In the mid 1990s my beat as a science writer was nuclear energy and radiological health issues. For the Los Angeles Times I visited the Trinity site in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was detonated. For Smithsonian I wrote about nuclear waste disposal. After studying the voluminous research on the health effects of plutonium, I did an article for The Atlantic titled “Atomic Overreaction.” The article pushed back against overheated reporting about plutonium, “the most toxic substance known to man,” according to Ralph Nader.

Closer to home—less than five miles from my house as the crow flies—I visited the radioactive interior of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. Diablo sits above a pretty ocean cove near Avila Beach in the central part of California. Although construction had begun on its two generating units in the late 1960s, it was not until 1985 that the first megawatts of electricity flowed into the grid. Diablo’s commissioning was drawn out, on the one hand, by environmental opposition and public protests, which included mass arrests, and, on the other hand, by the discovery of an offshore geological fault, which prompted seismic reinforcements.

Nestled in the coastal hills, the plant operated for a decade without a hitch, yet many residents distrusted it and wished it weren’t there. I visited Unit 1 during an outage for scheduled maintenance. A photographer took my picture before I went into the containment dome: Draped head to toe in protective white fabric, I looked like a deer in the headlights. The full-body suit was meant to guard me from spot contamination by radioactive substances but not from the ambient radiation, which a dosimeter on my chest kept note of.

The plant’s safety director escorted me around. The reactor, its lid pulled off, ran at a low boil. We stood 100 feet from the open core. I remember the safety director pointing a Geiger counter at a jumble of pipes next to us. “Entirely gamma,” he said, glancing at the counter, referring to the type of radiation. “The rate here isn’t that high, really, but there’s no point in standing around.” We moved away.

“Officially”—so I boasted at the end of my article—“I got a total of six millirems of radiation from my visit to Diablo Canyon, which is on the order of a chest X-ray.” In those days I was the sort of reporter who didn’t mind having an unnecessary X-ray.

Fast forward to the present. My wife and I live in the same house. I’ve had a few chest X-rays over the years, but my health remains good. A second geologic fault was found, but scientists for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission calculated that the power plant could withstand a quake if the fault broke. That is, no additional structural modifications were required. Diablo Canyon hums along, providing 8 to 9 percent of California’s electricity while emitting almost no greenhouse gases. Yet the plant is a dead man walking, because in just three years it is scheduled to close permanently—the first unit in 2024, the second in 2025. In 2015 the owner, Pacific Gas and Electric, working with state and local authorities and environmental groups, decided not to renew the 40-year operating licenses for the twin units.

Nationally, the outlook for nuclear power is not any brighter. Even as it provides about 20 percent of America’s electricity, the atom is fizzling out. Older plants sporadically have closed, and just one new facility has come online since 1996. In Georgia two additional plants are slogging through cost overruns toward completion, but when they open in a year or two they will be the exceptions that prove the rule.

Why is there a rule? Nuclear energy in its civilian garb is innocent of any crime. People may question whether nukes ought to be expanded given the high cost of construction and the nagging matter of waste disposal. Yet to retire existing plants, especially a problem-free facility like Diablo, is sure to aggravate the real crime, the crying shame of climate change. Decarbonize has become the energy watchword of the century, but if you think climate change is really that important, you cannot use the word denuclearize in the same sentence with decarbonize.

Hello, California? With each heat-driven blackout, wildfire conflagration, and doomsday prediction from climatologists, the argument for keeping Diablo open becomes louder. This summer the Sacramento Bee, a statewide newspaper, suggested that closing Diablo would be a mistake. Four of five of my local county supervisors have come out against a shutdown, joining one of my state senators. The state’s Republican delegation in the U.S. Congress is opposed as well.

At the same time, the easing of the pandemic has revived economic activity and demand for electricity. Burning of fossil fuels has surged, not only in California but across the United States and abroad. In Germany and Japan, both of which have resolved to phase out nuclear power, carbon emissions have accelerated and second thoughts about the shutdowns are rumbling, if not yet rife. Even dirty coal is looking good again to stock market investors. And all that was before the war in Ukraine, which has disrupted energy markets worldwide. Germany is now reconsidering the shutdown of its last few plants, and even before the war France decided to double down on nuclear power.

To be sure, my fiercely blue Golden State has been ramping up solar and wind, but no analyst claims that renewable energy will be able to take over Diablo’s contribution by 2025. California has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2045; that means it will offset its greenhouse gas emissions with an equivalent reduction of CO₂ pollution by sequestration or other means. However, the state can deliver on the promise only if it establishes a carbon-free electrical grid. Right now the antiquated grid is maxed out and depends more than ever on plants that run on oil and natural gas.

When the decision to close Diablo was made, critics warned that electrical generation would fall short and that rising greenhouse gas emissions would disrupt the region’s weather. With drought perpetually threatening the state, yesterday’s Cassandras look conservative. “In a cruel twist,” notes the editorial board of the Sacramento Bee, “California needed to burn excess fossil fuels to meet the electricity demand caused by extreme heat that experts say would have been impossible without climate change. That’s right—we need fossil fuels to protect us from the environmental dangers that grew more severe because of our over-reliance on them.”

The crunch that’s looming on the energy horizon is sparking uncomfortable calculations regarding land use. According to a 2021 report by engineers at Stanford and MIT, California’s one remaining nuclear plant, which is fully paid for, occupies just 140 acres. How many acres of new solar panels will be needed to match Diablo’s output? The answer, they approximate, is 90,000.

Or this brainteaser: Which source of power, nuclear or fossil fuels, kills more people? It’s not close. Thousands die each year from breathing carbon particles in the air.

The best spin that can be put on the situation is that the economy has to rob Peter (burn more carbon) in order to make Paul sustainable in the future. President Biden, addressing the awakened appetite for fossil fuels even as his administration promises to go green, acknowledged that it seems “inconsistent.” But will Paul, to mix metaphors, be able to pull a rabbit out of his hat when the time arrives? Right now Paul has nothing up his sleeve but nuclear. The president’s climate plan actually calls for boosting nuclear power, but he doesn’t like to say that in public.

The keep-Diablo argument is so strong that I am more interested in the source of the antipathy on the other side, the revulsion even, that many Americans feel about nuclear energy. It all comes down to fear, of course: the regularly refreshed fear that started with the bomb in 1945.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and radioactive fallout from weapons testing during the 1950s overshadowed the bounties promised by “the peaceful atom.” Struggling with the stigma, civilian nuclear power took hold in the 1960s, but then came Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011). Each succeeding accident was perceived by the news media as a disaster, reigniting the fear. Popular movies, their fingers on the pulse, have played on public anxiety ever since Godzilla, a Japanese monster, emerged from a radioactive nimbus. The China Syndrome, about a scary meltdown at a power plant, uncannily came out at the same time as the Three Mile Island accident. Silkwood (1983) enlisted Meryl Streep as a nuclear whistleblower, a woman contaminated with plutonium, doomed as she does her duty.

Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, makes a better case than I for the rehabilitation of nuclear power. In his 2018 book, Energy: A Human History, Rhodes reviews the toll of the three accidents. The meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania hurt no one, as radioactive releases were minor. Chernobyl, a primitive reactor without a containment dome, killed the Russian responders who tried to put out the burning core and caused additional deaths from cancers in Ukraine, in part because of radioisotopes that got into the milk supply. Fukushima’s toll of destruction came almost exclusively from the tsunami that knocked out the reactors. The radioactive releases in Japan were on the order of those from Three Mile Island. It does seem there was slightly more radioactive release with Fukushima compared with Three Mile Island, according to the World Nuclear Association, but still not enough to cause harm to human health. None of this is to say that the accidents were not alarming. Yet Rhodes concludes: “Nuclear power’s public health record more than compensates for its few occupational accidents. Its limited air pollution combined with its extremely low greenhouse gas emissions and its 24/7 availability more than 90 percent of the time make it easily the most promising single energy source available to cope with twenty-first-century energy challenges.”

Psychologists talk about “availability bias,” the illogical focus on the thing nearest or highest in mind as the basis for making a decision. That nuclear energy, and by extension Diablo Canyon, is unacceptably dangerous is an irrational belief, but it may be insurmountable. In Sacramento, new legislation and environmental waivers would be necessary to keep Diablo open —and would be challenged in court. In San Luis Obispo County, where I live, the bureaucratic forces working to shut the plant have acquired great momentum, like an ocean liner that won’t be turned around. I’ve attended meetings on Zoom of the citizens’ panel that is advising the utility on decommissioning the plant. We are at the “PSDAR stage,” i.e., discussion of the post-shutdown decommissioning activities report. I have to pinch myself when I hear plans to repurpose Diablo Cove in 2040 after the spent fuel rods and radioactive concrete are magically whisked away. A resort hotel is proposed . . . opportunities to rent kayaks . . . a “glamping” business. Yes, why not? No health concerns for families there!

When preparing this essay, I looked at the Wikipedia page for the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. It’s a journalistic no-no to rely on Wikipedia as a sole or even partial source. You must go to the citations at the bottom of the page, and determine if those sources are good, and review them for accuracy yourself. However, there was one citation I didn’t have to check because I had written it myself for Life magazine in 1979. My article was about Three Mile Island and the implications of the accident. I’d gone to the area of the plant with a Life photographer. Naturally, we did not get very close. The perimeter was off-limits. The photographer had to shoot pictures of the cooling towers from the misty-morning distance.

My mention of Diablo in the article was about the seismic risks and construction delays at the site. There was a possibility that Diablo would never open. Of course, I had no idea I would move to the coast of California in 1992 and would live near the plant for 30 years. Recently I looked again at Life’s spooky blue cover. I probably wrote the headline. It was: Judgment Day for Nuclear Power: Is public confidence gone forever? As a journalist, my finger was always on the pulse.

There was a time when the internet was seen as an unequivocal force for social good. It propelled progressive social movements from Black Lives Matter to the Arab Spring; it set information free and flew the flag of democracy worldwide. But today, democracy is in retreat and the internet’s role as driver is palpably clear. From fake news bots to misinformation to conspiracy theories, social media has commandeered mindsets, evoking the sense of a dark force that must be countered by authoritarian, top-down controls.

This paradox—that the internet is both savior and executioner of democracy—can be understood through the lenses of classical economics and cognitive science. In traditional markets, firms manufacture goods, such as cars or toasters, that satisfy consumers’ preferences. Markets on social media and the internet are radically different because the platforms exist to sell information about their users to advertisers, thus serving the needs of advertisers rather than consumers. On social media and parts of the internet, users “pay” for free services by relinquishing their data to unknown third parties who then expose them to ads targeting their preferences and personal attributes. In what Harvard social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism,” the platforms are incentivized to align their interests with advertisers, often at the expense of users’ interests or even their well-being.

This economic model has driven online and social media platforms (however unwittingly) to exploit the cognitive limitations and vulnerabilities of their users. For instance, human attention has adapted to focus on cues that signal emotion or surprise. Paying attention to emotionally charged or surprising information makes sense in most social and uncertain environments and was critical within the close-knit groups in which early humans lived. In this way, information about the surrounding world and social partners could be quickly updated and acted on.

But when the interests of the platform do not align with the interests of the user, these strategies become maladaptive. Platforms know how to capitalize on this: To maximize advertising revenue, they present users with content that captures their attention and keeps them engaged. For example, YouTube’s recommendations amplify increasingly sensational content with the goal of keeping people’s eyes on the screen. A study by Mozilla researchers confirms that YouTube not only hosts but actively recommends videos that violate its own policies concerning political and medical misinformation, hate speech, and inappropriate content.

In the same vein, our attention online is more effectively captured by news that is either predominantly negative or awe inspiring. Misinformation is particularly likely to provoke outrage, and fake news headlines are designed to be substantially more negative than real news headlines. In pursuit of our attention, digital platforms have become paved with misinformation, particularly the kind that feeds outrage and anger. Following recent revelations by a whistle-blower, we now know that Facebook’s newsfeed curation algorithm gave content eliciting anger five times as much weight as content evoking happiness. (Presumably because of the revelations, the algorithm was changed.) We also know that political parties in Europe began running more negative ads because they were favored by Facebook’s algorithm.

Besides selecting information on the basis of its personalized relevance, algorithms can also filter out information considered harmful or illegal, for instance by automatically removing hate speech and violent content. But until recently, these algorithms went only so far. As Evelyn Douek, a senior research fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, points out, before the pandemic, most platforms (including Facebook, Google, and Twitter) erred on the side of protecting free speech and rejected a role, as Mark Zuckerberg put it in a personal Facebook post, of being “arbiters of truth.” But during the pandemic, these same platforms took a more interventionist approach to false information and vowed to remove or limit COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories. Here, too, the platforms relied on automated tools to remove content without human review.

Even though the majority of content decisions are done by algorithms, humans still design the rules the tools rely upon, and humans have to manage their ambiguities: Should algorithms remove false information about climate change, for instance, or just about COVID-19? This kind of content moderation inevitably means that human decision makers are weighing values. It requires balancing a defense of free speech and individual rights with safeguarding other interests of society, something social media companies have neither the mandate nor the competence to achieve.

None of this is transparent to consumers, because internet and social media platforms lack the basic signals that characterize conventional commercial transactions. When people buy a car, they know they are buying a car. If that car fails to meet their expectations, consumers have a clear signal of the damage done because they no longer have money in their pocket. When people use social media, by contrast, they are not always aware of being the passive subjects of commercial transactions between the platform and advertisers involving their own personal data. And if users experience has adverse consequences—such as increased stress or declining mental health—it is difficult to link those consequences to social media use. The link becomes even more difficult to establish when social media facilitates political extremism or polarization.

Users are also often unaware of how their newsfeed on social media is curated. Estimates of the share of users who do not know that algorithms shape their newsfeed range from 27 percent to 62 percent. Even people who are aware of algorithmic curation tend not to have an accurate understanding of what that involves. A Pew Research paper published in 2019 found that 74 percent of Americans did not know that Facebook maintained data about their interests and traits. At the same time, people tend to object to collection of sensitive information and data for the purposes of personalization and do not approve of personalized political campaigning.

They are often unaware that the information they consume and produce is curated by algorithms. And hardly anyone understands that algorithms will present them with information that is curated to provoke outrage or anger, attributes that fit hand in glove with political misinformation.

People cannot be held responsible for their lack of awareness. They were neither consulted on the design of online architectures nor considered as partners in the construction of the rules of online governance.

What can be done to shift this balance of power and to make the online world a better place?

Google executives have referred to the internet and its applications as “the world’s largest ungoverned space,” unbound by terrestrial laws. This view is no longer tenable. Most democratic governments now recognize the need to protect their citizens and democratic institutions online.

Protecting citizens from manipulation and misinformation, and protecting democracy itself, requires a redesign of the current online “attention economy” that has misaligned the interests of platforms and consumers. The redesign must restore the signals that are available to consumers and the public in conventional markets: users need to know what platforms do and what they know, and society must have the tools to judge whether platforms act fairly and in the public interest. Where necessary, regulation must ensure fairness.

Four basic steps are required:

• There must be greater transparency and more individual control of personal data. Transparency and control are not just lofty legal principles; they are also strongly held public values. European survey results suggest that nearly half of the public wants to take a more active role in controlling the use of personal information online. It follows that people need to be given more information about why they see specific ads or other content items. Full transparency about customization and targeting is particularly important because platforms can use personal data to infer attributes—for example, sexual orientation—that a person might never willingly reveal. Until recently, Facebook permitted advertisers to target consumers based on sensitive characteristics such as health, sexual orientation, or religious and political beliefs, a practice that may have jeopardized users’ lives in countries where homosexuality is illegal.

• Platforms must signal the quality of the information in a newsfeed so users can assess the risk of accessing it. A palette of such cues is available. “Endogenous” cues, based on the content itself, could alert us to emotionally charged words geared to provoke outrage. “Exogenous” cues, or commentary from objective sources, could shed light on contextual information: Does the material come from a trustworthy place? Who shared this content previously? Facebook’s own research, said Zuckerberg, showed that access to COVID-related misinformation could be cut by 95 percent by graying out content (and requiring a click to access) and by providing a warning label.

• The public should be alerted when political speech circulating on social media is part of an ad campaign. Democracy is based on a free marketplace of ideas in which political proposals can be scrutinized and rebutted by opponents; paid ads masquerading as independent opinions distort that marketplace. Facebook’s “ad library” is a first step toward a fix because, in principle, it permits the public to monitor political advertising. In practice, the library falls short in several important ways. It is incomplete, missing many clearly political ads. It also fails to provide enough information about how an ad targets recipients, thus preventing political opponents from issuing a rebuttal to the same audience. Finally, the ad library is well known among researchers and practitioners but not among the public at large.

• The public must know exactly how algorithms curate and rank information and then be given the opportunity to shape their own online environment. At present, the only public information about social media algorithms comes from whistle-blowers and from painstaking academic research. Independent agencies must be able to audit platform data and identify measures to remedy the spigot of misinformation. Outside audits would not only identify potential biases in algorithms but also help platforms maintain public trust by not seeking to control content themselves.

Several legislative proposals in Europe suggest a way forward, but it remains to be seen whether any of these laws will be passed. There is considerable public and political skepticism about regulations in general and about governments stepping in to regulate social media content in particular. This skepticism is at least partially justified because paternalistic interventions may, if done improperly, result in censorship. The Chinese government’s censorship of internet content is a case in point. During the pandemic, some authoritarian states, such as Egypt, introduced “fake news laws” to justify repressive policies, stifling opposition and further infringing on freedom of the press. In March 2022, the Russian parliament approved jail terms of up to 15 years for sharing “fake” (as in contradicting official government position) information about the war against Ukraine, causing many foreign and local journalists and news organizations to limit their coverage of the invasion or to withdraw from the country entirely.

In liberal democracies, regulations must not only be proportionate to the threat of harmful misinformation but also respectful of fundamental human rights. Fears of authoritarian government control must be weighed against the dangers of the status quo. It may feel patermalistic for a government to mandate that platform algorithms must not radicalize people into bubbles of extremism. But it’s also paternalistic for Facebook to weight anger-evoking content five times more than content that makes people happy, and it is far more paternalistic to do so in secret.

The best solution lies in shifting control of social media from unaccountable corporations to democratic agencies that operate openly, under public oversight. There’s no shortage of proposals for how this might work. For example, complaints from the public could be investigated. Settings could preserve user privacy instead of waiving it as the default.

In addition to guiding regulation, tools from the behavioral and cognitive sciences can help balance freedom and safety for the public good. One approach is to research the design of digital architectures that more effectively promote both accuracy and civility of online conversation. Another is to develop a digital literacy tool kit aimed at boosting users’ awareness and competence in navigating the challenges of online environments.

Achieving a more transparent and less manipulative media may well be the defining political battle of the 21st century.

Until 2013, much of the information carried within your DNA was owned by somebody else. People were dying of cancer because they were not legally allowed to test their own genetic code for deadly mutations. For the time being, you are back in control. But given the huge profits at stake, that may not be the case for long.

Intense lobbying and political maneuvering are under way in the United States right now over the lucrative right to read this genetic code and to tell us what it means for our health and our identities. Doctors’ ability to diagnose and treat hundreds of medical conditions—and your access to those critical services—could be at stake.

The implications are huge but the issues involved are highly technical, straddling the worlds of biotechnology and U.S. patent law. As a result, few people are up in arms about the possibility that not only control but ownership of the information encoded within our genes could be taken away once more.

The fundamental biological coding in our DNA is essential to biomedical research, public health, and self-knowledge. The absence of property interests in genomic information has resulted in a wide range of benefits in the United States, from lower prices for cancer screening to rapid research on COVID-19 vaccines. We shouldn’t forfeit these benefits to enrich a few companies. Sequences of naturally occurring genomic material should remain in the public domain, free from claims of ownership.

The history of this struggle is crucial for understanding the current battle. In the late 1980s, researchers who discovered associations between genetic variants and diseases like cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, and cancer began to apply for patents. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) enthusiastically granted these researchers, and their employers, exclusive rights over increasingly large swaths of the human genome. This enabled companies to monopolize the diagnosis of genetic variants covering a wide range of hereditary health conditions, hindering research and pricing potentially life-saving tests beyond the reach of many patients.

Think about it for a moment. We each carry within our cells thousands of sequences of DNA, known as genes; each gene contains millions of units, called bases, that determine how our bodies are made and function. But some of those genes, or at least the information in them, were owned by someone else—the company, university, or researcher that was the first to patent them. The very DNA that makes us human was being parceled out like lots in a housing development. Without the permission of the patent owner, you couldn’t learn what secrets your DNA held, even if that information could save your life.

In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court changed all this, ruling that naturally occurring DNA sequences are not patentable. But in the years since, the biotech industry and its lawyers have worked tirelessly to overturn the Court’s decision. In 2019 members of Congress drafted a bill that would have returned us to the days of gene patenting. Though that bill failed to advance, last summer the same legislators asked the PTO to initiate a public inquiry into the potential benefits of renewed DNA patenting, a clear prelude to further congressional action.

The lawsuit that led to the elimination of gene patents in the U.S. was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation in 2009. They sued on behalf of a group of 20 organizations and individuals who claimed to have been injured by the existence of these patents. One the plaintiffs was Lisbeth Ceriani, a 42-year old single mom from Newton, Massachusetts, who received a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2008. Ceriani worked two part-time jobs and relied on Medicaid for health coverage. Given her relatively young age and the aggressive form of her cancer, Ceriani’s oncologist suspected that it might be hereditary, arising from defects in genes known as BRCA1 and BRCA2. If that were the case, Ceriani would need to have her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed to prevent ovarian cancer, another likely result of the BRCA mutations. What’s more, if Ceriani did carry a harmful BRCA mutation, her young daughter would also be at risk and, once she got older, would need to consider these measures as well.

Despite these medical recommendations, Ceriani could not get tested for the BRCA mutations. There was just one company in the United States that offered the test, Myriad Genetics, which controlled the patents on the BRCA genes. Myriad charged more than $3,000 for testing, but the Medicaid carrier in Massachusetts, MassHealth, was unwilling to pay more than $1,600. Ceriani could either pay Myriad’s price or not get tested. There was no other choice.

Ceriani was not alone—breast cancer is tragically common, affecting about one in eight American women. According to a 2021 report, there are some 13,000 oncologists in the United States. Yet between 1999 and 2013, there was only one provider of BRCA testing. Why? Because the BRCA genes were patented, and Myriad Genetics controlled those patents.

A patent gives its owner the exclusive right to make, use, and sell a novel invention throughout the country. All types of inventions can be patented: machines, processes, articles of manufacture, and even new compositions of matter. Surprisingly, like advanced new materials and chemical compounds, genes isolated from the body were treated as new compositions of matter that could be patented. Like the holder of a patent on a new carbon fiber or gasoline additive, Myriad had a 17-year monopoly on all uses of the BRCA genes. This expansive right included the ability not only to conduct diagnostic tests, but also to develop and manufacture test kits, drugs, and anything else requiring the use or replication of these genes. Myriad leveraged its patents to lock up the market for BRCA testing by threatening to sue any other lab or clinic that offered a test. As a result, many women were unable to obtain testing that literally could save their lives.

The BRCA genes were not the only genes patented in the United States. From the early 1990s through the mid 2000s, thousands of human genes linked to diseases ranging from asthma to cystic fibrosis were patented. In 2005, MIT researchers estimated that nearly 20 percent of all known human genes were covered by patents, and diagnostic tests for a wide range of genetic disorders were locked up by individual companies. None of these companies had competitors and could charge whatever they wished to look at a patient’s DNA and tell her whether she carried deadly defects in her genetic code.

This all changed in 2013 with the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, the case involving Ceriani. The BRCA litigation was lengthy and complex. The Patent Office argued that patenting human genes that were removed from the body (“isolated and purified”) was perfectly legitimate, since genes in the body are attached to much longer chains of DNA called chromosomes, while genes in their stand-alone, isolated form exist only in the laboratory. They are, the argument went, like any other novel composition of matter created by humans—things like polyester, ultralight steel, and superglue—and thus patentable. The plaintiffs, on the other hand, argued that human genes, even when removed from the body, are not new compositions of matter, but products of nature that are ineligible for patent protection. Thus, like a plant discovered at the bottom of the ocean or in the depths of a rain forest, these naturally occurring substances should remain in the public domain so that they are accessible to all. In simple terms, the plaintiffs said, nobody should own our genes other than ourselves.

After four long years, the Supreme Court agreed (mostly) with the plaintiffs. Its decision enabled women at risk for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer to access their own genetic codes and learn whether they and their daughters, sisters, and other relatives carried cancer-causing mutations. Literally overnight, the price of BRCA testing dropped by half, and today direct-to-consumer services like 23andMe can identify potentially deadly BRCA mutations and a host of other genetic risk factors at a modest price, generally less than $200.

The Court’s decision in Myriad eliminated patents not only on the BRCA genes, but on all naturally occurring genomic sequences in humans as well as other living organisms. (While patents are still available to protect biomedical innovations like vaccines, drugs, and test kits, no one can claim ownership over basic genetic sequences.) This result has had lasting and important repercussions. For example, research and collaboration on viral outbreaks such as MERS, SARS, and H5N1 were stymied by races to patent the viruses’ genetic sequences. But this did not occur with SARS-CoV-19, the virus responsible for COVID-19, the genomic code for which was released to public databases and made freely available to researchers around the world within a week of its discovery.

Today, however, the freedom to look inside our own DNA could be at risk. Many in the biotechnology industry have been critical of the Myriad decision and have worked tirelessly to overturn it and other key Supreme Court decisions limiting patents. Critics of the Court’s patent eligibility decisions claim that unless the reach of patents is restored to its prior broad dimensions, biomedical innovation will be stifled, research will not be funded, and lives will be lost. In 2019, with strong industry backing, Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) drafted a bipartisan bill that would have overridden all judicial decisions limiting the patentability of natural phenomena. If enacted, their legislation once again would have authorized the patenting of genomic sequences in human BRCA genes, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and other products of nature that are rightfully in the public domain.

The 2019 bill was opposed by the ACLU and a host of advocacy groups, prominent scientists, and forward-thinking companies. Though the bill did not advance out of committee, two years later a group of legislators and industry insiders revived and escalated the campaign to expand the scope of patent protection. In the summer of 2021, at the request of Senators Tillis, Coons, and others, the PTO issued a formal call for public comment on the ways that judicial decisions have “impacted investment and innovation, particularly in critical technologies like . . . precision medicine, diagnostic methods, and pharmaceutical treatments.” It received 145 responses, many in favor of expanding patent protection for products of nature. This effort seems designed to create a public record of opposition to the Supreme Court’s limitations on such patents. It is likely that in the next Congressional session, biotech lobbyists will use this study to argue that insufficient patent protection is responsible for flagging investment, declining innovation, and the loss of ground to foreign competition.

Despite these complaints, a lack of patents is not the problem. Though there was a dip in patents in 2020 due to COVID, 2019 saw more patents issued than in any other year on record. Estimates are that we’ll see the numbers increase again rapidly as we exit the pandemic.

But the patent laws were never intended to allow private companies to control the use of substances found in nature. These are simply not “inventions” that the laws were designed to protect. The Supreme Court’s sensible limitations on these patents have resulted in dramatically lower pricing for genetic diagnostic tests, as well as unprecedented global research cooperation on COVID and other diseases. And far from killing innovation, investment in the biotechnology sector has grown substantially. According to McKinsey & Co., biotech stocks appreciated during 2020 at more than twice the rate of the S&P 500.

Let’s remember the hard lessons learned from the BRCA wars and the COVID-19 pandemic: A return to the days of patenting naturally occurring genetic sequences and other products of nature would enrich a few self-interested parties at the expense of public health and human life. In the end, no one should own our genomes other than ourselves.

Hands up: Who thought it was cool that Captain James T. Kirk (aka Canadian actor William Shatner) got to go into space for real at the age of 90—and, at the same time, thought the flight itself was a ghastly PR exercise for Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space business?

Hands up: Who feels awed watching Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rockets land on floating drone ships at sea—and simultaneously horrified at the plans of the world’s richest person to use such technology to commercialize space and allegedly to build private colonies on Mars?

I know I’m not alone in struggling with such cognitive dissonance after moments like the Shatner flight. “I hated it on one level and thought it was cool on the other,” says planetary scientist Carolyn Porco, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Mark McCaughrean, senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency, admits that sometimes he refuses to watch feats of virtuoso spacefaring from the new space barons, lest he get sucked in by their superficial glamour. It is not just sour grapes about the cool things they get to do with their wealth. It’s about the scientific, social, and philosophical implications of what they are doing and how they are doing it.

Many of us grew up on the excitement and allure of space, inspired by Captain Kirk’s mission “to boldly go where no man has gone before” and by NASA’s heroic Apollo moon landings. We were taught to anticipate lunar bases, gigantic rotating space stations, and settlements on Mars. Later, even when we came to recognize that the Apollo program was a product of Cold War belligerence, we didn’t want to lose those childhood dreams of breaking free from Earth’s gravity and voyaging to the stars. Nor should we: The person who is indifferent to the sublime wonders of the cosmos is blind to a crucial part of the mystery of the human condition.

The new space race pursued by the likes of Bezos, Musk, and Virgin’s Richard Branson taps into that same thirst for inspiration and transcendence. Their companies are pushing the limits of technology in remarkable ways. At the same time, there is something deeply unsettling about the space barons’ capitalist swagger. They measure the grandeur of space in terms of dollars and Bitcoin. They look out into the cosmic expanse and see another frontier for business expansion, ripe for profit-making colonies, mining operations, and satellite swarms.

This is where the dissonance kicks in. A deep tension exists between the notions of space as a place of wonder and as a resource. Our yearnings for what space represents are being exploited to justify vanity projects that risk undermining a genuine fascination and respect for the universe beyond our planet.

Perhaps, you might say, we shouldn’t be put off by the braggadocio, mistreatment of staff, tax dodging, and all-around smugness of the space tycoons. We aren’t meant to like them; it’s all part of their performative “hubristic genius” shtick. “You might not like them, but we need them!” the argument goes. Well, let’s consider the reality behind some of the popular ways people defend the space barons.

“These companies are developing useful technology for serious space science.”

A popular idea is that companies like Musk’s SpaceX and Blue Origin will advance space technology by being more ambitious and flexible than purely state-driven efforts. NASA or other public agencies provide funding and set the overall goals; then the private companies can figure out the best way to achieve them. Such public–private collaborations have had some notable successes—most recently in the development of Covid vaccines. The payoff of this approach for space science is by no means obvious, however.

The low-cost, reusable rockets that SpaceX has developed with the support of government contracts make a big difference in your budget if your payload is cheap, McCaughrean notes. Not coincidentally, cheap payloads are the kinds of things Musk is interested in, like the assembly-line internet satellites of his Starlink project. Or like human beings, “so cheap that they’ll pay for themselves to go,” McCaughrean says. But big scientific payloads like the James Webb Space Telescope are not cheap at all. The priority for them is the most reliable rocket, and even a major cut in launch costs won’t have much effect, proportionally speaking, on the bottom line.

Neither is it obvious that the money NASA has given to Musk and company could not have been equally well used by a public agency that was similarly set loose to innovate. “The U.S. is giving massive government grants to Musk and Bezos,” says Mary-Jane Rubenstein of Wesleyan University, author of the forthcoming book Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race. “Why not not? It’s that Reagan-ish thinking that if you let the wealthiest pursue whatever they want to, eventually it will benefit everyone else.”

“OK, but it doesn’t do any harm to serious space science.”

Anyone who thinks that Musk’s priorities align neatly with the needs of space science should ask astronomers what they think of his 1,500 or so active Starlink satellites that are now obstructing the view of telescopes with bright streaks and raising concerns about radio-signal interference. Starlink has filed plans to launch up to 42,000 satellites in total—about five times the total number currently orbiting Earth—and competing services like Amazon’s Project Kuiper plan to add thousands more. There are already 1,600 close encounters in space (within 1 kilometer) a week from Musk’s satellites, risking collisions that could strew debris in low Earth orbit.

“There was a time when I was enthusiastic about commercial space because I saw it as a possible way we could conduct more science,” Porco says. She now concludes that this is not the way it will work. “When you put science, and the way science needs to be conducted, up against commercial interests, the two make very bad bedfellows.”

The ostentatiousness of private spaceflight could also tar the public perception of space exploration as a whole. It would be foolish of space researchers and advocates to suppose that the rest of humankind—beset with disease, poverty, climate change, and political oppression—shares their positive feelings for the value of the enterprise. “The danger with all of this is that we look so detached, so removed from reality, that people say, ‘You’re all just lunatic fantasists. Why should we give you any money?’ ” says McCaughrean.

“Commercial space ventures provide inspiration.”

One of the most disturbing aspects of the private space race is how readily its capitalistic impulse can exploit the romantic fantasies of voyage and discovery that have always impelled human spaceflight. Even as Bezos has created an earthly empire worth more than the GDP of Spain—an empire that has exempted itself from the normal rules of commerce—he beguiles us with false promises of democratic travel to other worlds.

In reality, the story that the entrepreneurs are selling intensifies a disturbing antidemocratic aspect to spaceflight that has been there all along. From the start, human spaceflight has tapped into old religious and nationalistic narratives of expansion, entitlement, and conquest, as Rubenstein’s forthcoming book explains. For example, a 1986 “vision statement” by the U.S. National Commission on Space, whose members included Neil Armstrong, declared that “the promise of virgin lands and the opportunity to live in freedom brought our ancestors to the shores of North America,” making it very clear which subsection of the U.S. population it was addressing. “The settlement of North America and other continents,” it went on, “was a prelude to humanity’s greater challenge: the space frontier.”

If you buy into the notion that human settlement of space is part of our (a very selective “our”) manifest destiny, then perhaps the commercialization of spaceflight and proposals to mine asteroids for profit create no discomfort. But for many scientists and space enthusiasts, efforts to privatize the solar system hijack our well-founded sense of awe about space. “The commercial space people have hacked for profiteering reasons those feelings of exaltation we all feel at the thought of space travel,” Porco says. “What better hack could there be but to send Captain Kirk into space?”

“We need to get into space to survive, and these guys are taking the first steps.”

Shatner returned shaken from his Blue Origin flight. The voyages of the starship Enterprise were meant to be mythic, not realistic: Its cosmos was full of adventure as well as hazard and positively teeming with life. That’s not what Shatner found in space. Instead, he spoke of how the beautiful blue of Earth’s atmosphere vanished in an instant as he ascended. “You’re looking into blackness . . . there’s the blue down there, and the black up there.” At that moment, he realized a basic truth about space: “This is life, and that’s death.”

“The moment he got out there, he woke up,” Rubenstein says. Shatner’s comments weren’t exactly on message for the planetary-settlement crowd, she notes: “The tension between the optics and the text of the revelation grew so intense that Bezos interrupted Shatner to pop the cork off a bottle of champagne.”

As Shatner recognized, space is not filled with bountiful islands that we can reach if only we have the resolve and the technology to cross the forbidding ocean. It is a place of unrelenting emptiness, terror, and peril. It’s hard to swallow Musk’s pitch of Mars as a safeguard for human survival when we don’t yet know if we can get anyone there at all, much less keep them alive self-sufficiently. The even more extravagant promise that Mars could be made a habitable oasis by terraforming—transforming its atmosphere to warm it and to support breathable air and liquid water—is “almost certainly impossible,” says Porco.

“People get so wrapped up in wish-fulfilment fantasies about living on Mars that they lose context completely, as if you can just fly away and leave all our troubles behind. It doesn’t solve any problems by going to Mars,” McCaughrean adds. For the goal of survival, we would be much smarter using our knowledge and resources to keep Earth habitable in the face of the inadvertent geoengineering we are already conducting here.

What is frustrating about the efforts of the space barons is that they contrast clever feats of engineering with impoverished acts of imagination. Hidden behind their lofty language and populist promises, Rubenstein says, lies a banal rationale: “If we want to keep living as we do, the only thing we can do is find some other place to exploit.”

Space agencies in the United States, Europe, China, Canada, Japan, India, and elsewhere are showing different ways to establish an uplifting, shared presence in space—without business, and without people. The James Webb Space Telescope, now orbiting the sun a million miles from Earth, is opening the most powerful artificial eye on the cosmos we’ve ever had. Robotic missions will soon fly over the hydrocarbon dunes of Titan and investigate the ice-covered oceans of Europa.

We might plausibly extend that approach to an international, crewed research base on the moon. But we don’t need space tourism and private industry to get it. This doesn’t mean that big commercial ventures should be banned. But we should be more clear-eyed about their motives and priorities and consider how much we want their already ubiquitous presence in our lives to expand into the heavens too, with barely any regulation to constrain them.

Even if you feel in your marrow that our human destiny lies in the stars, you might want to look closely at what the space billionaires have done down here. Then ask yourself whether they are the best people to take us up there.

In February of 2020, as a mysterious zoonotic virus winged its way across the planet, I resolved to do whatever I could to stay on top of pandemic reports. I created a coronavirus browser folder, filled it with trusted news links, and checked it multiple times a day. But as the pandemic’s finish line receded into the future, my optimism flagged and my resolve to stay informed dwindled. Soon I felt like a panic-saturated sponge, incapable of absorbing any more bad news. I descended into the numbness so many of us have experienced, but the alerts kept coming.

When alarm signals bombard us from every direction, our concentration and judgment both take a nosedive. According to research at hospitals, where health care workers face a constant barrage of alerts, an endless blare of warning signals can cause people to overlook important cues. Brain activity studies also show that alarm overload can sap our cognitive focus and ability to handle tasks. There’s a clear connection between this kind of alarm fatigue and the cognitive overload that follows an onslaught of bad news. Like health care providers frazzled by perpetual alerts, we often inhabit a mental space in which danger signs never seem to abate.

Absorbing a barrage of crisis content leaves people “exhausted,” says Cherie Armour, who studies stress and adversity at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. “You’re probably feeling less energy—you’re just done. People get to that stage, and then they completely disengage.”

Not only can unrelenting crisis story lines take a toll on our mental health, but we sometimes grow numb to them. That numbness can potentially make it harder for us to distinguish between true crises and trumped-up ones. But setting strict news consumption limits and opening up real-world dialogues, experts say, can help buffer some of the worst effects of crisis fatigue.

Some of the best insight comes from hospitals, where workers suffer literal alarm fatigue.

Nurse-scientist Michele Pelter has faced an assault of alerts for decades. At the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center, where she does her research, a cacophony of beeps dominates the soundscape, most potentially signaling something wrong with a patient. The lowest-level alerts are flashing lights next to patients’ beds. “Advisory” alerts, one level up, are intermittent single beeps. “Warnings” are spaced-out double beeps, and “crisis” alerts, the highest level, are strings of piercing beep-beep-beeps that don’t stop until a nurse actively silences them. In a typical critical care ward, one study reports, anywhere from 150 to 400 of these alarms may sound on every patient every day. Approximately 90 percent of them are “nuisance” alarms that are either false or clinically irrelevant.

Amid this sensory chaos, it’s tough to imagine how a nurse could manage all the alerts from just one patient, let alone the five or more patients they attend to in some wards. There are so many false alarms, Pelter says, “that people will just hit ‘OK, OK, OK,’ and those alerts just get lost.” About 8 in 10 clinicians, in fact, report having disabled an alarm at least once.

While conducting her research, Pelter watched nurses press alarm-silencing buttons over and over. When she asked what alarm they’d just silenced, they would say, “I don’t remember.” The nurses’ minds were so used to the alarms’ cry-wolf clangor that they barely registered what they’d just done. Though this adaptation might seem to work for a while, it can have deadly results.

In March 2012 in Pennsylvania, a nurse dosed 17-year-old Mariah Edwards with the powerful opioid fentanyl after a routine tonsillectomy. Soon after the drug hit Edwards’s system, she went into respiratory distress. No one responded. By the time a nurse finally reached her, Edwards had suffered severe brain injury due to a lack of oxygen; a couple of weeks later, she died. Afterward, investigators found someone had muted Edwards’s respiratory monitor, which was supposed to sound if there was a problem.

Designing more human-friendly alarm systems, Pelter says, could begin with setting higher alert thresholds to protect providers’ brains from becoming overwhelmed or habituated. For instance, current heart-rhythm tracking devices sound an alarm after just six abnormal heartbeats, but these six-beat sequences rarely signify something is truly wrong. Now Pelter and her team are testing alarm systems that sound only after 30 abnormal beats. Colleagues of Pelter are working on a more nuanced machine they call a SuperAlarm, which would sound an alarm only when a combination of troubling signals from hospital monitors and lab tests in the patient’s electronic health record met a threshold that predicted a deadly “code blue” event. Pelter hopes reducing the sheer number of alerts in the soundscape will help providers focus on the remaining alarms and respond more thoughtfully.

While alarm fatigue is an overt sensory challenge in health care, we’re all prone to impaired judgment when up against the brain’s normal processing limits. In one study, researchers at Brigham Young University exposed subjects to dozens of security warnings on their digital screens over a five-day period and scanned their brains with functional MRI once a day. It was hardly a surprise, but the right and left insula regions of subjects’ brains, centers of attention, displayed decreasing levels of activation as the study progressed. The muted response showed that participants’ brains were habituating to the warnings, directing less focused attention to them over time. This may happen, Armour says, because the brain adapts to constant alarms by setting the bar for response higher. In the same fashion, we adapt to certain mind-altering drugs by requiring a greater quantity to produce the desired effect.

Something similar likely happens when we have news notifications turned on. Because our phones are buzzing more or less constantly, we start to gloss over each distressing headline as it comes in. Over time, a constant state of distress becomes unsustainable, so the brain downgrades the apparent risk—a kind of distancing that could be dangerous in a true crisis.

Processing never-ending alarms can also hamper the brain’s ability to perform other tasks. Researchers at Japan’s Osaka University had 15 adults use a computer flight simulator to attempt flying a plane through racecourse gates. While flying, they also had to press a joystick button whenever they heard or saw an alarm. The researchers observed that when participants missed an alarm, they had greater activity in the brain’s right inferior frontal gyrus and the superior medial frontal cortex. Because activity in these regions was also present when they demonstrated poor flying performance, the results suggested an attentional bottleneck. With so many demands on their attention, the subjects’ brains reached their cognitive limits.

In a news-consumption context, that kind of cognitive overload can mean we chew through 12 alarming stories between work meetings but barely digest any of what we’re reading. It can also leave us more vulnerable to misinformation, Pelter observes. We can “get sloppy and say, ‘Oh, OK, somebody published this; this must be true. I’m not going to do the work to figure out if it is true or false.’ ”

Immersion in a sea of crisis narratives ultimately takes a toll on our well-being, reports psychologist Alison Holman of the University of California, Irvine. In a survey study of media consumption habits after the 9/11 attacks, Holman and colleagues found that when people watched more than one hour per day of TV news related to the attacks, they had more post-traumatic stress symptoms up to three years later than did those who watched less.

Fortunately, this state of constant overstimulation isn’t inevitable, even in the age of the 24/7, social media–amplified news cycle. As researchers test strategies to reduce hospital alarm fatigue, their findings suggest new ways to address broader, news-driven crisis fatigue. Reducing the number of alarms that invade people’s mental space, as Pelter and her team are trying to do, is a promising tactic.

In an ideal world, alarm reduction would start with news producers. Newsrooms would set policies that nix needlessly inflammatory headlines. They would spend more time reporting stories with public service potential and less time on minor scandals. But since media companies’ profit motives drive them to bang the crisis drum hard—in the absence of overload, viewers generally tend to pay more attention to negative news—the onus will remain on consumers to do much of the filtering themselves.

You can raise your own alarm threshold with a three-pronged strategy.

First, carefully curate the news you consume, making sure it’s from trusted outlets that vet the accuracy of their content. “Make sure that you go and check bona fide sources,” Armour says. “A lot of information is not correct,” and that incorrect information can set off false alarms in your brain, aggravating your crisis fatigue and blunting your judgment.

This isn’t always easy; there’s lots of false information on sites like YouTube and TikTok, but experts share valuable information on these platforms as well. If you’re in doubt about whether a particular source passes muster, check to make sure that it has a transparent means of correcting errors; that it clearly indicates the source of facts it provides (citing journal articles or named officials, for instance); and, if it’s a traditional news outlet, that it distinguishes between straight news and opinion pieces. Trustworthy news sources will also be up front about how they update their content as a developing story unfolds. And be wary of supposed experts with a product to sell on social media.

Second, limit your total daily media use to reduce the number of crisis narratives on your mental radar. “If you want to stay on top of what’s going on in the news, do so in very deliberate, brief periods,” such as 15 to 30 minutes at a time, Holman says. “Then shut it off. Don’t look at it again.” Other ways to curtail your media use include turning off notifications on your phone, unfollowing influencers who draw eyeballs by stoking fear, and deleting the apps that leave your brain in a jangled state. (I’ve removed Facebook from my own phone because it’s a prime offender here—its algorithms have proved to boost divisive and anger-generating content.)

Finally, extricate your mind from its bad-news bubble by seeking out meaningful connection with people close to you who can provide a sounding board as you try to separate overblown crisis story lines from those that truly merit your concern. At the same time, since misinformation can spread easily through social ties, you should subject any story a friend passes along to the reputable-news test.

All this adds up to reducing the number of alarms vying for your mental space and signal-boosting the ones worthy of attention. When you curtail the amount of crisis news coming through, Armour says, you’ll be better equipped to process what you encounter and make meaning from it. Addressing the true crises we all face will require freeing up mental bandwidth so we can filter the critical signals from all the beeping, blinking, stultifying noise.