Government Health LARP: Microplastics

The Healthcare Wars, Part 12

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How often do you get the feeling that there are no adults in the room who generally care about all those lofty goals that we are told are important for our health, our society, our environment, and this here "Spaceship Earth"?

According to a recent Yahoo!tech article, two teenagers came up with a cool solution to filtering between 84 and 94 percent of microplastics out of water.

I'm going to skip doing all the [obvious] research for you: microplastics are definitely and for certain no good for any living thing.

Here is what I'm here to explain: There is no good reason that this solution was left to two teenagers.

Understand, I do not mean to take away from the two teenagers: Victoria Ou and Justin Huang certainly deserve the scholarships they were awarded for their science and engineering fair project.

What I do mean is that there is no good reason that this problem was left unsolved. We live in a nation that spends—often wastefully—ungodly amounts of money while politicians grandstand about health and environmental issues, telling us about the tens of trillions of dollars that will have to be spent to perform the complex dance of going green while destroying the economy. For a tiny, tiny proportion of the federal budget, an operation of 220 or so top notch engineers like DARPA could be expanded to include 20 more engineers entirely tasked with environmental health solutions. 

The two brilliant teens made use of ultrasound technology to cheaply outperform current filtration methods. Ultrasound is currently used in numerous forms of surgery, not to mention methods of filtering and purifying chemicals. Electronics (and jewelry) are often cleaned in ultrasonic baths. This is not an unknown tool, and it would be on somebody's white board of "broadly applicable tools not yet exhaustively employed," cross-applied to a list of tools with the property that it "separates substances." It should not have been a particularly significant leap to employ the technology in water filtration. Among a pool of top notch engineers, using ultrasound to filter water would have been a low hanging fruit.

I'll go a step further. Having spent fifteen years running education programs for high performing teens (a few of whom won national science and engineering fair scholarships), some of that budget could be shipped straight to engineering and technical universities and—as Ou and Huang demonstrate—high schools. In fact, we should probably let students like these out of the half of their classes so that they can work productively on problems like this with half their days.

This is one of those moments that demonstrates how broken the current system is. Anyone left who thinks their political party would solve the problem is cognitively stuck in a tar pit of dissonance. But the next step, once unstuck, is to wonder whether the point is not to solve the problem. In other words, are such problems now only solved by high school students by some sort of design—like channeling all the engineers into building surveillance tools or social media platforms designed to mindf*ck teenagers before they ever start a science and engineering fair project?