The Conversation Yearbook 2018: 50 standout articles from Australia’s top thinkers

By John Watson

In an era when everyone has an opinion, we rely on facts more than ever. Australia’s leading thinkers give their robust opinion on the arguments and issues that fuelled public debate in 2018.

This collection of essays brings you the best of the authoritative journalism for which The Conversation is renowned. Immerse yourself in the insights of experts and navigate the key questions of our times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9780522873375

John Watson

John Watson is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Optical Engineering at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.

Book preview

Melbourne

Introduction

Misha Ketchell

Editor, The Conversation

As I write this introduction Australians are still scratching their heads over the premature departure of yet another prime minister. There is now among us a generation of voters who have not seen an Australian prime minister complete an entire term. Not Kevin Rudd. Not Julia Gillard. Not Tony Abbott. Not Malcolm Turnbull.

Australia is gripped by what has been dubbed a ‘coup culture’, one so entrenched it threatens our democracy and treats voters like a ‘gullible audience for a low-grade reality show’, as Michelle Grattan observes. This hyperactive political cycle reflects a troubling new reality in which personality politics and an increasingly partisan media make considered policy development all but impossible.

Turnbull’s demise is a case study. He was dumped after trying to introduce the National Energy Guarantee (NEG), a middle-of-the-road policy widely supported within the business community and criticised from the left as being manifestly inadequate to meet Australia’s emission target under the Paris Agreement.

Looked at in the clear light of day, the NEG was, at worst, potentially ineffectual. Yet it became the pretext for a botched leadership coup that ended Turnbull’s political career.

How is it that in a developed country like Australia a policy that barely nods to the settled scientific reality of climate change can spark such an emotive over-reaction?

How is it that a policy that is fairly popular with business and appears to create no particular disadvantage in the broader community can be a political death knell?

One explanation is that politicians can no longer gather their support from voters in what was once termed the ‘sensible centre’ because the media business is increasingly targeting fragmented audiences at the emotional extremes.

Digital disruption has created a world of information plenty. But at the same time as this deluge of content has enriched Facebook and Google, it has destroyed the business model that supported quality media outlets. It has been especially damaging for those driven by the desire to inform audiences and host sober debate.

Instead, the digital world is a pure attention economy. Attract enough attention and you can make money, through selling advertisements, or harvesting and selling data, or some clever combination of the two.

And, when it comes to attracting attention, no one cares about the niceties of distinguishing reporting and opinion. Emotion trumps evidence. The shrill and sensational win every time.

Any rigorous history of Turnbull’s prime ministership cannot fail to take into account the changing role of the media in hastening his demise. Channel Nine political editor Chris Uhlmann called it out on Nine’s Today show when he said News Corp and a small group of commentators on Sky News and 2GB—Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones, Ray Hadley and assorted ‘after dark’ commentators—had crossed a line and become players, improper participants in the push to oust a prime minister.

Uhlmann was right, but in pointing out the oversized role of self-appointed media Svengalis he risked obscuring the bigger picture. Much of the real work of making a sensible climate policy impossible took place over the preceding decade. It was frequently led by The Australian, a serious national broadsheet, which created the false impression that climate science was unsettled and that a policy response was unnecessary, unwise or somehow against the national interest.

In public policy, the ‘Overton window’ is a term that describes the range of ideas acceptable in public discourse. One way to influence public opinion is to move the window by expressing views outside the acceptable public discourse at either end of the spectrum.

The continued prominence of irrational and emotive views on climate change in Australia has moved the window. Views that were once seen as way out have become common in mainstream media outlets.

This is not merely a matter of free speech, and it is unquestionably bad for the country. A similar movement of the Overton window can be seen in the area of race relations. The appearance of far-right nationalist Blair Cottrell on Sky News was widely lamented, but it is the type of media behaviour that opens up space for fear-mongering over so-called African gangs and other forms of more ‘moderate’ racial paranoia.

According to American journalist Robert Rosenthal, one of the key problems we face today is that media and journalism are now confused:

Much of media today is entertainment, opinion-driven, or based on business models forged and founded on fostering divisive partisan political agendas. Journalism and a free press must be supported by those who believe in democracy. The best journalism is done to make sure the people are still in charge. We are not subjects, we are citizens. Subjects are told what to do, citizens tell their government what to do.

The antidote to shrill opinion or vested interests is to move the Overton window back towards reliable information. Quality journalism provides essential context to help people make sense of a complex and confusing barrage of information, as well as making markets more efficient and providing essential insights into our environment, our culture and our history.

In the digital age, in which social media spread content without regard for its accuracy, the business of muddying the waters on matters of public importance is cheaper than ever. The Conversation aims to fight back against this trend as a global not-for-profit project that draws on academic expertise to inform the public. We now have teams in Australia, Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, France, Spain and Indonesia.

The global audience for our evidence-based analysis and research has doubled in the past year. More than 35 million people read The Conversation articles each month.

The articles featured in this collection are drawn from the slice of that global output aimed at Australians. A rigorous approach to evidence is not negotiable but the topics covered are intentionally diverse: Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty reflects eloquently on the fiendish challenges of climate change; Fabrizio Carmignani examines the claim that corporate tax cuts in the United States led to lower wages; Robyn Whitaker explores the significance of Jesus’s racial background (he wasn’t white); Andrew Watkins explains what causes windy weather; and medical expert Alessandro Demaio looks at why a healthy diet matters even if you aren’t overweight.

I hope you get as much pleasure from reading this collection as I did from being part of its creation. Thanks to this book’s editor, John Watson, our knowledgeable authors and to all my colleagues whose hard work has made The Conversation a global success and a ray of hope in troubling times.

CHAPTER ONE

Exploring the Evidence

Young blood: Magic or medicine?

David Irving

Director, Research and Development, Australian Red Cross Blood Service, and Adjunct Professor, University of Technology Sydney

Ben Franklin famously wrote that ‘in this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes’. What he didn’t mention, despite being 83 years old, was a third, almost inevitable eventuality: ageing.

Depending on when in history and where on the planet you look, ageing is variously considered desirable—bringing with it wisdom and status—or as something to be feared, eliminated, or at least delayed as long as possible.

In the 16th to 18th centuries, Western societies believed old age was a time of considerable worth. But since the 19th century we have sought ways to eliminate or minimise the effects of ageing.

Even in the time of Herodotus (the 5th century), there were stories of a ‘Fountain of Youth’ located far away in the land of the Ethiopians, whose waters would bring youth and vigour to those who drank from it.

Blood is a potent symbol of life and of death. It is hardly surprising, then, that this incredible fluid is linked to the search for eternal youth in literature, legend, magic and medicine.

Recent scientific studies have claimed, almost vampire-like, that transfusions of blood from teenagers can help delay or reverse the ageing process. Where do these claims come from? Do they stack up? And how long will it be before we have the power to stave off what now is inevitable?

The first blood transfusion from one human to another is reported to date from 1492, for Pope Innocent VIII.

There is some discussion as to whether this was an attempt at a blood transfusion as we understand it today, or some other form of administration of blood (such as oral), given that the theory of circulation of blood was first published in 1628, almost 140 years later.

Sources from 1873 stated:

All the blood of the prostrate old man should pass into the veins of a youth who had to yield up his to the Pope.

But earlier reports, from 1723, were less specific:

Three ten-year-old boys died because blood had been taken from their veins … in an attempt to cure the Pope.

Whatever the truth of the treatment, the pope did not recover, and neither did the boys. Here, at what is arguably the start of transfusion history, we can already see the lure of the belief in the power of young blood.

Fast forward to 2017 and the reputation of ‘young blood’ is moving into the world of big business.

A company called Alkahest, based on work by Tony Wyss-Coray, a neurobiologist studying Alzheimer’s disease at Stanford University, is spruiking the results of a trial where plasma from young donors (aged 18–30) was transfused into patients with dementia.

Eighteen patients aged between 54 and 86 with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease were enrolled in the trial. They were infused with plasma (or placebo, in a control group) twice a week for four weeks.

Thankfully the trial was more successful than Pope Innocent VIII’s treatment. None of the patients showed any ill-effects, but neither did they show any improvement in tests of thinking ability. They did, however, demonstrate some improvement in tests that assessed their daily living skills.

At almost the same time, controversial trials by a company named Ambrosia (‘food of the Gods’, depicted as conferring immortality) are transfusing plasma from people aged 16–25 into people aged 35–92.

Despite the experimental nature of this treatment, participants are paying US$8,000 each to be included in the trial, for which there is no control group.

These factors make it virtually impossible to interpret the results, because people in the trial may ‘feel better’ merely through having paid money for a treatment they believe is going to work.

Jesse Karmazin presented the results of the study so far at the Recode technology conference in Los Angeles in mid-2017. Ambrosia’s scientists examined the levels of various molecules, believed to be predictive of cancer or Alzheimer’s disease, in the blood of people who had been treated. They found that those who had been treated with young blood had lower levels of several proteins known to be involved in disease, namely carcinoembryonic antigens (which increase in cancer patients) and amyloid (which forms plaques in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease patients).

However, the long-term significance of these changes is unclear.

The science of stealing youth

Science has come a long way since Pope Innocent VIII, so what has led these modern scientists to try what appears to be a modern version of a very similar experiment?

The roots of both these companies lie in experiments in ‘parabiosis’ (from Greek par meaning alongside, and bios meaning life)—a technique that dates back to the 1864 physiologist Paul Bert.

Bert surgically spliced animals together in his lab, so that two animals shared a single blood supply. This grizzly practice provides an opportunity to find out how soluble blood factors affect various bodily functions.

A group at Stanford University, led by Thomas Rando and including Irina Conboy, found in 2005 that when they joined the bodies and circulations of old and young mice, the muscle and liver cells in the old mice were able to regenerate as well as those in their younger counterparts.

Several experimental avenues led the researchers to conclude the factor involved was circulating in the blood, although its identity was not known.

In 2007, Tony Wyss-Coray analysed the plasma proteins of patients with Alzheimer’s disease along with those from healthy people over a number of years. He found levels of proteins in the blood change with age, with some increasing and others decreasing.

His doctoral student at the time, Saul Villeda, looked at effects of parabiosis on the brain and found that the old mice in the pairs enjoyed more brain connection, and the brains of the young mice physically deteriorated.

But it was hard to test how well these brains worked in practice, because measuring an old mouse’s ability to find its way through a maze is difficult when it is physically attached to a young mouse, which may be leading the way!

There are other problems with the interpretation of parabiosis experiments. Old animals have access to the effects of younger organs, and their brains may also benefit from the environmental enrichment of being paired with a younger animal.

The search was on for what factor or factors might be responsible for the dramatic effects seen in parabiosis experiments, and to find if their rejuvenating effects could be replicated without the inconvenience of sharing a circulatory system. There are a few molecular suspects so far.

A protein known as GDF 11 is one contender for the title of ‘youth protein’. In 2013, researchers Amy Wagers and Richard Lee found that this protein from the blood of young mice can reverse the symptoms of heart failure in older mice. A year later they showed GDF 11 appeared to act on skeletal muscle stem cells and enhance muscle repair.

Other studies have disagreed, suggesting that GDF 11 in fact increases with age and inhibits muscle repair. There are several technical reasons why these studies differ, and further studies may shed light on the role of GDF 11 and similar proteins.

In 2014, researchers Saul Villeda, Tony Wyss-Coray and their team found that exposing an old mouse to young blood can decrease apparent brain age. The effects were seen not only at the molecular level but also in the structures of the brain and in several measures of learning and memory.

In this case, a protein in the brain known as Creb (cyclic AMP response binding element) controlled the effects, although the stimulating factor in the blood was not identified.

The development and control of the brain involves numerous molecular signals, and a recent study has found yet another link between young blood and brain development. A protein in the brain, Tet2, declines with age, but mice whose brains have been given a boost of Tet2 are able to grow new brain cells and they improve at mouse-learning tasks.

The presence of young blood can provide such a boost in Tet2 because, in these experiments, old mice who are joined to young mice in a parabiosis have an increase in Tet2 in their brain. This provides yet another clue to the mechanism by which young blood acts on the brain.

Youth proteins v elder proteins

While old mice show benefit from transfusions of young mouse blood, the opposite is also true: young mice show signs of ageing when exposed to their elder’s blood. It appears there are not just ‘youth proteins’ present in young blood, but also ‘elder proteins’ in the blood of older animals.

In 2016, Irina Conboy’s research team used a blood-exchange technique between old and young mice, without surgically joining them. The results of this method would be easier to translate into a human medical setting than parabiosis, as it resembles exchange transfusions that are already used medically.

When they received old blood, the muscle strength of young mice decreased and the growth of their brain cells slowed down.

A protein known as B2M (beta-2-macroglobulin) may be involved in this process, although it does not appear to be elevated with age—possibly acted on by another signal from older blood.

Hanadie Yousef at Stanford University has identified a protein called VCAM1 that increases with age and causes signs of ageing when injected into young mice. What’s particularly interesting is that, in her studies, an antibody to VCAM1 can block these effects.

Quest for targeted therapies

So, where does this lead us today? Can teenagers full of young blood rest safely from elderly vampiric super-villains?

It seems that, rather than being the stuff of myth and magic, there are indeed factors in the blood that change with age: some that increase, some that decrease. Research has started to discover how some of these may work at a cellular level in muscles, organs and, in particular, the brain, as we age.

One day these discoveries could lead to rational and targeted therapies for a variety of conditions.

What is certain is that human plasma contains a vast array of active molecules, many of which are already in medical use. Donated plasma has been used for decades to fight disease, control bleeding and help with certain chronic neurological disorders.

Fortunately for us all, plasma from people of all ages can be used in these treatments.

Dr Alison Gould, Scientific Communications Specialist for the Australian Red Cross Blood Service, co-authored this