There are many links between the cost of healthcare and our environment, but last night I read something interesting. I popped open my favorite science book, Life: The Science of Biology. If you don’t have it, you should buy it. No matter what field you are in, it’s a great reference book. I have the fourth edition by William Purves of Harvey Mudd College, Gordon Orians of the University of Washington, Seattle, and H. Craig Heller of Stanford University. The book is now on its ninth edition.
On time scales, it reads:
When Galileo studied the motion of a ball rolling down an inclined plane 375 years ago, he used his pulse to mark off equal intervals of time because no better device existed for measuring time. The rise of modern science has depended upon the invention of instruments capable of measuring time accurately. Scientists need to measure time spans both longer and shorter than those we can perceive accurately with our unaided senses. In biology, the longer time spans have caused the greatest conceptual difficulties. Earth is a very old planet; the difficulty in perceiving its age delayed the recognition of evolutionary change for a long time.
Biologists working at different levels of organization may think about and study problems in different time scales. Biochemists and physiologists are concerned primarily with the time span relevant to the intervals required for chemical reactions and physiological changes within an organism. These intervals range from fractions of seconds to a day or a year. Studies of physiological processes such as aging may require observations extending over the lifetime of organisms, which may range up to centuries for some long-lived plants.
Studies of populations may extend over many generations of the organisms. The time span of generations ranges from less than an hour for some bacteria to centuries for some plants, but for any particular type of organism, the time required for changes in the sizes and distributions of populations is much longer than the time required for physiological changes in single individuals.
The study of changes in the genetic constitution of populations requires us to think in terms of microevolutionary time. Significant genetic changes usually take many generations, but they can happen quite rapidly when environmental conditions change abruptly.
That opens up a whole host of questions. How abrupt do the environmental changes need to be to have an impact? Are we in one of those periods now? If so, how fast could genetic changes occur? What will that mean for the medicine available today? Will we mutate faster, become more resilient and not need much of it? And when we need some of it, will it be ineffective or too effective?
Perhaps we can morph into martians and make do on Mars. Meanwhile, it brings up other interesting questions from the financing perspective. For example, clearly property insurance companies are interested in investing in environmentally friendly infrastructure projects; higher than predicted volatility in weather patterns could threaten their business model. But how much should health insurance companies be involved?
These are initial questions. But there’s one more link between healthcare costs and the environment that is worth remembering.