofuel currently made in the United States.

And, importantly, customers are already lining up, including FedEx and Chevron.

The holy grail is to find a way to profitably make renewable fuels from otherwise wasted biomass, as opposed to valuable food crops.

“If we can do it with biomass, then there is no more discussion of food versus fuel; it’s over,” Mr. Ortega [CEO of a Spanish company setting up a plant in Kansas] said.

Pre-Term Births Are a Global Priority

A few days ago, I mentioned the news from the US Centers for Disease Control that the high infant death rate in Mississippi and other southern states was due especially to an above average rate of pre-term births. It turns out that today was "World Prematurity Day" at USAID, supporting an effort by the World Health Organization to raise awareness of this issue, which speaks directly to Millennium Development Goal 5 relating to the improvement in child health. Perhaps not too surprisingly, the regions of the world with the highest rates of prematurity are Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.

Over 60% of preterm births occur in Africa and South Asia (Figure 1). The 10 countries with the highest numbers include Brazil, the United States, India and Nigeria, demonstrating that preterm birth is truly a global problem. Of the 11 coun- tries with preterm birth rates of over 15%, all but two are in sub-Saharan Africa (Figure 2). In the poorest countries, on average, 12% of babies are born too soon compared with 9% in higher-income countries. Within countries, poorer families are at higher risk.

This, of course, is the problem. There is not a single set of biological causes of prematurity, so there isn't an easy fix. The basic solution is to improve the lives of pregnant women, making sure that risks are identified and monitored. Healthy, empowered women, who are neither too young nor too old when they get pregnant will be at the lowest risk of prematurity, so moving a greater fraction of women into those categories is the solution, but it is a societal-wide fix, not simply an individual-level treatment regime. Perhaps the only good news out of this is that the infant mortality rates have gone down so much over the years everywhere that we are now able to concentrate on the really hardest issues.

Will Texas Go From Red to Blue?

Prior to the recent US presidential election I had read Gail Collins' book "As Texas Goes..." which includes an interview with demographer Steven Murdock discussing the future importance of the Latino vote in that state. As expected, at least this time around, the state did vote for Romney, but it is clear in the aftermath of President Obama's re-election that Latinos in Texas are in the spotlight as people contemplate the state's future, which includes lots of immigrants and children of immigrants. The immediate thought among most people is that Texas will become a "blue" state because the Democrats did so much better this year among Latinos than did the Republicans. Ryan Lizza, writing for The New Yorker, notes that even the state's newly elected Republican US Senator Ted Cruz, is worried about this.

“If Republicans do not do better in the Hispanic community,” he said, “in a few short years Republicans will no longer be the majority party in our state.” He ticked off some statistics: in 2004, George W. Bush won forty-four per cent of the Hispanic vote nationally; in 2008, John McCain won just thirty-one per cent. On Tuesday, Romney fared even worse. 

“In not too many years, Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat,” he said. “If that happens, no Republican will ever again win the White House. New York and California are for the foreseeable future unalterably Democrat. If Texas turns bright blue, the Electoral College math is simple. We won’t be talking about Ohio, we won’t be talking about Florida or Virginia, because it won’t matter. If Texas is bright blue, you can’t get to two-seventy electoral votes. The Republican Party would cease to exist. We would become like the Whig Party. Our kids and grandkids would study how this used to be a national political party. ‘They had Conventions, they nominated Presidential candidates. They don’t exist anymore.’ ”

However, Cruz (who is of Cuban-origin) also notes that many Hispanics share the traditional values of hard work and strong family ties that are regularly seen as being central to the Republican Party. If non-Hispanic Republicans come to understand this, the story may change. Indeed, even Sean Hannity of Fox News has flipped on immigration. If Fox News gets behind this, will that matter? The first task would have to be to convince people in Texas cities, which are already more blue than the more rural parts of the state, as you might anticipate, and as you can see in a very interesting map put together by Kirk Goldsberry, an assistant professor of geography at Michigan State University

Trying to Get a Handle on Alzheimer's

Alzheimer's disease (sometimes called "Oldtimer's" disease) is named after the German physician, Alois Alzheimer, who first described it more than 100 years ago. It is a devastating disease because it effectively kills a person socially years before they mortally succumb. While there is still no treatment or cure for the disease, Robert Bazell on NBC News reported today on new studies just published in the New England Journal of Medicine that move the science forward a bit in terms of the causes.

A gene mutation whose discovery was announced Wednesday triples the risk for Alzheimer’s disease. It is a headline that might sound frightening but shouldn’t evoke fear. 

The mutation in the gene called TREM2 is rare, occurring in about 1 in 150 people. By comparison one in five people carry a form of a different gene called APO-E that also triples the risk. One in 50 carries a form of APO-E that raises risk 13 times. APO-E’s relation to Alzheimer’s was discovered in 1993. So in terms of public health implications, TREM2 is a small player, and is one of an ever growing list of genes implicated in Alzheimer’s. 

The leading contender as the main cause of Alzheimer’s is the accumulation of plaques of protein called amyloid-beta. It is likely that the inflammatory response is attempting to keep that buildup at bay. Last July, Stefansson’s team [one of the researcher's whose work was just published] discovered a different gene mutation, even more rare, that actually protects against Alzheimer’s. That, too, was important science because that gene is responsible for production of amyloid-beta. So it both supports the hypothesis about the cause and leads to ideas about how to make drugs to stop it.

If you know or have known someone with Alzheimer's, as I have, you'll appreciate the fact that we are dealing with not only a serious cause of death, but with a serious cause of distress among the survivors during that painful interval between the onset of the disease and death.

Mississippi's Infant Death Rate the Same as in Sri Lanka

The infant death rate in Mississippi is the highest of any state in the US, and is comparable to a number of less developed nations, such as Sri Lanka and Botswana. These are the sad facts from the Centers for Disease Control and are the numbers behind a nicely detailed story that appeared today on CNN.

Mississippi is 50th out of 50 states when it comes to infant mortality, and it's been that way for a long time, says state health officer Mary Currier.

There's not one clear explanation. Experts cite a multitude of factors that are also seen in other parts of the country and around the world.

For example, Mississippi leads the nation in obesity, which can carry with it a host of complications that might affect a baby, such as hypertensive disorders, says Dr. Michelle Owens, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Other Southern states with a high prevalence of obesity -- Alabama and Louisiana, for instance -- also have some of the nation's highest rates for infant mortality. A 2010 study also found that overweight and obese women are at higher risk for preterm birth.

Poverty, lack of insurance, and teen pregnancies all contribute to elevated levels of infant deaths and these are more characteristic of Mississippi and its neighboring states than in the rest of the US. Cross-cutting these factors is race. The CDC data show that the infant death rate for blacks in the US (12.67 deaths per live births) is 2.3 times higher than for non-Hispanic whites (5.52) and 2.8 times higher than for Asians, who have the lowest infant mortality of any group (4.51). To be sure, poverty, lack of insurance, and teen births help to account for this difference, but the article points out that black women are much more likely than others to give birth prematurely, which drives up the risk of a baby dying. This has been true for a long time, but no one knows why it happens.