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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/llewellyn-king/no-end-to-the-cold-wars-e_b_12079208.html?utm_hp_ref=science&ir=Science
No End To The Cold War's Expensive Nuclear Legacy
It was the Cold War, and it was a potential race to Armageddon. The Soviet Union produced an excessive number of nuclear warheads, and we did likewise.

Now another war rages bitterly-- but not on the front pages -- over what to do with the legacy of cold war: plutonium from the warheads.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and in the honeymoon period that followed between Russia and the United States, it was obvious that there were way too many warheads and the number needed to be reduced. In particular the key ingredient, plutonium, had to be contained and, preferably, disposed of.

In 2000, the United States and Russia agreed to dismantle large numbers of nuclear warheads known as "pits."

But getting rid of plutonium is not easy. It is a transuranic element, made in special reactors and, up to this point in time, with only one purpose: to make hydrogen bombs. It also is possible to use it as a fuel in power reactors, if they are the light water reactors now in service around the world. This can be done by mixing the plutonium with uranium reactor fuel in the proportion of 95 percent uranium to 5 percent plutonium.

This is not a great rate of disposal, but it works.

The French process is the one the Clinton Administration committed to using to burn up 34 metric tons of pit plutonium from warheads being dismantled at the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas.

The Russians committed to burning their equivalent excess plutonium in fast reactors. These are reactors with a high-neutron-flux -- a technology that the United States abandoned during the Carter Administration.

To accomplish the U.S. commitment to the Russians and get rid of the plutonium, the Department of Energy commissioned the building of a facility at its huge Savannah River Site nuclear reservation (310 square miles) near Aiken, S.C., on the Georgia border.

The plant -- a massive structure with double walls (each 10-feet thick) of the highest grade concrete and with a dense matrix of steel reinforcing -- is as close as humans can come, in my view, to building something that will last for thousands of years. It is awesome.

But the plant is troubled.

The DOE wants to halt construction and abandon the idea in favor of mixing the plutonium with a granular substance and burying it in a waste facility in New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which is having its own difficulties after an accident. The process is called "down blending." It does not get rid of the plutonium which, with a half-life of 240,000 years, is essentially indestructible, unless it is burned in a reactor. It just stabilizes it and makes it hard to retrieve.

The suggested change has exacerbated tensions with Russia at a difficult time in U.S.-Russia relations. Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the proposed change of plan, saying, "This is not what we agreed on."

John MacWilliams, the DOE's point man on the issue, told me that the root of the problem is money. The South Carolina facility, known as the MOX (mixed oxide fuel) plant, has cost more than anticipated with $5 billion spent and a dispute over how far along construction is.

The DOE maintains that it is only 40 percent complete, and the contractor says it is 70 percent complete. Both have relied on outside consultants for their numbers.

Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz, himself a nuclear scientist, told a meeting in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 13 that the South Carolina plant would cost $50 billion to $60 billion over its life-cycle. He estimated it would cost between $15 billion and $20 billion for the alternative down blending proposal. That is a number that is likely to be challenged in Congress.

The South Carolina congressional delegation and other supporters, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), are passionate in their support for MOX. But Congress is funding the construction at just $350 million a year, less than the $500 million needed to keep to the construction schedule, thus making the whole enterprise more expensive.

One way or another the Cold War is going to keep on costing for a long, long time. -- For InsideSources

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science

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science

%feed
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-king/the-science-of-nobel-priz_b_12117976.html?utm_hp_ref=science&ir=Science
The Science of Nobel Prize Prediction
If the scientific and scholarly world has an equivalent of filmdom's annual, pre-award "Oscar fever" of late February, it's just about upon us: Beginning on October 3rd, the committee that decides the Nobel Prizes will notify a select group of honorees that they've won science's highest award.

Since 2002, to mark Nobel Prize week, the Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters has released its own list of Nobel-worthy researchers. These are the Web of Science ™ Citation Laureates - scientists whose published work has won special recognition among peers by being read and footnoted, or "cited," at a level far above the norm. The latest group of Laureates
has just been announced.

Because citations serve as quantifiable markers of influence and significance, a high citation rate attests to work that has truly made a difference to ongoing research. The Citation Laureates, therefore, are scientists whose work has proved itself worthy of possible Nobel recognition - perhaps soon, perhaps a decade or two in the future, depending on the prize committee's inclinations and deliberations.

To select this latest class of Citation Laureates, analysts turned, as always, to the Web of Science, an online database that compiles publication and citation statistics in science, the socials sciences, and the arts and humanities, reflecting scholarly inquiry back to the year 1900. Scientists whose papers have attracted an unusually high number of citations, and whose work is clearly associated with a specific and notable discovery or advance, win the distinction of being "of Nobel class."

Continuing a feature introduced in last year's presentation of Laureates, an online "People's Choice" poll permits readers to vote on their favorite Nobel-worthy candidates, either from this year's new batch or from among previous Citation Laureate selections who still await the call from Stockholm. Register your vote here.

As always, the new Laureates represent all four science fields honored by the Nobel: Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Economics. A trio of scientists recognized in Physics, for example, represent a recent breakthrough in a longstanding astrophysical quest: Roland W.P. Drever, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss were the key drivers behind the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) facility, an installation in Pasadena built to detect gravitational waves. Earlier this year, LIGO captured evidence of these ripples in space-time, predicted more than a century ago by Albert Einstein as part of his theory of general relativity.

In Chemistry, George M. Church and Feng Zhang are recognized for their contributions to another recent breakthrough, the genome-editing method known as CRISPR-Cas9. This "find and replace" utility for gene sequences has been the subject of highly active research since the method was originated in 2012, as it raises the prospect of actually re-writing genetic code to cure or avert disease. But the method has also spawned qualms about the ethics of such gene-tampering, along with a bitter legal battle over who should own the lucrative patent rights for the method, pitting Zhang against another Citation Laureate, Jennifer A. Doudna, who was selected last year with another CRISPR inventor, Emmanuelle Charpentier. Furthermore, Nobel rules stipulate that no more than three researchers may share any given prize, so the selection by the Nobel committee for CRISPR, if and when it comes, seems certain to stir controversy.

Other new Citation Laureates are honored for findings that harness the immune system to attack tumors, or that permit non-invasive screenings for pregnant women, or provide a deeper understanding of why unemployment is a persistent problem in developed economies.

One of this year's selections, Stuart L. Schreiber, is tipped in Physiology or Medicine for work on a gene known as TOR, whose intracellular workings have provided insights for the targeting of therapeutic drugs. A decade ago, Schreiber was selected as a Citation Laureate in the field of Chemistry for work on small molecules. Thanks to groundbreaking work in these two areas, Schreiber may have doubled his chances for an invitation to Sweden someday.

The 2016 Thomson Reuters Web of Science Citation Laureates

PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE
James P. Allison of the University of Texas Houston, and Jeffrey A. Bluestone of the University of California San Francisco Medical School, and Craig B. Thompson of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
For explaining how CD28 and CTLA-4 are regulators of T cell activation, modulating immune response

Gordon J. Freeman of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University, and Arlene H. Sharpe of Harvard Medical School
For elucidating programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) and its pathway, which has advanced cancer immunotherapy

Michael N. Hall, University of Basel, Switzerland, and David M. Sabatini of the Whitehead Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Stuart L. Schreiber of the Broad Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
For discoveries of the growth regulator Target of Rapamycin (TOR) and the mechanistic Target of Rapamycin (mTOR)

PHYSICS
Marvin L. Cohen of the University of California Berkeley
For theoretical studies of solid materials, prediction of their properties, and especially for the empirical pseudo potential method

Ronald W.P. Drever of the California Institute of Technology, and Kip S. Thorne of the California Institute of Technology, and Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
For the development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) that made possible the detection of gravitational waves

Celso Grebogi of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and Edward Ott of the University of Maryland, and James A. Yorke of the University of Maryland
For their description of a control theory of chaotic systems, the OGY method

CHEMISTRY
George M. Church of Harvard Medical School, and Feng Zhang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
For application of CRISPR-cas9 gene editing in mouse and human cells

Dennis Lo Yuk Ming of the Chinese University of Hong Kong
For detecting cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma, a revolution in noninvasive prenatal testing

Hiroshi Maeda of Sojo University and the University School of Medicine, Japan, and Yasuhiro Matsumura of the University of Tokyo
For discovering the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect of macromolecular drugs, a key finding for cancer therapeutics

ECONOMICS
Olivier J. Blanchard of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
For contributions to macroeconomics, including determinants of economic fluctuations and employment

Edward P. Lazear of Stanford Graduate School of Business
For his development of the distinctive field of personnel economics

Marc J. Melitz of Harvard University
For pioneering descriptions of firm heterogeneity and international trade.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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science

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lab-notes/a-revolution-in-supercomputing-is-coming-from-a-remote_b_12116590.html?utm_hp_ref=science&ir=Science
A Revolution In Supercomputing Is Coming. From A Remote Mountain Town. In New Mexico.

By Gary Grider

Tucked in the foothills of the Jemez mountains in northern New Mexico, among the ponderosa pines and endless blue skies, sits one of the world's fastest computers. Trinity is a 42-petaflop supercomputer (that's one quadrillion floating point operations per second, in case you're counting) that resides at Los Alamos National Laboratory and can perform complex 3D simulations of everything from ocean currents to asteroid impacts.

While a remote mountain town might seem to be an odd place for this computer to call home, it makes sense when you consider Los Alamos' history. Founded during World War II as the location of the top-secret Manhattan Project, scientists toiled away to build the first atomic bomb. What they didn't realize is that, in the process, they were pioneering the advent of Big Science. Today, Big Science brings together theory, modeling, experiments that produce massive amounts of data, and supercomputers to run incredibly sophisticated simulations providing feedback and validation to those theories and models. When J. Robert Oppenheimer led his all-star team of scientists to unravel the secrets of the atom, they were embarking on an integrated research program at a scale the world had rarely seen.

Computers were here from the start. During the war years, the term “computers” applied to mathematicians—mostly women—who worked the differential equations by hand, with help from mechanical desktop calculators and simple punch-card machines from IBM. These were the first steps in the process of inventing how to use computers. Los Alamos scientists went on to run the first production job on the world's first general-purpose electronic digital computer, ENIAC, and Nicholas Metropolis spearheaded development of the Lab's own computer, playfully dubbed MANIAC, in 1952, to continue the work of modeling nuclear processes.

Working with corporate collaborators, the Lab has been stretching the boundaries of computing ever since, with innovation following innovation as the Lab's computers often topped the list of the fastest in the world. In 2008, the Lab's Roadrunner supercomputer became the first to break the petaflop barrier, processing a thousand million floating point operations each second. That kind of speed enables resolution in simulations that would have been unimaginable 70 years ago. In a global ocean climate model, for example, scientists can look at individual eddies in an ocean current. (See image below.)

None of these computers were “plug and play.” For each one, the Lab and its corporate partners developed new software and hardware to make it run. Those innovations benefitted public and private computer users everywhere, from how best to network very large clusters of computer processors to how to manage the data they produced.

Roadrunner's petaflop speed, for instance, was spinning out data at unprecedented rates during simulations running many months. Storage technology in that era struggled to keep up with the technology's ability to generate and consume data. During long-running calculations at very large scale, with thousands of processors operating for weeks to months, failures occur—several per day, potentially. A method for dealing with this recurring and somewhat random failure is checkpoint-restart, where the application periodically saves a snapshot of its current state to guard against impending failure. The program can restart from these checkpoints and thereby continue for long periods, making forward progress towards a meaningful scientific result.

If the stable storage that holds checkpoints is too slow, then computing time is lost either through spending too much time checkpointing, which bogs down the program, or by not checkpointing, which amplifies the effect of each failure.

The challenge intensified with Trinity, with its Cray architecture and two kinds of Intel processors. When fully installed, it will run about 40 times faster than Roadrunner and has memory roughly equal to the amount of memory of all the laptops in New Mexico. That performance would only make the check-point problems worse. But several years ago, we invented burst buffers, paving the way for Trinity. Using solid-state flash memory, similar to memory in the average smart phone, burst buffers take the rapid-fire data off the supercomputer processors and dole it out to slower disk drives while keeping the data handy for a restart. Performance improves, and flash memory for burst buffers is cheaper when bandwidth, basically access speed, is taken into account compared to disk drives.

Burst buffers were installed for the first time on Trinity to support its crucial nuclear stockpile simulations. Other Department of Energy laboratories, academia, corporations, and European supercomputer user sites are rapidly adopting this new technology. Our software engineers also went on to develop another storage tool that allows supercomputers to save extremely large data sets for years on relatively inexpensive devices similar to those used by cloud-based businesses like Amazon. Cloud-style inexpensive disk storage had not been applied to high performance computing before.

Trinity and these storage tools continue the tradition of close collaboration between Los Alamos and computer vendors on the very latest developments in computing technology. Big Science and its constant companion, Big Data, rely on the most advanced computers to simulate how the world works or to solve a mystery whose solution hides in a vast sea of data. We take on challenges at a grand scale, from climate modeling to genetics, earthquakes to cancer, black holes to nuclear physics—work that tests the limits of computing superpower. The computing innovations we develop to solve these problems gives others the tools to address more everyday problems, such as by simulating a car crash as a means of improving real-world safety—research that ultimately enriches everyone's life.

Gary Grider is division leader of High Performance Computing at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a recognized international expert on supercomputing.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

science

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science

%feed
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johan-rockstrom/from-compassion-to-care-o_b_12096930.html?utm_hp_ref=science&ir=Science
From Compassion to Care on Climate: Why The Dalai Lama's Visit to Brussels Raises Some Serious Questions For The EU
The Dalai Lama's visit to Brussels recently was hardly low-key. A crowd of 10,000 people turned up to listen to His Holiness's speech on individual commitment and global responsibility, after prominent scientists, psychologists, ethnologists, economists and other experts from far and wide had gathered for a conference on the themes of 'Power and Care' during the previous two days.

It is to be hoped that the impact that these discussions have on the Brussels policy scene does not end there, however. In one speech, the Dalai Lama reflected that, while compassion is a feeling essentially experienced on the mental level, care for others is rather defined by action. When it comes to restoring the Earth's delicate balance and tackling climate change, it's time for the EU to add more care to its compassion.

"2016-09-20-1474355926-9046887-Johanrockstromanddalailama.jpglarge"

The Dalai Lama in conversation with Johan Rockström on the "Great Acceleration" in consumption and production and the impact on Earth's life support system. Image: Nikolet Zwart

Let us recall the extremely compelling scientific reasons for why we should care in the first place. While the Earth's climate has always changed to a greater or lesser extent, the last 11,000 years - known as the Holocene epoch - have been remarkably stable. It is this climatic stability that has allowed humanity to cultivate land, sustain ourselves and flourish during that time.

Since the industrial revolution and especially in the last few decades, however, humans have stretched Earth and its resources to breaking point. Cutting down trees at unsustainable rates, overfishing and burning the fossil fuels that release heat-trapping greenhouse gases into our atmosphere and contribute to global warming - these human actions have taken us to the limits of the planetary boundaries, defined uncompromisingly by nature, within which we reduce risk of Earth slipping into a new state.

In concrete terms, this means that, after several consecutive months of record-breaking high temperatures, last month was tied with July 2016 as the hottest month the world has seen in the last 136 years. Arctic sea ice is melting at alarming rates with hugely disruptive consequences on the way in which heat is distributed around the world. The Great Barrier Reef - the world's largest reef system and one of the most beautiful sites on earth - is bleaching. Climate change has contributed to recent floods in the US, India and China, wildfires in Canada and drought in Africa.

Indeed, the EU's care for our climate need not exclusively be motivated by compassion for others - Europe, too, is extremely vulnerable to the negative changes to which it has contributed. Research suggests that the devastating June floods in France - which caused one billion euros worth of damage - were aggravated by global warming. The continent is also expected to suffer from a combination of ever scarcer fresh water and rising sea levels.

EU Heads of State and policymakers within the EU institutions are not oblivious to these facts. Few of them would challenge the statements of leaders like EU Climate and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete when he called tackling climate change 'our solemn duty' and said that 'Europe has some of the broadest shoulders in the world and we are ready to continue leading by example'.

And yet, Europe, which has long prided itself on being a leader when it comes to climate action, is not doing all it can to save us - Europeans and non-Europeans - from the worst effects of global warming.

As I and other scientists have argued elsewhere, the scale of the decarbonisation challenge to meet the targets set out in last December's Paris Agreement is often underplayed in public discourse, and this is the world's biggest gamble. To limit warming to 2˚C compared to pre-industrial levels and have a fair chance of limiting warming to 1.5˚C drastic and immediate action would be needed within and outside of Europe to change the way we produce energy and goods on a level that we are still far from today. The world has already warmed by over 1˚C since the industrial revolution started, and even 1.5˚C and 2˚C worlds would impact our lives and those of the biosphere severely.

In the same paper in the journal Earth's Future, my colleagues and I assert that only a carbon roadmap will put the world on course to collapse GHGs and create the essential carbon sinks for Earth-system stability. The Paris Agreement has provided a framework for action and defined our end goals, but we must have a global plan for exactly when and through what means they will meet this challenge.

Progress has of course been made, globally and in Europe: renewable technology is developing at a rate few predicted, as is the battery storage technology that, when coupled with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, has the capacity to revolutionise energy generation. Renewable energy costs are falling, investment in renewable technologies is rising and jobs are being created. The existence of the Paris Agreement is itself a huge step forward, with all countries, on paper at least, putting a second-half-of-the-century time limit on the bringing down global greenhouse gas emissions to net zero.

The impacts of climate change are only getting worse, however - neither the EU nor any other country or bloc should ever feel justified in responding to calls for greater ambition by claiming that they have done enough. Upcoming Montreal Protocol negotiations to include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in the list of banned substances used in the refrigeration industry due to their atmospheric warming potential provide the EU and the world with an opportunity to further prove their commitment to climate action, especially as viable and less harmful alternatives to HFCs already exist. Negotiations on reducing aviation emissions within the framework of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and talks at COP22 in November to iron out the fine details of the Paris Agreement do the same.

To return to the title of the conference led by the Dalai Lama, then, EU politicians certainly have the 'Power' to effect change - they must now make sure that 'Care' is at the heart of how they use it.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

science

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science

%feed
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johan-rockstrom/from-compassion-to-care-o_b_12096890.html?utm_hp_ref=science&ir=Science
From Compassion to Care on Climate: Why The Dalai Lama's Visit to Brussels Raises Some Serious Questions For The EU
The Dalai Lama's visit to Brussels recently was hardly low-key. A crowd of 10,000 people turned up to listen to His Holiness's speech on individual commitment and global responsibility, after prominent scientists, psychologists, ethnologists, economists and other experts from far and wide had gathered for a conference on the themes of 'Power and Care' during the previous two days.

It is to be hoped that the impact that these discussions have on the Brussels policy scene does not end there, however. In one speech, the Dalai Lama reflected that, while compassion is a feeling essentially experienced on the mental level, care for others is rather defined by action. When it comes to restoring the Earth's delicate balance and tackling climate change, it's time for the EU to add more care to its compassion.

Johan Rockström in conversation with the Dalai Lama discussing the "Great Acceleration" in industrial production and the impact on Earth's life support system Image: Nikolet Zwart

Let us recall the extremely compelling scientific reasons for why we should care in the first place. While the Earth's climate has always changed to a greater or lesser extent, the last 11,000 years - known as the Holocene epoch - have been remarkably stable. It is this climatic stability that has allowed humanity to cultivate land, sustain ourselves and flourish during that time.

Since the industrial revolution and especially in the last few decades, however, humans have stretched Earth and its resources to breaking point. Cutting down trees at unsustainable rates, overfishing and burning the fossil fuels that release heat-trapping greenhouse gases into our atmosphere and contribute to global warming - these human actions have taken us to the limits of the planetary boundaries, defined uncompromisingly by nature, within which we reduce risk of Earth slipping into a new state.

In concrete terms, this means that, after several consecutive months of record-breaking high temperatures, last month was tied with July 2016 as the hottest month the world has seen in the last 136 years. Arctic sea ice is melting at alarming rates with hugely disruptive consequences on the way in which heat is distributed around the world. The Great Barrier Reef - the world's largest reef system and one of the most beautiful sites on earth - is bleaching. Climate change has contributed to recent floods in the US, India and China, wildfires in Canada and drought in Africa.

Indeed, the EU's care for our climate need not exclusively be motivated by compassion for others - Europe, too, is extremely vulnerable to the negative changes to which it has contributed. Research suggests that the devastating June floods in France - which caused one billion euros worth of damage - were aggravated by global warming. The continent is also expected to suffer from a combination of ever scarcer fresh water and rising sea levels.

EU Heads of State and policymakers within the EU institutions are not oblivious to these facts. Few of them would challenge the statements of leaders like EU Climate and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete when he called tackling climate change 'our solemn duty' and said that 'Europe has some of the broadest shoulders in the world and we are ready to continue leading by example'.

And yet, Europe, which has long prided itself on being a leader when it comes to climate action, is not doing all it can to save us - Europeans and non-Europeans - from the worst effects of global warming.

As I and other scientists have argued elsewhere, the scale of the decarbonisation challenge to meet the targets set out in last December's Paris Agreement is often underplayed in public discourse, and this is the world's biggest gamble. To limit warming to 2˚C compared to pre-industrial levels and have a fair chance of limiting warming to 1.5˚C drastic and immediate action would be needed within and outside of Europe to change the way we produce energy and goods on a level that we are still far from today. The world has already warmed by over 1˚C since the industrial revolution started, and even 1.5˚C and 2˚C worlds would impact our lives and those of the biosphere severely.

In the same paper in the journal Earth's Future, my colleagues and I assert that only a carbon roadmap will put the world on course to collapse GHGs and create the essential carbon sinks for Earth-system stability. The Paris Agreement has provided a framework for action and defined our end goals, but we must have a global plan for exactly when and through what means they will meet this challenge.

Progress has of course been made, globally and in Europe: renewable technology is developing at a rate few predicted, as is the battery storage technology that, when coupled with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, has the capacity to revolutionise energy generation. Renewable energy costs are falling, investment in renewable technologies is rising and jobs are being created. The existence of the Paris Agreement is itself a huge step forward, with all countries, on paper at least, putting a second-half-of-the-century time limit on the bringing down global greenhouse gas emissions to net zero.

The impacts of climate change are only getting worse, however - neither the EU nor any other country or bloc should ever feel justified in responding to calls for greater ambition by claiming that they have done enough. Upcoming Montreal Protocol negotiations to include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in the list of banned substances used in the refrigeration industry due to their atmospheric warming potential provide the EU and the world with an opportunity to further prove their commitment to climate action, especially as viable and less harmful alternatives to HFCs already exist. Negotiations on reducing aviation emissions within the framework of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and talks at COP22 in November to iron out the fine details of the Paris Agreement do the same.

To return to the title of the conference led by the Dalai Lama, then, EU politicians certainly have the 'Power' to effect change - they must now make sure that 'Care' is at the heart of how they use it.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

science

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science

%feed
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allen-frances/connecting-the-dots-between-the-opioid-epidemic-and-philanthropy_b_11996752.html?utm_hp_ref=science&ir=Science
Connecting The Dots Between The Opioid Epidemic And Philanthropy
The Sackler family is justly famous in one way -- and justly notorious in two others.

Arthur, Raymond, and Mortimer Sackler (and members of their families) have been among the world's greatest contributors to good causes -- particularly in the arts and sciences. The Sackler name is prominently displayed at the Smithsonian, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim, Tate, Louvre, and Harvard Museums; at various medical and science facilities at Berkeley, Tufts, MIT, Oxford, King's College, University Of London, and Tel Aviv University; at the beautiful Kew Gardens; and in many other important institutions in the US and abroad.

The Sacklers are on the short list of the world's greatest and most honored philanthropists. Family members have received the very highest awards and titles, bestowed in many different countries, by among many others, the Queen of England.

The great honor that comes from Sackler giving is tainted by the great dishonor in how their fortunes have been accumulated. Sackler notoriety comes from the two unsavory sources of their wealth.

The lesser evil was inventing drug company marketing; the greater evil was pushing opioid prescription painkillers that now kill close to 20,000 people a year in the U.S. alone.

The Sackler fortune is enormous and self-made. Even with all their previous generous philanthropy, the Sackler family still retains a net worth of $13 billion -- more than the much more famous, old money families like the Rockefellers, the Busches, and the Mellons.

Strikingly, none of the Sackler family fortune was inherited. The Sackler brothers all began their careers as psychiatrists, an unpromising profession when it comes to accumulating vast wealth. But the Sacklers were enterprising, energetic, and early on displayed remarkable business savvy. They made their initial fortune by inventing many of the aggressive marketing techniques that turned the pharmaceutical industry into a profit machine. They taught drug companies how to conduct the full court selling of drugs to doctors and how to gear sales pitches directly to consumers.

One can heartily dislike the pharma marketing machine and disapprove of the Sackler role in creating it -- but still recognize it as within moral bounds. It is much harder, however, to justify the Sackler role in creating the prescription opioid epidemic.

In 1952, the Sacklers purchased a small drug company -- Purdue Pharma -- and have since turned it into a giant cash cow. In the past 20 years, the company has generated more than than $35 billion in the U.S. and about an equal amount in other countries.

The star attraction was OxyContin, a time-released, preparation of oxycodone, that was misleadingly marketed as addiction-proof. In a later blog, we will go into detail on all the ways Purdue pushed opioids and created the deadliest drug epidemic in our history. Suffice to say, the company was only marginally less ruthless than the drug cartels and is now responsible for at least twice as many deaths per year.

The Sackler family seeks publicity and fame when it comes to their philanthropy, but keeps a very low profile when it comes to the notoriety of OxyContin gains. Thus far, they have largely succeeded in avoiding blame for the devastating epidemic of prescription opioid addiction that they caused and continue to profit from. This despite the fact that nine family members are currently on the Purdue board. There are encouraging signs, however, that Sackler impunity may soon change.

Richard Sackler has been the most active family member directing Purdue affairs and has left his fingerprints all over the OxyContin disaster. In 1971, shortly after graduating medical school, he began work at Purdue and has held just about every important leadership position in the company -- from directing its research and marketing to serving as president and co-chair of the board.

Of great public interest, Richard Sackler was recently deposed in a lawsuit for the first time -- in regard to Kentucky's claims charging Purdue with continued illegal marketing of OxyContin. It is easy to imagine the questions he must have been asked: What did you know about the addicting impact of OxyContin? When did you know it? What have you done to cause or prevent Purdue's misleading the medical profession and the public? What do your internal company documents show?

Current efforts to make Sackler's testimony public are crucial in strides to make the family accountable for the actions of the company and perhaps might result in the clawing back of some significant portion of their ill-gotten gains.

Sackler's deposition is one of several sealed documents that a Kentucky judge ordered to be released to the public at the request of STAT. Purdue said it will appeal the ruling, meaning the documents will be withheld, pending the outcome of the appeal.

For at least a decade, everyone knew OxyContin was misleadingly marketed and causing great damage. The $600+ million dollar fine levied in 2007 as punishment for Purdue's criminal activity would surely have been a wake up call for its company co-chairman. It is hard to believe that Richard Sackler can offer even a shred of plausible deniability.

If the Sacklers really are philanthropists, and not just seekers of fame, they should want to do the right thing and help those they have hurt.

Purdue is a privately held company and all its profits go to the Sacklers in one form or another. In any fair world, Purdue and the Sacklers should be hit with multibillion dollar fines -- the proceeds devoted to the compensation and rehabilitation of the millions of people they have harmed and to the reimbursement of the states (and their taxpayers) for the enormous public costs occasioned by the opioid epidemic.

It makes no sense to allow the Sacklers free rein to accumulate ever more I'll gotten profits and to launder them with donations to museums and medical centers -- in the service of glorifying and cleansing the Sackler name. The family should be forced to disgorge a significant portion of its fortune to help clean up the opioid mess they created.

If the Sacklers really are philanthropists, and not just seekers of fame, they should want to do the right thing and would come forward now to offer help to those they have harmed.

---

This article was originally published on Recovery Brands' Pro Talk/Pro Corner.

Allen Frances is a professor emeritus at Duke University and was the chairman of the DSM-IV task force.

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