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Since this is the year in which Ronald Reagan’s Presidency will be in the news, because this is the 100th anniversary year of his birth, we do not want to leave any stones unturned on his achievements, including the reversals of fortune. Last Night, though I found it difficult, I tied myself down to a chair and watched the 2 1/2 hour PBS show on Ronald Reagan’s Presidency. It was mostly about his foreign policy achievements and how he destroyed the Soviet Union through forming a good relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, who presided over the destruction of the Soviet Union. There was virtually nothing about his domestic policies, the huge public debts he ran up and the justification for doing so–it was to “kill the beast,” to make the public debt so large that the New Deal would crumble of its own weight and the inability to finance its programs, like public welfare, Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. What the report did point out, was that Reagan was such an ideologue, that he believed what he wanted to believe, independent of the evidence. Though the facts said otherwise, he never fully accepted that his administration had traded arms for hostages during the Iran-Contra affair. Yet, in essence, that is what he ordered from the White House. He never imagined that the missile defense strategy he designed would never work, or that it would be perceived as another offensive weapons system, which started a new arms race now engaging China–the weaponization of space!

So, to set the record a little straighter on Reagan, my current candidate for the worst president in history, I can add the following to the litany of deficiencies about his presidency, things not covered in the PBS documentary. During Reagan’s first term, AIDS came of age and Reagan steadfastly refused to acknowledge the disease or have his government act on it, as they should have done because of the government’s responsibility for protecting the interests of public health. The Surgeon General of the United States was expressly forbidden to discuss AIDS.  It was not until late in his second term, when he learned that his friend Rock Hudson had died of AIDS, did he finally bring the word into his dialog. In the meantime, tens of thousands of Americans and perhaps millions of Africans could have had their lives saved with more timely information and better supportive care and education. Reagan also began the process of destroying the integrity of the Surgeon General’s office, so that he/she could not independently advocate things like the dangers of smoking or AIDS or anything else that was a political no-no for the Republicans. This trend, started under Reagan, would gain momentum under GW Bush who delayed the report on the health problems of second-hand smoke. For Reagan’s handling of the AIDS problem alone, we cannot dismiss the damage that was done to the health of this country, the lack of understanding about AIDS and the role that our government, driven by an ideological interpretation of disease, allowed Ronald Reagan  to suppress vital  information about AIDS because he thought that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuality. They went so far as to suppress information on AIDS in Africa because that form of AIDS was not homosexual in origin, but rather heterosexually transmitted and such an admission would get the Reagan administration off message on AIDS: so the delusional tactic remained in place. You can read about Reagan’s AIDS policy history here.

RFM

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Our most effective pollinator, the honey bee, has been dying off in massive numbers through an unknown process described as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD): bees leave the hive and don’t return, while the hive is essentially destroyed as member numbers decline. CCD has not shown any signs of decline over the years and represents a serious threat to the future of our food supply, as about 1/3 of the food we eat depends on pollination from bees. The almond business in California has been especially hard hit by this problem, as almond trees need massive levels of pollinators during a short critical period; honey bees are now delivered by trucks during the pollination season, but the spreading nature of CCD has caused almond tree farmers to destroy many of their trees for lack of access to pollinators. Some trucks arrive with bees that themselves experience CCD during the almond pollination season. The problem is not just confined to America, but has also seriously impacted Europe, asia and India. Multiple, different explanations for massive bee hive loss have been suggested, including fungal, viral and mite disease and also the possibility that bees are more stressed due to the collective load of pesticides, herbicides and other unidentified toxic chemicals that are increasingly abundant in our environment. The idea is that bees leave the hive in search of food but get disoriented because of the disease and die far removed from the hive. For that reason, the sick bees are hard to study because they get lost.

A recent  NYT article describes a possible major breakthrough in the disovering the etiology of CCD.  The Times article was based on an extensive study described in the on-line science journal Plos One (public access is available). The combined force of academic researchers and a group of army researchers studying proteomics, extensively analyzed  and compared stable, unstable and collapsed bee colonies. They used a very powerful method of mass-spectrometry based proteomics. With this approach, instead of looking for genomic evidence, they were able to analyze thousands of different proteins and infer back to identify the organisms that generated them. The field of proteomics has exploded in the last decade and is becoming an increasingly powerful way of looking at gene control through analysis of the proteins they generate. Although many pathogens have already been detected in bees and many were also discovered in the Plos One study, two different organisms seemed to consistently track one another and correlate best with CCD, including a large DNA virus, not described in bees previously, and referred to as the invertebrate iridescent virus (IIV; Iridoviridae); however samples also consistently contained a microsporidia Nosema apis (fungus); the co-localization of these two pathogens was more consistent with CCD than either one alone. Once a hive was infected, forager flights began to decline, as dead honey bee samples showed increasingly high peptide counts from the two pathogens. Using pathogen injections into single bees (see figure), they were able to show that bee toxicity was far more evident when both pathogens were injected as opposed to either one alone.

Injection of single bees

The take home message from this study is twofold: first MSP is a powerful tool for studying the pathogenic origins of bee infections and secondly, perhaps a dual infection with a previously unknown (in bees) large DNA virus (Iridoviridae) and a  fungal agent (Nosema apis) accounts for beehive collapse in America. The authors are quick to point out that  CCD in other countries may be attributed to different pathogens and that their analysis may only account for the problem in North America. It is still not clear whether the dual infection is the cause of CCD or whether it is a sign of imminent colony collapse, but the injection studies certainly point to these two pathogens as the cause rather than an indicator. The obvious question is that if the double pathogen theory is correct, how can CCD be treated and can beehives be restored to centers of industry and productivity? Many workers in the field seem to believe that treating the fungus may be the best approach, but as the graph shows, fungus control alone may not solve the entire problem. Iinjections with either pathogen reduced bee lifespan over controls. Perhaps on the way to recovering normal beehive function, we may have a period in which beehive lifespan is reduced, while still serving a pollinating function. The other possibility that is difficult to eliminate is that healthy bees can effectively fight off these infections, while bees that are environmentally intoxicated through other means cannot. Thus, one can ask whether CCD in North American bee colonies reflects the globalization of pathogen exposure or have these pathogens always been in the environment and now have opportune moments for bee infection, because their hosts decline in health through other mechanisms? Only time and a lot more research can answer these questions. The good thing about the Plos One report is that a new bee pathogen has been discovered and it may hold important clues to the future of pollination and the security of our own food supply.

Let’s see now, how would the free market  respond to the pollination problem we are facing in America? No, they would not invest in the development of electronic pollinators because the development time is too long (remember that the lifespan of a CEO is about five years, so investment must yield something substantial within that time frame).  Only the shaky and uncertain thrust of venture capitalism would respond with long-term investments and the hope of a payoff down the road. That sector of our financial repertoire  is about the only healthy element  that remains, but it is too small to be a broadly effective source of financing.  In the meantime, thank God we have a government who will support these studies, though I find it worrisome that a U.S. Army MSD apparatus was necessary, rather than having one available to the scientists on their own, together with the expertise required to run the machine and interpret the data. This is what happens when grants get cut to the bone and research is limited because of limited funding. I counted eighteen authors on the Plos One article and thirteen different institutional locations. A problem of the depth and magnitude of CCD can only be approached through highly collaborative scientific efforts.  CCD is truly one of the more profoundly disturbing components of our modern culture and, in my view,  should be ranked with global climate change as a looming threat for which we need to mobilize a strong research effort, preferably one that doesn’t require the American military. On the other hand this story represents a good union of vital resources and technologies that proved essential to unravel this part of what remains as a serious whodunit problem.

RFM

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If you haven’t seen the documentary “Flow: For Love of Water“, you don’t want to miss it:  you can get it through Netflix or by going to the  website that promotes the indie documentary. Directed by Irena Salina, the 2008 film tells how multinational corporations like Coca-Cola and Nestle, are privatizing water supplies throughout the globe to drive up the price of water and force everyone to pay more for what many of us believe should be a natural, free right of our world citizenship. This free market strategy is driven by the idea that in the near future, good water will become a scarce necessity and should be treated as a commodity. But the backlash is already palpable. In the wake of this drive towards global water privatization, citizens in many different countries are beginning to mobilize against this trend by forming grass roots movements that are gaining momentum, though it remains a very uphill battle.  In the U.S., court rulings have so far protected corporate rights to establish for example, a production site and remove huge quantities of local fresh water, bottle it and distribute it throughout the country without paying any costs for the water to the locals. The major benefit to the local region is usually a seriously depressed water supply (Michigan was one of the major examples). You cannot take huge quantities of water out of the ground without running the risk of creating giant sinkholes and such events are now a common occurrence in many regions around the globe. You can’t just pump in air to replace the water, you need a non-compressible substance to replace it, something like “water.”

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