Fixing the World
Solving daunting problems is a thing we do
by Ivan Amato
When you thumb through the articles of The Moonshot Catalog now and in the coming months, you will read about daunting problems which demand solutions. Ending the threat of pandemic disease. Feeding 10 billion people in 2050 affordably and sustainably. Fighting climate change. Manufacturing affordable pharmaceuticals anywhere, anytime.
These challenges are so big and so hard that you might be inclined to relegate them in your mind to a perpetual wish list whose items can never really get checked off. But choosing an attitude of defeatism in the midst of these and other salient challenges facing humanity is not a defensible stance. Like the archetypal moonshot that President Kennedy announced in 1961 and that a mobilized nation realized eight years later, the “moonshots” in this catalog are daunting and they are doable. Between 1969 and 1972, a dozen human beings did, in fact, walk on the moon; six of them tooled around in rovers. What’s more, over the past century, collaborations of sometimes thousands of people have scored hard-won successes born from the choice to quash defeatism and instead to take on challenges of the greatest magnitudes. Here are just a few examples:
Fixing the Ozone Hole. In the 1930s, chemical manufacturers began ramping up production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), to what would become vast quantities of one of history’s greatest chemovillains. These former wonder chemicals had many applications, among them refrigeration and air-conditioning, aerosol-can propellants, cleaning solvents, and the manufacturing of polymer foams for insulation, cushioning, and packaging. But, unbeknownst to most, they were also harmful to the atmosphere.
In the 1970s, atmospheric scientists finally sounded an alarm. Their research indicated that CFCs had been wafting into the stratosphere where they participate in sun-driven reactions that destroy ozone molecules. Because this high-altitude layer of ozone filters the sun’s harmful ultraviolet wavelengths, its degradation, if unchecked, would mean a planet with more skin cancer and cataracts, less agricultural productivity, and more harm to marine ecosystems. The discovery in 1985 of the Antarctic “ozone hole” amplified the alarm to klaxon intensity. Stark satellite images of an enlarging ozone hole helped mobilize and integrate the political, industrial, technological, and public movements it would take to solve the problem. In 1987, international stakeholders signed on to the Montreal Protocol — and later to its subsequent amendments — for protecting stratospheric ozone by phasing out CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances (ODS). By the mid 1990s, production of CFCs and related compounds had nearly been eliminated and by 2030 their production should cease altogether. Meanwhile, the health of the stratospheric ozone layer has been recovering. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Continued declines in ODS emissions are expected to result in a near complete recovery of the ozone layer near the middle of the 21st century.” Getting all of the way to the finish line will require vigilance and tenacity as a recently detected uptick in emissions of trichloromethane (CFC-11) from eastern mainland China has reminded those monitoring the composition and health of the global atmosphere.
Eradicating Small Pox. As you will read in one of The Moonshot Catalog’s articles, one of humanity’s greatest public-health success stories is the eradication of small pox, a horrific and lethal viral disease that killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone. At the end of 1979, a World Health Organization commission signed their names onto a now historic document with this statement: “We, the members of the global commission for the certification of smallpox eradication, certify that smallpox has been eradicated from the world.”
It took a global vaccination campaign that began in 1959, dedicated vaccine-deploying public health workers spanning out everywhere on the planet, and some $300 million, but humanity had scored its first and still only eradication of a dreaded infectious disease. Each year, that achievement now spares the world billions of dollars in economic loss and averts an inestimable amount of human suffering. Polio is on track toward the same status: a disease eradicated from the world. And ambitious researchers are now making headway toward powerful new technology platforms, which they say could stop just about any outbreak with pandemic potential from actually growing into a global wildfire.
Ending Water-borne Disease. At the turn of the 20th century, dysentery, typhoid fever, and other water-borne diseases were killing thousands each year in the United States and many more people elsewhere in the world. In 1908, Jersey City, then a city of 200,000 with Manhattan in sight across the Hudson River, became the first U.S. city to use chlorine to disinfect its public water supply. Soon the city’s death rates due to water-borne diseases declined. Within a decade, thousands of cities and towns across the U. S. followed Jersey City’s lead, providing 33 million people with safer, disinfected water sources. Today, most of the country’s 328 million citizens have access to safe water.
On a national scale in the U.S. and in other developed countries, the prevalence of water-borne disease and mortality has plummeted with the advent of water treatment, while longevity has increased dramatically. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of 2017, 71% of the global population (about 5.3 billion people) had access to “a safely managed drinking-water service.” This is moonshot-caliber progress, but it also means that the goal of providing clean water to all of the planet’s 7.6 billion people is far from being realized. Citing the latest WHO statistics, in 2017, 785 million people worldwide still lacked access to a basic drinking water service and an estimated 485,000 diarrheal deaths, most of them of children, were due to contaminated water.
Getting the Lead Out. Many books have been written about the reprehensible, decades-long delays by government, industry, and other societal players to reduce the public’s exposure to lead. No amount of lead is considered safe; any amount of this heavy metal in the blood has harmful health consequences. Even extremely low exposures of lead can impair physical, cognitive, and behavior growth, bringing with them lifelong personal, familial, societal, and economic consequences. Lead, as a neurotoxin, is especially detrimental for children who are undergoing rapid brain and neurological development.
For much of the 20th century, lead in gasoline, paint, food canning, industrial emissions, drinking water, and other sources amounted to a population-wide health bomb. The U.S. began taking the lead-poisoning hazard seriously in the 1970s. In 1978, the U.S. government banned the use of lead paint in housing. In the 80s, bans on the use of lead in water-carrying pipes were placed. And in 1996, the U.S. finally banned the use of lead in gasoline after a long phaseout period. These and other federal regulatory actions have paid off: According to data from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES), blood lead levels (BLLs) in children decreased from a mean of 14.9 micrograms/deciliter (μg/dL) in 1976 to 1.7 μg/dL in 2006 and childhood BLLs have continued to lower since then. “Over the past 40 years, the percentage of U.S. children with BLLs of 10 μg/dL or more declined from 88.2% to less than 1%,” researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported earlier this year in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice. An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute of the societal benefits derived from lowering lead exposures, published in 2009 in Environmental Health Perspectives, concluded that each dollar invested to reduce the hazard posed by lead paint alone returned social and economic benefits equivalent to between $17 and $221, amounting to a net savings of between $181 and $269 billion. The incidence of lead poisoning and its concomitant costs have been significantly reduced in the U.S. and Europe, enough to be considered by many to stand as a major public-health success.
The threat of lead-poisoning has not been eradicated, however. As a heavy metal, lead remains where it is until it is physically removed. Thus, the toxin persists in older neighborhoods, older water systems, and in the soil and grounds near heavily trafficked highways. Further, researchers continue to reveal how even tiny amounts of lead exposure can be detrimental. Recent studies have shown that low-dose exposure in childhood correlates strongly with ADHD, behavioral and emotional disorders, and criminal activity. And impact is not limited to children and young people. One investigation found that adult occupational exposure to lead increases the risk of getting ALS and Parkinson’s disease by 50% while another study found significant impact on pregnancy and birth outcomes. Further, our system for monitoring and managing the presence of lead appears inadequate: A recent comparison of blood lead data for children 12 months to 5 years of age suggests that incomplete testing might have blinded the CDC to nearly half of the children (some 600,000) with elevated BLLs. The water-contamination tragedy in Flint, Michigan — with similar situations occurring in cities such as Newark, New Jersey, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — adds ground-truth to the concern that lead pipes in U.S. cities still can be dangerous. Elsewhere in the world, particularly in lower-income countries such as India, the Philippines, and Mexico, lead-poisoning, according to the United Nations, remains an even more pressing problem. Lead-battery recycling is a major source of exposure. And industries in less regulated countries continue to use lead in paint and in toys, jewelry, pottery, and other consumer goods, which easily flow into the markets of upper-income countries like the U.S.
While incredible progress in reducing lead exposure has been made in the last 50 years, this public health journey still has more distance to cover. The cross-sector nature of the lead issue, the persistence of the metal across society, and the hidden but long-term impacts of even low-dose exposure call for a concerted, coordinated, and deliberate effort. The goal of ending lead poisoning is a moonshot that has yet to reach its destination and is in need of redoubled determination.
The problems at the center of all of these moonshots and the ones fleshed out in the feature articles of this publication, The Moonshot Catalog, have solutions that share the same two characteristics: Their solutions are dauntingly difficult and yet they are achievable. The recognition in the 1970s of the environmental perils posed by acid rain and its dramatic mitigation in the U.S. and Europe in subsequent decades shares these traits. So do many defense-driven moonshots such as the Global Positioning System, and the dramatic industrial ramp-up of synthetic-rubber production during World War II. The same goes for the meteoric rise of the integrated circuit since 1958 and for the Human Genome Project’s feat of delivering a full readout of a person’s 3-billion-nucleotide genetic code in the early years of this new millennium. The innovation in crop genetics and farming practices known as the Green Revolution helped to feed billions of people otherwise at risk of malnutrition and starvation. This “ambitious but achievable” trait applies also to the recent feats of scientific instrumentation and coordination that have led to the detection of gravitational waves and the first image of a black hole. All of these heap onto the abundance of evidence and experience that should give us the confidence to run toward — not away from — moonshot-caliber problems, especially ones whose solutions would mean so much good for so many people and the planet. The right attitude to take for these problems is that we can and should solve them.
Ivan Amato is a writer, editor, podcaster, and science cafe host based in Hyattsville, Maryland. He is the editor of The Moonshot Catalog.
