What Do The Airlines Have in Common with Your DNA?


The airlines have an interesting policy. Unofficially, it’s called the 1% Defection Rule, and it goes something like this. Imagine that you’re the head of an airline and you want to maximize profit. Your strategy might include offering uncompromising service to guarantee customers will always fly with you. The problem with this strategy is it begins to get expensive; more service = more money (don’t kid yourself, those little bags of peanuts add up). This cuts into corporate revenue, making your shareholders grumpy, and putting your very livelihood in jeopardy.

So instead, being the genius you are, you come up with another strategy: provide just enough services to keep your customers from defecting to the other guy’s airline. It’s just like your buddy the hunter, who takes you into the forest and tells you the old joke about outrunning a Grizzly Bear. He doesn’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than you.

This kind of thinking can be seen in the evolution of the airplane headrest. At one time, each headrest had a removable paper liner to insure that the back of your head never came in contact with the aftermath of the Dapper Dan man who sat there before you, and who might have left behind “a little dab [to] do ya.”

If the lack of cranial sanitation bothers you now, there’s nothing you can really do about it. No matter which airline you fly, the headrest protector has gone the way of the dinosaurs. Too bad for the dinosaurs, but like the airlines, evolution has a tendency to lurch forward, surprisingly following much the same path as the 1% Defection Rule.

When scientists first sequenced the human genome, they encountered a minor predicament. A big portion of the DNA found in humans seemed to serve no purpose. It was just there, hanging out. They appropriately gave it the high-minded scientific nomenclature of “junk DNA.”

This was the predominant belief until along came grad student Hervé Perron, and his radical notion that our genetic junk drawer might actually contain some interesting stuff. (Just like your junk drawer at home.) He had discovered that our DNA also contains the complete code for HERV-W, a retrovirus that causes Multiple Sclerosis. In fact, our chromosomes play host to the blueprints of around 100,000 retroviruses. 40% of our DNA is virus-related. M.S., schizophrenia, and many other diseases have been hiding inside our bodies from birth, Trojan horse style.

Geneticists theorized that, every now and then, a virus managed to slip into the reproductive cells of some early monkey, who passed the whole mess along to their descendants--ultimately, us. Instead of developing an immune system capable of taking down any pathogen under the sun, the body adopted a “seal it and forget it” system, safely walling in the junk DNA with proteins. The airline industry would be proud; not a perfect solution, but hey, good enough!

In today’s world, the “good enough” strategy works pretty well--until you’re assaulted by a whole host of things, some environmental, (like modern chemicals found in the air, water and manufactured products), some internal (including stress chemicals like cortisol), and let’s not forget cellular predisposition, to name but a few. As long as the walls surrounding your Junk DNA stay intact, you’re flying high, but if you’re one of the unfortunate who finds the waters have risen well above the break wall, you may encounter a full Fukushima-style meltdown.

Still, the bottom line is there’s no point in worrying about it. On airplanes, keep your valuables out of the dirtiest place on earth, the doody pocket, and remember to be kind to the overworked flight attendants (who, when confronted with a smile, will often comp you an extra bag of peanuts). As far as your junk DNA goes, help your immune system out by getting plenty of rest, proper nutrition and exercise. Other than that, buckle up for the occasional bump on the flight called life. 

I wonder if Trojan horses like peanuts?
 
Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

  1. Mary Gleason BestAugust 31, 2012 at 12:45 PM

    I'll never be able to rest my head in an aircraft without thinking of Dapper Dan.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more