Organizing organ donation by social media

In the NY Times, David Bornstein writes about the efforts by Organize to bolster organ donor registries by prompting statements of intent on internet media:
Using Tweets and Posts to Speed Up Organ Donation

"One group attacking the question is Organize, which was founded in 2014 by Rick Segal’s son Greg, and Jenna Arnold, a media producer and educator who has worked with MTV and the United Nations in engaging audiences in social issues. Organize uses technology, open data and insights from behavioral economics to simplify becoming an organ donor.

This approach is shaking up longstanding assumptions.

For example, in the last four decades, people have most often been asked to register as an organ donor as part of renewing or obtaining a driver’s license. This made sense in the 1970s, when the nation’s organ procurement system was being set up, says Blair Sadler, the former president and chief executive of Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. He helped draft the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act in 1967, which established a national legal framework for organ donation. “Health care leaders were asking, ‘How do we make this more routine?’” he recalled. “It’s hard to get people to put it in their wills. Oh, there’s a place where people have to go every five years” — their state Department of Motor Vehicles.

Today, governments allow individuals to initiate registrations online, but the process can be cumbersome. For example, New York State required me to fill out a digital form on my computer, then print it out and mail it to Albany. Donate Life America, by contrast, allows individuals to register online as an organ donor just by logging in with email or a Facebook or Google account — much easier.

In practice, legal registration may be overemphasized. It may be just as important to simply make your wishes known to your loved ones. When people tell relatives, “If something happens to me, I want to be an organ donor,” families almost always respect their wishes. This is particularly important for minors, who cannot legally register as donors.

Using that insight, Organize is making it easier to conduct social media campaigns to both prompt and collect sentiments about organ donation from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

If you post or tweet about organ donation, or include a hashtag like #iwanttobeanorgandonor, #organdonor, #donatemyparts, or any of a number of other relevant terms, Organize captures the information and logs it in a registry. In a year, it has gathered the names of nearly 600,000 people who declare support for organ donation. Now the big question is: Will it actually increase organ donation rates?

We should begin getting an idea pretty soon. Organize has been working with the Nevada Donor Network to test its registry. And in the coming months, several other states will begin using it."

Market design in Siam and Germany--(book reviews of Who Gets What and Why)

First in the Siam news (not this Siam, rather this Siam),

May 02, 2016

Mathematical Matchmaking--Algorithms That Address Real-World Problems

By James Case

Who Gets What—And Why. By Alvin E. Roth, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2015, 272 pages, $28.00.

Case likes the book but warns the non-economist reader as follows:
"In closing, it should be mentioned that by classifying matchmaking venues as markets, Roth gives the impression that economists are uniquely qualified to design and modify them, though nothing in the traditional economics curriculum seems particularly relevant. On the contrary, students of combinatorics, computer science, and/or operations research (in which Roth himself received his doctoral degree) would seem at least as well prepared for the task. "
**********

And from Germany:

Macht der Matching-Märkte  ("Power of Matching Markets")Nicht der Preis entscheidet über Angebot und Nachfrage

I liked this phrase from Google Translate: " fast and refreshingly drinkable written book"
**********

While I'm at it, here's another recent review, from a blog called "Don't worry, I'm an economist!"

A repugnant gun transaction

USA Today has the story of the on again, off again and once more on again auction of a notorious gun:
George Zimmerman's auction of Trayvon Martin gun back on
The url is more informative:  http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/05/12/george-zimmerman-auctions-gun-used-trayvon-martin-killing/84271998/

"George Zimmerman tried a second time Thursday to auction off the firearm he used to kill 17-year-oldTrayvon Martin in Florida in 2012 after the first gun-selling website yanked the listing minutes before bidding was to begin on the "piece of history."

A statement posted on the website GunBroker.com said listings are user generated, and that the company reserved the right to reject any at its discretion.

"Mr. Zimmerman never contacted anyone at GunBroker.com prior to or after the listing was created and no one at (the website) has any relationship with Zimmerman," the company wrote in its statement.

It added, "We want no part in the listing on our web site or in any of the publicity it is receiving."

The listing, which got more than 185,000 views, was replaced at mid-morning Thursday by a message that said, without elaboration, "Sorry, but the item you have requested is no longer in the system."

Zimmerman told the Orlando Sentinel that GunBroker.com was not "prepared for the traffic and publicity surrounding the auction of my firearm. It has now been placed with another auction house."

The new listing for the Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm firearm was posted on unitedgungroup.com.

Zimmerman wrote in both listings that that he was "honored and humbled" to announce the sale of the weapon and set the bidding to start at $5,000. Similar firearms normally sell on the site for around $200.

"The firearm for sale is the firearm that was used to defend my life and end the brutal attack from Trayvon Martin on 2/26/2012," he wrote.

Zimmerman, 32, noted the Justice Department returned the weapon to him recently and it still bears the case number written on it in silver permanent marker.

"This is a piece of American History," he wrote. "It has been featured in several publications and in current University text books."

Zimmerman, then a neighborhood watch volunteer, shot and killed Trayvon in February 2012, in a confrontation as the unarmed teenager was heading back to a relative's house in Sanford, Fla., after buying snacks at a convenience store.

A jury found Zimmerman, who alleged that Martin was trying to bash his head on the pavement during a struggle, not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter."

NBER Market Design: 2016 Methods Lectures, Tuesday July 26 (Abdulkadiroglu, Agarwal, Ashlagi, Pathak, and Roth)

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Nikhil Agarwal, Itai Ashlagi, Parag Pathak and I will be delivering a set of "Methods Lectures" on Market Design as part of the NBER Summer Institute sessions on Labor Economics, which will be held July 25-29, 2016 at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge MA.
The program for the whole week is here, and below is the Tuesday afternoon Market Design program.

NBER Market Design: 2016 Methods Lectures
1:15 pm	Welcome
1:20 pm	Al Roth: Game Theory and Market Design
2:05 pm	Parag Pathak and Atila Abdulkadiroglu: Design of Matching Markets
2:50 pm	Break
3:00 pm	Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak: Research Design meets Market Design
3:45 pm	Nikhil Agarwal: Revealed Preference Analysis in Matching Markets
4:30 pm	Break
4:40 pm	Itai Ashlagi: Matching Dynamics and Computation
5:30 pm	Adjourn

Should prostitution remain illegal in the U.S?

The NY Times is on the case:

Should Prostitution Be a Crime?

A growing movement of sex workers and activists is making the decriminalization of sex work a feminist issue.

By EMILY BAZELONMAY 5, 2016

"Three months earlier, at a meeting attended by about 500 delegates from 80 countries, Amnesty voted to adopt a proposal in favor of the “full decriminalization of consensual sex work,” sparking a storm of controversy. Members of the human rights group in Norway and Sweden resigned en masse, saying the organization’s goal should be to end demand for prostitution, not condone it. Around the world, on social media and in the press, opponents blasted Amnesty.
...
"In the United States and around the globe, many sex workers (the term activists prefer to “prostitute”) are trying to change how they are perceived and policed. They are fighting the legal status quo, social mores and also mainstream feminism, which has typically focused on saving women from the sex trade rather than supporting sex workers who demand greater rights. But in the last decade, sex-worker activists have gained new allies. If Amnesty’s international board approves a final policy in favor of decriminalization in the next month, it will join forces with public-health organizations that have successfully worked for years with groups of sex workers to halt the spread of H.I.V. and AIDS, especially in developing countries. “The urgency of the H.I.V. epidemic really exploded a lot of taboos,” says Catherine Murphy, an Amnesty policy adviser.
...
"At the Amnesty conference, Muñoz told the crowd that she thinks decriminalization would have benefits for many people by bringing the sex trade out from underground. “I believe in the empowered sex worker,” she said. “I was one. But the empowered sex worker isn’t representative of the majority of sex workers. It’s O.K. for us to be honest about this.” She was referring to the social and economic divide in the profession. Activists in the sex-workers’ movement tend to be educated and make hundreds of dollars an hour. The words they often use to describe themselves — dominatrix, fetishist, sensual masseuse, courtesan, sugar baby, whore, witch, pervert — can be self-consciously half-wicked.

Some of their concerns can seem far removed from those of women who feel they must sell sex to survive — a mother trying to scrape together the rent, say, or a runaway teenager. People in those situations generally don’t call themselves “sex workers” or see themselves as part of a movement. “It’s not something people we work with would ever talk about,” says Deon Haywood, the director of Women With a Vision in New Orleans, an African-American health collective that works with low-income women and trans clients. Some of them sell sex, Haywood says, because it’s more flexible and pays better than low-wage work at businesses like McDonald’s.

Human rights advocates tend to focus on people in grim circumstances. “Like many feminists, I’m conflicted about sex work,” says Liesl Gerntholtz, executive director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch, which took a stand in favor of decriminalization four years ago. “You’re often talking about women who have extremely limited choices. Would I like to live in a world where no one has to do sex work? Absolutely. But that’s not the case. So I want to live in a world where women do it largely voluntarily, in a way that is safe.

Buying old drugs and raising their price is a repugnant transaction on Capitol Hill

Valeant Chief, at Senate Hearing, Concedes Mistakes on Steep Drug Prices

"The chief executive of Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, which has been harshly criticized for its practice of raising prices on old drugs, said during a tense hearing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday that the company had made “mistakes,” while lawmakers accused him and others connected to Valeant of favoring profits over patients’ needs.

“Let me state plainly that it was a mistake to pursue, and in hindsight I regret pursuing, transactions where a central premise was a planned increase in the prices of the medicines,” J. Michael Pearson, the chief executive, said at the hearing."

Los Angeles starts to discuss common enrollment school choice

The LA Times has the story:
How realistic is L.A. Unified's common enrollment application plan?

"According to a report that district employees prepared for the board of education in October and obtained by The Times in April, the district would favor a website like that of Boston Unified School District, in which parents can come to one website, enter their preferences for their child and receive suggestions on schools that fit the criteria. The information technology department recommended hiring a vendor to create this "search engine," according to the report.

The paper also suggests moving the application timeline to the fall semester, and creating one common application for all L.A. Unified schools. This would allow the district to compete with charter schools that have their lotteries early in the school year.

Unlike some other districts that have adopted this kind of process, L.A. Unified would not include independent charters. During a budget meeting in March, superintendent Michelle King told board members this single enrollment system would be a way to keep students, and the revenues they bring, in traditional public schools.

The discussions come as more students abandon district schools in favor of charter schools.

Right now there are about 10 kinds of public school options for families, including neighborhood schools, magnets, open enrollment, and zones of choice. Even if parents know that they have options and figure out what the alphabet soup of words means, the enrollment and application dates are at different times of the year, from October through March."

Interview about Who Gets What and Why at the American Academy in Berlin (audio, 10 minutes)

When I was in Berlin in March I gave an interview which I just noticed is on the web...

Matching with (sexual) contracts, by Arcidiacono, Beauchamp, and McElroy

Quantitative Economics, Volume 7, Issue 1 (March 2016)

Terms Of Endearment: An Equilibrium Model Of Sex And Matching

Peter Arcidiacono, Andrew Beauchamp, Marjorie McElroy

Abstract

We develop a two‐sided directed search model of relationship formation that can be used to disentangle male and female preferences over partner characteristics and over relationship terms from only a cross section of observed matches. Individuals direct their search for a partner on the basis of (i) the terms of the relationship, (ii) the partners' characteristics, and (iii) the endogenously determined probability of matching. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we estimate an equilibrium matching model of high school relationships. Variation in gender ratios is used to uncover male and female preferences. Estimates from the structural model match subjective responses on whether sex would occur in one's ideal relationship. The estimates show that some women would ideally not have sex, but do so out of matching concerns; the reverse is true for men. Counterfactual simulations show that the matching environment black women face is the primary driver of the large differences in sexual activity among white and black women.

The college admissions scramble is now open: many colleges still accepting applications

There is still time to find a college, and here is a link to a listing of colleges still seeking students:

College Openings Update 2016

NACAC’s annual College Openings Update: Options for Qualified Students (formerly the Space Availability Survey) is a voluntary listing of NACAC member postsecondary institutions that are still accepting applications from prospective freshman and/or transfer students for the upcoming fall term. Now in its 29th year, the College Openings Update is designed as a tool for counselors, parents and others assisting students who have not yet completed the college admission process. Typically, colleges will continued to join the update after the May 5 public release date, so check back periodically to see additional colleges still accepting applications.

Burning ivory to educate the world about the illegal poaching of elephants

Kenya burns world's biggest ivory stockpile worth $105m in conservation effort

"Kenya set light to 105 tonnes of elephant ivory in the biggest burn in history on Saturday, aimed at crushing poaching and the illicit wildlife trade.

The country’s president set light to 11 pyres containing a total of 25,000 pieces of wildlife contraband including elephant tusks, rhino horns, exotic animal skins and medicinal bark.

"If sold on the black market, the tusks alone, from around 8,000 elephants, would fetch more than $105m. But the Kenyan authorities are burning burn the ivory to show the world it should have no value without a live elephant attached to it.
...
"Speaking to delegates at the Giants’ Club summit of conservation experts, Uhuru Kenyatta, the Kenyan president, said poaching was not just about animals, it was holding Africa back.

“There is convincing evidence poaching is aided by international criminal syndicates; it fuels corruption; it undermines the rule of law and security; it even provides funding for other trans-national crime,” he said.

“This directly threatens the capacity of our nations to achieve sustainable and meaningful socio-economic development.”

"Each year, between 20,000 and 33,000 elephants are thought to be lost to poaching, which is driven by a mainly Chinese market for their tusks to be carved into trinkets and jewellery.

"Despite millions of dollars in foreign aid and from local government budgets being poured into clamping down on poachers and criminal syndicates, elephants are still being killed faster than they are being born. As few as 470,000 African elephants are now thought to remain in the wild.

"This year so far, Kenya lost at least 94 elephants to poachers and, according to Dr Richard Leakey, the renowned palaeontologist and chair of the Kenyan Wildlife Service, the country’s pachyderm population remains in a “terrible, perilous state”.

“We are burning the ivory because we believe ivory should be worthless. We believe not just in putting it out of economic reach but getting rid of it completely forever,” he said.

"Advertisements for the burn were broadcast on big screens onto Shanghai’s Bund building in its equivalent of Times Square and live-streamed on the internet accompanied by commentaries by some of the country’s best-known celebrities.

"Aisling Ryan, from the American charity WildAid which has focused on disrupting the Chinese market, said the Chinese word for “tusk” is the same as for “teeth” and many consumers had been unaware an elephant had to die for it to be harvested."

College admissions, on Bloomberg Surveillance (audio interview, 7 minutes)

I spoke briefly about college admissions yesterday on Bloomberg Surveillance:

Roth: College admissions look for signals of student interestMay 3, 2016 —  Professor Alvin Roth discusses college admissions and how it’s a congested market place. He speaks with Tom Keene and Michael McKee on Bloomberg Surveillance.Running time 11:14 

Download: Roth: College admissions look for signals of student interest
(the section on college admissions starts around minute 1:45 and ends around minute 9:00)

Refugees: "no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land"--from "Home" by Warsan Shire

I only belatedly came across the poem “Home” by Warsan Shire, from which the iconic line that is the title of this post comes...

“Home” by Warsan Shire

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

The Effect of Rules on Market Performance: a guest post by James Case

Jim Case, the author of Competition: The Birth of a New Science , who also frequently reviews books for the SIAM Review, writes that I could have written a different book than Who Gets What and Why, and offers some thoughts on what it might cover. Here's his guest post.

The Effect of Rules on Market Performance  by Jim Case

          The early chapters of Who Gets What and Why argue, by means of examples, that the success or failure of individual markets often depends less on the details of supply and demand than on the way the markets are organized, and the rules (written or unwritten) that govern participant behavior. History offers any number of memorable examples, of which the following seem particularly instructive:

The parimutuel system of betting at racetracks was invented in 1867. The large amount of calculation involved led to the development of a specialized mechanical calculating machine known as a “totalizator,” or “tote board”. The first one was installed at a track in New Zealand in 1913. The U.S. introduction was in 1927, at Arlington Park, near Chicago. The system was immediately popular with gamblers, for allowing them to bet against other gamblers, rather than “the house,” invariably suspected of acting on inside information.

Air-Brakes on Railroads engaged in interstate commerce were mandated by federal law in 1893. Before that, no individual road could afford the expense of installing such brakes. When all were required to have them, however, freight and passenger rates could be raised sufficiently to make them affordable. Railroad profits actually increased, due to the feasibility of operating longer trains in relative safety!

The Texas Railroad Commission (TRC) was allotted the task, during the 1920s, of regulating in-state oil production on the ground that (pipelines being yet few and far between) crude was mainly transported in railroad tank cars, limited numbers of which were available. After the discovery of the East Texas Field in 1931, the supply of crude oil so far outpaced demand that the price fell to 10 cents a barrel, ironically bringing many producers of “black gold” to the verge of bankruptcy. The commission responded by imposing limits on the fraction of rated capacity well owners were permitted to produce. Initially, they were allowed as little as ten percent, or three “producing days” per month. Texas oil men grew rich only after the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the TRC was indeed within its rights to enforce such regulation by whatever means necessary.

The Securities and Exchange Commission was established in 1934 to regulate trade in stocks, bonds, and other securities. Before that time, controls on the issuing and trading of securities had been virtually nonexistent, allowing all manner of fraud and manipulation. Drastic measures were required to restore public confidence (and participation) in the stock market following the crash of 1929. The business community, ever wary of New Deal reforms, was mollified by the effective yet business-friendly chairmanships of Joseph P. Kennedy and William O. Douglas.

The Regulation of Radio Communication has been ongoing in the US since 1912. Military, emergency responder, police, and entertainment enterprises all wanted the ability to get their signals out over the airwaves to target audiences without interference. The Radio Act of 1912 authorized the establishment of a commission to designate which airwaves would be reserved for public use and which would be available to private users. In 1926, at the request of the nascent broadcasting industry, the Federal Radio Commission was established for the immediate purpose of assigning non-interfering radio frequencies to near-by broadcasters. Advertising time became markedly easier to sell when potential buyers could be assured that their messages would be audible to target audiences. It was exactly the boost the fledgling industry needed at the time, and hastened the day when governments could generate significant revenue by auctioning radio frequencies. The Communications Act of 1934 replaced the Federal Radio Commission with the Federal Communications Commission, holding dominion over telephone as well as radio (& later TV) traffic.

The New Jersey Holding Company Act of 1893: Large corporations were illegal under English common law, which formed the basis of state law in most of the United States. Wholesale mergers and acquisitions therefore remained impossible until legal obstacles were eliminated. The critical piece of legislation is generally held to be the New Jersey Holding Company Act of 1889, which reversed the common law taboo forbidding corporations to buy and hold stock in other corporations. Further restrictions were removed in 1893 and 1896. The result was the consolidation of some 5300 original manufacturing firms into just 318 large corporations between 1897 and the panic of 1903, mostly under New Jersey law. By 1920, most US industries had become oligopolies, with consequences the economics profession has been reluctant to acknowledge.

          It should be added that failure to modify the rules of conduct within specific markets can lead directly to market failure. Congress’ failure to regulate the sale and purchase of derivative securities during the 1990s, and its continued failure to impose a carbon tax, are but two of many cases in point.

Interview about market design in the economics newspaper Wirtschafts Woche (in German)

I was interviewed about market design by Hans Jakob Ginsburg for Wirtschafts Woche
"Märkte gestalten heißt nicht Märkte abschaffen"

Discussion of Who Gets What and Why in Japan: a book review and an article (in Japanese)

A book review and an article about my lecture at Tokyo Institute of Technology:

Matching of the economy: "Who Gets What" by Noburi Ikeda

At 10:00 on April 25, 2016

• 

Nobuo Ikeda

Who Gets What- match new economics of Mei King and market design [book]

Alvin · E · Ross

Japan Jingji News Publishing

★★★★★

*************

With Akira Ikegami at Tokyo Institute of Technology

April was National Donate Life Month

I received a variety of emails this past month related to National Donate Life Month, and I liked this image (from the Alliance for Paired Donation) the best:

Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen channel Condorcet on American and Indian politics, in the NY Times

How Majority Rule Might Have Stopped Donald Trump

By ERIC MASKIN and AMARTYA SENAPRIL 28, 2016

Continue reading the main storyShare This Page

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Zurich celebrates Tuomas Sandholm: Symposium on Electronic Market Design

A symposium and more in honor of Tuomas Sandholm:

Location

The symposium will take place at the Department of Education of the University of Zurich (building KAB), at Kantonsschulstrasse 3, 8001 Zurich in room G-01 (interactive map).

A map is available below.

Talks

Time	Speaker	Title
14:00 - 15:00	Prof. Tuomas Sandholm Carnegie Mellon University, USA	Keynote: Journey and new results in combinatorial auctions, automated mechanism design for revenue maximization, and kidney exchanges
15:00 - 15:45	Prof. Martin Bichler TU Munich, Germany	All models are wrong, but some are useful: About spectrum auction design and challenges in market design
15:45 - 16:15	Coffee Break
16:15 - 17:00	Prof. Sven Seuken University of Zurich, Switzerland	Designing better combinatorial auctions: Algorithms, incentives, and bidding languages
17:00 - 17:45	Prof. Axel Ockenfels University of Cologne, Germany	Engineering trust on eBay

Organizers

• Prof. Dr. Sven Seuken
• Dr. Timo Mennle

Stanford celebrates Paul Milgrom and the Incentive Auction "Dream Team"

New on the SIEPR webpage, by Krysten Crawford: To secure a mobile future, Stanford expert creates an auction like no other (the url is more informative than the headline: http://siepr.stanford.edu/highlights/secure-mobile-future-stanford-expert-paul-milgrom-creates-auction).

"More than two decades ago, Stanford economist Paul Milgrom played a key role in the design of the first wireless spectrum auction. Since then, the framework he helped create has been used in more than 80 auctions in the United States, generated billions of dollars in government licensing fees — and been replicated around the world.

"So it made sense for the Federal Communications Commission to tap Milgrom in 2011 when the agency needed a new way to free up more broadband for mobile devices. It took him and a small band of fellow economists and computer scientists 18 months to design the auction, which finally opened last month after years of regulatory procedures, software development and presentations to potential bidders.

"When the auction ends later this year, the country’s wireless landscape will never look the same.
...
"For help, Milgrom pulled together an interdisciplinary “dream team” of top experts in economics and computer science: Jonathan Levin, also a SIEPR senior fellow and faculty member in economics; Ilya Segal, a professor of economics at Stanford; and Kevin Leyton-Brown, a computer scientist at the University of British Columbia who earned his PhD from Stanford."

Hank Greely on future possibilities for human reproduction

One of the 2012 Nobel Laureates in Medicine was Shinya Yamanaka whose work allows stem cells to be generated from skin cells. My Stanford colleague Hank Greely has now written a book, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction, contemplating some of the possibilities--some of them possibly repugnant transactions--for human reproduction. Here's a Stanford news article: Changes in human reproduction raise legal, ethical issues, Stanford scholar says

"Yet, by the same token, the ability to make gametes from skin cells might have some undesirable consequences. For example, Greely pointed out that someone could take a paper coffee cup that you casually tossed in the trash and turn you into a parent without your knowledge or consent.

“We probably need some laws to deal with that; unconsenting parenthood seems like a bad idea,” Greely said. 

Complicated questions

One possibility he proposes would be to require documentation of the provenance of any cells used to derive eggs or sperm.

“I think there are a lot of complicated questions, and for some of them, there is no particular law book to turn to,” Greely said.

...

Fairness is a central issue, Greely said. What if some people have access to the technology and others don’t? He predicts that in rich countries this child-making process will be subsidized, making it effectively free for prospective parents.

“In part,” he said, that will happen “because it will save the health care system a lot of money. You don’t need to prevent the births of very many really sick babies to pay for hundreds or thousands of attempts at making babies through easy PGD.”

But even so, there will certainly be international disparities, and possibly national ones as well. 

People with disabilities

Greely also raises challenging issues with respect to people with disabilities.

“If you’ve got a genetic disease and this means far fewer people are going to be born with your disease, well, in one sense that’s a good thing, but in another sense that lowers the research interest in your disease, the social support for your disease, and it kind of says your society thinks you shouldn’t have been born,” he said.

Citing the examples of heritable deafness and dwarfism, he noted that it’s plausible that parents would want a child like them.

“If a parent deafened a living baby, we’d certainly take the baby away and we’d prosecute the parent. If parents choose an embryo because it’s deaf, like themselves, in order to preserve deaf culture from genocide, what do we do then?”

Greely seeks to spark broad discussions about policies regarding these issues.

“I think something that changes the way we conceive babies affects everyone in such basic ways that it’s not a topic that should be left solely to the law professors or to the bioethicists or to the ob-gyns or to the fertility clinics,” he said.

Theory and application, and age...

An op-ed yesterday by Manil Suri in the NY Times, celebrating the 90th birthday of the mathematician Ivo Babuska, was in part a meditation on "pure" versus applied math, that should ring a bell for economists and game theorists too: The Mathematician’s 90th-Birthday Party.

Suri contrasts Babuska's career with the famous views of G.H. Hardy (he of "A Mathematician's Apology")

"Hardy believed that the only important questions in the field arose internally from this game, that the sole purpose of a mathematician was to create beautiful and “almost wholly useless” theorems.

"But ever since its inception, mathematics has also been driven by another powerful force: applications. From the early commerce and measurement needs that motivated the Sumerians to the subject’s symbiotic co-development with physics, mathematical inquiry has been spurred by questions from external fields. Although Hardy disparaged any math that could be applied to real life as “ugly,” “dull” and “trivial,” surely usefulness should be an additional measure for a mathematician’s worth?
...
"Hardy dismissed exposition as “work for second-rate minds,” but such activity is critical for a field notoriously inept at communicating its results to outsiders.

"It’s of course unfair to criticize Hardy, given how much the world has changed since his day. The division he created between “beautiful but useless” and “useful but ugly” mathematics has long been breached; even his own “useless” research area of number theory has become essential in cryptography and cybersecurity. Conversely, many elegant and aesthetically pleasing mathematical theories have emerged from the most utilitarian applications — even from the analysis of machine parts, as I can personally attest.

"Let’s cherish Hardy’s theorems, not his opinions, and recognize mathematics as a field with diverse goals and needs, where people can expect to make useful contributions regardless of gender or age."

The first successful heart-lung transplantation

Bruce Reitz recalls first successful heart-lung transplant: 

The surgeon who led the team that performed the first successful heart-lung transplant 35 years ago discusses his recollections of the patient and the operation.

"On March 9, 1981, just minutes past midnight, Mary Gohlke, a 45-year-old Arizona woman dying of primary pulmonary hypertension, was wheeled into a Stanford Hospital operating room for a heart-lung transplant surgery that would become a medical milestone.

...

"Lung transplants were technically feasible, but no human lung transplant patient had survived more than 23 days. The only antirejection drugs then approved for use interfered with the healing of the surgical wounds where new lungs connected to the patient’s airway. After Gohlke read a newspaper story about the successful heart-lung transplants Stanford cardiothoracic surgeon Bruce Reitz, MD, had done on rhesus monkeys, she telephoned him. Reitz took the call. She asked him how many heart-lung transplants he planned to do that year on humans. He said 10. She told him she’d like to be the tenth so she “could see how the rest of them turn out,” and Reitz responded with a chuckle.

"The holdup, however, was the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It had approved a better antirejection drug, cyclosporin A, for heart-transplant patients, but not for other transplant patients.  Stanford had asked the FDA to approve cyclosporin A for heart-lung transplant patients, too — and then waited and waited. Gohlke, increasingly desperate, asked her former boss, the executive editor of the Mesa Tribune, to help. He made calls to then-U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Arizona, and about an hour later the FDA approved the drug for use in heart-lung transplantation at all qualified hospitals. Gohlke received her new heart and lungs — becoming the first patient in the world to undergo a successful heart-lung transplant — and lived for five years with her new organs."