This Year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry Honors a Revolution

With Crispr, two scientists turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race.

By

 Walter Isaacson

, The New York Times, Oct. 7, 2020

Emmanuelle Charpentier, left, and Jennifer Doudna may have made the most important biological advance since the discovery of the structure of DNA.Credit...Miguel Riopa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled “The Double Helix” on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama, filled with colorful characters, about ambition and competition in the pursuit of nature’s wonders. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would.

She would help to make what the book’s author, James Watson, later told her was the most important biological advance since he and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA. She worked with a brilliant Parisian biologist named Emmanuelle Charpentier to turn a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as Crispr, it ushered in a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.

For this accomplishment, on Wednesday they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It is a recognition that the development of Crispr will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, the computer and the internet. Now we are entering a life-science era. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study the code of life. It will be a revolution that will someday allow us to cure diseases, fend off virus pandemics and (if we decide it’s wise) to design babies with the genetic features we want for them.

Crispr is especially relevant in this year of the coronavirus. The gene-editing tool that Dr. Doudna and Dr. Charpentier developed is based on a virus-fighting trick used by bacteria, which have been battling viruses for billions of years. In their DNA, bacteria develop clustered repeated sequences, known as Crisprs, that can remember and then destroy viruses that attack them. In other words, it’s an immune system that can adapt itself to fight each new wave of viruses — just what we humans need in an era that has been plagued by repeated viral epidemics.

The award is also a great testament to the growing power of women in the life sciences. When Rosalind Franklin made the images that helped James Watson and Francis Crick discover the structure of DNA, she became just a minor character in the early histories, and she died before she could share a Nobel Prize. Until now, only five women, beginning with Marie Curie in 1911, have won or shared the Nobel for chemistry, out of 184 honorees. When this year’s prize was announced, Dr. Charpentier said it would “provide a message specifically to young girls who would like to follow the path of science and to show them that in friendship women can also be awarded prizes.”

Crispr is now being used to treat sickle-cell anemia, cancers and blindness. And this year, Dr. Doudna and her research teams began exploring how Crispr could detect and destroy the coronavirus. “Crispr evolved in bacteria because of their long-running war against viruses,” Dr. Doudna told me. “We humans don’t have time to wait for our own cells to evolve natural resistance to this virus, so we have to use our ingenuity to do that. Isn’t it fitting that one of the tools is this ancient bacterial immune system called Crispr? Nature is beautiful that way.”

In November 2018, He Jiankui, a young Chinese scientist who had been to some of Dr. Doudna’s gene-editing conferences, shocked the world by using Crispr to help produce the world’s first “designer babies.” He edited human embryos to remove a gene that produces a receptor for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. There was an immediate outburst of awe and then shock. After more than three billion years of evolution of life on this planet, one species (us) had developed the talent and temerity to grab control of its own genetic future. There was a sense that we had crossed the threshold into a whole new age, perhaps a brave new world, as when Adam and Eve bit into the apple or Prometheus snatched fire from the gods.

Crispr raises some tough moral questions. Should we edit our species to make us less susceptible to deadly viruses? In the midst of this coronavirus plague, most of us probably think that would be a wonderful boon. Right? Should we eliminate disorders such as Huntington’s, sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis? That sounds good, too. And what about congenital deafness or blindness? Or being short? Or depressed? Hmm. How should we think about that? A few decades from now, if it becomes possible and safe, should we allow parents to enhance the IQ and physical strength of their kids? Should we let them decide eye color? Skin color? Height?

After helping to discover Crispr, Dr. Doudna has become a thought leader on these moral issues. That’s the main message we should take from this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry: New technologies can be a huge benefit to the human race, but in order to make sure they are used wisely, it’s important for people to understand them. By shining a light on gene editing, the Nobel committee is bringing a needed awareness of the wonders of nature — and of the technology that will increasingly determine how nature works.

Why Can’t Trump’s America Be Like Italy?

By Paul Krugman

The New York Times, 23 July 2020

A few days ago The Times published a long, damning article about how the Trump administration managed to fail so completely in responding to the coronavirus. Much of the content confirmed what anyone following the debacle suspected. One thing I didn’t see coming, however, was the apparently central role played by Italy’s experience.

Italy, you see, was the first Western nation to experience a major wave of infections. Hospitals were overwhelmed; partly as a result, the initial death toll was terrible. Yet cases peaked after a few weeks and began a steep decline. And White House officials were seemingly confident that America would follow a similar track.

We didn’t. U.S. cases plateaued for a couple of months, then began rising rapidly. Death rates followed with a lag. At this point we can only look longingly at Italy’s success in containing the coronavirus: Restaurants and cafes are open, albeit with restrictions, much of normal life has resumed, yet Italy’s current death rate is less than a 10th of America’s. On a typical recent day, more than 800 Americans but only around a dozen Italians died from Covid-19.

Although Donald Trump keeps boasting that we’ve had the best coronavirus response in the world, and some credulous supporters may actually believe him, my guess is that many people are aware that our handling of the virus has fallen tragically short compared with, say, that of Germany. It may not seem surprising, however, that German discipline and competence have paid off (although we used to think that we were better prepared than anyone else to deal with a pandemic). But how can America be doing so much worse than Italy?

I don’t mean to peddle facile national stereotypes. For all its problems, Italy is a serious and sophisticated country, not a comic-opera stage set. Still, Italy entered this pandemic with major disadvantages compared with the United States.

After all, Italy’s bureaucracy isn’t famed for its efficiency, nor are its citizens known for their willingness to follow rules. The nation’s government is deeply in debt, and this debt matters because Italy doesn’t have its own currency; this means that it can’t do what we do, and print lots of money in a crisis.

Unfavorable demography and economic troubles are also major Italian disadvantages. The ratio of seniors to working-age adults is the highest in the Western world. Italy’s growth record is deeply disappointing: Per capita G.D.P. has stagnated for two decades.

When it came to dealing with Covid-19, however, all these Italian disadvantages were outweighed by one huge advantage: Italy wasn’t burdened with America’s disastrous leadership.

After a terrible start, Italy quickly moved to do what was necessary to deal with the coronavirus. It instituted a very severe lockdown, and kept to it. Government aid helped sustain workers and businesses through the lockdown. The safety net had holes in it, but top officials tried to make it work; in a supreme case of non-Trumpism, the prime minister even apologized for delays in aid.

And, crucially, Italy crushed the curve: It kept the lockdown in place until cases were relatively few, and it was cautious about reopening.

America could have followed the same path. In fact, the Covid-19 trajectory in the Northeast, which was hard-hit in the beginning but took the outbreak seriously, actually does look a lot like Italy’s.

But the Trump administration and its allies pushed for rapid reopening, ignoring warnings from epidemiologists. Because we didn’t do what Italy did, we didn’t crush the curve; quite the opposite. Matters were made worse by pathological opposition to things like wearing masks, the way even obvious precautions became battlegrounds in the culture wars.

So cases and then deaths surged. Even the promised economic payoff from rapid, what-me-worry reopening was a mirage: many states are reimposing partial lockdowns, and there is growing evidence that the jobs recovery is stalling, if not going into reverse.

Incredibly, Trump and his allies seem to have given no thought at all about what to do if the overwhelming view of experts was right, and their gamble on ignoring the coronavirus didn’t pan out. A miraculous boom was Plan A; there was no Plan B.

In particular, tens of millions of workers are about to lose crucial unemployment benefits, and Republicans haven’t even settled on a bad response. On Wednesday Senate Republicans floated the idea of reducing supplemental benefits from $600 a week to just $100, which would spell disaster for many families.

For someone like Trump, all this must be humiliating — or would be if anyone dared tell him about it. After three and a half years of Making America Great Again, we’ve become a pathetic figure on the world stage, a cautionary tale about pride going before a fall.

These days Americans can only envy Italy’s success in weathering the coronavirus, its rapid return to a kind of normalcy that is a distant dream in a nation that used to congratulate itself for its can-do culture. Italy is often referred to as “the sick man of Europe”; what does that make us?

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

George Orwell + Aldous Huxley_infographic

Why the humanities are as important as engineering

 By Vivek Wadhwa 12 June 2018

Earlier in my academic career, I used to advise students to focus on science and engineering, believing that they were a prerequisite for success in business. I had largely agreed with Bill Gates’s assertions that America needed to spend its limited education budgets on these disciplines, because they produced the most jobs, rather than the liberal arts and humanities. This was in a different era of technology and well before I learned what makes the technology industry tick.

In 2008, my research teams at Duke and Harvard surveyed 652 U.S.-born chief executives and heads of product engineering at 502 technology companies. We found that they tended to be highly educated, 92 percent holding bachelor’s degrees and 47 percent holding higher degrees. Hardly 37 percent held degrees in engineering or computer technology, and just 2 percent did in mathematics. The rest had degrees in fields as diverse as business, accounting, health care, and arts and the humanities.

We learned that though a degree made a big difference in the success of an entrepreneur, the field it was in and the school that it was from were not significant factors. YouTube chief executive Susan Wojcicki, for instance, majored in history and literature; Slack founder Stewart Butterfield in English; Airbnb founder Brian Chesky in the fine arts. And, in China, Alibaba chief executive Jack Ma has a bachelor’s in English.

Steve Jobs touted the importance of liberal arts and humanities at the unveiling of the iPad 2: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing, and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices.” With this focus, he built the most valuable company in the world and set new standards for the technology industry.

Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell, who majored in English, also emphasized this. I recently asked him how he turned his company around and caused its stock price to increase by an astonishing 450 percent over five years. He said that it was through relentlessly focusing on design in every product the company built; that engineering is important but what makes a technology product most successful is its design.

The key to good design is a combination of empathy and knowledge of the arts and humanities. Musicians and artists inherently have the greatest sense of creativity. You can teach artists how to use software and graphics tools; turning engineers into artists is hard.

And now, a technological shift is in progress that will change the rules of innovation. A broad range of technologies, such as computing, artificial intelligence, digital medicine, robotics and synthetic biology, are advancing exponentially and converging, making amazing things possible.

With the convergence of medicine, artificial intelligence and sensors, we can create digital doctors that monitor our health and help us prevent disease; with the advances in genomics and gene editing, we have the ability to create plants that are drought resistant and that feed the planet; with robots powered by artificial intelligence, we can build digital companions for the elderly. Nanomaterial advances are enabling a new generation of solar and storage technologies that will make energy affordable and available to all.

Creating solutions such as these requires a knowledge of fields such as biology, education, health sciences and human behavior. Tackling today’s biggest social and technological challenges requires the ability to think critically about their human context, which is something that humanities graduates happen to be best trained to do.

An engineering degree is very valuable, but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology provides a big advantage in design. A history major who has studied the Enlightenment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire gains an insight into the human elements of technology and the importance of its usability. A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer who has only worked in the technology trenches. A musician or artist is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine.

When parents ask me now what careers their children should pursue and whether it is best to steer them into science, engineering, and technology fields, I tell them that it is best to let them make their own choices. They shouldn’t, I tell them, do what our parents did, telling us what to study and causing us to treat education as a chore; instead, they should encourage their children to pursue their passions and to love learning.

To create the amazing future that technology is enabling, we need our musicians and artists working hand in hand with our engineers. It isn’t either one or the other; we need both the humanities and engineering.

Vivek Wadhwa is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School.

Let's not use Mars as a backup planet

Love Machines

Why do we feel so compelled to seek out emotional attachments with mechanical life forms? JOHNATHAN BELLS reports.

Few technologies have been so extensively foreshadowed as robotics. For nearly 100 years, we’ve indulged in an array of speculative fictions that have defined the form, function and social impact of robots far in advance of the available technology. As a result, automation is treated more as a cultural trope than an economic threat. All the while the robots are fermenting the stealthiest industrial revolution in history.

We delved behind the scenes at the London Science Museum’s recent exhibition about our obsession with mechanical life forms. As well as asking the big questions about robotic pasts, presents and futures, the show offers up a rogue’s gallery of android approximations of specialist applications, from healthcare through to entertainment.

Popular perception of robots rarely aligns with reality. Large swathes of modern industry are automated beyond the point of no return. Cars, white goods and electronics all depend on robotic manufacture, and the huge labour populations deployed to assemble iPhones, laptops and sneakers are also being usurped by robotic alternatives with no need for dorms or unions. China is the largest buyer of industrial robots in the world. Yet, for most consumers, it matters not a jot if an assembly shop is powered by sweat or sparks; the end result is the same. Instead, we seem hard-wired to seek out emotional attachments with robots, happily ignoring the irreplaceable mechanical ballet of the robotic production line.

Perhaps this is our species’ great mistake; we want robots to be familiar and friendly, whereas their uglier, more adept relatives are quietly doing the heavy lifting we’d rather not deal with. As a result, the path to automation is unstoppable, with global industrial robot sales rising year on year. Change will come with the robotic shift from physical to emotional labour. Projects like Komodroid, a ‘robot newscaster’ that reads headlines without inflection or emotion, letting you project your own feelings, or ROSA (Rob’s Open Source Android) with its imitation of human muscular structures and spooky face-tracking ability, only scratch the surface of our desperation to love, and be loved, by the machine. Many generations of cultural representation have given robots direct access to our heartstrings, and we haven’t even touched on the thorny issue of sex, let alone death.

It’s safe to say that every conceivable human interaction (and form of fluid exchange) will eventually be subcontracted to a machine. Along the way, we’ll take the mandatory trek to the ‘uncanny valley’, a dive into the awkward intersection between true-to-life human features and the skin-crawling consequences of getting it a bit wrong. This partly explains why humanoid, but not human-like, robots generate the most affection among those who interact with them. 

A robot is still best at doing a single thing exceptionally well, be it sifting, sorting, sweeping, welding or stamping. And yet technologists and consumers seem compelled to empower our metal friends to do much, much more. Unfortunately, we have little idea of what will happen once they actually can.

After being shown at the London Science Museum, "Robots" will be showing at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester from 19 October 2017 to 15 April 2018 as part of the Manchester Science Festival. [Wallpaper Magazine, September 2017]