Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society

Established to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, to advance the public’s understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society.

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INDUSTRY LEADERS ESTABLISH PARTNERSHIP ON AI BEST PRACTICES

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September 28, 2016 NEW YORK —  IBM, DeepMind,/Google,  Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook today announced that they will create a non-profit organization that will work to advance public understanding of artificial intelligence technologies (AI) and formulate best practices on the challenges and opportunities within the field. Academics, non-profits, and specialists in policy and ethics will be invited to join the Board of the organization, named the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society (Partnership on AI).

The objective of the Partnership on AI is to address opportunities and challenges with AI technologies to benefit people and society. Together, the organization’s members will conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness, and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability, and robustness of the technology. It does not intend to lobby government or other policymaking bodies.

The organization’s founding members will each contribute financial and research resources to the partnership and will share leadership with independent third-parties, including academics, user group advocates, and industry domain experts. There will be equal representation of corporate and non-corporate members on the board of this new organization. The Partnership is in discussions with professional and scientific organizations, such as the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), as well as non-profit research groups including the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), and anticipates announcements regarding additional participants in the near future.

AI technologies hold tremendous potential to improve many aspects of life, ranging from healthcare, education, and manufacturing to home automation and transportation. Through rigorous research, the development of best practices, and an open and transparent dialogue, the founding members of the Partnership on AI hope to maximize this potential and ensure it benefits as many people as possible.

Steven Pinker interview: case against bioethocrats & CRISPR germline ban

CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology is red-hot right now.

It has great power for research in the lab and there are hypothetical transformative clinical applications of CRISPR too. The latter efforts could include experimental attempts at reversal of disease-causing mutations in one-cell embryos with the hope that they then grow into full-fledged, healthy human beings. Hypothetically CRISPR could also be used for pursuing human enhancement via germline genetic modification.

As a tool CRISPR is exciting and my own lab is using it for genetic studies, but from a technical perspective it’s not perfect. It can introduce a range of types of errors into the genome, with largely unknown biological consequences. To date, the first and only report of CRISPR-based modification of human embryos was arguably most notable for the problems encountered including genetic errors. However, suboptimal CRISPR methods were used so better design would almost certainly reduce risks of errors.

CRISPR raises a number of questions and has sparked many discussions. 

• How should we handle a cutting edge biotechnology of this kind as a community of scientists? 
• What if anything should be the appropriate role of others in such considerations including bioethicists? }
• Should there be a temporary moratorium on clinical use of CRISPR? 

I tackled some of these issues in my own past piece Practical Plan for Managing Human Germline Genetic Modification. Others advocate for a more liberal perspective on the road to possible clinical use of CRISPR, focusing on the potential for great benefits.

Overall, this all might be summed up as follows: how do we balance the gas pedal and the brakes on CRISPR’s use in humans to aim for the greatest overall net benefit?

Steven Pinker

Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard has been one of the most outspoken advocates for more gas and less brakes here. Both in writing and in talks he has expressed the view that we should move forward without substantial impediments to CRISPR-Cas9. For instance, Pinker’s “get out of the way” editorial last week in The Boston Globe on CRISPR was very critical of bioethics and advocated an expeditious path forward for the research without constraints. It sparked wide-ranging discussions and even some anger from bioethicists. Update: see also this brief reply to Pinker’s interview from noted bioethicist, Art Caplan.

A few days ago I reached out to Dr. Pinker to do an interview to learn more of the specifics about his views with a goal toward increasing dialogue. For instance, I wondered if he really felt that strongly about the harms caused by bioethics that were suggested in his editorial. I want to thank him for taking the time to provide such detailed answers that make the full depth of his views on these issues far clearer here than in the past.

Knoepfler. 1. Related to your talk at BEINGS and your more recent editorial, what do you see as the appropriate role for bioethics and bioethicists in the life sciences? “Get out of the way” seems rather absolute. Can you help us understand the nuances there in your view of bioethics if any?

Pinker: There’s a difference between ethics, on the one hand, and “bioethics” and “bioethicists,” on the other. Of course everything a scientist does—everything a human being does—ought to be ethically guided. But bioethics has become a professional guild that all too often impedes sound ethical concerns rather than advancing them. Many moral philosophers—the scholars who specialize in evaluating the soundness of ethical arguments—believe that mainstream bioethics commonly trades in confused claims based on emotion and woolly thinking (see these articles by Julian Savulescu,Sally Satel, and me for examples).

Take the very foundation of ethics. You’d think it would be an obvious ethical principle that life is better than death, health is better than disease, and vigor is better than disability. But, astonishingly, so-called bioethicists have repeatedly denied these truisms, either explicitly (in the case of the country’s former bioethicist-in-chief, Leon Kass, who argued that the desire to extend life is a sign of shallowness and immaturity), or implicitly, by fetishizing sweeping rubrics such as dignity, equity, social justice, sacredness, privacy, and consent at the expense of the health and lives of actual people.

It’s not just that many bioethicists practice bad moral philosophy. It’s that they are entangled in a conflict of interest. Institutionalized bioethics has become an academic and bureaucratic industry, and they need to rationalize their existence. You hardly need a bioethicist to tell you that it’s wrong to inject typhus into twins or to withhold antibiotics from syphilis patients. But to come up with an abstruse argument as to why a parent should be prohibited from saving the life of her infant by donating a part of her liver—for that you need a “bioethicist.”

Regarding my advice to “get out of the way,” the nuances were stated, albeit tersely, in the article. The first is that a truly ethical bioethics must weigh the benefits of any restriction on research against the harm that will be caused to the vast number of people who would benefit if the research proceeded expeditiously. Savulescu puts it starkly: “To delay by 1 year the development of a treatment that cures a lethal disease that kills 100,000 people per year is to be responsible for the deaths of those 100,000 people, even if you never see them.”

The second is that a truly ethical bioethics should justify any restrictions on research with rigorous, defensible arguments about benefit and harm, not with moralistic grandstanding, science fiction dystopias, perverse analogies to Nazis and nuclear weapons, esoteric theories pulled out of the air, or freak-show scenarios like armies of cloned Hitlers, people selling their eyeballs on eBay, or warehouses of zombies to supply people with spare organs—all of which I’ve heard in these debates.

And as I wrote, no one questions the need to protect patients and research subjects from exploitation or harm. If there are flaws in the existing safeguards, as, for example, Alice Dreger argues, the safeguards should be fine-tuned or re-engineered. This is not the same as giving more power to the bioethocrats. A great deal of bioethical argumentation has nothing to do with protecting people. It rather cooks up reasons why consenting adults should be prohibited from doing things that help them or others while harming no one—a prominent example being recipient-solicited or incentivized organ and tissue donation. And establishment bioethics has caused preventable harm. Most infamous is the case of Jesse Gelsinger, the young man who died in a Phase-1 trial of gene therapy in 1999. Common sense would say that the experimental therapy should have been tested for safety on infants with a severe form of the disease who would have died anyway. But Arthur Caplan, the country’s most famous bioethicist, argued that the parents of such infants would be so consumed with grief that they could not truly give consent—the kind of paternalistic argument that is all too common in this field—and that an 18-year-old with a mild form of the disease, who technically could give consent, should be enrolled instead. A strained interpretation of the magic word “consent” was allowed to trump expected harm and benefit, and the result was tragedy.

Today mainstream bioethics gets in the way on a massive scale. The most obvious example is Institutional Review Boards. They are blatant abridgments of free speech, convenient weapons for fanatics to wield against people whose opinions they don’t like, and high-volume red-tape dispensers which bog down research while being unnecessary or even harmful to the protection of patients and research subjects. (See the Illinois White Paper and American Association of University Professors reports on IRB mission creep, David Hyman’s “The Pathologies of Institutional Review Boards,” and the new books The Ethics Police by Robert Klitzman and The Censor’s Hand by Carl Schneider). Regulations on confidentiality and consent to use data and tissues have also gone way overboard. The future of medicine hinges on the use of massive, open-access datasets to find signals in the noise. If every byte has to be multiply certified for consent and privacy, or even destroyed after a few years, no matter how inconsequential to the person who contributed it, then huge numbers of future patients will suffer or will fail to be helped by our faulty knowledge of the real effects of treatments.

There is, to be sure, an important role for bioethics. Satel puts it well: bioethicists at their best are “scholars who study the intellectual and social history of value controversies in medicine and biotechnology. They can teach us about the technical and cultural antecedents of modern debates and show us how to engage in disciplined moral inquiry. They are skilled at drawing conceptual maps of the dilemma at hand while enumerating various ways to resolve it.”

Knoepfler. 2. Forgetting bioethicists entirely for the moment, prominent scientists such as Jennifer Doudna, David Baltimore, and others have publicly called in unambiguous terms for at least a temporary moratorium on clinical applications of human germline editing technology. Do you disagree or agree? Why?

Pinker: Disagree. The specific harms they warn against, such as inducing cancer, mutations, or birth defects in the unborn child are already ruled out by a plethora of existing regulations and norms. Obviously we shouldn’t mess around with embryos in ways that have a significant probability of producing a sick or deformed child with no compensating benefit. But why do we need a new, across-the-board ban on an entire method to rule out what’s already ruled out on the uncontroversial grounds of protecting individuals against foreseeable harm? The authors seem to be acquiescing to the yuck-factor that surrounds the very idea of germline modification, if for no other reason than to draw a firewall around their own research programs, which are restricted to the genetic modification of somatic cells. But scientists should work to dismantle irrational taboos, not indulge them.

First, the idea that there is some sacrosanct entity called “the human germline,” such that deliberately manipulating it would violate this sanctity, or restrict the freedom of future generations, or alter the species in unprecedented and frightening ways, is biological nonsense. No two people, not even monozygotic twins, have the same germline. Each of us introduces dozens of random mutations into our germlines, often multiplied by voluntary choices such as exposing ourselves to mutagens like tobacco smoke or fathering a child in middle age. And we affect the genetic makeup of our offspring, and the species, every time we choose to have unprotected sex with one partner rather than another. So even if it did come to pass that some people edited out disease genes, or (far less likely—see below) edited in enhancement genes, it would be a droplet in the maelstrom of naturally churning genomes.

Second, a ban or moratorium would only reinforce the pernicious aura of dread that surrounds genomic modifications. This is the dread that incites across-the-board opposition to genetically modified organisms and that underpins the bogus moral arguments against cytoplasmic donation for mitochondrial disease (the so-called three-parent babies—another case in which so-called bioethical concerns increase rather than decrease death and suffering). And the spurious ideal of germline sacredness could compromise the treatment of disease in other ways. Though lots of things went wrong in the Gelsinger case, one complication was the decision to administer massive doses of the viral vector directly to his liver, with the risk of lethal inflammation, rather than systemically, out of the fear that (God forbid!) it might introduce the needed gene into his sperm-forming cells. That’s probably not what killed Gelsinger, but it did kill a monkey in a safety trial, and this germlinophobia could certainly endanger gene-therapy patients in the future.

Third, germline editing could have direct benefits in a number of scenarios:

• to parents with disease genes who don’t produce enough viable embryos for preimplantation genetic diagnosis (especially when more than one such gene is involved, which multiplies the number of necessary embryos); 
• to parents who both are homozygous for some recessive disease gene (not far-fetched given how often people meet each other through support groups); if future data were to show that PGD babies have compromised longevity or health; and 
• in other scenarios that perhaps we can’t imagine. 

For these reasons Savulescu, with Chris Gyngell, and Henry Miller with Drew Kershen argue that research on germline editing is not only morally permissible but morally imperative.

Knoepfler. 3. You appear relatively confident in future benefits of new biotechnology such as CRISPR to millions of people, but you seem very skeptical of the risk predictions that you described as “speculative harms”. What makes you so confident of benefit and at the same time so skeptical of risks? If us humans struggle generally at accurately predicting outcomes of biomedical science, why should there be a more accurate expectation of benefits as opposed to risks?

Pinker: No, this is wrong. Though it’s certain that the biomedical research enterprise as a whole will deliver benefits to billions of people, we can have no such confidence in particular technologies. That’s why we need a diversified research portfolio, without arbitrary bans. If you ban something, the probability that people will benefit is zero. If you don’t ban it, the probability is greater than zero.

As for the potential harms, they are far too nebulous to justify a ban or moratorium. Far from being confident in the power of gene editing, I’m on the record as being skeptical that we’ll ever see genetic enhancement of babies—the outcome that the prohibitionists and moratoristas dread and that many bioethicists blithely assume is inevitable. (For example, in 1999 Caplan announced that before the end of this century “We will see many children made by the artificial creation of embryos…This prediction is 100 percent certain.”) The prophesy of designer babies ought to be a relic of the early 1990s, when people thought there was “A Gene For” this or that talent. We now know that heritable psychological traits such as intelligence and personality are the product of hundreds or thousands of genes, each with a tiny effect, many of which may have harmful effects as well, such as an increased risk of neurological disease or cancer. With each enhancement gene providing a nugatory benefit and a non-negligible risk, and with the editing process itself imposing risks, it’s unlikely that today’s morbidly risk-averse helicopter parents will take a chance at enhancing a child—they won’t even feed their babies genetically modified applesauce! And that’s assuming that such a procedure ever got to the point of clearing conventional safety hurdles, which is far from likely. Add these risks to the fantastic expense and tribulation of IVF compared to good old-fashioned sex, and one should conclude that widespread genetic enhancement is too unlikely a possibility to worry about. And that’s assuming we should worry at all. There is, in addition, the argument (from Savulescu, the transhumanists, and others) that if enhancement were ever feasible it would be a good thing, not a bad thing—or at least a matter of individual freedom rather than government coercion.

Now, the story is different for editing out disease genes. There are more ways that a complex system can break down than that it can work better, and it’s easier to fix a defect than engineer in an improvement. Also, the benefits are very different for preventing death and disease (huge) than for implementing an enhancement (minor). So the possibility that germ-line editing might prevent disease in the future is well worth exploring.

Knoepfler. 4. Congress recently held a public hearing on human germline modification and is considering a legal provision to block editing of human embryos. What do you think of having such a hearing and the possibility of a restrictive legal provision? You said to bioethics, “get out of the way”. Should we scientists say the same thing to lawmakers? Why?

Knoepfler. 5. There is likely to be a NAS meeting sometime late this year on human germline modification by such technology as CRISPR-Cas9 and mitochondrial transfer (3-person IVF) in the spirit of the 1975 Asilomar meeting. Do you think this new meeting will achieve positive outcomes such as a white paper that appropriately has a vision for the future? What if the consensus is for a moratorium? Could you support that?

Pinker: I’ll answer these together. I think that scientists should reiterate the principle that no experiment should be permitted which imposes an unreasonable risk of an illness or birth defect on an individual. But no, I don’t think that scientists should support a ban or moratorium on germline genetic editing, for the reasons I set out in my answers to questions 2 and 3. Though the Asilomar recommendations have long been a source of self-congratulation among scientists, they were opposed by a number of geneticists at the time, who correctly argued that they were an overreaction which would needlessly encumber and delay important research. And the journalist Victor McElheny reminds us that the recommendations sowed a panic which came perilously close to shutting down some of the nation’s major laboratories, a danger he argues we are now in danger of repeating.

That having been said, I recognize that the political arena follows different rules than scientific and intellectual discourse. The scientists who lead major research institutions and deal with politicians and other public figures have to master the arts of compromise, tact, euphemism, and strategic deal-cutting. That’s how democracy works, and I’m grateful to the scientific leaders who carve out a space in which the rest of us can flourish. There are things they may believe but can’t say. But it’s important that someone says them, and that’s how I see my role in these debates.

ORIGINAL: Ipscell

August 10, 2015

MIT, Broad scientists overcome key CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing hurdle

Courtesy of Ian Slaymaker/Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

The researchers used structural knowledge of Cas9 to guide engineering of a highly specific genome-editing tool.

MIT, Broad scientists overcome key CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing hurdle

Team re-engineers system to dramatically cut down on editing errors; improvements advance future human applications.

The following is adapted from a press release issued today by the Broad Institute.

Researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT have engineered changes to the revolutionary CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing system that significantly cut down on “off-target” editing errors. The refined technique addresses one of the major technical issues in the use of genome editing.

The CRISPR-Cas9 system works by making a precisely targeted modification in a cell's DNA. The protein Cas9 alters the DNA at a location that is specified by a short RNA whose sequence matches that of the target site. While Cas9 is known to be highly efficient at cutting its target site, a major drawback of the system has been that, once inside a cell, it can bind to and cut additional sites that are not targeted. This has the potential to produce undesired edits that can alter gene expression or knock a gene out entirely, which might lead to the development of cancer or other problems. 

In a paper published today in Science, Feng Zhang and his colleagues report that changing three of the approximately 1,400 amino acids that make up the Cas9 enzyme from S. pyogenes dramatically reduced “off-target editing” to undetectable levels in the specific cases examined. Zhang is the W.M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering in MIT’s departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering, and a member of both the Broad Institute and McGovern Institute.

Zhang and his colleagues used knowledge about the structure of the Cas9 protein to decrease off-target cutting. DNA, which is negatively charged, binds to a groove in the Cas9 protein that is positively charged. Knowing the structure, the scientists were able to predict that replacing some of the positively charged amino acids with neutral ones would decrease the binding of “off target” sequences much more than “on target” sequences.

After experimenting with various possible changes, Zhang’s team found that mutations in three amino acids dramatically reduced “off-target” cuts. For the guide RNAs tested, “off-target” cutting was so low as to be undetectable.

The newly-engineered enzyme, which the team calls “enhanced” S. pyogenes Cas9, or eSpCas9, will be useful for genome editing applications that require a high level of specificity. The Zhang Lab is immediately making the eSpCas9 enzyme available for researchers worldwide. The team believes the same charge-changing approach will work with other recently described RNA-guided DNA targeting enzymes, including Cpf1, C2C1, and C2C3, which Zhang and his collaborators reported on earlier this year.

The prospect of rapid and efficient genome editing raises many ethical and societal concerns, says Zhang, who is speaking this morning at the International Summit on Gene Editing in Washington. “Many of the safety concerns are related to off-target effects,” he says. “We hope the development of eSpCas9 will help address some of those concerns, but we certainly don’t see this as a magic bullet. The field is advancing at a rapid pace, and there is still a lot to learn before we can consider applying this technology for clinical use.”

ORIGINAL: MIT News

News Office 

December 1, 2015

How swarm intelligence could save us from the dangers of AI

Image Credit: diez artwork/Shutterstock

We’ve heard a lot of talk recently about the dangers of artificial intelligence. From Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates, to Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak, luminaries around the globe have been sounding the alarm, warning that we could lose control over this powerful technology — after all, AI is about creating systems that have minds of their own. A true AI could one day adopt goals and aspirations that harm us.

But what if we could enjoy the benefits of AI while ensuring that human values and sensibilities remain an integral part of the system?

This is where something called Artificial Swarm Intelligence comes in – a method for building intelligent systems that keeps humans in the loop, merging the power of computational algorithms with the wisdom, creativity, and intuition of real people. A number of companies around the world are already exploring swarms.

• There’s Enswarm, a UK startup that is using swarm technologies to assist with recruitment and employment decisions. 
• There’s Swarm.fund, a startup using swarming and crypto-currencies like Bitcoin as a new model for fundraising. 
• And the human swarming company I founded, Unanimous A.I., creates a unified intellect from any group of networked users.

This swarm intelligence technology may sound like science fiction, but it has its roots in nature.

It all goes back to the birds and the bees – fish and ants too. Across countless species, social groups have developed methods of amplifying their intelligence by working together in closed-loop systems. Known commonly as flocks, schools, colonies, and swarms, these natural systems enable groups to combine their insights and thereby outperform individual members when solving problems and making decisions. Scientists call this “Swarm Intelligence” and it supports the old adage that many minds are better than one.

But what about us humans?
Clearly, we lack the natural ability to form closed-loop swarms, but like many other skills we can’t do naturally, emerging technologies are filling a void. Leveraging our vast networking infrastructure, new software techniques are allowing online groups to form artificial swarms that can work in synchrony to answer questions, reach decisions, and make predictions, all while exhibiting the same types of intelligence amplifications as seen in nature. The approach is sometimes called “blended intelligence” because it combines the hardware and software technologies used by AI systems with populations of real people, creating human-machine systems that have the potential of outsmarting both humans and pure-software AIs alike.

It should be noted that “swarming” is different from traditional “crowdsourcing,” which generally uses votes, polls, or surveys to aggregate opinions. While such methods are valuable for characterizing populations, they don’t employ the real-time feedback loops used by artificial swarms to enable a unique intelligent system to emerge. It’s the difference between measuring what the average member of a group thinks versus allowing that group to think together and draw conclusions based upon their combined knowledge and intuition.

Outside of the companies I mentioned above, where else can such collective technologies be applied? One area that’s currently being explored is medical diagnosis, a process that requires deep factual knowledge along with the experiential wisdom of the practitioner. Can we merge the knowledge and wisdom of many doctors into a single emergent diagnosis that outperforms the diagnosis of a single practitioner? The answer appears to be yes. In a recent study conducted by Humboldt-University of Berlin and RAND Corporation, a computational collective of radiologists outperformed single practitioners when viewing mammograms, reducing false positives and false negatives. In a separate study conducted by John Carroll University and the Cleveland Clinic, a collective of 12 radiologists diagnosed skeletal abnormalities. As a computational collective, the radiologists produced a significantly higher rate of correct diagnosis than any single practitioner in the group. Of course, the potential of artificially merging many minds into a single unified intelligence extends beyond medical diagnosis to any field where we aim to exceed natural human abilities when making decisions, generating predictions, and solving problems.

Now, back to the original question of why Artificial Swarm Intelligence is a safer form of AI.
Although heavily reliant on hardware and software, swarming keeps human sensibilities and moralities as an integral part of the processes. As a result, this “human-in-the-loop” approach to AI combines the benefits of computational infrastructure and software efficiencies with the unique values that each person brings to the table:

• creativity, 
• empathy, 
• morality, and 
• justice. 

And because swarm-based intelligence is rooted in human input, the resulting intelligence is far more likely to be aligned with humanity – not just with our values and morals, but also with our goals and objectives.

How smart can an Artificial Swarm Intelligence get?
That’s still an open question, but with the potential to engage millions, even billions of people around the globe, each brimming with unique ideas and insights, swarm intelligence may be society’s best hope for staying one step ahead of the pure machine intelligences that emerge from busy AI labs around the world.

Louis Rosenberg is CEO of swarm intelligence company Unanimous A.I. He did his doctoral work at Stanford University in robotics, virtual reality, and human-computer interaction. He previously developed the first immersive augmented reality system as a researcher for the U.S. Air Force in the early 1990s and founded the VR company Immersion Corp and the 3D digitizer company Microscribe.

ORIGINAL: VentureBeat

LOUIS ROSENBERG, UNANIMOUS A.I. 

NOVEMBER 22, 2015

How Your Brain Is Wired Reveals the Real You

The Human Connectome Project finds surprising correlations between brain architecture and behavior

©iStock.com

The brain’s wiring patterns can shed light on a person’s positive and negative traits, researchers report in Nature Neuroscience. The finding, published on September 28, is the first from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), an international effort to map active connections between neurons in different parts of the brain.

The HCP, which launched in 2010 at a cost of US$40 million, seeks to scan the brain networks, or connectomes, of 1,200 adults. Among its goals is to chart the networks that are active when the brain is idle; these are thought to keep the different parts of the brain connected in case they need to perform a task.

In April, a branch of the project led by one of the HCP's co-chairs, biomedical engineer Stephen Smith at the University of Oxford, UK, released a database of resting-state connectomes from about 460 people between 22 and 35 years old. Each brain scan is supplemented by information on approximately 280 traits, such as the person's age, whether they have a history of drug use, their socioeconomic status and personality traits, and their performance on various intelligence tests.

Axis of connectivity

Smith and his colleagues ran a massive computer analysis to look at how these traits varied among the volunteers, and how the traits correlated with different brain connectivity patterns. The team was surprised to find a single, stark difference in the way brains were connected. People with more 'positive' variables, such as more education, better physical endurance and above-average performance on memory tests, shared the same patterns. Their brains seemed to be more strongly connected than those of people with 'negative' traits such as smoking, aggressive behaviour or a family history of alcohol abuse.

Marcus Raichle, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, is impressed that the activity and anatomy of the brains alone were enough to reveal this 'positive-negative' axis. “You can distinguish people with successful traits and successful lives versus those who are not so successful,” he says.

But Raichle says that it is impossible to determine from this study how different traits relate to one another and whether the weakened brain connections are the cause or effect of negative traits. And although the patterns are clear across the large group of HCP volunteers, it might be some time before these connectivity patterns could be used to predict risks and traits in a given individual. Deanna Barch, a psychologist at Washington University who co-authored the latest study, says that once these causal relationships are better understood, it might be possible to push brains toward the 'good' end of the axis.

Van Wedeen, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says that the findings could help to prioritize future research. For instance, one of the negative traits that pulled a brain farthest down the negative axis was marijuana use in recent weeks. Wedeen says that the finding emphasizes the importance of projects such as one launched by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse last week, which will follow 10,000 adolescents for 10 years to determine how marijuana and other drugs affect their brains.

Wedeen finds it interesting that the wiring patterns associated with people's general intelligence scores were not exactly the same as the patterns for individual measures of cognition—people with good hand–eye coordination, for instance, fell farther down the negative axis than did those with good verbal memory. This suggests that the biology underlying cognition might be more complex than our current definition of general intelligence, and that it could be influenced by demographic and behavioural factors. “Maybe it will cause us to reconsider what [the test for general intelligence] is measuring,” he says. “We have a new mystery now.”

Much more connectome data should emerge in the next few years. The Harvard Aging Brain Study, for instance, is measuring active brain connections in 284 people aged between 65 and 90, and released its first data earlier this year. And Smith is running the Developing Human Connectome Project in the United Kingdom, which is imaging the brains of 1,200 babies before and after birth. He expects to release its first data in the next few months. Meanwhile, the HCP is analysing genetic data from its participants, which include a large number of identical and fraternal twins, to determine how genetic and environmental factors relate to brain connectivity patterns.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 28, 2015.

ORIGINAL: Scientific American

By Sara Reardon and Nature magazine

September 28, 2015

First almost fully-formed human brain grown in lab, researchers claim

Research team say tiny brain could be used to test drugs and study diseases, but scientific peers urge caution as data on breakthrough kept under wraps

The tiny brain, which resembles that of
a five-week-old foetus, is not conscious.
Photograph: Ohio State University

An almost fully-formed human brain has been grown in a lab for the first time, claim scientists from Ohio State University. The team behind the feat hope the brain could transform our understanding of neurological disease.

Though not conscious the miniature brain, which resembles that of a five-week-old foetus, could potentially be useful for scientists who want to study the progression of developmental diseases. It could also be used to test drugs for conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, since the regions they affect are in place during an early stage of brain development.

The brain, which is about the size of a pencil eraser, is engineered from adult human skin cells and is the most complete human brain model yet developed, claimed Rene Anand of Ohio State University, Columbus, who presented the work today at the Military Health System Research Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Scientists create lab-grown spinal cords. Read more

Previous attempts at growing whole brains have at best achieved mini-organs that resemble those of nine-week-old foetuses, although these “cerebral organoids” were not complete and only contained certain aspects of the brain. “We have grown the entire brain from the get-go,” said Anand.

Anand and his colleagues claim to have reproduced 99% of the brain’s diverse cell types and genes. They say their brain also contains a spinal cord, signalling circuitry and even a retina.

The ethical concerns were non-existent, said Anand. “We don’t have any sensory stimuli entering the brain. This brain is not thinking in any way.”

Anand claims to have created the brain by converting adult skin cells into pluripotent cells: stem cells that can be programmed to become any tissue in the body. These were then grown in a specialised environment that persuaded the stem cells to grow into all the different components of the brain and central nervous system.

According to Anand, it takes about 12 weeks to create a brain that resembles the maturity of a five-week-old foetus. To go further would require a network of blood vessels that the team cannot yet produce. “We’d need an artificial heart to help the brain grow further in development,” said Anand.

Several researchers contacted by the Guardian said it was hard to judge the quality of the work without access to more data, which Anand is keeping under wraps due to a pending patent on the technique. Many were uncomfortable that the team had released information to the press without the science having gone through peer review.

Zameel Cader, a consultant neurologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, said that while the work sounds very exciting, it’s not yet possible to judge its impact. “When someone makes such an extraordinary claim as this, you have to be cautious until they are willing to reveal their data.”

3D-printed brain tissue. Read more

If the team’s claims prove true, the technique could revolutionise personalised medicine. “If you have an inherited disease, for example, you could give us a sample of skin cells, we could make a brain and then ask what’s going on,” said Anand.

You could also test the effect of different environmental toxins on the growing brain, he added. “We can look at the expression of every gene in the human genome at every step of the development process and see how they change with different toxins. Maybe then we’ll be able to say ‘holy cow, this one isn’t good for you.’”

For now, the team say they are focusing on using the brain for military research, to understand the effect of post traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries.

ORIGINAL: The Guardian

Helen Thomson

Tuesday 18 August 2015 

Janine Benyus: Inventing the Eco-Industrial Age

Could a large-scale industrial factory actually be designed to be good for the environment and for the ecosystem that surrounds it? And could that, in turn, generate long-term economic value for the population of people connected to that factory? Author and global bioengineering guru Janine Benyus doesn’t just believe it’s possible—she’s partnering with the world’s biggest carpet tile manufacturer to set the example to follow. 

Atlanta-based Interface is already on track to hit zero-waste status by 2020, thanks to decades of sustainability initiatives, such as operating four of seven factories with 100 percent renewable energy and using simulation technology to replace physical carpet samples. The next step, which Benyus and Interface are plotting, is a project they call “Factory as a Forest,” which entails remaking one of Interface’s 10 factories, in New South Wales, Australia, using the local ecosystem as the new foundation.

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This isn’t just the next flavor of the month in corporate social responsibility. Benyus, founder of the Biomimicry Institute, helps clients such as Nike tap into biology and planetary science as a new source of tech innovation. For example, her consultancy studied how nature captures fog and wicks moisture to help an aircraft manufacturer reduce moisture and the spread of germs within an airplane cabin. With Interface, she and her team are helping define the region’s specific “ecosystem services” —how much water it stores, how much carbon it sequesters, how many pollinators it supports. Interface, in turn, will use those guidelines to ensure that the ecological “output” of the new factory operates in the black, not the red. 

We asked Benyus to explain in greater detail how this concept can work, and for her thoughts on a tech-enabled future. 

What excites you about where technology is taking humankind?

I’m excited by the fact that we are probably the first generation to actually be able to gather biological intelligence and distribute it to the people because of the Internet. Our understanding of how nature works is just increasing exponentially. Now we have a way to gather it and to actually make it available to people. Our experiment is AskNature.org to try to get that biological intelligence out. That’s exciting to me—understanding how nature works, and then possibly being able to emulate it. 

What scares you about where we’re headed with technology? 

What scares me is that we might actually believe that we truly can create life before we fully understand its complexity. I’m very much a believer in the precautionary principle when it comes to creating life forms—synthetic biology. What worries me is getting ahead of ourselves. I think we should emulate many things, but I don’t think we should emulate self-reproducing organisms until we understand a lot more of what we’re doing. 

Companies that preach sustainability often focus on mitigating damage. How does the “Factory as a Forest” concept flip this around? 

The next evolution of “do no harm” is to produce beneficial services.

• The way local ecosystems actually function, 
• the way you know they’re healthy, is that they’re producing services that are beneficial to us as human beings and to all life. 
• They’re cleaning water. 
• They’re cleaning air. 
• They’re building soil. 
• They’re supporting biodiversity and pollinators. 
• They’re holding sediments during flooding. 
• They’re mitigating climate change. 
• They’re protecting against pests. 
• Even providing food and fiber, and cultural experiences like recreation and inspiration. 

These services are called ecosystem services. 

We thought this would be an amazing framework for the next aspirational goal for Interface—once they had reached do no harm, to actually become a generous company, in the fact that their facilities were functionally indistinguishable from local ecosystems, meaning that they actually performed like the ecosystem next door, meaning they would meet the same metrics that the system next door would. 

How do you get from studying an ecosystem to recreating its benefits in a factory? 

At Biomimicry 3.8 [Benyus’ biomimicry innovation consulting firm] we’ve been working with city planners for several years now, working to figure out how a city could produce ecosystem services, giving city managers these kinds of metrics—purify this much water, purify this much air, store this much water, store this much carbon. We call them ecological performance standards. When you have those metrics, they become an organizing framework to cumulatively gather what are now fragmented technologies and put them together and then start to count what it is they produce. 

Before, [Interface CEO Ray Anderson] set metrics for reducing energy use, reducing waste. Now what we’re doing is saying, “What positive effects can we start to count up?” Once you have an aspirational goal like this, and you have numbers, you begin to gather collections of design changes. For instance, we can go next door and look at relatively untouched areas and figure out how much water they purify and store per hectare. Then you say, “OK, we can start to meet or exceed that metric in different ways. 

• We can change our water use. 
• We can purify the water from the manufacturing process even more than we have before. 
• We can use constructed wetlands. We can store water with rainwater harvesting.” 

Suddenly you’re not doing those things in a fragmented way. You’re actually trying to meet a metric. 

How will quantifying nature’s benefits change how the factory operates? 

What we’re doing now is basically understanding the habitat type. We look at the system and what makes it tick. We look at the ecological realities of that river flat eucalypt forest [the ecosystem where the factory is located]. Which ecosystem services are most important to this company in terms of its business model and what it has to accomplish as a business, and then how can we reduce risk and make the site more resilient? 

For instance, if you were to increase carbon storage on site, you were to increase the fertility of soils and the cycling of nutrients in the soils, and slow water and sink it and store it, the landscaping would be more resistant to drought. You want to store more carbon or more water, so you want permeable pavement wherever you possibly can, changing the parking lots. You may incent your employees to commute and not bring their cars to the factory. 

How can the concept of a factory that produces these ecosystem services change our human relationship to manufacturing? 

Nobody wants it in their neighborhood. In fact, there’s a social justice component of this, because poor people have tended to live closer to the chain-link fence with the factory on the other side, right? Now what we’re saying is how can development, or manufacturing facilities, actually be welcome neighbors in a neighborhood? That’s a radical thought. 

If you think about the factory as having a metabolism, the exhale—the outcome of a factory has been pretty nasty pollution—air, water, and soil pollution. Does it have to be like that? This is an idea of re-envisioning what it might be if a factory actually released water cleaner than what came into it or released air cleaner than what came into it. 

I expect that there will be cascading benefits, and that the benefits will be—to the business, it’ll be healthier employees, lower healthcare costs, more happiness, more productivity, the ability to recruit and retain. Then also for the company, it’s reduced risk in terms of liabilities and regulators. You’re suddenly producing cleaner air. You’re not wrangling with regulators. 

You’ve said that “heat, beat, and treat”—heating up materials, beating them with high pressure, and treating them with chemicals—is the de facto slogan for our current industrial age. What should be the slogan for the next era in manufacturing? 

I think manufacturing will be local, safe, and cyclical. I’m doing a lot of work as to how nature’s models can help 3D printing or additive manufacturing. I actually think manufacturing’s coming home. I think manufacturing is going to be coming into neighborhoods in the form of print centers. 

This is a really key moment for biomimetic chemistry inside the printer, biomimetic designs of adding function to very common raw materials. [Nature uses non-toxic building materials like keratin and chitin to create forms, while 3D printers currently rely on toxic plastics and resins.] That’s what nature does. It doesn’t use very elaborate materials. It has very good designs that make it tough and strong and resilient. And then, of course, nature is able to easily disassemble at the end of its life and be reassembled into new product. These are all things manufacturing needs. 

That’s very different than what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about an industrial process, where you wear hard hats and eye guards. We’re a long way to go before it’s local raw material, safely produced, and then recycled at the end of its life—put back into the printer, if you will, as the raw materials for the next product. We’ve got a long way to go. 

ORIGINAL: Wired

MARGUERITE MCNEAL

Pope Francis blames 'human selfishness' for global warming

The Pope calls for a radical change in behaviour to save the planet for future generations

Pope Francis has blamed human selfishness for global warming in his long-awaited encyclical calling for action on climate change.

In the letter, he urges the rich to change their lifestyles to avert the destruction of the ecosystem.

Environmentalists hope the message will spur on nations ahead of the UN climate conference in Paris in December.

But parts of the document, leaked earlier this week, have already been criticised by some US conservatives.

It has been dismissed by two Republican presidential candidates.

Humans to blameThe encyclical, named "Laudato Si (Be Praised), On the Care of Our Common Home", aims to inspire everyone - not just Roman Catholics - to protect the Earth.

The 192-page letter, which is the highest level teaching document a pope can issue, lays much of the blame for global warming on human activities.

Pope Francis writes that: "We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will.

"The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life." 

The letter highlights the loss of biodiversity in Amazonian rainforests and the melting of polar glaciers

 He criticises what he calls a "collective selfishness", but says that there is still time to stop the damage, calling for an end to consumerism and greed.

'Moral approach'
Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi launched the pontiff's second encyclical at a news conference on Thursday.

The teaching is more evidence of a pontiff determined to act as a catalyst for change, and a powerful diplomatic player on the world stage, says the BBC's religious affairs correspondent Caroline Wyatt.

The release comes six months before international leaders gather in Paris to try to seal a deal to reduce carbon emissions.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed the document, saying climate change was a "moral issue requiring respectful dialogue with all parts of society". 

Metropolitan of Pergamon Joannis Zizioulas (left) became the first high-ranking Orthodox Church official to present a papal document

It has also been widely praised by environmental groups, with WWF president Yolanda Kakabadse saying it "adds a much-needed moral approach'' to the debate on climate change.

Greenpeace leader Kumi Naidoo highlighted passages calling for policies that reduce carbon emissions, including by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy.

But a leak of the document, published by Italy's L'Espresso magazine on Tuesday, had a frosty response from sceptical conservatives in America, including two Roman Catholic presidential candidates.

Jeb Bush said he did not get his economic policy from his bishops, cardinals or pope - so why his policy on the environment?

Meanwhile Rick Santorum questioned whether the Pope was credible on the issue of climate science.

US Senator, Jim Inhofe, chairman of the US Senate Environment Committee, said he disagreed with the Pope's "philosophy" on global warming.

"I am concerned that his encyclical will be used by global warming alarmists to advocate for policies that will equate to the largest, most regressive tax increase in our nation's history."

However, many academics have welcomed the pontiff's input.

Prof Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science at the University of Oxford in the UK, said: "If Pope Francis can't speak up for our unborn grandchildren, then God help us all."

Will Pope sway Americans? - Roger Harrabin, BBC News environment analyst 

Jeb Bush dismissed a leaked draft of the encyclical

 The UN's climate change chief Christiana Figueres says the Pope's message will influence talks in Paris this year on a deal to tackle global warming.

Developing countries are demanding firmer promises of financial help from rich countries so they can adapt to inevitable changes in the climate and get clean energy to avoid contributing to further warming.
Ms Figueres said their position would be strengthened by the Pope's insistence that this was the clear moral responsibility of the rich.

The encyclical will be welcomed by poor countries in Africa and Latin America.

The big question is how it will play in the USA, where it has already been dismissed by a Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, who is a Catholic.

Leading Republicans have warned the UN that they will undo President Barack Obama's climate policies - so if the encyclical sways any of the conservative Catholics in Congress that could prove significant.

ORIGINAL: BBC

June 18, 2015