Some Vindication?

 I've long belabored the point in this blog and elsewhere that the primary description for COPD causes is misguided.   That smoking, "the smoking gun" if you will excuse the pun, is NOT the primary cause of COPD, never mind what CDC and AMA and ALA have promoted and proclaimed for sixty plus years.

My first clues date back to my first term on the Colorado Air Pollution Control Commission, when we were assured by CDC that Colorado was the 2nd worst state per capita for Emphysema (the primary portion of the COPD cluster), and neighboring Utah was 15th.   Married to a Mormon girl, I thought, "They don't allow smoking in Utah, how can that be?"

Armed with a dizzying pile of Z-fold computer printer paper with a decade of Colorado Health Dept statistics from their fancy new IBM 370-195 in 1970, I transferred the data to an unknown personal computer several years before the world knew of such a thing (the HP 9100A), and created a novel geographical demographic sheet for every death.  It revealed that smoking (and not incidentally the bad urban air of every Colorado city) did not correlate with the deaths.   Instead, small (often sub-micron) particulate matter, in a trapped toxic air environment, correlated extremely well.

This is all outlined in some detail in an essay entitled "Confronting COPD". https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236865558_Confronting_COPD

For years, I'd show the CDC maps (seen sporadically throughout this blog for years) that indicated poor correlation with smoking for COPD deaths but great correlation for Lung Cancer deaths.

Now, a disturbing truth is emerging on a world scale.   Even Lung Cancer now seems less related to smoking, and more to small-particulate toxic air, as Taiwan continues to experience surging Lung Cancer deaths in non-smokers.   Oh, my, how can CDC explain this one?

From the Journal of Clinical Oncology, reported at the 2024 annual meeting, "Lung cancer incidence in Taiwan has been rising with the epidemiological profiles distinct from Western country. Notably, nonsmoking lung cancers accounts for more than 60% and half of lung cancers were diagnosed in advanced stages."

https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2024.42.16_suppl.8009

Indeed, this story has been brewing for some time.   Two years ago this week, Climate News published a story over the headline, "Lung Cancer in Nonsmokers? Study Identifies Air Pollution as a Trigger."   Author Victoria St. Martin sub-titled it, "Researchers have discovered how tiny particles from fossil fuel emissions exploit a gene mutation to promote the growth of cancer."

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05102022/lung-cancer-nonsmokers-air-pollution/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwu-63BhC9ARIsAMMTLXSnnEG7l2DunzDhwAscxjVdRjAFP8aVOEIlBCU0QXv38r-H5gje-fMaAhLmEALw_wcB

This study 'fingers' coal-fired power-plant emissions, much as my study a decade ago does.   And it notes that we're now finding that 20% of American lung cancer victims were never smokers.   By the way, America's energy needs have resulted in 600% increase in power plant emissions since my CAPCC study--could there possibly be a relationship?   Duh...   

And COPD is more susceptible to this phenomenon than Lung Cancer.  Whew.   When with geospatial demographic studies begin to make an impression?

Revisiting the story

In the last post, early April, I described some preliminary thinking about twin proposals for a Virtual Medical Observatory.   Well, we decided to winnow the ideas into one proposal--and we await the decisions on that front (probably several months from now).

Meanwhile, our Bucky Beaver team cannot sit still.   We took the Chronic Illness idea on, and chased it to an interesting point.   Turns out that CDC has a host of major chronic illnesses 'on-line' as choropleth maps (well, not perfectly designed choropleth maps, but certainly maps built along that line.  Did I ever define choropleths within this blog, especially the issues involved in their proper design and display?

Ahh, choropleths--a fancy word, to be sure, but an important one for cartographers, demographers, or epidemiologists.   Here's the Wikipedia defiinition: A choropleth map (from Ancient Greek χῶρος (khôros) 'area, region', and πλῆθος (plêthos) 'multitude') is a type of statistical thematic map that uses pseudocolor, meaning color corresponding with an aggregate summary of a geographic characteristic within spatial enumeration units, such as population density or per-capita income.

Choropleth maps provide an easy way to visualize how a variable varies across a geographic area or show the level of variability within a region. A heat map or isarithmic map is similar but uses regions drawn according to the pattern of the variable, rather than the a priori geographic areas of choropleth maps. The choropleth is likely the most common type of thematic map because published statistical data (from government or other sources) is generally aggregated into well-known geographic units, such as countries, states, provinces, and counties, and thus they are relatively easy to create using GIS, spreadsheets, or other software tools.

I authored a descriptive essay to illustrate key features for choropleths using our COVID maps.  See.  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377777227_Choropleth_design.   

Well, the point of this discussion is to say that we have adopted the COVID mapping models for a slew of chronic diseases.  29 of them, yup!   Here is the first view, showing all tractable illnesses on the left and a COPD choropleth map for California, Oregon, and Colorado (including ranked counties @ right)

Another choice is to compare two diseases for the same geographies.  Here, for example, we show the same states for COPD and Diabetes.   Note that Colorado and Oregon have much lower Diabetes rates than COPD rates, while counties in Southern California climb.  

Imagine this kind of comparative illustration for the panoply of chronic diseases, mapped to the granularity of counties for every nation on earth, able to be time-sequenced so that disease and treatment efficacy can be longitudinally evaluated.   This is the dream of the Worldwide Medical Observatory.

Telling the bigger story

 Well, maybe this is not yet "telling" the story, but it is a chance--a huge chance--to create a very large story.   We have been invited to participate in a pan-European bid for Next-Gen Internet capabilities, and we're immersed in preparing two bids for possible grants.

The first proposal is to expand the dataset that we built several years ago, for COVID-19 cases and deaths, along with per capita calculations of same, for 1,024 days for 3,141 USA counties and 196 countries.  

How might you expand that?  Well, some would like to have ethnic and age data, others would like vaccine rates and pre-existing conditions, etc.   That's for the data already gathered.   But what about equivalent data for other countries where today all we have are macro-data for the entire nations.

And, if you can get that, how about other 'pandemic-like' diseases (e.g. flu, colds, SARs).  But then immediately medical folk say, "that's all well and good, but what about many chronic diseases?  Diabetes, COPD, heart attacks, lung cancer, and many others have major findings related to geospatial mapping, and each would be good to work with.  Granted the data is not as dynamic as COVID data was for the early days, but what a treasure trove.

So, we're imagining putting a proposal together to build a Global Virtual Health Center or Observatory, hopefully to build something useful for the world's underpaid, underresourced Health Community.

We'll keep you posted, but we WELCOME your input.

Telling the story

 Well, interesting--Brian Berg and the Asilomar committee (this is the long-standing, e.g. 50th anniversary) microprocessor workshop) are granting me a ten-minute slot in the RATS section tonight.  My theme--"A Picture--Really worth 1,000 words?" is buttressed by a video tape with lots of URL's to other video clips, and it uses both the COPD and the COVID stories as the backdrop for why we've done so much with Virtual Multi-Display environments.  Here's the link for your viewing enjoyment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UldbgcTl8Pg

This is actually a great opportunity.  The AMW workshop is one of the more prestigious events in our industry.  Today's technical talks were amazing--quantum computing made 'clear' and the incredible power hogging of the data centers and what a speciific Nvidia chip burns.   Most cities cannot host a data center of the Google size, and Google cannot hardly cool these systems enough to keep them running.  

I heard a definition of "Big Data" being done for one cancer study-- they had to 'reconfigure' Excel, from 1 million cells to i trillion cells--howze that again?   10 to the 6th, vs 10 to the 12th.   A mere 23 Million rows and 55,000 columns, easily and quickly scanned, according to the speaker!

So what we are showing is a quick overview of AVI capabilities, starting with the focus on what a picture can tell you, especially if using math tools such as Conformal Mapping and Convolution Integrals, not to mentioin AI Deep Dives.   And then, we show comparative pictures for "why multiple pix at once" and then we show the 3D aspects of walking through our environments (with accompanying companions from anywhere), getting to an interactive screen, scanning it and selecting from it to engage a stored video for that person, etc.

Quite the opportunituy!

Chuck

UNGA '78 -- A Day in Court

 As outlined in the last post, I did get re-energized about the state of COPD, and I was encouraged to bring the story to an august meeting of the United Nations General Assembly last September in New York City.  

How did that come about, you might ask?  What did you say?  And how was it received?

Well, the story could be viewed as a long one, or a short one.

The short version is that I got stimulated about COVID-19 statistics, like the week after I myself got COVID (the first person in Tulare County, California--on March 6, 2020, the same day that President Trump triumphantly announced at CDC that America has "plenty of tests, over a million. . . " when in fact there were none that worked, and only a few that had been shipped.

And I thought back to the old CAPCC days, when the data was slow and imperfect for a disease few cared about.  I thought "THIS will be different.  There will be LOTS of data, coming fast and furious (yes, we might quibble about how 'perfect' it will be)."

So, I began a major data acquisition of COVID data--confirmed cases and deaths--and quickly discovered that, YES INDEED, this was a LOT of data.   I knew an old HP colleague, Scott Futryk, who had a small company called AnywhereAnytime LLC that specialized in multi-variate spreadsheet presentations using PowerBI from Microsoft (Business Intelligence is the meaning of BI--Microsoft dubs it 'Data Analytics Report Software).    I asked him if he could help me construct a PowerBI view that was roughly akin to the old COPD geospatial maps (see blog posts herein for May 1, 2013 and May 11, 2013)

He did, and here is a snapshot of what he built (showing not only Confirmed and Deaths but per capita occurrences alongside those absolute numbers).  

I reported much of this work in another blog, InnovaScapes Institute, something like 49 posts in 54 weeks.    https://innovascapes.blogspot.com/2021/

I also posted one paper in ResearchGate   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344751028_Four_'waves'_of_Covid_Confirmed_Cases_per_capita#fullTextFileContent

Well, the upshot of three years of work, was that Professor Martin Curley, the chief information officer for the Irish Health Service, was co-chair of the UNGA event.  Curley and I knew each other from our time at Intel Corporation a decade earlier, and he knew of this COVID study.   Hence the invitation.

The net was a chance to present an updated COPD story on the first day, and the COVID story on the second day.  Wow!   So that is 'how it happened'--I'll share what we said in the next post.  

COPD 'today'

 Yes, it's all true.   My old concerns about COPD re-surfaced, AND I "got my day in court" so to speak.   Agitated about COPD fifty-four years ago  (although I didn't then know what emphysema was, or that COPD would later be coined to describe it and its companion, chronic bronchitis), I began a personal inquiry while serving on the Colorado Air Pollution Control Commission (CAPCC).    Ultimately, prompted by encountering Warren Muir in 2010 at Stanford in connection with Katy Borner's exhbit (see post of March 22, 2024), I put considerable resuscitation effort into understanding the fate of COPD research circa 2013-14, which among other things led to creating this blog.

For a quick 'introduction' to this story, see "Johnny Carson died from it" -- my post from May 1, 2013.

https://breathecopd.blogspot.com/2013/05/johnny-carson-died-from-it.html

That series of blogs details 'new findings' from my earlier CAPCC days, and I imagined for awhile that I might get some university traction on the issue.   Well, yes, I did--but what I found wasn't exactly what I had in mind.   "They" would love to research the topic, I found at several prestigious universities, but they expected me to fund the work.   My naïveté really showed up here--how silly of me to expect that I could join a group of serious researchers who would be funded by outside sources (say, NIH, or a clear-eyed foundation, or a patron saint).   

I now know that this finding is not unique.  And a number of billionaires (who CAN fund the work) are putting their money where their personal concerns are.  See, for example, Steven A. Edwards' 2014 article, "Science and the billionaire philanthropists"  where he writes: "For better or worse, the practice of science in the twenty-first century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money to give." https://www.aaas.org/science-and-billionaire-philanthropists.     Edwards, a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is gravely concerned that this upsets a long-standing national priority approach.

Andy Stirling, writing in Nature early this year, laments this trend, calling it "The Bill Gates problem," while citing the issue that "personal priorities are often trumping real needs and skewing where charitable funding goes."   https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00394-0

And howls went up about researching some obscure disease and diverting skill and attention from more pressing societal needs--no surprise.   We'll describe some of those as well.

But a key fact missing from most of the lamentations is the speed--or rather, the lack of speed--for issues that beg to be solved.  Witness the COVID-19 response, and consider this July 2023 Forbes article 

https://fortune.com/2023/07/18/billionaires-musk-zuckerberg-thiel-5-minute-phone-call-collison-fast-grants/

EDEN STIFFMAN AND THE ASSOCIATED PRESS -- How a 5-minute phone call between a millennial billionaire and an economist created a $50 million grant program backed by Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg and more tech luminaries

In March 2020, an experiment in science philanthropy was hatched in the span of a five-minute call. Patrick Collison, the now 34-year-old billionaire CEO of the online payments company Stripe, and economist Tyler Cowen were chewing over a shared concern: Scientific progress seemed to be slowing down. As the first pandemic lockdowns went into effect, researchers were in a holding pattern, waiting to hear if they could redirect their federal grants to COVID-related work. Collison and Cowen worried that the National Institutes of Health wasn’t moving quickly enough, so they launched Fast Grants to get emergency research dollars to virologists, coronavirus experts, and other scientists rapidly.

“We thought: Let’s just do this,” Cowen recalls. “It was a bit like put up or shut up.”Collison and his brother, John — a Stripe co-founder — contributed and along with Cowen raised more than $50 million from some of the biggest names in tech: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy.  The first round of grants went out in 48 hours, and later rounds were distributed within two weeks, a drastic difference from the hundreds of days a scientist typically waits to hear from the NIH.  Grants of $10,000 to $500,000 backed early efforts to sequence new coronavirus variants, clinical trials for drugs that could potentially be repurposed, and a simple and reliable saliva-based COVID-19 test. By January 2022, all the money had gone out the door to more than 260 projects.

Fast Grants is one of many science improvement projects launched or backed by Silicon Valley billionaires since the pandemic began. Donors have channeled hundreds of millions of dollars into research labs and nonprofits to address what they view as problems with how government agencies and institutional philanthropies fund science. They argue that scientists spend too much time seeking funding for grants that are too restrictive and see a need to support high-potential young scientists and risky or speculative projects that are often overlooked or underfunded.

Collison, along with Vitalik Buterin, creator of the Ethereum blockchain platform, and other donors, pledged more than half a billion dollars to the Arc Institute, a new biomedical research nonprofit that wants scientists to focus on science, not chasing grants.  Eric and Wendy Schmidt spun off Convergent Research, a nonprofit helping to incubate independent organizations to develop research tools and niche or underfunded areas of science.

While these contributions are just a drop in the bucket compared with the nearly $50 billion the NIH spends on research each year, they’ve been met with both applause and ambivalence from scientists and philanthropy observers. Many of the experiments are similar to approaches already backed by government, leading some to question whether small-scale funding experiments in science are money well spent. Others question the societal implications when more science research is driven by a handful of tech elites motivated by the “move fast and break things” ethos.

Private donors have long played a role in shaping science in the United States — from the creation of the modern research universities to the independent research institutions of the early 20th century and beyond.  “There is a sort of ‘back to the future’ element to what these guys are doing,” says Eric John Abrahamson, a historian at work on a book about science philanthropy. He sees parallels between today’s donors and Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who wanted to reimagine the institutions of science in the 1910s, ’20s and ’30s.

The federal government became the majority funder of basic science research at universities and nonprofit research institutes in the post-World War II era. Today federal funding for basic science, which provides a foundation for knowledge and discovery rather than solving a specific problem, still exceeds the combined contributions from corporations, universities, and philanthropy. That margin is narrowing, according to National Science Foundation surveys.

The impact of private donors has grown since the 1990s, says France Córdova, president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, which works to increase giving to science research. Nonprofit and philanthropic contributions for basic research increased from $1.5 billion in 1990 to $9.8 billion in 2020, according to NSF surveys. Contributions from higher education funds, which include money donors gave to university endowments in the past, increased from $1.9 billion to more than $14 billion in that same period. That growth is largely thanks to new philanthropies built on wealth from technology, data, and finance, she says.  These donors “want to apply some of the same entrepreneurial spirit that they used to get their money to philanthropy,” Córdova says.

Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science, which works to increase transparency in the research process, applauds donors for helping to shake up how science is funded.  “There are many possible ways to decide what to fund, who to fund, how to fund them, how to track progress,” Nosek says. “We haven’t had a culture of experimentation.”   Nosek is on the board of the Good Science Project, an advocacy group that’s pushing government agencies to make their science grant making more innovative and efficient. Stuart Buck founded that nonprofit last year after a conversation with Collison. Collison and his brother, John, are its biggest benefactors, though they have not disclosed the size of their contributions.

Collison is also involved in the Arc Institute, which he helped launch in 2021 with $650 million pledged by more than a dozen other donors. The Palo Alto-based biomedical research organization provides scientists with no-strings-attached funding over eight-year terms to study the causes of complex diseases like cancer. The effort builds on lessons from Fast Grants. Funding isn’t tied to a particular research project so if scientists want to change course, their hands aren’t tied.

Funding approaches that shield scientists from bureaucracy or allow a wider range of ideas to get support may be useful in a circumscribed way, says David Peterson, an assistant professor of sociology at Purdue University who studies how scientific organizations are evolving. But he has doubts that these efforts will tilt the scale more broadly.   In Peterson’s conversations with scientists, some said they view these donors’ approaches as an extension of the tech world’s fixation with disruption, he says. “There is a feeling that science is another institution like the music industry or taxicabs that are ripe for fundamental transformation to make it much more efficient.”

But for a select group of scientists doing the kind of work these extremely wealthy donors care about, there’s now more money and opportunity.  At E11 Bio, for example, an interdisciplinary team of nine scientists is developing a technology platform for scientists to map every circuit between the 100 billion or so neurons in the brain. Understanding the full architecture of the brain could eventually lead to new treatments for brain disorders.  E11 bio is funded by Schmidt Futures, founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, which spun off the nonprofit Convergence Research in 2021 to help launch independent organizations focused on areas like synthetic biology or how drugs target human proteins. Each research organization receives a $20 million to $100 million budget for a five- to seven-year duration.  Schmidt Futures declined to disclose total funding amounts for this work but in March announced a joint $50 million commitment with hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin to launch two more organizations.

It may take years to know whether these efforts succeed.  New approaches can have a big impact if they’re transparent about what’s working — and what isn’t, says Nosek.   “The main limitation that we’ve had in a lot of these efforts to improve science is that it’s done with good ideas and good intentions,” he says, “but without good evidence” to determine whether they’ve worked.

_____

This article was provided to The Associated Press by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Eden Stiffman is a senior editor at the Chronicle. Email: eden.stiffman@philanthropy.com. The AP and the Chronicle receive support from the Lilly Endowment for coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits. The AP and the Chronicle are solely responsible for all content.

Katy Börner

Katy Börner, my heroine, a major professor at Indiana University with multiple accolades and numerous appointments.   I first learned of her from Davis Masten, who was a key MediaX@Stanford program Advisor for me from 2006-2011.   Six years into an NSF funded program to promote "Data Visualization Literacy: Research and Tools that Advance Public Understanding of Scientific Data", Börner had an exhibit with 60 poster-boards that showed interesting, sometimes exciting, ways to portray data, especially Big Data (although that term hadn't yet reached the trade press).

I called her to ask how we might be able to host her exhibit at Stanford.  It turned out that she'd shown it maybe fifteen times, NOWHERE WEST of the Mississippi River, even though she was at Indiana Univ. This little factoid is remarkably consistent in America, in my experience--the map for New Yorkers that looks west and sees New Jersey and the Pacific Ocean (only) is all too prevalent, as any perusal of sports channels will illustrate on your weekend television.

She said, "If you'll pay the shipping costs, you can have it for three months."  Which we did, hosting it in Wallenberg Hall (the left front building at Stanford when you see the oval lawn with Memorial Church in the center background).   We filled the first floor lobby and hallways, the second floor hallways, and parts of the fourth floor.  We invited the artists (these were, for the most part, computer scientists with artistic skills) to a grand opening, and it was this opening to which Warren Muir attended.

The show was a smash hit, and co-incidentally Edward Tufte lectured on campus concurrently, with no indication to me that he attended our exhibit, although he indeed might be called the progenitor of such efforts.   The fact that my COPD work was several years prior to Tufte's first book is one of those personal satisfactions for which no credit accrues, except for my own enjoyment.

Börner has gone on to author numerous books on the subject, easily the most informative and visually satisfying books on the subject.  Just read this blurb about her latest.

Atlas of Forecasts.   This book came out in 2021.  

Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures

Forecasting the future with advanced data models and visualizations.

To envision and create the futures we want, society needs an appropriate understanding of the likely impact of alternative actions. Data models and visualizations offer a way to understand and intelligently manage complex, interlinked systems in science and technology, education, and policymaking. Atlas of Forecasts, from the creator of Atlas of Science and Atlas of Knowledge, shows how we can use data to predict, communicate, and ultimately attain desirable futures.

Using advanced data visualizations to introduce different types of computational models, Atlas of Forecasts demonstrates how models can inform effective decision-making in education, science, technology, and policymaking. The models and maps presented aim to help anyone understand key processes and outcomes of complex systems dynamics, including which human skills are needed in an artificial intelligence–empowered economy; what progress in science and technology is likely to be made; and how policymakers can future-proof regions or nations. This Atlas offers a driver's seat-perspective for a test-drive of the future.

A Retrospective--after a decade

 My, my, time flies.   My last post on this COPD topic was ten years ago next month--where did the time go, and what has changed in my perspective since then?   Or, for that matter, the world's perspective?

First of all, I have just hit a somewhat magic milestone--54 years since I was first diagnosed with emphysema, and told that, at best, I had a 20 year forward life-expectancy at that point.   Well, harrumph.

Having no clue what emphysema was, or its prevalence, my first foray to the library (in 1970 , there was no WorldWideWeb) revealed the shocking and disturbing news that this was a terminal, albeit malingering, disease for which there was no known treatment.  Further, that the last ten years of the progression would be marked by essentially becoming an invalid, bound by the constraints of insufficient air to breathe--slowly suffocating, as the article described it.    Years later, the nation saw glimpses of that denouement with Johnny Carson's agonizing last few years.

I had three young daughters at home, and I'd been an active mountaineer in both California's High Sierra and the Colorado Rockies where I was then living.   What?  How can this be?  What might I do?

Over my lifetime, I've now had the privilege of meeting and discussing reactions for many people who have received unexpected and unwelcome bad news.   

First, there is shock and disbelief.  Me?  What?  How?  Why?  This is the rude awakening, the AWARENESS phase, which kicks off a nearly predictable set of reactions.

Right behind awareness is DENIAL.  "Bull****.   Can't be true.  No way, not me."

Then, ANGER.   "What?  Why me?  Dammit, I have other plans, big plans, This is an insult (or worse)"

Many then start what's called BARGAINING.   "Well, if that's true, maybe I can . . . "

More visibly, DEPRESSION sets in.    I still recall the day that my wife at breakfast said something to the effect of . . . "you know, you're a really fun guy to be with, or at least you were.  I'd like you to start acting positive, again, STARTING RIGHT NOW."   This wasn't with regard to my emphysema, but instead to months after a debilitating injury from which I didn't expect to be able to walk again.  But DEPRESSION can be a deep pit, and once you fall into it, it is hard to escape in my experience.

Finally, ACCEPTANCE.  "Okay, dammit, this is the situation.  No escaping it.  Buy in--it's the real deal"

********    

So there is a bit of preamble to say, YUP, I went through all those phases with the emphysema news.  That fueled my desire to learn more about the disease--who gets it, why, and what might be done.  

I found a creative way to get appointed at a tender age to the incipient Colorado Air Pollution Control Commission, the week after the monumental 1970 USA Clean Act was passed, and the First Earth Day was celebrated.   

The information I learned on that Commission was astounding, not least in regard to the political sand economic winds that control and thwart many if not most health concerns.  I also figured out a way to use "new tools" to understand where, when, and why this disease occurs, and what possible options exist.

And that gave me renewed perspective on how people (even supposedly well-educated and learned people) can become entrenched with their own biases, never mind the 'facts' as they might be construed.

For a time, I became a zealot, which quickly turns into becoming a pariah, as perceived by more reasonable (or less actionable) types.   I managed to garner headlines in the Denver Post, which I thought was an honor until I realized that it just makes one stick out, as in the Japanese Mogura Taiji game, which became popular in the US as "Whac-A-Mole"

That led to being replaced (fired, if you will, and replaced by a high-pedigreed well-respected conservative who agreed fully with Governor John Love's pathetic non-action pro-business plan that he carried into Nixon's administration as the first Director of Energy).

And, then, I seemed to 'get well'--at least well enough to function adequately, and I concluded that my zealot days were done--time to move on.

And that period lasted for decades, until I met Warren Muir one early morning in Davis Masten's kitchen in Portola Valley.   I'd never heard of Muir, nor he of me, but Davis was on my MediaX@Stanford's Advisory Board, and also chair of the White House Business Roundtable.  He thought the two of us should meet, but he had no particular topic in mind.  

I asked Muir the obvious question for any ex-mountaineer--"Are you related to John Muir, the famous environmentalist?"   I'd already become close friends with Gifford Pinchot III, whose grandfather with Muir and Teddy Roosevelt had promulgated the National Parks idea, and founded the US Forest Service.

Muir's answer was an infectious laugh--"Yes, he was my great-uncle"

Muir didn't go on to describe his own career, which I now know to be stupendous.  "Executive Director, Division of Earth and Life Studies, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, National Research Council, Washington, D.C; Warren has served under three U.S. Presidents and is the recipient of multiple honors and awards including the Environmental Protection Agency's Outstanding Service Award."  Wow, been there, done that!

Muir was "in town" to see the Katy Börner NSF exhibit about graphical information that I was hosting at Stanford, and he asked me why I had elected to sponsor the exhibit.   I said that I had been interested in these types of graphical representations since my days in Air Pollution Control, when I used them to find some causal relationships for emphysema.  He expressed surprise, and pressed the question, saying, "what did you find?"  As I told him, his eyes widened, and he said, "I found exactly the same thing, four years after you did."  We were thus bonded, and it encouraged me to do further reflection.

I don't have time in this post to explain, but that led to creating this Blog, for which I was enthusiastic but didn't reach a wide audience.   I did write a chapter for my "Early HP Days" memoir https://www.amazon.com/Permission-Denied-Charles-H-House/dp/130086429X and even applied for a couple of research grants via UC Santa Barbara and Yale, only to discover that they would expect me to fund the grants, not receive funds from them.  Ah, well. . .

And then I got COVID in March 2020, and started a wholly different path, that today begins to interweave with this COPD story.  

So, a very long pre-amble here, to tell the 'current version' for which I had the good fortune to present at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2023 for their Global Health Initiative.  The story actually is getting more interesting! 

Stay tuned.  The next post is not ten years away.