The US-EU equity divergence, nuclear cost explosion, uptown and downtown rats, Silicon Valley and the "mystery" of the human ovary
Great links, images and reading from Chartbook Newlsetter by Adam Tooze
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Georg Schrimpf, Radio station (Fürstenfeldbruck), 1933.
Born in Munich in 1889 and forced to leave home young, Schrimpf entered the itinerant and radical world of the precarious German working class, working as a baker and living in an anarchist colony before evading military service in World War I. He became involved in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic amid the excitement surrounding the October Revolution in Russia. He was part of the Weimar moment of radical modernist art. Never formally associated with the Communists (unlike others, like Georg Grosz), he was still able to work under the Nazis until 1937 when he came under suspicion for leftwing connections and his art was defined as “degenerate.” He died in 1938.
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The great US and European equity divergence… begins in 2009
Source: FT
Shiny Apple
Apple’s profits retain their shine, largely thanks to the iPhone: the company made $97bn in the financial year ending on September 30th, and had cash reserves of $162bn.
Source: The Economist
Means of pressure: Hungary and the EU
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Britain’s infrastructure, courtesy of the French state
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Georg Schrimpf, Level Crossing (Bahnübergang), 1932
Uptown and Downtown rats
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Bog boys — history rhymes
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Silicon Valley wants to live forever — but is it just for men?
Hannah Kuchler writes:
In the spring of 2017, celebrities and scientists gathered at the Los Angeles home of legendary television producer Norman Lear and his wife Lynn. The Hollywood power couple, outspoken supporters of myriad liberal causes, were also interested in the burgeoning field of longevity science. Among the speakers invited to update attendees on the latest advancements was Nicole Shanahan, the CEO of an intellectual property software company in Silicon Valley.
Shanahan, a slight woman, with long, highlighted hair, told the audience about the relatively mundane but valuable process of tracking new research through the patent system. She was followed on stage by Victor Dzau, a veteran doctor in his seventies and president of the US National Academy of Medicine. Dzau evangelised the importance of tackling ageing and announced a scientific competition seeking new ways to extend human lifespan.
But Shanahan couldn’t concentrate. Her body grew hot and her face flushed, as her public role collided with her private hopes. She and her partner, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, had been trying and failing to harvest eggs for a future conception.
Despite being just 31, Shanahan was haunted by the fear that her life was being shaped by an organ that had been ageing since before she was born. Early in a female foetus’s development, she has about six million eggs. Only a couple of million make it to birth. By the time she hits puberty, she has 300,000 to 400,000 and then begins losing 1,000 immature eggs a month. By the time she’s 40, she may have fewer than 10 per cent left. Shanahan flicked open the Flo app that tracked her fertility. “As I was watching another ovulation cycle go by, Victor was on stage saying, ‘We have to change the narrative on longevity. Ageing is a disease. It’s tractable. We have to treat this as a moonshot,’” she recalls. “And each one of those things went through my head as I was thinking about my own ovulation. It was a moment of powerful insight.”
Shanahan had been closely watching Silicon Valley’s growing obsession with longevity. Between 2013 and 2022, funding for companies working in the field soared from $600mn to $4.6bn, according to PitchBook data. But she eventually found that, while men were funding myriad ways to lengthen their own lives, barely anyone was researching how to slow ageing ovaries and help women have children for longer. When Shanahan scoured the patent corpus for advances on women’s reproductive longevity, she found “virtually nothing”. The only research was responding to the age-old pressure for women to look young. “It was mostly shiny hair and soft skin. It was very superficial, and none of it was about the core functions of being biologically woman,” she says.
In fact, science had neglected women’s health in general for decades, often seeing the differences in female bodies as confounding factors to be stripped out, rather than studied to improve the lives of more than half of the population. In the US, clinical trials were not obliged to include women until 1993. In the UK today, only about 2 per cent of medical research funding is spent on pregnancy, childbirth and fertility. This lack of money for basic research means, from a scientific perspective, that ovaries — the glands which produce the eggs that guarantee the continuation of the human species — are essentially a mystery. Fundamental questions remain unanswered: why are the ovaries one of the first organs to age? Why does the quantity and quality of eggs fall so dramatically? Why do humans go through menopause when most animals do not? And why does the age of menopause vary wildly between individual women?
Georg Schrimpf, Hegaulandschaft, 1933
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