'Highly creative' professionals won't lose their jobs to robots, study finds

A University of Oxford study finds that there are some things that a robot won’t be able to do. Unfortunately, these gigs don’t pay all that well.

Many people are in “robot overlord denial,” according to a recent online poll run by jobs board Monster.com. They think computers could not replace them at work. Sadly, most are probably wrong.

University of Oxford researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne estimated in 2013 that 47% of total U.S. jobs could be automated by 2033. The combination of robotics, automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning is so powerful that some white collar workers are already being replaced — and we’re talking journalists, lawyers, doctors, and financial analysts, not the person who used to file all the incoming faxes.

But there’s hope, at least for some. According to an advanced copy of a new report that U.K. non-profit Nesta sent to Fortune, 21% of US employment requires people to be “highly creative.” Of them, 86% (18% of the total workforce) are at low or no risk from automation. In the U.K., 87% of those in creative fields

“Artists, musicians, computer programmers, architects, advertising specialists … there’s a very wide range of creative occupations,” said report co-author Hasan Bakhshi, director of creative economy at Nesta, to Fortune. Some other types would be financial managers, judges, management consultants, and IT managers. “Those jobs have a very high degree of resistance to automation.”

The study is based on the work of Frey and Osborne, who are also co-authors of this new report. The three researchers fed 120 job descriptions from the US Department of Labor into a computer and analyzed them to see which were most likely to require extensive creativity, or the use of imagination or ideas to make something new.

Creativity is one of the three classic bottlenecks to automating work, according to Bakhshi. “Tasks which involve a high degree of human manipulation and human perception — subtle tasks — other things being equal will be more difficult to automate,” he said. For instance, although goods can be manufactured in a robotic factory, real craft work still “requires the human touch.”

So will jobs that need social intelligence, such as your therapist or life insurance agent.

Of course, the degree of creativity matters. Financial journalists who rewrite financial statements are already beginning to be supplanted by software. The more repetitive and dependent on data the work is, the more easily a human can be pushed aside.

In addition, just because certain types of creative occupations can’t easily be replaced doesn’t mean that their industries won’t see disruption. Packing and shipping crafts can be automated, as can could some aspects of the film industry that aren’t such things as directing, acting, and design. “These industries are going to be disrupted and are vulnerable,” Bakhshi said.

Also, not all these will necessarily provide a financial windfall. The study found an “inverse U-shape” relationship between the probability of an occupation being highly creative and the average income it might deliver. Musicians, actors, dancers, and artists might make relatively little, while people in technical, financial, and legal creative occupations can do quite well. So keeping that creative job may not seem much of a financial blessing in many cases.

Are you in a “creative” role that will be safe from automation? You can find out what these Oxford researchers think by taking their online quiz.

ORIGINAL Fortune

by Erik Sherman 

APRIL 22, 2015

Applications are invited for a full-time Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence (AI) safety within the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford University

Now Hiring Researchers



Applications are invited for a full-time Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence (AI) safety within the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford University. This post is fixed-term for 2 years from the date of appointment.

The application deadline is April 27th, 2015.

The post-holder, who will occupy an office at the Future of Humanity Institute in central Oxford, will work closely with Professor Nick Bostrom and other members of the FHI, and with external collaborators. The post-holder will conduct independent research related to the long-term safety of machine intelligence, including technical issues in AI control. The balance between the theoretical and practical aspects of the post is flexible and will be tailored to the research interests of the successful applicant. The Research Fellow will be expected to produce a number of publications, single and/or co-authored.

The successful candidate must demonstrate strong evidence of relevant research potential in the indicated area. Outstanding analytical skills and the ability to engage with results and methods of computer science are essential. A Bachelors degree (2.1 or above, or international equivalent) in mathematics, computer science, statistics, or other relevant subject is essential. A PhD is desirable but not required. Expertise in machine learning is desirable but not required. For further details, see here.

The Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) is also hiring research fellows capable of examining the ethics and evaluation of extreme technological risk, horizon scanning, and/or issues in responsible innovation. For more information on these posts, please see here.


ORIGINAL: FHI Oxford
March 29, 2015 

The Global Search for Education: Education and Jobs

"The Future of Employment study makes clear that what matters most today is what you can do with what you know, rather than how much you know."
- Dr. Tony Wagner

What does today's technology mean for tomorrow's jobs and how can we better structure our education system to ensure that the future working population can prosper in the labor market?
A large range of 20th century jobs are endangered by the machine age. A recent Oxford Martin School study by Dr. Carl Benedikt Frey (Oxford Martin School) and Dr. Michael A. Osborne (Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford) found that 47% of current US jobs are at risk of automation within the next twenty years. Further, despite recent job growth in the service industry sector, occupations within this industry are highly susceptible. Frey and Osborne assessed the degree to which 702 specific jobs are vulnerable to computerization, distinguishing these occupations into categories of high, medium and low risk.

Job Automation May Threaten Half of U.S. Workforce (Bloomberg)
Mobile robots and ‘smart’ computers — that learn on the job — make it likely that occupations employing about half of today's U.S. workers could be possible to automate in the next decade or two, according to an Oxford University study that estimated the probability of computerization of more than 700 occupations. Published March 12, 2014

Sources: University of Oxford, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne

GRAPHIC: AKI ITO / BLOOMBERG NEWS & DAVE MERRILL / BLOOMBERG VISUAL DATA

One of the main ways governments have helped people during previous waves of technological progress is through education system reform. What should government be doing now to make the changes that are necessary?

To discuss these issues further, I am joined today in The Global Search for Education by Dr. Carl Frey and Dr. Michael Osborne, authors of The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerization, and Dr. Tony Wagner, Expert in Residence at Harvard University's Innovation Lab. Tony will be leading a presentation on Education for Innovation at last week's OPPI Festival in Helsinki, Finland.

"I can only recommend that young people continue to gain the kind of cognitive and creative skills that give them a competitive edge over machines." Dr. Michael A. Osborne

Gentlemen, could you please summarize what you believe were your most important findings in your study?

Michael: We found that a substantial fraction (47%) of current US employment is at risk of automation within the next twenty years. While some of these occupations are in categories previously thought unthreatened by automation, such as logistics and services, we expect automation to continue to predominately threaten low-skilled workers. In fact, we found a strong negative relationship between the average degree of education within an occupation and its susceptibility to computerization. In a similar way, this was true for the average wage: the better-paid jobs, featuring largely better-educated workers, are unlikely to be automated in the near future. Quantitatively, we found that if only a quarter of people within an occupation have a bachelor's degree or better, the occupation would likely have a fifty-fifty chance of being automatable within the foreseeable future. If half of workers within an occupation have at least a bachelor's degree, its probability of automation is close to zero. It seems clear that education is a crucial issue in considering future jobs.

Can you speak a little about the range of 20th century jobs that are endangered by the machine age?  

Michael: We firstly expect that existing trends of automation in production will continue: robots, with ever improving sensors and manipulators, will continue to replace factory workers. We further predict that  
many sales jobs are vulnerable: online shopping and self-checkouts will only continue to become more popular at the expense of human salespeople and cashiers. In fact,  
telemarketers were rated as one of the most computerizable occupations; to the dismay, no doubt, of anyone who is sick of speaking to robots on the phone. Perhaps more surprisingly,
we expect transportation and clerical jobs to be at risk from new technologies. Autonomous vehicles threaten many logistics occupations, such as drivers of forklifts or mine vehicles, while
big data analytics place occupations reliant on storing or accessing information at risk, such as tax preparers.
As evidence for the latter: we're already seeing paralegal jobs replaced by algorithms, so this is not an unreasonable prediction.
We finally suspect that many jobs in the service sector will be increasingly at risk, with the growth of service robotics and sophisticated algorithms.
As examples, court reporters may have their jobs threatened by transcription software, and
electronics repair jobs are already being affected by the declining costs of increasingly complex electronic items. This is particularly alarming given the recently high fraction of workers undertaking service work.
Nonetheless, many other service sector jobs are likely to remain unautomatable; as an example, human housekeepers are still much better at their jobs than robots.

Carl: To expand a bit on that, what we are saying is that service occupations that do not require much creative and social intelligence are likely to be automated. Some personal service jobs, however, do require especially some social intelligence. These, we think, will not be automated.

"In the short run, the government could support employment by stimulating the demand for personal services. In the long run, I do not believe there is much of a substitute for training workers to work with computers." - Dr. Carl Benedikt Frey

Please discuss some of the characteristics of occupations not at risk of computerization. 

Michael: These jobs involve tasks at which machines are relatively poor: tasks involving creativity or social intelligence. As examples, I think

• recreational therapists, 
• mental health counselors and 
• primary school teachers are relatively safe for the foreseeable future. 
• Many people may also be surprised to learn that occupations requiring work in very cluttered environments are also relatively safe. For example, the perceptual capacity of a human housekeeper, able to distinguish unwanted dirt from a pot plant, is unlikely to be matched by a robot cleaner for many decades.

Tony, why does this evolutionary phase require more revolutionary changes in education versus the gradual changes we have seen in previous generations?

The Future of Employment study makes clear that what matters most today is what you can do with what you know, rather than how much you know. Many recent college graduates find themselves unemployed or underemployed because they lack the skills needed in an increasingly innovation-driven economy. With academic content knowledge having become a commodity that's available on every internet-connected device, the ability to 

• initiate, 
• discern, 
• persevere, 
• collaborate, and 
• to solve problems creatively 

are the qualities most in demand today and will be increasingly important in the future. The problem is that our education system was designed, primarily, to teach the three R's and to transmit content knowledge. We need to create schools that coach students for skill and will, in addition to teaching content. If we don't make this transition quickly, a growing number of our youth will be unemployable at the same time that employers complain that they cannot find new hires that have the skills they need.

"We need to create schools that coach students for skill and will, in addition to teaching content. If we don't make this transition quickly, a growing number of our youth will be unemployable at the same time that employers complain that they cannot find new hires who have the skills they need." - Dr. Tony Wagner

What recommendations would you make to governments about retraining workers who are now or will be unemployed as a result of this evolution? 

Tony: I wish I had an intelligent answer to this important question, but I'm a "recovering" high school English teacher, not an economist. My hunch is that it will take a generation to better prepare young people for the new economy. Meanwhile, perhaps we'll need to put people to work repairing our crumbling infrastructure, helping out in preschools and assisted living homes, and so on. There is a lot to be done to make our country a better and more humane place to live. The question is: are we willing to pay people to do this work?

Carl: In the short run, the government could support employment by stimulating the demand for personal services. In the long run, I do not believe there is much of a substitute for training workers to work with computers.

If you were speaking to a group of high school students today, what fields and disciplines would you encourage them to explore to ensure success in the job market?

 Tony: First, I would encourage them to pursue their real interests. Curiosity and intrinsic interest trump mere academic achievement today. Secondly, I'd suggest they consider designing an interdisciplinary major in college around a problem of interest to them. Innovation increasingly happens at the intersections of academic disciplines, not within them.

Michael: One thing that came out very clearly from our analysis was the continuing importance of education. In particular, we found a strong negative trend between an occupation's average level of education and its probability of computerization. As such, I can only recommend that young people continue to gain the kind of cognitive and creative skills that give them a competitive edge over machines. In particular, and I may be biased, but occupations revolving around creative uses of data are likely to be resistant to automation for some time. Further, people skills: the ability to negotiate, or persuade, are likely to become increasingly important for human work, due to their resistance to automation. Finally, manual work in unstructured environments is probably a fairly safe bet: gardeners are unlikely to have to worry about their jobs for a good long while.

C. M. Rubin, Dr. Tony Wagner, Dr. Carl Benedikt Frey, Dr. Michael A. Osborne

Photos are courtesy of the Oxford Martin School and Tony Wagner.

For more information on the Oxford Martin School Study:
http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/files/The_Future_of_Employment_OMS_Working_Paper_1.pdf

For more information on Education for Innovation at the OPPI Festival: http://oppifestival.com/

In The Global Search for Education, join me and globally renowned thought leaders including Sir Michael Barber (UK), Dr. Michael Block (U.S.), Dr. Leon Botstein (U.S.), Professor Clay Christensen (U.S.), Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond (U.S.), Dr. Madhav Chavan (India), Professor Michael Fullan (Canada), Professor Howard Gardner (U.S.), Professor Andy Hargreaves (U.S.), Professor Yvonne Hellman (The Netherlands), Professor Kristin Helstad (Norway), Jean Hendrickson (U.S.), Professor Rose Hipkins (New Zealand), Professor Cornelia Hoogland (Canada), Honourable Jeff Johnson (Canada), Mme. Chantal Kaufmann (Belgium), Dr. Eija Kauppinen (Finland), State Secretary Tapio Kosunen (Finland), Professor Dominique Lafontaine (Belgium), Professor Hugh Lauder (UK), Professor Ben Levin (Canada), Lord Ken Macdonald (UK), Professor Barry McGaw (Australia), Shiv Nadar (India), Professor R. Natarajan (India), Dr. Pak Tee Ng (Singapore), Dr. Denise Pope (US), Sridhar Rajagopalan (India), Dr. Diane Ravitch (U.S.), Richard Wilson Riley (U.S.), Sir Ken Robinson (UK), Professor Pasi Sahlberg (Finland), Professor Manabu Sato (Japan), Andreas Schleicher (PISA, OECD), Dr. Anthony Seldon (UK), Dr. David Shaffer (U.S.), Dr. Kirsten Sivesind (Norway), Chancellor Stephen Spahn (U.S.), Yves Theze (Lycee Francais U.S.), Professor Charles Ungerleider (Canada), Professor Tony Wagner (U.S.), Sir David Watson (UK), Professor Dylan Wiliam (UK), Dr. Mark Wormald (UK), Professor Theo Wubbels (The Netherlands), Professor Michael Young (UK), and Professor Minxuan Zhang (China) as they explore the big picture education questions that all nations face today.

The Global Search for Education Community Page

C. M. Rubin is the author of two widely read online series for which she received a 2011 Upton Sinclair award, "The Global Search for Education" and "How Will We Read?" She is also the author of three bestselling books, including The Real Alice in Wonderland, and is the publisher of CMRubinWorld.

Follow C. M. Rubin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@cmrubinworld

TAGS: Education Technology Future of Employment Carl Benedikt Frey Michael A. Osborne Automation of Production Tony Wagner The Global Search for Education Computerizable Occupations Job Automation Oxford Martin School 20th Century Job Market C. M. Rubin Education for Innovation OPPI Festival Education Reform Occupation Computerization

Ingenious. Fixing a body’s broken genes is becoming possible

IT SOUNDS like science fiction, and for years it seemed as though it was just that: fiction. But the idea of gene therapy—introducing copies of healthy genes into people who lack them, to treat disease—is at last looking as if it may become science fact.

The field got off to a bad start, with the widely reported death of an American liver patient in 1999. In 2003 some French children who were being treated with it for an immune-system problem called SCID developed leukaemia. Since then, though, things have improved. Indeed one procedure, for lipoprotein lipase deficiency (which causes high levels of blood fats, with all the problems those can bring), has been approved, in Europe, for clinical use.

The most recent success, announced last month in the Lancet, was of an experimental treatment for choroideremia, a type of blindness. This is caused by mutation of the gene for a protein called REP1. Without REP1, the eye’s light receptors degenerate. Robert MacLaren of Oxford University used a virus to deliver working versions of the REP1 gene to the most light-sensitive part of the retina. Five of the six participants in the trial duly experienced an improvement in their sensitivity to light. Two were so improved that they could read more letters than previously on a standard eye chart.

Dr MacLaren’s work complements that of Albert Maguire and Jean Bennett at the University of Pennsylvania, who use gene therapy to treat another eye disease, Leber’s congenital amaurosis. A defective version of a gene called RPE65 means that, in this condition, retinal cells are starved of vitamin A, which also causes blindness. Putting normal copies of RPE65 into the retina leads, as with REP1, to greater light sensitivity and—sometimes—clearer vision.

Drs MacLaren, Maguire and Bennett all use adeno-associated viruses (a type not known to cause illness, and which does not much provoke the immune system) to carry their genetic payloads to the target. Luigi Naldini of the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy, in Milan, employs a rather scarier vector—one derived from HIV, the virus that causes AIDS—because its life cycle involves it integrating its genes into its host cells’ nuclei.

Last year Dr Naldini and his colleagues reported that, using their safely neutered version of HIV, they had inserted working copies of genes into blood stem cells which lack them, in order to treat metachromatic leukodystrophy (which damages nerves) and Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome (which harms the immune system and reduces blood’s ability to clot). In both cases—though in only a handful of patients, for the diseases are rare—Dr Naldini’s approach either prevented the disease or at least halted its progress.

The rarity of metachromatic leukodystrophy, Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome and many other diseases for which gene therapy might be appropriate means a lot of the applications of this approach are narrow. But a different one—constructing tailored genes and using them to guide the immune system—may have wider application, specifically against cancer.

Michel Sadelain, of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre, in New York, is one of those at the forefront of a method that works this way. It employs chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) cells, which are engineered versions of T-cells, the part of the immune system that kills body cells, including tumorous ones, which have become threats.

Dr Sadelain’s trick is to take natural T-cells from patients (specifically, leukaemia and lymphoma patients) and add to them genes which turn those cells’ attention to the tumour in question, causing them to seek out its cells and destroy them. He then returns the modified cells to the patient, where they multiply and attack.

The CAR pool

The extra genes in CAR cells are derived in part from monoclonal-antibody genes. These have, in turn, been selected for their affinity to the target tumour. Because CAR cells multiply in the body this is, as Dr Sadelain puts it, like creating a living drug.

Last year Dr Sadelain’s team, and also another group led by Carl June at the University of Pennsylvania, published results showing the promise of CAR cells in treating people with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Dr Sadelain’s paper showed that they caused full remission in all five adult patients treated (though two subsequently died of complications, one set of which was unrelated to the treatment); Dr June’s, that they eradicated the cancer from two children. And, at a meeting of the American Society of Hematology held in December, both researchers reported further successes.

There is, moreover, one further technique that might bring gene therapy into the mainstream. Current approaches work by adding genes to affected cells. But it may be possible to modify those cells’ existing, broken genes, using a method called CRISPR-Cas9 editing, a process that takes advantage of a natural antiviral system which chops up genetic material.

CRISPR-Cas9 editing is specific to particular sequences of genetic letters, and can thus be tweaked to do a researcher’s bidding. In a recent edition of Cell, Sha Jiahao of Nanjing Medical University showed how to use it to execute the reverse of gene therapy—creating genetic problems, rather than solving them—in monkeys. His aim was to produce model organisms that might help understanding of diseases in human beings (though making such models out of monkeys is controversial). But the technique might eventually be employed to do running repairs on damaged DNA in people.

That, if it ever happens, is a long way off. In the meantime, the promise of gene therapy can be seen in the fact that it is attracting lawyers. The University of Pennsylvania has licensed its CAR technology to Novartis, a Swiss drugs firm. The pair of them are now fending off a lawsuit brought by competitors including Juno Therapeutics, the creation of three research centres of which Memorial Sloan-Kettering is one. For patients, that suggests gene therapy really is something worth fighting over.

From the print edition: Science and technology



ORIGINAL: The Economist

From the print edition

Feb 8th 2014

Mass unemployment fears over Google artificial intelligence plans

The development of artificial intelligence - thrown into spotlight this week after Google spent hundreds of millions on new technology - could mean computers take over human jobs at a faster rate than new roles can be created, experts have warned

DeepMind was founded two years ago by 37-year-old neuroscientist and former teenage chess prodigy Demis Hassabis, along with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman Photo: AP

Artificial intelligence could lead to mass unemployment if computers develop the capacity to take over human work, experts warned days after it emerged that Google had beat competitors to buy a firm specialising in this kind of technology.

Dr Stuart Armstrong, from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, gave the stark warning after it emerged that Google had paid £400m for the British artificial intelligence firm DeepMind.

He welcomed the web giant’s decision to set up an ethics board to safely develop and use artificial intelligence claiming the advances in technology carried a number of risks.

Mr Armstrong said computers had the potential to take over people’s jobs at a faster rate than new roles could be created.

He cited logistics, administration and insurance underwriting as professions that were particularly vulnerable to the development of artificial intelligence.

Related Articles
Google snaps up British start-up for £400m 27 Jan 2014
Google buys UK artificial intelligence firm DeepMind 27 Jan 2014
Google wants an Android in every Audi and Honda 06 Jan 2014

He also warned about the implications for uncontrolled mass surveillance if computers were taught to recognise human faces.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “There’s a variety of short term risks for artificial intelligence, everyone knows about the autonomous drones.

“But there’s also the potential for mass surveillance, you don’t just have to recognise cat images, you could also recognise human faces and also mass unemployment in a variety of professions.”

He added: “We have some studies looking into which jobs are the most vulnerable and there’s quite a lot of them in logistics, administration, insurance underwriting but ultimately a huge swathe of jobs are potentially vulnerable to improved artificial intelligence.”

His concerns were backed up by Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, who said: “I think it is a very good thing that Google has set up this ethics board and I think there certainly are some short term issues that we all need to be talking about.

“It’s very difficult to predict and that is of course a concern but in the past when we’ve developed new kinds of technologies then often they have created jobs at the same time as taking them over but it certainly is something we ought to be discussing.”

DeepMind was founded two years ago by 37-year-old neuroscientist and former teenage chess prodigy Demis Hassabis, along with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.

The company specialises in algorithms and machine learning for simulation, e-commerce and games.

It is also working in an area called Deep Learning in which machines are taught to see patterns from large quantities of data so computers could start to recognise objects from daily life such as cars or food products and even human faces.

It is believed Google will use DeepMind’s expertise to improve the functions of its current products such as the Google Glass and extend its current artificial intelligence work such as the development of self-driving cars.

Mr Shanahan said: “We all know that Google have got an interest in wearable computing with their Google glass and you can imagine them and other companies using this technology to build some kind of assistant that for example could help you to make a lasagne in your kitchen and to tell you what ingredients you needed and where to find them.

“Not necessarily a robot assistant but something wearable such as your Google glass or some other maker might make a similar thing so you can carry it around with you.”

ORIGINAL: The Telegraph

By Miranda Prynne, News Reporter
29 Jan 2014

The Best Shots Fired in the Oxford Comma Wars

Image credit: Thinkstock

The Oxford comma, so-called because the Oxford University Press style guidelines require it, is the comma before the conjunction at the end of a list. If your preferred style is to omit the second comma in "red, white, and blue," you are aligned with the anti-Oxford comma faction. The pro-Oxford comma faction is more vocal and numerous in the US, while in the UK, anti-Oxford comma reigns. (Oxford University is an outsider, style-wise, in its own land.) In the US, book and magazine publishers are generally pro, while newspapers are anti, but both styles can be found in both media.

The two main rationales for choosing one style over the other are clarity and economy. Each side has invoked both rationales in its favor. Here are some quotes that have served as shots exchanged in the Oxford comma wars.

Pro: "She took a photograph of her parents, the president, and the vice president."

This example from the Chicago Manual of Style shows how the comma is necessary for clarity. Without it, she is taking a picture of two people, her mother and father, who are the president and vice president. With it, she is taking a picture of four people.

Con: "Those at the ceremony were the commodore, the fleet captain, the donor of the cup, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Jones."

This example from the 1934 style book of the New York Herald Tribune shows how a comma before "and" can result in a lack of clarity. With the comma, it reads as if Mr. Smith was the donor of the cup, which he was not.

Pro: "Zinovieff shot over five hundred of the bourgeoisie at a stroke—nobles, professors, officers, journalists, men and women."

George Ives, the author of a 1921 guide to the usage style of the Atlantic Monthly Press, gives this example to show how making the comma before "and" standard practice is more economical. This way, the reader will know for sure that if it's missing, there's a good reason. Here the reading is that there were both men and women among the nobles, professors, officers, and journalists. Without the expectation of the Oxford comma, the reader has to work harder to figure out that men and women aren't two additional groups on the list.

Con: "There are certain places where for the sake of clarity and good form the presence of a comma is obligatory, but on the other hand a too liberal use of this form of punctuation tends to slow up the pace of the reading matter and to create confusion and hesitancy in the mind of the reader."

The 1937 New York Times style guide put economy on the side of the no comma rule. Use when necessary—otherwise, it's just clutter to slow you down. 

Pro: "...use the comma between all members of a series, including the last two, on the commonsense ground that to do so will preclude ambiguities and annoyances at negligible cost."

Wilson Follett, in his 1966 Modern American Usage, advocates for the comma on the grounds that it can't really hurt.

Con: "All those commas make the flag seem rained on. They give it a furled look. Leave them out, and Old Glory is flung to the breeze, as it should be."

This complaint was addressed to Harold Ross, the founding editor of the New Yorker, by James Thurber, who preferred "the red white and blue" to "the red, white, and blue." Ross, a notorious defender of the serial comma, was impressed by Thurber's argument and responded, "write a piece about it, and I'll punctuate the flag any way you want it—in that one piece."

Pro: "This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God"

A probably apocryphal book dedication, this example has been a favorite of pro-Oxford comma language blogs for a while. Without the comma before "and," you get a rather intriguing set of parents.

Con: "The English are rather more careful than we are, and commonly put a comma after the next-to-last member of a series, but otherwise are not too precise to offend a red-blooded American."

H.L. Mencken, who did not use the serial comma himself, implies, in this quote tucked into a supplement to The American Language, that there is something prissy, pedantic, and altogether un-American about the extra comma.

?: "By train, plane and sedan chair, Peter Ustinov retraces a journey made by Mark Twain a century ago. The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector."

Languagehat dug this gem out of a comment thread on the serial comma. It's from a TV listing in The Times. It supports the use of the Oxford comma, but only because it keeps Mandela from being a dildo collector. However, even the Oxford comma can't keep him from being an 800-year-old demigod. There's only so much a comma can do.

ORIGINAL: Mental Floss
Arika Okrent

“Citizen science” apps, happiness, and monogamy

ORIGINAL: OBR Review
by: Roundtable Review News

Friday, 2nd August 2013

BAY AREA
New app puts smartphones to work for science If you have ever wondered what it might be like to walk on an asteroid or wished you could improve the lives of people around the world, you can now get a little closer to these dreams by simply charging your smartphone. A new Android app developed at Berkeley through the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) aims to use your smartphone to advance computationally intensive research. The app, also called BOINC, allows users to donate idle computing power to projects that would otherwise require cost-prohibitive supercomputers. BOINC was available as of July 22 from the Google Play Store for Android versions 2.3 and later and by default only runs when the phone is plugged in, has greater than 95% charge, and is connected to WiFi. The projects currently available through BOINC include  

• Asteroids@Home, which aims to better define the physical properties of asteroids;  
• FightAIDS@Home, which searches for more effective AIDS treatments;  
• Einstein@Home, which searches radio telescope data to identify pulsars; and 
• other math and natural science projects that deal with the analysis of complex algorithms surrounding large quantities of data. 

Though not yet available for iPhones, two-thirds of all smartphones are Android based and that means a lot of potential power for science.

SAN DIEGO
UC San Diego receives grant to promote science at the intersection of biology and physics A professor of biology and physics at UCSD, Suckjoon Jun, has received a $1.15 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create “boot camps” designed to introduce local high school and college students to quantitative biology. Jun describes quantitative biology as the application of “quantitative rigor” traditionally found in the physical sciences to biological questions. For example, this approach can be used to model complex processes such as drug interactions in human patients before the drugs are actually tested in clinical trials. In Jun’s lab, he utilizes a device he developed to analyze cell growth at the single cell level. Dubbed the “mother machine”, the instrument allows Jun’s lab to probe how cells sense their size and when to divide, and has potential to shed light on a variety of basic biological problems, such as the aberrant cell division that occurs in cancer. The NSF grant pairs Jun with a biology professor at San Diego State University, Anca Segall, who will help establish and run the boot camps. The goal of the boot camps, Jun says, is to first “spread the culture of quantitative biology” among young scientists in the San Diego area, and then to implement quantitative biology curriculum and undergraduate research opportunities at local universities.

LOS ANGELES
New amyloid-targeting compound for Alzheimer’s discovered Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles have identified compounds that target amyloid beta fibrils, the protein aggregates found in abundance in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. The research team, led by UCLA professor David Eisenberg, employed a structure-based approach to identify promising compounds – a technique that has been used for drug design in infectious and metabolic diseases, but had not yet been applied to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. To identify their candidate compounds,

• the team used their detailed knowledge of the atomic structure of the amyloid beta protein to find compounds that would interact with that structure. They first computationally screened 18,000 compounds, and 
• then tested those with a strong potential for binding amyloid beta in a cell culture model. Of the tested compounds, they identified 8 compounds and 3 compound derivatives that significantly protected cells from amyloid beta’s toxic effects. Interestingly, these compounds did not reduce protein aggregation in culture, but they did increase amyloid fibril stability and reduce cell toxicity. 

These results support the idea, which has been gaining traction in recent years, that smaller oligomers of amyloid beta, and not the larger fibrils, are actually the main culprit for cellular toxicity and Alzheimer’s symptoms. The researchers speculate that their compounds may prevent toxic effects by tightly binding to amyloid beta fibrils and preventing oligomers from breaking free. The results are a promising step in the right direction for developing therapies for Alzheimer’s disease, and also demonstrate that the structure-based approach is an effective, viable option for drug design that could be applied to many other neurodegenerative conditions.
Happiness may aid proper gene expression in immune cells If you’re happy and you know it, your genes will surely show it according to a new study from UCLA and the University of North Carolina. What you may not know is that what type of happiness yours is will also affect your genes. Previous research has established that during periods of stress, threat, or uncertainty, the genes related to the inflammatory immune response are turned on, whereas the activity of those related to antiviral responses significantly decreases. The question is then does happiness and well-being have a similar effect? Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina and Steven Cole of UCLA’s Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology sought to answer this by assessing the happiness of 80 healthy adults while accounting for potentially problematic psychological and behavioral factors. The study, published in the current online edition of PNAS, further divides the happiness measurements into two different categories:

• eudaimonic well-being and 
• hedonic well-being. 

Those individuals with high eudaimonic well-being, which is happiness that stems from a sense of purpose and meaning in life, exhibited reduced expression of inflammatory genes and increased expression of antiviral and antibody genes, the opposite of the stress response. However, those individuals with high hedonic well-being, or happiness from self-gratification, showed high expression of inflammatory genes and low expression of antiviral and antibody genes. Despite the differences in immune factor expression, the hedonics did not report feeling any worse than the eudaimonics. The moral appears to be that even if we can’t feel the difference, our systems still benefit more from doing good for others instead of ourselves.
LONDON
Aggressive form of leukemia puts stem cells to sleep Scientists from Queen Mary, University of London have found that malignant cells comprising Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), an aggressive blood cancer, actually put their stem cell counterparts in the bone marrow to sleep, rather than outcompeting them as originally believed. Conducted with support from the London Research Institute, this discovery could open the door to new treatment strategies where these ‘sleeping’ stem cells are reawakened. While healthy bone marrow generates the hematopoietic stem cells that become our various blood cell types, including red blood cells and platelets, the bone marrow of AML patients is instead colonized by leukemic myeloid cells incapable of any further development. Dr. David Taussig, who led the research project, said, “The widely accepted explanation has held that AML causes bone marrow failure by depleting the bone marrow of normal hematopoietic stem cells by killing or displacing them. However, we have found that samples of bone marrow in both mice models and patients with AML contain the same, or more, of these normal stem cells than usual. So the cancer isn’t getting rid of them, instead it appears to be turning them off so they aren’t going on to form healthy blood cells. If we can find out how the cancer cells are doing this, we can look at exploiting it to find ways to wake these stem cells up.”

Monogamy as a mating strategy evolved due to infanticide Social monogamy arose relatively late in primate evolution – only about 16 million years ago. The scientific community have proposed three major hypotheses:

• Monogamy provides more effective parental care for infants; 
• it prevents females from mating with rival males; or 
• it protects against the risk of infanticide, which is very high among some primate species, including chimpanzees and gorillas, and is often explained by the desire of a rival male to quickly return a mother to a fertile state. 

A team of researchers from UCL, University of Manchester, University of Oxford and University of Auckland have now confirmed an evolutionary pathway for the development of social monogamy in humans and other primates. The findings, published in the Journal PNAS, collected data from 230 primate species and indicate that only the presence of infanticide reliably increases the probability of a shift to monogamy. The team also found that following the emergence of social monogamy males were more likely to care for their offspring. Dr Kit Opie of the UCL anthropology department and lead author of the study said: “This is the first time that the theories for the evolution of monogamy have been systematically tested, conclusively showing that infanticide is the driver of monogamy. This brings to a close the long running debate about the origin of monogamy in primates.” These findings are in contrast with those reported recently by a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge and further described in the Cambridge news section. These conflicting studies have rekindled the monogamy debate. Phyllis Lee, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Stirling, UK, said: “Both papers have been carefully researched and will be discussed for some time to come.”
CAMBRIDGE
Second study finds an alternative explanation for the evolution of monogamy A comparative study carried out by researchers at the University of Cambridge has revealed that social monogamy, where one female and one breeding male are closely associated with each other over several breeding seasons, appears to have evolved as a mating strategy. This contrasts with previous theories that explained monogamy as a means to elicit extra parental care from the father. Instead, it has been suggested that paternal involvement evolved after the onset of monogamy. The research, published in Science, shows that monogamy in mammals evolved where males were unable to monopolise and defend multiple females. This generally corresponds to habitats with low densities of females. Furthermore, it was found that species with diets that rely on high quality but patchily distributed food sources are more likely to become monogamous. Although these findings were based on investigation of 2500 mammalian species, the human species was not included in the analysis, and the researchers are sceptical that the results tell us much about human breeding systems.

Potable Water for All – More Than a Pipe Dream

ORIGINAL: OBR Review
by: Megan Barrett

15th July 2013

Many of us take for granted the availability of a clean glass of water. Yet even at the turn of the second millennium, approximately one billion people still did not have access to a sustainable source of potable water.[1] With water contamination and shortages most prevalent in the remote regions of developing countries (where money and technology can be limited), scientists are faced with a daunting challenge: to develop new ways of treating water to make it safe, using simple, locally sourced and inexpensive processes. Interestingly, the local environment may hold the key. Recent discoveries suggest that naturally occurring products, such as plant seeds and even tomato peel, may be used to help purify water.

Water is essential to our survival and health, with the human body being approximately 70% water. We use water in industry, to grow crops and cook; in sanitation; and for transportation purposes; yet, untreated water sources can contain many hidden threats including toxic heavy metals and dangerous pesticides. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), approximately 80% of illness in developing countries is known to be associated with contaminated drinking water.[2]

A number of methods for treating water currently exist, mostly involving the addition of chemical substances, such as chlorine or aluminium sulphate (alum), to contaminated bodies of water. The availability, cost and knowledge to ensure the correct dosage of such substances, however, is often lacking in remote communities.[2] Consequently, some scientists are looking for more natural solutions– ones potentially more accessible to people living away from areas of development.

Figure 1: Moringa oleifera pods

The Moringa oleifera (figure 1), a variety of plant found abundantly across rural India, Africa and Cambodia has drawn considerable attention in recent history. Parul Sharma and a team from the Faculty of Science at Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Dayalbagh investigated the ability of M. oleifera seed powder to remove cadmium, a dangerous heavy metal responsible for itai-itai disease, from water sources on a laboratory scale. Cadmium was labelled with a radioactive tracer so its levels could be tracked and the M. oleifera plant seeds were crushed to form a powder. Quite surprisingly, Sharma’s group found that cadmium levels were effectively reduced by the seed powder, suggesting this species of plant may be useful in remote and developing regions of the world to help reduce contamination of the local water supplies.[3]

A second ecologically friendly method of treating water has been developed by a group of scientists from Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa. Recently, Oranso Mahlangu and colleagues tested the ‘Silver Impregnated Porous Pot (SIPP) filter’, a clay-based filtering pot, as a tool to produce safe drinking water at a household level.[4] The SIPP filter is made using certain clay types that naturally remove contaminants (e.g. toxic heavy metals) by a process known as adsorption. This is when particles in a gas, liquid or dissolved solid bind to a surface, and is not to be confused with absorption: when a gas or fluid is taken into a solid (e.g. a sponge soaking up a puddle of water).

Figure 2: Diagram illustrating the set up of Mahlangu and colleagues ‘Silver Impregnated Porous Pot (SIPP) filter’

Mahlangu’s team filtered different river sources through the SIPP filter six times, for 3 hours at a time (figure 2). They then used a method known as atomic adsorption spectrophotometry (AAS) to analyse the level of metal contaminants (such as magnesium, iron and arsenic) in the water samples before and after filtration. What they found was remarkable: the SIPP filter reduced the amounts of magnesium and iron in the water samples by more than 50% to a level below the WHO’s acceptable maximum for these heavy metals (70–100micrograms per litre and 0.2–2micrograms per litre, respectively). Arsenic levels were also reduced, though unfortunately not to within the WHO’s stated guidelines, and the effectiveness of the SIPP filter did lessen with use.[4]

Figure 3: Peeling a tomato

Nevertheless, the search for an affordable and accessible way of acquiring potable water in remote parts of the world has continued. A few months ago, Ramakrishna Mallampati and Suresh Valiyaveettil from the University of Singapore investigated a somewhat unexpected tool for water purification— the tomato peel (figure 3).[5] Remarkably, this fruit‘s “biomembrane” (or cell-covering barrier) also acts as an adsorbent to the toxic heavy metals in polluted water and removes dangerous dyes and pesticides that may have contaminated a natural water source.

Mallampati and Valiyaveettil treated their local shop-bought tomato peels by boiling them, washing them with propanol (an alcohol that removes pigment, i.e. the red colour of the tomato) and drying them. These peels were then added to different solutions containing known water contaminants and were found to effectively lower the levels of chemicals such as arsenic, alcian blue and neutral red (two dyes) and phenol which is used in pesticides. Moreover, the effectiveness of the tomato peels to help remove the water pollutants did not seem to deteriorate over time, suggesting that the easily accessible and inexpensive tomato peel may be a useful material for treating drinking water.[5]

The availability of sustainable water sources for the more isolated communities around the world; (especially in developing countries) is a serious problem facing scientists and society today. Many of the current chemical processes for treating drinking water are not obtainable or affordable for remote populations, such as those in rural India or Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet scientists have made some bio-friendly breakthroughs. The recent findings that certain heavy metals and other contaminants toxic to human health can be reduced by natural materials, such as plant seeds, clay and tomato peel, is a significant achievement in the fight to provide safe potable water for all— a battle I will definitely be thinking about the next time I turn on my tap.

References

1. Rush EC. 2013. Water: neglected, unappreciated and under researched. Eur J Clin Nutr. 1-4. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23361160
2. Yongabi K, Lewis D, Harris P. 2012. Natural materials for sustainable water pollution management. In Prof Nuray Balkis (Ed). Water Pollution. InTech. http://www.intechopen.com/books/water-pollution
3. Sgarma R, Kumari P, Srivastava M, et al. 2006. Removal of cadmium from aqueous system by shelled Moringa oleifera Lam. seed powder. Bioresour Technol. 97:299-305. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15949938
4. Mahlangu O, Mamba B, Momba M. 2012. Efficiency of Silver Impregnated Porous Pot (SIPP) filters for the production of clean potable water. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 9:3014-3029. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23202668
5. Mallampati R, Valiyaweettil S. 2012. Application of tomato peel as an efficient adsorbent for water purification— alternative biotechnology? RSC Advances. 2:9914-9920. http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2012/ra/c2ra21108d

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What Would Suburbia Look Like If It Had The Same Water Resources As Africa?

Big Data in Biotech: Where do we go from here? OBR-Bay @ UCSF, June 17th

ORIGINAL: Oxbridge Biotech
by Nick Mordwinkin, OBR-Bay

Tuesday, 28th May 2013

Do big questions come from big data?

SAN FRANCISCO, California – Big data in the Silicon Valley is about more than just getting people to click ads. The real promise lies in understanding health from the molecular to the population level. Recently “Big Data” has become almost cliché, a buzzword bandied about The Valley by tech stars leveraging their mathematical acumen to crunch site visits and bounce rates to deliver ever more potent advertisements. But the real promise of Big Data lies in health care. As the cost of acquiring data lowers, academia and industry are amassing data by the petabyte (that’s 1,000 terabytes) from 

• microarrays, 
• high-throughput sequencing, 
• drug compound libraries, and even 
• patient data. 

For example, when the Human Genome Project wrapped up in 2003, it took more than a decade and billions of dollars to appreciate the 20,000 genes buried within the 3 billion bases.

Now another 3 billion bases can be sequenced in a morning. The price has continued to fall, from billions in the 1990s, to $10M in 2007, to less than $1000 today – a vertiginous decline outpacing Gordon Moore’s eponymous law. From sequencing in the clinic, to predictive modeling of drug compounds, evidence-based medicine and massive clinical trials – the commercial potential of Big Data is approaching an inflection point in the life sciences. The real question is, how do we take mountains of this data from the server closet and the cloud and translate it into clinically relevant outcomes? As AstraZeneca’s Vice President of R&D, John Reynders, warns, “big data is only going to be as good as the questions that are being asked of it.” And now even billionaire philanthropist Li Ka Shing is getting in the act. Recently his foundation awarded Oxford University £20 million ($31 million) to help establish the Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Information and Discovery, which will include a Big Data Institute. The goal of this center is to analyze large data sets from DNA sequencing, electronic medical records, and other sources in order to advance knowledge about treatments and diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cancer.

Locally, more and more Bay Area startups are springing up with a major focus on collecting and interpreting Big Data. Syapse, which was founded at Stanford University in 2008, aims at disrupting healthcare by “bringing omics into routine medical use.” Their suite of cloud-based applications enables the generation and use of next generation genomic sequencing to diagnostic companies hospitals, laboratories, research institutions, insurance companies, and medical clinics, with the ultimate goal of improving patient care by helping clinicians with the diagnosis and treatment of patients. Syapse recently raised $3 million in series A financing led by The Social+Capital Partnership.

To help answer these questions, Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable’s OBR-Bay chapter is holding a panel discussion on Monday, June 17 entitled “The Commercial Potential of Big Data in Biotech”. The event will be held at Genentech Hall at the University of California, San Francisco Mission Bay Campus, and led by Sarah Aerni, Senior Data Scientist at Pivotal, and Jonathan Hirsch, Founder and President at Syapse.

Descubren un gen que hace que algunas personas sean zurdas

ORIGINAL: El Clarín

INVESTIGACION DE CIENTIFICOS EN OXFORD 

Se transmite por vía paterna y afecta a los dos hemisferios del cerebro.

Qué lado del cerebro maneja cada mano

Hasta ahora las certezas sobre los zurdos eran pocas y estaban más asociadas a la estadística que a la ciencia: se sabe que un 10 por ciento de la población es zurda y que los zurdos varones duplican en número a las mujeres. Pero un nuevo estudio asoció por primera vez a un gen con el hecho de escribir con la mano izquierda.

Un grupo de científicos de la Universidad de Oxford llegó a la conclusión de que el gen LRRTM1 transmitido por vía paterna está altamente asociado con el ser zurdo. 

El cerebro es asimétrico y cada hemisferio cumple funciones distintas. En la mayoría de las personas el lado izquierdo del cerebro controla el lado derecho del cuerpo y viceversa. Sin embargo, en los zurdos, a veces, esto se invierte. Hasta el descubrimiento del grupo de científicos era un misterio por qué eso ocurría y ahora los investigadores han puesto sobre la mesa un gen -es decir, una secuencia de ADN que codifica una información- para comenzar a rastrear los motivos.

"Esperamos que las conclusiones del estudio nos ayuden a entender el desarrollo de la asimetría en el cerebro, porque es una función fundamental. Esta función muchas veces se interrumpe cuando hay problemas psiquiátricos", aseguró a la BBC Clyde Francks, especialista en genética de la Universidad de Oxford e investigador del Wellcome Trust Centre para genética humana.

El gen LRRTM1 (por las siglas en inglés de leucine-rich repeat transmembrane neuronal 1) demostró tener un papel importante en el control de las partes del cerebro que controlan funciones como el habla y las emociones. 

En las personas diestras, la parte izquierda del cerebro controla el habla y el lenguaje, mientras que la derecha controla las emociones. En las personas zurdas con frecuencia sucede lo contrario, y los investigadores creen que el gen LRRTM1 es el causante de este cambio. 

La investigación se realizó sobre un total de 1.002 familias, ya que tuvieron que estudiar la herencia del gen de padres y madres hacia hijas e hijos.

Los investigadores determinaron que cuando el gen se hereda de padres a hijos o hijas produce sus efectos.

"La asimetría izquierda-derecha en las funciones cerebrales abarca a gran parte de las capacidades cognitivas, de comportamiento y de emociones del ser humano. Los orígenes moleculares, evolutivos y de desarrollo de la asimetría cerebral son desconocidos. (...) Hemos encontrado una asociación significativa de la transmisión del gen LRRTM1 con una medición cuantitativa de la habilidad para utilizar una u otra mano cuando es transmitido por vía paterna", describe el estudio publicado por la revista especializada "Molecular Psychiatry".

El mismo estudio determinó que el gen también está asociado a enfermedades psicóticas como la esquizofrenia. Sin embargo, Francks aseguró que los zurdos no deben preocuparse por los vínculos entre el ser zurdo y la esquizofrenia.

"Hay muchos factores que hacen a las personas susceptibles a la esquizofrenia, y la mayoría de los zurdos nunca tiene problemas", dijo el especialista. Y agregó: "No sabemos todavía cómo funciona el gen". 

Cifras

10% Es el porcentaje de zurdos en la población mundial. El número es una estimación estadística y no incluye a los que tienen capacidad para escribir con las dos manos (ambidiestros).

2 a 1 Es la relación de zurdos hombres con mujeres. La ciencia todavía no dilucidó por qué más hombres escriben con la mano izquierda, pero el descubrimiento del gen ayudaría a hacerlo.

24% Es el porcentaje de gemelos que escribe con distintas manos, según un estudio que pone en duda que el componente del ser zurdo sea completamente genético.

Totally blind mice get sight back

ORIGINAL: BBC

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News

Totally blind mice have had their sight restored by injections of light-sensing cells into the eye, UK researchers report.

The team in Oxford said their studies closely resemble the treatments that would be needed in people with degenerative eye disease.

Similar results have already been achieved with night-blind mice.

Experts said the field was advancing rapidly, but there were still questions about the quality of vision restored.

Patients with retinitis pigmentosa gradually lose light-sensing cells from the retina and can become blind.

“It's the first proof that you can take a completely blind mouse, put the cells in and reconstruct the entire light-sensitive layer” Prof Robert MacLaren University of Oxford

The research team, at the University of Oxford, used mice with a complete lack of light-sensing photoreceptor cells in their retinas. The mice were unable to tell the difference between light and dark.

Reconstruction

They injected "precursor" cells which will develop into the building blocks of a retina once inside the eye. Two weeks after the injections a retina had formed, according to the findings presented in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Prof Robert MacLaren said: "We have recreated the whole structure, basically it's the first proof that you can take a completely blind mouse, put the cells in and reconstruct the entire light-sensitive layer."

Previous studies have achieved similar results with mice that had a partially degenerated retina. Prof MacLaren said this was like "restoring a whole computer screen rather than repairing individual pixels".

The mice were tested to see if they fled being in a bright area, if their pupils constricted in response to light and had their brain scanned to see if visual information was being processed by the mind.

Vision

Prof Pete Coffee, from the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London, said the findings were important as they looked at the "most clinically relevant and severe case" of blindness.

"This is probably what you would need to do to restore sight in a patient that has lost their vision," he said.

However, he said this and similar studies needed to show how good the recovered vision was as brain scans and tests of light sensitivity were not enough.

He said: "Can they tell the difference between a nasty animal and something to eat?"

Prof Robin Ali published research in the journal Nature showing that transplanting cells could restore vision in night-blind mice and then showed the same technique worked in a range of mice with degenerated retinas.

He said: "These papers demonstrate that it is possible to transplant photoreceptor cells into a range of mice even with a severe level of degeneration.

"I think it's great that another group is showing the utility of photoreceptor transplantation."

Researchers are already trialling human embryonic stem cells, at Moorfields Eye Hospital, in patients with Stargardt's disease. Early results suggest the technique is safe but reliable results will take several years.

Retinal chips or bionic eyes are also being trialled in patients with retinitis pigmentosa.