Índex per November 4, 2019 a TIME Magazine

SPICY SCOOP While reporting a story on Colonel Sanders in 2016, a journalist snapped a picture of a family scrapbook that appeared to detail KFC’s secret spice mix for its fried chicken. KFC denied its authenticity. CREAM SCHEME In 2014, a federal court found two men guilty of stealing DuPont’s recipe for a chemical used in paper, plastic—and the filling in Oreo cookies. They sold the info to a state-owned Chinese firm. KERNEL OF TRUTH In April, the parent company of Garrett Popcorn Shops sued its former research director, alleging she stole recipes. The files were guarded by biometric sensors and accessible by only three people’s thumbprints.…

AROUND THE world, 2019 has been a year of public protest, and in some countries it’s not hard to understand why. In Hong Kong, demonstrators want to preserve the city’s autonomy within a repressive Chinese political system. In Algeria and Sudan, the issue is frustration with decades of dictatorship. In Ecuador, Nicaragua and Haiti, it’s poverty and bad governance. In Iraq and Lebanon, the protest focus is endemic corruption. But what’s going on in Chile, one of South America’s most peaceful and prosperous countries? Earlier in October, a team of government technocrats announced that a weakening currency and higher fuel costs demanded an increase from 800 to 830 pesos in the cost of rush-hour public-transit fares in Santiago, Chile’s capital. That’s a rise of about 4 U.S. cents. In…

OUR WORLD HAS NEVER WITNESSED A TIME OF greater promise for improving human health. Many of today’s health advances have stemmed from a long arc of discovery that begins with strong, steady support for basic science. In large part because of fundamental research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which traces its roots to 1887, Americans are living longer, healthier lives. Life expectancy for a baby born in the U.S. has risen from 47 years in 1900 to more than 78 years today. Among the advances that have helped to make this possible are a 70% decline in the U.S. death rate from cardiovascular disease over the past 50 years, and a drop of more than 1% annually in the cancer death rate over the past couple…

IT’S KARAOKE-REHEARSAL TIME AT KNOLLWOOD MILITARY RETIREMENT Community in Washington, D.C. Knollwood resident and retired U.S. Army Colonel Phil Soriano, 86, has hosted the facility’s semimonthly sing-alongs since their debut during a boozy snowstorm happy hour in 2016. For the show in late August 2019, he’ll share M.C. duties with a special guest: Stevie, a petite and personable figure who’s been living at Knollwood for the past six weeks. Soriano wants to sing the crowd-pleasing hit “YMCA” while Stevie leads the crowd through the song’s signature dance moves. But Stevie is a robot, and this is harder than it sounds. “We could try to make him dance,” says Niamh Donnelly, the robot’s lead AI engineer, though she sounds dubious. She enters commands on a laptop. In response, Stevie stretches its peglike…

‘The problem is the system is still entirely too complex.’BILL CLINTON, 42nd President of the United States ‘The poorest women on earth subsidize health care globally to the tune of $1 trillion with their unpaid and underpaid work. That’s larger than the economies of over 150 countries.’DR. RAJ PANJABI, CEO and co-founder of Last Mile Health 1.3 trillion dollars The annual budget of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, accounting for almost one-third of all federal spending, of which spending on drugs is the fastest-growing portion, according to administrator SEEMA VERMA “When I went in for my appointment and was diagnosed with invasive cancer, it took my breath away in horror—and like, ‘Oh my God, this is hilarious.’ Of course, it wasn’t hilarious, but something has to break…

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WERE SINGLE-CELL BACTERIA. They were the only life on earth for billions of years, then larger cells evolved, then multicellular organisms, and then plants and animals. But the bacteria never went away, and all organisms, including us humans, have had to learn to live with them. Today, the lessons they are teaching us could change the trajectory of human health for generations. When bacteria were first discovered more than three centuries ago, most attention was on the ones we fought, which caused diseases like cholera, typhoid and tuberculosis. Through vaccines and antibiotics, we have made amazing progress in conquering these scourges. Now, through the combined tools of DNA sequencing and computer-based analysis, we have a first approximation of the innumerable other bacteria with which we…

IN RECENT YEARS WE HAVE WITNESSED INCREDIBLE advances in science and technology that improve the care we deliver to patients. But if people can’t take their medication because they don’t have a home, or have to choose between buying food and medication, then this innovation means little. Health is about so much more than the care we provide at a hospital or medical office. An individual’s ZIP code can be a more accurate driver of health than their genetic code. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, Kaiser Permanente found stark evidence that select neighborhoods experience higher rates of diabetes (up to 11%) and child obesity (up to 23%). A study published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention in 2017 concluded that obesity rates among breast-cancer survivors were higher…

ANDRÉ ACIMAN WASN’T ENTIRELY HONEST with us. In late 2017, around the release of the film adaptation of his cherished 2007 novel Call Me by Your Name, he indicated that he’d closed the book on his characters Elio and Oliver, the star-crossed lovers at the center of the story. “I’ve said what I had to say,” he told a reporter, when asked about a potential sequel. But Aciman had been working on a follow-up for over a year. Now, as he prepares for the Oct. 29 release of Find Me, his new book set in the world of Call Me by Your Name, Aciman settles in his New York City apartment to come clean. “I wasn’t sure,” he says. “And I didn’t want to use the word, which became poisonous,…

WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT … AMERICA’S FOREVER WAR In the Oct. 21/Oct. 28 cover package about America’s military, Elliot Ackerman made the case for a draft—and many of his fellow veterans agreed. Iraq War vet Mike Busovicki of Canonsburg, Pa., said he’d never supported the idea but now thinks “it’s the only way for Americans to take their military—and our lives—seriously.” Navy vet Bruce Jayne of Saluda, N.C., said those who serve would gain an “appreciation” for people from all walks of life, and vets and civilians alike said the wealthy would particularly benefit from service that would give them experience of challenges faced by those less fortunate, as Del Jordan of Monroeville, N.J., put it. But Tim Ackert of Orlando felt differently. “Keep it a volunteer military,” he…

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP IS SUPPOSED TO be the man who could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing any political support. But the threat of impeachment is constraining the President’s power in surprising ways. As defiant witnesses provide damning testimony in the House inquiry, Republicans are increasingly seeking shelter from unrelated scandals. The result—a spreading weakness in the West Wing—has driven increasingly erratic behavior by Trump, according to those close to him inside the White House and outside of government. Examples of Trump’s diminished power aren’t hard to find. A series of government officials have defied the White House’s Oct. 8 edict that the Administration would not comply with the impeachment inquiry. Most damaging so far was the Oct. 22 testimony of acting U.S. Ambassador to Kiev…

State Dept. closes Clinton email inquiry The State Department ended a three-year inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as Secretary of State, concluding there was no “systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information,” according to a report made public on Oct. 18. Trudeau re-elected but loses majority Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party won the most seats in Canada’s general election on Oct. 21 but lost its parliamentary majority, so it will have to seek opposition votes to pass legislation. The Prime Minister’s campaign was rocked by revelations, first reported by TIME, that he had worn brownface and blackface makeup in the past. Ohio opioid settlement reached Four drug companies, including McKesson and Cardinal Health, reached a $260 million settlement with two Ohio counties on…

In his 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, Deepak Chopra advises readers to “go beyond” human constructs and connect with their innate beings. He calls this becoming “metahuman” and says it’s necessary for creating a better world. Why did you write this book after so many others? The impetus was looking at what our collective mind has created: climate change, extinction of species, poison in our food chain, nuclear weapons, biological warfare, interference with democracies through Internet hacking. Seriously, it looks like we’re planning our extinction. How can being metahuman help? We have the technologies to reverse these trends already. But do we have the collective will? I think that requires a spiritual shift. What’s the first step in becoming metahuman? A simple contemplative meditation practice. Also a little…

IT’S A PARADOX OF THIS MOMENT IN HUMAN HISTORY—we have a vast universe of information at our fingertips, yet we still struggle to understand the forces that shape our world. The very technologies and social-media platforms that were supposed to bring us together have been used to sow division and undermine our democracy. Power comes from “we the people,” yet public trust in institutions continues to decline. The free press that ensures transparency and accountability is under attack, here in the U.S. and around the world. We’re surrounded by unprecedented prosperity but also shocking inequality, leading to calls for a new, more equitable and sustainable form of capitalism. Artificial intelligence can make us smarter, wealthier and healthier, yet algorithms increasingly decide which articles we read. In moments of transformation…

ILLUSTRATIONS BY BROWN BIRD DESIGN FOR TIME Pocket-size ultrasound devices that cost 50 times less than the machines in hospitals (and connect to your phone). Virtual reality that speeds healing in rehab. Artificial intelligence that’s better than medical experts at spotting lung tumors. These are just some of the innovations now transforming medicine at a remarkable pace. No one can predict the future, but it can at least be glimpsed in the dozen inventions and concepts on the pages that follow. Like the people behind them, they stand at the vanguard of health care. Neither exhaustive nor exclusive, the list is, rather, representative of the recasting of public health and medical science likely to come in the 2020s. Doug Melton A stem-cell cure for diabetes Type 1 diabetes affects 1.25…

ILLNESS IS UNIVERSAL, HEALTH CARE IS NOT. OVER HALF OF the world’s 7.3 billion people, including 1 billion in rural communities, lack access to health care. Approximately 13 million children still go without a single dose of any vaccine. Nearly 9 million newborns, children and mothers still die each year from preventable or treatable conditions. Compounding this crisis is a massive health-worker shortage, forecast to grow to 18 million by 2030. Training more doctors is necessary, but because doctors are concentrated in cities, they alone are insufficient to close this gap. What if the residents of rural communities—even those without a high school degree—could become a vital part of our health care team? I recently visited Ruth Tarr in an isolated community in Liberia, the country where I was born…

ROBERT CHELSEA TURNED DOWN THE FIRST face he was offered. It was a fine face, one that could have taken him off the transplant waiting list after just a couple months. But Chelsea—severely disfigured after a catastrophic car accident five years earlier—was in no hurry. He’d gotten used to tilting his head back so food and water wouldn’t fall out of his nearly lipless mouth. He knew how to respond compassionately to children who stared in shock and fear. The face, offered in May 2018, had belonged to a man with skin that was much fairer than what remained of Chelsea’s—so light that Chelsea, who is African American, couldn’t bear the thought of becoming “a totally different-looking person.” Chelsea’s doctors understood his hesitance. Face transplants in general are rare. Since…

IN A HIP OAKLAND, CALIF., NEIGHBORHOOD, just blocks from cocktail bars and swanky Mexican restaurants, is an enormous warehouse, home to Counter Culture Labs, ground zero for an audacious challenge to the high cost of prescription drugs. In the entryway stands a 1½-story cardboard T. Rex, and inside it’s a bit as if Dr. Frankenstein shared his lab with a hoarder: cluttered shelves hold piles of drying mushrooms, Clorox wipes, wires, kitchen pots, motor oil, two books about Darwin, ropes, a broken alarm clock, a telescoping magnifying glass, a heat gun, a 3-D printer and several jars of clear liquid with tubes running between them. One shelf holds plastic bins labeled LAB COATS, PAINT & BRUSHES and EBOLA SUITS. A group of professional scientists and amateur tinkerers founded Counter Culture…

What is narrative economics? I define narrative economics as the study of popular stories that are economically relevant, that have a moral, that are a lesson that people will take heed of in their economic decisions. You write that these narratives can and do shape the economy. Can you give me an example from the past of how a narrative has caused a recession? The narrative that comes to my mind for the 2007 through 2009 recession is the housing narrative. There were a lot of people flipping houses. That was a new term. And the idea that home prices have always gone up was encouraged by the stories of people making a lot of money selling houses in that environment. There wasn’t much attention to the history of price…

IN MEXICO’S BIG CITIES, DRUG-CARTEL gunmen normally act like phantoms. They hide in safe houses or amid communities, suddenly striking with an assassination or a gunfight, and then disappearing again. But on Oct. 17 in the Sinaloan city of Culiacan, the cartel gunmen were everywhere. Flights in and out of the airport were canceled as they took control of roads, blocked government buildings and exchanged fire with security forces for hours, leaving at least 14 people dead. Everyone else had to act like ghosts, hiding behind locked doors, not daring to step outside. And in this unusual battle, the Sinaloa Cartel won. The uprising was in response to soldiers’ storming a house and arresting Ovidio Guzmán López, the 28-year-old son of convicted kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. In February,…

There was a time, not so long ago, when medical discoveries still struck like thunderbolts, specific and dramatic. Alexander Fleming realized on Sept. 28, 1928, that the spores growing in his lab were penicillin, the first antibiotic. In 1953, Jonas Salk explained the vaccine against polio on a radio show. It is a paradox of our age that medical advances now accumulate at such a rate that a significant challenge for the health community lies in just keeping up. The technology for editing the human genome was discovered only in 2012, and is already being used to snip out the genetic mutation responsible for sickle-cell anemia in patients. For decades, harnessing the immune system to fight cancer was a tantalizing idea, yet over the past 10 years, nearly 20 new…

WHEN THE DISEASE PLAGUING her digestive system was at its worst, Kelly Owens once had to rush to the bathroom 17 separate times in the course of a few hours. By the time she was 25, her crippling case of Crohn’s disease had given her arthritis from her ankles all the way up to her jaw and fingertips. The dozens of drugs she took helped a bit, but the brutal side effects included nausea, fatigue and weight gain. Nights were the worst. On good nights, Owens woke up to excruciating pain and couldn’t fall asleep again, trying in vain to find a comfortable position. On bad nights, the diarrhea and vomiting made her so dehydrated, she needed to be hospitalized. “My body was at war with me,” she says. Worse,…

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE HAS THE POTENTIAL TO RADICALLY change health care. Imagine a not too distant future when the focus shifts away from disease to how we stay healthy. At birth, everyone would get a thorough, multifaceted baseline profile, including screening for genetic and rare diseases. Then, over their lifetimes, cost-effective, minimally invasive clinical-grade devices could accurately monitor a range of biometrics such as heart rate, blood pressure, temperature and glucose levels, in addition to environmental factors such as exposure to pathogens and toxins, and behavioral factors like sleep and activity patterns. This biometric, genetic, environmental and behavioral information could be coupled with social data and used to create AI models. These models could predict disease risk, trigger advance notification of life-threatening conditions like stroke and heart attack, and warn of…

EVER SINCE THE DISCOVERY OF THE STRUCTURE OF DNA IN the 1950s, scientists have been dreaming about rewriting the code of life. What if we could correct genetic mutations that cause disease in order to radically improve human health? Harnessed from the naturally occurring immune system that bacteria use to defend themselves against viruses, CRISPR-Cas9 is a revolutionary, once-in-a-generation tool that offers the real potential to quickly and efficiently achieve what was once thought impossible. Ensuring responsible use of CRISPR is an ongoing challenge Since 2012, the technology has been adopted rapidly, transforming basic research, drug development, diagnostics and agriculture. In the past seven years, over 15,000 papers containing the term CRISPR have been published, and hundreds of different organisms have been edited. CRISPR has become a mainstream topic of…

I LOST MY GRANDMOTHER AND MY MOTHER TO BREAST CANCER. I remember once holding my mother’s hand, as she was receiving chemotherapy, when she started to turn purple and I had to race to get the nurse. Now there are new ways to identify which chemotherapy medication is best for each patient, resulting in fewer of the horrible side effects. Fewer. It’s often still so hard on the body. My mother fought cancer for nearly a decade. As I stood in the hallway of the hospital waiting for my mother’s body to be collected and taken to be cremated, her doctor told me she had promised my mother that she would make sure I was informed about my medical options. Years later, I was able to have a genetic test…