“Every man has inside himself a
parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.”
-William S. Burroughs
In
1972, Walter Mischel of Stanford University conducted the famous marshmallow
test to measure four-year-old children’s ability to delay gratification. The
deal was that children had to resist eating a marshmallow
for a few minutes while no one else was in the room, then they would be given two
marshmallows. Predictably, many of the children couldn’t hold out, but those
who did were found in follow-up studies to be higher achievers in academics and
careers.
Philip
Zimbardo has spoken about this and other psychology experiments in a series
of TED talks, and he adds the caveat that one can lean too much toward a focus
on future payoffs. He says, “… the optimal temporal mix is what you get from
the past -- past-positive gives you roots. You connect your family, identity
and yourself. What you get from the future is wings to soar to new
destinations, new challenges. What you get from the present hedonism is the
energy, the energy to explore yourself, places, people, sensuality.”
This
balance is difficult enough for individuals to achieve, but the question I
raise here is how the human race is to collectively find such balance. As it is
now, with serious people declaring that we can solve global warming by having
more nuclear energy, they have decided to be like a heroin addict
who switches to crystal meth during a supply crisis.
No
one ever stops to think about what future generations might want. This involves
not only our desire for cheap energy now, but it is also seen in our attitude
to cancer. We know what’s causing it, but when it appears close to us, all we
want is the cure.
Imagine
that tomorrow all the cancer therapy were gone. Perhaps governments just wanted
to devote their resources to education and vaccinations and dental care for the poor. No radiation
treatment, no chemotherapy, no surgery, no MRIs and other fancy diagnostic
tools. A small percentage of the population, most of whom had already lived a
few decades, would just have to quietly leave the stage so that others could
have a good life. Of course, if this were to happen, there would be massive,
instant protests, and in fact, every politician knows cancer treatment is too sacred
to even question like this. Even if cutbacks in health care do occur,
politicians never spin them as reductions in cancer treatment. This is because
we are present-focused. When we were healthy we let governments and
corporations fill up the world with carcinogens and other toxins, but when we
ourselves or our loved ones are sick, we want the cure and we want it now. But
for every day of our healthy lives we accept that industrial pollution and
nuclear accidents will, inevitably, cause thousands of cancers and diseases at
some time in the future, hopefully to no one we know. This death and suffering
is acceptable, while the abandonment of present cancer patients is unthinkable.
And
so the war on cancer is completely focused on treatment and research to find
the cure, a cure which, if it exists, will be available to only a minority of the world’s
population. We wear pink ribbons for breast cancer research and grow mustaches
for prostate cancer research, and every corporation hops on the bandwagon by
promising to support the cause if you just buy their brand (for more on this see the trailer for the documentary Pink Ribbons).
My
favorite example of this excessive sentimentalizing of cancer can be found in
the beautiful parkland of Toronto’s Don Valley. In a spot just behind the
Ontario Science Centre one can now find Lung Cancer Canada Grove,
which is a plaque with a bas-relief of two lungs, surrounded by saplings.
Nowadays, as you enjoy nature, you didn’t ask for it, but you are expected to pause
for a moment to mourn for the fallen soldiers in the war on cancer.
And
yes, I get it. It’s sad. We’ve all lost people to cancer, and most of us will
die of it, but my point is, while we’re all jogging and swimming and cycling
for the cure, we look kind of dumb for not stopping to ask why this is
happening. If you really want to honor the memory of those who have died, think
less about the cure and do something to eliminate the root causes.
We’ve
been led to believe that cancer is natural and unavoidable. Rare mutations
occur, it’s part of the natural process of aging and dying. In any case, we die
of cancer in our later years because now we live longer thanks to medical
science’s vanquishing of other diseases. However, this is only partly true.
This argument can’t account for the increase in childhood cancer and the increasing
rate of cancer in otherwise healthy adults, not to mention the shocking rise in
so many other diseases. The fifty-year-old in 2012 who hasn’t died of infectious disease or accident is exactly the same as the fifty-year-old in 1912 who hadn’t died
of infectious disease or accident, except the former is more likely to have pancreatic cancer at
this age.
In
the 1950s, when atmospheric thermonuclear testing was in full swing, some
scientists predicted an increase in cancer would hit the Northern Hemisphere in
the 1970s, and sure enough it appeared (see Childhood
Cancers by the US National Cancer Institute). Just as this fallout was
decaying away to less harmful levels, the fallout from Chernobyl went around
the world in 1986.
During
the period of bomb testing, one researcher in Missouri had the foresight to collect
thousands of baby teeth, and he tracked strontium 90 levels in the teeth to
health outcomes forty years later. The persons more exposed to bomb fallout had
worse health, and cancer was not the only noticeable health effect.
There
is evidence but no perfect proof of a causal link between cancer and radioactive fallout, and doubters will never be convinced, as its effects have been mixed with the effects
of environmental chemical pollution. Furthermore, people smoke, drink, eat junk
food, and live sedentary lives. Then, when they become unwell, they get x-rays
and CAT scans, and consume pharmaceuticals that contribute to a new health a
problem while fixing another. So it is not only the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco
Company, but also Dupont Chemical and the nuclear divisions of Toshiba and
General Electric that would like to say, “Thank you for smoking.”
The
fetal origins hypothesis was originally focused on the effects of poor
nutrition in utero, but now many
researchers look at the effects of toxins on fetuses and how these exposures condemn
an individual to poor health in adulthood. Toxicity can no longer be
understood by just the effects of chemicals on adults. The really destructive impact
on health has been the exposure of millions of people in utero. A fetus is much more sensitive to toxic chemicals and
radiation, and exposure during early development is irreversible. Even the eggs
inside the fetus (thus the mother’s grandchildren) can be affected.
Cancer
is not the only disease caused by fetal poisoning. Every physiological system
is affected, and the outcomes are plain to see. This is not some future
nightmare. The nightmare happened, and we are living with the results: more
allergies and asthma, more liver and kidney failure, higher rates of obesity,
diabetes, autism, attention deficit, depression, infertility, cardiovascular
diseases and immune disorders. All of these have been traced to fetal exposure
to toxins. Other factors are involved, but a lot of people were inactive
over-eaters in the past too. In the 1960s when I was a child, everyone watched
hours of television every day, ate lots of candy and drank gallons of soft
drinks, but childhood obesity was pretty rare. Something else is needed to explain
why the incidences of these diseases have increased.
Unfortunately,
there is a limit to what can be done for the people already born with ailments
caused by fetal poisoning. Whatever can be done for them has to be balanced
with a moral response to future generations. What Philip Zimbardo said about
individual psychology can be said about collective psychology: the optimal
temporal mix includes a consideration of future consequences. But if that
consideration is only for the future of the self, and not for future
generations, it is as selfish and immoral as the present-focused hedonism of a
drug addict.
I’ll
give the last word to the radioman of the Lucky
Dragon, the Japanese tuna boat that was showered in the fallout of a
nuclear weapon test in 1954. He died of radiation poisoning shortly
afterwards, and his dying wish was not that there would someday be a cure for
radiation sickness. His wish was that he would be the last victim of atomic weapons.
Book summary: We are all shaped by our genetic
inheritance and by the environment we live in. Indeed, the argument about which
of these two forces, nature or nurture, predominates has been raging for
decades. But what about our very first
environment--the prenatal world where we exist for nine months between
conception and birth and where we are more vulnerable than at any other point
in our lives?
In More Than Genes,
Dan Agin marshals new scientific evidence to argue that the fetal environment can
be just as crucial as genetic hard-wiring or even later environment in
determining our intelligence and behavior. Stress during pregnancy, for
example, puts women at far greater risk of bearing children prone to anxiety
disorders. Nutritional deprivation during early fetal development may elevate
the risk of late onset schizophrenia. And exposure to a whole host of
environmental toxins--methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins,
pesticides, ionizing radiation, and most especially lead--as well as maternal
use of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or cocaine can have impacts ranging from
mild cognitive impairment to ADHD, autism, schizophrenia, and other mental
disorders. Agin argues as well that differences in IQ among racial, ethnic, and
socioeconomic groups are far more attributable to higher levels of stress and
chemical toxicity in inner cities--which seep into the prenatal environment and
compromise the health of the fetus--than to genetic inheritance.
