After a secret meeting, scientists announce they are making synthetic human genomes

ktsdesign/Shutterstock.com

It's happening.

An international group of scientists has just announced their plan to create a synthetic human genome within 10 years - which means they're going to try to write a brand new DNA code for human life from scratch.

The ambitious undertaking, called Human Genome Project-write, could be the key to understanding human disease better than ever before, and it could also greatly reduce the cost of genetic sequencing. It's an incredibly exciting project for science, but what's worrying some is the fact that the project has been launched without the public having been properly consulted on any ethical concerns.

Rumours about the new project started last month, when 150 scientists met in a closed-door meeting at Harvard Medical School to talk about building an entirely synthetic human genome.

The fact that journalists weren't allowed to be at the meeting was met with criticism, and now 25 of the researchers have outlined their proposal in Science- although it hasn't done much to relieve concerns. 

Posed as an unofficial follow-up to the hugely important Human Genome Project (HGP) - which ended in 2004 and resulted in the complete mapping of our genetic code - the goal of HGP-write is to take things one step further and not just read our genomes, but create them.

The expectation is that this research, if nothing else, will drop the price of genetic engineering and testing 1,000-fold over the next decade - which would be pretty incredible, seeing as we're already able to sequence an entire genome for under US$1,000 today.

"[T]he goal of HGP-write is to reduce the costs of engineering and testing large genomes, including a human genome, in cell lines, more than 1,000-fold within 10 years, while developing new technologies and an ethical framework for genome-scale engineering as well as transformative medical applications," the researchers wrote in a draft of a press release obtained by

The Washington Post (no official press release has been put out as yet).

To pull this off, the scientists say they'll attempt to raise US$100 million of private and public funding over the next decade, and collaborate with international groups in order to get it done.

And as cool as that would be, they've definitely got their work cut out for them. Although scientists have managed to create synthetic genomes for bacteria the past, writing a complete human DNA code is going to be A LOT harder.

As Bec Crew reported for us back in May, creating a synthetic human genome "means figuring out which chemicals are needed to create the 3 billion bases of DNA that sit inside the 23 pairs of chromosomes found inside every cell nucleus in our body".

Oh, and then they're going to have to work out where all those chemicals go, put them together in lab in the right order, and then arrange them so that they can direct a cell to stay alive.

The good news is that this crazily ambitious project could teach us a whole lot about our biology and disease. But, as someone on Facebook is bound to point out to you today, it could also help scientists get one step closer to creating 'designer babies'.

The concern is that this kind of research could teach us more about how to engineer humans that are resistant to disease, or are exceptionally strong or intelligent. While it's actually not as simple as programming whatever traits we want, it's definitely something we'd be closer to after this project. 

To be very clear, that isn't anywhere near the intention of this project. The researchers state outright that their project will end in the petri dish, and they have no intention of keeping any of the human genome cell lines alive.

But critics are saying that the problem is that the proposal laid out in Science still really doesn't deal with the ethical concerns that it brings up.

The team does write that they "will enable broad public discourse on HGP-write; having such conversations well in advance of project implementation will guide emerging capabilities in science and contribute to societal decision-making", though they don't really outline exactly what questions those discussions will involve. 

There are existing stem cell research guidelines that will apply to their research, but because this is such a new undertaking, the researchers will have the responsibility of creating many new rules as they go.

"Before launching into such a momentous project, questions need to be asked," including whether it should even occur, Stanford University bioengineer Drew Endy told MIT Technology Review. "The authors fail to pose these essential questions. In fact, in their proposal, they fail to pose any questions."

But for all those ethical concerns, the undeniable truth is that this project is probably going to benefit all of us, and our children, in ways we can't even imagine.

"This is as bold an aim as the original human genome project and the authors of this Science paper acknowledge that their new aim will be met with similar controversy as the original HGP had to contend with," synthetic biologist John Ward, from University College London, told the Genetic Expert News Service via email.

"But its now well accepted that the original HGP opened up the possibility and increasingly, the reality, for new medical treatments in human genetic diseases and cancer and we will be reaping the benefits of this for decades to come," he added.

Talking about such an ambitious program again should be incredibly exciting, but as much as we love to see science advance our understanding of biology to all new heights, projects like this need to come with the appropriate level of ethical discussion - if only for the fact that without upfront, transparent discussion, the public is never going to trust what's going on.

And in a world of misinformation, anti-vaxxers, and climate change denial, the last thing we need is to give people a reason to be wary of science.

Let's do this, but let's do it right.

ORIGINAL: Science Alert
FIONA MACDONALD
3 JUN 2016

Should we synthesise a human genome?

As specialists gather in private to discuss a grand plan for constructing a human genome, Drew Endy and Laurie Zoloth argue that such an enormous moral gesture should not be discussed behind closed doors.

CREDIT: MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

At Harvard today, an invitation-only group of about 150 scientists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs, met to discuss if and how to construct from scratch an entire human genome – the heritable genetic material that in nature is transferred from parents to children.

The meeting was originally organised to focus on “deliverables and industry involvement” with the primary goal of the project being “to synthesise a complete human genome in a cell line within a period of 10 years”.

Such a synthetic genome could then be tested in a laboratory by replacing the existing genome within a human cell. All this would still be far removed from making a synthetic human.

However, the possibility of making a human cell, whose genome is realised from only digital information and raw materials, should trigger broader considerations. 

For context, total synthesis of a human genome is becoming plausible at an accelerating rate. Thanks to new production techniques developed since 2003 the cost of assembling the genetic material encoding genes, the “building blocks” of life, has decreased from $4.00 to just three cents per individual letter, or “base pair” of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). 

As a result, the estimated initial cost of printing the DNA fragments encoding a three billion base pair human genome has dropped from $12 billion to $90 million. 

If cost reductions continue in the way they have been, then this price would approach $100,000 within 20 years. However, such dramatic additional cost reductions might never be realised without an overwhelming demand.

Advocates of synthetising a human genome, therefore argue that some open, collaborative “grand challenge” is needed to drive development of such technologies. 

While we strongly agree that sustained improvements in DNA construction tools are essential for advancing basic biological science and improving public health we are sceptical that synthesising a human genome is an appropriate demand driver.

We recall how controversies associated with many of the earliest genome synthesis projects delivered unintended consequences. 

For example, a project that made polio virus from scratch in 2002 generated such fear that public funding for improving DNA synthesis tools was cancelled, unwittingly harming research across diverse and unrelated fields while policy makers struggled to imagine how such tools could ever be controlled.

We argue that the synthesis of less controversial and more immediately useful genomes along with greatly improved sub-genomic synthesis capacities (for example, the real-time printing of plasmids the casettes that transfer genes between cells) should be pursued instead.

"In a world where human reproduction has already become a competitive marketplace...
it is easy to make up far stranger uses of human genome synthesis."

These are alternatives that would deliver broad and diverse public benefits.

Other topics on today’s agenda included changing the human genome itself. For example, could scientists synthetise a modified human genome that is resistant to all natural viruses? 

They likely could, for purely beneficial purposes, but what if others then sought to synthesise modified viruses that overcame such resistance? Might doing so start a genome-engineering arms race? 

And, what of even greater changes that can be imagined?

In a world where human reproduction has already become a competitive marketplace, with eggs, sperm and embryos carrying a price, it is easy to make up far stranger uses of human genome synthesis capacities. 

Would it be OK, for example, to sequence and then synthesise Einstein’s genome? If so how many Einstein genomes should be made and installed in cells, and who would get to make them? 

Taking a step back, just because something becomes possible, how should we approach determining if it is ethical to pursue?

Given that human genome synthesis is a technology that can completely redefine the core of what now joins all of humanity together as a species, we argue that discussions of making such capacities real, like today’s Harvard conference, should not take place without open and advance consideration of whether it is morally right to proceed.

When the first people at the table mostly have significant and direct material interests in proceeding, everyone, not just those in the room, risk out-of-control competition between public and private interests, ethical conflicts of interest, and temptations to manipulate human subject consent.

Pluralistic, public, and deliberative discussions are instead the best appropriate way to frame paths forward.

We note that the narrative of creation of the human is the central narrative for many religious communities.

To create a human genome from scratch would be an enormous moral gesture whose consequences should not be framed initially on the advice of lawyers and regulators alone.

The perspectives of others including self-identified theologians, philosophers, and ethicists from a variety of traditions should be sought out from the very beginning.

Critical voices representing civil society, who have long been sceptical of synthetic biology’s claims, should also be included. 

The creation of new human life is one of the last human-associated processes that has not yet been industrialised or fully commodified. It remains an act of faith, joy, and hope. 

Discussions to synthetise, for the first time, a human genome should not occur in closed rooms. 

Drew Endy is Associate Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University.

Laurie Zoloth is a professor of medical ethics and humanities at Northwestern University, Chicago.

ORIGINAL: Cosmos Magazine

First Human Tests of Memory Boosting Brain Implant—a Big Leap Forward

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all.” — Luis Buñuel Portolés, Filmmaker

Image Credit: Shutterstock.com

Every year, hundreds of millions of people experience the pain of a failing memory.

The reasons are many:

• traumatic brain injury, which haunts a disturbingly high number of veterans and football players; 
• stroke or Alzheimer’s disease, which often plagues the elderly; or 
• even normal brain aging, which inevitably touches us all.

Memory loss seems to be inescapable. But one maverick neuroscientist is working hard on an electronic cure. Funded by DARPA, Dr. Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California, is testing a memory-boosting implant that mimics the kind of signal processing that occurs when neurons are laying down new long-term memories.

The revolutionary implant, already shown to help memory encoding in rats and monkeys, is now being tested in human patients with epilepsy — an exciting first that may blow the field of memory prosthetics wide open.

To get here, however, the team first had to crack the memory code.

Deciphering Memory

From the very onset, Berger knew he was facing a behemoth of a problem.

We weren’t looking to match everything the brain does when it processes memory, but to at least come up with a decent mimic, said Berger.

“Of course people asked: can you model it and put it into a device? Can you get that device to work in any brain? It’s those things that lead people to think I’m crazy. They think it’s too hard,” he said.

But the team had a solid place to start.

The hippocampus, a region buried deep within the folds and grooves of the brain, is the critical gatekeeper that transforms memories from short-lived to long-term. In dogged pursuit, Berger spent most of the last 35 years trying to understand how neurons in the hippocampus accomplish this complicated feat.

At its heart, a memory is a series of electrical pulses that occur over time that are generated by a given number of neurons, said Berger. This is important — it suggests that we can reduce it to mathematical equations and put it into a computational framework, he said.

Berger hasn’t been alone in his quest.

By listening to the chatter of neurons as an animal learns, teams of neuroscientists have begun to decipher the flow of information within the hippocampus that supports memory encoding. Key to this process is a strong electrical signal that travels from CA3, the “input” part of the hippocampus, to CA1, the “output” node.

This signal is impaired in people with memory disabilities, said Berger, so of course we thought if we could recreate it using silicon, we might be able to restore — or even boost — memory.

Bridging the Gap

Yet this brain’s memory code proved to be extremely tough to crack.

The problem lies in the non-linear nature of neural networks: signals are often noisy and constantly overlap in time, which leads to some inputs being suppressed or accentuated. In a network of hundreds and thousands of neurons, any small change could be greatly amplified and lead to vastly different outputs.

It’s a chaotic black box, laughed Berger.

With the help of modern computing techniques, however, Berger believes he may have a crude solution in hand. His proof?

Use his mathematical theorems to program a chip, and then see if the brain accepts the chip as a replacement — or additional — memory module.

Berger and his team began with a simple task using rats. They trained the animals to push one of two levers to get a tasty treat, and recorded the series of CA3 to CA1 electronic pulses in the hippocampus as the animals learned to pick the correct lever. The team carefully captured the way the signals were transformed as the session was laid down into long-term memory, and used that information — the electrical “essence” of the memory — to program an external memory chip.

They then injected the animals with a drug that temporarily disrupted their ability to form and access long-term memories, causing the animals to forget the reward-associated lever. Next, implanting microelectrodes into the hippocampus, the team pulsed CA1, the output region, with their memory code.

The results were striking — powered by an external memory module, the animals regained their ability to pick the right lever.

Encouraged by the results, Berger next tried his memory implant in monkeys, this time focusing on a brain region called the prefrontal cortex, which receives and modulates memories encoded by the hippocampus.

Placing electrodes into the monkey’s brains, the team showed the animals a series of semi-repeated images, and captured the prefrontal cortex’s activity when the animals recognized an image they had seen earlier. Then with a hefty dose of cocaine, the team inhibited that particular brain region, which disrupted the animal’s recall.

Next, using electrodes programmed with the “memory code,” the researchers guided the brain’s signal processing back on track — and the animal’s performance improved significantly.

A year later, the team further validated their memory implant by showing it could also rescue memory deficits due to hippocampal malfunction in the monkey brain.

A Human Memory Implant

Last year, the team cautiously began testing their memory implant prototype in human volunteers.

Because of the risks associated with brain surgery, the team recruited 12 patients with epilepsy, who already have electrodes implanted into their brain to track down the source of their seizures.

Repeated seizures steadily destroy critical parts of the hippocampus needed for long-term memory formation, explained Berger. So if the implant works, it could benefit these patients as well.

The team asked the volunteers to look through a series of pictures, and then recall which ones they had seen 90 seconds later. As the participants learned, the team recorded the firing patterns in both CA1 and CA3 — that is, the input and output nodes.

Using these data, the team extracted an algorithm — a specific human “memory code” — that could predict the pattern of activity in CA1 cells based on CA3 input. Compared to the brain’s actual firing patterns, the algorithm generated correct predictions roughly 80% of the time.

It’s not perfect, said Berger, but it’s a good start.

Using this algorithm, the researchers have begun to stimulate the output cells with an approximation of the transformed input signal.

We have already used the pattern to zap the brain of one woman with epilepsy, said Dr. Dong Song, an associate professor working with Berger. But he remained coy about the result, only saying that although promising, it’s still too early to tell.

Song’s caution is warranted. Unlike the motor cortex, with its clear structured representation of different body parts, the hippocampus is not organized in any obvious way.

It’s hard to understand why stimulating input locations can lead to predictable results, said Dr. Thoman McHugh, a neuroscientist at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute. It’s also difficult to tell whether such an implant could save the memory of those who suffer from damage to the output node of the hippocampus.

“That said, the data is convincing,” McHugh acknowledged.

Berger, on the other hand, is ecstatic. “I never thought I’d see this go into humans,” he said.

But the work is far from done. Within the next few years, Berger wants to see whether the chip can help build long-term memories in a variety of different situations. After all, the algorithm was based on the team’s recordings of one specific task — what if the so-called memory code is not generalizable, instead varying based on the type of input that it receives?

Berger acknowledges that it’s a possibility, but he remains hopeful.

I do think that we will find a model that’s a pretty good fit for most conditions, he said. After all, the brain is restricted by its own biophysics — there’s only so many ways that electrical signals in the hippocampus can be processed, he said.

“The goal is to improve the quality of life for somebody who has a severe memory deficit,” said Berger. “If I can give them the ability to form new long-term memories for half the conditions that most people live in, I’ll be happy as hell, and so will be most patients.”

ORIGINAL: Singularity Hub

BY SHELLY FAN

ON NOV 15, 2015

Researchers may have discovered fountain of youth by reversing aging in human cells

Japanese noriben, in the shape of mitochondria (Credit: University of Tsukuba)

Researchers in Japan have found that human aging may be able to be delayed or even reversed, at least at the most basic level of human cell lines. In the process, the scientists from the University of Tsukuba also found that regulation of two genes is related to how we age.

The new findings challenge one of the current popular theories of aging, that lays the blame for humans' inevitable downhill slide with mutations that accumulate in our mitochondrial DNA over time. Mitochondrion are sometimes likened to a cellular "furnace" that produces energy through cellular respiration. Damage to the mitochondrial DNA results in changes or mutations in the DNA sequence that build up and are associated with familiar signs of aging like hair loss, osteoporosis and, of course, reduced lifespan.

So goes the theory, at least. But the Tsukuba researchers suggest that something else may be going on within our cells. Their research indicates that the issue may not be that mitochondrial DNA become damaged, but rather that genes get turned "off" or "on" over time. Most intriguing, the team led by Professor Jun-Ichi Hayashi was able to flip the switches on a few genes back to their youthful position, effectively reversing the aging process.

Professor Hayashi. (Credit: University of Tsukuba)

The researchers came to this conclusion by comparing the function level of the mitochondria in fibroblast cell lines from children under 12 years of age to those of elderly people between 80 and 97. As expected, the older cells had reduced cellular respiration, but the older cells did not show more DNA damage than those from children. This discovery led the team to propose that the reduced cellular function is tied to epigenetic regulation, changes that alter the physical structure of DNA without affecting the DNA sequence itself, causing genes to be turned on or off. Unlike mutations that damage that sequence, as in the other, aforementioned theory of aging, epigenetic changes could possibly be reversed by genetically reprogramming cells to an embryonic stem cell-like state, effectively turning back the clock on aging.

For a broad comparison, imagine that a power surge hits your home's electrical system. If not properly wired, irreversible damage or even fire may result. However, imagine another home in which the same surge trips a switch in this home's circuit breaker box. Simply flipping that breaker back to the "on" position should make it operate as good as new. In essence, the Tsukuba team is proposing that our DNA may not become fried with age as previously thought, but rather simply requires someone to access its genetic breaker box to reverse aging.

To test the theory, the researchers found two genes associated with mitochondrial function and essentially experimented with turning them on or off. In doing so, they were able to create defects or restore cellular respiration. These two genes regulate glycine, an amino acid, production in mitochondria, and in one of the more promising findings, a 97-year-old cell line saw its cellular respiration restored after the addition of glycine for 10 days.

The researchers' findings were published this month in the journal Scientific Reports.

Whether or not this process could be a potential fountain of youth for humans and not just human fibroblast cell lines still remains to be seen, with much more testing required. However, if the theory holds, glycine supplements could one day become a powerful tool for life extension.

Similar research from the Salk Institute has also recently looked at other ways to slow down or stop aging at a cellular level, while yet another team is looking into a new class of drugs called senolytics that could help slow aging.

Source: University of Tsukuba

ORIGINAL: Gizmag

ERIC MACK

MAY 27, 2015

Leading Harvard physicist has a radical new theory for why humans exist

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer Lisa Randall.

Where do we come from? There are many right answers to this question, and the one you get often depends on who you ask.

For example, 

• an astrophysicist might say that the chemical components of our bodies were first forged in the nuclear fires of stars.
• On the other hand, an evolutionary biologist might look at the similarities between our DNA and that of other primates' and conclude we evolved from apes.
• Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University, has a different, and novel answer, which she describes in her latest book, "Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs."

Randall has written other popular science books, including the New York Times bestseller "Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions." Her studies at Harvard explore theoretical particle physics and cosmology.

In her latest book, she posits that the extinction of the dinosaurs — necessary for the emergence of humans — is linked to dark matter. Dark matter is the mysterious, invisible matter that astronomers estimate makes up 85% of all matter in our universe.

One species' extinction is another's head start

Thomson Reuters

Paleontologists largely agree that about 66 million years ago a giant, 9-mile-long celestial body — likely a comet — struck Earth. The impact wiped out 75% of species across the planet, including most of the dinosaurs.

Among the survivors were small primates. Over the next 66 million years these primates diversified, grew larger, learned to walk on two legs, and developed large brains, which they eventually used to invent pizza delivery.

So what caused that giant space rock to collide with our planet in the first place and give primates a chance to thrive?

It could just be chance — or luck, depending on your perspective — but Randall would disagree with both of these ideas.

Business Insider

In her book, Randall describes a dark, pancake-shaped patty of densely packed dark matter within our galaxy that could be responsible for our emergence as a species.

Dark matter has never been directly detected. However, there is enough evidence for its immense gravitational influence on our universe that the vast majority of the scientific community agrees that dark matter is a form of mysterious matter that we can neither see or touch, but that nevertheless must permeate the cosmos.

Generally, dark matter tends to be concentrated in large halos around galaxies like giant bubbles. But Randall thinks that there could also be a so-called dark disc amid the stars, planets, and gas clouds in our galaxy.

Beware the dark disc

If there is dark matter in Randall's hypothetical disc, then it stands to reason that the disc has a powerful gravitational influence on the objects around it — including our solar system.

But our solar system is not always near the disc, which is the crux of Randall's theory.

As the solar system revolves around the center of the Milky Way — the same way Earth revolves around the sun — it moves up and down, or oscillates, through the plane of our galaxy. And the rate of this oscillation is very intriguing.

Below is an illustration of our solar system's oscillation, where the orange dot in the lower left rectangle is our sun and the black line at the center is the dark disc:

APS/Alan Stonebraker

A team of astronomers made a rough estimate of this oscillation rate near the turn of this century, calculating that our solar system passes through the plane of the Milky Way about once every 32 million years, which means if there's a dark disc, we pass through that at the same rate.

Interestingly, there's evidence to suggest that mass extinctions in Earth's past happened within this time frame, or about once every 25 to 35 million years.

It's this similarity between the mass-extinction rate and the rate of our solar system's oscillation through the galaxy that made Randall and her Harvard colleague Matthew Reece first suggest the link in a scientific paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters last year, and that Randall explores more in her book.

Randall hypothesizes that when we're passing through the dark disc, the gravity from the dark matter within influences the outer region of our solar system, called the Oort cloud.

The Oort cloud, illustrated below just right of center, sits between roughly 1,000 to 100,000 Astronomical Units (90 billion to 9 trillion miles) from the sun and is thought to contain billions of icy objects at least 12 miles wide.

Uploaded by WolfmanSF to Wikipedia

If something 12 miles wide hit Earth today, it would mean the end of life as we know it. And Randall thinks that's exactly what happened to the dinosaurs 66 million years ago that opened the door for widespread primate evolution.

Prove it

NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center Dark matter is illustrated here as the fog between galaxies.

While it's impossible to wind back the clock, proving the existence of the dark disc would greatly advance Randall's theory.

She's tried to do so by looking at the speed and direction of stars in our galaxy. If stars moved in ways that couldn't be explained by the amount of ordinary, visible matter around them, then it could suggest the presence of the dark disc.

But that's a very tall order. There are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and hunting dark matter is notoriously tricky.

We have a dozen or so functioning detectors underground, on Earth's surface, and in space — and none of them has yet managed to sniff out a dark-matter particle. If they do, it would be a significant step toward supporting Randall's hypothesis.

In her concluding remarks, Randall writes:

"In some global sense, we are all descendants of Chicxulub [the town where the dinosaur-killing meteor impacted]. It's a part of our history that we should want to understand. If true, the additional wrinkle presented in this book would mean that not only was dark matter responsible for irrevocably changing our world, but also that some of it played a crucial role in allowing our existence." 

ORIGINAL: Business Insider 

By Jessica Orwig

14.11.2015

Computer Learns to Write Its ABCs

Photo-illustration: Danqing Wang

A new computer model can now mimic the human ability to learn new concepts from a single example instead of the hundreds or thousands of examples it takes other machine learning techniques, researchers say.

The new model learned how to write invented symbols from the animated show Futurama as well as dozens of alphabets from across the world. It also showed it could invent symbols of its own in the style of a given language.

The researchers suggest their model could also learn other kinds of concepts, such as speech and gestures.

Although scientists have made great advances in .machine learning in recent years, people remain much better at learning new concepts than machines.

"People can learn new concepts extremely quickly, from very little data, often from only one or a few examples. You show even a young child a horse, a school bus, a skateboard, and they can get it from one example," says study co-author Joshua Tenenbaum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In contrast, "standard algorithms in machine learning require tens, hundreds or even thousands of examples to perform similarly."

To shorten machine learning, researchers sought to develop a model that better mimicked human learning, which makes generalizations from very few examples of a concept. They focused on learning simple visual concepts — handwritten symbols from alphabets around the world.

"Our work has two goals: to better understand how people learn — to reverse engineer learning in the human mind — and to build machines that learn in more humanlike ways," Tenenbaum says.

Whereas standard pattern recognition algorithms represent symbols as collections of pixels or arrangements of features, the new model the researchers developed represented each symbol as a simple computer program. For instance, the letter "A" is represented by a program that generates examples of that letter stroke by stroke when the program is run. No programmer is needed during the learning process — the model generates these programs itself.

Moreover, each program is designed to generate variations of each symbol whenever the programs are run, helping it capture the way instances of such concepts might vary, such as the differences between how two people draw a letter.

"The idea for this algorithm came from a surprising finding we had while collecting a data set of handwritten characters from around the world. We found that if you ask a handful of people to draw a novel character, there is remarkable consistency in the way people draw," says study lead author Brenden Lake at New York University. "When people learn or use or interact with these novel concepts, they do not just see characters as static visual objects. Instead, people see richer structure — something like a causal model, or a sequence of pen strokes — that describe how to efficiently produce new examples of the concept."

The model also applies knowledge from previous concepts to speed learn new concepts. For instance, the model can use knowledge learned from the Latin alphabet to learn the Greek alphabet. They call their model the Bayesian program learning or BPL framework.

The researchers applied their model to more than 1,600 types of handwritten characters in 50 writing systems, including Sanskrit, Tibetan, Gujarati, Glagolitic, and even invented characters such as those from the animated series Futurama and the online game Dark Horizon. In a kind of .Turing test, scientists found that volunteers recruited via .Amazon's Mechanical Turk had difficulty distinguishing machine-written characters from human-written ones.

The scientists also had their model focus on creative tasks. They asked their system to create whole new concepts — for instance, creating a new Tibetan letter based on what it knew about letters in the Tibetan alphabet. The researchers found human volunteers rated machine-written characters on par with ones developed by humans recruited for the same task.

"We got human-level performance on this creative task," study co-author Ruslan Salakhutdinov at the University of Toronto.

Potential applications for this model could include 

• handwriting recognition, 
• speech recognition, 
• gesture recognition and 
• object recognition. 

"Ultimately we're trying to figure out how we can get systems that come closer to displaying human-like intelligence," Salakhutdinov says. "We're still very, very far from getting there, though."

The scientists detailed .their findings in the December 11 issue of the journal Science.

ORIGINAL: .IEEE Spectrum

By Charles Q. Choi
Posted 10 Dec 2015 | 20:00 GMT

How To Get The Most Out Of Life, According To Jane Goodall

Dr. Jane Goodall has earned the title of living legend for her groundbreaking research on chimpanzees, but she also has some great advice on how to be a better human.

Below are 12 inspirational and entertaining quotes, selected from the many sage words Goodall has shared about her very own species.

Enjoy.

12. Strive to be compassionate.

11. Ask more questions.

SHUTTERSTOCK

"What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language," Goodall said in an interview with .Happy and Well.

10. Remember that you affect the world around you.

9. Admit when you've been wrong.

SHUTTERSTOCK

Goodall .was asked:

If chimps are so much like us, why are they endangered while humans dominate the globe?

Well, in some ways we're not successful at all. We're destroying our home. That's not a bit successful. 

Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest, living fantastic lives, never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. I would say that they have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment.

8. Learn from those who are different than you.

7. Speak up.

6. Talk with people who disagree with you.

"Change happens by listening and then starting a .dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right," Goodall said.

5. Keep a sense of humor.

4. Remember you're part of something greater than us all.

3. Don't give up. Keep your goals in mind.

2. Keep your spirit strong.

1. Appreciate the world around you.

Watch Goodall's message to the world on how to make a difference.

.Jane Goodall sat down to talk with The Dodo. Read her interview here.

ORIGINAL: .The DoDo

By .Solon Kelleher

08 December 2015

Allen Institute researchers decode patterns that make our brains human

Each of our human brains is special, carrying distinctive memories and giving rise to our unique thoughts and actions. Most research on the brain focuses on what makes one brain different from another. But recently, Allen Institute researchers turned the question around.

Add caption

“So much research focuses on the variations between individuals, but we turned that question on its head to ask, what makes us similar?” says Ed Lein, Ph.D., Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “What is the conserved element among all of us that must give rise to our unique cognitive abilities and human traits?”

Their work, published this month in Nature Neuroscience, looked at gene expression across the entire human brain and identified a surprisingly small set of molecular patterns that dominate gene expression in the human brain and appear to be common to all individuals.

“Looking at the data from this unique vantage point enables us to study gene patterning that we all share,” says Mike Hawrylycz, Ph.D., Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “We used the Allen Human Brain Atlas data to quantify how consistent the patterns of expression for various genes are across human brains, and to determine the importance of the most consistent and reproducible genes for brain function.”

Despite the anatomical complexity of the brain and the complexity of the human genome, most of the patterns of gene usage across all 20,000 genes could be characterized by just 32 expression patterns. The most highly stable genes—the genes that were most consistent across all brains—include those that are associated with diseases and disorders like autism and Alzheimer’s and include many existing drug targets. These patterns provide insights into what makes the human brain distinct and raise new opportunities to target therapeutics for treating disease.

Allen Institute researchers decode patterns that make our brains human

Conserved gene patterning across human brains provide insights into health and disease

The human brain may be the most complex piece of organized matter in the known universe, but Allen Institute researchers have begun to unravel the genetic code underlying its function. Research published this month in Nature Neuroscience identified a surprisingly small set of molecular patterns that dominate gene expression in the human brain and appear to be common to all individuals, providing key insights into the core of the genetic code that makes our brains distinctly human.

“So much research focuses on the variations between individuals, but we turned that question on its head to ask, what makes us similar?” says Ed Lein, Ph.D., Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “What is the conserved element among all of us that must give rise to our unique cognitive abilities and human traits?”

Researchers used data from the publicly available Allen Human Brain Atlas to investigate how gene expression varies across hundreds of functionally distinct brain regions in six human brains. They began by ranking genes by the consistency of their expression patterns across individuals, and then analyzed the relationship of these genes to one another and to brain function and association with disease.

“Looking at the data from this unique vantage point enables us to study gene patterning that we all share,” says Mike Hawrylycz, Ph.D., Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “We used the Allen Human Brain Atlas data to quantify how consistent the patterns of expression for various genes are across human brains, and to determine the importance of the most consistent and reproducible genes for brain function.”

Despite the anatomical complexity of the brain and the complexity of the human genome, most of the patterns of gene usage across all 20,000 genes could be characterized by just 32 expression patterns. While many of these patterns were similar in human and mouse, the dominant genetic model organism for biomedical research, many genes showed different patterns in human. Surprisingly, genes associated with neurons were most conserved across species, while those for the supporting glial cells showed larger differences.

The most highly stable genes—the genes that were most consistent across all brains—include those that are associated with diseases and disorders like autism and Alzheimer’s and include many existing drug targets. These patterns provide insights into what makes the human brain distinct and raise new opportunities to target therapeutics for treating disease.

The researchers also found that the pattern of gene expression in cerebral cortex is correlated with “functional connectivity” as revealed by neuroimaging data from the Human Connectome Project. “It is exciting to find a correlation between brain circuitry and gene expression by combining high quality data from these two large-scale projects,” says David Van Essen, Ph.D., professor at Washington University in St. Louis and a leader of the Human Connectome Project.

“The human brain is phenomenally complex, so it is quite surprising that a small number of patterns can explain most of the gene variability across the brain,” says Christof Koch, Ph.D., President and Chief Scientific Officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “There could easily have been thousands of patterns, or none at all. This gives us an exciting way to look further at the functional activity that underlies the uniquely human brain.”

This research was conducted in collaboration with the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Medical Center and Washington University in St. Louis.

The project described was supported by award numbers 1R21DA027644 and 5R33DA027644 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

About the Allen Institute for Brain Science

The Allen Institute for Brain Science is an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit medical research organization dedicated to accelerating the understanding of how the human brain works in health and disease. Using a big science approach, the Allen Institute generates useful public resources used by researchers and organizations around the globe, drives technological and analytical advances, and discovers fundamental brain properties through integration of experiments, modeling and theory. Launched in 2003 with a seed contribution from founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, the Allen Institute is supported by a diversity of government, foundation and private funds to enable its projects. Given the Institute’s achievements, Mr. Allen committed an additional $300 million in 2012 for the first four years of a ten-year plan to further propel and expand the Institute’s scientific programs, bringing his total commitment to date to $500 million. The Allen Institute’s data and tools are publicly available online at brain-map.org.

ORIGINAL: Allen Institute

November 16, 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