Chemists to the rescue?

Here's my Crucible article for the December issue of Chemistry World, which arose when I chaired a recent talk by John Emsley at the RSC.

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Can chemists save the world? In his new book, targeted at the 2011 Year of Chemistry and published by the RSC, John Emsley argues in his characteristically inspirational manner that chemical innovations in areas such as biofuels, food production and clean water treatment can deliver the promise of the book’s title: A Healthy, Wealthy, Sustainable World. Emsley makes no apologies about his crusading, even propagandizing agenda, for he rightly points out that many of the biggest global challenges, from climate change to the end of oil, demand the expertise of chemistry, making it potentially the key science of the twenty-first century.

But Emsley concedes that his survey of the wonderful things that chemists have achieved in sustainable technology – converting rapseseed oil to biodiesel or to plastics feedstocks, say – does not look in depth at the economic picture. It’s a frequent and valid objection to technical innovation that it is all very well but how much does it cost in comparison to what we can do already? What’s the financial motivation, say, for China to abandon its abundant coal reserves for biofuels?

There is no blanket answer to such economic conundrums, but common to them all is the question of whether one can rely on market mechanisms to generate incentives for a desirable technology, or whether it should be nurtured by governmental or regulatory intervention. Here, as just about everywhere else right now, the issue is how ‘big’ government should be.

In the wake of the financial crisis, market fundamentalists sound less credible asserting that the market knows best, especially when it comes to societal benefits: the recent boom years were not so much generated by market mechanisms as bought on credit. But it seems equally clear that highly managed economies which subsidize unprofitable enterprises are unsustainable and risk stifling innovation. A middle course has been successfully steered by the German government’s investment in photovoltaic (PV) energy generation, where money for research and breaks for commercial companies are coupled to a concerted effort to build a market for solar power through a feed-in tariff: a guaranteed, highly competitive price for energy generated from solar panels and fed into the grid. This stimulus recognizes that new, desirable technologies may need a hand to get off the ground but need eventually to become independent. With government assistance, the German PV industry has created around 50,000 jobs, brought revenues of €5.6 billion in 2009, and made Germany the largest national source of PV power in the world. By 2020, up to 10 percent of Germany’s energy may be solar.

This is one reason why it is unrealistic to dismiss the prospects for an innovative technology on the basis that its (perhaps less desirable) rivals can currently do things more cheaply. There is a financial component to changing attitudes. Encouraging investment in a fledgling innovation can ultimately lower its price both by enabling efficiencies of scale and by supporting research into cost-cutting improvements. That was amply demonstrated by the Human Genome Project (HGP): the international decision that it was a Good Thing created the opportunity for new sequencing technologies that have reduced the cost and increased the speed of decoding an individual’s genome by orders of magnitude. Simply put, it became financially worthwhile for companies such as Illumina (spearheaded by chemists David Walt and Anthony Czarnik) to devise radical new sequencing methods. As a result, the economic hurdle to realizing the potential medical benefits of genome sequencing was lowered.

At the same time, the race between the publicly funded HGP and a private enterprise by Celera Genomics Inc., the company founded by entrepreneur Craig Venter, shows that competition can accelerate innovation. What’s more, through canny marketing the HGP engineered a favourable climate for investment and public endorsement, creating what economist Monika Gisler at ETH in Zurich and her coworkers have called a ‘social bubble’ [1]. They say that ‘governments can take advantage of the social bubble mechanism to catalyze long-term investments by the private sector, which would not otherwise be supported.’ Of course, there is a fine line between supportive publicity and hype. But this is another reminder that promising new technologies, like children, flourish best when they are neither left to fend for themselves nor mollycoddled indefinitely.

1. M. Gisler, D. Sornette & R. Woodward, preprint http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.2882 (2010).

Flight of fantasy

The chorus of disapproval that greeted Howard Flight’s remark about how cuts in child benefits will encourage ‘breeding’ among the lower social classes (or as Flight called them,‘those on benefits’) has left the impression that such comments are now to be judged in a historical vacuum, purely on the basis of whether or not they accord with a current consensus on ‘appropriateness’, or what some would sneeringly call political correctness. This solipsistic perspective is dangerously shallow.

The media coverage has largely ignored the obvious connection between Flight’s comment and the argument for eugenics originally advanced by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century and pursued by intellectuals on both the left and the right for a considerable part of the twentieth. Galton voiced explicitly what Flight had at least the restraint (or the nous) only to imply: given the chance, the inferior stock among the lower classes will breed like rabbits and thereby corrupt the species. Galton worried about the ‘yearly output by unfit parents of weakly children who are constitutionally incapable of growing up into serviceable citizens, and who are a serious encumbrance to the nation.’ If the harshness of their circumstances were to be alleviated by welfare, he said, then natural selection would no longer constrain the proliferation of ‘bad genes’ throughout society. In a welfare state, the gene pool of humankind would therefore degenerate.

Some eugenicists felt that the answer was to encourage the genetically superior echelons of society to breed more: educated, middle-class women (who were beginning to appreciate that there might be more to life than endless child-rearing) had a national duty to produce offspring. Some biologists, such as Julian Huxley and J.B.S. Haldane, welcomed the prospect of ectogenesis – gestation of fetuses in artificial wombs – so that it might liberate ‘good’ mothers from that onerous obligation (presumably nannies could take over once the child was ‘born’). Even conservatives who regarded such technologies with distaste felt compelled to agree that they offered the best prospect for maintaining the vitality of the species.

This approach was called ‘positive eugenics’: redressing the imbalance by propagating good genes. It is one that Flight apparently endorses, in his concern that we should not discourage the middle classes from breeding by taking away their cash perks. But the other option, also advocated by Galton, was negative eugenics: preventing breeding among the undesirables. In the many US states that introduced forced-sterilization programmes in the early twentieth century (and which ultimately sterilized around 60,000 people), this meant the mentally unstable or impaired (‘idiots and imbeciles’), as well as perhaps the ‘habitually’ unemployed, criminals and drunkards. In Nazi Germany it came also to mean those whose ‘inferiority’ was a matter of race. (There was no lack of racism in the US programmes either.)

Liberal eugenicists such as Haldane and Huxley were rather more nuanced than Flight. They argued that eugenic policies made sense only on a level playing field: while social inequalities held individuals back, there was no guarantee that ‘defective’ genes would be targeted. But once that levelling was effected, what Huxley referred to chillingly as ‘nests of defective germ plasm’ should be shown no mercy. As he put it, “The lowest strata, allegedly less well endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be reproduced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world.” Flight was at least socially aware enough to pull his punches in comparison to this.

Although it was mostly the taint of Nazism that put paid to eugenics (not to mention the emergence of the concept of human rights), the scientific case was eventually revealed to be spurious too, not least because there is no good reason to think that complex traits such as intelligence and sociability have isolable genetic origins that can be refined by selective breeding.

Yet the survival nonetheless of Galton’s ideas among the likes of Flight and, in previous decades, Sir Keith Joseph, should not be mistaken for a failure to keep abreast of the science. I should be surprised if Flight has even heard of Galton, and I suspect he would be surprised himself to find his remark associated with a word – eugenics – that now is (wrongly) often considered to be a product of fascist genocidal fantasies. Galton was after all only providing pseudo-scientific justification for the prejudices about breeding that the aristocracy had espoused since Plato’s time, and it is surely here that the origins of Flights remark lie. That is why what was evidently for him a casual truism represents more than just a lapse of decorum, sensitivity or political acumen. It implies that David Cameron does not merely have the poor judgement to favour loose cannons, but that he is still heir to a deep-rooted tradition of class-based bigotry.

Funny things that happened on my way to the Forum

This Sunday I appear on the BBC World Service’s ‘ideas’ programme The Forum. In principle I am there to discuss The Music Instinct, but it’s actually a round table discussion about the issues raised by all the guests; my fellows on this occasion are the bio-nanotechnologist Sam Stupp and the polemicist and writer P. J. O’Rourke, whose new book is the characteristically titled Don’t Vote: It Only Encourages the Bastards. I have followed Sam’s work for nigh on two decades: he designs peptides that self-assemble into nanostructures which can act as biodegradable scaffolds for tissue regeneration. It is very neat, and I relished the opportunity to see Sam again. O’Rourke embodies the gentlemanly, amusing Republican whose spine-chilling views on such things as gun laws and the Tea Party are moderated by such charm and worldliness (he is no friend of US xenophobes) that you feel churlish to take issue. I was simply happy to establish that his opposition to Big Government applies only to nations and not to his own home. He is also rather funny, as right-leaning polemicists often are when they are not swivel-eyed. In any event, the programme deserves to be better known – rarely does one get the chance to discuss ideas at such leisure in the broadcast media, even on the beloved BBC.

PS: I just got an update with a direct link to the site for this programme. It includes mugshots, but I can't help that now. Gone are the days when it didn't matter how you looked on the radio.

Beyond the edge of the table

Here’s my Crucible column for the November Chemistry World. It gets a bit heavy-duty towards the end – not often now (happily) that I have to go and read (and pretend to understand) textbooks about quantum electrodynamics. But by happy coincidence, I was introduced recently to the numerology (and Pauli’s enthusiasm for it) by a talk at the Royal Institution by Arthur I. Miller, which I had the pleasure of chairing.

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Does the Periodic Table run out? Folk legend asserts that Richard Feynman closed the curtains on the elements after the hypothetical element 137, inelegantly named untrispetium, or more appealingly dubbed feynmanium in his honour.

As physicists (and numerologists) will know, that is no arbitrary cutoff. 137 is an auspicious number – so much so that Feynman himself is said to have recommended that physicists display it prominently in their offices as a reminder of how much they don’t know. Wolfgang Pauli, whose exclusion principle explained the structure of the Periodic Table, was obsessed with the number 137, and discussed its significance over fine wine with his friend and former psychoanalyst Carl Jung – a remarkable relationship explored in Arthur I. Miller’s recent book Deciphering the Cosmic Number (W. W. Norton, 2009). When Pauli was taken ill in Zürich with pancreatic cancer in 1958 and was put in hospital room number 137, he was convinced his time had come – and he was right. For Carl Jung 137 was significant as the number associated with the Jewish mystical tradition called the Cabbalah, as pointed out to physicist Victor Weisskopf by the eminent Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem.

Numerology was not confined to mystics, however, for the ‘explanation’ of the cosmic significance of 137 offered by the astronomer Arthur Eddington was not much more than that. Yet Eddington, Pauli and Feynman were captivated by 137 for the same reason that prompted Feynman to suggest it was where the elements end. For the inverse, 1/137, is almost precisely the value of the so-called fine-structure constant (α), the dimensionless quantity that defines the strength of the electromagnetic interaction – it is in effect the ratio of the square of the electron’s charge to the product of the speed of light and the reduced Planck’s constant.

Why 137? ‘Nobody knows’, Feynman admitted, adding that ‘it’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the hand of God wrote that number, and we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.’ It’s one of the constants that must be added to fundamental physics by hand. Werner Heisenberg was convinced that the problems then plaguing quantum theory would not go away until 137 was ‘explained’. But neither he nor Pauli nor anyone else has cracked the problem. The fact that the denominator of the fine structure constant is not exactly 137, but around 137.035, doesn’t diminish the puzzle, and now this constant is at the centre of arguments about ‘fine-tuning’ of the universe: if it was just 4 percent different, atoms (and we) could not exist.

But was Feynman right about untriseptium? His argument hinged on the fact that α features in the solution of the Dirac equation for the ground-state energy of an atom’s 1s electrons. In effect, when the atomic number Z is equal to or greater than 1/α, the energy becomes imaginary, or in other words, oscillatory – there is no longer a bound state. This doesn’t in itself actually mean that there can be no atoms with Z>137, but rather, there can be no neutral atoms.

However, Feynman’s argument was predicated on a Bohr-type atom in which the nucleus is a point charge. A more accurate prediction of the limiting Z has to take the nucleus’s finite size into account, and the full calculation changes the picture. Now the energy of the 1s orbital doesn’t fall to zero until around Z=150; but actually that is in itself relatively trivial. Even though the bound-state energy becomes negative at larger Z, the 1s electrons remain localized around the nucleus.

But when Z reaches around 173, things get complicated [1]. The bound-state energy then ‘dives’ into what is called the negative continuum: a vacuum ‘sea’ of negative-energy electrons predicted by the Dirac equation. Then the 1s states mix with those in the continuum to create a bound ‘resonance’ state – but the atom remains stable. If the atom’s 1s shell is already ionized, however, containing a single hole, then the consequences are more bizarre: the intense electric field of the nucleus is predicted to pull an electron spontaneously out of the negative continuum to fill it [2]. In other words, an electron-positron pair is created de novo, and the electron plugs the gap in the 1s shell while the positron is emitted.

This behaviour was predicted in the 1970s by Burkhard Fricke of the University of Kassel, working with nuclear physicist Walter Greiner and others [1]. Experiments were conducted during that and the following decade using ‘pseudo-atoms’ – diatomic molecules of two heavy nuclei created in ion collisions – to see if analogous positron emission could be observed from the innermost molecular rather than atomic orbitals. It never was, however, and exactly what would happen for Z>173 remains unresolved.

All the same, it seems that Feynman’s argument does not after all prohibit elements above 137, or even above 173. ‘The Periodic System will not end at 137; in fact it will never end!’, says Greiner triumphantly. Whatever mysteries are posed by the spooky 137, this is apparently not one of them.

1. B. Fricke, W. Greiner & J. T. Waber, Theor. Chim. Acta 21, 235-260 (1971).
2. W. Greiner & J. Reinhardt, Quantum Electrodynamics 4th edn (Springer, Berlin, 2009).

Some like it hot

I have been slack with my postings over the past couple of weeks, so here comes the catching up. First, a Muse for Nature News on a curious paper in PNAS on the origin of life, which seemed to have a corollary not explored by the authors… (I can’t link to the PNAS paper, as it’s not yet been put online, and in the meantime languishes in that peculiar limbo that PNAS commands.)

Heat may have been necessary to ensure that the first prebiotic reactions didn’t take an eternity. If so, this could add weight to the suggestion that water is essential for life in the cosmos.

Should we be surprised to be here? Some scientists maintain that the origin of life is absurdly improbable – Nobel laureate biologist George Wald baldly stated in 1954 that ‘one has only to contemplate the magnitude of [the] task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible’ [1]. Yet others look at the size of the cosmos and conclude that even such extremely low-probability events are inevitable.

The apparent fine-tuning of physical laws and fundamental constants to enable life’s existence certainly presents a profound puzzle, which the anthropic principle answers only through the profligate hypothesis of multiple universes of which we have the fortune to occupy one that is habitable. But even if we take the laws of nature as we find them, it is hard to know whether or not we should feel fortunate to exist.

One might reasonably argue that the question has little meaning while we still have only a few hundred worlds to compare, about most of which we know next to nothing (not even whether there is, or was, life on our nearest neighbour). But one piece of empirical evidence we do have seems to challenge the notion that the origin of terrestrial life was a piece of extraordinarily good fortune: the geological record implies that life began in a blink, almost the instant the oceans were formed. It is as if it was just waiting to happen – as indeed some have suggested [2]. While Darwinian evolution needed billions of years to find a route from microbe to man, it seems that going from mineral to microbe needs barely a moment.

According to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA by Richard Wolfenden and colleagues at the University of North Carolina, that may be largely a question of chemical kinetics [3]. Just about all the key biochemical processes in living organisms are speeded up by enzyme catalysis; otherwise they would happen too slowly or indiscriminately to make metabolism and life feasible. Some key processes, such as reactions involved in biosynthesis of nucleic acids, happen at a glacial pace without enzymes. If so, how did the earliest living systems bootstrap themselves to the point where they could sustain and reproduce themselves with enzymatic assistance?

The researchers think that temperature was the key. They point out that, not only do reactions speed up with temperature more than is commonly appreciated, but that the slowest reactions speed up the most: a change from 25 C to 100 C, for example, increases the rate of some prebiotically relevant reactions by 10 million-fold.

There’s reason to believe that life may have started in hot water, for example around submarine volcanic vents, where there are abundant supplies of energy, inorganic nutrients and simple molecular building blocks. Some of the earliest branches in the phylogenetic tree of life are occupied by thermophilic organisms, which thrive in hot conditions. A hot, aqueous origin of life is probably now the leading candidate for this mysterious event.

This alone, then, could reduce the timescales needed for a primitive biochemistry to get going from millions to tens of years. What’s more, say Wolfenden and colleagues, some of the best non-enzyme catalysts of slow metabolic reactions, which might have served as prebiotic proto-enzymes, becomes more effective as the temperature is lowered. If that’s what happened on the early Earth, then once catalysis took over from simple temperature-induced acceleration, it would have not suffered as the environment cooled or as life spread to cooler regions.

If this scenario is right, it could constrain on the kinds of worlds that support life. We know that watery worlds can do this; but might other simple liquids act as solvents for different biochemistries? In general, these have lower freezing points than water, such as the liquid hydrocarbons of Saturn’s moon Titan, ammonia (on Jupiter, say), formamide (HCONH2) or water-ammonia mixtures. One can enumerate reasons why in some respects these ‘cold’ liquids might be better solvents for life than water [4]. But if the rates of prebiotic reactions were a limiting factor in life’s origin, it may be that colder seas would never move things along fast enough.

Hotter may not be better either: quite aside from the difficulty of imagining plausible biochemistries in molten silicates, complex molecules would tend more readily to fall apart in extreme heat both because bonds snap more easily and because entropy favours disintegration over union. All of which could lend credence to the suggestion of biochemist Lawrence Henderson in 1913 that water is peculiarly biophilic [5]. In the introduction to a 1958 edition of Henderson’s book, Wald wrote ‘we now believe that life… must arise inevitably wherever it can, given enough time.’ But perhaps what it needs is not so much enough time, but enough heat.

References
1. G. Wald, Sci. Am. 191, 44-53 (1954).
2. H. J. Morowitz & E. Smith, Complexity 13, 51-59 (2007).
3. R. B. Stockbridge, C. A. Lewis Jr, Y. Yuan & R. Woldenden, Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi:10.1073/pnas.1013647107.
4. S. A. Benner, in Water and Life (eds R. M. Lynden-Bell, S. Conway Morris, J. D. Barrow, J. L. Finney & C. L. Harper, Jr, Chapter 10. CRC Press, Boca Raton, 2010.
5. L. J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment. Macmillan, New York, 1913.

Beanbag robotics

Here’s a neat idea that I’ve written up for my Material Witness column in the November issue of Nature Materials.

It’s a commonplace observation in robotic engineering that some of the hardest tasks for robots are the ones we do without thinking: balancing upright, say, or catching a ball. Even the simple feat of picking up objects, when considered as a problem in control systems engineering, becomes a formidable challenge. How should we position the fingers on approach, where should we grip the object, how much pressure should we apply? Answering these questions generally requires exquisite feedback between vision, motor control, and tactile sensing, not to mention (in our case) a fair degree of intuition and training.

The ingenuity that has gone into solving these problems in robotics is exhilarating, as exemplified by the very recent reports in this journal of pressure-sensing ‘smart skin’ [1,2]. But these solutions tend to be predicated on the assumption that a robotic hand will follow the human prototype in having several gripping fingers. The widespread use of this design in the animal world testifies to its virtues, but there’s no escaping the demands it makes on actuation, sensing and feedback.

Now Eric Brown of the University of Chicago and his coworkers have described a new design for a robotic gripper that dispenses altogether with these difficulties by replacing active control with passive adaptability. Their device has no fingers at all, but instead uses a soft mass that moulds itself to the shape of the object to be gripped [3]. The crucial aspect of the design is that, once configured in this way simply by pressing onto the object, the gripper undergoes a transition from soft to hard, becoming a rigid body encasing enough of the object to hold it with, in general, an appreciable force.

That is achieved by filling the body of the gripper – an elastic latex bag – with granular material, such as tiny glass spheres or, in one prototype, ground coffee. Rigidification of the conformable grainy mass is then induced by evacuating the air between the grains, causing slight compaction. This is sufficient to trigger a jamming transition: the grains enter a collective state of immobility, like that in a blocked funnel, which, as Brown’s coauthor Heinrich Jaeger explains in another preprint [4], is a non-equilibrium state directly analogous to a glass. Indeed, such a packing-induced transition between solidity and fluidity is familiar to anyone who has ever opened a vacuum-packed packet of coffee.

Once rigid, the gripper holds an object by a combination of three mechanisms: friction, suction caused by deformation of the jammed bag as it lifts, and geometrical ‘wrap-around’ interlocking. The resultant gripping force depends on the geometry of the object, but a whole variety of forms, from steel springs to raw eggs, can be securely held. What is more, the device works in the wet, and can grip several different objects at once while retaining their orientation. Much as in the case of walking robots [5], it shows how smart use of passive control can greatly simplify the engineering problem.

References

1. Takei, K. et al., Nat. Mater. 9, 821-826 (2010).

2. Mannsfeld, S. C. B. et al., Nat. Mater. 9, 859-864 (2010).

3. Brown, E. et al., preprint http://www.arxiv.org/1009.4444.

4. Jaeger, H. & Liu, A. J., preprint http://www.arxiv.org/1009.4874.

5. Collins, S. H.,Wisse, M., Ruina, A. & Tedrake, R., Science 307, 1082-1085 (2005).

Prospects for the Science Book Prize

I’ve just put up a more expansive comment on the Prospect blog about the demise of the Science Book Prize. Sob.

Under the bridge

I was recently sent this striking photo of a pattern in melting ice by Georg Warning in Konstanz. He asked if I’d seen anything like it in my research for The Self-Made Tapestry, in which Georg noticed the apparent similarity to my picture of Marangoni convection. That venerable  tome has now been updated as Nature’s Patterns, in which I include a discussion of ice erosion patterns called penitentes, found in the Andes. Penitentes are much more strongly peaked, but it sounds to me as though the early stages of growth might resemble something like this. In the third book of the trilogy (Branches) I say the following:

The snowfields of the Andes experience a kind of erosion process that creates one of nature’s strangest spectacles. The high glaciers here can become moulded into a forest of ice spires, typically between 1 and 4 metres high, called penitentes because of their resemblance to a throng of white-hooded monks. Charles Darwin saw these eerie formations in 1835 en route from Chile to Argentina. ‘In the valleys there were several broad fields of perpetual snow’, he wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle. ‘These frozen masses, during the process of thawing, had in some parts been converted into pinnacles or columns, which, as they were high and close together, made it difficult for the cargo mules to pass. On one of these columns of ice, a frozen horse was sticking as on a pedestal, but with its hind legs straight up in the air. The animal, I suppose, must have fallen with its head downward into a hole, when the snow was continuous, and afterwards the surrounding parts must have been removed by the thaw.’
   Darwin remarked that the locals believed them to be formed by wind erosion. But the process is more complicated than that, representing a classic case of pattern formation by self-amplifying feedback. The air at these great heights is so dry that sunlight falling on the ice transforms it straight into water vapour rather than melting it into liquid water. A small dimple that forms in the smooth ice surface by evaporation acts as a kind of lens that focuses the sun’s rays into the centre, and so it is excavated more quickly than the surrounding ice. It’s a little like diffusion-limited aggregation or dendritic growth in reverse: a ‘fingering’ instability penetrates into the ice rather than pushing outwards from the surface.
   The process can be accelerated by a fine coating of dirt on the snow surface. As the troughs deepen they expose clean snow that is prone to further evaporation, whereas dirt in the old snow at the peaks covers the ice crystals like a cap and insulates them. You might expect that, on the contrary, snow or ice will melt faster when dirty than when clean, because the darker material will absorb more sunlight. But whether a layer of dirt acts primarily as an insulator or an absorber depends on how thick it is.

That last comment about dirt seems to establish the link, since evidently dirt in the ice traces out the ridges in this case. The underside of this ice bridge is presumably never exposed to the direct rays of the sun, but all the same there is probably some analogous process at play here.

None shall have prizes

Hurrah for Nick Lane, whose Life Ascending won the Royal Society Science Book Prize last night. If anyone there was in doubt that Nick’s book deserved the award, it became crystal clear during the short readings by each author before the announcement (a first for this prize) that his tight, elegant and vivid prose put him ahead of the others. Shame on me for not mentioning Nick’s book in my round-up of the year's science books in the Sunday Times last year.

But the ceremony seemed to me curiously muted, which perhaps reflects the fact that it may be the last: the Royal Society has said it cannot continue funding the prize without a sponsor, and has been unable to find one. This is tragic and baffling. The financial cost can’t be onerous: the glitzy award ceremony was ditched some years back, and there can’t be many other costs except for the modest prize money itself. Besides, as Georgina Ferry said to me recently apropos the also (more or less) defunct Association of British Science Writers Awards, it’s not about the money anyway: the winners would be just as pleased (well, almost) with the recognition alone. As well as the big literary prizes, just about every genre of fiction and non-fiction has its awards – it would be sad indeed if science writers do not, not least because this sends out the message that no one cares much about what they do. Yes, I know we writers are insecure, and that prizes are in any case mostly capricious and invidious beauty contests – but now that the science book prize looks set to vanish, it is more clear to me than ever that what I cared about is not the thought of winning it but the mere knowledge that it is there. And as I tried to say clumsily terms to the BBC, this award was a way of getting a conversation going about how and why science is communicated, and about the roles of science in society. Are the big pharma or IT companies not so keen, even in these straitened times, to see that conversation happen that they can’t find a bit of spare cash?

Music on the brain

There was a nice conference on ‘music and the brain’ here in London last weekend, and I have a report on it on Nature News. Here’s the longer version.

The emotions teeming inside the works of the Romantic composers may have neurological explanations, as a recent meeting explored.

It’s not hard to understand why Robert Schumann should have been selected as the focus of a meeting called 'The Musical Brain', which took place last weekend in London [1]. Not only is the 200th anniversary of the German composer’s birth, but his particular ‘musical brain’ gives neuroscientists plenty to think about.

For one thing, Schumann suffered from the neurological condition called focal dystonia – a loss of muscle control that afflicts an estimated 1 in 100 professional musicians and ended Schumann’s hopes to be a concert pianist. And he seems also to have struggled with severe bipolar disorder, which apparently dictated the rhythm of his creativity and left him confined to an asylum for the last two years of his life.

Focal dystonia is sometimes called ‘musician’s cramp’, but it is not primarily a muscular problem: it begins in the brain [2]. As neuroscientist Jessica Grahn of Cambridge University explained, it stems from the way intense musical practice can over-inflate the mental representation of the relevant part of the body (usually the fingers, although it can affect lip control in brass players). Once the neural representations of the fingers overlap, they can no longer be controlled independently.

This typically manifests itself as a stiffening or curling-up of some fingers. The American pianist Leon Fleisher lost the use of his right hand in this way in 1963, and was restricted for decades to the repertoire for left hand only (much of it written for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein who lost his right arm in World War I). Although dystonia is a consequence of over-practice (or as Fleisher says, inappropriate practice techniques), there may also be a genetic predisposition to it – it is more common, for example, among men. It’s precisely because it is a neural rather than a muscle problem that dystonia is so hard to treat, and indeed there is still no genuine cure.

Schumann succumbed to this excruciating condition in his right middle finger at the age of 21 [3]. He used a home-made contraption to stretch the finger, but it may have done more harm than good. He even composed an extremely difficult piece, his Toccata Opus 7, that avoids the use of the middle finger entirely (hear it here). ‘I was hoping to convince someone to play it at the meeting’, says Grahn, ‘but it’s a bear, so no luck.’

With his performing career stalled, Schumann focused on composing – which, according to neuroscientist Eckart Alternmüller, a specialist on focal dystonia, was for us ‘a blessing, because it allowed his creative talent to be developed to masterful perfection’ [3]. But that was probably little consolation to poor Schumann, particularly as things got far worse for him. Towards the end of his life, he heard voices and was tormented by visions of angels and demons. Fearful that he might harm his wide Clara, in 1854 he attempted to drown himself in the Rhine, only to be rescued by boatmen. That was when he voluntarily entered the asylum where he stayed until his death.

Not everyone agrees that Schumann was bipolar: a recent biographer John Worthen argues that he exhibited no serious mental disturbance until the end of his life, when his psychological disintegration could have been caused by tertiary syphilis [4]. Alternatively, it has been argued that Schumann’s final ‘madness’ looks like a case of mercury poisoning, caused by the mercury medication then used to treat syphilis. But psychiatrist (and concert pianist) Richard Kogan has argued that Schumann’s well documented spells of wild creativity and sleeplessness interspersed with periods of lethargy look like a classic case of bipolar disorder.

If so, he is by no means unique among composers in wrestling with mental illness: Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Leonard Bernstein all seem to have done so. All of which raises the question whether we can hear the emotional turmoil in what they wrote. It’s not hard to imagine so: music critic Stephen Johnson, who introduced the life and work of Schumann at the meeting (and also has bipolar disorder), says of Schumann’s fiendish Toccata that ‘it seems exuberant, it seems it’s flying and it’s very exciting – but it’s breathless, it’s on the edge of something frightening.’

It’s not obvious, however, that we should infer a composer’s state of mind from the music. The German composer Paul Hindemith felt that, if we believed that, the leaps of emotional tone classical compositions often exhibit would compel us to be diagnosing mental disorder all the time, while even the febrile Tchaikovsky doubted that composers express their mood at the actual moment of composition. Take Mozart’s wickedly playful A Musical Joke (K.522): it was apparently the first piece he composed after his father died.

But nonetheless there can be no doubt that music does express emotion – indeed, it is one of the most powerful emotional vehicles in all of human creativity, which seems to be one reason why it can be so effective in therapeutic contexts. It was an interest in the use of music in learning and therapy, says music psychologist Katie Overy of Edinburgh University, ‘that forced me to get into the emotional aspects’.

While acknowledging that musical expression is multi-faceted, she argues that current neurological studies suggest that the activation of mirror neurons – ‘empathy circuits’ that fire both when we watch another person perform an action and when we perform it ourselves – offer a clue about how music works [5].

It may be, she says, that when we hear music, we can ‘read’ it as we would read indicators of emotional state in another person’s vocal or physical gestures. ‘Happy’ music is typically up-tempo and high-pitched, while ‘calm’ or ‘sad’ music tends to be soft, slow and low-pitched [6], because of the way these acoustic qualities mimic the actions and voices of people in those emotional states – an observation that seems to hold across cultures, as Stefan Koelsch of Sussex University, another speaker at the meeting, and his coworkers have shown recently [7].

‘Music has the capacity to tap into these qualities and expand on them’, says Overy. Pianist Ian Brown illustrated during her talk how, for example, musical expressivity involves the mimicry of singing with legato (smoothly connected notes) and speech-like phrasing. The composer and performer can then add to this effect by deploying culture-specific structures (such as major/minor keys; see here) or unexpected rhythms and harmonies: Koelsch showed that musical ‘surprises’ can elicit the same neurological signals as other types of surprise [8].

In this respect, then, support may be emerging for the suggestion of philosopher Susanne Langer that music mimics the dynamics of emotion itself – or, as psychologist Carroll Pratt put it in 1931, that ‘music sounds the way emotions feel’.

References
1. The Musical Brain: Arts, Science and the Mind, St John’s Smith Square, London, 2-3 October 2010.
2. E. Altenmüller & H.-C. Jabusch, J. Hand Therapy 22, 144-155 (2009).
3. E. Altenmüller, in J. Bogousslavsky & F. Boller (eds), Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists (Karger, Basel, 2005).
4. J. Worthen, Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007).
5. I. Molnar-Szakacs & K. Overy, SCAN 1, 235-241 (2006).
6. L. L. Balkwill & W. F. Thompson, Music Perception 17, 43-64 (1999).
7. T. Fritz et al., Curr. Biol. 19, 1-4 (2009).
8. S. Koelsch, T. Frtiz & G. Schlaug, NeuroReport 19, 1815-1819 (2008).

The Corrections

Somehow I suspect that Jonathan Franzen doesn’t need me to feel his pain. But all the same, I do. He has just demanded the shredding of something like 80,000 copies of the UK edition of his book Freedom because the wrong version of the proofs was used for the final printing, containing lots of little typos and omissions of corrections. Several reviewers have admitted that they’d never have noticed the difference, but that’s not the point. It’s not so much about perfectionism as a kind of pride. I have never, like Franzen, taken nine years to write a book, and I don’t have the ability, and probably not the inclination, to choose words as carefully and precisely as he evidently does. But all the same, I know that errors introduced in the production process feel like a two-year-old has just scribbled over your pages – like mindless or wilful destruction. I know this is unfair – no one in the production process is trying to do other than perform their job well – but that’s how it feels. What is particularly galling is that, unless you’re Franzen, one these errors have happened, you’re stuck with them forever. It arouses that childhood feeling of a terrible injustice that you are utterly powerless to rectify. And it happens in the swanky hardback version, the version that is meant (unlike the paperback) to be an object of beauty. There are one or two pages of my previous books that I still mustn’t look at for fear that I’ll start fuming all over again.

There have been times when I have been driven to conclude that, if you leave typesetters the slightest opening for introducing a mistake, they’ll seize it. Many times I have said to myself that I would in future always insist on seeing the final, final version of the proofs before they go off for printing, only to feel, when the time came, that this would seem just too much like the neurotic author – and then to regret not doing so. It does amaze me that typesetters will interpret letters in handwritten proof corrections in such a way as to turn a perfectly obvious and ordinary word into gibberish – sometimes you can’t help feeling they are just having a laugh. And publishers often seem to feel no need to double-check corrections, or so it seems. Oh, I’m sure typesetters must be confronted with some real nightmares sometimes – pages covered in wild scribbles connected by a maze of looping arrows. I have occasionally done them no favours myself. But there just don’t seem to be enough checks built into the publishing process, which seems bizarre given how tough it is to get a book published and how cautious publishers have become about commissioning.

I exempt my current publisher, Bodley Head, from these criticisms – not simply to keep them sweet, but because they are undoubtedly the most careful and conscientious I have ever worked with. Of course, that is inviting trouble, especially with a stack of proof corrections sitting on my desk right now (February 2011, since you ask). And worse: when I read that the typesetter for Franzen’s book was a company called Palimpsest, it rang a bell. So I checked out my own pages… yup.

Return to Chartres

About 18 months ago I went to Chartres for the filming of a documentary about the Gothic cathedrals for Nova. The documentary is now finished, and airs in October in the US. I’ve no idea how it ended up, but there is an outtake available here which bodes well. I’m glad they managed to find a use for this footage, since it wasn’t easy taking it: up in the galleries we had to keep persuading the organist to postpone his practice, while out on the front steps we had to placate the resident alcoholics and grab takes between rain squalls. I’d frozen my gonads off by the end of it. That, no doubt, is all very thirteenth-century.

The prospect for October

Here’s the full-cream version of my Lab Report for Prospect in October.

The IPCC is in a bind. There are good arguments for reforming the way it operates, not least improving the efficiency and transparency of its review process. A recent independent assessment by the InterAcademy Council, representing all the world’s major science academies, agreed with that but concluded that the IPCC’s scientific conclusions are reliable and that it has generally worked well on a shoestring. But should its chair, Rajendra Pachauri, stay? Pachauri has been pilloried for errors that led to unjustified forecasts about melting of the Himalayan glaciers – a bad mistake, but negligible in the grand scheme. He has also been unjustly smeared over alleged conflicts of interest. There is nothing here to warrant resignation

But Pachauri’s leadership during the IPCC’s tribulations of the past year has not been inspiring, and more to the point, all leaders grow stale eventually. A change could bring fresh vigour and restore public confidence. Yet such is the aura of distrust fomented by the smear campaign that it would now be all but impossible for Pachauri to step down without being seen to validate climate sceptics’ criticisms. We are now in a mirror-image reality in which some consider Bjorn Lomborg’s U-turn on the threat of climate change more principled than Pachauri’s steadfast advocacy of the science. A reformed IPCC would be welcome, but there will be no winners.

Although it’s perhaps no surprise that the restoration of federal funding for stem-cell research in the United States under the Obama administration is not plain sailing, no one could have foreseen the oddness of the latest, potentially devastating obstacle. The injunction issued by a district court judge in Columbia against such funding stems from a case brought not by Christian ‘pro-life’ groups, who object to the destruction of human embryos in harvesting new stem-cell lines, but by two stem-cell scientists. James Sherley and Theresa Deisher work on adult stem cells and oppose research on embryonic cells, saying that the adult-cell work is both scientifically and ethically superior.

Outsiders to the US legal system will be baffled that a district judge can, by reinterpreting the meaning of a long-standing constraint on embryonic stem-cell work, force the National Institutes of Health instantly to freeze all funding, plunging work in progress into limbo and ensuring funding chaos months or years down the line. But there it is: Chief Judge Royce Lamberth has decided that the 1996 Dickey-Wicker Amendment to NIH budget legislation, prohibiting funding for research involving the creation and destruction of embryos, in fact must prohibit all embryonic stem-cell work whether or not it destroys or creates embryos. The injunction has been appealed by the US Department of Justice.

The amendment itself is probably here to stay, since it impinges also on abortion, but the current Obama policy had left room for the use, with donor consent, of embryos from fertility clinics that would otherwise be destroyed.

Sherley is a complicated character with an agenda that is hard to read. But the fact that a maverick case in a district court can wreck an entire nation’s research effort at the forefront of medical science is chilling.

Because every month now seems to bring a new complete genome sequence – now mouse-ear cress, now the panda – it might have been tempting at first to greet the announcement of the wheat genome with a touch of ennui. But no longer. Drought and flood have devastated wheat yields in Russia and China. Russia, one of the world’s biggest producers, has now imposed an export ban that has sent wheat prices soaring, threatening the food security of millions of people. The riots in Mozambique over bread prices may be just a taste of what is to come.

This is why the wheat genome sequence is one of the most important so far, and why public access to the data granted by the researchers, led by a team at Liverpool University, is so valuable and commendable. The genetic information should point to shortcuts for breeding of new, hardier varieties, as well as identifying specific genes that might be engineered to improve resistance to drought and disease.

            Why, then, has wheat not been genetically sequenced sooner? The answer is sobering: the genome is not only larger than that of most crops, but is five times larger than the human genome. And some scientists have cautioned that the British work offers just a preliminary first draft: the International Wheat Genome Sequence Consortium says that there is still a lot of work to be done in sorting and ordering the raw data.

The much-vaunted medical benefits of sequencing the human genome itself have just received some vindication from the results of clinical trials of the anti-cancer drug PLX4032. The dramatic potential of the drug for shrinking skin-cancer tumours was reported in August, and is confirmed by a recent paper in Nature. But the real excitement stems from the approach: the drug was developed to target a specific carcinogenic mutation of a gene called BRAF, involved in cell growth. The problem is that there are several dangerous mutations of BRAF alone, and thousands of other genetic mutations that also cause cancer. But the new results show that targeting a particular mutation can be highly effective, hitting only those cancer cells that possess it instead of employing the scattershot attack of current cancer chemotherapies. If many mutant-specific drugs come online, rapid gene profiling of patients could enable them to be given precisely the right treatment, without the debilitating side-effects. That, however, will require the development of an awful lot of new drugs. [See my Prospect article on the problems with Big Pharma.]

Grand designs?

My review of Hawking’s new book has now been published, although you’re unlikely to stumble across it unless you live in Abu Dhabi. Since it is published pretty much verbatim, and seems to be freely accessible, I won’t post it again here.

God, the universe, and selling books

I have a comment on the Prospect blog about the way the media has been hyperventilating (see here and here (Graham Farmelo being characteristically astute) and here) about Stephen Hawking. Here is how it started out. [Incidentally, I can't figure out why my last paragraphs are reverting to Roman typeface. Sorry for this distraction.]

It’s a harsh reality of journalistic life that you will sometimes have to write up ‘news’ that is neither new nor significant, simply because your editor knows that everyone else will do so. That is the generous interpretation of the blanket media coverage of Stephen Hawking’s pronouncement that God is no longer needed to create the universe.

Hawking has form in this arena, having previously been accorded oracular status when he uttered some comment about a Theory of Everything permitting us to ‘know the Mind of God’, the kind of idle metaphor that only someone lacking any serious interest in the interface of science and religion would employ. Hawking clearly had not read Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, which wisely declares that ‘if any man think, by his inquiries after material things, to discover the nature or will of God, he is indeed spoiled by vain philosophy.’ Although interpretations of Bacon’s pieties as those of a closet atheist minding his back are unlikely, he did at least have the good taste thus to dispense with God at the outset.

Let’s not be too harsh on Hawking: the man is one of the best physicists in the world. The problem is that, in the public view, this statement probably seems as absurd as saying that Messi is a good striker: a lame way of acknowledging incomparable genius. Most people will be astonished to hear that Hawking is not rated by his peers among the top ten physicists even of the 20^th century, let alone of all time. They probably imagine he has so far been denied a Nobel prize out of sheer jealousy. Hawking is extremely smart, but so are others, and he is a long way from being Einstein’s successor.

More importantly, Hawking has no reputation among scientists as a deep thinker. There is nothing especially profound in what he has said to date about the social and philosophical implications of science in general and cosmology in particular. There is far more wisdom in the views of Martin Rees, John Barrow or Phil Anderson, not to mention the old favourites Einstein, Bohr and Feynman. Hawking’s latest remarks on the redundancy of God have little depth, as Paul Davies showed easily enough in the Guardian: if you have any kind of law-like regularity in the universe, the door is always open for those who like to attribute it to God. And Mary Warnock (no religious apologist) points out – or reminds us that Hume pointed out – that the Biblical God is not simply or even primarily a God who made the universe. It’s a sterile debate, as Bacon already saw.

This makes it ridiculous, then, that Hawking’s announcement in his new book The Grand Design (I’m currently reviewing this, and will post the review shortly) has been greeted as though it is the final judgement of science on the Biblical Creation: Hawking Has Spoken. Even atheists must feel some sympathy for the likes of Rowan Williams having to comment on such a shallow assertion, as though Hawking is supposed to have set the foundations of their faith quaking. Hawking is speaking about the God of Boyle and Newton, not the God of contemporary theology. (This is not to deny that millions still believe in this anachronistic, childish vision of God, who waved his fingers and made the world, but just to say that it is a bit silly to pander to it.)

So why does Hawking get awarded this status by the idolatory press? It’s time to stop being squeamish and take the bull by the horns. The Cult of Hawking is the Cult of the Great Mind in the Useless Body. It is attributable in part to a simple, ghoulish fascination with the man’s physical disability, but more so (and more troublingly) to the unspoken astonishment that a man with such severe bodily impairment can be intelligent. It speaks volumes about our persistent prejudices about disability.

I find it disturbing that the media plays along with this so readily, even while now seemingly keen to feign blindness to Hawking’s condition. It is hard to know whether Hawking recognizes this situation himself. He has always seemed inspiringly stoical, even gently self-mocking, in the face of the extreme challenges of his affliction. If he knows that his fame and reputation stem from his illness, no one has any right to expect him to comment on it. But as for the rest of us: the more we turn Hawking into a guru, the more we do a disservice to everyone else whose minds are vibrant while their bodies are impaired.

Happy now?

Here’s the pre-edited version of my latest Muse for Nature News.

**********

Does money make you happy? It depends what you mean by happy.

You want to be happy? Here’s how: be highly educated, female, wealthy, not middle-aged (tell me about it), married and self-employed. These are among the most salient characteristics of people who describe themselves as being the most happy. Misery, meanwhile, comes from unemployment, low income, divorce and poor health.

Not rocket science, is it? Nevertheless, the booming discipline of ‘happiness studies’ continues to excite controversy. What is cause and effect, for example? Are people happier when they marry, or do happy people marry?

And what exactly do we mean by happiness: that we laugh a lot, feel optimistic and secure in our lives, are serenely calm or deliriously hedonistic? In a recent Gallup poll of national happiness, the USA came fifth, and yet at the same time came 89^th from ‘best’ (out of 151) in terms of ‘worry’ and had the fifth highest stress levels. How to make sense of that? Does happiness compensate for stress, or are they ineluctably conjoined?

Besides, is happiness a desirable goal? That might seem obvious (it was to the authors of the US Declaration of Independence) – and it surely seems a better measure of human wealth than conventional ‘well-being’ economic indices such as GDP. But what if a happy nation is a selfish or profligate one? And who’s to say that the inhabitants of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World would not, blissed out by the drug soma, have rated high on the happiness scale?

These dilemmas have deep roots. Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian political philosophy in the nineteenth century sought to arrange for the maximum happiness for the greatest number of people, according to a so-called ‘hedonistic calculus’: a principle, however, rendered indeterminate by what has been called the ‘fallacy of double optima’, with no unique optimum.

One of the most contested issues is the relationship between happiness and income. Everyone agrees that abject poverty is miserable, but how does the relationship play out above that unfortunate state? While being female or married are all-or-nothing factors, income is quantitative: if being wealthy makes you happy, does being more wealthy make you more happy?

Since most of us are, by definition, not relatively wealthy in our society, we probably feel a glow of self-righteous satisfaction from studies suggesting there is a ‘wealth threshold’ above which happiness no longer increases [1][2]. That fits with intuition: the super-rich do not strike us as a particularly joyful bunch. (In the UK we like to wheel on the Royal Family as the prime exhibit, disregarding the fact that less representative members of society you will never find.)

But now Nobel laureate economist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Angus Deaton at Princeton University have thrown a cat among the pigeons. In a new paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA [3] they use the US data from the recent Gallup survey to argue that income does continue to impact on our evaluation of life satisfaction as we enter the realm of the rich.

Does this validate the anonymous quip that those who say money can’t buy happiness don’t know where to shop? Not exactly. Kahneman and Deaton say that previous discussions have been muddied by a failure to distinguish a sense of emotional well-being from our life evaluation. The first refers to daily experience: how much we laugh, how relaxed we feel as we go about our life. The second is a more objective overview: are we content with our family, job, house, insurance, credit rating? It is not hard to imagine the head of a big corporation feeling good about all this while never cracking a grin.

The Gallup poll surveyed more than 700,000 US residents, although Kahneman and Deaton jettison about a quarter of the responses because they appear unreliable. From the rest, they deduce that income is more closely correlated with life evaluation than with emotional well-being, and that this correlation persists for all income levels, at least up to around $160,000 per annum. While reported well-being also generally increases with income, this relationship plateaus at an income of around $75,000.

For all their ambiguities, happiness studies are closely monitored by politicians and policy makers, not least because policies that make people happy seem likely to win votes. What will they make of these findings? Is it better to promote good life evaluation, or emotional well-being?

Kahneman and Deaton refrain from taking a position – and the richness and subtlety of their data advise against glib answers. As they imply, any society should wish to improve the lot of people who have poor emotional health and are gloomy about their prospect. But their results, while complicating the previous picture, surely suggest that income (and dare one therefore add, taxation levels?) should not be regarded as a relevant happiness dial for the comfortably off. While some might be determined to extract the conclusion that, as the New York Times once put it [4], ‘maybe money does buy happiness after all’, there is a strong case here that better education, secure health provision, lowering of stress, and the nurturing of social and familial relationships offer a far greater dividend of smiles.

  

References

1. Easterlin, R. A. in Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz (eds P. A. David & M. W. Reder) 89-124 (Academic Press, New York, 1974). Paper available here.

2. Layard, R. Happiness: Lessons From a New Science (Penguin, New York, 2005).

3. Kahneman, D. & Deaton, A. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi: 10.1073/pnas.1011492107.

4. Leonhardt, D. New York Times 16 April (2008).

The prospect for September

Bit of overmatter from my Prospect Lab Report this month, as the top story below blew up shortly before it went to press, so the last two stories below were shelved. Here, as ever, is the unexpurgated version.

It would be nice to be able to report that the much trumpeted ‘end of antibiotics’ is just a slice of media alarmism. But it isn’t. The danger that just about all our existing antibiotics will soon be powerless against resistant bacteria, as claimed in Lancet Infectious Diseases, is all too real. A paper in the journal reports the emergence and spread of strains of common pathogens, such as E. coli and the pneumonia bug K. pneumoniae, containing a gene that confers resistance against even current last-resort antibiotics called carbapenems. Such bacteria, Chris Walsh of Harvard Medical School confirms, “are on the brink of being impossible to treat with existing antibiotics.” “This is a very serious problem”, agrees Gerry Wright, a specialist in antibiotic resistance and discovery at McMaster University in Ontario. Without antibiotics, even routine surgery could cause fatal infections.

Antibiotic resistance has been with us ever since penicillin revolutionized medicine. So why the problem now? Partly, it’s simply becoming harder to find new drugs to expand the arsenal. But the difficulties also stem from practices within the pharmaceutical industry. “This is a very grim time in antibacterial drug development”, says Wright. “The reasons are complex, but the fact that many pharmaceutical companies have moved to a focus on chronic diseases is one.”

Wright is one of several specialists who have been clamouring for years about the danger. In 2004, Carl Nathan of Cornell University’s Weill Medical College decried the way companies look for profitable blockbuster antibiotics. These are general-purpose drugs for chronic infections, and their widespread use quickly elicits resistance. But if their use is restrained, profits fall and funding and expertise leaches away. This, along with regulatory hurdles, the debilitating effects of a spate of big pharma mergers, and myopic focus on hitting tried-and-tested biochemical targets in the pathogens, has now almost dried up the antibiotic development pipeline. Nathan called for an overhaul in the way new antibiotics are sought and brought to market, including a vigorous not-for-profit pharmaceutical sector.

Something certainly needs to change: this is a global problem for which the market may not offer any solution. “Multidrug resistant bacteria will only continue to spread”, says Wright. “There is no chance that the problem will go away.”

*****

The UK coalition government’s plan to dismantle the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority in its cull of ‘health quangos’ is nothing short of vandalism.

The Health Protection Agency, also on the hit list, supplies vital advice about infectious diseases to the government, public and medical profession. But that demands rather specific expertise which could at least conceivably be transferred intact within the civil service. The HFEA is different.

Set up in 1991 after much governmental procrastination in the wake of the first IVF birth (1978) and the subsequent Warnock Report (1984) on embryo research, its responsibilities ballooned as developments in embryology and assisted conception accelerated. The authority’s recent wrestling with the ethics of human-animal hybrid embryos and stem-cell research seems a long way from treatments for infertility, but there is an inextricable link between them, historically and scientifically. This is one reason why the possible plan floated by Health Secretary Andrew Lansley to parcel out the HFEA’s work to three other bodies is naïve and potentially dangerous. Decisions about these delicate matters at the forefront of reproductive and biomedical technology require a comprehensive overview of the context, and ever more so as time goes by.

The real tragedy is that the HFEA did its job so well, as attested by the fact that it managed to upset both religious (and secular) conservatives, for perceived liberalism, and scientists, for alleged restrictiveness (despite the UK having one of the most permissive embryo research frameworks in the world). The HFEA was genuinely independent, refusing to kowtow to government, scientists, IVF clinics, religious groups, or public opinion. Doubtless some of its decisions could be criticized, but they were always taken with sober, informed consideration. It was a bulwark against the hazards of both a laissez-faire free market in infertility treatment and knee-jerk reactionary prohibition. It will be a miracle if the same acumen can be assembled from the scattered remains.  

*****

The announcement of an antiviral vaginal gel that can reduce HIV infection by around 50 percent is good news, however qualified. The current clinical trial, conducted by the Durban-based Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa, is modest in scale and awaits replication, along with more data on safety and a better understanding of why it doesn’t always succeed. But the great virtue of this strategy is that it gives some autonomy to women, who can reduce their chance of contracting the virus when male sexual partners refuse to use a condom. In South Africa, a third of all women between 20 and 34 are thought to be HIV-positive, and they account for around 60% of all new infections.

The gel contains an antiviral drug which interferes with a key enzyme involved in viral replication, unlike previous efforts which have sought either to inhibit the entry of viruses into cells or to kill the viruses (or infected cells) directly. Testing on 889 HIV-negative women over two years showed that regular use could reduce the chance of infection by 54%. The gel should be very cheap per dose and has few side-effects. The question now is how to balance the urgency of need against time-consuming confirmation and in-depth clinical testing.

There was more promising news with the announcement that two ‘therapeutic vaccines’ for HIV – which aim to prevent transmission from infected people rather than preventing infection in the first place – have at last shown some success in boosting immune systems debilitated by HIV. The vaccines use pieces of RNA from the virus to stimulate an immune response.

Many AIDS researchers had concluded that therapeutic vaccines would not work, and even now the response to the new trials, which report only a modest suppression of the virus, is somewhat muted. Some fear the strategy might backfire by boosting evasive viral mutations.

*****

It’s a good time to be an oil specialist: lucrative contracts beckon both from BP and from the US government as they prepare for the obligatory Natural Resource Damage Assessment. But there are strings attached in either case: you probably won’t be able to publish your research for confidentiality reasons. Some academics have already declined offers for this reason. There is of course nothing very usual about gag rules for work contracted by a private company or for government-backed research with legal implications. But it could mean that, in the absence of significant independent funding for such research, a detailed understanding of the effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill will never be made public.

On the other hand, oil clean-up technology could be improved by the carrot of a $1.4 million prize dangled by the X Prize Foundation, a Californian organization that aims to stimulate “radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity”. The company has previously offered a $10 million award for the development of a privately funded, manned spacecraft, which was claimed by the company Scaled Composites now working on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic commercial spaceflight programme. Entries for the oil prize are already being prepared. It’s good that the Foundation has noticed there are better ways to spend its money.

In search of beauty

In his review of my trio of books Nature’s Patterns in the TLS, Martin Kemp makes a start on a question that I leave more or less untouched: the issue of our subjective experience of pattern and form. Why do we respond aesthetically to pattern and order? Or to put it simplistically but, in the end, in the form that perhaps really counts: why do we find snowflakes and flowers beautiful?

That’s the issue psychologist Nicholas Humphrey tackles in an ambitious article in the current Prospect. More specifically, he asks why we apprehend beauty both in art and in nature. He seeks an answer in evolutionary psychology. And guess what: he finds it. He believes that ultimately an appreciation of beauty has its origin in sexual selection, much as Darwin anticipated. Beautiful works, he says, bear the hallmarks of human skill that offer signals of reproductive fitness: dexterity, intellectual ability, sensory acuity, perhaps even morality.

But why do we then find nature beautiful too, when there is no maker? Partly, says Humphrey, this is a question of convergence: we find traits in animals beautiful (such as butterfly wings) because the courtship displays of other animals are akin to those of humans. And partly, it is the result of the way we habitually personify inanimate nature, believing that it does indeed have a maker, and that this maker should therefore be the object of our love.

Now, let’s be fair: experience of beauty, and judgements of beauty in art, are so diverse that just about any attempt to explain them in biological and evolutionary terms is likely to be vulnerable. But just about every statement in Humphrey’s piece is open to challenge. It is hard to know where to start.

Probably the most serious problem for his thesis is that it is so culturally biased. Humphrey seems to assume that all cultures find beauty in the same places: that making visual art, music and literature is always primarily about making beauty, and that we all agree on it when we see it. But it is hotly debated whether, say, the primary function of music in some cultures is an aesthetic one at all. (Without culturally agreed points of common reference, it can be very hard to say.) Humphrey’s notion of what art is and what it strives to do seems solidly located within the Western Renaissance tradition.

The sexual selection idea seems kind of plausible, but no more than others. Certainly that’s the case for music, as I discussed in The Music Instinct. And like so much evolutionary psychology, not only is this idea not put to the test, but its proponents seem wholly unconcerned even to think about how that might be done. Is musical prowess an honest signal of survival skills, for instance? There seems to be no evidence for that (and sometimes evidence to the contrary). And what are the relevant skills? How does art demonstrate ‘loyalty’, for example, as Humphrey suggests? Are the ‘rich resources’ really those of the artist, or his/her patron?

And does a human sense of beauty really converge with animal mating displays? Sure, we admire the peacock’s tail, but some of these displays just strike us as bizarre. And many ‘beautiful’ animal traits, such as some butterfly markings, aren’t used for sexual display in any case. Humphrey argues that biological ‘good form’ is necessarily adaptive – among which characteristics he lists ‘rhyme’ (huh?), grace and symmetry. But symmetry is not necessarily adaptive in itself, and in any case, do we really look for the highest symmetry in art? (Answer: no. The highest symmetry is uniformity.)

But the weakest part of the argument surely comes when Humphrey tries to explain why we deceive ourselves in imagining that there is a creator in nature. He says that ‘at least in modern culture, many of our encounters with nature come first through art.’ One could question this statement even as it stands, but even if you accept it, it won’t wash. Why would we transform the ‘maker’ of a painting of a waterfall into a ‘maker’ of the waterfall itself? More to the point, if this is only the case in ‘modern culture’ (which it is), then it can play no evolutionary role.

Humphrey asks an important question: why do we possess a sense of beauty? It’s hard to answer, for sure. But inventing Just So stories, devoid of any means of empirical validation, won’t help. Nor are we likely to get very far by introversion: by assuming, as Hobbes and Descartes did, that we can so easily step outside our culture that it is meaningful to commence by asking ‘Well, how do I feel about it?’ We need at least to begin by asking not only what other cultures find beautiful, but what they mean by beauty.

Christmas is coming

I’m excited. Really. I have just discovered that my friend Mark Miodownik is going to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures this year. Mark is a materials scientist at King’s College (where, outrageously, the Materials Science Department is no more). He runs the wonderful Materials Library, where one can see and touch lots of very weird materials. I can think of no one better to fill Michael Faraday’s shoes for the Christmas Lectures, and I plan to be there.

More on the problem with economics

OK, my article on agent-based modelling of the economy is now out in the Economist – you might be able to get it here, but if firewalls prevent that then here, naturally, is the original thing. And I’m interested that the reader comments don’t seem by any means as adverse to this sort of thing as I’d imagined regular economists would be. Encouraging. Some feel that the economy, or people, are too complex to be captured by any kind of modelling. I don’t believe there is any reason to think that (and some good evidence to the contrary), although it is surely right that we must keep all models in perspective. And we have to remember that social science is the hardest science of all.

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For economists, the most serious deficit of the credit crunch may be in credibility. Vocal critics such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb are demanding to know why, when they failed utterly to foresee the crisis – indeed, apparently endorsed the conditions that created it – we should have the slightest faith in their capacity to mend it. And the diametrically opposed views of professional economists on what the remedy should be scarcely commands trust.

Yet there is little sign of discomfort or self-reflection in the citadel of orthodox economic theory. Much the same people, using much the same tools, are guiding economic policy after the crash as before it. Forecasting at the Federal Reserve, for example, is still being done using the so-called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models that led one of its governors, Frederic Mishkin, to deliver an assessment of the downturn in the US housing market in summer 2007 that now looks grotesquely optimistic. The message seems to be ‘if you don’t fix it, it ain’t broke.’

Mainstream economics has always had its dissidents. But the seeds of change have never before found such fertile soil. Heavyweights such as Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman are calling for radical rethinking. The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) in New York, which had its inaugural conference in April, boasts Stiglitz and Amartya Sen on its advisory board, and is bankrolled by George Soros. A hearing of the US House of Representatives Committee of Science and Technology in July called on distinguished witnesses such as Robert Solow to ‘build a science of economics for the real world’.

Critics tend to concur about what is wrong with the tools currently used for macroeconomic forecasting and policy – DSGE models were targeted in the House hearing, for example, while the INET has attacked many of the assumptions, including the efficient-market hypothesis and rational expectations, on which these models are predicated. But there is less agreement about what should replace the old techniques.

The hearing aimed to ‘question the wisdom of relying for national economic policy on a single, specific model when alternatives are available.’ One of the most promising and popular of these alternatives was on display at a workshop in Warrenton, Virginia at the end of June, funded by the US National Science Foundation and attended by a diverse bunch that included economists from the Fed and the Bank of England, social scientists, policy advisors and computer scientists. They explored the potential of so-called agent-based models (ABMs) of the economy to help us learn the lessons of the current financial crisis and perhaps to develop an early-warning system for anticipating the next one.  Better still, this non-traditional approach might offer prevention rather than cure: not the false promise of a crisis-free economy, but a way of identifying systemic vulnerabilities and mitigating their effects.

Agent-based modeling [1] does not assume that the economy can achieve a settled equilibrium. The modeler imposes no order or design on the economy from the top down, and unlike many traditional models, ABMs are not populated with ‘representative agents’: identical traders, firms or households whose individual behaviour mirrors the economy as a whole. Rather, an ABM uses a bottom-up approach which assigns particular behavioural rules to each agent. For example, some may believe that prices reflect fundamentals while others may rely on empirical observations of past price trends.

Crucially, agent behaviour may be determined (and altered) by direct interactions between them, whereas in conventional models interaction happens only indirectly through pricing. This provision of ABMs enables, for example, the copycat behaviour that leads to “herding” among investors. The agents may learn from experience or switch their strategies according to majority opinion. They can aggregate into institutional structures such as banks and firms. These things are very hard, sometimes impossible, to build into conventional models. But in an agent-based model one simply runs a computer simulation to see what emerges, free from any top-down assumptions. As economist Alan Kirman has put it, ABMs ‘provide an account of macro phenomena which are caused by interaction at the micro level but are no longer a blown-up version of that activity.’

Agent-based models are not exactly an alternative to conventional approaches, but a generalization of them: just about any economic theory could be expressed as an ABM, including the DSGE models now used for forecasting by most central banks. While those models are also based on microeconomic foundations, they accept the traditional view that there exists some ideal equilibrium towards which all prices are drawn. That this is often approximately true is why DSGE models perform well enough in a business-as-usual economy.

But DSGE models are useless in a crisis, as even advocates such as Robert Lucas admit. Last year, Lucas responded in this magazine to the criticism that these theories had failed to foresee the credit crunch by saying that such events are inherently unpredictable. All that can be reasonably expected of economic models, Lucas implied, is that they work well in ‘normal’ times. Crashes must forever be anomalies where theory breaks down.

That’s true of DSGE models because their ‘dynamic stochastic’ element amounts to minor fluctuations around an equilibrium state. Yet there is no equilibrium during big market fluctuations such as crashes – one can say that DSGE models thus insist that such events never occur.

ABMs, in contrast, make no assumptions about the existence of efficient markets or general equilibrium. The markets that they generate are generally not in equilibrium at all but are more like a turbulent river or the weather system, subject to constant storms and seizures of all sizes. Big fluctuations and even crashes are an inherent feature.

That’s because ABMs contain feedback mechanisms that can potentially amplify small effects, such as the herding and panic that generates bubbles and crashes. In mathematical terms the models are nonlinear, meaning that effects need not be proportional to their causes. These nonlinearities are absent from DSGE models, but they were evidently central to the credit crunch.

For example, in Virginia Andrew Lo of MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering presented a model of the US housing market, inspired by ABM approaches, which showed how a fateful conjunction of rising house prices, falling interest rates and easy access to refinancing created high systemic risk, amplifying the housing downturn into an awesome burden of debt [2]. And John Geanakoplos of Yale University explained how the leverage cycle in remortgaging – high leverage during booms, low during recessions – can bloom into instability like an out-of-control pendulum, unless carefully managed [3]. The web of interdependencies forged from the buck-passing of risk using complex derivatives may create the potential for propagating nonlinear instabilities analogous to those that crashed the power grid of the North American eastern seaboard in 2003, and are precisely the kind of thing that ABMs are well suited to capturing. Sujit Kapadia of the Bank of England is attempting to uncover and model these network-based vulnerabilities in financial systems [4],

While all of these culprits have been fingered in the voluminous post-mortems of the current crisis, there has been barely any discussion of the way nonlinear feedbacks gave them such impact. As a result, the understanding on which any preventative regulation and ‘macroprudential’ strategies might be based is still thin.

Another of the key lessons of the crisis is the role of interactions between different sectors – housing and finance, say. While concentional macroeconomic models can incorporate these, ABMs might be better tailored to each specific sector – for example, including banks in financial markets, which DSGE models do not. In principle, ABMs can include as much of the economy as you like, with all the sector-specific structures and quirks. Indeed, the organizers of the Virginia workshop – physicist-turned-economist Doyne Farmer of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and social scientist Robert Axtell of George Mason University in Virginia – wanted to explore the feasibility and utility of constructing an immense ABM of the entire global economy by ‘wiring’ many such modules together.

What might be required for such an enterprise in resources and expertise, and what might it hope to achieve? One vision is a real-time simulation, fed by masses of input data, that would operate rather like the traffic models now used for forecasting on the roads of Dallas and the Rhine-Westphalia region. But it might be more realistic and useful to employ a suite of such models, in the manner of global climate simulations, which project various possible futures and thus give an aggregated forecast – and show how our actions, laws and institutions might influence it.

In either case, the models would need much more data on the activities of individuals, banks and companies than is currently available. Gathering such information will be one of the key tasks of the US Office of Financial Research instituted by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act to reform Wall Street. While this plan has raised privacy fears, such data-gathering is no less essential for understanding the economy than are meteorological observations for understanding climate, or geological monitoring to anticipate earthquakes.

And although seismologists may never be able to make precise forecasts, it would be deplorable if they were to shrug and resign themselves to modelling just the regular, gradual movements of tectonic plates and faults. Instead they have developed methods for mapping the evolution of stress patterns, identifying areas at risk, and refining rough heuristics for hazard assessment. Why should the same not be done for the financial system? It won’t be cheap or easy. But to deny the very possibility merely to absolve the conventional models of their severe limitations is starting to look unforgivable.

References

1. B. LeBaron & L. Tesfatasion, Am. Econ. Rev. 98(2), 246-250 (2008).

2. A. E. Khandani, A. W. Lo & R. C. Merton, Working Paper, September 2009.

3. A. Fostel & J. Geanakoplos, Am. Econ. Rev. 98(4), 1211-1244 (2008).

4. P. Gai & S. Kapadia, Bank of England Working Paper 383 (2010).