Little known fact: The first diesel engine was able to run on peanut oil.

With petroleum putting the squeeze on the environment and our pocketbooks, the push to create sustainable biofuels with commodity crops is increasing.

There’s an intriguing prospect in the March issue of The Atlantic by Nicholas Schmidle about efforts to turn the poppy fields of Afghanistan into a source of biodiesel fuel that will not only benefit the gas-guzzlers of the world, but the Afghan people themselves.

Read more…

A smart post by The Sunlight Foundation’s Nancy Watzman has me thinking about what it really means to have access to all of our personal health data. In the past, I’ve myopically viewed personal health data as anything that my body produced, in one way or another, and now sits in my shadowy file at the doctor’s office. Things like X-rays, MRIs, and blood test results. No doubt, I should have access to all of this information.

What about prescription medication? Sure, I can easily make a list of the meds I’m currently taking, or get my doctor to hand this list over if memory fails me. But how much do I really know about these drugs? Most people, myself included, take our doctor’s word when he or she decides to put us on a commonly prescribed medications. For example, let’s say a patient has blood-work that shows elevated LDL cholesterol on two consecutive screenings, comes from a family where cardiovascular disease runs rampant, and was previously unable to regulate cholesterol levels with strict diet and exercise regimes. If the doctor prescribed Lipitor to treat the problem, a patient may not even think twice about taking it. After all, we see commercials for such drugs on our TV, and we flip past their ads in our magazines. Direct-to-consumer marketing by pharmaceutical companies makes drugs familiar and, presumably, safe.

But regardless of what advertisements say, the FDA is ultimately responsible for giving drugs the safety stamp of approval. The decision to approve a drug is based on substantial amounts of preclinical (testing in animals) and clinical (testing in humans) data submitted to the FDA by the drug manufacturer.

Let’s say someone – a doctor, a patient, a concerned citizen – wants to review the data that the FDA uses to approve a drug. If the drug you’re taking was approved after 1998, you can find the FDA’s review documents online. If you’re prescribed an older medicine, you may strike out when trying to find what the FDA has to say about it. The government’s information on drugs approved through 1997 may be released if someone makes a request through the Freedom of Information Act, but the FDA reserves the right to not publish reports if the agency deems the preserved documents are of “poor quality”. In fact, Watzman found that online safety information is missing for 9 of the 25 most commonly prescribed drugs.

For older and newer drugs alike, when the FDA publishes a review online, it’s never in a text-searchable format. Rather, the agency prints the original paperwork, edits with white-out to cover “propriety information”, scans the newly edited document, and finally, posts the altered PDFs online.

Are these edited documents, with words covered with white-out and entire sections omitted, really providing us with useful information? Somewhere along the drug approval process, there has to be a succinct memo that circulates around the FDA headquarters describing the agency’s major findings on a particular drug. Why can’t the FDA publish a simple summary of their findings?

Skeptics may argue that detailed information about a drug already published by pharmaceutical companies in medical journals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) or the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), should suffice. However, there are two problems with the information reported in medical journals. First, most of these journals are not open access, meaning the average consumer cannot access them without paying for the article. Second, many drug companies only publish positive findings, and bury negative results that show less than desirable efficacy or safety.

Watzman’s report is an eye-opening look at what’s wrong with the flow of drug information as it goes from pharmaceutical company to the FDA to the consumer. If pharmaceutical companies are allowed to market directly to consumers, we should demand the right to know what the FDA has to say about the safety of these drugs.

A brief tangent: I’m at the TED conference this week, and today I put on my editor hat and moderated a panel on how to change our global energy priorities, by moving away from oil/gas towards renewables. On the panel were two luminaries – Richard Sears, a VP at Shell and visiting scientist at MIT, and Dan Reicher, head of energy initiatives at Google.org (Dan was a member of the Obama transition team and on the shortlist, reportedly, to be Obama’s secretary of energy).

The lunch went well – among others, Bill Gates was in the audience – and it seemed a lively discussion about what can actually be done, right now, to incentivize both the oil industry as well as consumers to start the shift to other energies.

The consumer angle is especially intriguing, given the focus of The Decision Tree, since one of the items most often mentioned as a driver towards better consumer behavior – in terms of moving towards conservation and making smarter more efficient energy choices – is metrics. Reicher mentioned that the Obama stimulus package, as originally written, has something like $4 billion earmarked to go towards buying (or help buying) some 40 million smart meters for households. That’s enough to change one in three households towards smarter energy usage. Smart meters are basically feedback devices that let consumers know how much energy they’re using and at what times, allowing them to adjust their consumption habits to consume less (and spend less).

This is, readers will recognize, the same sort of thing that’s emerging as significant for changing our health behaviors – giving people a way to see and measure, quantitatively, what they’re doing – and then to calibrate adjustments. Even better: Provide for openness, and let people compare and collaborate on improving their behaviors.

A couple cool examples in the energy world are Fuelly, a website with a social networking component that let’s you track how much you drive your car, what sort of mileage you’re getting, and so on. This is the province of so-called hypermilers, but also folks who just want to drive less and spend less on gas – which was pretty much all of us over the summer. Another cool tool here is WattzOn (pronounced “watson”), a site developed by Saul Griffith that lets you track your overall energy consumption, from airplane travel to food production to consumer goods like clothing. OK, this borders on obsessive, and isn’t entirely practical – but it does give a remarkable picture of our overall energy footprint – not just our carbon footprint – and might provide ways we could cut back (Griffith, for instance, rations the amount of airplane trips he’ll go on each year).

So the parallels here are quite neat – in both circumstances (health and energy), new tools are emerging that suddenly turn our invisible lives into stark, bold numbers, numbers that we can give us insight into exactly where we stand, as well as direction for where we might want to go. In both cases, it’s not going to be easy to actually stick to our principles and change how we do things. It’s no easier to stop driving than it is to stop eating (or in the case of In ‘n’ Out burger, doing both at once). But gaining perspective on the relationship between our actions and our greater context – be it our health or our planet’s health – is a necessary first step.

A couple observations on the official announcement today that Obama will nominate Tom Daschle as secretary of Health and Human Services as well as oversee an office of healthcare reform. This officially designates healthcare as a leading issue for the administration – but not in the 100 days sense. Daschle talked about a process of several years, which may be simply a way to carve out some breathing room but also to avoid the impression that they’ll go in there guns-a-blazin’ like Clinton did in 1992, only to come up empty (is that one metaphor or two?).

Also, very intriguing to hear Daschle talk about soliciting input from all Americans, via house meetings (Daschle promises to sit in on a few) and suggestions posted on Change.gov. “Over the next few weeks, we will be coordinating thousands of healthcare discussions in homes all across the country through our Web site, change.gov, where ordinary Americans can share their ideas about what’s broken and how to fix it,” Daschle said.

Obama calls this part of an “open and transparent process,” but another word for it – if he’s serious – is opensource healthcare reform. In this case, I think that’s a great idea. One, it gets buy-in (or creates the impression of buy-in) from the populace, getting them on board with what has been demonized as freightening change or “socialized medicine.” And two, it acknowledges that healthcare is an infinitely complicated beast, and demands to be considered from every perspective. Crowdsourcing has been used a bit by some government agencies – most inventively by NASA and its “clickworkers” effort a few years back – but never far as I know to hash out real policy reform. It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, the power of the crowd comes up with that 50 years of expert (though failed) wonkery hasn’t thought of.

One side note: I think this is also the first official suggestion of what the Obama administration might do with Change.gov post-inauguration, as well.