vox--2019-05-31--The decline of trust in science terrifies former MIT president Susan Hockfield

The decline of trust in science “terrifies” former MIT president Susan Hockfield

If an asteroid were spotted hurtling toward Earth, we wouldn’t be arguing over whether asteroids exist. But that’s basically what the politicization of science has done to the public discussion about climate change, says former MIT president Susan Hockfield.  “I understand that people might debate the fine points of climate change, but the fact is that the best science indicates that we’re in trouble,” Hockfield said on the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, adding, “It’s simply folly to my mind not to step up and invent the technologies that are going to prevent us from the ravages of climate change that we’re inflicting on the planet, or frankly whether it’s us or anyone or some other natural operation.”  Hockfield said that even though politics and science are often intertwined, with government funding driving progress in research, the scientific community must “insist on an apolitical realm.” And that means accepting that some people are experts in their fields and we should trust their opinions more than others’.  “We test ideas, we contest ideas, and if we don’t believe that there are things that are more right than others, which is where we place our bets now, we have no way of making it into the future.  “We have to insist on an understanding that there are people who understand areas better than we do,” she added. “I don’t pretend to be an engineer. I don’t pretend to be a physicist. If the physicists at MIT tell me that they’ve figured out gravitational waves, I’m going to trust them more than I’m going to trust myself to imagine whether or not there are gravitational waves.”  Hockfield’s latest book, which she discusses at length in the new podcast with Swisher, is The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution.  You can listen to Recode Decode wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Overcast.  Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of Kara’s conversation with Susan.  Kara Swisher: Hi, I’m Kara Swisher, editor-at-large of Recode. You may know me as someone who has AirPods in her ears so often, I might as well be a cyborg, but in my spare time I talk tech, and you’re listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network.  Today in the red chair is doctor Susan Hockfield, the former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. She’s also a neuroscientist who has studied the way cancer spreads in the brain, and is the author of a new book, called The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution. We’re actually here taping at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, on the very rainy campus today. I was visiting the Media Lab, Joi Ito at the Media Lab, but Susan, welcome to Recode Decode.  Susan Hockfield: Thanks, it’s a thrill to be here with you.  There’s so much to talk about, I want to get a sense ... I don’t travel to Boston that often, but obviously Harvard, MIT, all the others are doing incredibly groundbreaking work in a lot of areas in technology, and Silicon Valley sort of sucks up all the oxygen, but there’s so much stuff being done here, especially at MIT. Talk a little bit about your background, because running MIT is a big deal for a lot of people, there’s a lot of people who are in Silicon Valley that went to MIT or Stanford or one of the big institutions. Talk a little bit about how you got here and why you decided to write this book.  Yeah, MIT is a really amazing place, and our country is blessed with a lot of phenomenal universities, places of fantastic research and great education. MIT is a little different from many of them. I spent 20 years at Yale University before coming to MIT, I often make the comment, perhaps a little too cheeky, that MIT and Yale are reciprocal institutions. Both are known for great strengths, Yale the humanities and social sciences, MIT for the sciences and engineering, and yet even with those great strengths, we have, both institutions, really strong representation in the other disciplines.  So I joined Yale on the faculty as a neuroscientist and spent most of my career there, my scientific career there, and then was recruited into academic leadership by the then-president Rick Levin, and that’s a story by itself. MIT recruited me to be its president, I joined MIT in 2004.  And what did you think at the time when you were going to do that? Going to be the president of MIT. I mean, there’s a different track of someone who’s a neuroscientist doing their work, right? Which you need to work on, and then running an institution, what was your thoughts when you were doing that?  So the real transition for me happened when Rick Levin invited me to be Dean of the Graduate School, and like many faculty members, many scholars, many academics, I had not really considered taking on any kind of academic leadership role, because that seemed to me to be really kind of on the sideline of what really mattered, which was teaching students and doing cutting-edge research.  When he first approached me, I demurred, and I went home and thought about it, and I realized that the reason I had had such a spectacularly interesting, successful, and productive career as a scientist and educator was that people had stepped up into these roles and it was about time for me to step up for the next generation.  My graduate education changed my life, dramatically changed my life, and opened worlds that I didn’t even know existed to me; and I felt it was time for me to do the same for others, so I told Rick that I would be Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for three years before going back full-time to my research. Needless to say ...  I did not return full-time to my research, but then moved on to be provost at Yale, and then from there to come to MIT was an interesting transition. People often remark on my having been the first woman to be president of MIT.  Yes, they do.  But perhaps the more … interesting first was that I was the first life scientist to be president of MIT.  And that was in some ways, a little...  Which is known for engineering, and really computer engineering, in particular.  Materials, you know electrical, we’ve got a full array of spectacular engineering departments, a great school of engineering; but very, very strong science. That strength in science really dates to the time before World War II, when a physicist became MIT’s president, Karl Taylor Compton was invited to be president of MIT to build strength in the sciences, recognizing that this pairing of science with engineering was critical to developing technologies for the future, and indeed that is the 20th century technology story.  Similarly, this strength built, not just in the physical sciences, but also in the life sciences, a number of our faculty have won Nobel Prizes in physiology and medicine for their discoveries in fundamental biology.  Anyway, so by the time I was recruited to be MIT’s president, I had already made the transition from being a full-time researcher and educator to being, essentially, a full-time academic leader.  Right, talk a little bit about that, how you create, innovate. Because you’ve worked at places, especially MIT, where you create innovation, and you both work for the government, you have people that go into startups, it’s sort of the way people move into these companies. How did you think about it when you came here? Because you came in 2000...?  2004, so it was sort right after the internet bubble burst, and then it was back pre-Facebook, pre- a lot of the most recent things. How did you look at your role of what you were supposed to do for your students?  The biotech revolution had begun, but hadn’t reached the kind of intensity that it now has. So MIT has a different founding history from Yale: MIT was founded in 1861 to deliver technologies for America’s industrialization. No question, that was what William Barton Rogers, our founder, wanted to do. He felt there was no education available for the people that were needed to take this nation into the industrial age. So MIT, Rensselaer [Polytechnic Institute], West Point, we were all founded about the same time with the same kind of mission, so I often say that MIT was founded with tech transfer in our DNA.  Right, the idea that this would be commercialized, that this would be...  So, while at other schools, this business of moving from the academy into industry is a little awkward, at MIT, it is as smooth as just about any place.  And it’s respected, faculty who live both lives are respected. One of the things that surprised me when I joined MIT is that a lot of our faculty/entrepreneurs, will leave to start a company for a little bit of time, and come back until they have figured out how to start their next company.  Leave to start a company and then come back. I hadn’t seen that at Yale. Faculty who started companies basically left and pursued that and never really returned.  So this idea that it’s a two-way street, that you can both pursue fundamental research, drive it into applications, take those applications into the real world of the marketplace, and then come back is a really powerful force for MIT.  Absolutely, and when you think about that, but a lot of the action was happening in the west, how did you relate to that when you were thinking of that? Because there was some, you know, I visit here a lot, and there was some Boston companies, but really it had moved really dramatically West with a lot of the bigger companies locating there.  Yeah, well, digital technology we kind of lost, so a lot of the computer revolution began here.  And we lost it. And one of the things I studied when I came to MIT is AnnaLee Saxenian’s book on regional advantage because I wanted to understand the difference between the Boston region’s innovation economy and Silicon Valley’s innovation economy; and she’s quite insightful about what it takes to build those kinds of vibrant economies, vibrant ecologies, and I thought it was really interesting.  So regional advantage somehow got inside my brain and has become something that I’ve actually pursued and tried to foster, and regional advantage in terms of what we do on campus, in terms of how we interact between campus and our industrial neighbors — frankly, how we build bridges across the academic institutions so that we can do more with our resources than we could do on our own. Truth be told, if there’s a theme for my presidency, it really was that.  Among the things that we started when I was president was the MIT Energy Initiative, a cross-campus activity, because when I arrived, I heard from almost everyone I talked to, when I asked the question of, “What were MIT’s opportunities and responsibilities for the next decade?” The answer I got invariably was, “We should be doing more to invent a sustainable energy future.”  It was not an idea that I brought to MIT, it was an idea that was here, and as I explored it, I discovered dozens of fantastically important energy research projects that were not yet seeing the light of day because it was one by one ...  Throughout MIT, across the campus.  Yeah, economics and the business school and mechanical engineering and chemistry, I mean really, everywhere I looked, there was someone, or many people, with an interest in designing a sustainable energy future. So we launched the MIT Energy Initiative as this cross-campus activity. Ernie Moniz and Bob Armstrong started out a co-directors, but Ernie became the director and Bob the associate director and really engendered a kind of, not just enthusiasm, but the, again, the regional advantage to, I think, really advance technologies, policies, economics for a sustainable energy future.  So when you left, you were getting back to your roots, you had built a building, right? You had built this center for cancer ... I don’t have the full name.  Right, and so what were you, you had been part of creating that, correct?  Yeah, so that was another example of this kind of idea of bringing together different disciplines to attack a problem. So the other theme — so the primary theme I heard was climate and energy, and the second thing was the opportunities around the convergence of biology with engineering.  When I first came to MIT, I was talking to everyone I possibly could to understand what was going on, and again, what the opportunities and responsibilities were. The Dean of Engineering at the time, Tom Magnanti, told me that of the almost 400 faculty in the School of Engineering, a third of them were using biological parts in their work, and as a sometimes know-it-all, I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, bio-medicine.”  And he said, “Uh-uh, you don’t get it. Way beyond bio-medicine.” And so that door began to open for me to understand what was going on: Engineers building technologies out of biological, rather than physical, parts.  That became the second major theme of the presidency, and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research is one example. So the Center for Cancer Research was started in 1974, here at MIT. Salvador Loera, who had already won a Nobel Prize, was the founder of that, he recruited 12 faculty in the department of biology to be the founding members, and they did spectacular work. Four of those original 12 have a Nobel Prize at this point, and my guess is that others of those 12 will win the Nobel Prize before time is out on that.  The then-current director of the Center for Cancer Research, Tyler Jacks, came to talk to me, as everyone did who had promises from the previous administration, and said that the Center for Cancer Research had been targeted to have either a renovation or a new building and would I be committed to that also? And I said, “Well, tell me what’s going on.”  He described a turn in the Center for Cancer Research to cancer nanotechnology — basically, the application of engineering concepts in the study of cancer, and I found that very intriguing because it resonated with this thing I had been hearing, and I said, “We could do that.” And that was kind of the founding conversation for what has become the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. The thesis is, take the 12 cancer biologists that were in the Center for Cancer Research, pair them with 12 engineers, put them in the same building, get this conversation going, and see whether we can accelerate progress to finding new ways to diagnose, treat, prevent cancer, to accelerate progress on cancer which has been, I mean, we’ve been making progress, but can we make progress faster?  It has proved to be successful beyond anything I could’ve imagined.  So to have this conversation ...  How so? Talk about what was the concept, is that you brought them together for them to percolate ideas together.  So, what I’ve learned is you don’t just throw people together and say, “Mix it up, have fun.”  This cancer thing’s been a problem, we need some solutions.  Yeah, can’t you engineers find solutions? So the 12 engineers were hand picked, engineers will work on any problem with their technology, and so most of the engineers who joined the biologists worked on cancer and other things.  One of my favorite examples is Angela Belcher, who works on building batteries, using viruses to build batteries.  Yeah, I want to talk about that in a minute, yeah.  But also using viruses to build cancer detection systems. So a set of 12 engineers ... but understanding that foundationally people who are raised in a discipline have a certain vocabulary, they have a certain perspective on what a problem is, they have a certain perspective on what a great solution would be, and it’s different. So we started out with basically conversations between the engineers and biologists, so they could understand one another’s worlds, develop a kind of vocabulary that would allow them to approach problems in a different way.  Right, to be thinking of them, and we’re going to talk a little bit about this, because this leads right into your book, The Age of Living Machines, that you discuss the virus battery, would you call it the virus battery? I don’t know what you call it, whatever.  In our next section we’re going to talk about this. So you decided then to focus on this idea, this idea of living machines, the combination of biology and technology?  And the physical sciences. The Koch Institute is one example. The Ragon Institute is similar, a kind of mash-up of clinicians, biologists, and engineers to develop a vaccine against HIV/AIDS and other things.  We started a new center called The Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, similarly can we figure out ways to bring biologists, clinicians, and engineers together around some of the really big problems ...  And you think this is where the answers are, because you do say, “how biology will build the next technology revolution.”  I do think so.  Talk a little bit about how you decided to do this. I mean, you had been running institutions like Yale and MIT for years, you had abandoned what you were studying, or what did you want to do when you got out? Like the idea of studying, you’re a neuroscientist.  During my academic leadership at Yale I had kept my lab, but had spent less and less attention on it. My mind had migrated from problems in the lab to problems in the university.  Fundraising, really, you know?  Not just fundraising, actually...  We can talk about fundraising, because I found that to be incredibly exciting.  And interesting to meet people who were capable of giving us enormous gifts, but they were capable of doing that because they had fantastic ideas that had changed the world.  And when I moved to MIT from Yale, I decided not to move my lab, realizing that I would not have enough time in the day to be president, never mind time to be president and run a lab, so I left my research. I decided it was time to close the lab, which I did, and came to MIT, and this theme of the convergence of biology with engineering had started when I was at Yale. We invented a new department of biomedical engineering that was a hybrid between the medical school and the FAS campus. I felt really good about that, until I arrived at MIT and realized the scale of the enterprise was tenfold different.  There was more going on here than I had ever imagined, so the idea of the age of living machines kind of emerged, and it didn’t really take concrete form in my mind until I spent a sabbatical year, and at the close of that sabbatical, I was at the Belfort Center at the Kennedy School at Harvard, I was invited to give the Godkin lecture, and I used this idea of the convergence of biology with engineering as the theme of that lecture, and realized with some encouragement from some close colleagues that it should be a book, and it should be a book.  What do you mean by “living machines?” Define that for people who have some idea, I mean people have ideas in their heads about robots who are sentient, you know, from sci-fi or Star Trek or wherever they’re watching their things. And then of course you have the visions of robots that are all over — Boston Dynamics, there’s all kinds of robot stuff going on, but what does “living machines” mean? Define it.  So this is very different from what you’ve just described.  I know that, I’m saying, when you say, “living machines,” people think, I don’t know, Data from Star Trek or whoever.  So I can hold up my cellphone and say, “This is a machine, built with physics.”  Or I could hold up an abalone shell, and say, “This is a machine built with biology.”  And what an abalone does is gather up components of the stuff in the seawater and creates an incredibly strong yet light and sufficiently flexible shell. Well, why can’t we build things that way? When the abalone dies, the shell falls apart into pieces and provides the resources for the next generation of abalone. So why can’t we build things using the principles of biology?  Rather than the principles of physics.  Rather than the principles of physics. But you know, at the end of the day, the biology is based on principles of physics. But why can’t we fast-forward? Let me give you an example from the book.  One of the great challenges for humankind, going back thousands of years, is clean water.  And remains to be.  Probably the most important one going forward.  Worse and worse problem because our fresh water becomes contaminated. There is less and less available for more and more people. And so we still rely on the same purification methods that were used 1500, 2000 BC, so filtration or distillation. These are energy-intensive, they’re slow, they’re expensive. Can we not do better?  So one of the ideas that I talk about in the book is using nature’s genius to filter water. And it ends up that all of our cells have a protein in their membrane, in the cell membrane, that is the conduit for water to pass into and out of the cell. And it’s a little biological machine that only allows water to pass. It’s a great filter of water.  Let me ask you, why do you call it a “machine?” I agree with you, but explain why you call it a machine versus people think of these as biological processes. Biology’s never thought of as a machine.  It’s interesting. This was my insight as ... I have to say, my background is in neuroanatomy. I am fascinated by structure and how structure gives rise to function. So it was a bit of a stretch, when I became a molecular neurobiologist, to understand what a gene was, to understand what a protein was. I mean, these things just didn’t ... Yeah, I didn’t know what they were. And for me, the breakthrough understanding about proteins is they’re little machines. They’re machines that can move and do jobs for us, but they’re built from biology. So a channel, as I said, is a pore in a cell. It’s a protein. But the protein is a string of amino acids that winds itself up into a structure that carries out a job.  The job that they’re doing, and machines have jobs, either general machines or very specific machines.  Yeah. And the components of machines have jobs too, and basically that’s what proteins are. Proteins are the components that form the whole machine of a cell. But the proteins themselves act as little machines.  Some of them are more active than others. Some are just kind of, you know, passive pores. In any case, so filtering water is a very difficult task. And with the discovery of this water channel called aquaporin — it was discovered by Peter Agre, another fascinating story, how he got to it. But the idea is that rather than racking our brains to figure out how to build a channel that would be selective for water, why don’t we just use what nature has given us? And so Aquaporin AS is a company outside of Copenhagen that’s building water filters using the aquaporin protein.  And it’s a very different way of thinking about how to purify water. Potentially more efficient, potentially more specific than the water purification methods that we’ve used before.  Right, for water only?  And so the concept is that there are millions of these machines living in biology. There’s zillions. Or everything is, and everything in biology is a machine, is some kind of machine that solves a problem. And that we just have to find, look at them, they’re there. We just have to look for them.  We have to find them. But we now have the technology to find them. We have technologies to understand them. And you know, we know how to change them to fit our purposes. So the molecular biology revolution that decoded how information is carried in a cell, and then the second biology revolution, genomics, which allows us to tackle genes and proteins in enormous number, allow us to figure out how we might manipulate a protein if it doesn’t perfectly fit our needs, how to change it a little bit so it more exactly fits the needs that we might want it to fit.  So the concept is that we have to ... That this biology, that we could find these machines in whatever areas we’re looking to solve, such as water purification. What else? Talk about some more examples. The battery. Go into the that. The battery gets ...  Sustainable energy is a really big problem for us. We love the idea of alternative energies to get off fossil fuels. But truth be told, wind and solar are not viable, really, at scale without storage. Sometimes the sun doesn’t shine, sometimes the wind doesn’t blow. And then what are you going to use? So without really phenomenally efficient and effective energy storage, wind and solar are not going to be really replacement technologies for fossil fuels.  So batteries is what energy storage devices are called. And the technology for batteries is basically the same that Volta invented, what, over 200 years ago.  It’s so funny. I just had this discussion with, I don’t mean to drop names, but Elon Musk was going on about this. Like, “It’s just a storage vehicle.” And then he was saying it hasn’t changed at all. It hasn’t changed in any way.  Right. So the components changed a little bit. So the lithium ion battery that is now kind of state of the art, great batteries. But the problem with lithium ion batteries is to make them consumes a huge amount of energy.  And produces a huge amount of toxic waste. And you know, that’s not really sustainable if you do a full accounting, that’s not sustainable at all. So we need better ways of making batteries.  And Angie Belcher, a faculty member at MIT at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research — by the way, you talk about what her cancer research also has figured out how to get viruses to organize battery components. So her lab now can make lithium ion batteries, essentially lithium ion batteries using viruses. But they make them at room temperature without any toxic byproducts. So that potentially ...  So talk about the science of it. I mean, I think it’ll be too hard for everyone to understand, but the science of it is using viruses. Explain that.  So what a battery is is a carefully organized, a closely organized set of materials. Lithium, cobalt, whatever you want to put in. But they have to be organized. It’s not all jumbled up together. They have to be organized into, essentially, layers and components and be separated.  The standard method is a chemical method, but Angie looks at the abalone shell. If abalone can build this, can’t we get living things to build what we need? And she has used viruses, standard lab strains of virus, that she has modified so that they bind the metallic components of batteries. Now, we knew they bound organic components. So biological ...  What was the inspiration from? What were they doing before that she saw this? What was their machine purpose before?  Well, viruses organize organic materials. That’s what they do. They bind to your cell. They interact with the world around them through the proteins on their surface.  So let’s use them for this.  So Angie’s question is, could we use the proteins on the surface of the virus not to bind biological things, not to bind an organic things, but to bind metals? Her first application was actually, could we use viruses to build wires? A simple problem, compared to batteries. So she did that and then realized that the ...  This is to manufacturer wires, right? That we might use different kinds of wires.  To build wires that could have some different kinds of designs than our current wires. And then she realized that the things that viruses organized well — metals — made them perfectly designed for building batteries. And so she’s done a couple of things. She has selected, she mutates viruses and then selects those that bind to, let’s just say cobalt, or carbon nanotubes or various things that you want to put in a battery to make them work better.  So some of that she does just through kind of random mutation and selection. And some of them she does by targeted genetic manipulation. So she has a library of viruses that organize components of batteries. Because these viruses have a rod-like structure, they’re almost like crystals. So you can get them to lie down in sheets with a highly ordered structure, which again makes it perfect for a battery. So she has these viruses that bind battery components make sheets, naturally, that she then packages into the standard coin cell battery cases that ...  That then hold ... They work just like regular batteries. It’s just that the cathode is built with a virus. The anode is built with a virus. You package them together and you have a battery. The batteries that she’s building now have the same charge density of state-of-the-art lithium ion batteries. And most importantly, they recharge over the same number of cycles as standard lithium ion batteries.  Which is a certain amount, right.  This is all really important to have batteries that really work. She told me recently that the new batteries that they’re building are built without lithium and without cobalt, which everyone who reads any kind of technology section of the newspaper will understand that if we are sticking with lithium or cobalt, we’re not going to get very far because these are expensive and dangerous metals to have around.  And so they become made out of what?  I’m not sure what she’s using, but it’s not lithium and it’s not cobalt.  All right. So it’s getting these cues from nature. Give me some more examples of what a living machine would look like. Take a big problem, even if it’s not being made right now.  A really big problem, of course, is ... Let me just back up. The biggest problem that we face right now outside of people not getting along...  The biggest technological problem is that ...  That’s why we have to get rid of the living and just replace them with living machines. But go ahead.  ... is that we have over seven-and-a-half billion people on the planet and very sage projections have it that we will be over 9.7 billion by 2050.  Susan, that’s when I plan to die. But go ahead. Keep going.  It’s fine. I’ll probably be dead then too.  But you know, we’ve got kids.  No, population is an enormous issue.  And we are already stressing our planet to provide the energy, the water.  The food. And by the way, the health and health care that we need to have a vibrant and productive global population. We can be hysterical about it, or we can say we’re going to develop new technologies to meet these challenges. This has been a refrain throughout human history. Many people are familiar with the name of Malthus.  In 1798, he did this fantastic demographic study showing that population growth was faster than the growth in agricultural production. Said, “We’re all going to starve.” And then he went back and looked through time and said, “We always faced this problem.”  And when there are too many people, there’s war, there’s famine, there’s epidemics, there are ways of reducing the population, and that’s coming. Basically, you know, the world is ending. What he didn’t recognize is that new technologies for agriculture were already in place for field crop rotation and the ships that were going around the world exploring things were coming on islands that were actually not much land mass, but a huge amount of bird poop, guano. And those ships were bringing this back for fertilizer. Fantastic fertilizer. So agricultural productivity in Britain ...  Fixed the problem. And of course, population actually grew even faster than had been predicted.  Because of the technology, because of the ability to feed more people, food and water.  Food is rate-limiting for population. In any case, we’re at a similar point now. We’ve got to figure out how to provide for 9.5 billion-plus people without provoking war and famine and all these terrible things.  So energy, we talked about energy. Water can be critical. But health, we have endless conversations in the United States about how we can deliver health and health care to our population at more reasonable costs and with better access. And for many diseases, not all, but for many diseases, you can make a lot of progress. Obviously, No. 1 is prevention, right? If you can prevent a disease, that’s great. That’s vaccination. So if we could persuade everyone to get vaccinated, we’d ...  It’s an uphill battle these days. But go ahead.  Unfortunately. We can come back to that if you want.  The second-best strategy for many diseases, not for all, is early detection. So particularly for cancer, if you can detect a cancer early, your probability of actually curing someone of cancer is much higher than if you detect it late after a cancer has spread from its primary location and metastasized to other locations. Our technologies for detecting cancer right now have gotten better. And declining death rates from cancer, finally, after decades of trying, resulting from reduced smoking but also from diagnostic procedures like colonoscopy and mammography.  Those are late, actually. So by the time you could detect a cancer using those methods, cancers are pretty far along. So can we move earlier? So one living machine that Sangeeta Bhatia here at MIT has developed is using nanoparticles that detect the earliest signs of cancer. That is, the changes in the biology of the cancer for a detection method. I love this. This just blows my mind. So let me see if I can explain it. I’m waving my hands but without a whiteboard or a blackboard.  So you take a nanoparticle and decorate it with a short stretch of a protein. One of the hallmarks of many diseases is they make disease-specific processes and disease-specific enzymes. An enzyme is a kind of protein that cuts other proteins, we’ll just say for now. And for a cancer to grow, it’s got to grow in an environment that’s very dense. It can’t grow unless it cuts up the material standing in its way. So cancers make particular kinds of enzymes.  So Sangeeta thought, “Huh, if we could detect that enzyme, we could actually see whether there’s a cancer or not.” So the nanoparticle has a little stretch of protein on it that contains the site for that cancer enzyme. So the idea is you put this decorated nanoparticle into a patient. If there isn’t any cancer, that nanoparticle stays whole, eventually will degrade. But if there is a cancer, the cancer’s enzyme will clip off those protein fragments. And she’s designed it so that the protein fragment is small enough to be filtered by the kidney into the urine.  And so you can detect it.  You can detect it. Now, we all happen to be familiar with over-the-counter pregnancy tests. We already know how to do that. And detecting something in urine is so much easier than detecting it in blood. Blood is full of other proteins. Urine, normal urine, has no protein background, essentially no protein background. And what she and her team have shown is that, at least in animal models, this synthetic biomarker that she’s designed can detect cancers when they’re about a tenth the size of current detection techniques, and at, we anticipate, a fraction of the expense. So very powerful technique.  So a machine that would go in your body and then pee out, essentially.  Which would give you the information. All right, that’s fascinating.  How do you shift the thinking on this? Because I think so much has been focused on computing and digital and things like that. How do you shift the idea that we move into this era?  Now, there’s some analog stuff going on, like self-driving cars and all kinds of things like that. So there’s more analog and tech computing coming together and analog activities and in health care. How do you shift the idea that this is where the investment should be made and this is where the big money should be spent? Because it hasn’t been.  No. So this is a very big challenge, and there are two pieces of this. There’s the funding of the fundamental research that leads to a possible opening in the marketplace. And then there’s the funding of the passage into the marketplace.  So, let me first talk about the basic research funding. We talked earlier about how biologists and engineers are raised in very different disciplines with very different vocabularies, and creating opportunities for these people from different cultures, essentially, to come together is a challenge, but it’s a challenge that, I think, we can meet. And more and more places are trying to figure out how to actually make that happen in terms of bringing people together.  But if you think about how these activities are funded, our federal funding agencies have done, truly, a magnificent job in catalyzing discovery. But they were set up along, let’s just say, a 20th century model. The National Institutes of Health, which has delivered incredible things, I mean, HIV/AIDS was a death sentence and within a decade, became a treatable ...  Because it was mobilized.  Took a long time. The government, I mean.  I’m talking about the government to focus in on ...  Yes, yeah. No, initially, the Reagan Administration ... the focus on it, to focus and mobilize on it.  But if we think about when HIV/AIDs was described as a disease ...  Right, I guess in the ...  No, it was in the ’80s.  And we actually got ...  Fantastic. But, you’re right, mobilizing the government to take a particular issue seriously takes a nation’s enthusiasm.  So the NIH does biomedical and biological research. The National Science Foundation does engineering research and some physics research and some math. The Department of Energy does a lot of physics research. And if you think about, how are you going to fund a project that crosses these disciplines, that is really hard to do.  Because none of these agencies is really set up to do that.  Right, and they have NASA doing space, right?  Yeah. And from time to time, we mount fantastic cross-agency collaborations. The National Nanotechnology Initiative, the United States was nowhere in nanotechnology until we realized that we had to get moving, and a cross-agency collaboration was built to make that happen.  The Human Genome Project: cross agency. It required the development of great technology and great biology.  We figured out how to do that.  The New Brain Initiative is another great example of crossing agencies. But it’s from time to time, so we don’t have a standard way of creating opportunities to cross disciplines.  We’ve got to get better at that.  And so, how would this be that way? I mean, and it requires the administration to also be, or maybe not, maybe these things just go on, these various institutes. How do you get the ...  So, it certainly helps for the administration to be enthusiastic about research and about science.  I think you can safely say this one is not.  This one is not, has not demonstrated enthusiasm for it. But Congress continues to step up to the plate and say ...  ”We’re going to fund it. We understand its importance. If you look through our history, this is the source of not just medical cures, this is the source of the technologies that have built our economy.”  ”And provided jobs and futures for our nation.” We can come back to that later if you like. But the agencies themselves can organize themselves. The Office of Science and Technology Policy has played a role in making that happen. You know, my own view is that we need a go-to strategy, rather than reinventing it episodically.  To deal with some particular thing.  That’s a really good way to put it, episodically.  That would be great. So that’s on the funding, the initial part of it.  The government, the government where ...  But then, we’ve got to get these technologies out of the lab, into the marketplace. And this is a place where I think, also, our national policies are misaligned. The kinds of technologies I’ve just described are what we at MIT call tough tech. They are tough.  Let me give you one example of just how hard it is to take a biologic from a lab into the marketplace. So Herceptin is a Genentech drug for a variant of breast cancer that was a death sentence. It’s called HER2-positive. It has a particular marker on it. The HER2 gene, between the discovery of the HER2 gene and the FDA approval of Herceptin, 20 years.  And not because no one was trying. They were working as hard as they can and, standardly for any biological product, the guess is — the estimate is, it’s not a guess — it is overall, it’s about 10 years and a billion dollars.  And so you have to have long-term investments. You have to set up conditions that encourage people to put in the money and have the stamina to last through all of the wrong, blind alleys and failed pursuits that you’re going to do before you actually get to the promised land. Currently, we don’t privilege long-term investments.  Our investments get the same kind of tax advantage if you invest for a year or two as if you invest for 20 years. That’s not a recipe for success for these really tough technologies. We talk about building a new manufacturing base in the United States. We’ve got to start by building the technologies that we want to manufacture.  We can go back to the technologies of yesteryear, but truth be told, you can do that less expensively someplace else.  So we want to be able to design a new manufacturing sector that makes use of these new ideas. But for that, we need long-term investment.  So, how do you do that? How do you get that, the people thinking like that? I mean, you have people with plenty of money. There’s plenty of money all over. They tend to fund universities or long-term research projects, but how do you get people thinking like that? Where does that ...  Yeah, we’re talking about bigger money, actually, and we’re talking about industrial productivity. There’s some argument about whether tax incentives are sufficient to actually drive people to fund things, and I think it’s worth the bet.  Okay, so putting the amazing amount of money into it, how does that happen?  It happens through incentives, and there are a number of things that we have done in the past to encourage those kinds of incentives and to privilege those kinds of companies. Right now, there is hardly an incentive to do that.  The big accelerant for the second half of the 20th century was coming out of World War II, where we had poured federal dollars into research that created the technology marvels of World War II. Toward the end of the war, FDR turned to Vannevar Bush, his primary science adviser, and said, “Can we not figure out how to transform this strategy for war into a strategy for peace?”  And Bush laid out a blueprint for the second half of the 20th century in America that actually put all the pieces together and produced not just a research enterprise, an educational enterprise and an industrial enterprise that was unrivaled in the world.  So, where is that now? These things do come out of war. They come out of conflict and things like that. And there are obviously controversies in Silicon Valley about funding a lot of war-related stuff, but we’re not in a state of war. We haven’t been in a state of major war for a very long time, luckily.  How do you get that kind of urgency then, to create things for peace, I guess? Because that’s where it really is. We will have wars over water. We’ll have wars over resources. We’ll have wars over energy. It seems that those are the wars to come going forward, if I had to guess, if one would have to guess.  Yeah, well there’s evidence of these being the catalysts of war. And so, motivating the nation to understand that we have an opportunity, not just to ... for the promise of peace, but also for the promise of the next generation of economic growth.  I’ll tell you, following World War II, the United States played this game essentially by ourselves. What might have been our rivals in Europe were rebuilding their countries after the war. We had emerged from the war without the need to rebuild our destroyed cities. So we had that advantage.  But now, everyone understands the recipe that the United States used. And while I was president, there was hardly a week that would go by when someone from some other country wasn’t in my office saying, “We understand what the United States did. We want to do it in our country. Can you help us understand how we can build something like MIT because we understand that is part of the recipe to build an economy like the United States has enjoyed.”  It is exciting. It’s awesome that other countries want to build these things, but what it means is that we’ve got competition.  And if you look at the investments ...  China, China, China, and other smaller countries, but China’s putting the kind of money behind this that is stunning. You know, when our Chinese colleagues came with the same question, they were enormously insightful because many of the others would say, “We just want to know how to build engineering. We need engineering departments because that’s where the tech transfer comes from. We understand that’s how some technology gets developed.”  But our Chinese colleagues would say, “We get it. We’re going to build the best physics department, we’re going to build the best math departments, we’re going to build the best biology departments. We’re going to do basic science because we understand that’s at the foundation of the engineering of the technologies of the future.” A very broad understanding of the intellectual backdrop for economic growth, for sustained economic growth.  So finishing up, how do we do that? How do we dominate the age of living machines? Because it worked out pretty well, the last technology booms were pretty ... Or is it just a global ... It seems like it still isn’t a global situation for anybody. It’s a Chinese situation or an American situation or a European ... How do we get our arms around owning this part of the future?  Well, there are a lot of components to it and I don’t ... I haven’t given up hope that the United States will be a leader in this. There are things that we do in our culture that are absolutely fantastic. Our insisting on scientific integrity, our sense of real competition, internal competition to figure out what kind of technology’s going to win. I love the idea, although I think it should be funded differently, of people making bets, different people making bets on various technology, that’s not all government. Government isn’t saying what we do and what we don’t do.  One of the recipes that Vannevar Bush laid out in his Science: The Endless Frontier blueprint was about federal funding. How is federal funding distributed? Peer review. So he understood that it was the community of scientists, the community of engineers who knew best where the frontiers would emerge from. So, you can say it’s top-down because it’s federal funding, but it’s top-down mediated by the community, who are at the leading edge. A brilliant solution.  So, finishing up, what would be the most exciting living machine you could conceive of?  Wow, what a great question. I don’t know that I have a favorite. I always say that my crystal ball gets a little fuzzy five years out. And I’m not sure if ... There are some people who 25 years before that computer that rode on Apollo 11, right? Which was an amazing achievement. There were people, probably, who thought there could be a computer like that.  It’s a step-by-step evolution. So I see a lot of potential in all the technologies I’ve called out and well beyond. There is some kid in some lab at MIT or in any place, anywhere in the country, who has an idea, a new idea of a living machine that you or I couldn’t ...  But what one would you make?  Oh, I’d make them all.  I think water is critical. I think energy is absolutely critical. If we don’t figure out how to provide sustainable energy, we are ... Our planet is doomed.  And one of the things I really do worry about is this current lack of confidence in experts and expertise. It’s what science is about. We test ideas, we contest ideas, and if we don’t believe that there are things that are more right than others, which is where we place our bets now, we have no way of making it into the future.  I agree. The truth is now political, you get that? So you have to be political.  I get that and it terrifies me. So we have to continue to insist on an apolitical realm. Politics are never out of it entirely. We have to insist on an understanding that there are people who understand areas better than we do. I don’t pretend to be an engineer. I don’t pretend to be a physicist. If the physicists at MIT tell me that they’ve figured out gravitational waves, I’m going to trust them more than I’m going to trust myself to imagine whether or not there are gravitational waves.  But this idea that there are people with expertise that we should value and value their opinions greater than others. I understand that people might debate the fine points of climate change, but the fact is that the best science indicates that we’re in trouble.  If an asteroid were coming toward Earth, don’t you think we’d mount every possible defense to send it off its course, rather than say, “Asteroids don’t exist?” Of course we would. So it’s simply folly to my mind not to step up and invent the technologies that are going to prevent us from the ravages of climate change that we’re inflicting on the planet, or frankly whether it’s us or anyone or some other natural operation.  It’s our job to protect ourselves so that we have a better future.  Absolutely. Or maybe we’ll just learn our lesson. It’s probably the way it’s going to go, unfortunately the way it’s going to go.  Yes, me too. Well, this is a fascinating read. This is Susan Hockfield, her book is called The Age of Living Machines, including machines that will help us have cleaner water, more sustainable energy and I don’t know, a dating app? I don’t know, what do you think? What is the dating app of a living machine? It’s a person. Anyway: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution. I urge you to read it. Thank you very much, Susan.  Thank you, Kara. It’s fun talking with you.  Recode and Vox have joined forces to uncover and explain how our digital world is changing — and changing us. Subscribe to Recode podcasts to hear Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka lead the tough conversations the technology industry needs today.


thinkprogress--2019-03-22--EPAs secret science proposal being used by Big Oil to undermine clean water rules

EPA’s ‘secret science’ proposal being used by Big Oil to undermine clean water rules

Internal emails reveal two major fossil fuel trade groups are lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from updating a decades-old list of toxic chemicals found in petroleum wastewater — and they’re using the Trump administration’s controversial “secret science” proposal to make their case.  The EPA currently monitors for 16 types of chemicals in wastewater, or effluent, released by petroleum refineries under the Clean Water Act. However, in the more than 40 years since the list was developed, scientific understanding around the number of chemicals and their toxicity levels has grown. As a result, the EPA is in the early stages of determining whether the priority list of chemicals needs to be updated.  But according to emails released to the Sierra Club and reviewed by ThinkProgress, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) are lobbying to limit the scope of the EPA’s study.  The fossil fuel trade groups want to ensure that two categories of chemicals known to be toxic to aquatic life, and potentially harmful to humans, are excluded from the study: alkylated polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (alkylated-PAHs) and naphthenic acids (NAs). The industry even goes so far as to state that including these in a study would risk “legal challenges.”  These two sets of chemicals are not currently on the EPA’s priority list. There are hundreds of different variations of PAH chemicals and levels of toxicity (alkylated-PAHs, for instance, are a derivative of the main “parent” PAH compounds). Burning coal and oil is the main source for these chemicals.  Yet, according to Jan Andersson, a chemistry professor at the University of Münster in Germany who has studied the EPA’s list, roughly 97 percent of the PAH chemical compounds found in crude oil are alkylated chemicals, making any lobbying against their inclusion quite significant. Meanwhile, NAs are found primarily in the byproduct of tar sands oil; the non-biodegradable compounds are stored in giant tailings ponds.  Excluding these types of chemicals from the EPA study would therefore serve to preemptively limit the scope of any potential rule changes in the future.  “They’re trying to cook the books at the very earliest stages of a study for petroleum refinery and ignoring the considerable data that’s out there that alkylated-PAHs are absolutely at least as toxic, if not more toxic, than the ones everybody monitors for right now,” Betsy Southerland, former director of the EPA’s Office of Water’s Office of Science and Technology, told ThinkProgress. Southerland worked for the EPA for 30 years before resigning in 2017 in response to the change in leadership.  At high or prolonged exposure, PAH chemicals can cause tumors in aquatic life and birds as well as impact their reproduction, development, and immunity. Studies show that NAs have similar impacts, along with causing liver and heart damage in mice. Some known health effects to humans from PAH exposure include eye and skin irritation, nausea, and diarrhea, as well as longer-term impacts such as kidney or liver damage and asthma-like symptoms.  Scientists are still studying how the various chemicals impact humans; a range of PAH chemicals are classified as suspected or possibly carcinogenic to humans. What is known though, is that alkylated-PAHs are likely more toxic than other types of PAHs. They also take a longer time to biodegrade in the environment.  Issued by the EPA in 1976, the list of 16 types of PAH chemicals is used to determine which chemicals must be monitored for risks to drinking water and human health. Under the Clean Water Act, petroleum wastewater effluent guidelines establish a national floor — a baseline limit — for these chemicals. So, if there is a discharge of waste such as the release of industrial wastewater, stormwater runoff, or oil spills, only these 16 chemicals are tested to determine the level of toxicity.  The simplicity of the list has made the process easily applicable and cost-effective, and other countries have also turned to it as a resource. The list hasn’t just been used to monitor wastewater, either — environmental studies frequently use it as a basis for research. However, as a 2015 article co-authored by Andersson and published in the academic journal Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds notes, the list leaves out three large groups of these chemical compounds, including alkylated-PAHs. As the paper states, crude oil and coal are “rich” in alkyl compounds.  Despite the potential impact on human health and the environment, the levels of these chemicals currently found in petroleum wastewater is unknown; that’s one thing the EPA’s study would determine. PAH concentrations can vary from site-to-site and by the source of the crude oil. The findings would then help guide any necessary changes to the list of chemicals that should be regulated.  As part of its argument against the EPA measuring these chemicals, the trade groups are using the EPA’s proposed “secret science” rule to argue against disclosure of NAs because that would constitute a risk to companies’ proprietary data.  The proposed rule, also known as the “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” rule, was introduced last April by former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. The rule has been supported by climate science deniers and effectively aims to restrict the use of scientific evidence in the rule-making process. The plan has been stalled under Administrator Andrew Wheeler, but if adopted, it would require the EPA to rely only on scientific studies where the underlying data used by the researchers is made public. Critics argue the bill would severely limit the kind of science the EPA could use in justifying regulations (excluding public health data, for instance) and would place a number of unnecessary burdens on EPA scientists.  Some in the chemical and fossil fuel industries, both of which maintain close ties with the Trump administration, have also warned that the rule would expose confidential corporate information. In a June 8, 2018 letter attached to an email to Brian d’Amico, branch chief at the EPA’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water, API and AFPM wrote that using the industry’s own proprietary method of analyzing naphthenic acids would be a “clear contradiction” to the EPA’s proposed secret science rule.  “Independent validation is clearly not possible when a proprietary analytical method is used to generate the data,” the organizations argued. “In the interest of transparency, per its own proposed rule, EPA should abandon the use of this proprietary method in the Detailed Study.”  “Data derived from these methods could result in the EPA facing substantial scientific and legal challenge,” API and AFPM warned.  In other words, under the hypothetical scenario where the EPA decides to update its chemicals list at a time when the secret science rule is officially adopted, it would require the results of the EPA’s effluent study be made public, as that would be considered underlying data used to introduce the new chemicals rule. But doing so would, in the eyes of the fossil fuel industry, violate their proprietary methods used to analyze the chemical and so the chemicals should instead be simply excluded from the very beginning to avoid such a scenario.  “Quoting a rule that has not even gone final yet for the reason why [the EPA] shouldn’t be allowed to monitor it is pretty outrageous,” said Southerland.  The EPA did not respond to a request for comment from ThinkProgress about whether or not it will be studying the two types of chemicals the fossil fuel industry has been lobbying against. The API and AFPM also did not respond to requests for comment.  The fossil fuel industry is also arguing that the EPA doesn’t have sufficient data to claim that these two groups of chemicals should be regulated. As Roger E. Claff, senior scientific adviser at API, wrote in a February 2018 email to d’Amico, among the concerns is a “lack of toxicity data for decision-making.”  But as Southerland explained, that’s precisely why the EPA is initiating its study; growing scientific findings suggest these chemicals are highly toxic and therefore updates might be warranted. Meanwhile, she said, “API is saying ‘hell no.'”  Andersson made the case for updating the list in his 2015 paper. The 1976 list was created based on what was commercially available at the time, but many more variations of PAH chemicals exist now. Meanwhile, toxicology has improved understanding of the adverse health impacts of a wide range of these chemicals, and “a wealth of new compounds have been added to the inventory of confirmed or suspect carcinogens.”  “This list of compounds is not suitable,” Andersson told ThinkProgress. “Most of them are pretty innocuous… [there are] many that are much more toxic that don’t appear on this list because in 1976, people didn’t know about them. This list looks pretty obsolete.”  The first meeting between the EPA and the fossil fuel trade groups on this issue occurred in May 2016, under the Obama administration. And as a January 2018 slide show presentation to the Trump administration shows, the industry highlighted its “collaboration through the years” with the EPA.  Of course, some degree of collaboration is needed in order for the EPA to properly conduct its study and gather the necessary data. However, the internal emails provide insight into the scale of influence the fossil fuel lobby is trying to exert at the very early stages of decision making.  Dalal Aboulhosn, who works on federal water policy for the Sierra Club, said this shows how under the current administration industry “is allowed to come in and pretty much write their wish list.”  On water specifically she said, there has been a pattern of industry approaching the EPA under both Pruitt and Wheeler with policy ideas before the EPA has actually decided to move on the issue. Shortly after, a change is announced.  “It’s very blatant and it’s across the board when it comes to issues in the agency, and we’re seeing it very starkly on water issues,” Aboulhosn said.  Indeed, after arguing last June that “the science and data for the toxicity of NAs and alkylated-PAHs are still a work in progress,” the two trade groups go so far as to suggest that, should the EPA wish to study them, the agency must address these two groups of chemicals “in a project outside of the Study.”  They argue the EPA should make a new official rule in order to create a new “method” for studying these chemicals. This separate project should undergo “the appropriate public notice and comment period required to gain method approval,” the trade groups’ letter states.  This, however, would be highly uncommon given public notice and comment periods typically apply to new regulations, or changes to existing regulations (such as repealing the Obama-era Clean Power Plan or introducing the “secret science” rule); it would also serve to delay the process by several years.  “It sounds like they’re trying to set some new bar to any future detailed studies,” Southerland said, “where no analyses can be done unless there’s a standard method… that would be a bar not just for petroleum refinery but every industry category.”  It quickly becomes a “chicken and egg” situation, Southerland said; you need a study to determine if a new rule is needed, but the industry is arguing you need a new rule before conducting the study.  But as the June 2018 industry letter to the EPA reads, “API and AFPM members believe in due diligence and support EPA in developing sound science.”


theverge--2019-01-13--How the government shutdown could harm the future of American science

A partial government shutdown that has dragged on for weeks has young scientists wondering if working for the federal government is a good idea.  Graduate students and early-career researchers are watching what the government has done to their colleagues at shuttered federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Department of the Interior, and they’re not liking what they’re seeing. For some, the ongoing threat of government shutdowns isn’t enough to change their career goals. But for others, it’s making them rethink whether a career in the federal government is really worth the frustration. “I don’t know if I want a job that could be used as a pawn to further someone’s agenda,” says Kathleen Farley, a graduate student at Rutgers University-Newark.  “I don’t know if I want a job that could be used as a pawn to further someone’s agenda.”  Scientists aren’t the only ones affected by the current shutdown, which has beat the 1995 shutdown by Republicans to become the longest one yet. Food stamps may end in March, while air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration agents are on the job without pay. But scientific research has, in some cases, halted, Nature reports. Grants are going unreviewed and field work has been delayed or scrapped altogether. At the National Weather Service, a key weather model is performing badly without anyone around who can maintain it, according to The Washington Post.  Policy experts are worried about what future scientific research in the US looks like. “All this comes to a halt when there is a shutdown,” says John Holdren, former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology under President Obama and now a professor of environmental policy at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “That’s a double whammy because it discourages folks from staying in the government if they have other options,” Holdren says. He and other sources in this story were careful to note that there are worse and more immediate consequences than a hit to American competitiveness, particularly for the federal employees and contractors who are living paycheck to paycheck.  “The less attractive government becomes as a place to work.”  Looking forward, he can see ongoing ripple effects even after the government starts up again. “The more frequent and the more long-running shutdowns are, the less attractive government becomes as a place to work for scientists and engineers,” Holdren says. And he worries that will mean that young scientists will take their years of education, their training, and their skills elsewhere. It could mean a federal brain drain from agencies where scientists help policymakers make critical decisions.  Farley, the graduate student who expressed nervousness about a federal career, is in her fifth year of graduate school studying birds and urban ecology, and hasn’t been directly affected by the government’s partial closure. As she reaches the end of her PhD, she’s looking ahead to applying to jobs, including work in the non-profit sector, teaching, and federal positions at the Department of the Interior, the National Park Service, or potentially the EPA.  The appeal of a government job is that she could do good for the community and also have healthcare and a chance to retire, one day. “I’d like to retire before age 80 or 90, and retirement packages don’t seem to really exist in the nonprofit world,” she says. “But they don’t do you any good if you can’t get the paycheck you need to pay for the medicines you need and to pay rent.”  Her colleague Nicole Dykstra, also a graduate student at Rutgers, has been through the frustration of a shutdown before. Dykstra, an Army Reservist who served in Iraq with the National Guard, was forced to miss a training weekend during the 2013 shutdown. “You do everything right, and everything supposed to — and suddenly you’re not being compensated on time for reasons that are entirely out of your control,” she says. “It is stressful and frustrating to feel like we’re being held hostage in a fight that has nothing to do with us.”  “It is stressful and frustrating to feel like we’re being held hostage in a fight that has nothing to do with us.”  Dykstra studies animal behavior, particularly group movement and leadership. And she’s pragmatic about the chances of snagging one of those coveted, ever-dwindling, tenure track positions: her son and her spouse’s job mean she probably can’t uproot her life to chase down a job. “If you’re being realistic with yourself looking at job prospects out there, the amount of tenure track or even non-tenure track positions are shrinking all the time,” she says.  So she’s also considering what she calls “alt-academic” positions — like one day applying for a job at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, for example. There’s a lot to like: federal healthcare, the possibility of a pension, not having to worry about being denied tenure, she says. But she worries about the potential to have to go weeks to months without the pay she’s relying on to support her family: “I don’t want to be in that position, I don’t think it’s fair. It feels so terrible to have that vulnerability at any time.”  “It feels so terrible to have that vulnerability at any time.”  Elena Thomas, a graduate student studying analytical chemistry at the University of Washington, says she’s always been interested in going into public service — maybe at the FDA, or even NASA. “However, it’s hard to stay motivated in going into that when I see how semi-regularly scientists who work government jobs have to go without pay for these extended periods,” she tells The Verge in a direct message on Twitter. She’s considering having a family one day, and says it’s hard to justify risking her future financial security when there are other options in pharmaceuticals, for example. “Industry jobs already pay better in general for scientists.”  NASA is among the institutions that could suffer. Taryn Black, a graduate student studying geoscience at the University of Washington, has considered working there. But being in the heat of the shutdown makes her more wary, she says. “Having dealt with financial insecurity before, not knowing when the next paycheck is coming would be terrifying,” she tells The Verge in a direct message. But she still has time left in her PhD to make that decision, and she’d considered jobs at the state or local level as well as in in the private sector before the shutdown. “So this isn’t drastically upending my career plans.”  “It’s hard to stay motivated in going into that when I see how semi-regularly scientists who work government jobs have to go without pay.”  But as some like Black consider other career paths, Zach Pace, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the shutdown hasn’t given him second thoughts about aspiring to a job at NASA. “NASA is the worldwide leader in not only space exploration but also astrophysics,” he says. “I don’t want to just throw up my hands and say ‘okay, well, I’ll go do something else.’” But Pace notes in a direct message on Twitter that he doesn’t have a family to support or significant debt — so his decision is less fraught than that of other scientists. And he worries that if the threat of unexpectedly having to go without pay for weeks or even months makes people avoid positions at government agencies, it could harm both equity and excellence in the long run. If only people with enough financial security to weather a shutdown apply, he says, “You will find yourself drawing from a smaller talent pool.”  One early-career scientist at the Department of the Interior who is currently furloughed remains hopeful. In fact, this scientist did not want their name used because they’re concerned it could damage their future career prospects in federal agencies — even as they anticipate dipping into savings to pay rent next month. Others, they say, have it worse. For them, the shutdown means missing out on collecting data, and puts papers, reports, and collaborations on hold. But that doesn’t change the fact that this job makes them feel like they can make a difference. And for now they’re willing to put up with the frustrations of the shutdown in order to keep doing work that matters. The longer the shutdown goes on, however, the more likely it is for that balance to shift.  “It is another factor that I’ll have to weigh.”  For Farley and Dykstra, there are too few jobs in their fields and the competition is too fierce for the ongoing threat of government shutdowns to fully deter them from applying to federal positions. “I think it just causes me to weight it less, as opposed to eliminating it from the running,” Farley says. Dykstra agrees: “Honestly, I’ll still probably look at them.” Thomas, too, says she’ll still consider government jobs: “I wouldn’t say it completely would change my mind on my career post-grad school, but it is another factor that I’ll have to weigh.”


thetorontostar--2019-07-03--Arctic mission will trap scientists in ice to study climate

BREMERHAVEN, Germany - Cranes hoist cargo onto the deck, power tools scream out and workers bustle through the maze of passageways inside the German icebreaker RV Polarstern, preparations for a yearlong voyage that organizers say is unprecedented in scale and ambition. In a couple of months, the hulking ship will set out for the Arctic packed with supplies and scientific equipment for a mission to explore the planet’s frigid far north. The icebreaker will be the base for scientists from 17 nations studying the impact of climate change on the Arctic and how it could affect the rest of the world.  “So far we have always been locked out of that region and we lack even the basic observations of the climate processes in the central Arctic from winter,” said Markus Rex of Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute, who will lead the 140-million euro ($158 million) expedition. “We are going to change that for the first time,” Rex told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday aboard the Polarstern at its dock in Bremerhaven, Germany. Scientists plan to sail the ship into the Arctic Ocean, anchor it to a large piece of sea ice and allow the water to freeze around them, effectively trapping themselves in the vast white mass that forms over the North Pole each winter.  As temperatures drop and the days get shorter, they plan to race time to build temporary research camps on the ice, allowing them to perform tests that wouldn’t be possible at other times of the year or by satellite sensing. “We can do a lot with robotics and other things but in the end the visual, the manual observation and also the measurement, that’s still what we need,” Marcel Nicolaus, a German sea ice physicist who will be part of the international mission, said. “We need to go out, establish that ice camp.” Dozens of scientists from the United States, China, Russia and other countries will be on board the Polarstern at any one time, rotating every two months as other icebreakers bring fresh supplies and a new batch of eager researchers. The mission is considered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for many scientists, even those who are veterans of multiple Arctic expeditions. The expedition is receiving substantial funding from U.S. institutions such as the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA  By combining measurements on the ice with data collected from satellites, scientists hope to improve the increasingly sophisticated computer models they use to predict weather and climate. The interdisciplinary work spans several fields of science, including physics, chemistry and biology. Its overarching purpose - to answer key questions around global warming - means there’s no time for national rivalry, said Rex.  “The different geopolitical interests don’t play a role in our research community,” he said. The mission’s international collaboration and scope have drawn comparisons with the International Space Station, the most expensive and remote outpost mankind has yet created. “Actually, we’ll be farther away from civilization because the space station is in an orbit only 400 to 500 kilometres high, and we’ll be much farther away,” Rex said. Once the Polarstern is carried into the depth of the Arctic night, far off the coast of northern Greenland, the scientists will be on their own, too far away for emergency evacuations by air or sea, he said. “We’ll be isolated,” Rex said. “No other ice breaker can then reach us because the ice will be too thick.” The MOSAiC mission, which stands for Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate, comes about 125 years after Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen first managed to seal his wooden expedition ship, Fram, into the ice during a 3-year expedition to the North Pole. Since then, scientific understanding of the role the Arctic plays in the world’s climate has grown. Scientists now believe the cold cap that forms each year is key to regulating weather patterns and temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere. Anything that disrupts the Arctic will be felt further south, they say. Rex cited the polar vortices that blasted cold air as far as Florida last winter and last month’s early heat wave in Europe as prime examples of the impact that a change in the Arctic weather system might entail. “The dramatic warming of the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic,” he said, adding that understanding the processes at play in the far north is crucial if world leaders are to make the right decisions to curb climate change. “We as scientists, I think, have the obligation to produce the robust scientific basis for political decisions,” Rex said.


thetelegraph--2019-08-22--Scientists apologise for accepting money from Jeffrey Epstein as academia engulfed by scandal

Leading American scientists have apologised for taking money from Jeffrey Epstein, as the academic community became engulfed in the scandal.  As more details of his predatory activities came to light, several leading universities and respected figures were struggling to contain the backlash.  It saw one prominent laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the firing line with its director apologising and pledging to return the money paid by Epstein.  Another Harvard academic has apologised for meeting with Epstein after the billionaire’s Florida conviction on child prostitution charges.  More scientists are likely to find themselves under the microscope over the next few weeks as critics demand to know how much Epstein’s beneficiaries knew of his activities, including his interest in eugenics and plans to “improve” the human race by impregnating 20 women at a time.


thetelegraph--2019-08-08--10 best UK universities to study forensic science

As any crime drama buff will know, forensic scientists are integral to a crime scene. By collecting and analysing evidence, their findings are essential in a criminal investigation and can support a case in a court of law.  If you enjoy chemistry and biology and you're good at problem-solving, then a degree in forensic science may be for you. This could put you on the path to becoming a forensic scientist, but could open doors to other careers, too - including jobs in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, hospitals or analytical service laboratories. You could become an analytical chemist, forensic computer analyst or even a toxicologist.  If you are set on a forensic science degree, you will undoubtedly notice that there is a lot of choice for UK institutions. That's why we have investigated the best universities for studying forensic science, including details on entry requirements, the course and any stand-out features.  The following is the list of the top 10 universities to study forensic science in the UK, according to the latest 2020 data from the Complete University Guide, which takes into account entry standards, research quality, student satisfaction and graduate prospects.  Entry requirements:  Applicants are required to have between 104 and 112 UCAS points (including Biology, Chemistry or Applied Science)


thetelegraph--2019-02-22--Tangerine Dream how German electronica is helping genetic science at The Francis Crick Institute

Tangerine Dream: how German electronica is helping genetic science at The Francis Crick Institute

German electronica, eyelashes stuck on cocktail sticks and 1.5 million fruit flies are the secret weapons of one of Britain’s largest scientific centre, it has emerged.  The Francis Crick Institute in London is at the cutting edge of research into cancer, Alzheimer’s and genetic engineering.  Now ‘The Crick’ is flinging open its doors to disclose the unusual goings-on of its technicians for a new exhibition into the unseen side of science.


thetelegraph--2019-01-02--Italy health czar resigns over populist governments unscientific anti-vaxxer stance

Italy health czar resigns over populist government's 'unscientific, anti-vaxxer' stance

The president of Italy's national health research organisation on Wednesday said he had been driven to resign due the "anti-scientific" policies of the country's populist government including efforts to undermine confidence in vital vaccinations.  Professor Walter Ricciardi of the National Health Institute (ISS) said an aversion to evidence-based policy among the coalition of Italy's far-right League and anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) put public health at risk.  "Representatives of the government have endorsed unscientific or frankly anti-scientific positions on many issues," he said in an interview with the Corriere della Sera daily.  "It's clear that when the deputy prime minister says that he, as a father, believes there are too many obligatory, useless and dangerous vaccines, that's not just unscientific, it's anti-scientific," he said in reference to League head Matteo Salvini.  In 2017 Italy's centre-left government made it compulsory for children in pre-school education to be vaccinated against 10 diseases, including measles, tetanus and polio.  The Five Star Movement, then in opposition, led a charge against the law, saying it amounted to a gift to pharmaceutical companies, while the League played on discredited claims that vaccinations can cause autism. The parties came power last year by forming a coalition government.  In the interview Dr Ricciardi listed a wide array of areas in which he accused government policy-makers of ignoring the facts.


aljazeera--2019-02-13--Mission complete NASA announces demise of Opportunity rover

Mission complete: NASA announces demise of Opportunity rover

During 14 years of intrepid exploration across Mars, it advanced human knowledge by confirming that water once flowed on the Red Planet - but NASA's Opportunity rover has analysed its last soil sample.  The robot has been missing since the US space agency lost contact with it during a dust storm in June last year and was declared officially dead on Wednesday, ending one of the most fruitful missions in the history of space exploration.  Unable to recharge its batteries, Opportunity left hundreds of messages from Earth unanswered over the months, and NASA said it had made its last attempt at contact.  "I declare the Opportunity mission as complete," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate told a news conference at mission headquarters in Pasadena, California.  The community of researchers and engineers involved in the programme were in mourning over the passing of the rover, known affectionately as Oppy.  "Spent the evening at JPL as the last ever commands were sent to the Opportunity rover on #Mars," Tanya Harrison, director of Martian research at Arizona State University, tweeted after a stint at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  "There was silence. There were tears. There were hugs. There were memories and laughs shared. #ThankYouOppy #GoodnightOppy," she wrote.  The nostalgia extended across the generations of scientists who have handled the plucky little adventurer.  "Godspeed, Opportunity," tweeted Keri Bean, who had the "privilege" of sending the final message to the robot.  "Hail to the Queen of Mars," added Mike Seibert, Opportunity's former flight director and rover driver, in another tweet while Frank Hartman, who piloted Oppy, said he felt "greatly honoured to have been a small part of it".  "Engulfed by a giant planet-encircling dust storm: Is there a more fitting end for a mission as perfect and courageous from start to finish as Opportunity?" he said.  The programme has had an extraordinary record of success: 28.1 miles (45.2 kilometres) traversed, more than the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 moon rover during the 1970s and more than the rover that US astronauts took to the moon on the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.  Opportunity sent back 217,594 images from Mars, all of which were made available on the internet.  "For the public, the big change was that Mars became a dynamic place, and it was a place that you could explore every day," Emily Lakdawalla, an expert on space exploration and senior editor at The Planetary Society.  "The fact that this rover was so mobile, it seemed like an animate creature," she said. "Plus it has this perspective on the Martian surface that's very human-like."  "It really felt like an avatar for humanity travelling across the surface," she added.  Opportunity landed on an immense plain and spent half its life there, traversing flat expanses and once getting stuck in a sand dune for several weeks. It was there, using geological instruments, that it confirmed that water was once present on Mars.  During the second part of its life on Mars, Opportunity climbed to the edge of the crater Endeavour, taking spectacular panoramic images - and discovering veins of gypsum, additional proof that water once flowed among the Martian rocks.  Opportunity's twin, Spirit, landed three weeks ahead of it and was active until it expired in 2010. The two far exceeded the goals of their creators: In theory, their missions were supposed to last 90 days.  Today, only a single rover is still active on Mars, Curiosity, which arrived in 2012.


newswars--2019-02-25--New NASA mission could find more than 1000 planets

New NASA mission could find more than 1,000 planets

The new telescope paves the way for a more accurate, more focused search for extraterrestrial life, according to researchers.  The study, by a team of astronomers at The Ohio State University, provides the most detailed estimates to date of the potential reach of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope mission (nicknamed WFIRST.) It was designed by NASA and astronomers throughout the country to find new planets and research dark energy, the mysterious force that pervades otherwise empty space and that could hold the keys to understanding how the universe expands. Their work was published Feb. 25 in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.  “We want to know what kind of planetary systems there are,” said Matthew Penny, lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher in the Ohio State Department of Astronomy. “To do that, you need to not just look where the obvious, easy things are. You need to look at everything.”  The planets WFIRST is likely to find will be further from their stars than most planets found to date, Penny said. The mission will build on the work of Kepler, a deep-space telescope that found more than 2,600 planets outside our solar system. The Kepler mission ended Oct. 30, 2018.  “Kepler began the search by looking for planets that orbit their stars closer than the Earth is to our Sun,” Penny said. “WFIRST will complete it by finding planets with larger orbits.”  To find new planets, WFIRST will use gravitational microlensing, a technique that relies on the gravity of stars and planets to bend and magnify the light coming from stars that pass behind them from the telescope’s viewpoint.  This microlensing effect, which is connected to Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, allows a telescope to find planets orbiting stars thousands of light-years away from Earth—much farther than other planet-detecting techniques. But because microlensing works only when the gravity of a planet or star bends the light from another star, the effect from any given planet or star is only visible for a few hours once every few million years. WFIRST will spend long stretches of time continuously monitoring 100 million stars at the center of the galaxy.  Penny’s study predicted that about 100 of those not-yet-discovered planets could have the same or lower mass as Earth.  The new telescope will be able to map the Milky Way and other galaxies 100 times faster than the famous Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched in 1990.  The WFIRST mission, with a budget of around $3.2 billion, will scan a small piece of the universe—about 2 square degrees—at a resolution higher than any similar mission in the past. That resolution, Penny said, will allow WFIRST to see more stars and planets than any previous organized search.  “Although it’s a small fraction of the sky, it’s huge compared to what other space telescopes can do,” Penny said. “It’s WFIRST’s unique combination—both a wide field of view and a high resolution—that make it so powerful for microlensing planet searches. Previous space telescopes, including Hubble and James Webb, have had to choose one or the other.”  WFIRST, Penny said, should give astronomers, astrophysicists and others who study space significantly more information about more planets outside of our solar system.  “WFIRST will allow us to find types of planets that we haven’t seen before now,” Penny said. “From WFIRST’s microlensing survey, we will learn how frequently different types of planets are formed, and how unique our solar system is.”  So far, scientists have discovered about almost 700 planetary systems—also known as solar systems—containing more than one planet. And they have discovered some 4,000 planets. But even though humans have searched galaxies near and far for signs of life, the search mostly has found planets that are closer to their stars than Earth is to our Sun.  The “infrared” piece of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope is also important, Penny said.  “Infrared light allows WFIRST to see through dust that lies in the plane of the Milky Way in between us and the galactic center, something optical telescopes on the ground cannot do,” he said. “This gives WFIRST access to parts of the sky that are more densely packed with stars.”  Ohio State has played an important role in WFIRST, from the project’s inception to the design of research programs the telescope will execute.  The mission is still in the planning stages; NASA announced plans to move forward with WFIRST in February of 2016, and began its initial planning in May of 2018.


tass--2019-11-01--Press review: NASA begs Roscosmos for seats on Soyuz and what’s fueling Kurdish separatism

Kurdish forces continue to confront the Turkish army and its allies in northern Syria, mostly along the territories that Ankara seized during its Operation Peace Spring. As for the areas controlled by Moscow and Damascus, there are no Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) units left, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. However, it doesn’t mean that the Russian-Turkish joint patrol of the safety zone, which is due to begin on November 1, will proceed smoothly, Nezavisimaya Gazeta writes. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has stated that he may resume his Syrian operation if Kurdish armed units fail to pull back 30 km away from the Syrian-Turkish border. Erdogan does have grounds for such statements. First, the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which include some SDF groups, are conducting a guerrilla war against Turkish troops. Second, the Syrian government has come up with an initiative to include SDF units into government forces. That said, Turkey has reasons not to trust Damascus.  "A situation where the Turkish leader and his allies are fighting against Syrian government troops gives Ankara the advantage as it seeks to find an excuse to combat the Kurds and seize as much of Syria’s land as possible," military expert Lieutenant General Yuri Netkachev told the newspaper. However, in his words, "SDF units and local Kurdish authorities… still have US support." Netkachev pointed out that the SDF had no desire to be disbanded and intended to continue defending its territories under the Syrian army’s flag. The Americans control all oil fields east of the Euphrates River with the SDF’s assistance, and have no intentions of handing them over to Bashar al-Assad. "By withdrawing troops from northern Syria, US President Donald Trump managed to pit the Turks and the Kurds against each other, as well as the Syrian army and the SDF. The Kurds remain in the country’s north under the protection of the Russian military police. They still have hopes for autonomy - an idea that the US continues to back, denying Damascus access to the rich oil fields on the other side of the Euphrates," military expert Colonel Vladimir Popov pointed out. He believes that unless the issue is resolved, the Syrian Constitutional Committee initiative is bound to fail. Beijing has issued a $357 mln grant to Tajikistan to reconstruct the Dushanbe-Kulma highway through the Kuhistani Badakhshan Autonomous Region, which connects the country’s central area with China. A Chinese company will build nine bridges in the region and will also develop the Yakchilva silver deposit, Nezavisimaya Gazeta noted. According to experts, China is becoming Tajikistan’s main economic partner, driving all other investors away. In addition, over the past few years, Tajikistan has found itself heavily indebted to China, which will inevitably lead to changes in Dushanbe’s foreign policy. "As a result, Tajikistan is putting off a response to Moscow’s proposal to join the Eurasian Economic Union. Right now, regional powers are seeking to divvy up spheres of influence in the region. Russia has been ensuring political and military stability, while China has shouldered responsibility to resolve economic issues," said Director General of the ‘East-West Strategy’ think tank Dmitry Orlov. According to Deputy Director General of the Moscow Center for Strategic Assessments and Forecasts Igor Pankratenko, Kuhistani Badakhshan is Tajikistan’s troubled region of strategic importance. Since Dushanbe is unable to integrate the region into the national economy, then some other power will fill the void. So, it’s good that it is China. "Investments into Kuhistani Badakhshan are not a purely economic matter, it’s more like a program to ensure the loyalty of a very complex region in order to prevent the spread of extremist ideas by way of raising the living standards," Pankratenko explained. He pointed out that China was largely involved in efforts to resolve the situation in Afghanistan and expected to gain Dushanbe’s assistance in that regard. "This is why Beijing will pursue a more active policy in its client states. It won’t involve direct pressure, but a clarification of China’s positions on various aspects of Dushanbe’s foreign policy," the expert emphasized. President Igor Dodon of Moldova, in an interview with Izvestia, pointed to a shift in relations with Transnistria and emphasized that half a year after a new government came on board in Chisinau, the country’s foreign policy had gained balance. He also said that Moldova’s Prime Minister Maia Sandu would soon go on an official visit to Moscow.  According to Dodon, "dialogue turned out to be positive" at his recent meeting with the leader of Transnistria, Vadim Krasnoselsky. The parties predominantly discussed the operation of their banking systems but refrained from touching upon political issues "since they are not on Chisinau’s nor Tiraspol’s agenda at the moment." "However, we thoroughly addressed current matters, which will make it possible to improve the lives of people on both sides of the Dniester River," Dodon pointed out. When asked about changes to the country’s foreign policy following the government change, the Moldovan president noted that "its foreign policy is beginning to show signs of balance." "Before the July events, the government and parliament had strongly refused to build dialogue with the East, and Russia in particular. Today, we can already see dialogue between lawmakers. Our speaker recently went on an official visit to Moscow. As for the government, the foreign minister, the economy minister and a deputy prime minister have visited Russia’s capital. The prime minister’s working visit is scheduled for November," Dodon said. He added that he planned to attend an informal summit of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) in St. Petersburg, Russia, in December and visit Moscow to attend the 75th anniversary celebration of the Soviet Union’s Victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War on May 9, 2020. Vedomosti: America has no alternative in sight to Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft Administrator of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) James Bridenstine has officially requested that Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russia’s Roscosmos State Space Agency provide additional seats for American astronauts on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft due to delays in efforts to put new US spaceships into operation, Vedomosti wrote. Rogozin believes that Boeing and SpaceX won’t complete the tests of their spacecraft earlier than in 2021, so Russia will have to cut the size of its crews in order to provide seats to the Americans.  According to a source close to Roscosmos, NASA is being held hostage to politics. The American agency could have reserved additional seats on the Soyuz spacecraft in advance, but was unable to do so due to extraordinary pressure from US government officials. The situation is now at a stalemate, said a space industry company’s manager, noting that work on both of the new American spacecraft had been underway since 2014 but the tests of SpaceX’s CrewDragon had faced serious technical difficulties, while Boeing’s Starliner still hadn’t been included into a test launch program because a number of systems were not ready. NASA only got around to asking Russia for assistance after a threat had emerged that the US segment of the International Space Station (ISS) would have to go offline. Now, according to the newspaper’s source, talks will rather focus on NASA’s chances to carry out manned space missions on Soyuz-MS spaceships than on seat purchases. NASA has preliminarily requested seats on spacecraft to be launched to the ISS in the fourth quarter of 2020 and the second quarter of 2021. At the same time, Roscosmos plans to allocate money to build two more Soyuz ships. A source close to the space corporation said they would be constructed as a backup. The debt burden of Russians (based on the correlation between debt repayments and disposable incomes) stood at 10.6% as of October 1, the country’s Central Bank said. It is at its highest since July 2012, Vedomosti notes. According to the Central Bank, more than half of Russia’s employed population (39.5 mln people) have loans to repay. Most people have either a cash loan or a mortgage, but the number of those with several types of loans is growing. The debt burden of all borrowers, particularly the poorest ones, has been increasing, the National Bureau of Credit History pointed out.  A growing debt load poses a significant danger to banks that are focused on unsecured consumer loans, as well as to families that have to take unsecured long-term loans, said Sovcombank First Deputy Chairman of the Board Sergey Khotimsky. The debt burden will continue to grow unless the pattern of loan products changes and interest rates are reduced, he warned. Since people’s real incomes are hardly rising, taking loans is a reasonable way to purchase goods and services, Director of the Research Center for Financial Technologies and Digital Economy at Skolkovo-New Economic School Oleg Shibanov noted. Real incomes and consumption fell by ten percent in 2015-2016, but after that, different trends emerged: incomes are not going up but consumption is increasing by two to three percent a year, ING Chief Russia Economist Dmitry Dolgin specified. Consumer loans are the main source of consumption growth. If income growth rates fail to go up, then the debt burden will only get heavier. In the event that no structural measures are taken to boost business activities and improve the revenues of private companies, consumer growth will keep leading to more banking and budget risks, although those are low at the moment, the expert pointed out. TASS is not responsible for the material quoted in these press reviews