“In the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, bacteria were largely portrayed as infectious and unhealthy. (The idea that you should aspire to and can achieve a germ-free body and environment is still mobilized to sell products from shirts to soaps.) Lynn Margulis saw it differently, and, after viewing the TV show Star Trek, commented acerbically that she “was struck by its silliness. The lack of plants, the machinate landscape, and in the starship, the lack of all nonhuman life-forms seemed bizarre. Humans, if someday they trek in giant spaceships to other planets, will not be alone. In space as on earth, the elements of life, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus and a few others, must recycle. This recycling is no suburban luxury; it is a principle of life from which no technology can deliver us.” Having contributed hugely to how we would understand life in its smallest unit, the cell, she went on to theorize life in its largest expression, collaborating with James Lovelock on the Gaia hypothesis that the planet Earth can be understood as a single self-regulating system. Lovelock, she writes in her book Symbiotic Planet, “pointed out that our planetary environment is homeostatic. Just as our bodies, like those of all mammals, maintain a relatively stable internal temperature despite changing conditions, the earth system keeps its temperature and atmospheric composition stable.” That is, the earth is a grand self-regulating system that modulates the gases in the atmosphere to stabilize temperatures—until human beings in the industrial age emitted so much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that we destabilized the climate. Because of some of Lovelock’s early language and his use of the earth goddess Gaia’s name, his theory was sometimes disparaged on the grounds he’d said the planet was alive. What he had really said was that it was a system sustained and stabilized by the whole of living organisms and inorganic systems. The stories we tell about what nature is are the stories we tell about who we are or should be. Nature is treated as a touchstone for what is genuine; natural used as a term for what is authentic, legitimate, proper. This is often twisted…” — The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit https://a.co/00o1T4TN
Monday, May 4, 2026
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Monday, January 19, 2026
Stop Worrying, and Let A.I. Help Save Your Life
…I am not arguing that we shouldn't aspire to perfection, nor that A.I. in health care should receive a free pass from regulators. A.I. designed to act autonomously, without clinician supervision, should be closely vetted for accuracy. The same goes for A.I. that may be integrated into machines like CT scanners, insulin pumps and surgical robots — areas in which a mistake can be catastrophic and a physician's ability to validate the results is limited. We need to ensure patients are fully informed and can consent to A.I. developers' intended use of their personal information. For patient-facing A.I. tools in high-stakes settings such as diagnosis and psychotherapy, we also need sensible regulations to ensure accuracy and effectiveness.
But as the saying goes, "Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative." In health care, the alternative is a system that fails too many patients, costs too much and frustrates everyone it touches. A.I. won't fix all of that, but it's already fixing some of it — and that's worth celebrating.