Now that we are in the AI era, when I ask Google a question it no longer begins with sponsored links or a list of websites based on perceived value algorithms. Rather, it begins with an AI Overview.
From the earliest days of the Covid epidemic it was suspected that the Covid virus or organism was created in a lab in Wuhan, China. This was flatly denied by Dr. Fauci, the CDC and other spokespersons. Voices that questioned "the company line" were squashed.
Once in a while we (the public) would hear references to what struck me as a strange phrase: Gain of Function research. We've heard it for years now, but frankly, I never really understood what it meant.
This week, with Dr. Fauci on the hot seat in DC, it seemed time to understand what this phrase meant, since it feels like a central feature of this story.
When I asked Google what it was, here is what was delivered to me:
Gain-of-function research is medical and biological study that genetically alters an organism to give it new or enhanced abilities, such as increased potency, wider host ranges, or faster transmission. It is used broadly across science to understand basic cell functions, create helpful products like insulin, and prepare for future viral outbreaks. However, when applied to dangerous pathogens, it sparks major safety debates over the risk of accidental leaks.
Core Concepts and Goals
Genetic alteration: Changes an organism's DNA or RNA in a lab or through selective growth to add a trait.
General applications: Helps design vaccines, map out disease targets, and build better medicines.
Everyday examples: Modifying bacteria to produce medical insulin or altering crops to resist bad weather and pests.
Safety and Controversy High-risk subset: Focuses on pathogens with pandemic potential by making viruses deadlier or easier to catch. Dual-use dilemma: Provides crucial insights for stopping real-world outbreaks, but carries the inherent biological risk of creating or releasing a severe contagion.
I suppose we should not be surprised that governments are doing this kind of research. As Dylan wrote in his 1982 song "License to Kill": "Man thinks 'cause he rules the earth he can do with it as he please // And if things don't change soon, he will"
The surprise is how totalitarian-like the efforts were to force the public to "accept" the story that this was not a lab leak and then smother us with mask mandates and isolation, shutting down of schools. Covid-19 was essentially a bad flu virus.
The whole Wuhan event makes me want to write a short story about a group of virions (singular for a virus cell) that are tired of being genetically altered in this foreign laboratory. The have meetings and discuss how to escape. In the end, one of the virions gets tired of the meetings and starts a new group called "Take Action." In the end, he concludes that meetings and protests aren't working, but clings to the hope that he might be able to escape on his own. His motive, he says, is this: "The world needs to know what is going on here."
Like most avid readers I read when I can, and never as much as I'd like. In 2010 I carried around with me a borrowed Spring 2008 edition of The Paris Review, chiefly with the purpose of reading a fascinating interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, author of Remains of the Day,which I then wrote about here.
Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-born British novelist and one of the most acclaimed contemporary writers in English literature. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 for works that, in the Swedish Academy’s words, uncover “the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” The first time I wrote about him here was in 2010
A 3-Day Ride with Ryder: Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled Is an Achievement of the First Order When a world-famous pianist returns home to perform an important concert, he is forced to come to terms with who he really is. Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled has the feel of a cross between Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and the magical realism of Jorge Luis Borges. Like each of these authors, he has created a work that defies categorization. https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2019/04/a-3-day-ride-with-ryder-ishiguros.html
In Awe of Ishiguro's The Buried Giant The novel takes place in England in that period after the passing of King Arthur. The story follows an elderly married couple, Axl and Beatrice, who for some reason cannot remember their past, or rather, the memories they've lost touch with are hazy and dark.
Ishiguro Again Shows His Mastery: Never Let Me Go There's something special about the students living at Hailsham, a boarding school in England. At first we don't know what's so special about this school, and neither do the children who grow up there, but eventually a little light streams in and we learn that these children are here for a purpose.
Ishiguro's Klara Is Apparently No Fiction Ishiguro demonstrates once again why he is considered one of the great writers of our time. The English language has a shortage of superlatives to describe the power of his prose, so I shan't even attempt it.
Interview with David Asch Offers Insights On A.I. Klara and the Sun is about A.I. and David Asch's review demonstrated his deeper understanding of the current status of Artificial Intelligence and where it is headed. I asked permission to pick his brain on this topic and he graciously accepted.
“Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.” —Thich Nhat Hanh
“To live without hope is to cease to live.”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
Yesterday as I listened to a video titled Niall Ferguson Stuns World Leaders at ARC Australia - "Are We The Soviets Now?" some thoughts clicked in my head. Ferguson, a historian from Edinburgh, has much to say about the times we live in. In the past hundred years the massses, who for various reasons have felt abandoned by the Church, how been encouraged to put their faith in the State. Today, this folly has become apparent. His talk is less than 20 minutes long and you can watch it below or follow the URL and listen on YouTube.
What follows here are some excerpts from his talk, with a few of my thoughts added in response.
American politics is geriatric. If you look at the chart on the other side of this slide, the United States is a real outlier because its legislators are also substantially older than those of peer countries.
Joe Biden was president when this was recorded, but it was apparent Donald Trump would be his successor. Each would end their terms at 82. Nancy Pelosi was well advanced and others as well. A friend of mine told me that a local congressperson confided that the worst part is that these people spend 70% of their time getting re-elected (to hold on to power) and 30% actually focused on legislation. Its very difficult to unseat those in office due to the massive name recognition advantage they have over new faces.
The Soviet Union's economy was characterized by the soft budget constraint which meant that state-owned enterprises were under almost no pressure to be economically efficient.That's in fact true of the US federal government too. I spend a lot of my time thinking about US fiscal policy. It's really shocking to observe that this year, for the first time, the United States federal government will spend more on interest payments on the federal debt than on defence.
Even without the massive amounts of grift and fraud, the government's fiscal irresponsibility is apparent to all. The blame game seems more important than fixing any of it.
One of the striking features of life in 1980s Soviet Russia was that nobody believed in the system anymore.
It was a crock and rampant cynicism spread like like an oil slick across the culture.
Fact, as many Americans have died of suicide or drug overdoses in the last 10 years, has died of COVID-19, 1.2 million. If you include the deaths from alcohol abuse, deaths of despair killed more people in the past 10 years in the United States than COVID did. This (above) was the statement that arrested my attention. I've noted it in the past, and have expressed alarm that there have been more overdose deaths each year than all the soldiers who died in Vietnam over the span of ten years. Back then it seemed like we saw in the evening news daily footage of bodybags being loaded onto planes. These news stories produced the pushback against the war that became known as the anti-war movement. Where is the outrage today? What are we doing to end our current tragedy?
Well, Ferguson gives it a context.
What an extraordinary increase there has been in deaths of despair from suicide, alcohol poisoning, or drug overdoses. And if you compare the United States with comparable countries, including Australia, which is in the lower chart, dotted blue line, you see that the United States has a completely unique trend, with an extraordinary upward surge in deaths of despair unlike anywhere else.
Our suicides, overdose deaths and alcohol poisoning among the you should alert us in the same way as those canaries in the mines. Something serious is amiss.
I come from Scotland. We invented the Rust Belt. We did Hillbilly Elegy before J.D. Vance was even born. I remember the east end of Glasgow, they shut down the steelworks, they shut down the shipyards. Glasgow in the 1970s was already a Rust Belt. By the 1980s, deaths of despair was our major export. Anybody seen the movie Trainspotting?
"Deaths of despair." Wow. This is not a nice sound byte. It's a painful reality that few upper crusts think about. Life at the bottom is not something cool.
As I looked at Angus Deaton's work on deaths of despair, and I kept asking myself, why have I seen this before? What does this remind me of? And then I remembered. The only other advanced economy where there has ever been a comparable decline in life expectancy, a comparable increase in particularly male midlife mortality, the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s. And you can see the data here. The extraordinary deterioration in male life expectancy at birth in the Soviet Union compared here with France.
Which leads to Ferguson's doppelganger comparison, our nation's ghostly double being the Soviet Union of 1980.
The explanation in the Soviet case was that people had completely lost their belief in the system and regarded the party as a massive scam. The cynicism was bone deep.
For many, there is still hope. I wish I shared their confidence. Too much of what passes for optimism today is little more than wishful rhetoric. Even here in Duluth, I see few signs that we are willing to confront our deepest problems with the seriousness they deserve. Hope cannot survive indefinitely on slogans. Unless we honestly face the realities before us, we may find ourselves following the same kind of decline and despair that engulfed the Soviet Union in its final years—a society that ignored its accumulating failures until they became impossible to escape.
Related Links
Niall Ferguson on the Breakdown of the Rule of Law
Most of us, if we've been around a while, have received (or at least seen) one of those birthday cards that highlight the various events of your birth year. I don't know if they do this in other countries, but in our country (USA) they have historical events from sports, science, pop culture--music, theater, movies, televsion--general trivia, and an assortment of other noteworthy achievements. It always ends with the most important event: you were born that year.
Somewhere amongst my packrat-clutter of papers and notebooks is a pile of birthday and thank you cards. (Yes, I'm sentimental about these things.) And among these is a "The Year You Were Born" card.
Events from my birth year included the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president, the successful first test of the hydrogen bomb, the Great Smog of London that killed thousands, and the debut of NBC's Today Show. The #1 movie was The Greatest Show on Earth. And, to no one's surprise, the New York Yankees won the World Series.
All this to say that I'm guessing (and I'm willing to be proven wrong) that the Bengali Language Movement in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) was not mentioned on the list of events of my birthday year.
For this reason it seems like an interesting bit of trivia to most of us that was actually of no small consequence for one of the most populated nations in the world.
The Bengali Language Movement centered on protests in Dhaka, where demonstrators were killed while demanding recognition of Bengali as a state language alongside Urdu.
After the 1947 partition of British India, Pakistan consisted of two geographically separated wings: West Pakistan (where Urdu was dominant among the ruling elite) and East Pakistan (where the vast majority spoke Bengali). The central government, based in the west, moved to make Urdu the sole official state language. This was seen in the east as a threat to Bengali linguistic, cultural, and educational rights, as well as to fair access to government jobs and education.
Protests and political organizing against the policy began in 1948 (including early student and political opposition, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s public insistence on Urdu). Tensions escalated in early 1952. On 21 February 1952, students and others in Dhaka defied Section 144 restrictions and marched toward the provincial assembly building. Police opened fire on the demonstrators near the present-day Dhaka University area and elsewhere. Several people were killed; among the widely commemorated “language martyrs” are Abul Barkat, Abdul Jabbar, Rafiq Uddin Ahmed, Abdus Salam, and Shafiur Rahman (with additional deaths reported in related clashes).
Shootings like this have a sobering effect on the masses, consolidating resolve. (I think here of the Kent State shooting, which amplified student protests against the Vietnam War, and the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.)
The Dhaka shootings triggered broader strikes, processions, and mourning. The movement ultimately forced the government to concede ground: Bengali was eventually recognized as a state language of Pakistan (formally in the 1956 constitution). The events became a foundational moment in East Pakistani political consciousness and later contributed to the broader autonomy movement that culminated in Bangladesh’s independence in 1971.
February 21 is observed in Bangladesh as Language Movement Day / Martyrs’ Day (Shaheed Dibosh). In 1999, UNESCO proclaimed it International Mother Language Day in recognition of the sacrifices made to defend linguistic rights. Monuments such as the Shaheed Minar in Dhaka commemorate those killed.
These events are documented in contemporary accounts, Pakistani and Bangladeshi historical records, and later scholarly work on the Language Movement. The core facts—the demand for Bengali’s official status, the 21 February 1952 police firing in Dhaka, and the deaths of protesters—are not in serious dispute. People put their lives on the line to preserve their language.
A couple weekends ago I learned there’s a graveyard not far from here where the parents of Bob Dylan, Abe and Beatty Zimmerman, were laid to rest. I decided to shoot a photo to accompany my blog entry about The Zimmermann Telegram, the book by Barbara Tuchman that I'd previously written about based on her research regarding how the U.S. got into World War One. Unfortunately, as I was writing about the book I realized the spelling was not the same, as you can see. So I slept on it.
The other night as I lay awake on my pillow, I found myself pondering how it is that places where celebrities have been, like our Duluth Armory where a young Bob Dylan saw Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper do their nearly last concert, can become charged with such meaning. Places like the graveyard in Paris where Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison are purportedly disposed, or Woodstock because of the festival it hosted, perhaps against its will, have become shrines.
I also thought about the concept of six degrees of separation and how a tomb, in a sense, puts us in close proximity with a segment of history that has meaning to us in one way or another. Likewise art museums and history museums which let us stand at arm’s length from the bi-products of another's elevated life. By this I mean a life elevated in importance to a certain segment of society.
Examples abound. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The Louvre. The museum at the Indianapolis Speedway where you can stand next to every winning car of the Indy 500. The countless art museums in major cities throughout the world housing paintings by Picasso, images by Warhol and other iconic ghosts of art history.
For those who find the objects of our interests fascinating, our proximity to these people and places in some ways impacts us much like a magnet transforms a pin, when stroked and floated on a film of water, into a compass. Maybe this already has another name but if not, today I call this magnetizing The Zimmerman Effect.
Though I've often been critical of the celebrity worship in our culture, maybe it's something innate in us, in our essence, in the way we're wired, that desires to place people, places and objects on pedestals. There is a sense in which maybe we are even wronging them to do so because they are really just people, places and objects, not gods. It's interesting how our hearts are restless in the pursuit of something higher than ourselves.
Reading this fifteen years later, another thought occurs to me. I can't help but think of a Bible passage that I believe speaks to this phenomenon, Isaiah 6:1-7, which begins, "In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord."
To appreciate this passage it helps to know that the history of Israel was pockmarked with good kings and bad kings, rulers who sought to do right and those who were committed to their idols and sought to kill God's prophets who attempted to bring light to their understanding.
Uzziah was not just a good king, he was a good king who ruled for 50 years. That's a half century. Unfortunately, perhaps due to the pedestal his people placed him on, he crossed an ethical boundary and undermined his legacy. Struck with leprosy, he became an object of shame, anathema.
Some have suggested that the death of Uzziah removed a human focal point, allowing Isaiah to see beyond the throne on earth to the throne in heaven. Whether that is exactly what the text intends, it is a provocative thought and I've spent most of my life looking at it that way.
Perhaps all of our modern shrines—the graves, museums, concert halls, and historic sites—are expressions of something deeper. We are creatures who long to connect with greatness. We visit places where remarkable people once stood because, in some mysterious way, we hope that a little of their significance might rub off on us.
But Isaiah reminds us that even the greatest human figures are only temporary. King Uzziah ruled for more than half a century. For Israel, he was a dominant figure of his age. Yet it was only after Uzziah died that Isaiah wrote, "I saw the Lord." The king on the pedestal had been blocking the Son.
That made me wonder whether this "Zimmerman Effect" points beyond itself. Maybe our fascination with famous people isn't merely celebrity worship. Maybe it reveals a longing for transcendence—a desire to encounter something lasting, something worthy of our admiration. The danger comes when we mistake the signpost for the destination. Graves, museums, and concert halls can remind us of greatness, but they cannot satisfy the deeper hunger that put us on the journey in the first place.
Perhaps the question every pedestal asks is this: Does it lift our eyes higher... or does it stop them there?
Billy Collins was born in New York City in March 1941, two months before Duluth-born Bob Dylan. Collins served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. Renowned for his accessible, conversational style, Collins writes witty, observational poems that transform everyday moments—reading in a hammock, listening to jazz, or pondering ordinary objects—into profound, often humorous reflections.
Billy Collins by Marcelo Noah (Public Domain)
I was introduced to his work through his Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001). "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House" was so apt and so fun that I purchased the whole book.
It can be argued that his career breakthrough came with Questions About Angels (1991), followed by popular collections like Picnic, Lightning (1998), (2001), and Aimless Love (2013).
As Laureate, he launched Poetry 180, introducing contemporary poems to high school students. Collins’s clear language and gentle irony have made him one of America’s most popular poets, bridging literary tradition with broad appeal. Evidently he continues publishing, most recently Dog Show (2025).
* * *
Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House
The neighbors' dog will not stop barking. He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house. They must switch him on on their way out.
The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music, barking, barking, barking,
and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra, his head raised confidently as if Beethoven had included a part for barking dog.
