{"id":9751,"date":"2021-02-05T08:48:55","date_gmt":"2021-02-05T16:48:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=9751"},"modified":"2021-02-24T16:35:41","modified_gmt":"2021-02-25T00:35:41","slug":"batman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=9751","title":{"rendered":"Batman."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/a> “What’s the point in even having <\/em>money if you can’t use it to buy better health care?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Jonathan, my (late) brother, explaining why
he renounced his Canadian citizenship<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve been reading a lot about bats recently, in particular this review article<\/a> from Nature. You can guess why, even if you haven’t hopped on the Batwagon yourself: bats appear to be the original reservoir of Covid-19. Those little flying furballs are notorious reservoirs for lots<\/em> of pathogens: Rabies, Ebola, SARS and MERS to name but a few. Bats host more zoonotic pathogens than any other mammal on record. Frankly, given typical Human behavior, I’m surprised that everyone from WHO to the Shriners haven’t already launched a worldwide campaign to Destroy All Bats on epidemiological grounds alone. (Not that we’re not seeing plenty of rumblings<\/a> along those lines, mind you.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But bats turn out to be way cool along other axes as well. Metabolism, for one thing: high metabolic rates generally correlate with short lifespans (the hotter you run the engine, the faster you wear out the parts). But bats break that rule. They have to run hot much of the time to support the energetic demands of powered flight, yet they live over three times as long<\/a> as earthbound mammals of comparable size. In fact, bats are the only species that live longer than we do, once you’ve corrected for body mass[1]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup> (the only other mammal that can make that claim is the naked mole rat).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also bats don’t get cancer. At least, not nearly as often as the rest of us mammals do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All these traits appear to be tangled up with a common underlying cause. I’m no geneticist\u2014my eyes glazed over the stuff about IFN-induction of RNASEL and the differential expression patterns of IRF7\u2014 but the broad strokes are straightforward. Bat metabolism involves a lot of something called “heat-shock proteins<\/a>“, which facilitate metabolism when the engine runs hot. (Name notwithstanding, heat shock proteins help cells deal with a whole range of stressors, by enhancing the repair of damaged proteins or the creation of new ones.) Bats also pack a deluxe set of DNA-repair pathways, and their mitochondria produce less reactive oxygen that you would expect from mammals of that size. (Remember the whole antioxidant craze, when everyone was eating blueberries to stave off their inevitable senescence? Same basic principle.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Don’t sweat it: it’s way beyond me too. From Irving et al<\/em> 2021.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This suite of cellular repair traits, which presumably evolved in conjunction with the energy demands of flight, confer a variety of side effects. It allows the organism to withstand pathogen loads that would kill other species, without manifesting symptoms. It makes them resistant to that particularly scary form of cell damage known as cancer<\/em>. It enhances longevity. And Irving et al<\/em> do not gloss over these incidentals. They zoom in on them, excitedly pointing out that ongoing bat research won’t just pay off in terms of predicting and controlling diseases, but also in terms of “potentially combat ageing and cancer in humans”. There’s even wet-lab proof-of-principle<\/a> in evidence:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a bat\u2013mouse chimaera model, an immunodeficient mouse reconstituted with a bat immune system appeared to be less prone to graft-versus-host disease than were other chimeric mouse systems reconstituted with immune cells from human and other mammalian animal donors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

So. We’re looking at tweaks in which elements of the chiropteran immune system are inserted into human beings, making them resistant to a wide variety of pathogens, cancer\u2014 and offering an increased lifespan to boot. What a glorious new chapter in the Human Adventure, eh?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Possibly. At least, such a scenario wouldn’t violate any laws of physics that I can see. It might strain the laws of Human Nature<\/em> past the bounds of credibility, but it’s hardly inconceivable. And as Rick Deckard once opined about a different subspecies of gengineered Humanity: “they’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit, it’s not my problem.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If they’re a hazard, it’s mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So let’s interrogate this scenario. Who is most likely to pioneer the research and make the breakthroughs that lead to this new golden age of healthy Methuselahs (or more precisely, who’s more likely to let some spunky start-up do all that, then ruthlessly swoop in and buy them out once the little guys have taken all the risks)? Big Pharma, that’s who.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How likely are the Pfizers and Johnson & Johnsons of the world to open-source the tweaks they’ve appropriated, for the good of all humankind? Not very.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prediction #1: long life and good health with be copyrighted, trademarked, proprietary, and will cost the fucking moon\u2014even if your factories can run off a dose for the price of a quarter-pounder with cheese. Because here on Capitalist Earth, it’s not the cost of production that dictates price: it’s the value of your product to the consumer. HealthyMethuselahTM<\/sup> will be extremely<\/em> valuable. It will be a privilege of the very wealthy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blindingly obvious as predictions go, I’ll grant you. ‘Twas ever thus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prediction #2: there will be biohackers. There will be people with significant molecular smarts who, while not card-carrying members of the One Percent, can at least afford a thermocycler and whatever gene drives have upstaged TALEN and CRISPR this week. The code for HMTM<\/sup> will be cracked eventually, so that even we proles may benefit. When this happens, it will be a crime: HMTM<\/sup> is patented, after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again, not an especially radical insight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here’s where it gets interesting: the fact that bats don’t get sick from all these diseases doesn’t mean they don’t have<\/em> them; it just means they don’t manifest symptoms. That’s the whole definition of reservoir<\/em>: your blood is swarming with bugs that are harmless to you, but which can transmit to all manner of more vulnerable hosts. Assuming that HMTM<\/sup> operates along the same lines (and the whole point of Irving et al<\/em>‘s paper is that we should study bat strategies with an eye to applying them to Humans), our healthy wealthy won’t necessarily be free of disease. In fact, given the behavior we’ve recently observed among certain members of that elite even when they can<\/em> get sick\u2014brazen violation of travel restrictions, outright contempt for the most basic Covid countermeasures\u2014we can take it as given that some of the ultrarich will use their new superpower to wander wherever they please, from melting tundra to tropical pesthole, without regard for the local pathogen count. Hell, eating meat that’s gone a bit off off might even become a kind of status symbol: what can a few miserable microbes do to them<\/em>, after all?[2]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Prediction #3: plutocrats will become, in their own right, massive pathogen reservoirs<\/em>. Wherever they go, they will shed disease. Of course, that won’t bother anyone down at the country club or over on the private island; all those good people are superspreaders themselves, completely asymptomatic thanks to HMTM<\/sup>. But if any of the zero-pointers (or their flunkies) decide to wander down Yonge Street or take in a play on Broadway, the rest of us are fucked. The very presence of the wealthy on our streets will cause sickness and death among the larger population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Legal restrictions? Criminal charges? Air pollution causes millions of deaths every year; how many captains of industry ever ended up in jail on that account? Does anyone really think we’re gonna charge Jeff Bezos’ limo driver for the crime of being contagious?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, for a final narrative twist: being healthy in the midst of a street-level outbreak will, in and of itself, make you criminally suspect if you fall below a certain income threshold. It’s a mentality on sad display every time some cop pulls over a car that seems just a bit too upscale<\/em> to be owned by the black person at its wheel. By the same token, if Josephine Sixpack finds herself wandering around asymptomatic in the midst of a Nipah outbreak\u2014well, how did she pull that<\/em> off, hmm? Maybe she had a bit of help. Ma’am, I’ll need to see to see a receipt for that immune system…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story almost writes itself. If I had a bit of legal expertise I could even turn it into an episode of Law & Order: Twenty Minutes Into the Future<\/em>. As it is I’ll probably need to come at it from a different angle\u2014but I think you’ll agree it’d make a decent little short. We open with our protagonist in detention, waiting for someone to bring a gene kit over from the 58th precinct because the reagents in the one upstairs are past their expiry date. We go from there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My only misgiving is that it might suffer from a lack of imagination. You barely even need the SF element: swap out “healthy in an outbreak” for “wearing a hoodie in a gated community” and you’ve got pretty much the same story. It’s hardly even a metaphor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps the main reason I’ve traditionally written science fiction is because unlike mainstream literature, SF is vast enough to explore scenarios that most might consider “extreme”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s strange to realize that in some ways, mainstream reality has always been so extreme that it’s swallowed science fiction in turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
  1. \n

    The same reference suggests that the caloric restriction resulting from hibernation increases bat longevity. Hibernating predators with really long lives? Sound familiar? \u2191<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>

  2. \n

    Don’t be fooled by the understandable focus on viruses: bats also act as reservoirs for various zoonotic bacteria, fungi, and metazoan parasites. \u2191<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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