The farm bill

A harvest of disgrace
May 22nd 2008 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

Congress at its worst

IF YOU measure the success of a pressure group by its ability to cram lousy policy through Congress, you might imagine that Big Oil or Wall Street would top the league: they are the lobbies most berated on the campaign trail. You would be wrong. If there were any doubt, the past few days should have confirmed that America's farmers are the capital's handout kings.

Consider their latest masterpiece, the 2007 farm bill that Congress this week delivered, several months late, to George Bush. Congress and the farmers have conspired to make an already unjust agricultural policy—a system that has subsidised the “farming” activities of such paupers as David Letterman and David Rockefeller—even worse. Through a complicated and overlapping system of government-sponsored insurance, counter-cyclical assistance, disaster aid and legacy payments tied to nothing, the five-year, $307 billion bill lavishes cash on wealthy farm households, the main restriction on collecting it being a means test that applies to couples making more than $1.5m a year. And even that can be avoided by employing a reasonably competent accountant.

Shockingly, the bill's authors tied some future subsidy payments to today's record commodity prices, therefore guaranteeing already well-off farmers high incomes. Commercial farm households, which get most of the largesse, will have an average income of $229,920 in 2008, says the Agriculture Department. And it means, as the department points out, that the government could owe billions in subsidy payments to these big farmers if and when prices dip again.

Farmers of all kinds get a slice of the action. American sugar producers, for example, are guaranteed 85% of the domestic sugar market, according to the bill. This measure will drain $1.3 billion over ten years from federal coffers, and will force consumers to pay an extra $2 billion a year in higher sugar prices.

The bill invites new trade disputes: Brazil is already considering a WTO suit over the barriers to ethanol produced from sugar cane. Congress has also ignored the world's hungry, declining to soften a rule requiring the government to buy all foreign food aid from American farmers and transport it on American ships.

Most legislators probably know the farm bill is a disgrace, but they voted for it overwhelmingly anyway, revealing the cynical genius of the farm lobby. The bill's backers scared urban congressmen about losing money for food stamps, a programme contained in the bill. They scared rural ones into worrying about offending farmers. They scared Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership about maintaining their House coalition, which is built on new wins in rural districts.

Resistance disintegrated when a few sops were thrown. Urban interests were promised support for the purchasing power of food stamps, which has declined since the 1990s. Ms Pelosi and other western legislators got money for fruit and nut growers. Mitch McConnell, the Senate's minority leader, even got tax breaks for the racehorse industry in his native Kentucky.

Mr Bush vetoed the measure on May 21st. But the bill won so much support in Congress that the legislative branch has enough votes to override him, thanks to Republicans voting with the Democrats against their own president. John McCain boldly voted against the bill; Barack Obama didn't. The fat cats of agribusiness can rest easy for now.

Intelligence Agency Joins U-Md. Research Center
By Anita Huslin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 16, 2008; D01

The University of Maryland's newest tenant is not in the business of advertising its existence or its work.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is the new corollary of the military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, created in 1958 in the wake of the Sputnik launch to develop new defense technologies. Among other things, DARPA's work led to the development of the Internet, global positioning systems and unmanned aircraft. IARPA is expected to perform similar work for the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

Maryland congressional and university officials see the agency as a boon to the university and local contracting community. IARPA is temporarily located in the university's Center for Advanced Study of Language, which is supported by the National Security Agency and, among other things, teaches Arabic to Iraq-bound Marines and researches cross-cultural interrogation techniques.

Ground is expected to be broken this summer on IARPA's new digs: a 120,000-square-foot sensitive compartmentalized information facility designed to provide the highest level of security for government intelligence work. It will be in the university's M Square research park, just off campus. Similar to DARPA, in a nondescript, unlabeled brick building in Arlington, IARPA is not expected to advertise its presence, nor are officials permitted to discuss any details about it.

This is what the region's first research park has been waiting for, members of the university and research community say.

"Projections are, it's going to become an enormous enterprise and there will be undoubtedly lots of companies, both as contractors and otherwise, that will locate around the building," said William E. Kirwin, chancellor of the University of Maryland system.

"I think it will be substantial," University of Maryland president C.D. Mote Jr. said of the new IARPA presence. "This is expected to be the premier supporter of the most advanced thinking in far-reaching intelligence research -- new stuff that hasn't been thought of."

What does that mean in terms of budgets, employees, contracting jobs?

No one at the university can say. And the agency's new director, who just recently put up help-wanted postings on the Internet for her top three project management jobs, is not available to talk about it, according to a spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The organization's budget is classified. In seeking congressional funding for the agency, officials last year said that IARPA will be significantly smaller than DARPA, which has a $3 billion annual budget. Its staff will consist of 35 national intelligence and 21 CIA employees, and research will be outsourced to contractors. Focuses will be language processing, quantum science, nanotechnology, biometrics, deception detection, counter-biological warfare and tagging, tracking and locating.

Last month, in an interview with the technology trade group IEEE, IARPA Director Lisa Porter suggested that the agency's new location at the University of Maryland indicates that it will be open to people and organizations, like academia and industry, that traditionally may not be able to access the intelligence research world.

"It sends a nice message that we're embracing the broad community to help us solve these challenging problems," she told the IEEE. "This is a great place for people with a great idea. It's really risky, the potential payoff is huge, and failure is okay -- that kind of environment is pretty hard to find."

Medicine
Smart drugs
May 22nd 2008
From The Economist print edition

Drugs to make you cleverer are in the test-tube. Good

Illustration by Claudio Munoz

THIS drug is peddled on every street corner in America, and is found in every country in the world. It is psychoactive, a stimulant and addictive. Users say that it increases alertness and focus, and reduces fatigue. But the high does not last and addicts must keep consuming it in increasing quantities.

Put this way, sipping coffee sounds more like an abomination than the world's most accepted form of drug abuse. But centuries of familiarity have put people at their ease. In the coming years science is likely to create many novel drugs that boost memory, concentration and planning. These may well be less harmful than coffee—and will almost certainly be more useful. But will people treat them with as much tolerance?

High time
The new cognition-enhancing drugs are designed to treat debilitating diseases such as Alzheimer's, attention-deficit disorder and schizophrenia. But because they act deep in neural pathways of the brain, some of them are bound also to enhance people's power to think and learn (see article). Such drugs will inevitably be used by healthy people too. That is the lesson from medicines such as Ritalin (methylphenidate) and Provigil (modafinil), which are now widely used “off label” to boost performance, as Nature has found. When the British journal asked its scientifically aware readers earlier this year, one in five of those who answered said they had used such drugs non-medically, to help them concentrate or learn.

For many, drug is a four-letter word. Unapproved use is at best worrying and unfair, and at worst dangerous and immoral. Such thinking leads to strict controls or even prohibition and criminalisation. In Britain, for instance, Ritalin is a class B drug. Yet strict controls would be both futile and wrong.

Futile, because if people really want medicines, they can easily get hold of them. Nature's drug users procured their stashes from prescriptions from doctors or over the internet. As anyone with an e-mail address knows, the difficulty is not scarcity, but keeping the offers for Viagra, real or fake, at bay.

And wrong because such drugs promise to do a lot of good. Many people already use Provigil to cope with night-shift work, jet lag and lack of sleep, and suffer few side-effects. Others use beta-blockers to overcome the anxiety and stress of performance. Scientists use off-label drugs to increase their focus. If that helps them unravel the mysteries of the universe, so much the better. If chemical assistance can help increase the useful human lifespan, the benefits could be huge.

Some worry about the unfair advantage and peer pressure that comes from these drugs. However, millions suffer from untreated but mild memory loss. Is it fair to deny them help? If the shy or the scatterbrained take cognitive enhancers, it is not obvious whether this is levelling their playing field or giving them an unfair advantage. Is it “natural” to prop up the ageing body with a nip and a tuck, but to restrict help for the ageing mind to brain-training on the Nintendo?

Punishing the off-label use of cognitive enhancers may also be unfair to those who find these drugs medically useful in unexpected ways. Schizophrenics, it has recently been found, are likely to be heavy smokers because nicotine is good for their condition. Genetic variations between people are associated with different levels of working memory. People using Provigil or Ritalin may eventually be found to have a legitimate but previously unknown need for the drug.

There will always be risks, but no more than for other medicines. Remember that the new drugs will have passed clinical trials because they are treatments for a disease, even if they have not been licensed as cognitive enhancers. There will be a lot of habitual off-label takers, more people than in the trials, so the regulators need to monitor them for side-effects—especially in children. But detailed and accessible information about the side-effects of drugs is to everyone's advantage.

With any compound, the task is to minimise harm while maximising the freedom to choose. It may even be that, like Viagra, society largely welcomes the arrival of a chemical that does, far better, what omega-3s, ginseng, vitamins and all the other quackery have failed to do. Unless of course, you want to outlaw double espressos too.

All on the mind
May 22nd 2008
From The Economist print edition

Illustration by David Simonds

Prepare for drugs that will improve memory, concentration and learning
FOR thousands of years, people have sought substances that they hoped would boost their mental powers and their stamina. Leaves, roots and fruit have been chewed, brewed and smoked in a quest to expand the mind. That search continues today, with the difference only that the shamans work in pharmaceutical laboratories rather than forests. If asked why, the shamans reply that they are looking for drugs to treat the effects of Alzheimer's disease, attention-deficit disorder, strokes, and the dementias associated with Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia—and that is the truth. But by creating compounds that benefit the sick, they are offering a mental boost to the healthy, too.

Such drugs are known as cognition enhancers. They work on the neural processes that underlie such mental activities as attention, perception, learning, memory, language, planning and decision-making, usually by altering the balance of the chemical neurotransmitters involved in these processes. This week a report* from the Academy of Medical Sciences, a British learned society, says that a large number of such brain-affecting drugs are likely to emerge over the next few decades. Sir Gabriel Horn, a researcher at Cambridge University who chaired the group that produced the report, reckons that scientists are working on more than 600 drugs for neurological disorders.

History suggests that most of these will fall by the regulatory wayside, but given their numbers, a fair few are likely to be approved. And although none of the companies working on cognition-enhancing drugs designed to treat illness intends to license them for wider use, that is what is likely to happen—at least going by the growing “off-label” use of existing drugs such as Ritalin (methylphenidate) and Provigil (modafinil) by people who want to pep themselves up.

Provigil and Ritalin really do enhance cognition in healthy people. Provigil, for example, adds the ability to remember an extra digit or so to an individual's working memory (most people can hold seven random digits in their memory, but have difficulty with eight). It also improves people's performance in tests of their ability to plan. Because of such positive effects on normal people, says the report, there is growing use of these drugs to stave off fatigue, help shift-workers, boost exam performance and aid recovery from the effects of long-distance flights.

Earlier this year, Nature, one of the world's leading scientific journals, carried out an informal survey of its (mostly scientific) readers. One in five of the 1,400 people who responded said they had taken Ritalin, Provigil or beta blockers (drugs that can have an anti-anxiety effect) for non-medical reasons. They used them to stimulate focus, concentration or memory. Of that one in five, 62% had taken Ritalin and 44% Provigil. Most users had somehow obtained their drugs on prescription or else bought them over the internet.

Given results like this, and the number of drugs of this kind that look likely to emerge, many people, including the authors of the report, believe that the use of cognition-enhancing drugs is going to grow a lot.

There are a number of approaches to cognition enhancement. One of them, according to Trevor Robbins, a colleague of Sir Gabriel's at Cambridge and another member of the working group, is to activate the brain's “off” and “on” switches. Crudely put, the brain's neural networks can be thought of as electrical circuits. Neurotransmitters throw the switches.

Thanks for the memory
One such neurotransmitter is glutamate. This throws switches to the “on” position in memory-forming circuits. Members of a newly discovered class of compounds, ampakines, boost the activity of glutamate and thus make it easier to form memories.

Cortex Pharmaceuticals, based in Irvine, California, is one firm that is developing ampakine drugs. One of its compounds, code-named CX717 to disguise its exact identity, is undergoing testing for Alzheimer's disease in elderly patients. Early trials have already shown that the drug can make people more alert. Unlike caffeine, amphetamines and other stimulants, CX717 causes no increase in blood pressure or heart rate. Nor does it offer any “high”, so is unlikely to be addictive.

Paradoxically, another glutamate-booster, D-cycloserine, is being tested not to enhance memory, but to abolish it. The paradox is resolved because unlearning (or “extinction”, in neurological parlance) is a process similar in its details to learning.

By binding to certain glutamate receptors, D-cycloserine selectively enhances extinction, suppressing the effects of conditioned associations such as anxiety, addiction and phobias. According to Dr Robbins, experiments have shown that if a rat is given a cue that it previously associated with fear at the same time as it receives D-cycloserine, the bad memory can be eliminated. Not only may this help remove unpleasant memories, such as those involved in post-traumatic stress disorder, but it may also help to return the brains of addicts to their pre-addicted states. It may, for example, be able to remove the triggers that cause smoking.

Another approach to cognitive enhancement, says Dr Robbins, is through a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. Cholinergic neurons—the name for those that respond to this molecule—are involved in concentration, focus and high-order thought processes, as well as memory. It is the cholinergic system that degenerates in Alzheimer's disease.

Interest has thus focused on drugs that inhibit the breakdown of acetylcholine, and also on nicotine, which works by mimicking its effect. Dr Robbins says that cholinergic drugs may offer minor cognitive benefits for things like alertness, and similar drugs could be “potentially useful in normal humans”.

Mind-expansion may soon, therefore, become big business. Even though the drugs have been developed to treat disease, it will be hard to prevent their use by the healthy. Nor, if they are without bad side-effects, is there much reason to. And if that is so, there may be a very positive side-effect on the profits of their makers.

* “Brain science, addiction and drugs”. The Academy of Medical Sciences, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

Gingrich: Jindal is best choice for vice president
By Klaus Marre
Posted: 06/15/08 12:29 PM [ET]
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said Sunday that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal “would be far and away the best candidate” to appear on the Republican presidential ticket with Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).
Gingrich, who appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” heaped praise upon the former congressman, saying that he is a “spectacular” governor and predicted that Jindal would be a presidential candidate in the future.

However, Jindal, who also was a guest on the show, said that he already holds the job he wants.
“I’m certainly supporting Sen. McCain, will do whatever I can to help him get elected, but I’m focused on being governor of Louisiana,” Jindal stated.

Asked whether it could be a problem that the governor, who is 37, might be perceived as not ready to lead the country in case he would have to replace McCain, Gingrich said the case can be made that Jindal’s “experience in the executive branch and in the legislative branch is greater than” that of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.).

“It strikes me that it’s going to be very hard for Obama’s campaign to explain that Jindal, as a governor, who has served as an assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, has served as a congressional staffer, has served as a congressman, is not qualified but Sen. Obama is qualified,” Gingrich said.

On the issue, he added that voters are “not going to reject Sen. Obama on inexperience.”

Gingrich argued that a GOP attempt to win the election by casting the Democrat as inexperienced would fail.

“Obama is a very articulate, very intelligent, Harvard law graduate, who is extraordinarily smart, and he’s not going to come across in a debate like some guy who’s dopey,” Gingrich said. “He’s going to come across as fully prepared. He knows how to study all this stuff. He has the military advisers.”

However, Gingrich added, “The problem with Obama is he’s wrong. It’s not that he’s inexperienced. It’s that his policies are wrong.”

Commenting on the race for control of Congress, the former House leader said that the record price of gasoline could help Republicans in a year that observers now say favors Democrats.

“At $4 and $5 a gallon -- if you have a more production, lower cost Republican Party running against a cripple the economy, hit your pocketbook Democratic Party, this election will change radically in September and October,” Gingrich said.