Homunculus

I just saw the production of Copenhagen at the Hampstead Theatre in London. I haven’t seen it performed since I went to the initial run at the National in 1998, when I believe I reviewed it for Nature (but if so, I can’t find it now). The play is about the meeting between Danish physicist Niels Bohr and German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1941 in Nazi-occupied Denmark, when Heisenberg was leading the German uranium project to try to harness nuclear fission, discovered by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin in 1938. (They did not understand their results, and sent a description of them to their former colleague Lise Meitner, who, as an Austrian Jew, had had to flee Germany after the Anschluss. Meitner was in Sweden, where, together with her nephew Otto Frisch, she figured out that the uranium atoms bombarded with neutrons were undergoing fission.)

Heisenberg regarded Bohr as a mentor. He worked with Bohr in Copenhagen on and off from 1924 to 1927, during which time they and their colleagues (especially Max Born and Pascual Jordan in Göttingen, as well as, independently, Erwin Schrödinger in Zurich) developed quantum mechanics. Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen was the centre of the universe for quantum mechanics in the 1920s and 30s, where all the bright young researchers went to learn and study under Bohr. But when Heisenberg went there in 1941, it was as a representative of the invading power and a cultural ambassador of the Nazis. He spoke with Bohr, apparently asking him for his opinion about working on the release of nuclear energy from fission. But the purpose of that conversation, and quite what was said, has been the subject of much controversy. Was Heisenberg seeking Bohr’s blessing for his uranium work for Hitler? Was he trying to find out what Bohr knew about the Allied work on fission? Was he trying to warn Bohr that the Germans were working on this? Or was he, as Bohr’s wife Margrethe suggests in the play, just wanting to show himself off to his former colleagues and mentor? In a three-way interaction between Bohr, Heisenberg and Margrethe looking back after they have all died, Copenhagen interrogates those questions, again and again, ultimately concluding that sometimes we do not even know our own reasons for what we do.

It’s a wonderfully smart play – often compared to Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia in its integration of scientific themes, though I have to say that Arcadia is the better play, with more emotional punch (and funnier). But it’s unfair to compare with Stoppard (and elsewhere, Frayn is extremely funny – I had to stop reading Towards the End of the Morning in public because I kept embarrassing myself with my snorting). Coming back to the play with much more knowledge about Bohr, Heisenberg and the surrounding history, I am deeply impressed at how informed Frayn was about the history and the science. I have no quibbles with the science at all. (I’m even happy to overlook the suggestion of Schrödinger’s Cat being alive and dead at once, as the scientists themselves might have said such things, as many scientists still do.) The handling of uncertainty, the staging on a round stage on which the performers circulate like orbiting electrons in the Bohr atom – all of it is extremely well managed. (The Hampstead in fact borrowed the rotating circular stage from the recent, and brilliant, production of Arcadia at the Old Vic.)

Bohr was played by Richard Schiff from The West Wing. Inevitably I have high expectations, and I have to say that this wasn’t the Bohr I feel I know. (My biography of Bohr, The Man Who Broke Reality, will be published in the autumn, but I have written books previously both about quantum mechanics (Beyond Weird) and about the response of the German physicists to life under the Third Reich, looking particularly at Heisenberg, Max Planck, and the Dutch physicist Peter Debye (Serving the Reich).) The American accent took a while to get used to – there’s no reason it shouldn’t be American, given that the actors wisely weren’t “doing accents” (the director Michael Longhurst said that would have been too ‘Allo ‘Allo), but I guess for a British audience this just seems more of a statement than Damien Molony (Heisenberg)’s Irish brogue. The bigger problem was that Schiff’s Bohr was just too prickly and irascible, lacking the evident warm and mild temperament that all who know Bohr testified to. This was not necessarily Schiff’s doing, as some of it was scripted. At one point Bohr berates Heisenberg for having the temerity to challenge him in a talk he gave in Göttingen when the two first met in 1922, whereas by all accounts Bohr didn’t mind in the slightest being challenged by a student (which would have been an affront to most German professors) and even sought Heisenberg out afterwards to chat some more. (At the same time, credit to Frayn for appreciating that Bohr’s presence in Göttingen at that time was in part a statement about bringing Germany back into the scientific fold when others were ostracizing it after the First World War.)

The big question is whether the play gives a fair picture of the views and motives of the characters about the Copenhagen meeting. Frayn wrote the play after reading the book Heisenberg’s War by journalist Thomas Powers, which argued that Heisenberg purposely dragged his feet in the German uranium project so as not to deliver an atom bomb to Hitler. Powers even implied that Heisenberg might have falsified his calculations to sabotage the project – an idea no historian buys, and which I discuss in Serving the Reich. Historians who have studied this period – one of the most authoritative is Mark Walker of Union College – don’t accept the account that Powers gave, and there is no good evidence that Heisenberg took any deliberate steps to ensure that the Germans did not make an atom bomb. Why the German project achieved so little – they were just beginning to get close to having a crude (and possibly unsafe) reactor working by the time the war ended – has been much debated, and Frayn does a good job of capturing some of this debate. Did Heisenberg estimate the critical mass needed to make a bomb? If so, did he do the calculation right? If not, why not?

But in any event, Copenhagen, having been so influenced by Powers’ book, was initially inflected far too much in Heisenberg’s favour. After the play was first performed, it stimulated so much discussion of the issues that the Bohr family decided to release previously undisclosed letters that Bohr wrote to Heisenberg in 1957 presenting his version of the events in Copenhagen. Bohr wrote these letters after seeing Heisenberg’s version – more properly, the version attributed to Heisenberg – in the book Brighter Than a Thousand Sons by the Austrian writer Robert Jungk, an account of the making of the atom bomb. That version was exculpatory, as was the account that Heisenberg generally offered after the war for what he was doing in the uranium project. He made out that the German scientists had after all been very smart in getting the Third Reich to fund their research on nuclear fission for a reactor while deftly avoiding the moral dilemma of whether to make a bomb. Bohr was uncharacteristically angry about what Heisenberg said to Jungk regarding the Copenhagen meeting. In typical Bohr style, he drafted and redrafted his letter many times – but in the end never sent it.

In the light of these letter drafts, Frayn revised his play to make it rather more even-handed. As I recall, the initial version had Heisenberg voice the position he and his protégé Carl von Weizsäcker began to concoct as soon as they, held captive by the British in Cambridgeshire, heard about the Hiroshima bombing: that they, working under an authoritarian regime, had chosen not to make this awful weapon, whereas the free scientists under the Allies had done so and used it on civilians. At any rate, there’s no such line in the current version of the play. All the same, there remains too much implication that Bohr was culpable for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atrocities because he went to Los Alamos. In fact, by the time he got there after escaping from Denmark in 1943 just before the Germans began rounding up those of Jewish heritage (Bohr’s mother was Jewish), the work was more or less done. Bohr made token contributions, really quite unnecessarily, to a few technical aspects, but he was mostly regarded by the scientists at Los Alamos as a kind of moral compass, bringing hope (as Oppenheimer put it) to a project that seemed to many of them to be grim.

Besides, Bohr was deeply alarmed at the implications of the atom bomb, and he began at once to try persuading the Allied leaders Roosevelt (and later Truman) and Churchill to start open talks with Stalin to avoid a postwar arms race. In this he was unsuccessful, but he devoted much of his postwar life to the attempt. Many see him as the first scientist to acknowledge the full moral and pollical seriousness of nuclear arms. It’s a shame that there is no mention of this at all in Copenhagen.

Heisenberg does now come in for a fair bit of criticism in the play, especially from Margrethe, played by Alex Kingston. (One of the great virtues of Frayn’s play is the central role it gives to Margrethe – a good reflection of the role she played in Bohr’s life, although Frayn’s Margrethe is more fierce and outspoken than she was in real life. Nonetheless, she was indeed outspokenly critical of and dismayed by Heisenberg’s conduct in Copenhagen in 1941.) But he is still somewhat let off the hook. Much is made, for example, of the fact that Heisenberg did not mention explicitly to Albert Speer in 1942 that a bomb could be created from plutonium produced in a uranium-fuelled reactor. But Heisenberg did allude to that possibility in a 1941 document he wrote for the German Army Ordnance, where he said that “once in operation, the machine [uranium reactor] can also lead to the production of an incredibly powerful explosive.”

And contrary to the idea that the Germans downplayed the possibility of a bomb, Heisenberg’s own accounts contradict this. He later wrote that “one can say that the first time large funds were made available in Germany was in the spring of 1942 after the meeting with [Bernhard] Rust [of the Reich Education Ministry] when we convinced him that we had absolutely definitive proof that it could be done” – “it” here clearly meaning a bomb in this context. There is an account from the spring of 1943 of a lecture by Heisenberg to Reich officials saying that the scientists felt they could, within just one or two years, deliver a bomb with “hitherto unknown explosive and destructive power.”

Well, there’s much more to be said, and I say some of it in Serving the Reich and The Man Who Broke Reality. But as I say in the latter, we should not read Copenhagen as history, or expect Frayn to have written it as such. It remains one of the most inventive, intelligent and creative plays about science and scientists, and I’d recommend anyone who can to go and see it. (Perhaps not at the Hampstead, which I think is now sold out…)

[Again, very much after the event – and written before Trump proposed slashing the NASA budget even more…]

The Artemis II moon mission launched by Nasa on April 1 wasn’t without controversy. Few people in the US consider human spaceflight a priority for Nasa, and some scientists feel it distracts (and steals funding) from space science that can be done more cheaply, and indeed ambitiously, using robots. 

Donald Trump’s focus on ostentatious crewed missions, first to the moon and then to Mars, look more concerned with grandstanding than with learning about the cosmos. Trump has proposed pouring money into lunar and Martian missions while cutting Nasa’s 2025 budget by almost a quarter, sacrificing climate-monitoring instruments and a robotic Mars mission. 

Even the fact that the astronauts included a woman and a person of colour feels of less consequence in the face of Trumpian attacks on diversity in Nasa. 

But the Artemis programme did have some scientific goals, and all the crew had some scientific training. The Artemis II craft orbited the Earth for a day (24 hours – there are no real days in space) before the Orion module housing the crew headed on a three-day journey to and around the moon. 

The main goal was simply to establish the feasibility of this means of reaching the moon, in particular to test out how well the tiny Orion capsule would protect the four crew members against the harsh radiation environment in space, where there is no geomagnetic field to deflect pervasive streams of high-energy cosmic particles. 

In this respect it was comparable to the Apollo 8 mission that transited the moon in 1968 before the landings the following year.

Sensors inside the capsule measured the radiation exposure during the flight. And, now they are back on Earth, the astronauts’ own cells will be studied for damage caused by radiation or the absence of gravity. Before the flight, the crew had the precursors of bone-marrow cells extracted from blood samples; some of these were placed on tiny plastic chips taken on board the spacecraft, while others have been kept on Earth. 

The space samples will now be compared with the Earth-based ones, looking for signs of deterioration such as DNA mutations (some of which can potentially trigger cancer) or changes to the DNA segments called telomeres at the ends of chromosomes that get eroded away in the ageing process. 

By personalising these experiments, it might become possible to predict in advance which astronauts have better resistance to space hazards. Another of the projects aimed to measure how being in deep space affects the crew members’ wellbeing, sleep patterns and activity in the face of such extreme confinement and isolation, not to mention a potential combination of high stress and monotony.  Suggested ReadingThe slow death of American sciencePhilip Ball

During the six-hour period that the capsule swung around the dark side of the moon, the crew observed the part of the lunar surface which is never visible from Earth. It has been scanned extensively already by automated instruments such as those on Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in 2009. 

But, unlikely though it might seem, planetary scientists say that the human visual system can still pick up information that it’s hard for robotic instruments to detect, such as subtle differences in colour of the lunar surface that could signify differences in geochemical composition. 

It would be very surprising if any big revelations had been uncovered this way, but arguably it offered a way to test whether human exploration of other worlds can really do more, faster, than robotic missions can. 

The Artemis mission is a key stepping stone towards the planned establishment of a permanent moon base, where a crew could potentially conduct observations of the stars and find out more about the moon’s geology and origins. 

But the politics of human spaceflight have always been complicated. It can yield a scientific bounty – but enough to justify the cost, especially when much of the science is about the effects of space on humans in the first place? It can inspire – but public support is hardly overwhelming. 

These days, “we choose to go to the moon”, in JFK’s famous phrase, for many reasons. But the rhetoric from Jared Isaacman, Trump’s appointee as Nasa administrator, about the “economic potential” of the moon and of putting “the Stars and Stripes on Mars” can sound like tub-thumping nationalism.

[I wrote and published this before Karp came out with his technofascist manifesto. It’s almost as if he wanted to prove my point.]

“Technology is inherently neutral – it’s just a matter of what we do with it.” That sentiment remains disturbingly resilient in the face of many decades of research by historians and social theorists of science and technology showing how nonsensical it is. It suits researchers who want to work on problems that are “technically sweet” – Robert Oppenheimer’s notorious remark about the atom bomb – without having to bother about the ethics. Even those who might not openly espouse the “neutrality” argument subtly imply it with talk of “dual use” technology, meaning that it might be deployed both for good and bad purposes, as if the choice is up to us. The truth is that, not only do many technologies involve an inherent mix of social benefits and drawbacks (mobile phones being an obvious example) but they do not come value-free in the first place (ditto).

The matter is brought into rather sharp focus as we continue to buy cars and award governmental contracts to the man who recently retweeted, with an emoji indicating 100% agreement, the comment that “White solidarity is the only way to survive”. I don’t know that it offers much comfort, as NASA considers making Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship rocket even more central to its Artemis crewed lunar program, to realise that this won’t be the first time that the United States’ efforts to send people to the moon has yoked itself to a white supremacist with a fondness for Nazi salutes.

The willingness of governments knowingly to embrace tech providers who have political and ideological goals does, however, make you wonder if they are getting any advice at all that has not swallowed the neutrality myth hook, line and sinker. The UK government seems now to be getting cold feet about the decision in 2023 to give the contract for an AI-enabled data platform for the NHS to the US surveillance technology company Palantir. Might, perhaps, the company’s involvement with Trump’s ICE raids and with the Israeli military and security agencies provoke distrust among doctors and the public that will hinder rollout of the technology?

Well, quite. But who could have guessed that the company cofounded by the dictatorship-curious far-right libertarian Peter Thiel, currently to be found lecturing the pope about the return of the Antichrist, might be inherently problematic? If only there had been some warning signal, when Keir Starmer was introduced to current Palantir chief executive Alex Karp by (who else?) Peter Mandelson, that this man’s interests might not align with those of the British government. (Here’s a hint, free of charge and not entirely sardonic: avoid all tech that takes its name from Tolkien, such as crystal balls that will almost inevitably corrupt all who gaze into them.)

Karp made his pitch apparent in a recent interview, where he openly and even proudly stated that his AI technology “disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less, and increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters.” To be even more explicit: it’s the “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” whose power will be lessened by it. And that, it seems, is something Karp would welcome. “Democrats completely neglect males”, he has said, his voice dripping with contempt. “I don’t find it very appealing as a dude”.

In other words, what Palantir is doing will intervene in democracy in specific ways. They are saying it out loud. But that is nothing new; tech leaders such as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (who recently announced, pace Socrates, that introspection is a modern malaise) are openly deriding democracy and boosting the voices of far-right racist “thinkers” such as Curtis Yarvin.

There is of course nothing new in mega-rich business leaders and media moguls aligning with the political right. But as writer Jacob Silverman explains in his new book Gilded Rage, the game has changed, not just because of the scale of the wealth and the reach of the technologies into every aspect of our lives but because such values are being built into those technologies themselves, and also because of the increasing extremism of this tech-based ideological fervour. The incursions of Cambridge Analytica into the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election were only the first hint of what is now unfolding: a potential future in which democratic agency becomes a façade and a self-appointed, astronomically rich tech elite run things just however they choose. That future is not inevitable, but it might be avoided only if governments stop supposing that tech developers are simply making convenient, value-neutral data-handling services or “innovation-accelerating” machines.

[Yes, it’s very late to the show, but there’s always a delay in reposting my columns in The New World…]

Meningitis is, among other things, a reminder that many diseases are examples of what the biologist Conrad Waddington called canalisation: the way in which diverse biological causes can produce much the same physiological result. Disease is generally defined not by the cause but by the outcome: in this case, an inflammation of the tissue surrounding the brain and spinal cord, which can be caused by various strains of bacteria as well as by viruses and even by fungi. That inflammation can provoke fever, headaches and sickness, but the most serious worry is sepsis, which can cause death or permanent brain injury. That’s why a meningitis outbreak like that at the University of Kent at Canterbury is a grave matter, as the two deaths so far have indicated. All of the confirmed cases have required hospital admission.

The Kent cases are specifically of meningitis B (MenB), which is caused by a particular type of bacteria that normally lives in the throat. Around 10 percent of the population, and perhaps as many as 25 percent of students and young people, are asymptomatic carriers, but the bacterium becomes dangerous if it gets into the blood or spinal fluid. It’s not yet known why some people are susceptible and others not. The disease is only mildly infectious, transmitted for example by intimate bodily contact, sharing vapes, or coughing. Anyone can get it, but children and young adults are most at risk. The treatment is a course of antibiotics, which is generally effective in both suppressing the disease and reducing transmission. But early intervention is needed to prevent a risk of the most serious effects.

Meningitis offers a textbook case for the value of vaccines. Each strain demands a different vaccine, but vaccination programmes have been effective in reducing infection rates. The variant of the disease caused by so-called meningococcal group C bacteria (MenC) has become rare since a vaccine was introduced in 1999, falling from  a few thousands to a few tens of cases annually in the UK. (The vaccine was tragically too late for some, like the poet Michael Rosen’s son Eddie, who died of MenC in 1999.) Vaccines for other bacterial groups are also now used, and around 70 percent of teenagers are covered by them.

But a vaccine for MenB wasn’t introduced until 2015, so only those younger than 11 or 12 have had it. Several hundred students at the University of Kent deemed to be at high risk are being given the vaccine now, and thousands have been offered preventative antibiotics. The protection scheme has been extended to students at some at other Kent schools and colleges; one student at a London college has also been diagnosed with meningitis linked to the Kent outbreak. About 20,000 doses of the vaccine have also been released by the NHS to pharmacies for private jabs, although it’s not clear if this will meet the demand. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation is considering whether the vaccines should be made more widely available at universities and sixth forms. Right now, though, the risk is low. At the time of writing, it looks as though the number of cases (both confirmed and suspected) may have peaked on 20 March and is falling.

The sight of people in masks queuing for a vaccine of course invokes memories of the Covid pandemic, and the comparisons are instructive. MenB is considerably less infectious, as the bacteria are not airborne. But the current outbreak has been traced to a nightclub in Canterbury, where the conditions – crowded and with plenty of physical and romantic contact – were ideal for transmission: a “perfect storm”, as Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, told The Guardian. It seems possible that there may have been a “superspreader”, an asymptomatic individual with a high bacterial load. This lower transmission and the existence of a vaccine and an antibiotic prophylactic all make an outbreak like this much less alarming than Covid. It’s a reminder too that there are different demographic risk profiles for different infectious diseases – this time it’s the young, not the elderly, who are at most risk. While the Covid pandemic showed the serious consequences of school closures for the education and mental well-being of children and young people, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to that problem for potential future pandemics.

Perhaps most of all, this is a reminder of the importance of effective vaccination programmes and of the significance of behavioural patterns (including mask-wearing) for transmission of infectious disease. With a growing appetite on the right for revisionist pandemic history and libertarian future plans, the lessons are worth repeating.

The pharmaceutical giant Novartis has reached a legal settlement with the family of Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cells, taken from the tumour from which she died in 1951 in a Baltimore hospital, have been widely used for biomedical research and drug development. Lacks’ family has been seeking recompense for the uses made of her cells for many years, although the Novartis suit was brought only in 2024. The value of the settlement hasn’t been disclosed.

The Lacks case raises a host of questions – legal, ethical, and scientific, but also about the social politics of race. As writer Rebecca Skloot explained in her 2010 bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Lacks was a Black American from a poor background who was admitted at the age of 31 to the Johns Hopkins Hospital for cervical cancer treatment. A doctor named George Gey took, without Lack’s knowledge or consent, some of the cancer cells from a biopsy and cultured them in a dish, finding them extraordinarily robust and apt to proliferate. Gey realised these characteristics made the cells very useful for research: for studying cancer itself, and for testing drugs, toxic substances, and vaccines. They were used in the development of the polio vaccine in the 1950s, and have now become the standard cell line for biological research, designated HeLa. They have been grown by countless researchers and used by more than 100 pharmaceutical companies, and were even cultured in space in the 1960s.

The Lacks family received no recompense at the time, and when Skloot contacted the family for her book, she found them – particularly Lacks’ daughter Deborah – confused and distraught about what had become of Henrietta’s tissue samples. The tale has become charged with racial politics. In 1954 Lacks was described bizarrely in an article in Collier’s magazine as a Baltimore housewife “thrust into a kind of eternal life of which such a woman would never dream”, with no mention that she was Black and poor. Later scientific discussion of how her cells – allegedly carrying a genetic variant found only in Black Americans – proliferated “aggressively” and were apt to “contaminate” and even to “doom” other cell lines used language that unwittingly (it seems) echoed White supremacist fear-fantasies.

At the same time, it is tempting to turn Lacks’ story into a parable about the exploitation of underprivileged African Americans that plays into the suspicions of the Black community about the biomedical establishment – a distrust amply justified by the infamous infection of Black sharecroppers with syphilis in the 1930s for a ghastly study at Tuskegee University in Alabama. But this narrative doesn’t really capture the facts either. In the 1950s it was common for tissue samples to be taken without consent for research purposes, a practice that was not regarded as unethical by either scientists or the public at the time. Gey gave samples freely to colleagues, never seeking to make money from them, and the hospital insists it has never profited from the HeLa line. This practice is rightly seen now as improper – there are well-defined and strict procedures for obtaining patient consent – but such measures were not introduced until the 1970s and 80s. Arguably, then, there was no wrongdoing by the standards of the day. All the same, HeLa cells have been so valuable to science and the pharmaceutical industry that it’s only proper the Lacks family should be compensated. The life sciences company Thermo Fisher Scientific previously settled for an undisclosed sum in 2023.

The Lacks case reveals how we still struggle to think about cell culture technology. It’s not just in Collier’s and in Skloot’s title that Lacks is spoken of as “immortal”. An obituary for Gey in 1971 claimed that she, “first as Henrietta and then as HeLa, has a combined age of 51 years.” Lacks’ promotion to almost saintly status makes HeLa cells take on the mantle of a kind of sacred relic, like the alleged remains of saints and of Christ.

And what is so special about Lacks’ tumour cells that they have this tremendous vitality? There’s usually a limit to the number of times cells can replicate, because of the progressive shortening of the DNA segments called telomeres that cap each chromosome – a central aspect of the ageing process. But cancer cells are adept at repairing their fraying telomeres, and HeLa cells especially so. All the same, HeLa cell lines have now acquired so many mutations and chromosomal reshuffles that in some respects they hardly look human any longer. Whatever genomes they now possess, these barely resemble those of Henrietta Lacks.    

In 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris, so fed up with bickering about the origin of language, banned the subject from its meetings. Needless to say, that didn’t end the speculation or arguments. But speculation is almost all we have, because there’s so little else to go on to understand how and why our ancestors began to communicate.

At least, that’s true for verbal communication. With writing it’s another matter: the oldest evidence of that appears on artefacts from Mesopotamia engraved with the precursors to cuneiform characters that date back to around 3500 BC. No one doubts that oral language came much earlier than written language – but new research by two German researchers suggests that writing of a sort might in fact be much older than Mesopotamian civilization. They have studied around 200 objects collected in France, Germany and Belgium that are known to be around 40,000 years old and are associated with the so-called Aurignacian Stone Age culture of humans. Many of these are bones engraved with marks, but they include carvings such as exquisite figurines of mammoths, horses, bison and bears.

Objects like these leave no doubt that this was a sophisticated culture that made art, ornaments, and specialized tools. Even musical instruments have been found in a cluster of cave sites in Germany: flutes carved from bone and ivory. But the two researchers have now claimed something more: that the marks on these artefacts, typically dots, lines or crosses, can be regarded as “a system of intentional and conventional signs” – something like a true written language.

What this means is subtle. On the one hand, there’s no sign of anything like an alphabet or character system. On the other hand, it’s not enough to say that the marks are just “memory aids” – numerical tallies, say, like the archetypal scratches that count the days on a prison wall. Such artificial memory systems have been previously well documented, perhaps as far back as 70,000 years ago and associated not with Homo sapiens but with Neanderthals. To qualify as a sort of proto-language, the symbols need to show certain statistical features: how often they are repeated, for example. If they serve a word-like or semantic function, they won’t just appear at random, nor repeated regularly like a geometric pattern, but something in between.

The researchers used computer algorithms to calculate these statistical properties for the Aurignacian objects and confirmed that these fit with what would be expected in a writing-like system. To check if the mathematical methods are valid, they compared the results of the same analyses applied to early cuneiform and to modern writing. To their surprise, they found that the statistics of the Stone Age symbols more closely resembled cuneiform than cuneiform resembles modern writing.

The work can’t prove that the marks conveyed very specific meanings to those who made them, let alone suggest what those meanings would have been. But it does seem to show that the symbols were systematic and intentional, and were not just decorative or tally-marks. If it’s not the birth of writing that we’re seeing here, it is at least the gestation. (I can’t work out if the researchers were being ironic when they told reporters that so far they have just scratched the surface.)

I’m never sure how surprised to be at findings like these. We’ve long known that the caricature of the brutish, grunting “caveman” is unfair. Cave art like that at Altamira in the Pyrenees and Lascaux in France – also partly a product of Aurignacian culture, some of it around 35,000 years old – speaks of a refined artistic sensibility in the ancestors of Europeans. And not just them, for Neanderthals made cave art too. The oldest attributed to them, hand stencils and images of animals in Spanish caves, dates back to 64,000 years, at least 20,000 years before modern humans even arrived in Europe.

But we’re not Eurocentric here, right? So it’s good to be reminded that culture was flourishing elsewhere in the world too. A new report in Nature by a team mostly of Indonesian researchers describes a hand stencil from an island in the Southeast Sulawesi province of Indonesia that is even older – at least 67,800 years – than those of the “Spanish” Neanderthals, and represents the most ancient rock art ever discovered. The finding (if, as the researchers suspect, it was indeed made by modern humans and not some extinct species of Homo) supports the idea that this region – a prehistoric continent called Sahul – was populated by modern humans around that same time via the first planned, long-distance sea crossing known to be undertaken by our ancestors. These are truly portentous handprints in the sands of time.

Planet Earth is not a well-stirred mixture, and that’s a geopolitical problem. Historical conquest and dominion has often been motivated by the uneven distribution of natural resources, whether it’s oil, timber, gold or diamonds. One of the precious assets stoking international tension today is the metal elements called rare earths.

These metals are critical to a wide range of modern technologies. The strongest permanent magnets, used for example in MRI scanners, electric vehicles, and wind turbines, are made from alloys containing the rare earths neodymium, dysprosium and samarium. Yttrium, terbium, and europium are used in materials that emit coloured light, making them indispensable for visual display technologies in televisions and smart phones. Lanthanum is important for camera lenses and lighting applications, while cerium is a component of catalytic convertors in cars. Clearly, some of these uses are central to green technologies, and researchers are eager to find alternative materials that are less economically fraught.

The clue to the problem is in the name. Compared to technological mainstays such as iron, copper, and lead, rare-earth elements aren’t abundant in the Earth’s crust. Many of them were discovered as trace elements in other minerals, particularly those mined in the Swedish town of Ytterby, after which four of the 17 rare earths are named (including yttrium and terbium).

But the Swedish deposits were minor. Around 40% of the world’s available rare earth reserves are thought to be in China, which is responsible for nearly 70% of global production: around a quarter of a million tons per year. The United States ranks second with a mere 12% of global production. All of that comes from a single mine in the Mojave Desert, where proposals to expand extraction and processing collide with its location in a National Preserve. China is meanwhile seeking to secure its dominance by investing heavily in reserves in Africa and South America.

Because of the key importance of rare earths, this monopoly gives China immense market power that its government is happy to exploit for wider political gain. In 2010, for example, it halted exports of rare earths to Japan during a territorial dispute, sending prices soaring and causing alarm because China and Japan were the only suppliers of rare-earth magnets. China doubled duties on rare earths during the first trade war with Trump in 2018, and in 2022 it placed export controls on seven critical rare earth elements.

The US in particular is worried about reliance on China. Trump has pressed for a deal with Ukraine over rare earths and other critical mineral resources in the country, shamelessly leveraging Ukraine’s ongoing vulnerability. (Some have argued that the Russian invasion was itself motivated in part by the rare earth resources.) Greenland has rich deposits too – the eighth largest in the world – that are so far unexploited. Some think that under the ice sheets there is enough to rival China. (And you thought Trump’s plans were all about Russian and Chinese warships?)

Where else might rare earths be found? There are big resources in Brazil that are not yet being exploited, and claims of deposits in Turkey. But figures for both rare earth mineral reserves and production are notoriously inaccurate, if available at all. Taking advantage of such opportunities needs time – new mining facilities don’t materialize overnight – and can incur a heavy cost. It’s a terrible irony that some of the key materials needed for a transition to green technologies can be extracted only by wreaking huge environmental damage. Creating new mines in Brazil could accelerate degradation of the biodiverse Amazon rainforests; mining in Greenland would be equally ugly.

But Julie Klinger, a geographer at the University of Delaware, says that turning rare earths into a source of geopolitical conflict “is completely avoidable, and if we make them so it will be totally our fault.” She says the problem is that “extraction is organized according to a competitive market logic”: whoever produces them most cheaply wins, which means that ethical practices that respect human rights and environmental regulations often can’t compete. One reason China controls the market is because it has turned a blind eye to damaging and sometimes illegal mining operations. One (Chinese!) estimate a decade ago claimed that 40% of all rare earths are traded illegally.

Klinger argues that what is needed is much the same as for green technologies themselves: subsidies and public investment, and perhaps also a global strategy rather than a free-for-all. In other words, it’s the same old story of natural resources and their uses generally, everywhere and always.

During the Covid pandemic, Boris Johnson’s promise of a “world-beating” test-and trace system came to seem like a sick joke. But there was one respect in which the UK’s testing really did excel: analysing the viral genome in samples so the emergence of new variants could be spotted quickly. This ability relied heavily on one laboratory: the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire. Over the course of the pandemic, the institute analysed more than two million viral genomes in a round-the-clock operation. “We were watching the pandemic evolve in real time, hour by hour, as samples came in”, says the Sanger’s Director of Strategy, Partnerships and Innovation Julia Wilson.

This remarkable feat was a dramatic vindication for the Sanger’s existence and its unique status in between an academic research institute and an industrial lab. The keystone of the Wellcome Genome Campus near the village of Hinxton, in the countryside nine miles south of Cambridge, the institute is a cluster of modernist glass and concrete springing from the meadows around the River Cam.

The Sanger was founded in 1992, with funding primarily from the Wellcome Trust, to develop the large-scale gene sequencing technology needed for the Human Genome Project (HGP), the international initiative to read the three-billion-letter code (“sequence”) of human DNA. The institute is named after the British biochemist Fred Sanger, who won two Nobel prizes, the second in 1980 for developing key techniques used in genome sequencing. One third of the HGP sequencing was done at the Sanger.

It was always clear that the HGP would initiate a demand for more sequencing. The key to understanding our genome is to tease out the small differences in sequence between individuals so that we can see how different gene variants are associated with specific traits and diseases. That demands not just one reference genome sequence, but many thousands or even millions. No academic labs could generate data on that scale.

With that goal in mind, the Sanger was central to the international 1000 Genomes project that ran between 2008 and 2015 to collect and compare the genomes of “1000” (in the end it was just over 2,500) individuals to identify common genetic variants in diverse human populations – “common” meaning that they are found in at least 1% of those populations. Impressive in its day, that effort pales in comparison with what is now possible: the Sanger has sequenced more than half of the half a million genomes stored in the UK Biobank repository, a collection of genomic material from volunteers. Data like this makes it possible to identify the genetic roots of many rare diseases associated with gene variants that only a tiny proportion of people carry, as well as showing how such variants are distributed across different populations.

It’s not just about data. Understanding the roles of genes in our constitution requires a huge amount of fundamental research. Using gene-editing methods to alter the genomes of individual cells, for example, can help to reveal how genes actually function and how they are linked to “phenotypes”: the characteristics of tissues and organisms. Such work is being done in university labs all over the world, but what the Sanger can offer is resources to pursue it on a larger scale. As well as having genome sequencing facilities, the institute now possesses large-scale cell-culturing and gene-editing capabilities.

Thanks to such facilities, the Sanger plays a key role in the international Human Cell Atlas initiative, which seeks to map out all the cells in the human body and how they are arranged – a map that of course differs in detail for everyone but shares the same broad structure. So far, the heart, lung, and placenta are among the tissues and organs that have been closely mapped, helping to understand the differences between healthy and diseased tissues at the cellular scale. Researchers at the Sanger also investigate the genomes of non-human organisms, from gorillas and dogs to antibiotic-resistant bacteria: information that can advance our understanding of evolution, biodiversity, and biomedicine. Cancers – how they develop, and how they can be combatted – are a major focus of the research at the institute.

Wilson says that freedom from the academic treadmill means that the Sanger groups can take a much longer-term view, pursuing “decadal challenges that you can’t do in a university setting.” In this way, the institute has a “mandate to do science that no one else can do.”

“The HGP was the exemplar of a large-scale project that was hard to do in academia”, says the Sanger’s director Matthew Hurles, whose research team seeks to apply new genetic technologies to the diagnosis of rare genetic disorders. Research in university departments tend to be driven by hypothesis testing, the end product of which are academic papers. Thus “academia excels at doing deep but narrow research”, says Hurles. The Sanger, on the other hand, can focus on generating large data sets, like those now needed for AI, that drive the whole knowledge ecosystem forward.

That’s possible because of the type of funding it receives. Academics must rely on grants, and can only conduct the projects that get funded. But the Sanger can be more strategic, because it has “core funding” guaranteed by Wellcome. Faculty leaders can decide on a program and allocate resources in a top-down approach. “The director has the autonomy to look at what the world is doing and define strategic areas”, says Wilson.

This structure also means that the Sanger can pivot very quickly from one topic to another. “Wellcome wanted agility, political and financial independence”, says Wilson.  That’s what made it easy for the institute to drop everything in the pandemic and devote its huge sequencing capability to analysing viral genomes.

Sanger researchers must, however, be on board with the mission, says Hurles – which won’t suit everyone. It doesn’t mean they get less autonomy than academics, he adds – but it’s a different kind of autonomy. “At the Sanger they get to do science that they can’t do elsewhere.” The institute currently has around 1,300 staff, which includes 30-35 faculty and principal investigators, between 80-100 PhD students and around 100 postdoctoral students. Group leader Emma Davenport says that one of the advantages compared with academia is the ability to hire new team members quickly and get working on a promising new idea right away, without having to go through the slow and painful process of applying for grants.

On the other hand there is no tenure for staff, and in the past the Sanger has suffered accusations of a lack of due process for hiring and firing, with some staff complaining that resources were allocated unfairly and feeling that “the axe can fall at any time”. There were also accusations of bullying and harassment, leading to an independent investigation in 2018 which cleared the institute of wrongdoing but called for more transparency in decision-making.

It’s perplexing that the Sanger’s model is not adopted more widely. Universities are an invaluable source of ideas and discoveries, but some objectives, especially in the life sciences, demand repetitive work that doesn’t attract academic kudos. The commercial sector can be good at turning basic science into useful applications, but in a narrow and market-driven way that doesn’t necessarily serve key societal needs. The Sanger aims to translate discovery into genuinely useful procedures before “passing the baton on to pharmaceutical and biotech companies”, says Wilson. “We deliberately democratize discovery, then move on.”

There are efforts internationally to fill this same gap: leveraging basic science to produce socially useful capabilities and applications and generating knowledge that is valuable rather than glamorous. Germany positions its Fraunhöfer Institutes, funded by government and industry, somewhat in that space. The United States, with a long tradition of philanthropic funding for non-profit research, has centres such as the Salk Institute in California, the Janelia Research Campus in Virginia, and the Broad Institute, affiliated with Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And since 2016 the Francis Crick Institute in London has served as a hub of biomedical research funded by the UK’s Medical Research Council and the charities Cancer Research UK and Wellcome, although Hurles says it operates rather closer to an academic model.

Among its projects, the Sanger Institute has worked closely with Genomics England, affiliated with the NHS to work on genomic diagnostics of disease. “145 families have received rare-disease diagnosis due to a new method developed at the Sanger”, says Wilson. Davenport has been collaborating with the Rosie Hospital, part of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, to predict pregnancy outcomes and complications from genetic analysis.

It is hard to get this kind of institute right. Hurles notes that comparable institutions in the US, such as the Allen Institutes for Brain and Cell Science in Seattle, tend to be younger than 30 years or so. After a time, he says, it seems very hard to resist the “gravitational pull” of the academic system, with its rigid departments, publications-driven incentives, and dependency on grants. The UK hasn’t traditionally been very good at setting up research institutes that deviate from the standard academic model. The Alan Turing Institute, established in 2014 as a hub for research on AI, became an awkward halfway house, lacking any centralized base and staffed by fellows from academia. The result was institutional bickering over funds and a tendency for staff to do their own thing rather than collaborate; the institute is now in crisis.

The lack of institutional diversity in the UK was highlighted by the 2023 report on research, development and innovation headed by Sir Paul Nurse, director of the Crick Institute. “In academia, the sizes of teams, budgets, and projects, is similar”, says Hurles. But there are surely many ways to produce useful knowledge. “I’d love to see more unconventional institutions like Sanger in the world,” he says. It’s not a bad idea.

[This article was published online by The New World]

Barack Obama says aliens exist! Not undocumented immigrants to the US (although of course they do too), but aliens of the outer-space variety. In a “rapid-fire” Q&A during an interview with podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen broadcast on 4 February, Obama was asked “Are aliens real?” “They’re real”, the ex-president responded, “but I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in Area 51 [the US air force site in Nevada that has become the focus of many alien conspiracy theories]. There there’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they they hid it from the president of the United States.”

It was clearly a light-hearted answer, and the absurd headlines Obama’s comments provoked (“‘They’re real’: Barack Obama’s shock alien claims”) speak volumes about the crude level of public discourse on the subject. Such was the feverish response that Obama felt obliged to issue a clarification: “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low.”

That’s a sensible and informed view, and speaks to an ongoing debate among scientists. The universe is indeed vast – no one knows just how vast – and it is evidently thronging with stars that have solar systems of planets like that of our own Sun. Thanks to astronomical instruments such as the James Webb Space Telescope, we now know of more than 6,000 known “extrasolar” planets, and it’s generally thought that nearly all of the hundreds of billions of stars in each of the trillions of galaxies in the observable universe will host some.

But for planets to host life, they must have habitable conditions. Quite what counts as habitable is not clear. Many researchers believe it demands liquid water, meaning the planet can’t be too hot (like Mercury) or too cold (like the dwarf planet Pluto). But others speculate that other liquids, existing outside the temperature range of liquid water – such as the liquid hydrocarbons on Saturn’s moon Titan – might act as the solvent for alien life forms quite unlike those on Earth. Meanwhile, other moons in our solar system, such as Jupiter’s Europa and Ganymede, and Saturn’s Enceladus, seem to have global oceans of liquid water beneath an icy crust, even though their parent planets lie outside the “habitable zone” (neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water) of the solar system. Such moons boost the potential tally of inhabitable worlds even further.

And we can be confident that, even if Earth-like extrasolar planets – rocky, with oceans of water – are in a small minority among alien worlds, there will still be vast numbers of them. But how likely is it that life will have begun on any of them? Some astrobiologists – scientists studying the prospects of extraterrestrial life – think the origin of life on Earth was an extraordinarily unlikely, chance event. Others argue that life is almost inevitable when the conditions are amenable. They point to geological evidence suggesting life began almost as soon as it became possible at all once our planet had cooled from its fiery birth.

But even if life is common on other habitable worlds, the chance that it would become intelligent – as we like to consider ourselves – is far less clear. An argument proposed by cosmologist Brandon Carter in the 1980s implies that for life evolving by Darwinian natural selection to get to our level of complexity and intelligence demands that it pass through several unlikely “bottlenecks” in the evolutionary process. In this view, we are only here pondering these questions because we’re the lucky ones who made it when most alien life got stuck at the level of bacteria and algae. Recently, however, other scientists have challenged Carter’s “hard steps” hypothesis, saying that on the contrary it might be common for Darwinian evolution to deliver high intelligence, given enough time.

When we speak of “aliens”, it’s typically this intelligent variety we have in mind – no one seems to care much about alien slime that will never build spaceships. Obama is right that “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there” – that’s an uncontroversial, even if not universal, scientific view. He’s also right that the physical obstacles to interstellar travel by intelligent aliens look daunting, perhaps insurmountable. The only reason we got excited about a US president saying such things is that it seems like a wink at Area 51 conspiracy theories. But for that sort of thing – witness Trump’s past interest in the US military’s “UFO files” – we’re looking at the wrong president.

As with Peter Mandelson, so in the science world: the Epstein files are not telling us anything that most ordinary punters didn’t already know, but are revealing the full, rotten, appalling extent of it. We have known for years that Epstein liked to surround himself with a certain type of male scientific “intellectual”: arrogant, entitled, “anti-woke” and often misogynist, typically late middle-aged and Ivy League and on the lookout for young women to impress and sleep with. We even knew (mostly) who they were. The Epstein files have simply shed some more light on this network, on how many within it continued to fawn to Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting underage sex and to accept his money and his offers of wild parties.

I’m not talking about Elon Musk – he was evidently caught up in it all, but let’s not confuse him with real scientists. I’m talking about people like evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers (sample email from 2012: “that was a wonderful lunch, a REAL pleasure… quite apart from the bevy of beauties”), linguist Noam Chomsky, physicist Lawrence Krauss, and mathematician Martin Nowak. This isn’t just about scientists – Epstein’s academic net spread wider, for example snagging economist Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, whose speculations in 2005 about whether women are just bad at maths was evidently just the mild public face of his predatory misogyny. But scientists were Epstein’s thing, and others who visited his island (even if there is no evidence linking them to sexual misdemeanours) include Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins.

Some of this was primarily about money. Joichi Ito, director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, resigned in 2019 after apparently concealing the source of funding to the lab from Epstein. But often it was about status, if not simply about sex. Many of Epstein’s pet scientists were supplied by literary agent John Brockman, famed in the 1990s for turning scientists into literary superstars who commanded huge book advances and wrote authoritative-sounding op-eds. This was the Big Ideas crew, almost entirely white males of a certain age. Brockman styled them as heralding a Third Culture (“rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives”) centred on his online salon the Edge Foundation, of which Epstein was the major funder.

There was (apart from the non-representativeness) nothing inherently wrong with this. Some of those in Brockman’s orbit were and remain phenomenally insightful intellectuals, and by no means all had Epstein connections. Others severed those links after Epstein’s first conviction. Brockman’s efforts to get science seen, to put it centre-stage in our cultural conversation, was commendable. And Brockman himself can be seen in the files pushing back on Epstein’s suggestion that women just don’t have the intellect to contribute to this world of ideas.

Yet we can’t ignore the thematic overlaps, not to mention the shared personnel, between Edge World and Epstein Island. One of the leading scientists who failed to cut ties to Epstein after 2008 has rationalized his mistake as “nerd tunnel vision”. But of course! Nerd tunnel vision is a defining feature of much of the Edge discourse: moral obtuseness; a determination to win the argument rather than to listen and ponder; a tendency to fabulate improbable futures from narrow “rational” logic; ignorance of and contempt for other ways of seeing the world. And in some cases, evidently a burning desire for fame and status, fuelled in part by the opportunities that brings for sexual conquests (consensual or not).

I am not the only science communicator of a certain age to look at all this not just with disgust and dismay but with a sense of “there but for the grace of God”. When I was starting out as a writer in the 90s, one big shot in science books asked me if I’d considered getting on Brockman’s list. I figured I was too small a fish to even try, for all the allure of six-figure deals. If it had happened, would I, naïve and easily impressed, have been able to resist invitations to meet all these big shots?

The Epstein files have exposed a moral rot in the circus of scientific public intellectuals, especially in the US. It doesn’t of course taint everyone in that arena, but it is depressingly easy for those of us who cover science to predict the famous names that have surface in these emails, or the kinds of things they will say – like Krauss persistently begging Epstein for legal advice on the charges of sexual harassment he faced from Arizona State University. (Krauss denies the charges but took retirement after being recommended for dismissal.) Celebrity culture always has a corrosive side, and intellectuals with feet of clay are nothing new. But in science it can have a coarsening effect on scientific discourse itself. Flashy simplicity trumps thoughtful complexity: these “thought leaders” often make claims that leave real experts with their heads in their hands. Considered views on history and ethics become distractions. And there’s a politicized element: Edge culture intersects with the technofascist futurism of Silicon Valley libertarians, and laments about #MeToo, wokeism, and pushy feminists are a constant refrain in the email exchanges. Frankly it stinks, and it doesn’t end with Epstein.