The Truth About Santa

by Gregory Mone

  Of course it’s all for a good cause, but you’re no doubt wondering why anyone would want to take such a job. Even with that extended respite and the two luxurious annual vacations, working like a galley slave for six months takes its toll on the body and mind. But there are also plenty of benefits. If they don’t get lost in an alternate universe, these men are likely to retire with a deliciously large sum of money in the bank. We’ll detail the compensation structure in part 3, but there’s another benefit that’s equally alluring.

  Santa offers a fantastic health plan.

  PART II

  Health

  6

  Santa’s Shrinking Waistline

  THE OBESITY EPIDEMIC, RNA INTERFERENCE, AND THE MYTH OF THE FAT, JOLLY ELF

  A massive waistline, a jiggling belly, and a fat, ruddy face have long been essentials of the Santa Claus aesthetic. These physical characteristics were part of the Santa myth long before Jebediah Meserole and his alien friends turned that legend into reality. Meserole himself tended toward the spherical, and when he abandoned his normal life and became the OC, he was intent on maintaining his girth. The people liked a fat Santa? He’d make sure they got one. He shifted to a diet consisting primarily of eggnog, whole milk, and chocolate-chip cookies. He wanted his lieutenants to be similarly large, so when he began recruiting, he only interviewed prospective employees with size-44-and-up waists.

  There were technical drawbacks to this hiring strategy. For one, it capped the number of homes his lieutenants could visit via wormhole, for reasons detailed in chapter 20. But the real problem with Santa’s insistence on prodigious waistlines had less to do with operational logistics than world health. In recent years, obesity has grown from a problem into an epidemic. Nearly one-third of American schoolchildren are overweight. Sixteen percent of kids between the ages of two and nineteen are obese. Back in the 1970s, only 5 percent of children in the same age bracket fell into that category.

  This is bad, of course, because obesity increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and some types of cancer. It can also affect mental health. An analysis of grade-schoolers in Korea concluded that severely overweight children have lower self-esteem. Several studies have linked obesity to depression, and still others contend that it’s linked to migraines and chronic headaches. A group of researchers at the University of Texas even attacked the old “fat and happy” idea directly. They found that for eight different indicators of mental health, including happiness, life satisfaction, and optimism, obesity either had no effect or made people worse off. The overweight, they concluded, are no more jolly than their wispy brethren.

  Granted, we can’t blame the rise in obesity entirely on Santa Claus and his support of large waistlines. Numerous factors, both genetic and environmental, have driven the trend. Children and adults have shifted to a more sedentary, TV-and-PC-focused lifestyle, and until recently, there was far too little focus on nutrition. But you can imagine that Santa didn’t feel too great about himself or his position as a role model when he became aware of the obesity problem. So, in 2002, after numerous consultations with branding experts, policy makers, scientists, and, just because he thinks they’re funny, semioticians, Santa decided to shrink his waistline.

  For the average person, this sort of decision would be followed by a drastic change in lifestyle. But Santa and his lieutenants didn’t need to change their diet, and the OC didn’t have to order a few hundred elliptical machines for the North Pole, either. No, all they had to do was pop a few pills.

  South of Santa’s workshop, down here in the non-alien-technology-enhanced world, weight loss is hardly this simple, but recent research points toward groundbreaking new means of fighting fat. In 2005, Jonathan Graff of the University of Texas–Southwestern reported that a gene called adipose may serve as a master regulator of fat levels in our bodies. In one experiment, Graff found that increasing adipose activity in mice allowed them to gorge on food and still remain lean. A different set of mice with dialed-down adipose activity gained weight on a similar diet. Graff determined that the gene doesn’t just act as a simple on/ off switch, instructing the body to either burn or store fat. It’s more of a volume dial. The more you crank it up, the more fat you convert into energy.

  Other scientists have found that shutting down specific genes could have fat-fighting potential. In 2006, a group led by biologist Michael Czech at the University of Massachusetts reported that they’d used a technique called RNA interference to silence the gene RIP140. RNA interference interrupts a cell’s signaling system; it stops proteins from doing the work determined by their corresponding genes. When Czech used it to switch off RIP140, a host of other genes involved in the cell’s energy production process became far more active. In effect, knocking out the gene turned adipose cells into fat burners instead of fat accumulators. Czech showed that mice lacking RIP140 didn’t gain weight even when fed a high-fat diet.

  Santa’s weight-loss program takes advantage of these and other forms of gene tic trickery, keeping the OC and his lieutenants trim despite their shared penchant for dipping still-hot chocolate-chip cookies into chilled glasses of creamy eggnog. (The nog coats the freshly baked cookie, wrapping it in a blanket of fatty, alcohol-enhanced wonder . . . oh, if she would only reveal her recipe.) Now, if losing weight is so easy for Santa, the next question is why hasn’t he just given this technology to the rest of the world? Obesity is an epidemic, and Santa has the means to help people lose weight. So why isn’t he dropping his pills off on Christmas Eve instead of a bunch of toys and dolls?

  Besides the risk of lawsuits, the widespread use of this technology, without an accompanying change in diet and lifestyle, could generate more problems than it would solve. Knowing they could burn fat on demand, people might switch to all-ice-cream diets and develop new and more complex ailments.

  Which brings us to yet another question: How is it that Santa carried around all that weight for so long but remained vibrant and healthy enough to work like an industrial robot for one night a year? Forget that: How is it that the old guy is even alive?

  7

  How Santa Handles His Booze

  LIFE EXTENSION AND DIETARY FLEXIBILITY THROUGH ON-DEMAND ORGAN PRINTING

  All those years of washing down mouthfuls of chocolate-chip cookies with cold glasses of creamy eggnog produced irreparable damage to Santa’s organs. Particularly his heart. Think of the cholesterol, the fat, the sugar. The average circulatory system couldn’t handle a habit like that for a decade, let alone a century.

  The well-chronicled act of putting his finger aside his nose also indicates some heart-risky behavior. Was this really a way of whisking himself up the chimney? Or was it a sign that he’d just ingested a certain powder that kept him jolly and energetic through the night? We don’t know. His lungs may have suffered, too. In early nineteenth-century depictions, before the famous illustrator Thomas Nast lifted his pencils to the task of sketching Santa, the old elf was never without his pipe. He appears to have smoked incessantly on his Christmas Eve rounds.

  True, we know that these renditions aren’t necessarily accurate. They’re the product of legend, rumors, speculation, imagination. But they also stem in part from observations of the real Santa Claus, since the OC does allow select children to spot him on Christmas Eve. Furthermore, we know that there was a kind of feedback mechanism at play around this time: The legends influenced the OC, and his adoption of the characteristics he preferred, such as that hefty waistline, fed the pictures. If artists were drawing him with a pipe, then it’s possible that the OC figured it would be okay for him to smoke on his rounds.

  Despite these indulgences, Santa has managed to dodge lung cancer, emphysema, and numerous other diseases. This isn’t because his organs are particularly special. The trick is that he gets to replace them. When Santa needs a new heart, he just has one printed.

  His organ printer may actually be among the least fantastical of Santa’s gadgets. Several scientists are trying to develop the t
echnology today. Biophysicist Gabor Forgacs leads a team at the University of Missouri–Columbia that uses three-dimensional printers capable of making structures out of living cells. The group has already shown that its technique should be able to produce working sections of blood vessels. In the long run they hope to be able to print out the functional equivalent of bladders, hearts, livers, and more.

  The printer works a little bit like a standard office ink-jet, with some key substitutions and modifications. In lieu of letterhead, the group lays down a gel-like material they call biopaper. And where the heads of your office printer spit out ink, Forgacs’s machine dispenses tiny spheres packed with different cells. In some cases, the spheres harbor more than forty thousand individual cells. The concept is fairly simple. The machine prints a given structure from the bottom up, as if it’s stacking blocks. To make a cylindrical blood vessel, for example, the group starts by printing the cell-filled spheres in a circular pattern on the first layer of the biopaper. Then they lay down another sheet and print out a second ring, right atop the first one. They continue the process, and the spheres eventually fuse, the vessel matures, and the cells actually start to organize themselves. This is nature’s own little trick, and it saves Forgacs and his team quite a bit of trouble, since they don’t have to figure out how to get the right cells to go to the right spots. The ones that belong in the outer wall migrate that way, and the cells that should be on the inside find their own way as well.

  How long it will take these scientists to perfect their technology and extend its capabilities from blood vessels to functional substitutes for hearts and livers is an open question, but the fact that Santa has a versatile organ printer of his own should, at minimum, be encouraging to the rest of us.

  Still, a printer is only one piece of machinery. It can’t tell Santa when his heart is failing or when a lieutenant’s liver is starting to shut down from too much brandy-and-rum-infused nog. Furthermore, how would he switch that ailing liver for a new one? A good question. But the answer should be fairly obvious.

  Robots.

  8

  Robotic Surgeons in Silly Outfits

  TELEOPERATION, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AND AUTONOMOUS MOBILE MANIPULATION

  Robots have already become valuable members of operating rooms across the world. By early 2008, the Da Vinci system, a surgical robot that’s controlled by a live doctor standing nearby, had been installed in more than eight hundred hospitals in the U.S. The NeuroArm, a more recent development, will enable surgeons to carry out procedures in delicate areas such as the brain. Each of these machines takes advantage of something called teleoperation.

  What this means is that a human actually runs the robot and makes all the key decisions. The doctor operates a pair of controllers while looking through a stereo viewer. When they move the controllers, a computer processes this action and instructs the robot’s manipulators to move in exactly the same way. The surgeon becomes a puppeteer.

  However, a setup like the Da Vinci system doesn’t lack intelligence. If the surgeon’s hands shake a bit, the system will eliminate that flaw and hold its own instruments steady. Yet the bulk of the procedure is still being carried out by a person. And every time that person moves the controllers, a certain amount of information has to travel from the teleoperation apparatus to the robot that’s actually poking around inside the patient.

  This works perfectly well in an operating room when the surgeon is right next door and the information doesn’t have to travel very far. It would even work fine over larger distances. The Pentagon, for example, is exploring a da Vinci upgrade that would allow doctors to operate on patients on the battlefield from a hundred miles away. Injured soldiers would be carried into a mobile, enclosed, robotic operating room, and the doctors, working in a safe zone far away, would use a future version of da Vinci to examine and possibly patch up their wounds.

  Given that Santa and his lieutenants don’t require new organs all that often—two procedures a year, at most—teleoperation would seem like a perfectly reasonable option. When necessary, you’d think that Santa’s alien friends could perform the surgery, implanting a new liver or kidney remotely.

  Unfortunately it’s not that simple. We don’t know exactly where these aliens live, but it’s certainly not in our solar system. Teleoperation wouldn’t work, therefore, because the commands would have too far to travel. Even performing the surgery from Mars would be out of the question, because it would take the necessary commands around ten minutes to get from the telemanipulator to the robot that’s actually performing the surgery at the Pole.

  Imagine Santa on the operating table, a robotic surgical system poised above him, Mrs. Claus and the elves sitting nervously in the other room. If something goes wrong during the surgery, news of that error, which travels at the speed of light, will take ten minutes to get back to the surgeon on Mars. And even if our alien operator knows how to correct it immediately, the first step in that fix won’t happen for another ten minutes. In other words, a minimum of twenty minutes will pass before the problem occurs and the solution is set into play. That kind of lag wouldn’t bode well for Santa.

  Which is exactly why the aliens provided him with a group of autonomous, or in dependent, robotic surgeons. In the non-alien-assisted world, Duke University bioengineer Stephen Smith recently announced results suggesting that autonomous robotic surgery—operations without the doctor performing every move—isn’t all that far-fetched. Using an advanced ultrasound imager that generates thirty pictures per second, creating detailed three-dimensional maps of interior structures, Smith showed that if given quality information and outfitted with artificial intelligence, robots should be able to complete simple surgeries without any help. The 3-D ultrasound map gives the robot a precise picture to work with, in the same way that laser scanners mounted on robotic cars give those vehicles’ computers a map of the terrain they need to navigate. In one simulation, Smith and his colleagues showed that their robot and its ultrasound eyes had the skills to carry out a tumor biopsy.

  Since Santa’s robots are entrusted with far more complex tasks, including removing and inserting organs, valves, arteries, and more, they are outfitted with far more advanced artificial intelligence, computing power, and sensors. They don’t simply activate a surgery program and follow a series of steps. Using ultrasound, stereo cameras, and more, they constantly monitor the environment—Santa’s innards—assess whether any important changes have occurred, such as a blood vessel popping, and then decide how to respond to those changes, if necessary.

  They are extremely intelligent machines, given these capabilities, yet they are not conscious. If they were, they would probably refuse to wear the candy-striper uniforms that Mrs. Claus made for them. You know, just to keep up the spirit. Call her strange, but let’s be honest here: If you had a highly intelligent robot in your home, wouldn’t you dress it up in silly clothes? Yes, you would. And besides, the elves—the ones who seem so perfectly suited for funny little costumes—absolutely refuse to wear even remotely demeaning or festive garments.

  9

  The Immortality Paradox

  THE NEW SCIENCE OF AGING AND THE QUEST FOR THE TWO-HUNDRED-YEAR LIFE SPAN

  The availability of robust, replaceable organs, and robotic surgeons with the skills to switch them in and out, has certainly prolonged Santa’s life. Still, we don’t know if he’s actually immortal. You could argue that angle, given that he is still alive. As my pleasantly wise great-aunt used to say, “The only way to prove someone’s mortal is to kill ’em.” But Santa has already lived for a phenomenally long time, which suggests that he must have other medical tricks. New organs alone couldn’t account for his tremendous success in combating the effects of aging.

  Today, scientists are working to extend the life spans of laboratory worms and mice, with an eye toward applying the tricks to humans, and possibly giving the rest of us a few extra years on Earth. Most researchers don’t seem to think that anything approaching immor
tality, or a two-hundred-year life span, is within the grasp of modern science. The English biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey disagrees, but he’s not like most researchers. He entered this particular field through an unusual door, earning his Ph.D. after proposing a slew of strange, wildly optimistic ideas about how to end aging. He also sports a frightening beard and looks like he’d be more comfortable ending lives, not extending them.

  De Grey is developing a seven-step plan for ending aging that he calls Strategies for Ending Negligible Senescence, or SENS. It has been derided by some scientists and hesitatingly supported by others. The seven-step-ness of de Grey’s approach immediately shouts self-help claptrap, but, unlike standard self-help books, his SENS plan does not lack detail. For example, one of the steps in his plan involves cleaning out the machinery in our cells known as lysosomes. These effectively act as waste recyclers: They pull in the cell’s garbage, break it down, and spit it back out again in more useful form. Over time, though, de Grey says that these lysosomes become less efficient. They start accumulating mangled and unfamiliar forms of cellular waste that they can’t operate on. The effect is a bit like bringing a bunch of newfangled soda bottles to the supermarket recycling machine, only to find that they don’t fit. The machine doesn’t take them, so they can’t be recycled, and you’ve got to hold on to them and use them to construct a pyramid to impress your friends.