The Youth Pill

I just finished reading "The Youth Pill" by my former colleague David Stipp. It's a terrific piece of science writing, and it's good news to boot. It shows that scientists are well on their way to developing pills that we can take daily in order to prolong the active, healthy part of our lives by ten years or so.
Full disclosure: David is a good friend and if I didn't like the book, I wouldn't write about it. But I did and I will.
Stipp makes a believable case that researchers can create pills that create the same effects inside our cells that calorie restriction does. As has been repeatedly proved, animals that exist on low calorie diets -- at least one-third less than normal -- live 20% or more longer than their normally fed peers. This isn't unalloyed good news. Very few humans want to live on such restricted diets all their lives.
But calorie restriction doesn't make us live longer through some Calvinist trade-off of happiness for age. It makes us live longer because it changes certain processes in our cells. Stipp explains that the search for the youth pill involves understanding those mechanisms and then finding chemicals that will promote or block those processes.
Stipp is a terrific reporter and writer who makes the science feel accessible, even for those of us who last took biology before the chemical structure of RNA was decoded. He is particularly endearing when describing research subjects like naked mole rats, -- long lived, long-toothed African rodents that live in colonies underground -- and a worm called a nematode that is transparent and reveals "a rich inner life."
The book acknowledges that we're still some years away from having a youth pill. But it makes a strong case that one or more will be developed and they will do a lot more to prolong and improve our lives than curing cancer or heart disease ever will.

WSJ fails to deliver in story on farmers and derivatives

Former NYT reporter Edmund Andrews delivered a devastating critique of a Tuesday WSJ story that purported to show that new financial regulations would hurt farmers. http://bit.ly/9ubTCE
As a former WSJ reporter I was shocked to read through the whole story and find no evidence of actual impacts. Worse, there wasn't even any cogent explanation of how any individual farmer was likely to be directly impacted.
I admired the Journal for going beyond the usual Washington-bureau article about vote-counting on the Senate floor and whether there are enough Republicans signing on to make it a bi-partisan bill. We need more stories that look at the real world impact of what Washington does.
But it's disappointing when a reporter goes out to Nebraska, talks to some pretty intelligent farmers, dealers and co-op managers and comes back with a story that doesn't actually demonstrate that the legislation will have any impact. At the least, the reporter should have found someone to say that spreads on derivative contracts are likely to rise by two-cents per hundredweight or something. Then we could get some idea of the magnitude of the issue.
As Ed wrote, the headline certainly led readers to expect more than the story delivered.

WSJ vs NYT on Teach-for-America Success

How different can two factual articles be?
When the NYT and WSJ cover the same subject, they sometimes display completely different world views.
The Wall Street The Journal's op-ed page and NY Times news pages had pieces on Teach for America in the past three days. It was fascinating to see the differences in their conclusions. The Journal evaluated TFA based on its results for kids. The Times evaluated it based on its results for teachers.
It's a classic example of differing world views: do organizations exist for their workers? Or for their customers? Twenty-year-old TFA recruits top college students from liberal-arts colleges, trains them for five weeks and offers them to underachieving school districts. Despite widespread teacher-union opposition, some 4,500 will start work in 100 terrible school districts next fall.
The Journal loves TFA because it believes the talented college grads that TFA recruits to teaching help kids learn. At the same time, TFA disrupts the teachers' unions that play a huge role in the Democratic Party.
The Times is deeply skeptical about TFA because Ivy League kids are signing up, but they aren't committing to a lifetime as teachers.
As is typical in analyses of education, each cites studies to support its view of the positives or questions about TFA. (Having covered education for the Journal for a few years in the 1990's, I can attest that education statistics generally are either slippery or slipshod, and often both. There's no SEC or GAAP for education statistics, and they tend to be flimsy. Experiments are seldom replicable)
The Journal piece emphasized TFA's concentration on improving performance of students. Money quote from the WSJ article by Naomi Schaefer Riley, former editorial page writer there:
"The results are clear. A 2008 Urban Institute study found that "On average, high school students taught by TFA corps members performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially in math and science, than peers taught by far more experienced instructors. The TFA teachers' effect on student achievement in core classroom subjects was nearly three times the effect of teachers with three or more years of experience." A new study from the University of North Carolina found that middle school math students taught by TFA teachers received the equivalent of an extra half-year of learning."
The Times is dubious: "Research indicates that generally, the more experienced teachers are, the better their students perform, and several studies have criticized Teach for America’s turnover rate.
“I’m always shocked by the hullaboo, given Teach for America’s size” — about 0.2 percent of all teachers — “and its mixed impact,” said Julian Vasquez Heilig, a University of Texas professor. Dr. Heilig and Su Jin Jez of California State University, Sacramento, recently published a critical assessment after reviewing two dozen studies. One study cited indicated that “by the fourth year, 85 percent of T.F.A. teachers had left” New York City schools.
Predictably, the quotes in the Times are from profs at a teachers college -- Cal State Sacramento. The critique is about lifetime job commitment - not what most parents and kids are concerned about.
If TFA is right, teachers colleges and the job-security concerns of their graduates are the problem rather than the solution.
The Journal quotes are from a Washington think tank. The Journal cites analysis of student performance. It's arguably politically motivated, but it's looking at the impact on students.

There's also an interesting side issue -- how to evaluate TFA vs. the Peace Corps, a comparison TFA encourages.
The Journal: "TFA received a federal appropriation of $21 million last year, and it has asked for $50 million in fiscal year 2011 Given that the Peace Corps gets $350 million, Ms. Kopp suggests "this seems like a no-brainer . . . " But so far, TFA has a big zero next to it in President Obama's budget. Almost no Republicans have signed on to support it because of budget deficit concerns.

The Times points out that TFA's attractions aren't altogether eleemosynary:
"Teach for America has become an elite brand that will help build a résumé, whether or not the person stays in teaching. And in a bad economy, it’s a two-year job guarantee with a good paycheck; members earn a beginning teacher’s salary in the districts where they’re placed. For Mr. Cullen, who will teach at a Dallas middle school, that’s $45,000 — the same he’d make if he’d taken a job offer from a financial public relations firm."
Again, the Journal focuses on the outcome (cost effectiveness) and the Times focuses on the workers.

The Journal has certainly created anxiety among its fans in the past year over whether political concerns color its coverage. But in this case, the Times seems to have gone way out of its way to critique TFA, and the Journal's analysis looks solid.