White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Myth of Immigrant Assimilation

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By Llewellyn King

In the aftermath of the Brussels attacks, critics are blaming Belgium for not assimilating immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

The fact is that Europe does not do assimilation. Europeans widely practice what might be called “anti-assimilation.” Instead of engagement with their immigrants, they practice a kind of look-the-other-way stance.

Muslim immigrants on the whole do not seek to integrate into European societies, but rather to demand that European societies adopt their ways. In Belgium, which has three official languages, Dutch, French and German, there are constant demands that Arabic become a fourth. Muslims in Britain, and throughout Europe, demand shari’a, or Islamic law, for their communities. Muslims in Europe, and the United States, demand that Eid al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice) be accorded the same recognition as a public holiday as Christmas.

Muslim defenders, after the bombings in Brussels, insist that Western countries with large Muslim minorities should do more to integrate them into national life. But this integration mostly means that the host culture should bow to the insurgent one.

In ancient lands, like Britain and France, this is an affront; as though the extraordinary traditions of those countries should be shoved aside to accommodate the cultural demands of an a very antagonistic minority. That is asking too much.

Europe has mostly dealt with the challenge by hoping that new generations born in Europe and subjected to the influence of European education, the arts and media will become little Europeans: little Frenchmen, little Belgians, little Englishmen, versed in European history and imbued with European values. There are such people throughout Europe, from those of Turkish descent in Germany to those of Indian descent in Britain and North African descent in France.

But by and large the Muslim minorities remain separate, unequal and belligerently hostile to the countries that have given them shelter and opportunity. Rather than the generations born in Europe adopting European norms, they have ended in an unfortunate place where they are outcasts by their own inclinations and by the difficulties posed by European societies, which are quietly nationalistic, closed, eyes-averted.

If anything, the separation has grown worse for generations that know no life other than the one they lead in Europe. This is often marginal, lived in ghettos like the banlieues, the suburbs to the north of Paris, the troubled Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, or Bradford in the north of England.

The original immigrants could look back to what they had escaped, whether it was war and persecution in Algeria, in the case of those who migrated to France, or the grinding poverty that prevailed in Pakistan, in the British case. People move for safety or for a better life. They do not move because they want a new food or a new religion: They want the old food and the old religion in a better place.

Trouble is that three or four generations on, the immigrant descendants may not feel they are in a better place. They are isolated, largely unemployed and subjected to the preaching of murderous extremists.

Once in Brussels, my wife and I were walking down a side street not far from the Grand Place. My wife, who lived in the Middle East and speaks Arabic, remarked that we had left Europe within a few streets and entered North Africa.

As we passed some young men standing outside a cafe, she heard one say to another in Arabic, “What are they doing here? They don’t belong here.”

When the London suburb of Brixton was becoming a black enclave, favored by West Indian immigrants, I lived nearby. “Don’t go there. Maybe they will leave one day,” my neighbors said when I wanted to go there.

No-go areas are not always that: they also are not-want-to-go areas. Someone has to want assimilation, if that is the answer. — For InsideSources


The Tribulations of the Ultra-Rich

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Take a moment, if you would, to pity the derided billionaire class. I have been watching them with keen interest on television. And based on my viewing, I can tell you that life at the top is miserable, boring and fraught.

One program features private islands, where the unimaginably rich get away from it all. But part of what the unimaginably rich get away from is the unimaginable loneliness of being stuck in unimaginable isolation. When the hideaway-from-it-all has been furnished in unimaginable opulence, the favored one is off to another home in so-close-to-it-all New York, London, Palm Beach or Aspen. Anywhere you can while away the day with a Bloomberg Terminal.

Why, you ask, do those who want to get away from it all and protect their privacy favor their New York residences over their other five homes? Call it Greta Garbo Syndrome. “I want to be left alone,” she said. Had she not heard of Nebraska?

From this you can deduce that those who are rich beyond counting, but count anyway, do not want to be left alone at all. They long for control — and you do not control much staring at your Impressionist masterpieces on your private island in the Bahamas.

Apparently, the super ridiculously rich yearn to entertain. One television program on buying mega yachts reveals all. The purchasers are prepared to plunk down around $70 million for what they seem to think is a floating hotel suite. They do not want to know about the yacht’s seaworthiness, crew requirement, propulsion, fuel consumption and range. No, they want to know how much closet space there is in the master stateroom (For what on a boat? Presumably, haute couture gowns and bespoke suits, and handmade deck shoes.) and how much deck space there is to entertain. Maybe they’re not planning to leave the dock in Ft. Lauderdale, Martha’s Vineyard, or wherever. A mega yacht is not for ocean voyaging. The captain will take the watery penthouse to Monaco or Bali. You will go in the private jet.

Friends, it appears, are a particular problem for those beyond the dreams of avarice. Ever since Lady Astor and her famous dining room that seated 400, it will not do to have fewer than 400 friends. But they have to be the right friends: people famous in the arts or the very top of the media, like Charlie Rose. I hear he is on every list. Ordinary people will not do. If you are rich enough, people will always want to be your friend. Ask Donald Trump.

One billionaire babe told me, “I only lunch with,” and she named another billionaire babe, “Everyone else just wants money.” How perceptive from someone who inherited a great fortune. We assume she is not parting with any of it — especially to some lunch supplicant.

No, the places where the ungodly rich load up on friends is at charity balls. “Darling, we’ve just snapped up a charming little place in the Hamptons. You must copter out.” Translation: Don’t you dare show your face, but tell everyone else about our 16-bedroom, 20-bathroom, beachfront monument to vulgarity.

If you have it all, you want to keep it always. You are obsessed with age. Age means health must come first. Those who have not in their luxurious boredom fallen prey to drugs and booze are in the thralls of life-extension through diet and exercise.

Once in a café on the main street in Aspen, I watched a famous and indecently rich and thin matron inquire of the server, “Are your muffins sweetened with apple juice or sugar?”

“Apple juice, ma’am,” the young man responded.

“I will take one,” she said.

When she left the café, I asked how the young man knew about the muffin’s sweetener.

“I don’t,” he said. “But I know what she wants to hear.”

Trickery is another burden on the ultra rich. — For InsideSources

Britain’s Woes and England’s Fears

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By Llewellyn King

England’s problem is English: the language it gave to the world.

In particular, it’s a problem because so many people in the world speak English and would like to live in England, maybe hundreds of millions of them. “We are here because you were there,” says a sign held by an India-born woman at a demonstration. The British Empire isn’t all wound up.

The immigrant stream into England has two principal sources. One stream is from former British possessions, like India, Nigeria and Pakistan. These immigrants are English speakers. In England, they’ll have medical care, welfare, and law and order — and it’s where they feel entitled by history.

The other immigrant stream is from Eastern Europe. These immigrants enter England under the terms of the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union. They want to live and work in England for economic reasons. Once there, they tend to stay and live in expatriate communities.

London, the great sprawling metropolis along the Thames River, is now home to 50 expatriate communities, each with more than 10,000 members. More than 300 languages are spoken in London. According to the 2011 census, 37 percent of the city’s population wasn’t born in Britain. If the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a melting pot, London is that and even more so today.

The UK immigration problem is primarily an English problem. It’s not a Scottish, nor a Welsh, nor a Northern Irish one. England and London are where the immigrants head. Accommodation is at a premium in London, and the situation is getting worse with property speculation an industry in itself.

But immigrants nesting in London isn’t just a problem of migration. It’s also a problem of population density for England. The capital bursts at the seams as the north of the country languishes. Think booming Washington D.C. and hurting West Virginia, so close and so faraway.

The immigration problem is one of two issues that dominate the run-up to a June 23 referendum on whether Britain should stay in the EU. The second issue is of sovereignty, and the belief in Britain — mostly England – that Brussels, the seat of the European administration, is setting up rules and regulations that are untenable.

British Prime Minister David Cameron favors Britain staying in Europe with greater control of its borders and freedom from some Europe-wide mandates. Many members of his Conservative Party want out, including about half of his cabinet. Industry wants in by and large, as do professional groups and the important financial sector.

But the desire to leave Europe, known as “Brexit,” may be gaining with the support of Boris Johnson, London’s popular mayor. Polls have “in” just ahead of “out” and closing.

Pulling out has ramifications for the very integrity of the United Kingdom. Feeling against Europe is very much an English phenomenon and isn’t shared in Scotland, where calls for new referendum on its future as part of the United Kingdom will surely follow a vote for Britain to quit Europe. The last vote in September 2014 went against Scottish independence, 55.3 percent to 44.7 percent. Since then, the nationalistic feeling in Scotland has grown, and Scottish nationalists favor membership in Europe. Wales seems to want in.

Britain’s immigrant problem is more severe than ours in the United States. The population stands at 64.9 million and is rising. The island is 600-miles-long and 271-miles-long at its widest point.

It is one small island that has always left a large imprint on the world, and left its language as its lingua franca. It’s troublesome in today’s world of shifting populations, when hundreds of millions think of you as the mother country. — For InsideSources



When Ireland’s Pain Was America’s Gain

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By Llewellyn King

There will be the “wearing of the green” all over the world come St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. Nowhere more so than in Boston, Chicago and New York. That’s right, not even in Ireland; although they’ve gotten the hang of their own saint’s festival in recent years.

For centuries, until the Americans showed their cousins in Ireland how to party on St. Patrick’s Day, it was a somber, religious feast day.

St. Patrick was what was known as a “Romano-British” missionary, who went to Ireland in the 5th century, probably in the latter half of the century. We know this from fragments of his own writing. He settled around Armagh, in the north of Ireland, and became the first bishop of Armagh, Primate of Ireland. He described the Irish as “heathen men.”

Myth tells of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland. But myth has many faces in Ireland, and is part of the charm of the Irish – a charm that has affected the whole world, and stirs people far removed from that small and at times very troubled island to wear something green, drink and pay homage.

Not the least of the celebrations this year, as in recent years, will be in London, where so many of the agonies of Ireland had their genesis. The English — and I was born into the British Empire — have treated Ireland savagely down through the centuries. Oliver Cromwell, the English reformer, wrote of his incursion into Ireland, “God made them as stubble to our swords.” At the battle of Drogheda in 1641, about which Cromwell was writing, the English killed some 3,500 Irish patriots. Hard work with broad swords.

William of Orange, the Dutch Protestant ruler who became William III of England, Scotland and Ireland, invaded Ireland on July 1, 1690 to fight massed Catholic forces, led by James II, the deposed Catholic king of England. The two armies faced each other across the River Boyne, just to the north of Dublin. William won the battle, but his victory left a divide between Irish Protestants and Catholics which exists in modified form to this day.

The “wearing of the green” most likely dates from the uprising of 1798, when the Irish tried to throw off the English yoke with French help, and were soundly defeated by Gen. Charles Cornwallis, who was seething from his defeat in the American Revolution. The Irish, who were rounded up and hanged in groups of 20 a day by some of the English general’s officers, showed their defiance by wearing something green — often a shamrock in their hats. The English considered that an offense: sedition.

Cornwallis also oversaw the formal incorporation of Ireland into Britain. But to his credit, he fought with George III (remember him?) over Catholic emancipation, and for a while resigned his commission.

More horror from England was on the way — and persisted essentially until Irish independence in 1922. During the potato famine (1845-49), England refused to allow relief ships with grain to land in the belief that the famine was part of a natural order, as laid out by the philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus. One million people died as potatoes were their only sustenance.

In this case Ireland’s pain was America’s gain. Hundreds of thousands of Irish fled starvation for a new life in America. This diaspora changed Ireland and America, forever. It is how 50 million Americans claim Irish ancestry.

The Irish in America began to celebrate the national saint of their motherland in their new land — and so was born the St. Patrick’s Day joyous celebration.

To my mind, the final Irish reprisal against England is not the world recognition but that Irish writers, writing in English, not the Irish language, have had such an incalculable impact on English literature. To take a few names at random Beckett, Behan, Goldsmith, Joyce, Shaw, Synge, Swift, Wilde, and Yeats.

In Ireland, there is an endless flow of wonderful language. The Irish will never say “yes” or “no” when they can give you a sentence with a flourish, which makes the mundane poetic.

Once in Dingle, my wife asked a waiter: “Is the fish fresh?”

He answered, “If it were any fresher, it would be swimming, and you wouldn’t want that would you?”

Also in Dingle, when I asked an elderly man whether the pub he was sitting outside of was open, he replied, “He would hardly be open now.”

The English occupied their land, but the Irish occupied their language and added to it with their genius. Erin go bragh! — For InsideSources

Beware of the Loving Embrace of the Government

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By Llewellyn King

I am not a government-basher per se. As a reporter, I have covered it too long to say the bureaucracy is always incompetent and lazy. But I have also seen how the government wastes money, veers from one project to another, and is indifferent to any damage done by its autocratic ways.

The government, for better or worse, is the great risk-taker on new technologies. As such, it has added immeasurably to the wealth of the nation, from the creation of the technologies that led to the fracking boom and the Internet to the creative advances one now sees in airliners.

After the Pentagon, the Department of Energy (DOE) is the worst offender of the love-it-then-leave-it school of support for technology innovation.

The country is littered with the carcasses of abandoned projects, such as the Yucca Mountain nuclear spent-fuel repository, which was canceled by the Obama administration to please its political ally, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Price tag: more than $15 billion.

This cancellation has had two other damaging effects: the first is there is still no permanent place to store nuclear spent fuel, which is piling up in America; and the second is the demoralizing of talented engineers and scientists by the government’s vacillation. These effects may be as huge as the price tag.

Gifted people throw themselves into government projects and move their families across the country to the work sites. Then the government says, “Thanks for your work on the project, but we are canceling it. Now, shove off!” These contractor employees do not have government protections; they are subject to government caprice.

In South Carolina, for example, a huge project to build a plant to blend weapons-grade plutonium into nuclear fuel for civilian reactors is 70-percent completed and hanging by a thread. That is because after spending $5 billion, the DOE wants to do something else equally expensive, according to one consultant.

Or take Gen4 Energy, a small, Denver-based company that has been strung along by the DOE and now is preparing pink slips. Its plan is to build a small (25-MWe), advanced nuclear power plant for use at mining sites, military bases and remote places that need electricity, such as Alaskan villages and those in less-developed countries. These reactors would work for 10 years and then would be swapped out and replaced with a new, factory-built module.

Robert Prince, Gen4 Energy’s CEO, who came out of retirement to lead the advanced reactor project, says it is a unique, safe design using tested materials and concepts. The Gen4 advanced reactor design was in the running for development funding from the DOE.

The DOE uses a device called a “funding opportunity announcement”(FOA), to encourage technology developers. In 2013, it issued an FOA and handed out grants of $1 million each to four advanced reactor designers, including General Electric, General Atomics, Westinghouse and Gen4 Energy.

The DOE’s next step was to issue another FOA. This time, the department planned to split $80 million over 10 years for just two designs, provided the grantees came up with their own $10 million. Gen4 and the others prepared detailed proposals and waited.

In January, the DOE picked two rector designs: one from a consortium that includes Bill Gates and the Southern Company, and the other from technology entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian. Neither were in the first round.

The DOE decision hit Gen4 Energy particularly hard, as it was the smallest contender and probably the one most in need of DOE help as it labored on its design, which had originated in the Los Alamos National Laboratory and was due for feasibility testing at the University of South Carolina, according to Prince. “We really thought we had a shot,” he said.

Not so. Love from the DOE is a sometime thing. Just ask Prince, who now must tell investors and staff that the $10 million or so they have already spent is gone and the business must pack up, technology abandoned, lives shattered, hope sunk.

Gen4 Energy is not alone in its disappointment. Other companies with exciting designs for reactors are also disappointed. Careers, brilliant ideas, and untold dollars are lost in the way the DOE seduces and abandons people and technologies. — For InsideSources


John T. Conway: A Remembrance

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By Llewellyn King

John T. Conway, who died on Feb. 12 at the age of 92, was a force. And he triumphed in many things — as a Navy engineer, an FBI special agent, an attorney, a congressional staffer, a presidential appointee, a utility executive, a husband and a father.

I am glad to say that John was my friend, and that I was the beneficiary of his joy and generosity.

I knew him for more than 40 years. And I knew him to be a man for whom everything was an adventure. He sought it and it sought him.

If you were lucky enough to know John, you were swept along in his adventure. I was swept along in the corridors of the Capitol, which he knew inside out from his days as a staffer on the storied Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. I was swept along in the labyrinth of offices at Consolidated Edison Company in New York, when he was executive assistant to the chairman. I was swept along into the arcane and essential work of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, when he became its first chairman, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, in 1989.

And I was swept along on K Street in Washington, when John was headed for a favorite watering hole. He was an Irishman from New York, where his father was a policeman for 30 years. John was Irish in the best sense of that: He enjoyed a drink and loved the companionship that went with it.

John was a raconteur who took time to ask questions. You always felt he knew a lot more than you did — and this was for the simple reason that he did. An evening in his company was a time to laugh, but also a time to learn.

A 42-page interview that FBI historians conducted with John in 2009, as part of an oral history of the agency, can be found online at http://www.nleomf.org/assets/pdfs/nlem/oral-histories/FBI_Conway_interview.pdf In this remarkable document, John discusses his attempts to see active duty in World War II and his extraordinary career at the FBI.

John had told me a lot about his life as an FBI special agent, including how close he had come to turning a Soviet spy. He said he felt cheated not to have closed the deal.

He was both an engineer and an attorney – with degrees from Tufts University and Columbia University School of Law — so he was well-suited to the nuclear business in Washington. From the 1950s, the nuclear world was populated with giants. John stood tall even among that august company.

He joined the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in 1958 as an assistant staff director, and became its executive director in 1968. It was the only joint committee of Congress that has ever had the power to introduce legislation — and as such, it was something of a law unto itself. It had very private offices in the Capitol, accessed by a discreet elevator that was almost under the dome.

All the committee members were there because of their devotion to nuclear energy. They sought their assignments because they believed in nuclear energy for defense, electricity generation and medicine. Democrat and Republican were as one where nuclear was concerned. The chairmanship switched between the House and Senate every two years, but the committee’s policy of collective aims never varied. Many of its members were national figures such as Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.), Sen. John Pastore (D-R.I.), Sen. Clinton Anderson (D-N.M.), and John Anderson (R-Ill.), who ran for president as an Independent.

Because of the secrecy which surrounded it and the depth of knowledge among its members, Congress was usually swayed by the committee. In short, it got what it wanted.

Making sure that happened was John Conway. As staff director, his influence in Congress and in its vassal agency, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), was considerable. He was at the right hand of members during an expansion of nuclear power and in dangerous days of the Cold War. He circled the globe as the quiet man who smoothed things out — some critical, as in Moscow with Sen. Jackson, or in Rome with Sen. Pastore.

When Pastore was chairman of the committee, he took John with him on a trip to Rome. Now Pastore was a short man, and John was a tall, raw-boned one. They traveled together at a time when Europe was littered with what were called “counterpart funds.” This was local currency that had accumulated in U.S. embassies in payments, but could not be repatriated and converted into dollars.

At the U.S. Embassy in Rome, John was given a big roll of lira — a common practice at that time when congressmen visited European countries. With the roll in his jacket pocket, John accompanied Pastore for an audience with the Pope. Pastore was a devout Catholic, and John told me he thought this was the highest point of the senator’s life.

The audience began in curtained room in the Vatican, and involved Pastore, John, the Pope and his aide. Before they left the room, the Pope handed a glass-and-metal crucifix to Pastore, who clutched it to his chest, profoundly moved.

Then the Pope indicated that he and Pastore should go to another room where, presumably, the senator received a papal blessing. John and Pope’s aide stood looking at each other in the curtained room. He was so grateful for his boss’s audience with the Pope and the gift of the crucifix that he felt some reciprocation was needed. Having brought no presents, John handed the Pope’s aide the roll of lira.

Then the aide, who thought this generosity required major reciprocity, threw back the room’s curtain to reveal a great tub of identical crucifixes. He grabbed a bunch and handed them to John. Big problem. If Pastore had found out that they were given to all, he would be devastated. And if John declined the offer, there might be an international incident. So he stuffed them into his shirt and crossed his arms over his chest to keep them from clinking.

Soon, John was reunited with Pastore. The two left the Vatican — with John suffering painful pricking from his burden.

When they were back on a Roman street and Pastore was distracted, John unloaded his burden into a trash can. “Ask John. He will know what to do,” they used to say all over Washington. And he always did.

A truly great man has passed, paid up in full in the human club.

Llewellyn King, executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS,” was the founder and publisher of “The Energy Daily” for 33 years.

America’s Year of Thinking Dangerously

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By Llewellyn King

If you accept that seminal means an event or moment after which things will never be the same again, then we are living through a seminal year.

In matters big and small, change is in the wind.

This wind blew through Iowa and New Hampshire, and is defining the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are not so much the leaders of this time of change, but rather the products.

The product is something hard to pin down, but it is there nonetheless — a sense that it is time to turn the page, to read the next chapter; a yearning for something fresh.

The millennials, hunched over their cell phones, are looking for the future in their small screens. The rest of us are looking for it in new leaders, new lifestyles; and new thinking, sometimes about old ideas.

Societies go through periods when they feel the need to change up things. But they want a sped-up evolution rather than a full-fledged revolution. This is such a time.

Change is everywhere from the bold, new things television is doing — frontal nudity, gay coupling and interracial love — to the kind of car we favor.

While we grapple with change and yearn for the new, we are surprisingly open-minded. American values appear to be undergoing a recalibration: We are getting more socially tolerant. Social conservatives are a diminished force.

Young people do not have the same commitment their parents had to conventional employment, to be defined by where they work. This leads to a world where people are less concerned with appearances, and all that goes with appearances. The business suit and its essential accoutrement, the necktie, are on the way out – and in much of the country, they are now curiously out of date. Apartments are being favored over houses because of new social values.

My generation experienced the hopeful 1940s (just the tail end), the smug 1950s, the turbulent 1960s, the oil-shocked 1970s, and the computer-excited 1980s, which continued unabated until the dot-com bubble burst at the turn of the century – but re-inflated with new developments in Internet products like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

In recent times, the only new American billionaire outside of the Internet was Hamdi Ulukaya, who popularized Greek yogurt in country hungry for yogurt choices. That is a dumbfounding fact. It means that it will be harder to get investment in old-line businesses and start-ups. The smart money has become myopically obsessed with the cyberworld.

If you were to go to Wall Street today to raise money for a new nuclear reactor that put all doubts of the past to rest and offered income for 100 years — there are such machines on the drawing board – you would find it hard to raise money; easier for a new Internet messaging system. This when there is no shortage of Internet messages (too many, I cry each morning). We are leery of the hard and enamored of the soft.

We sense that the education system is not doing its job; that it is broken and needs fixing. But how, we are not sure. We are sure, though, that we are going to change it.

We sense that we had the dynamic wrong in foreign affairs; that change at home, like toppling a generation of political leadership, is desirable, while toppling leaders abroad is a fraught undertaking, as with Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad.

We feel less good about the wealthy, and we are less sure that there are secure places for us in the future. We watch cooking shows and order in pizza. We gave up smoking and started jogging. But we are, so to speak, deaf to the damage we are doing to our ears with incessant music piped to them by earbuds.

We are more nationalistic and less confident at the same time. We treasure our values more, and wonder about their long-term durability.

The largest contradiction that can easily be inspected is in the themes of Trump and Sanders: Trump has rehabilitated a kind of racism aimed at immigrants, while Sanders has made the taboo word “socialism” acceptable in political dialogue.

The desire for change has moved from a slight wish to a hard desire for a new alignment. It is everywhere, from what we eat to how we feel about the climate. But we do not agree on this new alignment, hence the huge gulf between Sanders followers and Trump adherents. — For InsideSources

Cancer ‘Moonshot’ Has Paltry Dollars, Losers

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By Llewellyn King

Whenever the government wants to be seen to be doing something huge, it invokes the Manhattan Project or the moon landing. So the new cancer initiative of the Obama administration is called the “moonshot.”

But it’s neither the equivalent of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb during World War II, nor President Kennedy’s ambitious program to land a man on the moon, after the Russians appeared to have stolen a march with the launch of Sputnik, the first satellite in space.

Those programs succeeded because they were tremendous national commitments without regard to funding. The $1 billion in proposed funding for the “moonshot” cancer initiative is somewhere between modest and paltry. In the world of biomedical research, $1 billion simply doesn’t buy much.

The pharmaceutical industry estimates that it costs well over $1 billion to bring just one new drug to market. Cancer needs many drugs.

The lead agency in this new iteration of the war on cancer, declared in 1971, is the National Institutes of Health. It has an annual budget of $32 billion on which there are demands from many deserving fields of biomedical research besides cancer.

President Obama has asked Vice President Biden to lead the cancer moonshot effort. I’ve been with the vice president when he has talked about his commitment to the cause of cancer research and the death of his son, Beau, from brain cancer. His sincerity and his commitment to cancer research is palpable, but he won’t have the dollars to get the job done.

The biggest contribution to the research for a cancer cure may be the stimulation the moonshot will give to extant cancer efforts, but it’s not without a downside.

Many other diseases fear they may be undercut by the cancer initiative. In the world of biomedical research, there is finite funding and talent — and a new initiative tends to draw the best research minds. The top magnets for good biomedical researchers these days are cancer and AIDS, and many other deserving diseases lose out. Biomedical research requires stability, so that decades of a scientist’s life can be devoted to a single line of endeavor.

I follow one of the more obscure diseases, one that that has been pitiably starved of public and private funds: Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Compared to any other disease affecting a large number of people (1 million victims of ME/CFS in the United States, according to the Centers For Disease Control), it has been funded so little by the government as to amount willful neglect. It receives a miniscule $5 million a year in funding.

Last year, after public and media pressure that has been applied for years, NIH Director Francis Collins announced that things would be rectified. But he didn’t mention a dollar figure; not when he made the announcement in October and not to date. No moonshot here, not even a Fourth of July firework.

Yet the suffering of those with ME/CFS is truly awful. I’ve been in the sick rooms and interviewed the few doctors who specialize in the disease, and the situation is one of unabated misery. Those who are the most affected can’t tolerate light or sound, and must pass their days in the silent dark. For years, one poor young man has had to take refuge from the disease in a modified closet. Others suffer from a world in which they’re punished for doing everyday things: A dinner with friends can mean days in bed for recovery.

There seems to be no light at the end of the victim’s physical pain and mental fog, despite decades of pleading from advocates and caregivers that some serious research be funded by NIH.

While we’ve been the world’s powerhouse in research in all sciences, biomedical is now being starved of research dollars. Recently America’s most revered virus hunter, Dr. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, has had to resort to crowdfunding. He and his deputy, Dr. Mady Hornig, can be found on YouTube eating red-hot chili peppers in an attempt to raise money for their ME/CFS research.

Dollars in across-the-board biomedical research are falling when they should be rising. Recently, NIH’s budgets have been 25 percent smaller in constant dollars than they were in 2003.

Research pays. Most of it doesn’t yield dramatic stuff, like a moonshot, but rather solid, incremental gain. In science, incremental gain is the equivalent of compound interest. But it needs sustained funding. Not rhetoric. — For InsideSources


Nuclear Inventions Are Here, but not to Stay

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By Llewellyn King

In February, about 200 of the most gifted engineers and scientists you can squeeze into a single meeting room will be sharing PowerPoints at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, near Knoxville, Tenn.

They will not be rocket scientists, but they may as well be. They will be nuclear engineers, physicists, chemists and entrepreneurs advocating new designs for reactors that will make electricity and medical isotopes and burn up nuclear waste.

When you get away from the politics and other restraints that have so arrested traditional reactor deployment in the United States in recent years, wonderful ideas spring forth. Scientists, I assure you, when gathered together can generate as much enthusiasm as any other creative cohort for planning wondrous things for the future.

Creative people are not just those who work with paint, musical notes, and words, but also those who pour over complex calculations, look at the atomic nature of matter, and design wondrous machines that will make electricity, create medicines, clean the air and purify the water.

Invention is narcotic. Yes, call them mad scientists but new ideas, as yet untrammeled, are stimulative — and even aphrodisiacal.

That is why one of the most exciting places I will go to this year will be the Advanced Reactors Technical Summit III at Oak Ridge on Feb. 10-11. For several years, I have attended this conference, organized by the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council, in other places, including Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. I can report that nuclear engineers are as boyish in their enthusiasm for the possibilities of bending the atom to human need as college football coaches are when they survey the new recruits. Possibility lifts the spirits.

In Oak Ridge there will be schemes, dreams and some very creative engineering. There will be designs for fast reactors, that can burn nuclear waste as fuel; molten salt reactors, thorium reactors, and small modular reactors. Some will be incremental improvements on old ideas, others will be concepts created from whole cloth. All will strive for safety through design.

But the creators assembling in Oak Ridge do so against a background that is sorrowful for them and their industry.

The United States — the crucible of nuclear invention — looks to be losing its place as the leader in nuclear energy. American utilities are not lining up to build new nuclear plants, and old ones are likely to keep going out of service. Edward Davis, president of the Pegasus Group, talks about a “nuclear cliff” – a time around 2030, when most of the U.S. nuclear fleet will be retired. Then nuclear — which produces no carbon and has a life cycle of up to 80 years — will dwindle to a handful of reactors, just when our promises under the Paris COP21 climate conference agreement call for big reductions in carbon.

Brilliant men and women are designing reactors that may change everything to do with electricity generation and isotope production. But they doubt that their first-of-kind reactors will be built and licensed in the United States. Nuclear design is almost limitless; the parameters are very flexible and the future tantalizing.

These engineers, to a person, are looking overseas to build and demonstrate their machines – mostly in China, India and the United Arab Emirates. Even Bill Gates, who is supporting a revolutionary traveling wave reactor, is working with the Chinese.

That is a sadness and a bitterness that will also be present at the advanced reactor conference in Tennessee. — For InsideSources

 

The Sustaining Knock on the Door

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By Llewellyn King

For some Americans today, tomorrow and the day after, on and on, a knock on the door is the high point of a lonely life. They are the old, infirm and shut-in; and they are a growing part of our aging society. Even though many of them have children and grandchildren, if you live alone and you are old, you know what it is to be all by yourself and lonely.

I think of them as the Alone Generation: people who suffer the privations of age and the dark place of loneliness.

The daily knock on the door comes from a volunteer for Meals on Wheels, and means a meal and little companionship. It is a public-private partnership that works: food for needy people.

That knock on the door comes a million times a day as Meals on Wheels volunteers fan out in their communities to deliver food. Some drive great distances in rural areas, some around their own neighborhoods.

The meals are tailored for the elderly, and often for diabetics. Sometimes they are delivered hot and ready to eat. Sometimes they need to be heated in a conventional or microwave oven. Sometimes they reflect regional tastes. All the meals are manna to the recipients.

According to Ellie Hollander, CEO of Meals on Wheels America, based in Arlington, Va., the average recipient is 75 years old or older, is usually a woman, takes at least six medications a day, suffers some physical impairment, and wants to live independently.

About a third of the organization’s funding comes from the federal government, and the other two-thirds comes from state and local governments and charities. There is a lot of volunteer labor.

Hollander says the money spent on keeping people at home is a national bargain: It keeps them out of expensive nursing homes, hospitals and other pricey warehousing.

You do not have to plunge into the statistics about aging – but Pennsylvania alone has over 2 million seniors, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. Instead, just go to any rundown area of any town or city and you can see them asking grocery store employees about the price of everything, pulling wads of coupons out of their wallets before they hand over their money at the checkout, and struggling to carry their purchases.

My town in Rhode Island has an area called Arctic, which is home to a lot of old people. Their needs are palpable. I see them on the streets, in the drug stores and the grocery store. Some are bent over, nearly double. Others can walk only with canes and walkers. They stand in the cold without shelter, as they will this week, waiting for a bus that comes infrequently. Shopping is a burden without a car, and taxis are expensive. So my neighbors do things the hard way, the only way.

My neighbors are not derelicts. They have worked all their lives, many not in pensionable jobs. They live on Social Security and balance their spending between shelter, food, medicines, utilities and clothing. For them, and many millions of aged Americans, it is about staying alive.

There are studies and committees on the aging; the White House talks about it, Congress ruminates and appropriates a sliver of money. But the horrible truth is millions of old people, probably already undernourished and sick, choose daily between food and heat, food and medicine, food and rent or even clothes.

Retirement communities, assisted living centers, sunshine enclaves in Arizona, Florida and Nevada, are only part of the story of aging. Mostly age comes stealthily, creeping up on people in the communities where they have put down their roots.

I look at poor, old people everywhere and wonder what they were like when young; when they were full of love and joy and hope. I wonder how they make it now, staving off starving or freezing, or living with aching loneliness.

It is worth thinking about this when politicians attack “entitlements” and imply that those in need are there by choice.

The well-off avert their eyes and blame the old for not being better with money in their youth. Unfortunately, many never made enough money to save.

These winter days, as the snow piles up in much of America, fewer people will get that sustaining knock on the door.  -For InsideSources