Sunday Newsletter (No. 12): Linking maternal age and lifespan, coronavirus morality & offices of the future
Here’s my take on a few things in tech and science that have been happening recently:
Does having kids later mean you’ll live longer? A new study was published this week in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS), suggesting that a woman’s reproductive history may be linked to lifespan. The study found that women who delivered their last child later in life were likely to have longer telomeres. In general, longer telomeres suggest that someone is healthier and likely to live longer.
Telomeres are at the ends of chromosomes and function as protection during cell division, helping to prevent genomic instability. Telomere length decreases as we age, and links have been found between telomere length and diseases like cancer and type 2 diabetes.
Amidst anxiety around a ticking biological clock, this may be one silver lining for women who have children later in life. However, older maternal age is known to be linked to increased health risks for both the mother and the baby. It’s also worth stating that while this study did find a positive association between maternal age and telomere length, it could be a case of the classic “correlation is not causation”: it may be that longer telomeres simply indicate better health generally, meaning that these women are the ones who are actually able to have children when they are older. Further research is required to confirm the hypothesis that having children later in age is actually a cause of longer telomere length.
Links:
Women's expected longevity linked to age at birth of last child (Science Daily)
Pregnancy after 35: Healthy moms, healthy babies (Mayo Clinic)
What’s the right thing to do in a global pandemic? Progress in science and technology often means that we need to make moral decisions which we haven’t previously had to contend with. For example, with the development of self-driving cars, we’ve had to consider scenarios like: if a self-driving car malfunctions and we have the choice of crashing into a barrier and killing a parent with two young children in the car or continuing straight ahead and killing four pensioners crossing the road, which is the “better” choice? (Take a look at MIT’s Moral Machine if you’re interested in looking into this further - it’s a platform gathering data on the human perspective on moral decisions.) Whether you believe SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a research lab in Wuhan or originated from a wet market, our technological progress promoting increased globalisation has created an environment that allowed a global pandemic to occur. Governments and societies are now facing various moral conundrums around lockdowns, restrictions and who might get the much-awaited vaccine first. The MIT Moral Machine also has a new questionnaire around the ethical challenges that have arisen as a result of the pandemic, particularly in the situation where demand for ventilators exceeds availability. No answer seems like the right one, but I’m interested in MIT’s approach of gathering data on what people feel is right - will there one day be an algorithm that helps us make these tough decisions, or should this be a purely human activity? Personally, I’m not sure whether I would prefer Boris Johnson or a computer to decide what the new lockdown restrictions in London will be tomorrow…
Links:
Can you handle herd immunity? Ask these philosophers (Bloomberg Opinion)
Moral Machine (MIT)
The office of the future. There is no doubt that for many people, the coronavirus pandemic has changed how we work. We no longer commute to the office and spend the day with our colleagues, we now spend the day at home with families, housemates or alone. From what I’ve heard in London, organisations in more traditional industries, for example banking, are keen to get people back to the pre-pandemic way of working in an office. However, the world of tech is quite different: “remote-first” is the trendy term du jour and many companies are shifting to this way of working. Technology is being developed to help facilitate virtual water cooler moments for our new remote lives, but I’m not convinced that we can replicate the joy associated with real-life interactions virtually. Many remote first-companies will still have a physical office space, but these spaces need to be redesigned because the purpose of an office has changed. In the pre-pandemic world, the job of an office was to give people a place to do concentrated work, primarily at desks, with occasional use of meeting rooms. However, deep work is now done from home, and for many this seems to be a more conducive environment for this type of work - the distractions of an open-plan office are no longer. With this shift, the job of an office space is now to provide a place for connection with others - it needs to facilitate collaborative work as well as spontaneous and social interactions. Locations is another aspect of offices which may need to change, particularly in cities like London where commute times can be long. Rather than having one central office, it may make more sense to have multiple clusters in different areas to better facilitate co-presence with colleagues. For teams to continue to thrive, I think companies adopting a remote-first policy will need to adjust their physical space design in line with the office’s new purpose.
Links:
Reimagining the urban office (Harvard Business Review)
Microsoft to allow some employees to work remote permanently (Bloomberg)
This is a newsletter of a three things in tech and science that I've found interesting this week. It's a 5 minute read on a Sunday, in which I’m hoping you’ll learn something new.
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