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Tag Archives: Stanford University
Frugal science, foldable microscopes, and curiosity: a talk on June 3, 2019 at Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, Canada) … it's in Metro Vancouver
This is the second frugal science item* I'm publishing today (May 29, 2019) which means that I've gone from complete ignorance on the topic to collecting news items about it. Manu Prakash, the developer behind a usable paper microscope than can be folded and kept in your pocket, is going to be giving a talk locally according to a May 28, 2019 announcement (received via email) from Simon Fraser University's (SFU) Faculty of Science,
On June 3rd [2019], at 7:30 pm, Manu Prakash from Stanford University will give the Herzberg Public Lecture in conjunction with this year's Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) conference that the department is hosting. Dr. Prakash's lecture is entitled "Frugal Science in the Age of Curiosity". Tickets are free and can be obtained through Eventbrite: https://t.co/WNrPh9fop5 .
This presentation will be held at the Shrum Science Centre Chemistry C9001 Lecture Theatre, Burnaby campus (instead of the Diamond Family Auditorium).
There's a synopsis of the talk on the Herzbergy Public Lecture: Frugal Science in the Age of Curiosity webpage,
Science faces an accessibility challenge. Although information/knowledge is fast becoming available to everyone around the world, the experience of science is significantly limited. One approach to solving this challenge is to democratize access to scientific tools. Manu Prakash believes this can be achieved via "Frugal science"; a philosophy that inspires design, development, and deployment of ultra-affordable yet powerful scientific tools for the masses. Using examples from his own work (Foldscope: one-dollar origami microscope, Paperfuge: a twenty-cent high-speed centrifuge), Dr. Prakash will describe the process of identifying challenges, designing solutions, and deploying these tools globally to enable open ended scientific curiosity/inquiries in communities around the world. By connecting the dots between science education, global health and environmental monitoring, he will explore the role of "simple" tools in advancing access to better human and planetary health in a resource limited world.
If you're curious there is a Foldscope website where you can find out more and/or get a Foldscope for yourself.
In addition to the talk, there is a day-long workshop for teachers (as part of the 2019 CAP Congress) with Dr. Donna Strickland the University of Waterloo researcher who won the 2018 Nobel Prize for physics. If you want to learn how to make a Foldscope, t here is also a one hour session for which you can register separately from the day-long event,. (I featured Strickland and her win in an October 3, 2018 posting.)
Getting back to the main event. Dr. Prakash's evening talk, you can register here.
*ETA May 29, 2019 at 1120 hours PDT: My first posting on frugal science is Frugal science: ancient toys for state-of-the-art science. It's about a 3D printable centrifuge based on a toy known (in English) as a whirligig.
This entry was posted in science communication, science philosophy, sscience education, Vancouver and tagged 2019 CAP Congress, Canadian Association of Physics (CAP, Donna Strickland, Foldscope, Frugal Science in the Age of Curiosty, Manu Prakash, microscopy, origami microscope, Simon Fraser University (SFU), Stanford University on May 29, 2019 by Maryse de la Giroday.
First CRISPR gene-edited babies? Ethics and the science story
Scientists, He Jiankui and Michael Deem, may have created the first human babies born after being subjected to CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) gene editing. At this point, no one is entirely certain that these babies as described actually exist since the information was made public in a rather unusual (for scientists) fashion.
The news broke on Sunday, November 25, 2018 through a number of media outlets none of which included journals associated with gene editing or high impact journals such as Cell, Nature, or Science.The news broke in MIT Technology Review and in Associated Press. Plus, this all happened just before the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing (Nov. 27 – 29, 2018) in Hong Kong. He Jiankui was scheduled to speak today, Nov. 27, 2018.
Predictably, this news has caused quite a tizzy.
Antonio Regalado broke the news in a November 25, 2018 article for MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] Technology Review (Note: Links have been removed),
According to Chinese medical documents posted online this month (here and here), a team at the Southern University of Science and Technology, in Shenzhen, has been recruiting couples in an effort to create the first gene-edited babies. They planned to eliminate a gene called CCR5 in hopes of rendering the offspring resistant to HIV, smallpox, and cholera.
The clinical trial documents describe a study in which CRISPR is employed to modify human embryos before they are transferred into women's uteruses.
The scientist behind the effort, He Jiankui, did not reply to a list of questions about whether the undertaking had produced a live birth. Reached by telephone, he declined to comment.
However, data submitted as part of the trial listing shows that genetic tests have been carried out on fetuses as late as 24 weeks, or six months. It's not known if those pregnancies were terminated, carried to term, or are ongoing.
Apparently He changed his mind because Marilynn Marchione in a November 26, 2018 article for the Associated Press confirms the news,
A Chinese researcher claims that he helped make the world's first genetically edited babies — twin girls born this month whose DNA he said he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life.
If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics.
A U.S. scientist [Dr. Michael Deem] said he took part in the work in China, but this kind of gene editing is banned in the United States because the DNA changes can pass to future generations and it risks harming other genes.
Many mainstream scientists think it's too unsafe to try, and some denounced the Chinese report as human experimentation.
There is no independent confirmation of He's claim, and it has not been published in a journal, where it would be vetted by other experts. He revealed it Monday [November 26, 2018] in Hong Kong to one of the organizers of an international conference on gene editing that is set to begin Tuesday [November 27, 2018], and earlier in exclusive interviews with The Associated Press.
"I feel a strong responsibility that it's not just to make a first, but also make it an example," He told the AP. "Society will decide what to do next" in terms of allowing or forbidding such science.
Some scientists were astounded to hear of the claim and strongly condemned it.
It's "unconscionable … an experiment on human beings that is not morally or ethically defensible," said Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a University of Pennsylvania gene editing expert and editor of a genetics journal.
"This is far too premature," said Dr. Eric Topol, who heads the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California. "We're dealing with the operating instructions of a human being. It's a big deal."
However, one famed geneticist, Harvard University's George Church, defended attempting gene editing for HIV, which he called "a major and growing public health threat."
"I think this is justifiable," Church said of that goal.
h/t Cale Guthrie Weissman's Nov. 26, 2018 article for Fast Company.
Diving into more detail
Ed Yong in a November 26, 2018 article for The Atlantic provides more details about the claims (Note: Links have been removed),
… "Two beautiful little Chinese girls, Lulu and Nana, came crying into the world as healthy as any other babies a few weeks ago," He said in the first of five videos, posted yesterday {Nov. 25, 2018] to YouTube [link provided at the end of this section of the post]. "The girls are home now with their mom, Grace, and dad, Mark." The claim has yet to be formally verified, but if true, it represents a landmark in the continuing ethical and scientific debate around gene editing.
Late last year, He reportedly enrolled seven couples in a clinical trial, and used their eggs and sperm to create embryos through in vitro fertilization. His team then used CRISPR to deactivate a single gene called CCR5 in the embryos, six of which they then implanted into mothers. CCR5 is a protein that the HIV virus uses to gain entry into human cells; by deactivating it, the team could theoretically reduce the risk of infection. Indeed, the fathers in all eight couples were HIV-positive.
Whether the experiment was successful or not, it's intensely controversial. Scientists have already begun using CRISPR and other gene-editing technologies to alter human cells, in attempts to treat cancers, genetic disorders, and more. But in these cases, the affected cells stay within a person's body. Editing an embryo [it's often called, germline editing] is very different: It changes every cell in the body of the resulting person, including the sperm or eggs that would pass those changes to future generations. Such work is banned in many European countries, and prohibited in the United States. "I understand my work will be controversial, but I believe families need this technology and I'm willing to take the criticism for them," He said.
"Was this a reasonable thing to do? I would say emphatically no," says Paula Cannon of the University of Southern California. She and others have worked on gene editing, and particularly on trials that knock out CCR5 as a way to treat HIV. But those were attempts to treat people who were definitively sick and had run out of other options. That wasn't the case with Nana and Lulu.
"The idea that being born HIV-susceptible, which is what the vast majority of humans are, is somehow a disease state that requires the extraordinary intervention of gene editing blows my mind," says Cannon. "I feel like he's appropriating this potentially valuable therapy as a shortcut to doing something in the sphere of gene editing. He's either very naive or very cynical."
"I want someone to make sure that it has happened," says Hank Greely, an ethicist at Stanford University. If it hasn't, that "would be a pretty bald-faced fraud," but such deceptions have happened in the past. "If it is true, I'm disappointed. It's reckless on safety grounds, and imprudent and stupid on social grounds." He notes that a landmark summit in 2015 (which included Chinese researchers) and a subsequent major report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine both argued that "public participation should precede any heritable germ-line editing." That is: Society needs to work out how it feels about making gene-edited babies before any babies are edited. Absent that consensus, He's work is "waving a red flag in front of a bull," says Greely. "It provokes not just the regular bio-Luddites, but also reasonable people who just wanted to talk it out."
Societally, the creation of CRISPR-edited babies is a binary moment—a Rubicon that has been crossed. But scientifically, the devil is in the details, and most of those are still unknown.
CRISPR is still inefficient. [emphasis mine] The Chinese teams who first used it to edit human embryos only did so successfully in a small proportion of cases, and even then, they found worrying levels of "off-target mutations," where they had erroneously cut parts of the genome outside their targeted gene. He, in his video, claimed that his team had thoroughly sequenced Nana and Lulu's genomes and found no changes in genes other than CCR5.
That claim is impossible to verify in the absence of a peer-reviewed paper, or even published data of any kind. "The paper is where we see whether the CCR5 gene was properly edited, what effect it had at the cellular level, and whether [there were] any off-target effects," said Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute. "It's not just 'it worked' as a binary declaration."
In the video, He said that using CRISPR for human enhancement, such as enhancing IQ or selecting eye color, "should be banned." Speaking about Nana and Lulu's parents, he said that they "don't want a designer baby, just a child who won't suffer from a disease that medicine can now prevent."
But his rationale is questionable. Huang [Junjiu Huang of Sun Yat-sen University ], the first Chinese researcher to use CRISPR on human embryos, targeted the faulty gene behind an inherited disease called beta thalassemia. Mitalipov, likewise, tried to edit a gene called MYBPC3, whose faulty versions cause another inherited disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). Such uses are still controversial, but they rank among the more acceptable applications for embryonic gene editing as ways of treating inherited disorders for which treatments are either difficult or nonexistent.
In contrast, He's team disableda normal gene in an attempt to reduce the risk of a disease that neither child had—and one that can be controlled. There are already ways of preventing fathers from passing HIV to their children. There are antiviral drugs that prevent infections. There's safe-sex education. "This is not a plague for which we have no tools," says Cannon.
As Marilynn Marchione of the AP reports, early tests suggest that He's editing was incomplete [emphasis mine], and at least one of the twins is a mosaic, where some cells have silenced copies of CCR5 and others do not. If that's true, it's unlikely that they would be significantly protected from HIV. And in any case, deactivating CCR5 doesn't confer complete immunity, because some HIV strains can still enter cells via a different protein called CXCR4.
Nana and Lulu might have other vulnerabilities. …
It is also unclear if the participants in He's trial were fully aware of what they were signing up for. [emphasis mine] The team's informed-consent document describes their work as an "AIDS vaccine development project," and while it describes CRISPR gene editing, it does so in heavily technical language. It doesn't mention any of the risks of disabling CCR5, and while it does note the possibility of off-target effects, it also says that the "project team is not responsible for the risk."
He owns two genetics companies, and his collaborator, Michael Deem of Rice University, [emphasis mine] holds a small stake in, and sits on the advisory board of, both of them. The AP's Marchione reports, "Both men are physics experts with no experience running human clinical trials." [emphasis mine]
Yong's article is well worth reading in its entirety. As for YouTube, here's The He Lab's webpage with relevant videos.
Gina Kolata, Sui-Lee Wee, and Pam Belluck writing in a Nov. 26, 2018 article for the New York Times chronicle some of the response to He's announcement,
It is highly unusual for a scientist to announce a groundbreaking development without at least providing data that academic peers can review. Dr. He said he had gotten permission to do the work from the ethics board of the hospital Shenzhen Harmonicare, but the hospital, in interviews with Chinese media, denied being involved. Cheng Zhen, the general manager of Shenzhen Harmonicare, has asked the police to investigate what they suspect are "fraudulent ethical review materials," according to the Beijing News.
The university that Dr. He is attached to, the Southern University of Science and Technology, said Dr. He has been on no-pay leave since February and that the school of biology believed that his project "is a serious violation of academic ethics and academic norms," according to the state-run Beijing News.
In a statement late on Monday, China's national health commission said it has asked the health commission in southern Guangdong province to investigate Mr. He's claims.
"I think that's completely insane," said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, director of the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at Oregon Health and Science University. Dr. Mitalipov broke new ground last year by using gene editing to successfully remove a dangerous mutation from human embryos in a laboratory dish. [I wrote a three-part series about CRISPR, which included what was then the latest US news, Mitalipov's announcement, along with a roundup of previous work in China. Links are at the end of this section.'
Dr. Mitalipov said that unlike his own work, which focuses on editing out mutations that cause serious diseases that cannot be prevented any other way, Dr. He did not do anything medically necessary. There are other ways to prevent H.I.V. infection in newborns.
Just three months ago, at a conference in late August on genome engineering at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, Dr. He presented work on editing the CCR₅ gene in the embryos of nine couples.
At the conference, whose organizers included Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of Crispr technology, Dr. He gave a careful talk about something that fellow attendees considered squarely within the realm of ethically approved research. But he did not mention that some of those embryos had been implanted in a woman and could result in genetically engineered babies.
"What we now know is that as he was talking, there was a woman in China carrying twins," said Fyodor Urnov, deputy director of the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences and a visiting researcher at the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California. "He had the opportunity to say 'Oh and by the way, I'm just going to come out and say it, people, there's a woman carrying twins.'"
"I would never play poker against Dr. He," Dr. Urnov quipped.
Richard Hynes, a cancer researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who co-led an advisory group on human gene editing for the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine, said that group and a similar organization in Britain had determined that if human genes were to be edited, the procedure should only be done to address "serious unmet needs in medical treatment, it had to be well monitored, it had to be well followed up, full consent has to be in place."
It is not clear why altering genes to make people resistant to H.I.V. is "a serious unmet need." Men with H.I.V. do not infect embryos. …
Dr. He got his Ph.D., from Rice University, in physics and his postdoctoral training, at Stanford, was with Stephen Quake, a professor of bioengineering and applied physics who works on sequencing DNA, not editing it.
Experts said that using Crispr would actually be quite easy for someone like Dr. He.
After coming to Shenzhen in 2012, Dr. He, at age 28, established a DNA sequencing company, Direct Genomics, and listed Dr. Quake on its advisory board. But, in a telephone interview on Monday, Dr. Quake said he was never associated with the company.
Deem, the US scientist who worked in China with He is currently being investigated (from a Nov. 26, 2018 article by Andrew Joseph in STAT),
Rice University said Monday that it had opened a "full investigation" into the involvement of one of its faculty members in a study that purportedly resulted in the creation of the world's first babies born with edited DNA.
Michael Deem, a bioengineering professor at Rice, told the Associated Press in a story published Sunday that he helped work on the research in China.
Deem told the AP that he was in China when participants in the study consented to join the research. Deem also said that he had "a small stake" in and is on the scientific advisory boards of He's two companies.
Megan Molteni in a Nov. 27, 2018 article for Wired admits she and her colleagues at the magazine may have dismissed CRISPR concerns about designer babies prematurely while shedding more light on this latest development (Note: Links have been removed),
We said "don't freak out," when scientists first used Crispr to edit DNA in non-viable human embryos. When they tried it in embryos that could theoretically produce babies, we said "don't panic." Many years and years of boring bench science remain before anyone could even think about putting it near a woman's uterus. Well, we might have been wrong. Permission to push the panic button granted.
Late Sunday night, a Chinese researcher stunned the world by claiming to have created the first human babies, a set of twins, with Crispr-edited DNA….
What's perhaps most strange is not that He ignored global recommendations on conducting responsible Crispr research in humans. He also ignored his own advice to the world—guidelines that were published within hours of his transgression becoming public.
On Monday, He and his colleagues at Southern University of Science and Technology, in Shenzhen, published a set of draft ethical principles "to frame, guide, and restrict clinical applications that communities around the world can share and localize based on religious beliefs, culture, and public-health challenges." Those principles included transparency and only performing the procedure when the risks are outweighed by serious medical need.
The piece appeared in the The Crispr Journal, a young publication dedicated to Crispr research, commentary, and debate. Rodolphe Barrangou, the journal's editor in chief, where the peer-reviewed perspective appeared, says that the article was one of two that it had published recently addressing the ethical concerns of human germline editing, the other by a bioethicist at the University of North Carolina. Both papers' authors had requested that their writing come out ahead of a major gene editing summit taking place this week in Hong Kong. When half-rumors of He's covert work reached Barrangou over the weekend, his team discussed pulling the paper, but ultimately decided that there was nothing too solid to discredit it, based on the information available at the time.
Now Barrangou and his team are rethinking that decision. For one thing, He did not disclose any conflicts of interest, which is standard practice among respectable journals. It's since become clear that not only is He at the helm of several genetics companies in China, He was actively pursuing controversial human research long before writing up a scientific and moral code to guide it."We're currently assessing whether the omission was a matter of ill-management or ill-intent," says Barrangou, who added that the journal is now conducting an audit to see if a retraction might be warranted. …
"There are all sorts of questions these issues raise, but the most fundamental is the risk-benefit ratio for the babies who are going to be born," says Hank Greely, an ethicist at Stanford University. "And the risk-benefit ratio on this stinks. Any institutional review board that approved it should be disbanded if not jailed."
Reporting by Stat indicates that He may have just gotten in over his head and tried to cram a self-guided ethics education into a few short months. The young scientist—records indicate He is just 34—has a background in biophysics, with stints studying in the US at Rice University and in bioengineer Stephen Quake's lab at Stanford. His resume doesn't read like someone steeped deeply in the nuances and ethics of human research. Barrangou says that came across in the many rounds of edits He's framework went through.
… China's central government in Beijing has yet to come down one way or another. Condemnation would make He a rogue and a scientific outcast. Anything else opens the door for a Crispr IVF cottage industry to emerge in China and potentially elsewhere. "It's hard to imagine this was the only group in the world doing this," says Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell researcher at UC Davis who wrote a book on the future of designer babies called GMO Sapiens. "Some might say this broke the ice. Will others forge ahead and go public with their results or stop what they're doing and see how this plays out?"
Here's some of the very latest information with the researcher attempting to explain himself.
What does He have to say?
After He's appearance at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing today, Nov. 27, 2018, David Cyranoski produced this article for Nature,
He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who claims to have helped produce the first people born with edited genomes — twin girls — appeared today at a gene-editing summit in Hong Kong to explain his experiment. He gave his talk amid threats of legal action and mounting questions, from the scientific community and beyond, about the ethics of his work and the way in which he released the results.
He had never before presented his work publicly outside of a handful of videos he posted on YouTube. Scientists welcomed the fact that he appeared at all — but his talk left many hungry for more answers, and still not completely certain that He has achieved what he claims.
"There's no reason not to believe him," says Robin Lovell-Badge, a developmental biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. "I'm just not completely convinced."
Lovell-Badge, like others at the conference, says that an independent body should confirm the test results by performing an in-depth comparison of the parents' and childrens' genes.
Many scientists faulted He for a lack of transparency and the seemingly cavalier nature in which he embarked on such a landmark, and potentially risky, project.
"I'm happy he came but I was really horrified and stunned when he described the process he used," says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley and a pioneer of the CRISPR/Cas-9 gene-editing technique that He used. "It was so inappropriate on so many levels."
He seemed shaky approaching the stage and nervous during the talk. "I think he was scared," says Matthew Porteus, who researches genome-editing at Stanford University in California and co-hosted a question-and-answer session with He after his presentation. Porteus attributes this either to the legal pressures that He faces or the mounting criticism from the scientists and media he was about to address.
He's talk leaves a host of other questions unanswered, including whether the prospective parents were properly informed of the risks; why He selected CCR5 when there are other, proven ways to prevent HIV; why he chose to do the experiment with couples in which the fathers have HIV, rather than mothers who have a higher chance of passing the virus on to their children; and whether the risks of knocking out CCR5 — a gene normally present in people, which could have necessary but still unknown functions — outweighed the benefits in this case.
In the discussion following He's talk, one scientist asked why He proceeded with the experiments despite the clear consensus among scientists worldwide that such research shouldn't be done. He didn't answer the question.
He's attempts to justify his actions mainly fell flat. In response to questions about why the science community had not been informed of the experiments before the first women were impregnated, he cited presentations that he gave last year at meetings at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. But Doudna, who organized the Berkeley meeting, says He did not present anything that showed he was ready to experiment in people. She called his defence "disingenuous at best".
He also said he discussed the human experiment with unnamed scientists in the United States. But Porteus says that's not enough for such an extraordinary experiment: "You need feedback not from your two closest friends but from the whole community." …
Pressure was mounting on He ahead of the presentation. On 27 November, the Chinese national health commission ordered the Guangdong health commission, in the province where He's university is located, to investigate.
On the same day, the Chinese Academy of Sciences issued a statement condemning his work, and the Genetics Society of China and the Chinese Society for Stem Cell Research jointly issued a statement saying the experiment "violates internationally accepted ethical principles regulating human experimentation and human rights law".
The hospital cited in China's clinical-trial registry as the that gave ethical approval for He's work posted a press release on 27 November saying it did not give any approval. It questioned the signatures on the approval form and said that the hospital's medical-ethics committee never held a meeting related to He's research. The hospital, which itself is under investigation by the Shenzhen health authorities following He's revelations, wrote: "The Company does not condone the means of the Claimed Project, and has reservations as to the accuracy, reliability and truthfulness of its contents and results."
He has not yet responded to requests for comment on these statements and investigations, nor on why the hospital was listed in the registry and the claim of apparent forged signatures.
Alice Park's Nov. 26, 2018 article for Time magazine includes an embedded video of He's Nov. 27, 2018 presentation at the summit meeting.
What about the politics?
Mara Hvistendahl's Nov. 27, 2018 article about this research for Slate.com poses some geopolitical questions (Note: Links have been removed),
The informed consent agreement for He Jiankui's experiment describes it as an "AIDS vaccine development project" and used highly technical language to describe the procedure that patients would undergo. If the reality for some Chinese patients is that such agreements are glossed over, densely written, or never read, the reality for some researchers working in the country is that the appeal of cutting-edge trials is too great to resist. It is not just Chinese scientists who can be blinded by the lure of quick breakthroughs. Several of the most notable breaches of informed consent on the mainland have involved Western researchers or co-authors. … When people say that the usual rules don't apply in China, they are really referring to authoritarian science, not some alternative communitarian ethics.
For the many scientists in China who adhere to recognized international standards, the incident comes as a disgrace. He Jiankui now faces an ethics investigation from provincial health authorities, and his institution, Southern University of Science and Technology, was quick to issue a statement noting that He was on unpaid leave. …
It would seem that US [and from elsewhere]* scientists wanting to avoid pesky ethics requirements in the US have found that going to China could be the answer to their problems. I gather it's not just big business that prefers deregulated environments.
Guillaume Levrier's (he' studying for a PhD at the Universté Sorbonne Paris Cité) November 16, 2018 essay for The Conversation sheds some light on political will and its impact on science (Note: Links have been removed),
… China has entered a "genome editing" race among great scientific nations and its progress didn't come out of nowhere. China has invested heavily in the natural-sciences sector over the past 20 years. The Ninth Five-Year Plan (1996-2001) mentioned the crucial importance of biotechnologies. The current Thirteenth Five-Year Plan is even more explicit. It contains a section dedicated to "developing efficient and advanced biotechnologies" and lists key sectors such as "genome-editing technologies" intended to "put China at the bleeding edge of biotechnology innovation and become the leader in the international competition in this sector".
Chinese embryo research is regulated by a legal framework, the "technical norms on human-assisted reproductive technologies", published by the Science and Health Ministries. The guidelines theoretically forbid using sperm or eggs whose genome have been manipulated for procreative purposes. However, it's hard to know how much value is actually placed on this rule in practice, especially in China's intricate institutional and political context.
In theory, three major actors have authority on biomedical research in China: the Science and Technology Ministry, the Health Ministry, and the Chinese Food and Drug Administration. In reality, other agents also play a significant role. Local governments interpret and enforce the ministries' "recommendations", and their own interpretations can lead to significant variations in what researchers can and cannot do on the ground. The Chinese National Academy of Medicine is also a powerful institution that has its own network of hospitals, universities and laboratories.
Another prime actor is involved: the health section of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), which has its own biomedical faculties, hospitals and research labs. The PLA makes its own interpretations of the recommendations and has proven its ability to work with the private sector on gene editing projects. …
One other thing from Levrier's essay,
… And the media timing is just a bit too perfect, …
Do read the essay; there's a twist at the end.
Final thoughts and some links
If I read this material rightly, there are suspicions there may be more of this work being done in China and elsewhere. In short, we likely don't have the whole story.
As for the ethical issues, this is a discussion among experts only, so far. The great unwashed (thee and me) are being left at the wayside. Sure, we'll be invited to public consultations, one day, after the big decisions have been made.
Anyone who's read up on the history of science will tell you this kind of breach is very common at the beginning. Richard Holmes' 2008 book, 'The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science' recounts stories of early scientists (European science) who did crazy things. Some died, some shortened their life spans; and, some irreversibly damaged their health. They also experimented on other people. Informed consent had not yet been dreamed up.
In fact, I remember reading somewhere that the largest human clinical trial in history was held in Canada. The small pox vaccine was highly contested in the US but the Canadian government thought it was a good idea so they offered US scientists the option of coming here to vaccinate Canadian babies. This was in the 1950s and the vaccine seems to have been administered almost universally. That was a lot of Canadian babies. Thankfully, it seems to have worked out but it does seem mind-boggling today.
For all the indignation and shock we're seeing, this is not the first time nor will it be the last time someone steps over a line in order to conduct scientific research. And, that is the eternal problem.
Meanwhile I think some of the real action regarding CRISPR and germline editing is taking place in the field (pun!) of agriculture:
My Nov. 27, 2018 posting titled: 'Designer groundcherries by CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)' and a more disturbing Nov. 27, 2018 post titled: 'Agriculture and gene editing … shades of the AquAdvantage salmon'. That second posting features a company which is trying to sell its gene-editing services to farmers who would like cows that never grow horns and pigs that never reach puberty.
Then there's this ,
'The Genetic Revolution', a documentary that offers relatively up-to-date information about gene editing, which was broadcast on Nov. 11, 2018 as part of The Nature of Things series on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation).
My July 17, 2018 posting about research suggesting that scientists hadn't done enough research on possible effects of CRISPR editing titled: 'The CRISPR ((clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)-CAS9 gene-editing technique may cause new genetic damage kerfuffle'.
My 2017 three-part series on CRISPR and germline editing:
CRISPR and editing the germline in the US (part 1 of 3): In the beginning
CRISPR and editing the germline in the US (part 2 of 3): 'designer babies'?
CRISPR and editing the germline in the US (part 3 of 3): public discussions and pop culture
There you have it.
Added on November 30, 2018: David Cyanowski has written one final article (Nov. 30, 2018 for Nature) about He and the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing. He did not make his second scheduled appearance at the summit, returning to China before the summit concluded. He was rebuked in a statement produced by the Summit's organizing committee at the end of the three-day meeting. The situation with regard to his professional status in China is ambiguous. Cyanowski ends his piece with the information that the third summit will take place in London (likely in the UK) in 2021. I encourage you to read Cyanowski's Nov. 30, 2018 article in its entirety; it's not long.
Added on Dec. 3, 2018: The story continues. Ed Yong has written a summary of the issues to date in a Dec. 3, 2018 article for The Atlantic (even if you know the story ift's eyeopening to see all the parts put together.
J. Benjamin Hurlbut, Associate Professor of Life Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU) and Jason Scott Robert, Director of the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State University have written a provocative (and true) Dec. 3, 2018 essay titled, CRISPR babies raise an uncomfortable reality – abiding by scientific standards doesn't guarantee ethical research, for The Conversation. h/t phys.org
*[and from elsewhere] added January 17, 2019.
Added on January 23, 2019: He has been fired by his university (Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen) as announced on January 21, 2019. David Cyranoski provides a details accounting in his January 22, 2019 article for Nature.
This entry was posted in ethics, health and safety, human enhancement, medicine, science and tagged [China] Health Ministry, [China] Science and Technology Ministry, Agriculture and gene editing … shades of the AquAdvantage salmon, Alice Park, Andrew Joseph, Antonio Regalado, Arizona State University, ASU, authoritarian science, beta-thalassemia, Cale Guthrie Weissman, Canada, CCR5, Cheng Zhen, China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Food and Drug Administration, Chinese National Academy of Medicine, Chinese national health commission, Chinese Society for Stem Cell Research, communitarian ethics, CRISPR and editing the germline in the US (part 1 of 3): In the beginning, CRISPR and editing the germline in the US (part 2 of 3): 'designer babies'?, CRISPR and editing the germline in the US (part 3 of 3): public discussions and pop culture. Designer groundcherries by CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), CRISPR babies raise an uncomfortable reality – abiding by scientific standards doesn't guarantee ethical research, CXCR4, David Cyranoski, deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, Ed Yong, Eric Topol, Fyodor Urno, gene, gene editing, gene-edited babie, Genetics Society of China, genome editing race, George Church, germline editing, Gina Kolata, GMO Sapiens, Guangdong health commission, Guillaume Levrier, Hank Greely, He Jiankui, HIV-positive, HIV-susceptible, human babies CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), human clinical trials, human embryos, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), J. Benjamin Hurlbut, Jason Scott Robert, Jennifer Doudna, Junjiu Huang, Kiran Musunuru, Lulu, Mara Hvistendahl, Marilynn Marchione, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Matthew Porteus, Megan Molteni, Michael Deem, MIT, mosaic, MYBPC3, Nana, on human-assisted reproductive technologies, Oregon Health and Science University, Pam Belluck, Paul Knoepfler, Paula Cannon, People's Liberation Army (PLA), physics, resistant to HIV smallpox and cholera, Rice University, Richard Holmes, Richard Hynes, Robin Lovell-Badge, Rodolphe Barrangou, Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, Shenzhen Harmonicare, Shoukhrat Mitalipov, Southern University of Science and Technology, Stanford University, Stephen Quake, Sui-Lee Wee, Sun Yat-sen University, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, The CRISPR ((clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)-CAS9 gene-editing technique may cause new genetic damage kerfuffle, The Crispr Journal, The Genetic Revolution, US on November 28, 2018 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Create gold nanoparticles and nanowires with water droplets.
For some reason it took a lot longer than usual to find this research paper despite having the journal (Nature Communications), the title (Spontaneous formation …), and the authors' names. Thankfully, success was wrested from the jaws of defeat (I don't care if that is trite; it's how I felt) and links, etc. follow at the end as usual.
An April 19, 2018 Stanford University news release (also on EurekAlert) spins fascinating tale,
An experiment that, by design, was not supposed to turn up anything of note instead produced a "bewildering" surprise, according to the Stanford scientists who made the discovery: a new way of creating gold nanoparticles and nanowires using water droplets.
The technique, detailed April 19 [2018] in the journal Nature Communications, is the latest discovery in the new field of on-droplet chemistry and could lead to more environmentally friendly ways to produce nanoparticles of gold and other metals, said study leader Richard Zare, a chemist in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a co-founder of Stanford Bio-X.
"Being able to do reactions in water means you don't have to worry about contamination. It's green chemistry," said Zare, who is the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science at Stanford.
Noble metal
Gold is known as a noble metal because it is relatively unreactive. Unlike base metals such as nickel and copper, gold is resistant to corrosion and oxidation, which is one reason it is such a popular metal for jewelry.
Around the mid-1980s, however, scientists discovered that gold's chemical aloofness only manifests at large, or macroscopic, scales. At the nanometer scale, gold particles are very chemically reactive and make excellent catalysts. Today, gold nanostructures have found a role in a wide variety of applications, including bio-imaging, drug delivery, toxic gas detection and biosensors.
Until now, however, the only reliable way to make gold nanoparticles was to combine the gold precursor chloroauric acid with a reducing agent such as sodium borohydride.
The reaction transfers electrons from the reducing agent to the chloroauric acid, liberating gold atoms in the process. Depending on how the gold atoms then clump together, they can form nano-size beads, wires, rods, prisms and more.
A spritz of gold
Recently, Zare and his colleagues wondered whether this gold-producing reaction would proceed any differently with tiny, micron-size droplets of chloroauric acid and sodium borohydide. How large is a microdroplet? "It is like squeezing a perfume bottle and out spritzes a mist of microdroplets," Zare said.
From previous experiments, the scientists knew that some chemical reactions proceed much faster in microdroplets than in larger solution volumes.
Indeed, the team observed that gold nanoparticle grew over 100,000 times faster in microdroplets. However, the most striking observation came while running a control experiment in which they replaced the reducing agent – which ordinarily releases the gold particles – with microdroplets of water.
"Much to our bewilderment, we found that gold nanostructures could be made without any added reducing agents," said study first author Jae Kyoo Lee, a research associate.
Viewed under an electron microscope, the gold nanoparticles and nanowires appear fused together like berry clusters on a branch.
The surprise finding means that pure water microdroplets can serve as microreactors for the production of gold nanostructures. "This is yet more evidence that reactions in water droplets can be fundamentally different from those in bulk water," said study coauthor Devleena Samanta, a former graduate student in Zare's lab and co-author on the paper.
If the process can be scaled up, it could eliminate the need for potentially toxic reducing agents that have harmful health side effects or that can pollute waterways, Zare said.
It's still unclear why water microdroplets are able to replace a reducing agent in this reaction. One possibility is that transforming the water into microdroplets greatly increases its surface area, creating the opportunity for a strong electric field to form at the air-water interface, which may promote the formation of gold nanoparticles and nanowires.
"The surface area atop a one-liter beaker of water is less than one square meter. But if you turn the water in that beaker into microdroplets, you will get about 3,000 square meters of surface area – about the size of half a football field," Zare said.
The team is exploring ways to utilize the nanostructures for various catalytic and biomedical applications and to refine their technique to create gold films.
"We observed a network of nanowires that may allow the formation of a thin layer of nanowires," Samanta said.
Spontaneous formation of gold nanostructures in aqueous microdroplets by Jae Kyoo Lee, Devleena Samanta, Hong Gil Nam, & Richard N. Zare. Nature Communicationsvolume 9, Article number: 1562 (2018) doi:10.1038/s41467-018-04023-z Published online: 19 April 2018
Not unsurprisingly given Zare's history as recounted in the news release, this paper is open access.
This entry was posted in environment, nanotechnology and tagged Au, bio-imaging, biosensors, catalysts, chloroauric acid, Devleena Samanta, drug delivery, gold, gold atoms, gold films, gold nanoparticles, gold nanostructures, gold nanowires, green chemistry, Hong Gil Nam, Jae Kyoo Lee, microreactors, nanobeads, nanoprisms, nanorods, nanowires, noble metal, on-droplet chemistry, Richard N. Zare, Richard Zare, sodium borohydride, Spontaneous formation of gold nanostructures in aqueous microdroplets, Stanford Bio-X, Stanford University, toxic gas detection, US, water droplets, water microdroplets on August 28, 2018 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Immune to CRISPR?
I guess if you're going to use bacteria as part of your gene editing technology (CRISPR [clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats]/Cas9) then, you might half expect the body's immune system may have developed some defenses. A Jan. 9, 2018 article by Sarah Zhang for The Atlantic provides some insight into what the new research suggests (Note: Links have been removed),
2018 is supposed to be the year of CRISPR in humans. The first U.S. and European clinical trials that test the gene-editing tool's ability to treat diseases—such as sickle-cell anemia, beta thalassemia, and a type of inherited blindness—are slated to begin this year.
But the year has begun on a cautionary note. On Friday [January 5, 2018], Stanford researchers posted a preprint (which has not been peer reviewed) to the website biorXiv highlighting a potential obstacle to using CRISPR in humans: Many of us may already be immune to it. That's because CRISPR actually comes from bacteria that often live on or infect humans, and we have built up immunity to the proteins from these bacteria over our lives.
Not all CRISPR therapies in humans will be doomed. "We don't think this is the end of the story. This is the start of the story," says Porteus [Matthew Porteus, a pediatrician and stem-cell researcher at Stanford]. There are likely ways around the problem of immunity to CRISPR proteins, and many of the early clinical trials appear to be designed around this problem.
Porteus and his colleagues focused on two versions of Cas9, the bacterial protein mostly commonly used in CRISPR gene editing. One comes from Staphylococcus aureus, which often harmlessly lives on skin but can sometimes causes staph infections, and another from Streptococcus pyogenes, which causes strep throat but can also become "flesh-eating bacteria" when it spreads to other parts of the body. So yeah, you want your immune system to be on guard against these bacteria.
The human immune system has a couple different ways of recognizing foreign proteins, and the team tested for both. First, they looked to see if people have molecules in their blood called antibodies that can specifically bind to Cas9. Among 34 people they tested, 79 percent had antibodies against the staph Cas9 and 65 percent against the strep Cas9.
The Stanford team only tested for preexisting immunity against Cas9, but anytime you inject a large bacterial protein into the human body, it can provoke an immune response. After all, that's how the immune system learns to fight off bacteria it's never seen before. (Preexisting immunity can make the response faster and more robust, though.)
The danger of the immune system turning on a patient's body hangs over a lot of research into correcting genes. In the late 1990s and 2000s, research into gene therapy was derailed by the death of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger, who died from an immune reaction to the virus used to deliver the corrected gene. This is the worst-case scenario that the CRISPR world hopes to avoid.
Here's a link to and a citation for the preprint,
Identification of Pre-Existing Adaptive Immunity to Cas9 Proteins in Humans by Carsten Trevor Charlesworth, Priyanka S Deshpande, Daniel P Dever, Beruh Dejene, Natalia Gomez-Ospina, Sruthi Mantri, Mara Pavel-Dinu, Joab Camarena, Kenneth I Weinberg, Matthew H Porteus. bioRxiv posted January 5, 2018 doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/243345
This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed …
This preprint (not yet published paper) is open access and open for feedback.
Meanwhile, the year of CRISPR takes off (from a January 10, 2018 American Chemical Society news release on EurekAlert),
This year could be a defining one for CRISPR, the gene editing technique, which has been hailed as an important breakthrough in laboratory research. That's because the first company-sponsored clinical studies will be conducted to see if it can help treat diseases in humans, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society.
C&EN Assistant Editor Ryan Cross reports that a big push is coming from industry, specifically from three companies that are each partly founded by one of the three inventors of the method. They are zeroing in on the blood diseases called sickle-cell anemia and β-thalassemia, mostly because their precise cause is known. In these diseases, hemoglobin doesn't function properly, leading to severe health issues in some people. Crispr Therapeutics and Intellia Therapeutics plan to test the technique to boost levels of an alternative version of healthy hemoglobin. Editas Medicine, however, will also use CRISPR to correct mutations in the faulty hemoglobin gene. Labs led by university researchers are also joining the mix, starting or continuing clinical trials with the approach in 2018.
Because CRISPR is being used to cut a cell's DNA and insert a new sequence, concerns have been raised about the potential for accidents. A cut in the wrong place could mean introducing a new mutation that could be benign — or cancerous. But according to proponents of the method, researchers are conducting extensive computer predictions and in vitro tests to help avoid this outcome.
The January 8, 2018 Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) open access article by Ryan Cross is here.
Finally, if you are interested in how this affects research as it's being developed, there's University of British Columbia researcher Rosie Redfield's January 16, 2018 posting on RRResearch blog,
Thursday's [January 11, 2018] post described the hypothesis that bacteria might use gene transfer agent particles to inoculate other cells in the population with fragments of phage DNA, and outlined an experiment to test this. Now I'm realizing that I need to know a lot more about the kind of immunity I should expect to see if this GTA-as-vaccine hypothesis is correct.
That should give you some idea of what I meant by "research as it's being developed." Redfield's blog is not for the mildly interested.
Redfield is well-known internationally as being one of the first to refute research which suggested the existence of an 'arsenic bacterium' (see my Dec. 8, 2010 posting: My apologies for arsenic blooper. She's first mentioned in the second excerpt, second paragraph.) The affair was known online as #arseniclife. There's a May 27, 2011 essay by Carl Zimmer on Slate titled: The Discovery of Arsenic-Based Twitter: How #arseniclife changed science.
This entry was posted in science and tagged #arseniclife, bacteria, bacterial protein, Beruh Dejene, beta-thalassemia, Carl Zimmer, Carsten Trevor Charlesworth, Cas9, CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), CRISPR Therapeutics, CRISPR/Cas9, Daniel P Dever, Editas Medicine, gene editing technology, gene therapy, human immune system, Identification of Pre-Existing Adaptive Immunity to Cas9 Proteins in Humans, immune system, inherited blindness, Intellia Therapeutics, Jesse Gelsinger, Joab Camarena, Kenneth I Weinberg, Mara Pavel-Dinu, Matthew H Porteus, Matthew Porteus, My apologies for arsenic blooper, Natalia Gomez-Ospina, Priyanka S Deshpande, Rosie Redfield, RRResearch, Ryan Cross, Sarah Zhang, sickle-cell anemia, Sruthi Mantri, Stanford University, Staphylococcus aureus, stemcell research, Streptococcus pyogenes, The Discovery of Arsenic-Based Twitter: How #arseniclife changed science, US, β-thalassemia on April 10, 2018 by Maryse de la Giroday.
EuroScience Open Forum in Toulouse, France from July 9 to July 14, 2018
A March 22, 2018 EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) 2018 announcement (received via email) trumpets some of the latest news for this event being held July 9 to July 14, 2018 in Toulouse, France. (Located in the south in the region known as the Occitanie, it's the fourth largest city in France. Toulouse is situated on the River Garonne. See more in its Wikipedia entry.) Here's the latest from the announcement,
ESOF 2018 Plenary Sessions
Top speakers and hot topics confirmed for the Plenary Sessions at ESOF 2018
Lorna Hughes, Professor at the University of Glasgow, Chair of the Europeana Research Advisory Board, will give a plenary keynote on "Digital humanities". John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine and of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University, famous for his PLoS Medicine paper on "Why most Published Research Findings are False", will talk about "Reproducibility". A third plenary will involve Marìa Teresa Ruiz, a Chilean astronomer and the 2017 L'Oreal UNESCO award for Women in Science: she will talk about exoplanets.
ESOF under the spotlights
French President's high patronage: ESOF is at the top of the institutional agendas in 2018.
"Sharing science". But also putting science at the highest level making it a real political and societal issue in a changing world. ESOF 2018 has officially received the "High Patronage" from the President of the French Republic Emmanuel Macron. ESOF 2018 has also been listed by the French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs among the 27 priority events for France.
A constellation of satellites around the ESOF planet!
Second focus on Satellite events:
– 4th GEO Blue Planet Symposium organised 4-6 July by Mercator Ocean.
– ECSJ 2018, 5th European Conference of Science Journalists, co-organised by the French Association of Science Journalists in the News Press (AJSPI) and the Union of European Science Journalists' Associations (EUSJA) on 8 July.
– Esprit de Découvertes (Discovery spirit) organised by the Académie des Sciences, Inscriptions et Belles Lettres de Toulouse on 8 July.
More Satellite events to come! Don't forget to stay long enough in order to participate in these focused Satellite Events and … to discover the city.
The programme for ESOF 2018 can be found here.
Science meets poetry
As has become usual, there is a European City of Science event being held in Toulouse in concert (more or less) with and in celebration of the ESOF event. The City of Science event is being held from July 7 – July 16, 2018.
Organizers have not announced much in the way of programming for the City of Science other than a 'Science meets Poetry' meeting,
A unique feature of ESOF is the Science meets Poetry day, which is held at every Forum and brings poets and scientists together.
Indeed, there is today a real artistic movement of poets connected with ESOF. Famous participants from earlier meetings include contributors such as the late Seamus Heaney, Roald Hoffmann [sic] Jean-Pierre Luminet and Prince Henrik of Denmark, but many young and aspiring poets are also involved.
The meeting is in two parts:
lectures on subjects involving science with poetry
a poster session for contributed poems
There are competitions associated with the event and every Science meets Poetry day gives rise to the publication of Proceedings in book form.
In Toulouse, the event will be staged by EuroScience in collaboration with the Académie des Jeux Floraux of Toulouse, the Société des Poètes Français and the European Academy of Sciences Arts and Letters, under patronage of UNESCO. The full programme will be announced later, but includes such themes as a celebration of the number 7 in honour of the seven Troubadours of Toulouse, who held the first Jeux Floraux in the year 1323, Space Travel and the first poets and scientists who wrote about it (including Cyrano de Bergerac and Johannes Kepler), from Metrodorus and Diophantes of Alexandria to Fermat's Last Theorem, the Poetry of Ecology, Lafayette's ship the Hermione seen from America and many other thought-provoking subjects.
The meeting will be held in the Hôtel d'Assézat, one of the finest old buildings of the ancient city of Toulouse.
Exceptionally, it will be open to registered participants from ESOF and also to some members of the public within the limits of available space.
Tentative Programme for the Science meets Poetry day on the 12th of July 2018
(some Speakers are still to be confirmed)
09:00 – 09:30 A welcome for the poets : The legendary Troubadours of Toulouse and the poetry of the number 7 (Philippe Dazet-Brun, Académie des Jeux Floraux)
09:30 – 10:00 The science and the poetry of violets from Toulouse (Marie-Thérèse Esquerré-Tugayé Laboratoire de Recherche en Sciences Végétales, Université Toulouse III-CNRS)
10:00 –10:30 The true Cyrano de Bergerac, gascon poet, and his celebrated travels to the Moon (Jean-Charles Dorge, Société des Poètes Français)
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee Break (with poems as posters)
11:00 – 11:30 Kepler the author and the imaginary travels of the famous astronomer to the Moon. (Uli Rothfuss, die Kogge International Society of German-language authors )
11:30 – 12:00 Spoutnik and Space in Russian Literature (Alla-Valeria Mikhalevitch, Laboratory of the Russian Academy of Sciences Saint-Petersburg)
12:00 – 12:30 Poems for the planet Mars (James Philip Kotsybar, the 'Bard of Mars', California and NASA USA)
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch and meetings of the Juries of poetry competitions
14:00 – 14:30 The voyage of the Hermione and « Lafayette, here we come ! » seen by an American poet (Nick Norwood, University of Columbus Ohio)
14:30 – 15:00 Alexandria, Toulouse and Oxford : the poem rendered by Eutrope and Fermat's Last Theorem (Chaunes [Jean-Patrick Connerade], European Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, UNESCO)
15:00 –15:30 How biology is celebrated in contemporary poetry (Assumpcio Forcada, biologist and poet from Barcelona)
15:30 – 16:00 A book of poems around ecology : a central subject in modern poetry (Sam Illingworth, Metropolitan University of Manchester)
16:30 – 17:00 Toulouse and Europe : poetry at the crossroads of European Languages (Stefka Hrusanova (Bulgarian Academy and Linguaggi-Di-Versi)
17:00 – 17:30 Round Table : seven poets from Toulouse give their views on the theme : Languages, invisible frontiers within both science and poetry
17:30 – 18:00 The winners of the poetry competitions are announced
18:00 – 18:15 Chaunes. Closing remarks
I'm fascinated as in all the years I've covered the European City of Science events I've never before tripped across a 'Science meets Poetry' meeting. Sadly, there's no contact information for those organizers. However, you can sign up for a newsletter and there are contacts for the larger event, European City of Science or as they are calling it in Toulouse, the Science in the City Festival,
Camille Rossignol (Toulouse Métropole)
camille.rossignol@toulouse-metropole.fr
François Lafont (ESOF 2018 / So Toulouse)
francois.lafont@toulouse2018.esof.eu
Travel grants for media types
One last note and this is for journalists. It's still possible to apply for a travel grant, which helps ease but not remove the pain of travel expenses. From the ESOF 2018 Media Travel Grants webpage,
ESOF 2018 – ECSJ 2018 Travel Grants
The 5th European Conference of Science Journalists (ECSJ2018) is offering 50 travel + accommodation grants of up to 400€ to international journalists interested in attending ECSJ and ESOF.
We are looking for active professional journalists who cover science or science policy regularly (not necessarily exclusively), with an interest in reflecting on their professional practices and ethics. Applicants can be freelancers or staff, and can work for print, web, or broadcast media.
ESOF 2018 Nature Travel Grants
Springer Nature is a leading research, educational and professional publisher, providing quality content to its communities through a range of innovative platforms, products and services and is home of trusted brands including Nature Research.
Nature Research has supported ESOF since its very first meeting in 2004 and is funding the Nature Travel Grant Scheme for journalists to attend ESOF2018 with the aim of increasing the impact of ESOF. The Nature Travel Grant Scheme offers a lump sum of £400 for journalists based in Europe and £800 for journalists based outside of Europe, to help cover the costs of travel and accommodation to attend ESOF2018.
(My previous posting about this ESOF 2018 was Sept. 4, 2017 [scroll down about 50% of the way] should you be curious.)
This entry was posted in poetry, science and tagged 2017 L'Oreal UNESCO award for Women in Science, 2018 EuroScience Open Forum, 4th GEO Blue Planet Symposium, 5th European Conference of Science Journalists, A book of poems around ecology: a central subject in modern poetry, Académie des Jeux Floraux of Toulouse, Académie des Sciences, Alexandria Toulouse and Oxford: the poem rendered by Eutrope and Fermat's Last Theorem, Alla-Valeria Mikhalevitch, Assumpcio Forcada, Bard of Mars, Bulgarian Academy, Camille Rossignol, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Chile, Cyrano de Bergerac, digital humanities, Diophantes of Alexandria, ECSJ 2018, Emmanuel Macron, ESOF 2018, ESOF 2018 – ECSJ 2018 Travel Grants, Esprit de Découvertes (Discovery spirit), European Academy of Sciences Arts and Letters, European City of Science, European City of Science 2018, European Science Open Forum 2018, Europeana Research Advisory Board, Euroscience Open Forum, exoplanets, Fermat's Last Theorem, France, François Lafont, French Association of Science Journalists in the News Press (AJSPI), How biology is celebrated in contemporary poetry, James Philip Kotsybar, Jean-Charles Dorge, Jean-Patrick Connerade (Chaunes), Jean-Pierre Luminet, Johannes Kepler, John Ioannidis, Kogge International Society of German-language authors, Lafayette here we come!, Languages invisible frontiers within both science and poetry, Linguaggi-Di-Versi, Lorna Hughes, Marìa Teresa Ruiz, Marie-Thérèse Esquerré-Tugayé, Mars, Mercator Ocean, Metrodorus, Metropolitan University of Manchester, NASA, Nature Travel Grant Scheme, Nick Norwood, Philippe Dazet-Brun, Poetry of Ecology, poetry of the number 7, Prince Henrik of Denmark, Reproducibility, Roald Hoffmann, Russian Academy of Sciences Saint-Petersburg, Sam Illingworth, science and the poetry of violets from Toulouse, Science meets poetry, Scotland, Seamus Heaney, Sharing science, Société des Poètes Français, Spain, Spoutnik and Space in Russian Literature, Springer Nature, Stanford University, Stefka Hrusanova, The legendary Troubadours of Toulouse, Toulouse, Toulouse City of Science, Toulouse Métropole, Toulouse Science in the City Festival, UK, Uli Rothfuss, UNESCO, Union of European Science Journalists' Associations (EUSJA), United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, Université Toulouse III-CNRS, University of Glasgow, US, US National Aeronautics and Aerospace Administration, voyage of the Hermione, Why most Published Research Findings are False on March 28, 2018 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Tracking artificial intelligence
Researchers at Stanford University have developed an index for measuring (tracking) the progress made by artificial intelligence (AI) according to a January 9, 2018 news item on phys.org (Note: Links have been removed),
Since the term "artificial intelligence" (AI) was first used in print in 1956, the one-time science fiction fantasy has progressed to the very real prospect of driverless cars, smartphones that recognize complex spoken commands and computers that see.
In an effort to track the progress of this emerging field, a Stanford-led group of leading AI thinkers called the AI100 has launched an index that will provide a comprehensive baseline on the state of artificial intelligence and measure technological progress in the same way the gross domestic product and the S&P 500 index track the U.S. economy and the broader stock market.
For anyone curious about the AI100 initiative, I have a description of it in my Sept. 27, 2016 post highlighting the group's first report or you can keep on reading.
Getting back to the matter at hand, a December 21, 2017 Stanford University press release by Andrew Myers, which originated the news item, provides more detail about the AI index,
"The AI100 effort realized that in order to supplement its regular review of AI, a more continuous set of collected metrics would be incredibly useful," said Russ Altman, a professor of bioengineering and the faculty director of AI100. "We were very happy to seed the AI Index, which will inform the AI100 as we move forward."
The AI100 was set in motion three years ago when Eric Horvitz, a Stanford alumnus and former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, worked with his wife, Mary Horvitz, to define and endow the long-term study. Its first report, released in the fall of 2016, sought to anticipate the likely effects of AI in an urban environment in the year 2030.
Among the key findings in the new index are a dramatic increase in AI startups and investment as well as significant improvements in the technology's ability to mimic human performance.
Baseline metrics
The AI Index tracks and measures at least 18 independent vectors in academia, industry, open-source software and public interest, plus technical assessments of progress toward what the authors call "human-level performance" in areas such as speech recognition, question-answering and computer vision – algorithms that can identify objects and activities in 2D images. Specific metrics in the index include evaluations of academic papers published, course enrollment, AI-related startups, job openings, search-term frequency and media mentions, among others.
"In many ways, we are flying blind in our discussions about artificial intelligence and lack the data we need to credibly evaluate activity," said Yoav Shoham, professor emeritus of computer science.
"The goal of the AI Index is to provide a fact-based measuring stick against which we can chart progress and fuel a deeper conversation about the future of the field," Shoham said.
Shoham conceived of the index and assembled a steering committee including Ray Perrault from SRI International, Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jack Clark from OpenAI. The committee subsequently hired Calvin LeGassick as project manager.
"The AI Index will succeed only if it becomes a community effort," Shoham said.
Although the authors say the AI Index is the first index to track either scientific or technological progress, there are many other non-financial indexes that provide valuable insight into equally hard-to-quantify fields. Examples include the Social Progress Index, the Middle East peace index and the Bangladesh empowerment index, which measure factors as wide-ranging as nutrition, sanitation, workload, leisure time, public sentiment and even public speaking opportunities.
Intriguing findings
Among the findings of this inaugural index is that the number of active AI startups has increased 14-fold since 2000. Venture capital investment has increased six times in the same period. In academia, publishing in AI has increased a similarly impressive nine times in the last 20 years while course enrollment has soared. Enrollment in the introductory AI-related machine learning course at Stanford, for instance, has grown 45-fold in the last 30 years.
In technical metrics, image and speech recognition are both approaching, if not surpassing, human-level performance. The authors noted that AI systems have excelled in such real-world applications as object detection, the ability to understand and answer questions and classification of photographic images of skin cancer cells
Shoham noted that the report is still very U.S.-centric and will need a greater international presence as well as a greater diversity of voices. He said he also sees opportunities to fold in government and corporate investment in addition to the venture capital funds that are currently included.
In terms of human-level performance, the AI Index suggests that in some ways AI has already arrived. This is true in game-playing applications including chess, the Jeopardy! game show and, most recently, the game of Go. Nonetheless, the authors note that computers continue to lag considerably in the ability to generalize specific information into deeper meaning.
"AI has made truly amazing strides in the past decade," Shoham said, "but computers still can't exhibit the common sense or the general intelligence of even a 5-year-old."
The AI Index was made possible by funding from AI100, Google, Microsoft and Toutiao. Data supporting the various metrics were provided by Elsevier, TrendKite, Indeed.com, Monster.com, the Google Trends Team, the Google Brain Team, Sand Hill Econometrics, VentureSource, Crunchbase, Electronic Frontier Foundation, EuroMatrix, Geoff Sutcliffe, Kevin Leyton-Brown and Holger Hoose.
You can find the AI Index here. They're featuring their 2017 report but you can also find data (on the menu bar on the upper right side of your screen), along with a few provisos. I was curious as to whether any AI had been used to analyze the data and/or write the report. A very cursory look at the 2017 report did not answer that question. I'm fascinated by the failure to address what I think is an obvious question. It suggests that even very, very bright people can become blind and I suspect that's why the group seems quite eager to get others involved, from the 2017 AI Index Report,
As the report's limitations illustrate, the AI Index will always paint a partial picture. For this reason, we include subjective commentary from a cross-section of AI experts. This Expert Forum helps animate the story behind the data in the report and adds interpretation the report lacks.
Finally, where the experts' dialogue ends, your opportunity to Get Involved begins [emphasis mine]. We will need the feedback and participation of a larger community to address the issues identified in this report, uncover issues we have omitted, and build a productive process for tracking activity and progress in Artificial Intelligence. (p. 8)
Unfortunately, it's not clear how one becomes involved. Is there a forum or do you get in touch with one of the team leaders?
I wish them good luck with their project and imagine that these minor hiccups will be dealt with in near term.
This entry was posted in science, science policy and tagged 2017 AI Index Report, AI, AI Index, AI100, Andrew Myers, artificial intelligence, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Calvin LeGassick, Crunchbase, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Elsevier, Eric Horvitz, Erik Brynjolfsson, EuroMatrix, Geoff Sutcliffe, Google, Google Brain, Google Trends, Holger Hoose, Indeed.com, Jack Clark, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Mary Horvitz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Microsoft, MIT, Monster.com, OpenAI, Ray Perrault, Sand Hill Econometrics, SRI International, Stanford University, Toutiao, TrendKite, US, VentureSource, Yoav Shoham on March 19, 2018 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Monster Mash: a brief roundup of Frankenstein events for the 200th anniversary
In no particular order, here are some Frankenstein bits and bobs in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's book.
The Frankenstein Bicentennial Project
This project at Arizona State University has been featured here a few times and most recently in a October 26, 2016 posting about an artist using a Roomba (robotic vacuum cleaner) in an artistic query and about the Frankenstein at 200 online exhibition.
You can find out more at The Frankenstein Bicentennial Project website, which features descriptions of these projects on its homepage,
A Modern Myth
On the two hundredth anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Arizona State University launches new educational products and publications for audiences of all ages.
A free, interactive, multiplatform experience for kids designed to inspire deeper engagement with STEM topics and promote the development of 21st century skills related to creative collaboration and critical thinking.
Frankenbook
A collaborative, multimedia reading experiment with Mary Shelley's timeless tale examining the the scientific, technological, political, and ethical dimensions of the novel, its historical context, and its enduring legacy.
Annotated Edition
The original 1818 version of the manuscript paired with annotations and essays by leading scientists, philosophers, technologists, and novelists.
A set of hands-on STEM making activities that use the Frankenstein story to inspire deeper conversations about scientific and technological creativity and social responsibility.
How to Make a Monster
Kathryn Harkup in a February 22, 2018 article about her recent book for the Guardian delves into the science behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Note: Links have been removed),
The bicentenary of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus has meant a lot of people are re-examining this brilliant work of science fiction. My particular interest is the science fact behind the science fiction. How much real science influenced Mary Shelley? Could a real-life Victor Frankenstein have constructed a creature?
In terms of the technical aspects of building a creature from scraps, many people focus on the collecting of the raw materials and reanimation stages. It's understandable as there are many great stories about grave-robbers and dissection rooms as well as electrical experiments that were performed on recently executed murderers. But there quite a few stages between digging up dead bodies and reanimating a creature.
The months of tedious and fiddly surgery to bring everything together are often glossed over, but what virtually no one mentions is how difficult it would have been to keep the bits and pieces in a suitable state of preservation while Victor worked on his creation. Making a monster takes time, and bodies rot very quickly.
Preservation of anatomical material was of huge interest when Frankenstein was written, as it is now, though for very different reasons. Today the interest is in preserving organs and tissues suitable for transplant. Some individuals even want to cryogenically freeze their entire body in case future scientists are able to revive them and cure whatever disease caused their original death. In that respect the aims are not so different from what the fictional Victor Frankenstein was attempting two hundred years ago.
At the time Frankenstein is set, the late 18th century, few people were really thinking about organ transplant. Instead, tissue preservation was of concern for anatomy professors who wanted to maintain collections of interesting, unusual or instructive specimens to use as teaching aids for future students.
She provides fascinating insight into preservation techniques of the 18th century and their dangers,
To preserve soft tissues, various substances were injected into or used to coat or soak the dissected specimen. The substance in question had to be toxic enough to destroy mould and bacteria that could decompose the sample, but not corrosive or damaging to the tissues of the specimen itself.
Substances such as turpentine, mercury metal and mercury salts (which are even more toxic than the pure element) were all employed stop the decay process in its tracks. Killing off bacteria and mould means that some vital process within them has been stopped; however, many processes that are critical to mould and bacteria are also necessary for humans, making these substances toxic to us.
Working in cramped, poorly ventilated conditions with minimal regard for health and safety, the substances anatomical curators were using day in and day out took a serious toll on their health. Anatomical curators were described as emaciated, prematurely aged and with a hacking cough. …
One of the most successful techniques for tissue preservation was bottling in alcohol. …
In the 18th century the University of Edinburgh handed over twelve gallons of whisky annually to the anatomy museum for the preservation of specimens. Possible not all of those twelve gallons made it into the specimen jars. The nature of the curator's work – the smell, the problems with vermin and toxic fumes – must have made the odd sip of whisky very tempting. Indeed, more than one curator was dismissed for being drunk on the job.
Shelley described Frankenstein working in a small attic room using candlelight to illuminate his work. Small rooms, toxic vapours, alcohol fumes and naked flames are not a healthy combination. No wonder Shelley wrote the work took such a toll on Frankenstein's health.
Harkup's book, Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, was published on February 8, 2018,
The year 1818 saw the publication of one of the most influential science-fiction stories of all time. Frankenstein: Or, Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley had a huge impact on gothic horror and science-fiction genres, and her creation has become part of our everyday culture, from cartoons to Hallowe'en costumes. Even the name 'Frankenstein' has become a by-word for evil scientists and dangerous experiments. How did a teenager with no formal education come up with the idea for an extraordinary novel such as Frankenstein?
Clues are dotted throughout Georgian science and popular culture. The years before the book's publication saw huge advances in our understanding of the natural sciences, in areas such as electricity and physiology, for example. Sensational science demonstrations caught the imagination of the general public, while the newspapers were full of lurid tales of murderers and resurrectionists.
Making the Monster explores the scientific background behind Mary Shelley's book. Is there any science fact behind the science fiction? And how might a real-life Victor Frankenstein have gone about creating his monster? From tales of volcanic eruptions, artificial life and chemical revolutions, to experimental surgery, 'monsters' and electrical experiments on human cadavers, Kathryn Harkup examines the science and scientists that influenced Shelley, and inspired her most famous creation.
Frankenstein 2018 is an online site designed to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the book, from the About page,
The Frankenstein 2018 project is based at Volda University College in Norway, but aims to engage and include people from elsewhere in Norway and around the world.
The project is led by Timothy Saunders, an Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at Volda University College.
If you would like to get in touch, either to offer comments on the website, to provide information about related projects or activities taking place around the world, or even to offer relevant material of your own, please write to me at timothy.saunders@hivolda.no.
What a great idea and I wish the folks at Volda University College all the best.
The Monster Challenge
Washington University in St. Louis (WUSL; Missouri, US) is hosting a competition to create a 'new Frankenstein', from WUSL's The Monster Challenge webpage,
On June 16, 1816, a 19-year-old woman sat quietly listening as her lover (the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) and a small group of friends — including celebrated poet Lord Byron — discussed conducting a ghost-story contest. The couple was spending their holiday in a beautiful mansion on the banks of scenic Lake Geneva in Switzerland. As the conversation about ghost stories heated up, a discussion arose about the principle of life. Not surprisingly, the ensuing talk of graves and corpses led to a sleepless night filled with horrific nightmares for Mary Shelley. Later, she recalled her own contest entry began with eight words; "It was on a dreary night in November…" Just two years later, in 1818, that young woman, Mary Shelley, published her expanded submission as the novel Frankenstein, not only a classic of 19th-century fiction, but a work that has enjoyed immense influence on popular culture, science, medicine, philosophy and the arts all the way up to the present day.
Commemorating the 200th anniversary of the novel's publication in 1818, Washington University is hosting a competition open to WU students (full time and registered in fall 2018), both undergraduate and graduate. The submission deadline is October 15, 2018.
The prompt for our own WU "Monster Challenge" is "The New Frankenstein":
If you learned of a contest today, similar to the one that inspired the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818, what new Frankenstein would you create? Winning entries will be those best exemplifying the spirit, tone and feeling of Frankenstein for our age.
Submissions are eligible in two categories: written (including poetry, fiction, nonfiction and theater; 5000 word limit) and visual (including new media, experimental media, sound art, performance art, and design). Only one submission is allowed per student or student collaboration group. The winners will be determined by a jury of faculty members and announced in the fall 2018 semester. Winning entries will also be featured on the Frankenstein Bicentennial website (frankenstein200.wustl.edu).
Through the generosity of Provost Holden Thorpe's office, winners will receive a cash prize as well as the opportunity to have their submission read, exhibited, and/or performed during the fall 2018 semester. Prizes are as follows:
WRITTEN CATEGORY VISUAL CATEGORY
Grand Prize: $1000 Grand Prize: $1000
2nd Prize: $500 2nd Prize: $500
3rd Prize: $250 3rd Prize: $250
Please review the guidelines below and download the appropriate submission form … for your project.
All submissions are due by 3 pm on October 15, 2018.
Only one submission is allowed per student or student collaboration group.
Electronic submissions should be emailed to iph@wustl.edu along with the appropriate submission form (right).
Non-electronic submissions should be dropped off at the Performing Arts Department in Mallinckrodt Center, Room 312 (specific dates and times to be determined). All applicants submitting work here must also send an email to iph@wustl.edu with a digital image of the work and the appropriate submission form (right). Entries should fit into a case 74″ w x 87″ h x 23″ d. For exceptions, please contact Professor Patricia Olynyk (olynyk@wustl.edu).
For additional information about the contest, please contact the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities: iph@wustl.edu.
This competition (for WUSL students only) is part of a larger celebration as The Frankenstein Bicentennial 2017 – 2018 homepage indicates,
One of the most famous literary works of the last two centuries, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) permeates our cultural imagination. A man of science makes dead matter live yet abandons his own creation. A creature is composed of human body parts yet denied a place in human society. The epic struggle that ensues between creator and creature poses enduring questions to all of us. What do we owe our non-human creations? How might the pursuit of scientific knowledge endanger or empower humanity? How do we combine social responsibility with our technological power to alter living matter? These moral quandaries drive the novel as well as our own hopes and fears about modernity.
Over the last 200 years, Frankenstein has also become one of our most culturally productive myths. The Black Frankenstein became a potent metaphor for racial otherness in the 19th century and remains so to this day. From Boris Karloff as the iconic Monster of 1931 to the transvestite Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show of 1975, the novel has inspired dozens of films and dramatizations. Female poets from Margaret Atwood to Liz Lochhead and Laurie Sheck continue to wrestle with the novel's imaginative possibilities. And Frankenstein, of course, permeates our material culture. Think no further than Franken Berry cereal, Frankenstein action figures, and Frankenstein bed pillows.
Please join us at Washington University in St. Louis as we celebrate Mary Shelley's iconic novel and its afterlives with a series of events organized by faculty, students and staff from across the arts, humanities and life sciences. Highlights include the conference Frankenstein at 200, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities; a special Frankenstein issue of The Common Reader; a staging of Nick Dear's play Frankenstein; the symposium The Curren(t)cy of Frankenstein, sponsored by the Medical School; a film series; several lectures; and exhibits designed to showcase the university's museum and library collections.
This site aggregates all events related to the celebration. Please visit again for updates!
They do have a page for Global Celebrations and while the listing isn't really global at this point (I'm sure they're hoping that will change) it does open up a number of possibilities for Frankenstein aficionados, experts, and enthusiasts,
Technologies of Frankenstein
Stevens Institute of Technology, College of Arts and Letters and IEEE History Center
The 200th anniversary year of the first edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus has drawn worldwide interest in revisiting the novel's themes. What were those themes and what is their value to us in the early twenty-first century? In what ways might our tools of science and communication serve as an "elixir of life" since the age of Frankenstein?
Frankenstein@200
Frankenstein@200 is a year-long series of academic courses and programs including a film festival, a play, a lecture series and an international Health Humanities Conference that will examine the numerous moral, scientific, sociological, ethical and spiritual dimensions of the work, and why Dr. Frankenstein and his monster still capture the moral imagination today..
FRANKENSTEIN BICENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 2018
San Jose State University, Santa Clara University, and University of San Francisco
During 2018, the San Francisco Bay area partners will host The Frankenstein Bicentennial. The novel brings together STEM fields with humanities & the arts in such a way to engage almost every discipline and major. The project's events will address timely issues of our world in Silicon Valley and the advent of technology – a critical topic with questions important to our academic, regional and world communities. The novel, because it has been so popular for 200 years, lives on in discussions about what it means to be human in a digital world.
Frankenstein (a new musical)
An off Broadway production in New York City, Frankenstein (a new musical) has been extended through 2018,
Next performance: Monday Feb. 26, 2018; 7 PM
Extended through 2018!
BroadwayWorld review!
"..it is a success of a show that should be considered
something great in the realm of musical theater."
"A musical love letter"
– Local Theatre NY
"…infused with enough emotion to send chills down the spine…"
"" an ambitious theater piece that is refreshingly buoyed up by its music""
– Theater Scene
a new Off-Broadway musical by Eric B. Sirota
based on Mary Shelley's classic novel
Presented by John Lant, Tamra Pica & Write Act Repertory
at St. Luke's Theater in the heart of the theatre district
. . . a sweeping romantic musical, about the human need for love and companionship,
which honors its source material.
Performances Monday nights at 7 PM
tickets to performances into March currently on sale
(scroll down for performance schedule)
Contact us for Special Group Sales and Buyouts at: info@TheFrankensteinMusical.com
St. Luke's Theatre
an Off-Broadway venue in the heart of the theatre district on "Restaurant Row"
308 West 46th Street (btwn. 8th and 9th Ave.)
contact: info@TheFrankensteinMusical.com
– Book, Music & Lyrics: Eric B. Sirota
-Additional lyrics: Julia Sirota
– Director: Clint Hromsco
– Music Director: Austin Nuckols
(original music direction by Anessa Marie)
– Producer: John Lant, Tamra Pica and Write Act Repertory
– CAST: Jon Rose, Erick Sanchez-Canahuate, Gabriella Marzetta, Stephan Amenta, Cait Kiley, Adam Kee, Samantha Collette, Amy Londyn, Stephanie Lourenco Viegas, Bryan S. Walton
https://www.telecharge.com/Off-Broadway/Frankenstein-a-new-musical
Eric Sirota developed Frankenstein under the working title of "Day of Wrath", an Official Selection of the 2015 New York Musical Theatre Festival's Reading Series
Feb 26, Mon; 7 PM
Mar 5, Mon; 7 PM
Tickets to later dates on sale soon. . .
March 12, 19, 24
April 2, 9, 16, 23, 30
May . . .
Jun . . .
running though 2018
2018 – Frankenstein bicentennial year!
The Purgatory Press*
The Purgatory Press blog's* John Culbert (author and lecturer at the University of British Columbia) wrote a January 1, 2018 essay celebrating and examining Mary Shelley's classic,
She was born in 1797, toward the end of the Little Ice Age. Wolves had been extirpated from the country, but not so long ago that one could forget. Man's only predator in the British Isles was now a mental throwback. Does the shadow of extinction fall on the children of perpetrators? What strange gap is left in the mind of men suddenly raised from the humble status of prey?
In the winter of her sixteenth year, the river Thames froze in London for the last time. The final "Frost Fair," a tradition dating back centuries, was held February 1814 on the river's hard surface.
The following year, a volcano in present-day Indonesia erupted. It was the most powerful and destructive event of its kind in recorded history. Fallout caused a "volcanic winter" across the Northern Hemisphere. In 1816 – "the year without a summer" – she was in Switzerland, where she began writing her first novel, Frankenstein, published 200 years ago today — on January 1st, 1818.
Fascinating, yes? I encourage you to read the whole piece.
Frankenstein Festival
The Science Museum in London, UK, is splashing out with a Frankenstein Festival according to a February 13, 2018 press release,
3–8 April (with special events on 28 March and 27–28 April)
The Science Museum is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus with a free festival exploring the science behind this cultural phenomenon.
Through immersive theatre, experimental storytelling and hands-on activities visitors can examine the ethical and scientific questions surrounding the artificial creation of life. Families can step in Doctor Frankenstein's shoes, creating a creature and bringing it to life using stop motion animation at our drop-in workshops.
In the Mystery at Frankenstein's Lab visitors can solve puzzles and conduct experiments in an escape room-like interactive experience. Visitors are also invited to explore the Science Museum as you've never heard it before in It's Alive, an immersive Frankenstein-themed audio tour. Both these activities have limited availability so pre-booking is advised.
In Pandemic, you decide how far Dr Victor should go to tackle a virus sweeping the world. Is it right to create new life to save others? You decide where to draw the line in this choose-your-own-adventure experience. Visitors can also see Humanity 2.0, a play created and performed by actor Emily Carding. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, the play examines what could happen if a benevolent AI recreated humanity.
As part of the festival, visitors will meet researchers at the cutting-edge of science—from bio chemists who manipulate DNA to engineers creating artificial intelligence—and discover fascinating scientific objects with our curators which could have influenced Shelley.
The Frankenstein Festival will run daily from 3–8 April at the Science Museum and is supported by players of People's Postcode Lottery. Tickets for activities with limited availability are available from sciencemuseum.org.uk/Frankenstein.
Our free adult-only Frankenstein Lates on 28 March will focus on the darker themes of Shelley's iconic novel, with the Promethean Tales Weekend on 27–28 April, featuring panel discussions and special screenings of Terminator 2: Judgement Day and The Curse of Frankenstein in our IMAX cinema.
Frankenstein Festival activities include:
An immersive audio tour created by Cmd+Shift in collaboration with the Science Museum. The tour takes 45 minutes and is limited to 15 people per session. Recommended for ages 8+. Tickets cost £3 and are available here.
Mystery at Frankenstein's Lab
This interactive, theatrical puzzle experience has been created by Atomic Force Productions, in collaboration with the Science Museum. Each session lasts 45 minutes and is limited to 10 people per session. Recommended for ages 12+, under 16s must be accompanied by an adult. Tickets cost £10 and are available here.
Create Your Own Creature
Get hands on at our drop-in workshops and create your very own creature. Then bring your creature to life with stop motion animation. This activity takes approximately 20 minutes and is suitable for all ages.
Humanity 2.0 (3–5 April)
Step into a dystopian future and help shape the future of humanity in this unique interactive play created and performed by Emily Carding. Her full body make-up was created by award winning body painter Victoria Gugenheim in collaboration with the Science Museum. The play has a run time of 45 minutes and is recommended for ages 12+.
Pandemic (5–8 April)
This choose-your-own-adventure film puts you in control of a psychological thriller. Your decisions will guide Dr Victor on their quest to create artificial life.
Pandemic was created by John Bradburn in collaboration with the Science Museum. The film contains moderate psychological threat and horror sequences that some people may find disturbing. The experiences lasts 45 minutes and is recommended for ages 14+. Tickets are free and are available here.
Frankenstein Festival events include:
Frankenstein Lates
Wednesday 28 March, 18.45–22.00
Join us for a fun free evening of events, workshops and screenings as we ask the question 'should we create life'.
Lates is a free themed-event for adults at the Science Museum on the last Wednesday of each month. Find out more about Lates at sciencemuseum.org.uk/Lates.
Artificial Life: Should We, Could We, Will We?
Wednesday 28 March as part of the Frankenstein Lates
Tickets: £5
A panel of expert scientists and researchers will discuss artificial life. Just how close are we to creating fully synthetic life and will this be achieved by biological or digital means?
Discussing those questions will be Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College and scientific advisor for the hit movie Ex Machina Murray Shanahan, Vice President of the International Society for Artificial Life Susan Stepney and Lead Curator of the Science Museum's acclaimed 2017 exhibition Robots Ben Russell. Further speakers to be announced.
Promethean Tales Weekend
Terminator 2: Judgement Day + Panel Discussion
Friday 27 April, 19.30–22.35 (Doors open 19.00)
Tickets: £8, £6 Concessions
Age 15 and above
In part one of our Promethean Tales Weekend celebrating the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, we will be joined by a panel of experts in science, film and literature to discuss the topic of 'Promethean Tales through the ages' ahead of a screening of Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
The Curse of Frankenstein and Q&A with Sir Christopher Frayling
Saturday 28 April, 18.00–20.30 (Doors open 17.30)
In part two of our Promethean Tales Weekend, we are joined by Sir Christopher Frayling, author of Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years, to discuss the life and work of Shelley, the origins of her seminal story and its cultural impact.
The screening of The Curse of Frankenstein will be followed by a book signing with copies of Sir Christopher's book available to purchase on the night.
You can find out more about the festival and get tickets to events, here.
Frankenreads
This initiative seems like a lot of fun, from the Frankenreads homepage,
Frankenreads is an NEH [US National Endowment for the Humanitities]-funded initiative of the Keats-Shelley Association of America and partners to hold a series of events and initiatives in honor of the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, featuring especially an international series of readings of the full text of the novel on Halloween 2018.
They have a very open approach as their FAQs webpage attests to,
Why host a Frankenreads event?
Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus appeals to both novice and expert readers alike and is a work that remains highly relevant to contemporary issues. Thus it is perhaps no surprise that (according to the Open Syllabus project) Frankenstein is the most frequently taught work of literature in college English courses and the fifth most frequently taught book in college courses in all disciplines. It is certainly one of the most read British novels in the world. Hosting a Frankenreads event is an easy way both to celebrate the 200th anniversary of this important work and to foster discussion about issues such as ethics in science and the human tendency to demonize the unfamiliar. By participating in Frankenreads, you can make sure that your thoughts about Frankenstein are part of a global conversation.
What kind of event can I host?
You can host any kind of event you like! Below are some suggestions. Click on the event type for further guidance.
Complete Reading — A live, all-day reading (about 9 hours) of the full text of Frankenstein
Partial Reading — A live reading of selected passages from Frankenstein
Discussion — An informal discussion of some or all of the novel
Lesson — A class session, discussion, or exercise on the novel
Lecture — A lecture on the novel by a relevant expert
Panel — A formal panel discussion of the novel
Exhibit — An exhibit of Frankenstein-related materials
Scene — A dramatic enactment (perhaps with props, costumes, and blocking) of one or more scenes from the novel
Screening — A film screening
Viewing — A community viewing on Halloween 2018 of the livestream of the NEH reading or other online events
Other — Whatever other kind of in-person or online event you can think of!
Should I hold in-person events or online events?
Either or both! We encourage you to record in-person events and upload video to our YouTube channel. We will also be providing advice on holding events via Google Hangouts.
When should I hold the event?
You can hold a Frankenreads event any time you like, but we encourage you to schedule an event during Frankenweek: October 24-31, 2018.
Why post my event on the Frankenreads website?
Posting your event on the Frankenreads website enables the Frankenreads team to publicize your event widely, to give you help with your event, and to connect you with others who are holding nearby or similar events.
How do I post my event on the Frankenreads website?
To post your event on the Frankenreads website, first register an account, log in, and then submit your event. You should have the following information:
An event title (required)
An event description (required)
The event time and date
A square image no bigger than 128 Mb to represent the event
Venue information (e.g., name, address, phone number, website)
Organizer(s) information (e.g., name, email address, phone number)
How can I get help?
Lots of ways! You can contact us via this site, message us on social media, or join our Frankenreads discussion group to ask and answer questions of like-minded people.
There you have it from the academic to the informal and more. There is one more thing,
*'Purgatory Press' head changed to "The Purgatory Press' and 'The Purgatory blog' changed to 'The Purgatory Press blog' on February 26, 2018
This entry was posted in pop culture, public engagement, science communication and tagged #Frankenstein200, A Modern Myth, Adam Kee, Amy Londyn, anatomical curators, Anessa Marie, Arizona State University (ASU), Artificial Life: Should We Could We Will We?, Austin Nuckols, Ben Russell, Black Frankenstein, Bobby Pickett, Boris Karloff, Bryan S. Walton, Cait Kiley, Christopher Frayling, Clint Hromsco, Cmd+Shift, Come to LIFE, Create Your Own Creature, Day of Wrath, Dr. Frank-N-Furter, Emily Carding, Eric B. Sirota, Erick Sanchez-Canahuate, Ex Machina. Murray Shanahan, Frankenbook, Frankenreads, Frankenstein, Frankenstein (a new musical), Frankenstein 2018, Frankenstein at 200, Frankenstein Bicentennial Celebration 2018, Frankenstein Festival, Frankenstein Lates, Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years, Frankenweek: October 24-31 2018, Gabriella Marzetta, Hallowe'en, Hallowe'en costumes, Humanity 2.0, IEEE History Center, International Society for Artificial Life, It's Alive!, John Bradburn, John Culbert, John Lant, Jon Rose, Julia Sirota, Kathryn Harkup, Keats-Shelley Association of America, Laurie Sheck, Liz Lochhead, Lord Byron, Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Margaret Atwood, Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus, Monster Challenge, Monster Mash, Mystery at Frankenstein's Lab, NEH, Nick Dear, Norway, Pandemic, Percy Bysshe Shelley, preservation of specimens, Promethean Tales, Purgatory Press, Samantha Collette, San Jose State University, Santa Clara University, Science Museum London, Stanford University, Stephan Amenta, Stephanie Lourenco Viegas, Stevens Institute of Technology, Susan Stepney, Switzerland, synthetic life, Tamra Pica, Technologies of Frankenstein, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Curren(t)cy of Frankenstein, The Curse of Frankenstein, The Frankenstein Bicentennial 2017 - 2018, The Frankenstein Bicentennial Project, The Monster Challenge, The New Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Timothy Saunders, tissue preservation, UK, University of British Columbia, University of Edinburgh, University of San Francisco, US, US National Endowment for the Humanitities, Victor Frankenstein, Victoria Gugenheim, Volda University College, Washington University in St. Louis, whisky, Write Act Repertory, WUSL on February 23, 2018 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Beautiful solar cells based on insect eyes
What a gorgeous image!
The compound eye of a fly inspired Stanford researchers to create a compound solar cell consisting of perovskite microcells encapsulated in a hexagon-shaped scaffold. (Image credit: Thomas Shahan/Creative Commons)
An August 31, 2017 news item on Nanowerk describes research into solar cells being performed at Stanford University (Note: A link has been removed),
Packing tiny solar cells together, like micro-lenses in the compound eye of an insect, could pave the way to a new generation of advanced photovoltaics, say Stanford University scientists.
In a new study, the Stanford team used the insect-inspired design to protect a fragile photovoltaic material called perovskite from deteriorating when exposed to heat, moisture or mechanical stress. The results are published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science ("Scaffold-reinforced perovskite compound solar cells").
An August 31, 2017 Stanford University news release (also on EurekAlert) by Mark Schwartz, which originated the news item,
"Perovskites are promising, low-cost materials that convert sunlight to electricity as efficiently as conventional solar cells made of silicon," said Reinhold Dauskardt, a professor of materials science and engineering and senior author of the study. "The problem is that perovskites are extremely unstable and mechanically fragile. They would barely survive the manufacturing process, let alone be durable long term in the environment."
Most solar devices, like rooftop panels, use a flat, or planar, design. But that approach doesn't work well with perovskite solar cells.
"Perovskites are the most fragile materials ever tested in the history of our lab," said graduate student Nicholas Rolston, a co-lead author of the E&ES study. "This fragility is related to the brittle, salt-like crystal structure of perovskite, which has mechanical properties similar to table salt."
Eye of the fly
To address the durability challenge, the Stanford team turned to nature.
"We were inspired by the compound eye of the fly, which consists of hundreds of tiny segmented eyes," Dauskardt explained. "It has a beautiful honeycomb shape with built-in redundancy: If you lose one segment, hundreds of others will operate. Each segment is very fragile, but it's shielded by a scaffold wall around it."
Scaffolds in a compound solar cell filled with perovskite after fracture testing. (Image credit: Dauskardt Lab/Stanford University)
Using the compound eye as a model, the researchers created a compound solar cell consisting of a vast honeycomb of perovskite microcells, each encapsulated in a hexagon-shaped scaffold just 0.02 inches (500 microns) wide.
"The scaffold is made of an inexpensive epoxy resin widely used in the microelectronics industry," Rolston said. "It's resilient to mechanical stresses and thus far more resistant to fracture."
Tests conducted during the study revealed that the scaffolding had little effect on how efficiently perovskite converted light into electricity.
"We got nearly the same power-conversion efficiencies out of each little perovskite cell that we would get from a planar solar cell," Dauskardt said. "So we achieved a huge increase in fracture resistance with no penalty for efficiency."
But could the new device withstand the kind of heat and humidity that conventional rooftop solar panels endure?
To find out, the researchers exposed encapsulated perovskite cells to temperatures of 185 F (85 C) and 85 percent relative humidity for six weeks. Despite these extreme conditions, the cells continued to generate electricity at relatively high rates of efficiency.
Dauskardt and his colleagues have filed a provisional patent for the new technology. To improve efficiency, they are studying new ways to scatter light from the scaffold into the perovskite core of each cell.
"We are very excited about these results," he said. "It's a new way of thinking about designing solar cells. These scaffold cells also look really cool, so there are some interesting aesthetic possibilities for real-world applications."
Researchers have also made this image available,
Caption: A compound solar cell illuminated from a light source below. Hexagonal scaffolds are visible in the regions coated by a silver electrode. The new solar cell design could help scientists overcome a major roadblock to the development of perovskite photovoltaics. Credit: Dauskardt Lab/Stanford University
Not quite as weirdly beautiful as the insect eyes.
Scaffold-reinforced perovskite compound solar cells by Brian L. Watson, Nicholas Rolston, Adam D. Printz, and Reinhold H. Dauskardt. Energy & Environmental Science 2017 DOI: 10.1039/C7EE02185B first published on 23 Aug 2017
This entry was posted in biomimcry, energy, nanotechnology and tagged Adam D. Printz, bioinspired, biomimetics, Brian L. Watson, compound eye, compound eye of an insect, compound solar cell, insect-inspired design, Mark Schwartz, Nicholas Rolston, perovskite microcells, perovskite solar cells, perovskites, photovoltaics, Reinhold Dauskardt, Reinhold H. Dauskardt, Scaffold-reinforced perovskite compound solar cells, solar cells, solar devices, Stanford University, Thomas Shahan on October 5, 2017 by Maryse de la Giroday.
3-D integration of nanotechnologies on a single computer chip
By integrating nanomaterials , a new technique for a 3D computer chip capable of handling today's huge amount of data has been developed. Weirdly, the first two paragraphs of a July 5, 2017 news item on Nanowerk do not convey the main point (Note: A link has been removed),
As embedded intelligence is finding its way into ever more areas of our lives, fields ranging from autonomous driving to personalized medicine are generating huge amounts of data. But just as the flood of data is reaching massive proportions, the ability of computer chips to process it into useful information is stalling.
Now, researchers at Stanford University and MIT have built a new chip to overcome this hurdle. The results are published today in the journal Nature ("Three-dimensional integration of nanotechnologies for computing and data storage on a single chip"), by lead author Max Shulaker, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Shulaker began the work as a PhD student alongside H.-S. Philip Wong and his advisor Subhasish Mitra, professors of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford. The team also included professors Roger Howe and Krishna Saraswat, also from Stanford.
This image helps to convey the main points,
Instead of relying on silicon-based devices, a new chip uses carbon nanotubes and resistive random-access memory (RRAM) cells. The two are built vertically over one another, making a new, dense 3-D computer architecture with interleaving layers of logic and memory. Courtesy MIT
As I hove been quite impressed with their science writing, it was a bit surprising to find that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had issued this news release (news item) as it didn't follow the 'rules', i.e., cover as many of the journalistic questions (Who, What, Where, When, Why, and, sometimes, How) as possible in the first sentence/paragraph. This is written more in the style of a magazine article and so the details take a while to emerge, from a July 5, 2017 MIT news release, which originated the news item,
Computers today comprise different chips cobbled together. There is a chip for computing and a separate chip for data storage, and the connections between the two are limited. As applications analyze increasingly massive volumes of data, the limited rate at which data can be moved between different chips is creating a critical communication "bottleneck." And with limited real estate on the chip, there is not enough room to place them side-by-side, even as they have been miniaturized (a phenomenon known as Moore's Law).
To make matters worse, the underlying devices, transistors made from silicon, are no longer improving at the historic rate that they have for decades.
The new prototype chip is a radical change from today's chips. It uses multiple nanotechnologies, together with a new computer architecture, to reverse both of these trends.
Instead of relying on silicon-based devices, the chip uses carbon nanotubes, which are sheets of 2-D graphene formed into nanocylinders, and resistive random-access memory (RRAM) cells, a type of nonvolatile memory that operates by changing the resistance of a solid dielectric material. The researchers integrated over 1 million RRAM cells and 2 million carbon nanotube field-effect transistors, making the most complex nanoelectronic system ever made with emerging nanotechnologies.
The RRAM and carbon nanotubes are built vertically over one another, making a new, dense 3-D computer architecture with interleaving layers of logic and memory. By inserting ultradense wires between these layers, this 3-D architecture promises to address the communication bottleneck.
However, such an architecture is not possible with existing silicon-based technology, according to the paper's lead author, Max Shulaker, who is a core member of MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories. "Circuits today are 2-D, since building conventional silicon transistors involves extremely high temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Celsius," says Shulaker. "If you then build a second layer of silicon circuits on top, that high temperature will damage the bottom layer of circuits."
The key in this work is that carbon nanotube circuits and RRAM memory can be fabricated at much lower temperatures, below 200 C. "This means they can be built up in layers without harming the circuits beneath," Shulaker says.
This provides several simultaneous benefits for future computing systems. "The devices are better: Logic made from carbon nanotubes can be an order of magnitude more energy-efficient compared to today's logic made from silicon, and similarly, RRAM can be denser, faster, and more energy-efficient compared to DRAM," Wong says, referring to a conventional memory known as dynamic random-access memory.
"In addition to improved devices, 3-D integration can address another key consideration in systems: the interconnects within and between chips," Saraswat adds.
"The new 3-D computer architecture provides dense and fine-grained integration of computating and data storage, drastically overcoming the bottleneck from moving data between chips," Mitra says. "As a result, the chip is able to store massive amounts of data and perform on-chip processing to transform a data deluge into useful information."
To demonstrate the potential of the technology, the researchers took advantage of the ability of carbon nanotubes to also act as sensors. On the top layer of the chip they placed over 1 million carbon nanotube-based sensors, which they used to detect and classify ambient gases.
Due to the layering of sensing, data storage, and computing, the chip was able to measure each of the sensors in parallel, and then write directly into its memory, generating huge bandwidth, Shulaker says.
Three-dimensional integration is the most promising approach to continue the technology scaling path set forth by Moore's laws, allowing an increasing number of devices to be integrated per unit volume, according to Jan Rabaey, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, who was not involved in the research.
"It leads to a fundamentally different perspective on computing architectures, enabling an intimate interweaving of memory and logic," Rabaey says. "These structures may be particularly suited for alternative learning-based computational paradigms such as brain-inspired systems and deep neural nets, and the approach presented by the authors is definitely a great first step in that direction."
"One big advantage of our demonstration is that it is compatible with today's silicon infrastructure, both in terms of fabrication and design," says Howe.
"The fact that this strategy is both CMOS [complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor] compatible and viable for a variety of applications suggests that it is a significant step in the continued advancement of Moore's Law," says Ken Hansen, president and CEO of the Semiconductor Research Corporation, which supported the research. "To sustain the promise of Moore's Law economics, innovative heterogeneous approaches are required as dimensional scaling is no longer sufficient. This pioneering work embodies that philosophy."
The team is working to improve the underlying nanotechnologies, while exploring the new 3-D computer architecture. For Shulaker, the next step is working with Massachusetts-based semiconductor company Analog Devices to develop new versions of the system that take advantage of its ability to carry out sensing and data processing on the same chip.
So, for example, the devices could be used to detect signs of disease by sensing particular compounds in a patient's breath, says Shulaker.
"The technology could not only improve traditional computing, but it also opens up a whole new range of applications that we can target," he says. "My students are now investigating how we can produce chips that do more than just computing."
"This demonstration of the 3-D integration of sensors, memory, and logic is an exceptionally innovative development that leverages current CMOS technology with the new capabilities of carbon nanotube field–effect transistors," says Sam Fuller, CTO emeritus of Analog Devices, who was not involved in the research. "This has the potential to be the platform for many revolutionary applications in the future."
This work was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA], the National Science Foundation, Semiconductor Research Corporation, STARnet SONIC, and member companies of the Stanford SystemX Alliance.
Three-dimensional integration of nanotechnologies for computing and data storage on a single chip by Max M. Shulaker, Gage Hills, Rebecca S. Park, Roger T. Howe, Krishna Saraswat, H.-S. Philip Wong, & Subhasish Mitra. Nature 547, 74–78 (06 July 2017) doi:10.1038/nature22994 Published online 05 July 2017
This entry was posted in electronics, nanotechnology and tagged 3D architecture, 3D computer chips, Analog Devices, carbon nanotube field-effect transistors, carbon nanotubes, CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor), computer chips, computing, DARPA, data storage, Gage Hills, H.-S. Philip Wong, Jan Rabaey, Ken Hansen, Krishna Saraswat, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Max M. Shulaker, Max Shulaker, MIT, Moore's Law, nanomaterials, NSF, Rebecca S. Park, resistive random access memory (RRAM), Roger Howe, Roger T. Howe, Sam Fuller, Semiconductor Research Corporation, silicon, Stanford SystemX Alliance, Stanford University, STARnet SONIC, Subhasish Mitra, Three-dimensional integration of nanotechnologies for computing and data storage on a single chip, transistors, UC Berkeley, University of California at Berkeley, US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, US National Science Foundation on August 22, 2017 by Maryse de la Giroday.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl