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Why is it that the Atlantic these days often seems like the highbrow equivalent of local TV news? On your typical 10:00 news, if it bleeds, it leads, and Your Carpet Is Trying To Kill You!; in the Atlantic, if it’s catastrophic, it’s on the cover. Consider James Fallows’ cover piece (subscription required) in the latest issue, entitled “Countdown To A Meltdown” — ominous cover image here — in which Fallows looks back from 2016 at an America gone wrong. The economy is in dire straits: The dollar has crashed, there was an oil shock (gas is nine bucks a gallon), and the housing market has bottomed out. There are riots and massive evictions, all our best students are going to China, and the government has purchased RVs and mobile homes for families to live in. (On the plus side, Castro’s dead.)
A lot of this doomsday stuff is disturbingly plausible, if everything goes wrong, and it’s a useful exercise, even if Fallows occasionally overreaches: The president elected in 2012, he tells us, had led a unit that captured Osama bin Laden while he slept. He’s a black Republican and “devout Catholic who had brought the first openly gay commandos into front line combat.” If that one comes true, we’re gonna start calling Fallows “McFly.”
The Atlantic‘s gimmick of looking back from the future (Richard Clarke penned a similar piece a few issues ago) serves to give readers a sense of just how tenuous our current prosperity and comfort truly are, and how easily they might slip away. But these pieces sometimes seem like a 9th grade assignment turned in by a very smart student, and they’re so wide-ranging and speculative that it’s hard to come away from them with a serious grasp of how problems might be avoided. We tend to think that looks forward from the present are more likely to spur serious reflection than looks back from the future.
Onward: Our former colleague Zachary Roth, writing in the Washington Monthly, suggests that one way to help the economy now is to fix the patent office. As Roth points out, the agency’s flaws can result in a stifling of innovation. And not just in economic terms. In the early 1990s, for example, a group of scientists were on the verge of a breakthrough in their efforts “to identify and sequence the genes whose mutations had been linked to breast cancer.” One geneticist founded a private company, took the final steps in the sequencing, and patented how the genes could be used. The language of the patent was broad enough that researchers were soon getting cease-and-desist letters for their work developing breast cancer tests, and the price for tests went up. Here’s Roth:
Myriad’s broad patent has effectively kept any other researchers from trying to make the test more accurate at catching cancers. Debra Leonard, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Cornell, has been the target of numerous gene patent infringement claims by Myriad and others for her work on genes linked to Canavans, a rare disorder that causes severe neurological dysfunction in infants, and other diseases. “If you had a disease, would you want one company — with a commercial profit orientation — making all the observations about your disease in the testing diagnostic arena?” she asks. “I wouldn’t.”
Why are things so bad? Because the patent office is self-financing, giving it an incentive to green-light dubious patents for the application and maintenance fees they get from them. Overworked patent officers have to grant a certain number of patents per year, and are thus encouraged to rubber stamp all but the most egregious. And many of them are hired away by firms who value their input in gaming the system, which isn’t particularly hard to do.
Finally, we turn to Seymour Hersh, who writes in the New Yorker about covering Watergate while at the New York Times. A choice anecdote: Before Hersh went to print with a story that Henry Kissinger, then Richard Nixon’s national security advisor, had been involved in wiretapping reporters, officials, and his own aides, he got a call from Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s deputy:
“You’re Jewish, aren’t you, Seymour?” In all our previous conversations, I’d been “Sy.” I said yes. “Let me ask you one question, then,” Haig said. “Do you honestly believe that Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Germany who lost thirteen members of his family to the Nazis, could engage in such police-state tactics as wiretapping his own aides? If there is any doubt, you owe it to yourself, your beliefs, and your nation to give us one day to prove that your story is wrong.”
The Times printed the story, and Kissinger survived politically, of course. (In fact, he survived it so well that he was nominated by the current administration to chair the 9/11 Commission, in spite of the wiretapping.) Ultimately, writes Hersh, “neither [Kissinger nor Nixon] understood why the White House could not do what it wanted, at home or in Vietnam. The reason it couldn’t is, one hopes, just as valid today: they were operating in a democracy in which they were accountable to a Constitution and to a citizenry that held its leaders to a high standard of morality and integrity.”
Hopefully, it’s a lesson the pro-gay African-American Osama-capturing Christian commando president we elect in 2012 will take to heart.
–Brian Montopoli
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