The Sunday Morning Post: GLP1s Do Everything, How to Find Aliens, and the End of the World
A new weeklyish feature on awesome and interesting stuff at the frontier of science, technology, and beyond
The internet loves bad news. Researchers have shown that negative headlines attract more clicks, and antagonistic emotions, such as outrage, stimulate more viral sharing. So, one easy way to grow an independent media company or newsletter would be for me to focus relentlessly on all the most terrible things happening in the world.
I really don’t want to do that. The news cycle is a mess, and the world is full of crisis. But while the news media typically excels at pulling our attention toward developments that are sudden and negative, the press often fails to educate audiences about changes in the world that are slow or positive, even as the latter stories sometimes matter more in the long run.
That’s the thinking behind the Sunday Morning Post, a weeklyish rundown of the most interesting or wondrous stuff I’m seeing in science, technology, economics, and beyond. The goal of this feature is to utterly and completely fail every test of the 24-hour news cycle. I want to share findings and discoveries and stories that will be as critically relevant to our lives in 10 years as they are in 10 hours.
Since this feature is an experiment, I’ve opened the comments to everyone. Let me know if you hate it or love it; ambivalent thoughts are also permitted. Leave tips, papers, studies, tweets, posts, questions, and graphs in the comments, if you think they’ll serve for future editions.
1. Why are GLP1 drugs good for everything?
The most interesting question in medical science right now might be why GLP1 drugs, such as Ozempic and Zepbound, seem to have positive effects for not only type 2 diabetes and weight loss but also cardiovascular health, neurodegenerative health, arthritis, various forms of cancer, and fatty liver disease. I’m working on a much longer essay about the answer to this question, but accept the following as an amuse-bouche.
In June, scientists published the results of a small study finding that the GLP1 drug liraglutide "reduced monthly migraine episodes by nearly half." The study was published inside the perfectly named academic journal Headache.1 As you can see in the graph below, monthly “headache days” declined on average from 20 to 10.
One low-hanging explanation for why GLP1 drugs are good for everything would be that obesity is bad for everything, and these drugs reduce obesity. But that story wouldn’t explain this study, at all. The patients on liraglutide in this study didn't lose much weight. They did, however, lose half their migraines. According to the authors, the therapeutic effect of the drugs “is independent of their weight loss effects [and] the mechanisms driving liraglutide's effectiveness in migraine prevention may operate independently of the significant metabolic effects GLP-1R agonists have."
GLP1 drugs aren’t just pulling one big lever to melt fat. They seem to be pulling several levers and pushing several buttons, producing an array of fantastic and fascinating biological effects that scientists don’t yet understand.
Pleiotropy is a lovely, if inelegantly spelled, word in biology that refers to the phenomenon of one thing, like a gene or drug, having many unrelated effects on an organism. (A famous example: the genetic mutation that causes sickle cell anemia also seems to offer protection against malaria.) GLP1 drugs are magnificently pleiotropic. There’s no obvious reason why an injectable therapy that regulates insulin and slows the rate that food exits your stomach should also be, basically, Excedrin for migraines. And yet, notwithstanding the small sample size of this study, that’s exactly what Ozempic and its ilk might be.
It will never stop being amazing to me that the long journey toward inventing the GLP1 drug category got an assist from looking into the Gila monster’s mouth and stealing its saliva. Never listen to people who criticize weird science projects. Weird science is great science.
2. We look for aliens by turning starlight into words.
My favorite thing I’ve learned from my podcast Plain English this year is how astrophysicists, such as MIT’s Sara Seager, look for aliens in the universe.
Our telescopes can’t zoom in on faraway exoplanets to spot alien highways, or ET metropolises. What they can do is detect faint starlight from hundreds of light-years away. When an exoplanet passes in front of its star, some of that starlight filters through the planet’s atmosphere. Molecules and particles in the atmosphere absorb specific wavelengths of light, leaving behind a spectral fingerprint. When this blur of filtered starlight reaches our telescopes, scientists use a technique called transmission spectroscopy to analyze it. The result is an educated guess about which gases are present in the planet’s skies—and, by extension, what lies (or lives) below. If a distant alien civilization performed the same experiment on Earth, they’d detect a strong oxygen signal in our atmosphere, possibly suggesting a lush planet teeming with photosynthetic life that’s coughing up obscene amounts of O2.
In April, the New York Times sent the following push alert to millions of people: "Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet." A team of researchers performed a transmission-spectroscopic analysis of a little blur of light from an exoplanet about 100 light years away. You can see one result of their analysis in the chart below. The acronyms DMS and DMDS refer to the scientists’ estimation that the exoplanet, K2-18b, has traces of dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide in its atmosphere. On Earth, the source of abundant DMS is life, especially algae. That’s why some scientists got really excited that we might be looking at evidence of a huge ocean planet blooming with algae-like organisms.
There’s lots of fighting inside the astrophysics community over how exactly to do this science. That’s okay. Fighting about methodology is what science is. But the fact that the science exists at all is what’s most astonishing to me. When babies look at book pages, they see only serifs and scribbles. It’s only as they develop language skills that they find meaning in the lettering. When astrophysics was in its infancy, humans looked at faraway stars and saw nothing but the dumb glare of ancient light. Now we’re learning to read the light, as if the wavelengths themselves are words connoting the density of gases swirling around planets that might hold living things. Scientists are turning faint starlight into something legible to human minds, something almost like an alphabet. If we discover alien life, it may be because science made us literate in the language of exoplanet transmission spectroscopy.
3. Would the “end of fertility” stop the “end of the world”?
You will sometimes hear from progressives who care about climate change that they won’t have kids because they’re afraid their children will contribute to the destruction of the planet. It’s not my place to tell people what to do with their families and bodies. But it is my place to pass along things that I read, and this week I read a compelling argument that sharp declines in global fertility might have only minuscule effects on climate change.
The authors of the study work through a couple of assumptions, all plausible.
A smaller human population would emit less carbon, all things equal.
But, even with currently plummeting fertility rates, serious depopulation won’t happen for several more generations.
By the time global populations are in severe decline, per capita emissions will have significantly fallen, as solar power and other clean energy sources scale and countries with rising incomes continue to reduce their emissions intensity.
Meanwhile, shrinking populations might mean less innovation overall, since innovation comes from people. We need lots of innovation to come up with ways to remove all of the carbon already emitted, so anything that reduces total future ingenuity would be bad for climate change.
When you put it all together, even if the world’s population diverges from standard growth projections by billions of people in the 2100s, the authors project that severe levels of depopulation would only reduce global temperatures by “one tenth of a degree Celsius—far too small to impact climate goals.” Couples should live as they wish to live, but I personally would not forgo parenthood to protect 0.1 degree Celsius in 2200.
I don’t remember where I first heard that depopulation is a bit like climate change’s Republican twin, but I like that framing. Both phenomena are slow-moving, long-term global challenges that we’re not sure how to solve. But fertility anxiety seem disproportionately right-wing, while global climate anxiety is mostly left-wing. Personally, I think both stories are interesting and important, and I’m grateful that economists are studying how the Existential Crisis Twins might play along together.
Academic journal names can be blessedly blunt. Science is a journal about science. Nature is a journal about nature. Headache is a journal about headaches. Why is academic writing so opaque if academic journal titles are so straightforward?
Please keep this going! We need all the non-negative news we can get.
Yesterday I went to a book (actual hardcover books) event* in DC put on by Stripe Press (as many readers will know, they publish books/newsletters/etc on the broad topic of “progress”). I bought a couple of books but I also skimmed one I didn’t buy (yet), Pieces of the Action by Vannevar Bush, a key 20th century figure in technology development and science funding. The preface was written in 1970 and acknowledged that a lot of things looked quite bad, but at the same time a lot of good things were happening (this is a gross oversimplification but you get the gist). Unlike most of the attendees, I was alive in 1970; I was too young then to know what was going on but growing up later, in the rustbelt, things certainly seemed bad, so much so that the progress and prosperity of the 80s and 90s seemed kind of shocking at first.
This is just a long way of saying that it’s corrosive to obsess about how bad things are such that there’s no point in trying to change anything, and that’s the character of so much public discourse. I subscribe to newsletters looking for something different, so I’m happy to see this feature and I hope it continues.
*also there were a *lot* of people there! To talk about books! ❤️
Derek - this is a great concept and I'll look forward to reading on Sundays. A dose of tragic optimism. Love it. RE: GLP-1s, as you continue to explore this topic, I'd be curious to know what percentage of effective medications and interventions are, essentially, accidents. GLP-1s began as diabetes medications. You could argue weight-loss is part and parcel of an effective diabetes therapy. But their potential for things like migraines and addiction (if this stuff holds up) is what I'd call a serendipitous accident. I'm sure there are other examples of these. Similarly, I find it interesting that we still have very little in the way of mechanistic understanding on some of these broader effects. It brings to mind SSRIs, which were initially thought to alleviate depression by increasing the amount of serotonin in the brain (a very specific and bioplausible theory/target). Now, it's pretty well accepted that it's not an increase in serotonin that is working on depression (and anxiety/OCD) but something else. The best guess I've come across is that SSRIs increase overall neuroplasticity, explaining why they tend to work best in conjunction with therapy. (However, after multiple decades, we still know next to nothing about why and how SSRIs work.) But all of this makes me wonder if GLP-1s are having some kind of similar effect on hormonal plasticity or disrupting some other homeostatic groove/rut that gets set in the body and underlies some of these conditions. Who knows. This is all armchair speculation. But I'll be curious to learn more from people who think about and study this all day. As you write, it's fascinating we got here from a giant lizard's saliva.