The problem with our democracy isn't gerrymandering. It's integers

(This week, in the wake of the recent U.S. elections, I take a detour from my usual topics to apply a little math to our election system.)

As everyone knows, the U.S. Congress has grown increasingly un-representative. We have states where the population is evenly split among Democrats and Republications, but where–thanks to partisan gerrymandering–the number of House members is grossly skewed in favor of one party. Even without gerrymandering, voters for the losing side in many House districts feel, justifiably, that they have no representation in Congress.

The solution is surprisingly simple. We can save it with a little math. It's not even that complicated. The problem, as I explain below, is integers.

The New York Times just published an argument that the House of Representatives is too small. They point out that the House grew every decade until 1911, when its size was frozen at 435. The Times says that after 100 years of population growth, "America needs a bigger House."

Fair enough, but how do we fix it? The Times argues, oddly enough, that the right number is 593 representatives. Why? Because 593 is the cube root of the total U.S. population. Curiously, many other democracies follow a cube root rule, first described in this 1972 paper by Rein Taagepera. The legislature of Denmark, for instance, has 179 representatives for a population of 5.77 million, and 179 cubed is 5,375,339. Canada has 37 million people and 333 members of their House of Commons, a near-perfect example of this rule, if you ignore their 105 senators.

The first thing to point out is that the NY Times got the math a little bit wrong. The current U.S. population is 329 million, for which the cube root is 690. So if we keep the Senate at 100 members, then we need 590 Representatives in the House, not 593. But the Canadian model doesn't count their senate, so perhaps we need 690 Representatives. But that's a small quibble.

The real problem, though, is that expanding the House by 35% won't address the fundamental problems of our democracy. The Times observed, correctly, that a single representative can't stay in touch with 750,000 people. Increasing the size of the House to 593 will reduce that number to 550,000, which will hardly help. The framers of the Constitution wanted one representative for every 30,000 people, by the way, but that would yield a ridiculously large House today.

The real solution is to get rid of our reliance on integers. Let me explain.

The root of our problem is that each Congressional district elects just one person, in a winner-take-all election where you only need to win by one vote. This means that the losers end up with a Representative who simply doesn't represent them. This means that, in a close election, 49.9% of the voters can be effectively disenfranchised. Even in lopsided victories, where 70% of the voters support the winner, the remaining 30% are stuck with someone who doesn't represent them.

The solution: elect TWO representatives from each Congressional district, and award them each a fractional vote in Congress. Each of the top two vote-getters would have a Congressional vote that is proportional to the number of voters who supported them. Thus if a district elects a Democrat (D) with 55% of the vote, and the losing Republican (R) gets 45%, both of them go to Congress, and D gets 0.55 votes while R gets 0.45 votes.

This will double the size of the House, to 830 members. It will also completely fix partisan gerrymandering. Here's why: imagine a state that is 50-50 Democrat and Republican, but that has packed one district so that 80% of its voters are Republican, allowing it to create three majority-Democratic districts that are 60-40 in favor of D's. Under the current system, that state has 3 Democrats and 1 Republican in Congress. (We have many states that look just like this under our current system.)

Under my new system, our hypothetical state would send 4 D's and 4 R's to Congress. The R from the "packed" district would get 0.8 votes, and the R's from the other three districts would get 0.4 votes each. The entire state delegation would therefore have 0.8 + 0.4 + 0.4 + 0.4 = 2 Republican votes, and 0.2 + 0.6 + 0.6 + 0.6 = 2 Democratic votes, accurately reflecting the overall population of the state.

Gerrymandering is nearly impossible in this system. Packing voters into one district would simply increase the voting power of the majority member for that district, while reducing the voting power of other members of the same party by a corresponding amount.

My system is perfectly legal, and Congress could create it with a simple bill, just as they increased the size of the House in the past. No Constitutional amendment is necessary.

What if more than two people are running for a House seat, as is often the case? We could divide the single House vote proportionally among the top two vote-getters, ignoring the third parties. (States could also use ranked-choice voting to re-apportion the votes of the losing candidates.) A nice side effect is that "protest" votes for third parties wouldn't have such a devastating effect on either of the top candidates. What if only one person ran for a seat? Easy: he or she would get a full vote in Congress rather than a fractional vote. What if the top two vote-getters were from the same party? No problem there, they would both go to Congress, and their party would get a full vote from that district.

Of course, this would make counting votes in the House a bit more complicated. The majority and minority whips wouldn't be able to simply count integers; instead, they'd have to add up the fractional votes of their 435 members. But why should we limit ourselves to a voting system that only uses first grade math? In the U.S., fractions and decimals are covered by the fourth grade. I think Congress can handle that.

There. I've now fixed our democracy. Time to get back to science.

Starving science: a petty, shortsighted national "strategy"

This image taken approximately 438 miles above the earth's

surface provides a spectacular view of the Lena Delta in

Russia. Image courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, whose

 images are all in the public domain.

150 years ago, passenger pigeons were so numerous that they could black out the sky when their flocks passed overhead. The last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died in the Cinncinnati Zoo in 1914. All we have left of this species are specimens held in museum collections.

One of the most extensive collections of animal specimens in the world is managed by a tiny unit of the U.S. Geological Survey, called the Biological Survey Unit. A small group of curators maintains a collection of more than one million animals collected over the past 130 years by scientists and ordinary citizens across the U.S.

Now, for reasons that are at best mysterious, the USGS is planning to eliminate the Biological Survey Unit. The BSU has a very small budget, a mere $1.6 million out of the USGS's budget of $1.1 billion, and an even tinier fraction of the country's $4.4 trillion budget.

What the heck are they thinking? Shutting down the Biological Survey Unit won't save enough money in the vast government budget to even be noticed, but the loss of its precious collections will reverberate through the decades. Does someone in the USGS or the Department of the Interior have a grudge against the BSU? Or are they just petty?

The BSU's collection resides in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, one of the great museums of its type in the world. The collection contains some 370,000 birds, 300,000 mammals, and 390,000 amphibians and reptiles, many of them dating back to the late 19th century. These specimens represent a unique view back in time, illustrating the natural history of our continent and the animals that have lived on it over the years.

It's only through collections like this that scientists can understand how human activities have affected our natural world. For example, historical collections of eggs from wild birds allowed scientists to document the thinning of eggshells caused by the pesticide DDT, which was made famous by Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring.

Just a few weeks ago, the presidents of three of the leading animal science societies in the U.S. wrote a letter to Science magazine pleading for the USGS to continue funding its Biological Survey Unit. So far, the USGS has not responded to them.

Museum collections may not be as flashy as some areas science (perhaps we need a new Indiana Jones movie to raise their profile), but that doesn't mean they are not critically important to our understanding of the natural world. Once the BSU disappears, it's not coming back: the curators will retire or find other jobs, and the collection will become inaccessible, even if it still exists somewhere in the bowels of the Smithsonian.

The plan to shutdown the Biological Survey Unit seems indicative of a larger trend of neglecting investment in our future. It may reflect a particular form of neglect by the USGS, as pointed out by Cynthia Ramotnik in a 2015 article. It also reflects the severe cut to the USGS budget proposed by Donald Trump last month: he requested a total budget of $860 million, which represents a 20% cut from the current year's budget of $1.08 billion. But in the case of the BSU, the budget impact is so small that it seems worse than neglectful to cut it: it is shortsighted and petty.

When asked by the Washington Post, former House speaker (and current Trump enthusiast) Newt Gingrich admitted that the cutting the BSU's $1.6 million budget wouldn't matter to the larger budget, but he then went on to comment, “if this collection is that valuable, there are probably 20 billionaires that could endow it.”

Great: let's hand over our national resources to billionaires, and if they're not interested, well, it must be that the resources weren't that valuable in the first place. Not.

This is ridiculous. We're still a rich country, and we shouldn't be eliminating projects like the Biological Survey Unit just to give a massive tax cut to rich people, or just to make a point about budget cutting, or whatever the reason that the USGS and the Department of the Interior might offer. (The USGS hasn't responded to my inquiries.) Maintaining our museum collections not only shows respect for the thousands of people who built them over the years, but it benefits the countless scientists, educators, school children, and others who will learn from these collections in the future.

Let's speak up for research that saves lives

In this week’s Science magazine, former Republican Congressman John Porter calls on scientists to “speak up for research.” Well, I’m all in.

We’re in the midst of a remarkable stream of scientific and medical advances, spurred by dramatic advances in biotechnology, computing, and miniaturization. Our knowledge of biology has led to amazing leaps in our understanding of aging, immune responses, inherited diseases,  and brain function, to name but a few. And yet we're cutting science funding, year after year. As Porter writes,

“the general public, and in particular elected officials, have failed to embrace the promise of cutting-edge science as a means to improve health and the economy.” 

Somehow we found (or borrowed) $2 trillion dollars to spend on wars in far-off countries whose citizens don’t like us - a cost that will at least double before we’re done paying the bills. And some politicians this past week were demanding that we invest billions more in Iraq, money that we don’t have. It's touching how concerned they are for the citizens of Iraq.

Meanwhile, eight of the top 10 causes of death in the U.S. are diseases that we might cure through better research, including heart disease (#1), cancer (#2), Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and kidney disease. We already have far better treatments for these diseases than we had a few decades ago, thanks to our past investments in biomedical research.

In this column over the past few years, I’ve highlighted just a tiny sample of the remarkable advances coming out of the scientific world, such as

• a breakthrough cure for some forms of leukemia; 
• a new, less invasive prenatal test for Down Syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities; 
• stem cell treatments that can repair damaged hearts; 
• a promising breakthrough in Alzheimer’s treatment; and
• stem cells to treat blindness. 

Curing these diseases will not only save lives - it will also save money. A nonpartisan study revealed that publicly-funded research generates returns of 25 to 40 percent a year. And former Congressman Porter explains,

“If a treatment became available in 2015 that delayed the onset of Alzheimer's disease by 5 years annual Medicare and Medicaid spending would be $42 billion less by 2020.”

Without investment in research, though, these treatments will never arrive. Meanwhile, we’re spending $400 billion (13 times the entire annual NIH budget) on a new fighter plane that won’t even be ready to fly for another 5 years, after which the Pentagon says it will cost $850 billion to keep it going. We’re spending billions more on military equipment that even the Pentagon doesn’t want, such as the Global Hawk drone program, which Congress is forcing the Air Force to keep.

Obviously, the military-industrial complex has better lobbyists than we in the biomedical research world have.

We don’t invest in research just to make money, though. Make no mistake: biomedical research saves lives. We’ve effectively cured many types of childhood cancer such as retinoblastoma and Hodgkins lymphoma, but there are over 200 types of cancer, most of them still needing far more research.

We need elected leaders with the vision to re-examine our priorities and invest in the future. The U.S. scientific research enterprise remains the envy of the world, but it won’t stay that way long if we keep cutting it as we have been.

How much should we invest in biomedical research? Let me put some numbers on the table - not that we can get there overnight, but we could set these as goals and and then figure out how to get there.  How about allocating 2% of our total budget - $75 billion - for all of our biomedical (NIH) and basic science (NSF) research?  NIH’s budget is currently about 4 times the size of NSF; if we keep that ratio then NSF would get $15B and NIH $60B. That’s about twice what we spend now. We've done this before: Congressman Porter and his colleagues advocated a doubling of the NIH budget between 1998 and 2003, and we could do it again.

Congressman Porter wants us to speak up for research. Let’s start now.

GMOs versus antibiotic overuse: which is the greater evil?

People who worry about eating healthy food (and who doesn't?) have recently been very worried about genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.  Meanwhile, industrial livestock producers feed enormous quantities of antibiotics to cows, chickens, and bigs, as a way to make them grow faster.  Which of these practices poses the greater risk?

This one isn't even close. The threat of GMOs pales in comparison to the overuse of antibiotics, which are creating dangerous superbugs that already kill tens of thousands of people each year.

The anti-GMO forces have been making a big push recently to add "GMO" labels to foods. This particularly campaign is based on the hard-to-disagree-with notion that more information is always good. People have a right to know what they're eating, right?

Well, sure. But how many people out there understand what genetic engineering means? How many understand that virtually all the food we eat is genetically modified - including the most wholesome organic foods? Unless you live out in the wilderness eating wild nuts and berries, you're eating plants and animals that have been genetically modified over the centuries by humans, by selecting which ones to plant and breed.  The term GMO is meant to refer to something else:  precise genetic engineering, designed to alter just one or two genes. This creates genetic changes that are far less dramatic than the ones that turned ancient maize into today's modern corn, for example.  Thus the problem with "GMO" label is that it won't inform people unless they have a solid grounding in molecular genetics.

Teosinte is un-modified corn. Not so yummy, is it?

GMO opponents claim that GMOs are bad for you.  So far at least, there's no scientific evidence for this claim.  If GMOs were so bad, people would be dropping like flies every night after dinner.

But in the world of infectious disease, a different, far more deadly scenario is unfolding. Drug-resistant bacteria are spreading fast. Scientists have been warning for years that we are blindly marching towards an era when people start to die of previously treatable bacterial infections. Antibiotics, one of the greatest technological advances in the history of civilization, are losing their effectiveness.

Last week, the Washington Post reported that "nightmare bacteria" are real and on the rise.  In the U.S. alone, over 23,000 people died last year as a result of drug-resistant bacterial infections, according to the CDC. The CDC report implicated the use of antibiotics in animals as one of the primary causes.

Also last week, the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health issued a report looking at how we've responded to report 5 years ago that recommended ways "to curb the threats to human health posed by modern industrial agriculture practices." How have we done? According to Dr. Robert Lawrence, director of the Center:

"There has been an appalling lack of progress.  The failure to act by the USDA and FDA, the lack of action or concern by Congress, and continued intransigence of the animal agriculture industry have made all of our problems worse."

Can the FDA regulate antibiotics in livestock? Not really, thanks to intensive lobbying by industry. One of the authors of the Hopkins report commented that the FDA is “almost pleading with industry to make voluntary changes.”

But industry isn't going to do this on their own, and so far the government has been utterly ineffective.  The study points out that:

"Congress has killed every effort to restrict the feeding of farm animals the same antibiotics used in human medicine ...  even as antibiotics have grown less effective in treating infection."

So listen up, GMO alarmists: you're protesting the wrong thing. If you really want people to eat healthier food, start raising Cain over the use of antibiotics in livestock.  If you want labels on our food, insist on labels showing whether our food animals were raised antibiotic-free.  Stop worrying about a hypothetical fear of a few genetic changes in soybeans, and worry instead about the very real rise of superbugs.  You're right to worry about how we raise our food - you're just looking in the wrong place.

Alternative medicine quacks show their greedy side

Congress is on holiday this month, but the lobbyists are baiting their hooks, planning their strategies for how to get more money for themselves.

A growing lobby is Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) providers, who have discovered a new opportunity to extract even more money from patients than they do already. They want the government to force insurance providers to pay for quack treatments, regardless of whether or not the treatments work. Any attempt to require evidence, they argue, amounts to discrimination.

Discrimination? Yes! We must not allow the government to exclude health care providers just because those providers don't cure anything.  The CAMmers argument boils down to this: we have patients who want our services.  The patients like us. In some cases, thanks to lobbying at the state level, we even have state-approved licenses. Therefore insurance companies must pay for our services.

Neat.

To be specific, the CAMmers are lobbying furiously to try to protect a special clause in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) that promises them a fertile new ground for making money from vulnerable patients.

The strategy is simple: require the government to fund any treatment that a patient wants, and dress this up as "patient choice."  Then if insurance companies resist paying for ineffective treatments, accuse them of discriminating against the poor, hapless "integrative medicine" providers.

Thus through a diabolical twist of illogic, if Obamacare doesn't cover homeopathy, or naturopathy, or acupuncture, or magnetic energy healing, or any other so-called alternative therapy, it's discrimination.

The mind boggles.

Why is this an issue now?  Because, unbeknownst to most people outside the Washington beltway, two pro-CAM lobbying groups slipped a clause into the ACA, section 2706, that attempts to force insurance providers to cover a wide range of quack practices.  This section requires that insurers

"shall not discriminate with respect to participation under the plan or coverage against any health care provider who is acting within the scope of that provider's license or certification under applicable state law."

Sounds harmless, right?  Well, no.  This language was added to the ACA by Senator Tom Harkin, after heavy lobbying by the American Chiropractic Association and the Integrative Healthcare Policy Consortium.  In fact, it is virtually certain that lobbyists wrote the section, and Harkin simply inserted it into the law. The IHPC is a lobbying group dedicated to obtaining more government money for homeopathy, naturopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, and a raft of other ineffective medical practices.

Section 2706 opens the door to anyone who provides what they claim is health care - no matter how ridiculous the claim - to file a lawsuit claiming discrimination if an insurance company won't pay for their services.  You could start offering dried bird poop for arthritis, call it "avian nature therapy," and if an insurer won't pay for it, you can sue.

Some in Congress have realized how truly bad an idea this is, and just a few weeks ago, a new bill was introduced to get rid of it, HR 2817.  The American Medical Association supports the new bill. This has some CAM proponents alarmed.

Over at the Huffington Post, John Weeks, an outspoken apologist for questionable medical practices, offers the predictable, whining claim that this is all about "discrimination" by legitimate health care providers (the big, bad AMA) against poor, defenseless integrative medicine providers.

Make no mistake: this is all about greed.  The CAM industry sees Obamacare as a chance to reap huge profits, by forcing insurance companies to pay for ineffective treatments, including many that are wildly implausible.

Homeopaths, naturopaths, acupuncturists, reiki practitioners, energy healers, and other CAM practitioners don't want to subject their methods to rigorous tests of effectiveness.  They know that their methods have failed scientific scrutiny, time and time again.  So now they want to force health care providers to pay for anything the patient wants. "Our patients believe us," they argue, "so pay us."

Forcing health care providers to pay for anything a patient wants, even if it doesn't work, is guaranteed to drive up costs, without any benefit to patients.  Let's ditch this bogus "discrimination" clause in the ACA, and insist that all medical care be held to the same high, scientifically rigorous standards.

Congress is killing medical research

Congress is killing medical research.  The tragedy is that they don't want to, but they may do it anyway.

While the ridiculous posturing about the U.S. budget deficit drags on, seemingly without end, biomedical research in the U.S. is crumbling.  Congress's chronic inability to pass a budget, and especially the delays this year, are deeply damaging the core of our entire biomedical research enterprise: the National Institutes of Health.

Outside the beltway, the current battle over the budget probably looks like the usual blustering drama that Congress has been engaged in for years.  Somehow they always come up with another budget, don't they?  They'll tout it as a compromise where no one is very happy, and we move on to the next fight.  Business as usual, right?

Wrong.  There are very real consequences to Congress's inaction, and they are happening right now.  The "continuing resolution" that Congress passed in the fall, which allowed the government to avoid a shutdown, only runs until March.  It includes a 10% across-the-board budget cut to everything.  That includes most of the critical medical research in the U.S.  

Every year, many NIH projects end and many others begin.  (Most only last 3 or 4 years.)  But not this year.  Because of the budget shenanigans, NIH has been forced to cut or delay funding to almost all new projects.  In other words, biomedical research that has already gone through rigorous peer review and been given top priority is on hold.  And just to be clear: these are only the best projects.  80-85% of projects submitted to NIH, many of them excellent, don't make the cut because NIH just doesn't have enough funding for them.

While the budget is in limbo, many talented students, postdoctoral fellows, and research scientists who might work on these projects - some of them just beginning their careers in science - will have to find other work.  Some will go to industry, and some may leave science for another field.  Some of them won't come back.  This is a loss that is hard to measure.

For readers who might think I'm asking for a lot, think again.  The entire NIH budget comes to about $31 billion, which supports research on hundreds of diseases.  The total U.S. budget last year was 3,729 billion (3.7 trillion), so the NIH budget is less than 1% of the total.  A 10% cut from the NIH budget (the so-called "sequester" plan) would save 0.08% of the federal budget.  This matters not a whit in the overall budget debate - but it would be a huge blow to biomedical research, crippling some research programs for years to come.

And for those who want to look at this from an economic perspective , NIH funding is a terrific investment.  A nonpartisan study in 2000 concluded: 

"Publicly funded research in general generates high rates of return to the economy, averaging 25 to 40 percent a year." 

The same report provided detailed examples showing about how NIH-funded work saves billions of dollars per year in health care costs.  But keep in mind that most of these benefits don't appear for many years.  The private sector simply won't make such long-term investments.

If you are reading this, you either already benefit from medical research, or you will some day.  Even if you are in perfect health, someone close to you probably uses a treatment that was supported by NIH. Virtually every major medical center in the United States depends on this funding.  There are few investments with broader impact, and broader public support, than biomedical research.

Does Congress really want to kill medical research?  I think the answer is very clearly no.  The damage to our biomedical research enterprise is entirely unintentional: it's collateral damage in the never-ending partisan fights that consume Washington these days.  Those fights are about power and politics, not science and medicine.  Everyone, even the most intransigent Congressperson, wants better treatments for cancer, heart disease, genetic diseases, infections, and the many other illnesses that afflict us.

So I'm asking the leaders of Congress (yes, I'm talking to you, Congressman John Boehner and Senator Harry Reid) to put aside the fighting for a few minutes.  Bring up the NIH budget and pass it.  Don't cut it by 10% (the "sequester" plan), which would be devastating to biomedical research and would save only 0.08% of the budget.  Don't bundle it into some omnibus "grand bargain" that everyone knows is neither grand nor a bargain.

If they will simply vote on it, I predict that both houses of Congress will pass the NIH budget with overwhelming majorities, and for a brief moment, the country might even admit that Congress was doing its job.  I'll pledge right here to write a blog post titled "Congress delivers a victory to the American people."  So go ahead and do it.  I dare you.

[Disclosure: Like most biomedical scientists in the U.S., I receive funding for my research from NIH.  And also like most biomedical scientists, all of my lab's discoveries are freely shared with the public.]