Science (bio & medicine) news... plus a Ukraine/Iran proposal

Before launching one of my regular 'ain't we wonderful at science?' riffs... 

...All across the right-o-sphere, one sees not a single voice willing to discuss pros and cons of Joe Biden's actual policy proposals (during the State of the Union speech), largely because almost all of them poll separately as immensely popular and Republicans know that each would also be highly effective.

Instead, we see repeated mockery of a man who reached that lectern after struggling all his life with a stuttering handicap. Sure, at one point he said "Iranian" instead of "Ukrainian." Such gleeful pounces! Leading me to demand another wager challenge over any five random samples from Trump vs. Biden speeches, comparing passages for cogency, truthfulness, or salience to policy.

And yet... might there have been more to the "Iranian" slip of the tongue?

At an online conference today, I broached what could be the most powerful single stroke that might rock the world right now and leave Vlad the Invader reeling. Picture if Kamala Harris were to land in Tehran on a pre-negotiated "Nixon to China" mission? One that cleared our outstanding issues and performed a reset between two nations who had always been (pre 1979) the best of friends.

It'd take major concessions. On both sides. And mind you, I don't see it likely that the mullahs would let go, since their power is grounded on fear of America and Israel. But if it happened at this opportune time -- accompanied by true settlement of the nuclear issues -- then sudden release of Iranian oil production would be just the beginning. One can only envision ensuing howls from the jointly owned Kremlin-Saudi propaganda organ - Fox News - as the Riyadh r'oil house suddenly found itself desperately releasing supplies of their own, in order to hang onto whatever influence they have left.

Well, well, one can fantacize. 

Meanwhile, here is one of the better Ukraine update channels I've seen. It points out that the 'red zones' that seem 'conquered' by Russia are only occupied along direct paths and highways. There are no signs of police or civil affairs forces needed for a real occupation. A bypassed, angry citizenry with farm tractors and Molotov cocktails is not 'occupied.' 

That must make for long, unpeaceful nights in those floundering, quagmire brigade columns.

== Over to science! ==

Amazing. The U.S. Army's new Covid vaccine may give immunity to almost all coronaviruses, including SARS and many common colds. Developed at Walter Reed, the SpFN vaccine has undergone the first round of human trials. 

Unfortunately, as any sci fi reader knows, Covid-19 may not be the 'Big One': Army scientists warn of deadlier pandemics yet to come. 

Is it life? Living robots self-replicate: Xenobots are basically large structures of thousands of modified skin and heart cells from frogs. “The skin cells provide rigid support while the heart cells act as small motors to let the Xenobot move forward. When the 1-millimeter-wide Xenobots were first unveiled to the world last year, scientists were exhilarated by their ability to swim out and self-assemble into larger tissues.” Now comes news that they have been taught how to fabricate new xenobots out of cells piled amorphously nearby.

== Popularizing science ==

Particularly relevant to our current and ongoing pandemic problems: Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System that Keeps You Alive, by Philip Dettmer gives an extensive (and illustrated) overview of the human body's complex but powerful defense mechanisms to fight off infection and disease.

Bringing together the worlds of science: John Gribbin’s latest science journalism book is well worth a look.  Eight Improbable Possibilities: the Mystery of the Moon and Other Implausible Scientific Truths. “is a whirlwind tour of the most fantastical discoveries science has revealed – the facts that are almost impossible to believe, but are true according to the best available evidence. With chapters on topics from gravitational waves to the butterfly effect…” 

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, takes a far-ranging look at the future of our planet - and humanity. And how we will deal with threats to the Earth.

== From the frontiers of Biology! ==

The latest medical research indicates that the Epstein-Barr virus may trigger multiple sclerosis.

A wonder drug that reverses some of the debilitating effects of aging and other traumas to the brain? "ISRIB" could have long-range implications for dementia, age-related cognitive design and Parkinson's Disease, by rebooting cellular protein production. 

How do biological mutations happen? It’s a bit more complex than Darwin envisioned. Chromosome curls and folds apparently protect some vital genes from mutation better than others – a fascinating prioritization. “Knowing why some regions of the genome mutate more than others could help breeders who rely on genetic variation to develop better crops. Scientists could also use the information to better predict or develop new treatments for diseases like cancer that are caused by mutation.” 

A possible treatment for arthritis: Bioengineers are developing an implant which generates a tiny electrical current to help heal knee joints after cartilage damage.

(BTW I have noticed something. My own isolated patch of arthritis always nearly vanishes after a bee sting.)

A lifelong dream for biologists… solving the protein folding problem … appears to have come true with stunning speed, this year. DeepMind scientists reported have solved 350,000 proteins found in the human body—44% of all known human proteins. They expect their database will grow to 100 million proteins across all species, nearly half the total number believed to exist. The next step is to predict which of those proteins work together and how they interact, revealing which proteins bind to one another. Code for AlphaFold2 and RoseTTAFold is now publicly available. Alphabet, launched a new venture that will use predicted protein structures to design new drug candidates.  “Much work remains. Protein structures aren’t static; they bend and twist as they do their jobs, and modeling those changes remains a challenge. And it’s still a daunting task to visualize most of the large, multi-protein complexes that carry out myriad jobs in cells.”

Game-playing mini-brains: Scientists taught hundreds of thousands of brain cells to play pong in just five minutes, which is quicker than artificial intelligence (AI), which picks up the game 90 minutes later. Called "DishBrains," the system comprises brain cells grown on top of micro-electrode arrays that can both stimulate the cells.

In related news, an Israeli team found it took a five- to eight-layer neural network, or nearly 1,000 artificial neurons, to mimic the behavior of a single biological neuron from the brain’s cortex. Moreover, this assumed that everything is electrochemical stimulus and repression, via synapses feeding networks of dendrites. If those dendrites have (as suspected) computational elements along their length, then the difference could be orders larger. And if the Penrose-Hameroff speculations about quantum effects bear out, then all bets are off. 

Fish drive cars? Apparently, goldfish have the cognitive ability to learn a complex task in an environment completely unlike the one they evolved in. As in this experiment where goldfish learn to control and ‘drive’ a wheeled vehicle toward target sites on land.

We need to invest more in efforts like this one: “the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology aimed to replicate 193 experiments from 53 top cancer papers published from 2010 to 2012. But only a quarter of those experiments were able to be reproduced.” It’s not as bad as the headline implies… but it’s pretty bad and we need to institutionalize and regularize such reproducibility projects.

== Bio Miscellany ==

While it’s long been known that some fish and amphibians can do parthenogenesis… females producing young without contributions from a male… it is very rare among warm-blooded creatures. But lately it’s proved that California Condors have done it recently, much as in my novel Glory Season.

A project is underway, using advanced machine learning methods to parse the language (if any) of sperm whales. It will be an ambitious undertaking, calling for drones and robots to collect data on whale actions, to correlate with the utterances... hoping the robots won't interfere or bother the creatures, lest most of the translations turn out to be stuff like "I knew I shouldn't have swallowed that thing; it complains more than Jonah did!"

The ultimate answer to “government is useless”

The following ran as a special report in the January 2016 newsletter of Mark Anderson’s Strategic News Service. I post it now, as the right's hate-all-government narrative hits hysteric-histrionic levels. Rep. Mick Mulvaney, recently selected as Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget, posted “Do we really need government-funded research at all?” Which makes this an existential threat to your lives, and mine.

Does government-funded science play a role in stimulating innovation?

By David Brin

The hypnotic incantation that all-government-is-evil-all-the-time would have bemused and appalled our parents in the Greatest Generation – those who persevered to overcome the Depression and Hitler, then contained Stalinism, went to the moon, developed successful companies and built a mighty middle class, all with powerful unions and at high tax rates. 

The mixed society that they built emphasized a wide stance, pragmatically stirring private enterprise with targeted collective actions, funded by a consensus negotiation process called politics. The resulting civilization has been more successful – by orders of magnitude – than any other. Than any combination of others.

So why do we hear an endlessly-repeated nostrum that this wide-stance, mixed approach is all wrong? That mantra is pushed so relentlessly by right-wing media -- as well as some on the left -- that it came as no surprise when a recent Pew Poll showed distrust of government among Americans at an all-time high. 

This general loathing collapses when citizens are asked which specific parts of government they’d shut down. It turns out that most of them like specific things their taxes pay for.

In a sense, this isn’t new. For a century and a half, followers of Karl Marx demanded that we amputate society’s right arm of market-competitive enterprise and rely only on socialist guided-allocation for economic control. 

Meanwhile, Ayn Rand’s ilk led a throng of those proclaiming we must lop off our left arm – forswearing any coordinated projects that look beyond the typical five year (nowadays more like one-year) commercial investment horizon. 

Any sensible person would respond: “Hey I need both arms, so bugger off!  Now let’s keep examining what each arm is good at, revising our knowledge of what each shouldn’t do.”

Does that sound too practical and moderate for this era? Our parents thought they had dealt with all this, proving decisively that calm negotiation, compromise and pragmatic mixed-solutions work best.  They would be stunned to see that fanatical would-be amputators are back, in force, ranting nonsense.

Take for example Matt Ridley’s recent article in the Wall Street Journal, deriding government supported science as useless and counter-productive— a stance dear to WSJ’s owner, Rupert Murdoch. Ridley’s core question - recently reiterated more concisely by Rep. Mick Mulvaney, Donald Trump's nominee as director of the Office of Management and Budget - is “Do we really need government-funded research at all?” 

Ridley asserts that the forward march of technological innovation and discovery is fore-ordained, as if by natural law. That competitive markets will allocate funds to develop new products with vastly greater efficiency than government bureaucrats picking winners and losers. And that research without a clear, near-future economic return is both futile and unnecessary. 

        

 == The driver of innovation is… ==

Former Microsoft CTO and IP Impressario Nathan Myhrvold has written a powerful rebuttal to Ridley’s murdochian call for amputation. Says Myhrvold: “It’s natural for writers to want to come out with a contrarian piece that reverses all conventional wisdom, but it tends to work out better if the evidence one quotes is factually true. Alas Ridley’s evidence isn’t – his examples are all, so far as I can tell, either completely wrong, or at best selectively quoted. I also think his logic is wrong, and to be honest I don’t think much of the ideology that drives his argument either.”  Nathan’s rebuttal can be found here, along with links to the original, and Ridley’s response.

Myhrvold does a good job tearing holes in Ridley’s assertion that patents and other IP do nothing to stimulate innovation and economic development. (Full disclosure: Nathan is more self-interested in fierce IP protection than I - a patent and copyright holder - am.) Only, in his refutation of Ridley, even he does not go far enough or present a wide enough perspective. 

Myhrvold fails, for example, to put all of this into the context of 6000 years of human history.  So let me try.

During most of that time, independent innovation was actively suppressed by kings and lords and priests, fearing anything (except new armaments) that might upset the stable hierarchy. Moreover, innovators felt a strong incentive to keep any discoveries secret, lest competitors steal their advantage. As a result, many brilliant inventions were lost when the discoverers died. Examples abound, from Heron’s steam engines and Baghdad Batteries to Antikythera-style mechanical calculators and Damascus steel -- from clear glass lenses to obstetric forceps – all lost for millennia before being rediscovered after much unnecessary pain. 

In his monograph: "Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive," William J. Baumol tells a story widely repeated among classical sources like Pliny and Petronius, of an inventor who presented the secret of unbreakable glass to Emperor Tiberius, only to receive death, instead of a reward, because the invention was viewed as destabilizing... a tale reset in China by Ray Bradbury in "The Flying Machine." Baumol cites earlier words by M. Finley:

"Technological progress, economic growth, productivity, even efficiency have not been significant goals since the beginning of time. So long as an acceptable life style could be maintained, however that was defined {by the ruling castes}, other values held the stage."

Those "other values" were critiqued by Adam Smith when he castigated the way oligarchs would rig markets to reward rent-seeking, noble privilege, monopolies, cartels or (in Baumol's more modern analysis) state corporations or organized crime. With rare exception, all such parasitical activities were more privileged than competitive innovation.

Staring across that vast wasteland of sixty feudal and futile centuries — comparing them to our own dazzling levels of inventive success, especially since World War II — slams a steep burden of proof upon someone like Ridley, who asserts we are the ones doing something wrong. Or that innovation zooms ahead as if by natural law.

== We are different. And different is difficult. ==

In fact, though well-nurtured and tended competitive markets are remarkably fecund, they are anything but “natural.” Show us historical examples! Kings, lords, priests and other cheaters always — always — warped and crushed market competition, far more than our modern, enlightenment states do. Indeed, Adam Smith’s call for a more “liberal” form of capitalism offered little ire toward socialists. His liberal approach calls on the state to counter-balance oligarchy, in order to keep capitalism flat-open-fair. 

Our maligned democratic states — while imperfect and always in need of fine tuning — engendered revolutions in mass education, infrastructure and reliable law that unleashed creative millions, maximizing the raw number of eager competitors — exactly the great ingredient that Friedrich Hayek recommended and that Adam Smith prescribed for a healthy, competitive market economy.  

To be clear, those who rail against 200,000 civil servants – closely watched, compartmentalized and accountable – “picking winners and losers” have a reasonable complaint! We are well-served by libertarians who point at this or that meddlesome excess. But not when their counter-prescription is handing over the same power to a far smaller cabal of 5,000 secretive and unaccountable members of a closed and incestuous oligarchic-CEO caste. Smith and Hayek both had harsh words for that ancient and utterly bankrupt approach.

(Question: who actually de-regulates, when appropriate? Democrats banished the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) when they were captured. AT&T was broken up, and the Internet was unleashed by Al Gore’s legislation. Add in Bill Clinton’s deregulation of GPS and Obama's declaration that citizens may record police... and one has to ask a simple question. Does anti-regulatory polemic matter more… or effective action? Despite their railings, 'conservatives' never deliver deregulation, except in two particular industries - finance and resource extraction - with historic results. Please name another example.)

Yes, history does offer us a few, rare examples in the past, when innovation flourished, leading to spectacular returns.  In most such cases, state investment and focused R&D played a major role: from the great Chinese fleets of Admiral Cheng He, to impressive maritime research centers established by Prince Henry the Navigator that made little Portugal a giant on the world stage. Likewise, tiny Holland became a global leader, stimulated by its free-city universities. England advanced tech rapidly with endowed scientific chairs, state subsidies and prizes. 

Those rare examples stand out from the general, dreary morass of feudal history. But none of them compare to the exponential growth unleashed by late-20th Century America’s synergy of government, enterprise and unleashed individual competitiveness, the very thing that all those kings and priests and lords used to crush, on sight. One result was the first society ever in the shape of a diamond, instead of the classic, feudal pyramid of privilege – a diamond whose vast and healthy and well-educated middle class has proved to be the generator of nearly all of our great accomplishments.

It is this historical perspective that seems so lacking in today’s shallow political and philosophical debates. It reveals that the agenda of folks like Matt Ridley, Mick Mulvaney, or Rupert Murdoch is not what they claim -- to release us from thralldom to shortsighted, oppressive civil servants and snooty scientist-boffins. 

Their aim is to discredit all of the modern expert castes that we have established, who serve to counterbalance (as Adam Smith prescribed) the feudal pyramids under which our ancestors sweltered in constraint. Their aim is a return to those ancient, horrid ways.

==  Before our very eyes ==

I believe one of our problems is that the Rooseveltean reforms – which historians credit with saving western capitalism by vesting the working class with a large stake, something Marx never expected – were too successful, in a way. So successful that the very idea of class war seems not even to occur to American boomers. This despite the fact that class conflict was rampant across almost every other nation and time.  But as boomers age-out is that grand time of naïve expectation over?

Forbes recently announced that just 62 ultra-rich individuals have as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity. Five years ago, it took 388 rich guys to achieve that status. (See: The 500 Richest Individuals in 2015 and commentary.)  Which raises the question, where the heck does this rising, proto-feudal oligarchy think it will all lead? 

To a restoration of humanity’s normal, aristocratic pyramid of power, with them staying on top? 

Or to radicalization, as a billion members of the hard-pressed but highly skilled and tech-empowered middle class rediscover class struggle?

== We've been here before ==

The last time this happened, in the 1930s, lordly owner castes in Germany, Japan, Britain and the U.S. used mass media they owned to stir populist rightwing movements that might help suppress activity on the left. Not one of these efforts succeeded. In Germany and Japan, the monsters they created rose up and took over, leading to immense pain for all and eventual loss of most of that oligarchic wealth.

In Britain and the U.S., 1930s reactionary fomenters dragged us very close to the same path… till moderate reformers did what Marx deemed impossible – adjusted the wealth imbalance and reduced cheating advantages so that a rational and flat-open-fair capitalism would be moderated by rules and investments to stimulate a burgeoning middle class, without even slightly damaging the Smithian incentives to get rich through delivery of innovative goods and services.  

That brilliant, positive-sum moderation led to the middle class booms of the 50s and 60s and – as I cannot repeat too often - it also feature big majorities in our parents’ Greatest Generation adoring one living human above all others: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

(Pose the question to your "make America Great again" neighbors: "When was America great?" Then remind them who the GGs loved.)

Some billionaires aren’t shortsighted fools, ignorant of the lessons of history. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and many tech moguls want wealth disparities brought down through reasonable, negotiated Rooseveltean-style reform that will still leave them standing as very, very wealthy men. Heck, even Glenn Beck can see where it all leads, declaring (in effect) "OMG what have I done?"

The smart ones know where current trends will otherwise lead. To revolution and confiscation. Picture the probabilities, when the world’s poorest realize they could double their net wealth, just by transferring title from 50 men. In that case, amid a standoff between fifty oligarchs and three billion poor, it is the skilled middle and upper-middle classes who’ll be the ones deciding civilization’s course. And who do you think those billion tech-savvy professionals – so derided and maligned by murdochian propaganda -- will side with, when push comes to shove?

== Back to innovation ==

Oh, for an easy-quick and devastating answer to the “hate-all-government” hypnosis! How I'd love to see a second "National Debt Clock" showing where the U.S. deficit would be now, if we (citizens) had charged just a 5% royalty on the fruits of U.S. federal research. We'd be in the black! How effective such a “clock” would be. We deserve such a tasty piece of counter propaganda. (See: Eight Causes of the Deficit Fiscal Cliff.) 

Closer to the point, consider this core question: how have we Americans been able to afford the endless trade deficits that propel world development? (And make no mistake; 2/3 of the planet developed - sending their kids to school - in one way only: by selling Americans trillions of dollars worth of crap we never needed.) 

How did we afford this flood of stimulating red ink for 70 years?

Simple. Science and technology.  Each decade since the 1940s saw new, U.S.-led advances that engendered enough wealth to let us pay for all the stuff pouring out of Asian factories, giving poor workers jobs and hope.  Our trick was to keep the wonders coming -- jet planes, rockets, satellites, electronics & transistors & lasers, telecom, pharmaceuticals... and the Internet.

Crucially, the world needs America to keep buying, so that factories can hum and workers send their kids to school, so those kids can then demand labor and environmental laws and all that.  The job of George Marshall’s brilliant trade-policy plan is only half finished. Crucially, the world cannot afford for the U.S. consumer to become too poor to buy crap.

Which means we must protect the goose that lays golden eggs – our brilliant inventiveness. Our ability to keep benefiting from enlightenment methods that stimulate creativity. And that will not happen if the fruits of creativity are immediately stolen.  There is a bargain implicit in today’s rising world.  Let America benefit from innovation, and we’ll buy whatever you produce. 

Foreign leaders who ignore that bargain, seeking to eat the goose, as well as its eggs, only prove their own short-sighted foolishness… like our home-grown fools who rail against all government investment and research.

It is time to have another look at the most successful social compact ever created – the Rooseveltean deal made by the Greatest Generation, which we then amended and improved by reducing race and gender injustice and discovering the importance of planetary care. 

Throw in a vibrantly confident wave of tech-savvy youth, and that is how we can all move forward. Away from dismal feudalism.  Toward (maybe) something like Star Trek.