Welcome back to Techne! This week I have been watching lectures from author and English professor Aaron Gwyn, who is a scholar of writer Cormac McCarthy. I’d suggest starting with “Episode I: See the Child,” which is about the historical context of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. 

This summer I experienced a cruelty I hope no one should have to endure. On Saturday my mother passed away, just three months and two days after my dad did the same. 

I was in my office cubicle working on this newsletter when I got the news about my dad. He was a cancer survivor of nearly two decades, and he had been in and out of the ICU at least three times in recent years, so each call I would get from my mom or my aunt would cause a jump scare. He always bounced back from impossible odds, until this June, when he didn’t.  

After my dad passed, I went home to Illinois to help my mom, who was undergoing cancer treatments. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2018, but earlier this year, the treatments stopped being effective. I remember the call: Happy Mother’s Day, the drugs aren’t working anymore.

Except for two weeks when I went back to Washington, D.C., I spent most of my summer in my hometown of Springfield, effectively becoming full-time help for my mother, cooking her food, doing her laundry, and when things got really bad, helping her walk—all while working full time. She was on a new treatment regimen, Keytruda, and for some the drug has been a godsend. For her, it wasn’t able to stop the disease. 

I’ve found being back home for these couple months bittersweet. It has been heartbreaking to watch my mother decline, to see the woman who was always the life of the party, a former probation officer during the crack epidemic, hide from family pictures and say only a few words. But I am also glad I was there with her until the very end. She never wanted to talk about death, so instead, our last couple of conversations were about life, what I found digging into family history, the sleeping arrangements at Thanksgiving with our large family, the upcoming corn harvest, and the unique beauty of the Midwest. 

Easily the toughest part of all this was how my mom and my dad both shut down conversations about death. She barely talked about my dad once he passed, and she would always change the subject when it came to her own illness. Some years ago, I asked her why this part of life was so tough for her, why she never liked to discuss my dad’s cancer, and she told me that she wanted to shield me from the world. My dad nodded along in agreement. But I knew they were actually talking about themselves, not me.

However, it would be foolish on my part to deny that my career has been indelibly shaped by their medical histories. Yes, my dad was an economist who worked for the state of Illinois. But he was also a survivor of cancer largely because he was part of an experimental therapy. The reason I care about innovation is because I know what it means to extend good life years. 

My dad was diagnosed with non-squamous cell carcinoma when I was teenager, still living at home, and I initially coped with it by just turning away. My dad chewed tobacco for most of his adult life, but only did so after having a beer, which doctors said reduced his saliva and contributed to his developing neck cancer. The treatment was brutal and experimental. Chemo and radiation every other week for months, leaving him with third-degree burns in his mouth, until surgery, which cut out a third of his neck. The doctors who treated my dad also treated award-winning chef Grant Achatz, and they saved his life. 

At some point in those early months, when it was unclear whether my dad would survive, my mom had a brutal conversation with me about being more present. It was truly a reckoning. For years, I felt shame from that conversation, about how I reacted when my dad first got sick, but I now see the entire experience as her gift. She gave me what she never had—an ability to freely talk about life’s realities and to appreciate the limited time we all have.

A little over a decade later, my mom was diagnosed with lung cancer, and her prognosis was just as dire. We would later find out that her disease was caused by a defective ALK-positive gene. Thankfully, she could manage the disease by taking a tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI), a type of therapy that came to the market in the early 2000s. The drug was a lifesaver. It gave her the time to see her grandkids being born, to travel, and to live a normal life. 

In policy, we often talk about extending life years. But to me, even as I was living them, I knew those extra years my mom and dad had were incredibly precious. TKIs were nothing short of a miracle for my mom, but not everyone is so fortunate. Economist Alex Tabarrok calls it the invisible graveyard: 

I have long argued that the FDA has an incentive to delay the introduction of new drugs because approving a bad drug (Type I error) has more severe consequences for the FDA than does failing to approve a good drug (Type II error). In the former case at least some victims are identifiable and the New York Times writes stories about them and how they died because the FDA failed. In the latter case, when the FDA fails to approve a good drug, people die but the bodies are buried in an invisible graveyard.

Technology and innovation combined with smart regulatory regimes can extend lives. And there is lots of good evidence that it has. The likelihood of dying from cancer is on the decline, and I am hopeful that new advances in AI will keep on pushing death rates down. 

Still, it is everyone’s task to make those extra days meaningful. 

Almost two years ago, I pitched a version of this essay to both my parents and asked them if it was okay to talk about their medical histories. They both were incredibly supportive and told me that if our story can help others, then yes, please write about it. But when I tried to bring it up later, they both deflected.  

Though it may seem like this essay is an appeal for sympathy for me, it is not. I have already received an outpouring of love and support from friends and colleagues, including at the American Enterprise Institute and The Dispatch.

This essay is really an appeal for sympathy and love to others. No one is perfect—I fail at this all the time. But you never know if that person making you mad just lost their mother. 

Next week, I will be on vacation, which was planned months before any of this happened, so we will talk again when I return. Until then,

• Constellation Energy and Microsoft have signed a deal to resurrect a unit of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant, driven by big tech’s surging electricity demand for data centers and the appeal of nuclear energy’s reliability and low carbon emissions. Key regulatory permits for the plant’s restart have not been filed yet.
• The Federal Communications Commission has proposed new rules requiring disclosure of AI use in political ads. The proposal has prompted numerous comments from various groups, including the ACLU, the Motion Picture Organization, and NetChoice. Federal Election Commission Chairman Sean Cooksey outlines some of these responses in a thread and concludes: “To be sure, there are many comments in support of the proposal, and others who oppose (over 2000 total). But it’s an important sign that so many from across industries and politics—from the ACLU to the Heritage Foundation—have serious problems with this proposal.”
• Iran has successfully placed its Chamran 1 research satellite into orbit using a domestically developed launch vehicle, Qaem 100. This marks a significant milestone in Iran’s space program that feeds into missile tech.
• A Federal Trade Commission report revealed “vast surveillance” of social media users, finding that major platforms including Meta, YouTube, and TikTok collect and share user data far beyond what most people realize. The report also highlighted that these practices significantly affect children and teenagers.
• President Joe Biden said he will sign the Building CHIPS in America Act passed by the House this week. This legislation aims to streamline the approval process for CHIPS projects by reducing the number of such projects subject to National Environmental Policy Act review and shortening the time frame for legal challenges to these projects.
• FTC Chair Lina Khan’s comments about unspecified companies that “take massive risks in a way that can crash the economy” on 60 Minutes this week have sparked a lot of controversy. As economist Brian Albrecht noted, “To be clear, this is nonsense. We aren’t going to ‘crash the economy’ if antitrust enforcement declines and companies take more risks.”
• Frontier, a carbon removal marketplace, has partnered with CarbonRun, a Canadian company that uses a proven method of river deacidification called river liming. Buyers through Frontier will pay $25.4 million to permanently remove 55,442 tons of CO₂ at multiple sites between 2025 and 2029. The process, which involves adding grounded limestone to acidified rivers to repair acid rain damage, was successful in treating the problem in Scandinavia. 
• I know the hype for 3D printing has waned but there are still fascinating products being developed, like this new heat exchanger: “Using a Gyroid structure, a complex 3 dimensional interconnecting lattice inspired by nature, low pressure heat exchangers have been made that are 50% more effective than counterflow heat exchangers, but at only 1/10 the size.” 
• During a recent subcommittee hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin expressed support for a new AI regulation proposal that would create a licensing system for AI products and services.

• ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice mode is not available in a few locations, including the EU., where experts discovered the voice is illegal in workplaces and schools. 
• The Department of Justice announced updates to its Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs to address AI when investigating companies for other criminal offenses.
• Math may be the solution to building a chatbot that won’t hallucinate. 
• The Bank of Canada said adoption of AI may worsen inflation in the short term by adding price pressures and boosting demand through productivity growth. 
• The Biden administration will host a global AI safety summit in November amid a push for the government to better understand the technology. 
• California Gov. Gavin Newsom has until Monday to determine the fate of SB 1047.