The Progress Report: Recovered Life Expectancy

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Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. And this is our weekly progress report, where we look at some of the news that you likely will have missed in the sea of dystopic negative news. Emma, what news, what news do you bring from afar?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, and I should say, too, that we’re not going to talk about Trump at all this episode, so=

Zachary Karabell: Oh, except for that one mention.

Emma Varvaloucas: Except for that one mention, but besides, you know, not going to have any serious discussion about Trump, so this is going to be a little bit–

Zachary Karabell:  All right,  there’s another one.

Emma Varvaloucas: Oh, okay, okay, okay, enough, enough about, about that guy.

Zachary Karabell: He who shall not be named.

Emma Varvaloucas: I was just about to make a Voldemort joke. Yes. Yeah, I know.

Zachary Karabell: Okay.

Emma Varvaloucas: Anyway. Okay, so this one is actually, I think, It may be controversial to some, curious to hear your reaction. The U. S. has cloned an endangered species, and that endangered species has produced offspring for the first time.

So a U.S. clone of an endangered species has produced offspring for the very first time. It is a black footed ferret. Which was, actually we basically thought it was extinct but we accidentally found one hiding in Wyoming in the 1980s. And there, I think there’s less than 400 black footed ferrets in existence now in the U.S. And Because all of the black footed ferrets that are currently running around descend from only seven individuals because the population got so low, they’re very concerned about genetic diversity. So essentially they collected genetic material from a ferret, I think her name was Willa, yes, in 1988.

She had diverse genetic material, a great gene pool, I suppose. And they cloned her to create a ferret called Antonia, and Antonia has given birth. So Antonia has given birth to three kits. One of them died, but two of them are healthy, seem to be doing well, and you know, conservationists view this as a way to restore genetic diversity to the species.

So, I imagine if this goes well the first time, they’re going to look at it to do it a second, a third, and a fourth, and a fifth time.

Zachary Karabell: So she was hiding somewhere in Wyoming going, Oh my God, I’m the last Blackfoot Ethereum. By the way, saying that sounds like some bizarre tongue twister, you know, Blackfoot Ethereum, Blackfoot Ethereum, Blackfoot Ethereum.

Blackfoot Ethereum, yeah, yeah. So look, there’s a lot of, I would say, mixed feelings that people have about cloning. There’s a lot of concern about what that will do, particularly if it starts becoming human. I, I particularly start using cloning techniques and applying them to humans, which seems to be a barrier right now that no one is quite willing to go toward, but I assume will happen.

And the assumption is that this is all going to lead to kind of the Frankenstein world, right? That we’re all going to start messing around with the gene pool. in ways that are going to have unintended and negative consequences. But as you just pointed out, it could also have some intended very positive consequences.

I guess the fact is, right, most people don’t trust human beings to only deploy a powerful tool for good and not for, you know, and that’s probably the correct approach, meaning almost anything we innovate and create will have a downside and a dark side as well as an upside and a bright side. And I suppose part of our point here is to say that we should also look at the bright side and the upside, given that we seem congenitally predisposed to be acutely aware of the downside.

Like no one seems to be doing any of these things going, Oh, it’ll be fine. So we, you know, we seem, we seem to be clearly aware of the risks, but we should also be aware of the benefits.

Emma Varvaloucas: I mean, it’s definitely a lot more palatable than like the Jurassic Park, you know, I think what helps in this instance is that it’s just a cute little ferret, you know.

Zachary Karabell: You look at it and you’re like, Oh, that’s how it starts – just, it’s a cute little ferret, you know, remember those little, remember those little baby dinosaurs and in Jurassic Park, they seem so, you know, babies always seem cute and innocent.

Emma Varvaloucas:  So my other defense is that I’m pretty sure that I’m pretty sure the plan is they’re going to release these ferrets into the wild at some point and then they naturally start to reproduce.

I don’t think the idea is like they kind of continuously, genetically clone the ferrets, you know. 

Zachary Karabell: It’s a kickstart.

Emma Varvaloucas: It’s a kickstart. It’s a

Zachary Karabell: genetic kickstart.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. But yeah, we’ll let you know if something goes terribly wrong or terribly right. We’ll be there.

Zachary Karabell: We’ll be there.

Emma Varvaloucas: Going well. Innovation has come for breast pumps.

I love the story. Probably because I’ve seen a lot of my friends deal with like really ridiculous, archaic looking breast pumps, that you look at them and you’re like, that hasn’t changed. You know, since the 1980s, when Willa the Ferret was, was running around. Yeah, some of them actually

Zachary Karabell: look more like they would have been developed some weird Victorian, you know, vacuum machine, right?

Yes. I think the 1980s is a generous time. I think they probably haven’t changed much in forever, but yeah,

Emma Varvaloucas: exactly. But innovation has come for them. So the Wall Street Journal had a great article about all of the like cool new breast pumps that you can get. Some of them are cordless, they’re battery powered they’re portable.

You can wear them in your bra and they’re so slim that you can’t even tell that you’re wearing them. The author of the piece actually used one of them while at a tennis tournament. They’re quieter. They are more expensive, but the hope is that, I think they’re, you know, around five or six hundred dollars a pop.

It’s not exactly affordable, but the idea is that you buy one and it pays for itself, you know, by virtue of the fact that you’re popping instead of buying a formula. Not sure exactly if that math works out, but the fact that these things exist, they look very cool. They’re much more in line with what I would expect for 2024 mothering instead of 1940s mothering.

Zachary Karabell: You’re no longer carrying a pneumatic machine. around with you that reminds you of like a really heavy Hoover vacuum cleaner.

Emma Varvaloucas: Exactly. So I, as someone who hasn’t had kids yet, I was really heartened to see that. I highly recommend if anyone’s listening out there, gonna be in the market for a breast pump soon.

Look at the cool, the cool new ones.

Zachary Karabell: So yeah, this whole burgeoning world of, I guess what is sometimes called femtech he’s clearly advancing, there are clearly a lot more women, and frankly, it’s still mostly women who develop these technologies, not men are developing them for women, which I think is, is great, I’m just, right now there’s a certain amount of segmentation of who develops what.

But there’s a lot more money, there’s a lot more interest, there’s a lot more people going, hey, wait a minute. There are, there are a series of things that are gender specific here and require some degree of innovation and attention and some degree of money, right? I mean, in order to do these things, you need to invest money, money to develop them, money, which has been not as evident until recently.

So I think we’re probably on the early stages of a whole series of things. There’s obviously a lot more work about paramenopause and menopause and, you know, a whole area that had been kind of terra incognita or just terra we don’t want to deal with. for traditional medicine until now.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. I mean, what my favorite fun fact about this that I learned recently about an article about this very topic is that they don’t know how to test period blood.

Like you would think that we would have had a scientific method of testing period blood for various maladies and we don’t. So they are, that

Zachary Karabell: is, that is weird given that we’re constantly, we’re testing every bodily fluid essentially. You would

Emma Varvaloucas: think

Zachary Karabell: I mean, literally, you know. tears, sweat, blood, pus.

I mean, obviously, we could go on and on and on, but it would seem that that would have been an obvious one. So that’s actually pretty astonishing. Yeah. And you would assume

Emma Varvaloucas: it’s a rich source of information, you know?

Zachary Karabell: So

Emma Varvaloucas: they’re trying to figure that out. Let’s do two quick ones before we end. Number one, good news about American life expectancy.

Started to decline around 2015 and then had a pretty significant dip during COVID, which of course was a unique event, but there was worries that like it was just kind of generally going to decline since the decline started before the pandemic. But no, we have since recovered. It’s at the highest point in our history now and hopefully that trajectory is going to continue.

It is you know, this is a common criticism. It is lower than in other developed nations, if you’re going to compare us to Europe, but at least we are. Back on track now, so life expectancy is now a 79. 3 years, a hearty 79. 3.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, and obviously that is even greater. So if you reach the age of 60, your life expectancy, I think even for men is like 84 and for women it’s like 88.

So, to some degree, it even, I mean, the picture gets better as you get older, assuming you get older.

Emma Varvaloucas: Right. Cause as obviously this also includes things like opioid overdoses and things like that. It’s not just like old age

Zachary Karabell: Traffic accidents. I mean, it’s all cause mortality. So exactly And I you know, the the thing there that’s important is also always be careful about over extrapolating from a trend That’s only a few years old in that if it’s only a few years old, maybe it’s a new trend, or maybe it’s an anomaly.

And there’s always that question of like, how long does something have to be an anomaly before it’s a new thing? And how long do you allow for something to be an anomaly before you rush to this is this is a new trend? But it is an example of I mean, there was there was plenty of commentary. Starting around 2016, 2017, first about deaths of despair and opioids, and then, of course, people didn’t just say, well, COVID was an anomaly.

They said COVID exposed the healthcare fault lines that have been existing anyway, and therefore made manifest what was already a problem. Some of that was clearly true, by the way. But the calling of a new trend, like American life expectancy is going down, why? Let’s raise the alarm bells, was probably not the right trend.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, and it also doesn’t seem to be corrected now that it’s back on track. Like, there’s not an effervescence of news articles about that. I haven’t seen. I saw that on Twitter. No

Zachary Karabell: headlines.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. So, and last but not least just, I don’t know, this was an interesting one for me. It’s, it’s mostly bad news, but there’s a glimmer of hope and I’m throwing it in there because I had no idea this was even a problem.

Sexually transmitted infections. Have doubled since 2004 in the United States. I had no idea. Like this is not something that I have read in the news. Maybe I’m the only one. But yeah, they have nearly doubled since 2004, and they are finding in 2023 for the first time in a long time, that those cases, the numbers of cases are slowing down.

So gonorrhea cases dropped. For a second year in a row, declining 7%. Syphilis cases increased by 1 percent after years of double digit increases. And congenital syphilis, so it’s when a newborn has syphilis. There’s a 3 percent increase in 2022 nationally compared to a 30 percent annual increase in prior years.

So I just want to throw that in there because that was like a very, like, wow, I had no idea that STIs were exploding.

Zachary Karabell: Right. Although some of that is, there is also more testing. All these things have to be couched within the context of there is way more testing. There’s more testing for AIDS. There’s more testing for general kind of.

particularly in the past five or six years where people started testing for diseases. So I think there is a portion of that that is attributable to more testing, rather than more cases, particularly as the fear of AIDS waned, sexual behavior has gotten a little less Well, I mean, to be frank about it, right, men probably use condoms less than they did at one point.

Mm

Emma Varvaloucas: hmm.

Zachary Karabell: But the testing part has to be part of it, right?

Emma Varvaloucas: Probably. I mean, you’re, yeah, there’s nothing that says that. I mean, Generally, there’s not anything that says that when that’s the case. You’re probably right, like I would guess that you are correct about that. I mean, we’re talking about the change since 2004, so likely that is correct.

I just, I can’t say for, for sure.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, think about it. There are a lot more urgent healthcare clinics that have popped up over the past 15 years, as opposed to you either have to go and make an appointment with your doctor or go to a hospital. So there’s a whole range of testing. I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I mean, I know that just looking at places like LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics, which are two of the major commercial labs, the volume of testing at those labs has gone up, if not exponentially, then massively of all sorts.

I’m not just, I’m obviously not just talking about STI screening. So anyway, you know, and I think to some degree people are also, again, maybe becoming a little more tuned to sexual behavior and sexual health, but that’s probably discussion for another time.

Emma Varvaloucas: No, I think you’re right. I think awareness has improved.

I mean, I feel like when I was going through college, it was like, get tested, you know? And I’m not sure if it was like that a generation prior. I don’t think that it was.

Zachary Karabell: No, it wasn’t. I can assure you it was not. And I don’t even know if you could have easily, right? It’s the ease of doing it now too. Yeah.

No stigma, right? I mean, until well until the 90s, there was definitely stigma attached to even testing for those. Like you’re doing what? Why? Why are you testing for that?

Emma Varvaloucas: Fair enough. So that’s a point of progress. Anyway, we’re going to call that a progress, so either way you split it and everything’s progress.

No, but I, I, you are right. Like, and also now they’re developing all of the at home STI tests. So like, you don’t even need to go in and look your doctor in the eye. Not that that should be a shameful experience, but you know, it’s never fun. Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. So on that strangely ambiguous note. We will, we will end this Weekly Progress Report.

As you glean from this and others, we are not totally dedicated to only examining things that seem good. We also want to look at the nuance of how things progress and everything is not linear or straight or simple. And that is an example of. change can occur within a matrix of complexity and not just, wow, this is great.

That was awful. And that too is, I think, an important part of the mix. In a binary world where everything is reduced to simplicity, a lot of our lives have shades of gray and complexity and nuance, and we should honor that as well. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. Thank you for listening. We will be back with you next week.

We will wrap up our season right before Thanksgiving. We’re right around Thanksgiving. Right after. Right after Thanksgiving. Okay. Right after Thanksgiving. In the neighborhood of Thanksgiving, we shall wrap up this current season and then be back with you again in February-ish. Thank you for listening.

Check out the newsletter. Send us your comments. Send us your thoughts. Send us your critiques. Send us your compliments. Do all of the above. Please, please, please. And thank you, Emma. And thank you all for your time today.