—Systemic change begins with personal change—
Chris is a Professor in the Biological Sciences department at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute. In his words:
My lab studies the folding of proteins via structural bioinformatics, molecular simulations, and protein design. We are focused on the folding of green fluorescent protein and its application as a computationally programmable peptide biosensor. We use Hidden Markov models, kinetic simulations, data mining, machine learning, whole gene assembly and other molecular biology techniques, and Xray crystallography.
Of interest to sustainability and our conversations:
Computational modeling using system dynamic can predict the outcome of a well-described dynamic system, such as human population on Earth. To date, population models have been demographic models, considering only birth rates, death rates and migration. But the future of the human population depends on how much we affect the environment. Climate change and other anthropogenic changes to the Earth's ecosphere will affect the carrying capacity for humanity. Where will it lead? World4 is a system dynamics model for human population.
Also:
We are also engaged in a collaborative effort to develop a contraceptive vaccine. The vaccine will produce temporary and reversible infertility. Instead of having to take an action to be protected, you will be protected by default, and would need to take an action to be temporarilly fertile again. The vaccine targets the sperm-specific calcium channel CatSper, which is required for sperm hyperactive motility and therefore for fertility. Sperm antigens are placed on the surface of non-infectious virus-like particles (VLP) for vaccination.
A contraceptive vaccine is a humane way to deal with global overpopulation. Overpopulation is widely believed to be the root cause of anthropogenic climate change, overfishing, fresh water depletion, war, famine etc. -- in short, overpopulation is an existential threat. I recently published a computational model, called World4, for global population, predicting that a peak is coming soon. The good news is that by making every child a wanted child, population growth can be stopped humanely.
My lab is using chimeric constructs of Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) L1 protein as a self-assmbling virus-like nanoparticle. Theses particle raise strong immunity to epitopes on their surface. We are placing CatSper loops on the surface for a contracpetive vaccine, SARS-CoV2 spike protein loops on the surface as a glycan-free COVID vaccine, and metastatic cancer biomarkers for a late-stage cancer immunotherapeutic. This versatile chimeric-HPV technology has many applications in epitope-directed vaccine design.
Talking with Chris has made me more concerned about population projections that only show the possibility of collapse as error bars. I hope to bring him and past guest Wolfgang Lutz on the podcast together to help resolve their disparate views. I see some of humanity's effects on the environment that could affect our population beyond what the UN projections show not as low-probability high-impact events, but already happening. I mean things like depleting aquifers or fisheries that hundreds of millions of people rely on or plastic building up in the ocean. Several major rivers don't reach the ocean, including the Colorado, Tigris, and Euphrates. Solving these problems could be low-probability. They’re like driving by looking only in the rear-view mirror. Our relevant question is not, as the UN projections imply, “how do we feed ten billion?” It’s, “might human population collapse?” By implying we don’t have to worry about collapse, I see the UN discouraging acting on sustainability, in my view.
Population modeling can be hard, as is figuring out a prediction's accuracy, therefore how much confidence to give your conclusions. Many people can't hear talk about population without hearing things like eugenics and racism even when they aren't there. But population is one of the most important factors in sustainability. Everything becomes easier when population isn't near or above what Earth can sustain and harder when it's above. I came to Chris from reading his paper on modeling population growth, Footprints to singularity, which showed a couple things. It clarified that UN and peer projections lacked feedback mechanisms so couldn't show population decline. If your model can't show a population decline, it will blind you to the possibility and therefore keep you from preventing or preparing for it. It also leads you to ask, "how do we feed ten billion people" instead of seeing that we can't without causing a steep drop in population soon after, a pattern called overshoot and collapse. Second, it showed a good chance that population would likely decline significantly soon. It and he also reinforced my confidence in Limits to Growth's dynamical systems approach. Chris's paper prompted my contacting Wolfgang Lutz, and I recommend listening to his episode too. I hope to bring them together on one episode to see if they can reconcile their differences. Oh yeah, I also enjoyed and learned from the class slides for his undergraduate course in human population.