#but i think he worked for the csiro or something so he got a Very Good pension

[clueless1995]

called my MUMMY and she was NICE TO ME. the world is beautiful once more

[gracebolton]

The Australian Greens – Election 2016

The Australian Federal Election has been called for the first weekend in July. Like all these political things, its bloody hard to escape. The big parties are making the usual noises, but could The Australian Greens sneak up on them with a solar-powered stick?

One Bloke’s Perspective

I’ve don’t consider myself politically active. No time for student politics when you’re drinking at University. No set opinions on voting, except maybe putting the hard line religious parties dead last on any ballot paper, if they dare to show up in my electorate. Separation of church and state!

A firm belief that politicians get paid too much. That’s a point on which I’ve had many arguments. Australian politicians are among the best paid in the world, and have some ridiculously good retirement benefits.

Look, I’m quite sure parts of being a Member of Parliament suck, but there are parts of every job that suck. For that kind of money ($195K base + extras) I could put up with some crap – I already do for much less!

So I’ll stick my hand up and say that I’m opinionated, and probably naive in terms of deeper politics. But, as with art, I know what I like.

Australian Political Landscape

It has always seemed, to me at least, that the great irony of the political system in Australia is compulsory voting in a nation where, on average, people could care less about politics.

Yep, that’s right: you need to register to vote once you hit 18, and you can get fined if you don’t vote at either State or Federal level.

How I see two-party politics…

Oh sure, there are some dyed-in-the-wool supporters, who will unleash spittle at a rate of knots in support of their party. I’ve seen people nearly come to blows on election day; old dudes who look ready to go into cardiac arrest at a moment’s notice.

If you want a rundown on the major Australian political parties, go have a read here: the Liberal Party (conservatives) are in a Coalition with National Party (farmers) to form our present Federal Government. While they have their own little internal horse trading, the Coalition, as they are known, are fairly solid when it comes to opposing stuff from the other side, and pushing economic liberalism.

At the moment, the other side are the Australian Labor Party (progressives). In a similar vein to their opponents, they love nothing more than saying “Those guys bad! We good! Vote Us!” but politically are all about social democracy.

The fanatics of either side probably think everything is great when their lot are in power, and rubbish when they’re in opposition.

There other other parties, the most prominent of which is The Australian Greens (progressive environmentalists). However, they only hold a small number of seats, and along with some independents and minor parties, form the “conscience” of the Australian people on certain issues.

The influence of the Australian Greens is obviously limited in the bigger picture, but occasionally they’ll hold the balance of power in either house (upper house = Senate; lower house = House of Representatives) on specific issues, often forming a voting bloc with independents who haven’t already done a deal with a big party.

When you live on a continent with this much good weather, natural beauty, quality beer, and generally high standard of living, it doesn’t really seem to matter. Most people I know are of the belief that, regardless of who wins, there will be pros and cons, and its not worth getting worked up about.

The majority of Australians probably fit in the middle of politics, and will vote based on their conscience, guided in some cases by the media (who have their own agenda).

Combined with compulsory voting, and a hyped up news cycle feeding on social media, it makes Australia an interesting political minefield. This has resulted in some states recently suffering single-term governments for the first time in decades, as one notable fact.

It seems that people are just willing to throw out whoever is in power; parties don’t win elections, they lose them.

In turn, the major party politicians constantly play he-said/she-said in terms of trying to score points. Its quite tiresome when there are more important issues to address – things that affect all of us, and are largely being ignored.

The Biggest Issue

Across the world at the moment, the threats posed by environmental destruction, and ongoing threat of man-made global warming, are going to affect us all.

It is right there. People know it is right there. If you’ve been paying attention in the last 10 years, you know there is a lot of rubbish talked about how its not right there. It is one of those things that some people see as a threat to their way of life, or some kind of charlatan’s trick to cripple the economy, so they work to undermine it.

In Australia, we have such a very large investment in coal, across all of mining, export, and thermal power generation. There is even a campaign called “little black rock”, which I will not dignify with a link, which seeks to tell people how releasing carbon is awesome.

Australia has an abundance of bright sun and strong wind, as well as the emerging wave power we can generate. We have the highest level of rooftop solar PV penetration at around 1.5 million households. We have some of the best researchers in the world on Solar PV, and lots of space to build the necessary infrastructure, both domestic and industrial.

Renewable Energy – Why So Negative?

The Coalition government are definitely not keen on it. Under their leadership we’ve had wind farms called “visually awful” and cited other impacts, all of which have been long held in contempt by science.

One of my favourites – click image for story @ Independent Australia

They reduced the RET (Renewable Energy Target) and have had an ongoing campaign against change in the status quo, in order to protect their conservative interests in mining and export markets.

They have run the clippers over our peak scientific body, the CSIRO, valued here and internationally for scientific research and technology development. The move is ostensibly to move from “analysis” to “adaptation” of climate change, but when you look at the CV of their CEO, and hear some of the comments about his time in Silicon Valley, you have to wonder.

It won’t surprise anyone to note that the coal and energy lobbies pour money into the Liberal Party like water.

The opposition Labor Party (yes, that is the correct spelling) have also got a quandary on their hands, particularly as they seek to protect their traditional battleground of workers’ rights and family issues. They can’t simply shut coal off tomorrow, because it would leave a hell of a lot of wreckage on the social landscape of towns supported by coal.

Nevertheless, they have announced some targets, which are nice, but really could be more ambitious. Labor have strong ties to Unions, and the CFMEU (Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union) are a big player.

The gradual decline of mining has seen job cuts aplenty, and IMHO Labor need to work harder to convince people in the Unions that Australia can pivot into renewable energy.

Ironically, both the major political players are running the dusty political principles of “jobs and growth”, but aren’t really putting up alternatives to the status quo, despite Australia’s recent exit from manufacturing and the ongoing slide in the mining sector.

There is also a genuine fear of fundamental change, in part due to the historical allegiances the big parties have, and the unknown quantity of renewable energy in a nation historically riding on coal. The latter is understandable, as mining is what kept Australia bouyant during the GFC.

But, we’re at record low interest rates. Record high housing prices. Coal prices are falling, mining is shrinking. This isn’t 2008 any more and the government can’t just muddle through on the back of the mining giants.

Where is the next big wave coming from? When all signs point to a new revolution, neither of the big parties have used renewable energy as a pillar in this campaign, both as an environmental and economic winner.

The Australian Greens – The Little Engine That Might

At present, The Greens are under the leadership of Richard Di Natale, who has brought a kind of pragmatism from his Senate position in Victoria.

© The Australian Greens

It is unlikely they’ll win many seats, but the growing youth vote has seen them take several inner-city enclaves away from the big boys in the recent past at State and Federal level.

Along with disillusionment with the major parties, forthright leadership from Di Natale will assist the Greens wrest more of the vote away from the majors in years to come. Is this a good thing?

Perhaps, if for no other reason than getting the incumbents to change their thinking. More promising is the option to add a third voice to the decidedly binary view of Australian politics.

This change in rhetoric from the Australian Greens also dispels the myth that they are just a bunch of left-wing loonies, ready to bring down society and take us all back to peace-loving hippies with unrealistic expectations of love and peace. And kale … or something.

Renew Australia

Subtitled “Powering The New Economy”, the Australian Greens have released a document (PDF downloadable from that page), where they lay down the high-level principles behind fundamentally changing the energy economy, and several industries along with it.

Its worth a read, if for no other reason than to show that somebody is thinking about “jobs and growth” in terms that require a bit of a paradigm shift. The summary points are:

Ensure increases in energy efficiency

Get energy generation to 90% renewable by 2030

Establish a new authority to plan and drive the transition

Create a transition fund to assist coal workers and communities

Implement pollution standards to stage a gradual shut down of coal power stations in a suitable manner (dirtiest first)

All of these seem to be pretty reasonable, though I don’t doubt when some people read that – particularly those in the coal/energy industry – they’ll freak out a bit. And that’s OK, because change blows. We fear change.

The good news is, the Greens have released more detail about the transition process as it affects miners directly, as well as some dialogue on other policies via their website. Recognition of the issues facing people is not unexpected, as The Greens have a heavy emphasis on social equality.

Perhaps people still have this image of “Greenie” protesters who get all angry about people chopping down forests, or chaining themselves to mining equipment. Successive Greens administration have started to develop a more sophisticated approach to politicking, and it appears to be having an effect.

When I started this article, I’d planned a breakdown of the policy and the pros and cons of each bit. That would take a lot of words, and probably be a waste of time when you’re smart enough to figure out what the policy is about, by reading it yourself. So I’ll just look at one of the points above from a perspective close to my heart.

Energy Efficiency

When looking at how efficient the average Australian house is, people in Europe would be mildly shocked. The reasons why are probably more eye-opening, in terms of our building industry hitting the trough, and hard.

Overseas building industries started their push for better quality and efficiency decades ago. In Australia, labour costs are high and house prices surging, so adding extra cost is tough to accept. Consumer apathy is also a big factor, when you’ve got relatively cheap, abundant coal energy.

“Just turn on the Air Con!” is a pretty common statement. I’ve previously discussed the issues in my own house with ducted A/C (and associated muttering).

As a result, a lot of new housing in the last two decades is single-brick house with minimum ceiling insulation in the form of glasswool batts. If you wanted wall insulation, you’d pay extra in your new build in a lot of cases. Some didn’t even offer it, and I understand its extremely difficult to retrofit (i.e. ripping out internal walls)

We generally don’t do double/triple glazing, and just stick big reverse cycle air conditioners into new builds to cater for hot/cold days. No wonder we’re big electricity consumers!

People living in older weatherboard houses might as well be in a wooden tent. The farmhouse I grew up in had louvered windows and a big pitched roof, and yet somehow we got away without air conditioning in summer, and just a potbellied stove or combustion fire for winter.

Cold in Sydney right now – could really use one of these. AND, of course, the wine…

The great thing about seeking better efficiency, besides the obvious saving on heating/cooling requirements for the household, is the boost to the building industry in terms of jobs and growth (are you listening, major parties?). It also adds a layer of new requirements for retrofit options.

As new procedures and technologies are brought to bear, new opportunities crop up to establish service industries. This is especially important for people who might have skilled up in the practical arts of mining, and find themselves at a loose end.

A lot of people who went into mining got the training they needed, and can re-train to do something different in the building industry. Same for people no longer in car manufacturing after 2017. They’re smart people, and know the value of hard work. They need employment.

Better building practices can limit the upward growth of energy usage, as well as using the energy more intelligently. Along with home battery storage installed by companies like Natural Solar, smart control from Reposit Power, and better knowledge about how we use power, we can help limit the impact of change and minimise long-term costs.

The End Game for Coal

The Greens have put a shorter time limit on coal than the other political parties in Australia, recognising that this country has abundant natural resources for renewable energy generation.

They also acknowledge the practicalities of shutting down coal, and the social and financial cost in doing so.

However, their target of 90% renewables by 2030 leaves less than 15 years. In a political arena where The Greens won’t have the traction in Parliament to implement this kind of policy for at least the this Federal election, and probably the one after, you have to wonder where the impetus will come from.

With the falling price of solar PV, as well as the emergence of battery storage and the expected price drops there, I suspect we’ll see consumers have a big say in where the energy industry goes. The acceleration of uptake into battery storage, in particular, will force a rethink on network deployment and maintenance.

As I discussed in my last post, the Networks are interested in deeper consumer understanding.  They realise that working with the consumer on grid-connected battery storage is preferable to alienating them into off-grid battery storage.

The increase in domestic renewable generation will have a knock-on effect to the domestic coal market for power generation.

External forces like the falling world coal price will apply pressure from the other end. Mining for coal will come under serious pressure, particularly if it requires more generous subsidies from the taxpayer.

We have existing oversupply on our current networks, which presents the opportunity to shut down the dirtiest power stations (looking at you, Hazelwood) in the shorter term.

The white knight for mining companies could be other resources, such as Lithium. The demand for lithium will only increase over the shorter term, as battery factories (like $11B facility planned by Volkswagen) ramp up production.

It almost seems like closing the circle: moving energy away from coal requires more lithium, which allows mining to move away from coal into lithium.

Or is that too good to be true?

I think  even with these factors considered, we’re still going to need one of the major parties to help the Greens get this type of initiative across the line before 2030. I wouldn’t be putting money on the incumbent Government to help if they get back in.

After all, you can’t spell Coalition without “Coal”.

from https://www.sustainablefuturegroup.com.au/48/the-australian-greens-election-2016/ from https://sustainablfutg.tumblr.com/post/627957773469204480 from https://gracebolton.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-australian-greens-election-2016.html

[web-apps-blog]

Engineers Australia: Create

0SHARES000

Artificial intelligence will be able to do many things – destroying the world won’t be one of them, says Professor Toby Walsh.

In the 2013 movie Her, a lonely man called Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with his new operating system Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). Critically acclaimed, the movie won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and was nominated for Best Picture.However, the acclaim wasn’t limited to the arts community. According to one of Australia’s top artificial intelligence (AI) experts, Toby Walsh, the film resonated with his community too.“Unfortunately, if you ask AI researchers which AI movie they like, they complain that most of them paint such a dystopian picture of what AI’s going to do to the planet,” he said.“One that I like, and many of my colleagues have said they like as well, is the movie Her which is not a very dystopian picture at all, and gets something very right, which is that AI is the operating system of the future.”Walsh said the way we interact with computers has evolved from plugging wires into the front panel of the computer, to machine code programming, MS-DOS with its command line interface, and ultimately the graphical user interface we are all used to today.“The next layer is going to be this conversational one. You already see the beginnings of that in systems like Siri and Cortana,” he said. Toby Walsh with the collaborative industrial robot Baxter. (Photo: Grant Turner/UNSW) “As we move more to the Internet of Things, your house is full of devices that are connected to the internet that don’t have screens or keyboards. The front door, the light switch, the fridge, all of these are going to be networked together. There’s only one interface you can have with these, which is voice interface.“You’ll have this ongoing conversation that follows you around, and authenticates you on the biometrics of your voice. It will learn everything about you and your preferences. It will be very much like the movie. People will get quite attached to this person they’re having the conversation with all the time.”He said it’s hard to think of an area that artificial intelligence is not going to touch in some way.“It’s going to touch education, it’s going to touch healthcare, it’s going to touch pretty much every form of business you could imagine,” he said.“Anything cognitive that we do, you can imagine it touching. It’s hard to begin to think about what it won’t change.”Next moveWalsh said there are a lot of misconceptions out there about what artificial intelligence is able to do.“If you summed up all the things that you read in the newspapers, then you’d imagine it’s only a matter of moments before the machines are going to be taking over, which is far from the truth,” he said.“There are still a lot of significant hurdles to overcome before we can actually make machines as intelligent as us, and likely more intelligent than us. We recently saw the announcement of AlphaGo Zero, where they just gave it the rules of the game Go and it learned everything from scratch in just three days, then beat the program that beat Lee Sedol (World Go champion) 100-0.“That was pretty impressive. But we still build only narrow intelligence, programs that can do one task. We have made almost no progress on this idea of artificial general intelligence, programs that can match the breadth of abilities of the human brain.”He suspects it will be at least 50 years before we will get to machines that will be as intelligent as us and possibly longer.“I’m still hopeful it might happen in my lifetime, that would be a nice achievement. It’s not impossible but it could easily not happen for 100 years, or 200 years. One should always have a healthy respect for the human brain. It is the largest, most complex system we’ve seen in the universe by orders of magnitude, nothing approaches the complexity of the billions of neurons and the trillions of connections the human brain has, nothing!”The awakeningWalsh was born in southeastern England, just outside London, and confesses that as a boy he read too much science fiction.“From about the age of seven or eight I started to read about robots and intelligent machines,” he said.“Maybe I didn’t have any imagination, but it’s what I decided I wanted to do in life – try and build those things that I read about. The more I thought about the problem as I got older and could understand a bit more about it, I realised it was actually one of those challenging problems that wasn’t going to go away anytime soon, like how did the universe come into existence?”After studying maths and physics at Cambridge University, he did his PhD in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. There he met an Australian philosophy professor who invited him to Canberra to teach at a summer school each year for the next ten years or so.“I would come out for a couple of weeks or a month in the middle of December and January, and escape the British winter,” he said.“I learnt to love Australia in that time.”Eventually, he landed a permanent position at National ICT Australia (NICTA) now part of the CSIRO’s data innovation group, Data61, and the University of NSW where he is Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence. The cover of Toby Walsh’s new book. He is particularly interested in the interface between distributed optimisation, social choice, game theory and machine learning and believes now is probably the most exciting time to be an AI researcher.“I started as a postgraduate researcher at what was the tail end of the AI boom, the expert system boom,” he said.“It was actually already on the downswing at that point. Then it was what was called the AI winter. We’re definitely in spring, if not summer by now. It’s a very exciting time. You can’t open the newspaper and not read several AI stories.���Of course, this increasing interest opens the door to misinformation being spread about AI as well. So, last year Walsh decided he “had a duty” to write his own definitive guide to the field: It’s Alive! Artificial intelligence from the logic piano to killer robots.It’s Alive!One big question, which takes up a large chunk of Walsh’s book, is what will happen to human jobs in the future if many tasks can be performed better by machines?“We don’t really know the answer to this,” he said.“Lots of new jobs will be created by technology, that’s always been the case. Most of us used to work out in the fields, farming. Now just three per cent of the world’s population is involved in farming. Lots of jobs were created in office and factories that didn’t exist before the industrial revolution.”However, he acknowledged there is a chance it could be different this time around.“Previously when our brawn was replaced we still had a cognitive advantage over the machines,” he said.“If we don’t have a cognitive advantage over the machines, what is the edge that humans have? We have social intelligence, emotional intelligence that machines don’t have. We have creativity. Machines are not as adaptable as humans yet. It could be the case that we end up with fewer people employed than before. That is possible. One thing is absolutely certain, that there will be jobs displaced and new jobs will be created. And the new jobs will require different skills to the old jobs.”He said the caring professions, artistic professions and scientific professions should all survive, professions where there is no natural limit to the potential of the job, unlike say ploughing fields or assembling widgets, repetitive tasks that could be done by robots and then the humans are no longer needed in that role.Interestingly, he feels some ancient jobs will grow in stature while some newer jobs might be very short-lived.“One of the newest jobs on the planet is being an Uber driver. But Uber are already trialling autonomous taxis. The driver is the most expensive thing in the Uber. It’s clearly part of their business plan to get rid of them as quickly as possible. That’s probably one of the first jobs that’s going to completely disappear,” he said.“Whereas, one of the oldest jobs on the planet, with a very venerable history, is a carpenter, that is probably going to be one of the safest in the sense that hand carved objects are going to be increasingly valued. We’ll appreciate those things where we can see the touch of the human hand, and if we believe economists, their value will increase.“In fact, if you look at hipster culture today, you can already see the beginnings of that: craft beers, artisan cheese, and hand-baked bread. It seems to me that there might be some beautiful symmetry, where we’ll actually all end up doing the jobs that we used to do 500 years ago when we were craft people.” Toby Walsh with a Meccano robot he and his daughter assembled. This is where the choices he mentioned previously come into play again.“We need to think about how we might need to change education so that people are educated for whatever the new jobs are; whether we’re going to have more free time; whether income is going to be distributed well enough,” he said.“We seem to be suffering from an increase in inequality within society and technology may amplify that. That’s certainly a worrying trend.”Another area for discussion is how far we want AI to evolve. Do we want it to get to consciousness and what would the consequences of that be?“Supposing machines become intelligent, but not conscious, then we wouldn’t have to be troubled, if for example, we turn them off or we make them do the most terrible, repetitive, dangerous, or other activities that we wouldn’t ask a human to do,” he said.“So we could be saved from some difficult ethical quandaries. Whereas, if they are conscious, maybe they could be thought of as suffering in that respect, then maybe we’ll have to give them rights, so we’ll have to worry about these things. It could be useful if they’re not conscious.”Killer robotsWalsh said there are issues regarding the use of artificial intelligence where we should be concerned. Most notable is its use by the military.In 2015, he coordinated an open letter to the United Nations signed by more than 1000 leading researchers in artificial intelligence and robotics including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Tesla CEO Elon Musk as well as other luminaries such as physicist Stephen Hawking and philosopher Noam Chomsky. The letter called for a universal ban on the use of lethal autonomous weapons.“Certainly today machines are not morally capable of following international humanitarian law,” he said.“Even if we could build machines that were able to make the right moral distinctions, there are lots of technical reasons in terms of industrialising warfare, changing the scale at which you can fight warfare that would suggest to me that it would be a very bad road to go down.”He said the world has agreed in the past to ban certain nuclear, chemical and biological weapons after seeing the horrific impact they can cause. And they also preemptively banned blinding lasers after realising the potential horror. Playing around in the UNSW robotics lab. His activism on the issue has seen him invited to the United Nations in both New York and Geneva to argue the case for a ban on autonomous weapons.“It’s very surreal to find oneself in such an auditorium having conversations with ambassadors,” he said.“It’s also gratifying how flat the world is. I had a meeting with the Under Secretary General, who’s the number two in the United Nations. He was asking my opinion about autonomous weapons. It’s been a very interesting ongoing journey, in fact.”It has also opened his eyes to the reality of international diplomacy and how difficult it can be to get things done.“Pleasingly they have gone from the issue first being raised less than five years ago, to three years of informal discussions, and now last year they voted unanimously to begin formal discussions, what’s called a group of governmental experts,” he said.“I’m told, for the United Nations, that is lightning speed. But this is very slow from a practical perspective as the technology is advancing very rapidly.”He said they warned a couple of years ago in their open letter that there would be an arms race. Now, the arms race has begun with prototype weapons being developed by militaries around the world in every sphere of the battle, in the air, on the sea, under the oceans, and on the land.“There’s plenty of money to be made out of selling the next type of weapon to people. There’s a lot of economic and military pressure. You can see why the military would be keen to have assistive technologies,” he said.And he acknowledged there are some arguments for autonomous weapons.“You can see, certainly from an operational point of view, there are some obvious attractions to getting soldiers out of the battlefield, and having weapons that follow orders very precisely, weapons with super-human speed and reflexes, weapons that will fight 24/7, weapons that you can risk on the riskiest of operations, that you don’t have to worry about evacuating from the battlefield when they’re damaged,” he said.“It’s not completely black and it’s not completely white. But I think the weight of evidence is strongly against having autonomous weapons.”However, it is ethical questions such as this that make working in the field so interesting.“It is like the famous Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’,” he said.“It’s a very interesting time, because we’re starting to realise if we do succeed, then we have to worry about exactly how we use the technology. How do we make sure it doesn’t get misused? It’s a morally neutral technology, it can be used for good or for bad. We have to make the right choices so that it gets used for good.”

[cashcounts]

How CRISPR is Spreading Through the Animal Kingdom

Fifteen years ago or so, when Helen Sang, a geneticist at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, and her colleagues wanted to get a gene into a chicken, the process was anything but fast.

They would begin by making a virus that would insert genetic material into a chicken embryo. As the embryo developed, they would cross their fingers and hope that some of the cells that received the infusion of DNA became the chicken’s reproductive cells. Even if they did, it took waiting six months until the chicken reached maturity and could be bred to get a generation of chickens that had the gene in all their cells.

Inserting a gene into a chicken used to take over a year. CRISPR has dramatically shortened the timeline.

Depending how on the process went, by that point, more than a year might have passed. And the researchers still would not have gotten to do the actual science they were interested in—studying how the new gene worked in chickens, for instance. Even in mice, the well-studied, well-understood workhorses of the biology lab, it could be a lengthy and delicate process to get an animal that carried a gene of your choice. And if you were thinking of trying out a gene in a less-studied animal, say, parakeets or honey badgers, it could take a significant chunk of your career just to figure out how to do it.

This was the reality of doing science that involved gene engineering for many years, and researchers still managed to make enormous progress. One of Sang’s projects, to develop chickens that lay eggs containing melanoma and multiple sclerosis drugs, made headlines in 2007, for instance. The idea was to harvest the drugs from eggs, part of a trend to grow pharmaceuticals in engineered organisms. (It’s not as far out as it might seem at first blush, as the FDA has already approved goats that make antithrombin, an anti-blood-clotting protein, in their milk, and insulin is now commonly grown by vats of engineered bacteria.)

But in the last few years, a new technology has arrived on the scene. CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing has made its way into labs around the world. It’s a comparatively cheap, fast, and adaptable way of precisely snipping out pieces of the genome and swapping in new pieces, which can be used directly on the DNA in reproductive cells and produces a finished mouse in three weeks. In chickens, it nearly halves the amount of time needed, Sang says. The tools are so quick, she says with a laugh, that “I sometimes think I should have sat with my feet up for a long time and waited for them to come.”

With something like this in hand, ideas that might have seemed overwhelmingly difficult are now potentially doable. In particular, scientists have swiftly adapted CRISPR tools for use in animals beyond mice, fruit flies, and other model organisms. That opens up a whole menagerie of creatures where quick, accurate gene editing is possible, with implications for agriculture and medicine.

In Sang’s lab, using CRISPR, the researchers are able to get their genes into chicken eggs with much higher efficiency. Using viruses, they succeed only a portion of the time, but now, with CRISPR and some additional screening, the success rate approaches 100%.

Other parts of the process have gotten more efficient as well. “CRISPR has come along when we’ve got a lot of genome sequence information,” Sang says. She and her colleagues can make informed choices about which genes might be most interesting or useful to put into a modified animal, without having to do as much testing ahead of time in dish-grown cells as they used to. She is now interested in using CRISPR to give chickens greater resistance to disease, especially to the avian flu. If there are some strains of hardy chickens that can stand up to an infection, perhaps researchers can figure out what quirks of the genome contribute and then use CRISPR to make alterations in meat and laying breeds.

The hold-up now, Sang says, is not the time it takes to make chickens anymore, but having proper facilities to house them.

CRISPR at Sea

CRISPR has also opened new doors for Anna Wargelius, a salmon geneticist at the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, Norway. For many years, she and her colleagues had been working toward the goal of making a salmon for farming that was sterile, so that if any escaped into the open sea—a real risk in Norway, where salmon are farmed in the ocean—they would not be able to breed with wild ones.

The group wanted to use genetic engineering to study which genes were involved in the development of salmon reproductive, or germ, cells. But they had little luck with zinc fingers, an earlier form of gene editor. “We had tried for several years to functionally study genes, but it did not work well in salmon,” she said. When they read a study demonstrating that CRISPR could work in zebrafish, the most common fish model organism, they were delighted. “We were just so happy to see this technology,” she recalls. “We were ready!” In 2014, the group published a paper demonstrating that CRISPR could be used to knock out genes in salmon. Since then, they have successfully made salmon without germ cells, and are moving on to using CRISPR to see whether the fish can be encouraged to generate more of their own omega-3 fatty acids.

Sterile farmed salmon wouldn’t be able breed with wild populations if they escaped.

Wargelius says the efficiency—the fact that every organism they generate has the gene they want very quickly—has rapidly accelerated work not just in her lab, but in other groups whose study species take a long time to reach reproductive maturity. Having to wait out multiple salmon generations, which are about three years long, to begin the real work is a serious and expensive gamble. “For everybody working with long-generation animals or plants, they are really happy with this,” Wargelius says, “because you can functionally start with something already in the first generation. It saves a lot of time and money.”

Pigs and Beyond

The subtlety of the changes that CRISPR allows is also advancing projects in some creatures in remarkable ways, says Simon Lillico, a geneticist at the Roslin Institute who works with pigs. Funded in part by a breeding company, Lillico and colleagues have been studying how to keep pigs from catching a viral disease called porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome, or PRRS. While it may not be a household name for most people, the PRRS virus, which causes pneumonia and stillbirths and abortions in pregnant pigs, is behind massive losses in farming—$664 million a year in the U.S. alone, by one estimate. The virus gets into pig blood cells by clinging to a surface protein called CD163, specifically to a particular stretch of the protein called domain 5.

CRISPR pigs have successfully evaded a typically deadly virus.

Taking advantage not only of CRISPR’s efficiency and speed but its delicacy, Lillico and colleagues were able to generate pigs that were missing just that snippet of CD163. “When you put the virus on the pigs, it cannot infect them,” he says. “It’s kind of like a lock and key mechanism—the virus has the key, but we’ve removed the lock.” The domain-5-less pigs are otherwise healthy.

It’s not just pigs that are benefiting, Lillico says. It’s now more plausible to use pigs and other large mammals as models for human disease. There are some diseases and situations where mice might not be as good as a model as other mammals, he suggests, and CRISPR makes it more feasible for these options to be explored. There may be a more direct benefit, too: A group at MIT has also been using CRISPR to remove portions of the pig genome that contain remnants of old viruses, which might be a liability if ever it becomes possible to transplant pig tissues or organs into humans, an idea that’s been given some new life lately. And in Australia, a group at the CSIRO has been investigating how egg proteins can be modified with CRISPR so that they don’t trigger allergies in those who eat them. (No honey badger or parakeet CRISPR studies yet, though, according to a search in PubMed.)

A revolution in gene editing enables scientists to create and edit DNA like never before.

“It’s only just starting,” says Helen Sang, who notes that the technique has caused a shift in many scientists’ thinking about whether it is worth trying to engineer animals. “Somehow, the fact that we have a new technology that is so easy to use, and so precise, it’s beginning to get people to think, oh maybe we will be able to use it,” she adds. “Because there are so many advantages, and there really are a lot of opportunities.”

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

Researchers find 128-year-old shipwreck by chance while mapping seafloor

A "monotonous" survey of the sea floor has resulted in the unlocking of a 128-year shipwreck mystery.

Last year, scientists from Australia's chief scientific research agency, CSIRO, found the wreck of a sailing vessel called Carlisle in Australia's Bass Strait, which is located between the states of Victoria and Tasmania.

SEE ALSO: World's oldest surviving beer found in a shipwreck — and it's been revived

As first reported by the ABC, CSIRO released footage of the wreck captured by research ship Investigator, which is cruising down Australia's east coast on a surveying mission to improve charts of a primary shipping route and subsurface navigation.

The sunken ship appeared during mapping of the seafloor last year, where it had appeared as a "blip." 

This is what a ship looks like after spending 128 years at the bottom of Bass Strait. Thanks to @DELWP_Vic #HeritageVictoria for identifying the ship! https://t.co/P8oFIkpimO ^EK pic.twitter.com/KjlFdg0CjH

— CSIRO (@CSIROnews) May 18, 2018

"The way this survey works, it is very monotonous kind of stuff, very repetitive, we call it 'mowing the lawn'," CSIRO hydrographer Matt Boyd told the ABC. "We are sort of going back and forth for long periods of time over large areas of seabed."

When it was detected, cameras were deployed from Investigator to gather imagery and the wreck location to Heritage Victoria, who passed on the details to Maritime Archaeology Association of Victoria (MAAV) who later visited the wreck.

The Carlisle was lost at sea after hitting rocks on the Bass Strait on the 6th of August, 1890. Earlier that day, the Carlisle had left Melbourne for Newcastle, where it was to pick up coal for transport to South America. 

Only 12 of the 20 crew survived, drifting to the coast two days after the incident. The ship's location remained a mystery, until MAAV was notified in May last year.

Malcolm Venturoni, a MAAV member who was one of two divers who visited the site, told Mashable the shipwreck was largely untouched due to its depth and remote location. 

The Carlisle shipwreck.

Image: MAAV

"It is very artefact-rich," he said. "There is still a lot of organic material among the artefacts, so it is a very sensitive site."

No attempt was made to salvage the vessel after its wrecking, meaning it still has many of its fittings and the personal belongings of the crew still there.

"In this case, because it was lost and there was no salvage at the time of wrecking, we've got a time capsule of a vessel," Venturoni explained. The site is now protected under heritage laws, meaning nothing can be removed.

While shipwreck discovery is becoming more common due in part to newer technology, but that also means its location information is also getting out there — putting these sites at risk of looting, something which Venturoni frequently sees.

"I think it's important to document [these sites] as much as we can," he added. "It's a shame when we find new shipwrecks and you see them looted."

WATCH: A Tesla Model X just pulled a gigantic Boeing airplane like it's nothing

[drrobinjwillcourt-blog]

The Keystone Cops of Australian Medicine PART 2

Did AHPRA make an example of Dr Fettke? Prior to AHPRA’s ruling, a 2013 Senate Inquiry highlighted the failings of AHPRA’s complaints-handling in order to guarantee public safety. As a result of this investigation, there was a call for a more strict handling of complaints against practitioners by AHPRA. This could have motivated relentless pursuing of legal action against Dr Fettke for giving out unsolicited nutrition advice in favour of low carb. Gary Fettke: punished for speaking the truth The dietary evidence points to a low carb diet as the only non drug-mediated way that people with diabetes can truly control insulin and stabilise their blood sugar levels. For the majority of scientists interested in nutrition, if a new evidence-based approach provides better outcomes, then this evidence should be more explicitly reflected in patient care. Sadly, with low carb, this is often not the case, for many regulatory bodies think that it is not within a doctor’s remit to advise patients about this diet. Yet, Fettke’s patients have greatly benefited from his advice, and the diet reportedly caused no harm to any of them. But, AHPRA considers that Gary is not an expert in the field of nutrition or diabetes, and therefore has no authority to give such advice. The AHPRA has completely overlooked the fact that a great deal of Fettke’s patients suffered from weight-related joint issues and/or diabetes. Fettke was therefore immersed in the scientific literature about diabetes and nutrition research for years. Promoting high fat, low carb comes at a cost The mere act of informing patients about low carb and recommending it to them on a voluntary basis can trigger serious consequences for doctors these days. Meanwhile, patients are being given the wrong information and led to believe that there is nothing they can do besides treatment to help reverse their type 2 diabetes. The current recommendation, of eating less and moving more, that patients receive has not been proven as effective as reducing carbohydrate intake in a growing number of studies. In the UK, GPs tend not to give weight loss advice, because they know that standard recommendations don’t work, and, that if they push something like low carbing instead, they will be condemned for rebutting the official eat-well guidelines in use. Doctors have to follow national guidelines, or they run the risk of receiving complaints for not maintaining standard of care. The natural consequence of this idiotic ruling, is that NO doctor is capable of talking about dietary issues with patients. How does that affect GPs having to deal with diabetics, and people with heart disease? Clearly, they cannot breathe a word. Ah, the Law of Unintended Consequences. Surely AHPRA must see that there is a class action lawsuit to forbid all doctors and other professionals from discussing dietary advice with patients. If AHPRA is being consistent (and ignorant) they should immediately demand this- or, are they being driven by special interest groups and thus being vindictive? There are NO other possibilities. They are certainly known for being both. The issue here is who or what is an expert? Gary Fettke was using very well-reasoned and scientifically studied data on LCHF diets, of which Pete Evan’s Paleo diet is a part: for simplicity, LCHF diet = Paleo + Dairy. In Australia, it takes little to be an expert- you usually just have to announce yourself: usually an academic position, or a head of an organization will do and presto! you are an expert. I have listened to way too many radio and TV interviews with these ‘experts’ and in most cases I want to explode. Their ignorance and their arrogance are simply stultifying, as they so often make comments about a current controversy without having any clue about the science or otherwise about the content about which they are pontificating. Listen to the childish slop uttered by an expert, lifted from an earlier blog I did.   Researchers at the University of Sydney announced that: Paleo diet leads to ‘shorter lifespan’. “The Paleo people will be screaming and howling and they have a personal and professional interest in doing it,” says Professor Stephen Simpson the academic director of Sydney University’s Charles Perkins Centre. “One of the best ways to combat the lure of fad diets is to provide hard, experimental evidence,” he says. He should take his own advice. Not only was his comment above, less than academically articulate but it is dead wrong. He has not used one bit of solid scientific evidence to back up this outrageous claim. Instead he quotes data obtained from mice that were fed a diet that they normally don’t eat, got sick and died earlier than anticipated. Just the sort of dietary advice adjusted for humans that he and the other non-expert dietary pundits have been telling us to eat for the last 30 years with the obvious catastrophic health issues that have resulted.  Instead, the diet we evolved on for over 2.5 million years is described as a fad while something that has been in effect for 30 odd years is ‘normal.’ It doesn’t get much sillier except that you cannot take mice data and extrapolate it to humans as was done here. We have different physiologies.  Really? Yes, silly and sillier… Paleo, low carb high fat is NOT what mice eat and this invalidates the study. You have to shake your head when a supposedly educated man, and who one would assume has some degree of professorial decorum comes out with stuff like this, “The Paleo people will be screaming and howling”—well, excuse me, but isn’t that Drs Simpson and Gannon? In a Machiavellian twist on things, OZ’s own CSIRO has come out in support of the LCHF diet for Type 2 Diabetics. I am not sure how AHPRA can take their license away, but I imagine they are working on it. Meanwhile all healthcare practitioners in Australia, except dieticians (and the CSIRO), are putting their licenses on the line every day they mention the words sugar or fat… This is part of the summary of the CSIRO paper: "The most amazing benefit of the low carbohydrate diet was the reduction in the patient’s medication levels, which was more than double the amount than the volunteers following the lifestyle program with the high-carbohydrate diet plan. "Some of the participants managed to cease their medications altogether, and many described the study as life changing”. https://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2016/Improved-diabetes-control-with-new-diet Er, but, isn’t that what Pete Evans said? Seriously, Dr Gannon, arm yourself with the info before you speak. Now WTF is AHPRA  going to do with THAT information? As you can see, inconsistency and hypocrisy are nationally embedded traits in our governing bodies. So how can the doctors and the public ever get things straight?   Click to Post

[ds4design]

Professor Hendryx vs. Big Coal

Blasting in an open cut coal mine. (Photo: CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Professor Hendryx vs. Big Coal” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

What happens when a public-health researcher deep in coal country argues that mountaintop mining endangers the entire community? Hint: it doesn’t go very well.

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. And you’ll find credits for the music in the episode noted within the transcript.

*      *      *

Many of you have already subscribed to our other podcast, Tell Me Something I Don’t Know – and if you haven’t, now’s a good time to do it, since our new season starts February 19th. We’ll be putting out 30 episodes this year – so if you subscribe – on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts — you won’t miss a one. And: come see us live! In March, we’ll be in Washington, D.C., Boston, and New York. In April we’ll be in Chicago. Even better, sign up to be a contestant when we’re in your town. Big thanks to our producing partners WAMU in D.C., WBUR in Boston, and WBEZ in Chicago. And remember: new episodes of Tell Me Something I Don’t Know will start coming your way on Sunday, February 19th.

*      *      *

You wouldn’t think it’s a good time to make a bet on coal. As recently as the early 2000s, more than half of the electricity in the U.S. came from burning coal; now it’s only a third. One big reason is competition from cheap natural gas. But also coal, due to its environmental costs, has become heavily regulated over the past couple decades. And yet: coal is suddenly having a bit of a renaissance. A recovery in the price of coal has a number of mining firms looking to go public. The election of President Trump also helped; he called for a revival of the industry, and he criticized President Obama’s “War on Coal.” Indeed, just a couple weeks into his administration, Congress reversed a coal-mining regulation that Obama pushed through in his final days, and Trump is expected to sign it.

[MUSIC: Christopher Norman, “Lines” (from Process)]

Today on Freakonomics Radio: we go down a coal wormhole and we discover a surprising fact: one of the biggest hazards of the modern coal industry was a result of efforts to modernize the coal industry. Also: what it feels like for an academic who studies this issue to testify before a pro-coal congressional hearing:

John FLEMING: You should be embarrassed to be here with a study like this!

*      *      *

I’d like you to meet Michael Hendryx.

Michael HENDRYX: I’m a professor in the Department of Applied Health Science in the School of Public Health at Indiana University.

Stephen J. DUBNER: And Applied Health Science means that you, your discipline and your PhD. and so on, are in what?

HENDRYX: My PhD is originally in psychology. I’ve had a long route to where I am now. I was trained originally in research methods and research design, but for much of my career I applied that to other kinds of health services problems. It was only fairly recently that I started to get interested in environmental issues and in the health problems that the people in the mining communities were experiencing.

Fairly recently being around 2006, when Hendryx landed a job at West Virginia University, in the heart of coal country. He’d come from Washington State University, in Pullman, Washington – wheat country. His research there was focused on mental-health services.

HENDRYX: When I first decided to take the job, I didn’t really have any plans to pursue research interests related to coal. It was something that came about after I moved there.

Hendryx immediately found that West Virginia was different from Washington state in many ways – culturally, politically, and of course geologically.

[MUSIC: Jonathan Headley, “In The Hills”]

Crystal GOOD: My name is Crystal Good and I am a poet, an advocate, and entrepreneur.

Tammy NICHOLS: My name is Tammy. I’m 50 and I am from Summersville, West Virginia.

GOOD: Coal is a part of the fabric of West Virginia.  It doesn’t matter if you’re directly in the mines, there’s an ancillary business that we all benefit from or are connected to.

NICHOLS: This is a rich state, okay? And there is things out there in the mountains and everything that could really make money and jobs for people.

GOOD: Whether that’s my mom unloading a coal truck at DuPont or whether that’s my basketball team being sponsored by Friends of Coal or, you know, however. Everybody’s in some way connected to the industry.

That connection extended to Hendryx’s new university.

HENDRYX: West Virginia University would have their annual Coal Bowl football game, the game between West Virginia and Marshall every year, just as one example. And they had a research center for coal and energy on the WVU campus. Politicians were always quick to support and defend the coal industry if they wanted to get reelected. Very pro-coal environment there.

DUBNER: And it sounds like you were at least a bit of an environmentalist when you came to West Virginia. 

HENDRYX: Well, I loved the outdoors. I learned how to fly-fish and hiking and backpacking and such, yeah. That’s true.

DUBNER: Which is not to align you with any political movement, because we know there are naturalists and environmentalists across all political spectrums. But I am curious what your views were on coal, per se, coming into WVU.

HENDRYX: You know, I really knew almost nothing about it. I was one of those people that didn’t know how the lights were turned on or what the energy sources were. I was educating myself at about that time. I happened to come across a book, it was written by a journalist, Jeff Goodell, called Big Coal. And he was doing stories about the important and kind of quiet role that coal played in American life, and he was describing some of the stories of people that lived in these mining communities. And that’s what got me, kind of the first knowledge I had about this as a potential issue.

DUBNER: And then that led you to think, “Hey, I should take a look at public health implications of coal mining”?  Was it as direct a line as that?

HENDRYX: Yeah. It’s as simple as that. It seemed like a logical next step.

Now, we should back up here and say that coal mining had changed a great deal in the past few decades. As we noted earlier, the industry has been in serious decline, with production falling substantially and, with it, employment. Especially in a place like West Virginia. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which groups together mining and logging jobs, shows that sector has fallen roughly 40 percent in West Virginia in just the last five years. Again, there are several reasons for this decline – especially the natural-gas juggernaut – but it’s also related to something that happened decades earlier, in Washington, D.C.

President George H.W. BUSH: Thank you all very much. Thank you.

In 1989, at the White House, President George H.W. Bush made a major announcement.

PRESIDENT BUSH: First I’d like to lay on the table my proposals to curb acid rain and cut urban smog and clean up air toxics. And second, I want to call upon all of you to join me in an acting into law a new Clean Air Act this year.

The original Clean Air Act dated from 1963, and it had been amended several times. Bush’s new amendments, which took hold in 1990, directly affected the coal industry and coal-fired power plants. Sulfur dioxide, a byproduct of burning coal, lowered air quality generally and contributed to what was known as acid rain. The new amendments capped sulfur-dioxide emissions and established the first large-scale cap-and-trade program. Michael Hendryx again:

Michael HENDRYX: The Clean Air Act, it has been successful at reducing acid rain pretty significantly and at improving air quality from power plants. There’s no question about that.

But there was an unintended consequence of the new Clean Air Act.

HENDRYX: Economically, it became more attractive to try to mine coal that before maybe wasn’t attractive to mine.

This type of coal had lower levels of sulfur. And it was especially plentiful in the mountains of central Appalachia. To get it, miners turned to a process known as mountaintop coal removal. Rather than burrowing deep beneath the ground for seams of coal, mountaintop removal is a technique that involves literally blowing up mountains.

The health hazards of underground mining – both immediate and long-term – are substantial and well-established. But what about the health hazards of mountaintop removal?

HENDRYX: People that work in surface mining — even though there’s some evidence that they may suffer some respiratory issues over time as well — the evidence is that that’s less dangerous than underground mining.

Statistics from the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety, and Training show that surface mining is indeed much less dangerous than underground mining. At least for the miners. But what about everyone else — the people living near the mountains that were being blown up? For Michael Hendryx, a public-health researcher, that seemed a natural question to ask when he arrived in West Virginia.

[MUSIC: Planes on Paper, “Iron Boat” (from The Ruins)]

DUBNER: So at the time mountaintop removal mining was viewed as how in terms of environmental impact, and let’s say, public health impact?

HENDRYX: I think there was always concern about its environmental impacts. I mean, you’re using explosives to literally blow hundreds of feet off the mountaintops around where people live. There’s large-scale deforestation of existing forests in these areas. There’s permanent valley fills that permanently buried several thousand miles of streams in this region.You would hear stories from residents about the health concerns that they had, but nobody seemed to be investigating the public-health impacts of this form of mining until we started this line about ten years ago.

Hendryx began by reading the literature on the effects of open-mining sites and he was surprised to find there wasn’t much.

HENDRYX: And so I thought, “Well, one way or the other, this is an area where I can make a contribution.”

Hendryx began with mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control. It was specific enough that he could identify causes of death at the county level, and for specific population groups.

HENDRYX: So we would merge those data with other data. So we used, as a key source, information from the Department of Energy on the amount of coal that was mined in different counties. And we could merge these together, along with other kinds of demographic and behavioral risks, to try to understand whether people who lived in areas with heavier mining had higher mortality rates.

To find an answer, there was a fair amount of statistical maneuvering to be done.

HENDRYX: The people in these communities, as a general statement, tend to have lower levels of income, they tend to sometimes engage in less-healthy behaviors, smoking rates are higher. So we had to try to account for those somehow. But there are very well-established statistical approaches to be able to do that. So as we looked at it more and more, the evidence became, in our view, stronger, that there really was an independent association of being in mining communities that was related to a variety of poorer health outcomes. And it was an effect that was most pronounced in areas where surface mining takes place, especially mountaintop removal mining. And the health effects were present for men and for women, and for some children’s outcomes, which made us think that it’s more of a community-wide issue and not just an occupational exposure issue.

DUBNER: And talk me through, for a moment, the mechanics by which you believe mountaintop removal, and perhaps other coal mining, actually increases mortality, and the specific ways, I guess, in which it has an ill effect on the health of, as you described it, men, women, children, and I guess in-utero children as well.

HENDRYX: Sure. When we first started doing these studies, we did not have direct measures of environmental conditions. We only had these correlational studies that showed poorer health outcomes in these communities in ways that were not explained by other measures. So that was a limitation of the earlier studies. And more recently, we have been going out and collecting environmental data from communities where mining occurs, as well as control communities where it does not. We found evidence for a variety of environmental problems in these communities.

For example?

HENDRYX: For example, levels of silica, crystalline silica, which we think are coming from removing the rock and soil to reach the coal, which is done through the use of heavy machinery and through explosives, raises dust levels in these communities, and silica levels in particular are known to be a toxicant to lung tissue. They’re known to be a contributing factor to lung cancer, and that’s one of the most consistent health problems that we’ve seen in these communities. We’ve also seen evidence for elevations in some organic compounds in air samples. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are coming in part from, again, from the coal itself and from the rock and soil around the coal, we think, as well as potentially from some of the diesel products that are used in the machinery and in the explosives. So we think the air is a transport route for the health problems that exist. We’ve also measured the particle size in these communities, and we found, somewhat to our own surprise, that the most pronounced difference, when you compare mining communities to similar rural communities in West Virginia that don’t have mining, the primary difference is in very small particles that are called ultrafines that can penetrate deeply into lung tissue, that are known to be a particular health hazard, and those were the particle sizes that were the most pronounced. We’ve done some limited water quality testing, and we find some evidence, as well, for some coal-related contaminants in some groundwater samples. Higher levels of conductivity in water—we don’t know exactly what’s causing that, but there’s evidence for some water impairments, too, that are related to the chemicals that are used in the coal extraction and processing activities.

[MUSIC: Jetty Rae, “Another Town” (from Can’t Curse the Free)]

In a nutshell: a whole heap of bad news. Michael Hendryx and his colleagues would go on to publish more than 30 peer-reviewed studies that, to Hendryx at least, reached a clear conclusion:

HENDRYX:We’re convinced that surface mining in central Appalachia, especially mountaintop removal mining, is an independent significant risk to public health.

The paradox, of course, was that the problem stemmed, in part, from the success of the Clean Air Act:

HENDRYX: The principal unintended consequence of the Clean Air Act was to encourage the development of mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, and there is strong evidence that this form of mining is harmful. It’s harmful not only to public health, but it’s harmful environmentally, and the people who live in these communities have had to suffer so that others can enjoy cleaner air.

Coming up on Freakonomics Radio: Professor Hendryx goes to Washington — which doesn’t go quite as planned.

HENDRYX: Well, to tell you the truth, I was pretty naïve.

*      *      *

 [MUSIC: Planes on Paper, “Monolithia” (from The Ruins)]

The public-health researcher Michael Hendryx had discovered an unfortunate chain reaction: the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 did clean up the air, substantially, but they also incentivized a boom in mountaintop coal mining — which, his research showed, led to widespread public-health hazards. Not just for the people involved in mining, but for anyone living nearby. The fact is, almost any regulation or piece of legislation will have some unintended consequences. Environmental regulations seems particularly susceptible.

[MUSIC: Lerin Herzer and Andrew Joslyn, “Mister Moon” (from The Dead of Winter)]

About a decade ago, the United Nations began offer a generous bounty to manufacturers for destroying their stockpiles of a pollutant – HFC-23 – that is a byproduct in the manufacture of a common refrigerant. The U.N. was hoping the manufacturers would be grateful enough to collect their money from the stockpiles and switch to making a different refrigerant. Instead, factories in China and India doubled down, making even more of that refrigerant in order to create even more of the byproduct and get more of the money the U.N. was handing out. Or consider the Endangered Species Act. It is meant, of course, to protect species under threat – but there’s a good possibility, as one environmental economist puts it, “that the Endangered Species Act is actually endangering, rather than protecting, species.” Why? Because a species is often declared endangered months or even years before its “critical habitats” are officially designated. This allows time for public hearings – and it also allows time for developers and foresters to rush in and pave over those critical habitats before it’s illegal to do so. So perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that a law meant to clean up the air from coal pollution … has led to a different kind of coal pollution. That said, what should be done about it? Based on his research, Michael Hendryx went on record saying the appropriate policy would be a ban on mountaintop coal removal. Some people we spoke with in West Virginia supported this idea.

Casey LITZ: My name is Casey Litz and I am the singer of The Company Stores.

[“Pocket Change” by Company Stores: “Benjamin Franklin, I’d really like to thank him, because he paid all my bills with a smile on his face, and…”]

LITZ: Living in West Virginia this is an issue that is brought up all the time. You know, it pollutes our waters, it’s killing our mountains. We have a lot of other ways that we can create electricity, It should absolutely be banned.

But that view is hardly universal.

Brennan ZERBE: Brennan Zerbe. I’m 26. On the one hand, as like an everyday citizen living here I can say I at least dislike mining because it has a negative impact on my own life. But on the other hand I can’t speak to the need that some people have to work. The need for miners to make a living. And I can’t, you know, in total equanimity say that it should be totally banned.

HENDRYX: Well, to tell you the truth, I was pretty naïve when I first started.

Michael Hendryx again.

HENDRYX: I was coming from this position of being a rational, objective person, and in my naiveté, just moving to West Virginia, not yet really understanding the nature of coal in the state or the political pressures that it could play, I thought people would listen to me and make appropriate responses to the information, and I was quickly relieved of that idea when the first results started coming out and the first efforts from the industry and the politicians were more or less to ignore it, pretend they had never read it, not want to talk about it.  I thought people would listen to these results, and maybe the politicians would even listen, and maybe something could be done, and that was obviously not the case.

In recent years, we’ve learned how different industries – tobacco and sugar, for instance – essentially co-opted academic researchers to produce results favorable to their industries. But here was Michael Hendryx, a newcomer to coal country, putting out academic research that made the coal industry look bad – and complicated his relationship with his university.

HENDRYX: And I know that even though West Virginia University, to their credit, never pressured me to stop directly, I think that some of the upper-level administrators probably received some pressure to try to make me stop, but that was never an issue for me. I was always allowed to do the work that I felt I wanted to do.

Which didn’t mean it wasn’t tricky.

HENDRYX: It would be much easier for me to simply not talk about it and do something else. Because I have felt under considerable pressure to be very careful about what I would say to journalists, and be very cautious about what we would right in the papers.   

DUBNER: When you say you feel the pressure, what do you mean by that? You felt it how and from whom?

HENDRYX:  It was self-imposed, maybe, more than anything, but I knew that my department chair and upper-level administrators at the university were nervous about this work. They wanted me to be really careful. Whenever I would have an interview with a journalist, I would  have someone from the media office, if it was an in-person interview, by my side, to listen to what was being said. My chair would caution me on a regular basis to be careful, be careful and I would always try to do that, because I knew that it was — after I had gotten over my naiveté — I knew that it was a really charged issue and that I was threatening a vested interest, and so I felt that. I felt the stress from it.

One tool that industry groups use to challenge academic work they find unflattering is a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request. In the academic community, Hendryx came to be cited as a prime example of how FOIA can facilitate harrassment.

HENDRYX: We were subject to two very large FOIA requests. And the attorneys for the industry wanted essentially every scrap of paper that existed, every email that went back and forth, every draft of a manuscript, computer codes for the analyses, everything. And the attorneys for West Virginia University, to their credit, fought it as a way to protect academic freedom, and the case was ultimately heard at the West Virginia Supreme Court, and decided in favor of the university, that it was a request from the industry that was designed basically to intimidate, to freeze academic freedom, and to require me, essentially, just to waste a lot of time chasing down documents that they really didn’t need to see.

And then there was the time Hendryx was called to testify before Congress about his research. Under consideration was a proposal concerning mining permits and water-quality protection.

REP. DOUG LAMBORN: The Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources will come to order.

DUBNER: Can you talk about that experience?

HENDRYX: Yes. I was one of—

DUBNER: Or would you rather not?

HENDRYX: It’s all right. It wasn’t the most rewarding experience, ultimately, but I was one of four witnesses who was asked to testify before a committee for Congress—a committee, of course, controlled by the Republican majority. The other three speakers were supportive of the coal industry.

Hal QUINN: I’m Hal Quinn, the president and CEO of the National Mining Association. The Coal Industry strongly supports HR 1644.

HENDRYX: So I was  the lone voice there, and  I felt like the quality of the discussion was pretty infantile.

Rep. John FLEMING: So I would have to say to you, sir, I’ve seen fifth-grade science projects that were more scientific than this.

HENDRYX: You know, I came here not to be insulted.

FLEMING: Yeah, I’m sorry, sir, but–

HENDRYX: This paper when through peer-review. There are 30 of them…

FLEMING: I’m sorry, sir, but I have the time. The time is mine. And I’m sorry, but you’re–I didn’t ask you that question.  

HENDRYX: It can be pretty stressful sometimes.

FLEMING: You should be embarrassed to be here with a study like this!

DUBNER: Did you know pretty much what you were being set up to do?

HENDRYX: No; again, I’m just naïve, I guess. I thought there would be a dignified discussion and I would have a chance to present my views, and others would present theirs, and I didn’t realize that it would turn into this little, insulting little exchange.

FLEMING: You want us to set policy and damage jobs, take away job opportunities from people based on nonsense science here! And–

HENDRYX: Is that a question?

FLEMING: –and, I’m not asking you a question, sir. I’m making a statement.

DUBNER: I know that Representative John Fleming of Louisiana basically treated you as if you were defending your dissertation on how to conduct statistical analysis of public health records.

FLEMING: You control for those? How do you control for that?

HENDRYX: It’s a common statistical analysis to control for other risk factors.

FLEMING: So you use statistical analysis to control for the difference?

HENDRYX: Of course.

FLEMING: Okay.

HENDRYX: Yeah, he clearly knows nothing about analysis himself. He just had some predetermined question or two that one of his aides wrote for him, probably, that he flung out at me. We’ve published, like, 30 papers on the health problems related to this form of mining, and he chose one of them. One of our health surveys that was a published paper, maybe not one of our strongest efforts, but a published paper that documented the health problems in mining communities, and chose to take a couple of potshots at that one paper, as though that was going to make some grander statement about the weight of the evidence as a whole. But he knows nothing about research. He doesn’t even seem to understand basic control issues of how you measure covariates. He knows nothing.

DUBNER: I understand he objected to your reliance on self-reported data, said your sample size was too small. Let’s pretend for a moment that he’s on the other line, and how would you just explain how your research actually stands on its own?

HENDRYX: Well, the sample size for that study was several hundred people. It wasn’t too small. If it had been too small, we maybe would not have been able to find the differences that we had seen. The fact is, we did find big differences in health status across a variety of dimensions, and the sample size was certainly adequate enough to detect those. Self-report is one valid, well-recognized form for collecting health data. There’s plenty of evidence that people are, in fact, able to report their own health status accurately. I’m certainly not the only one who does analyses or writes papers based on self-reported health data.

DUBNER: Let’s say, however, I put you in the prosecution chair for a moment and ask you to pick apart the overall thrust of your own argument here, having to do with the relationship between mountaintop removal mining and health of the community. Talk about what you feel are the potential flaws, weaknesses, or unanswerable, let’s say, questions in your thesis.

HENDRYX: So we haven’t been able to make that direct connection within a single study between the health conditions that people have and the environmental conditions that those same people are exposed to. And that’s a limitation, there’s no question about it. We’re trying to do some work now to overcome that. But if you look at the pattern as a whole, and you see 30 papers—more than that now—and they document that the health problems are present throughout these communities. They become stronger as the levels of mining go up, they become stronger as mountaintop removal specifically occurs, they become stronger as people live closer to the sites. They are not due to other conventional confounds like smoking, obesity, education, age, insurance, et cetera. And, independently, we’ve been able to assess that the water quality is in fact impaired, that the air quality is in fact impaired in ways that are consistent with the health problems that we’re seeing in these communities. Even though we don’t have the smoking gun, you know, we don’t have the magic bullet that explains this relationship: at this point in time, with the weight of the evidence, to try to make a statement that we really don’t know, we really can’t be sure, has come to the point in my view that it’s immoral. And we have something in environmental science called the precautionary principle, that if you know there are health problems in communities, and you know that the environmental conditions are impaired, even if you don’t understand all the causal mechanisms, you have to take appropriate steps to reduce harm, and that’s what we should be doing.

[MUSIC: Johnny Fiasco, “Neptune”]

The Congressman who grilled Hendryx in Washington – Louisiana Representative John Fleming – recently left Congress. We reached out for a response to Hendryx’s characterization of him as someone who “clearly knows nothing” about this type of research. Fleming objected. He told us that in addition to serving as a Congressman, quote, “I am also a board-certified family physician who has studied medical literature for many years. As a trained physician, I can easily identify a well-designed or a poorly-designed study when I see one.” Furthermore, Fleming argued that Hendryx was in league with what he called “tree-hugging” environmentalists. “In short,” he said, “Dr. Hendryx attempted to push a personal environmental agenda in the guise of a public health study. That was plain to see as a physician. The conclusions about his ‘study’ were drawn by me, not my staff.” In any case, Hendryx’s testimony, and his research, have not accomplished what he hoped for.

HENDRYX: Well, I wish I could say it had had more impacts. Mountaintop removal is still taking place.

Hendryx says his research did gain some traction during the Obama presidency: the EPA tightened permitting guidelines for mountaintop removal; West Virginia politicians acknowledged the potential for public-health problems; and, Hendryx says, his message may have helped persuade some big-name investment banks to divest from mountaintop mining. But under a Trump Administration that has vowed to be pro-coal, momentum is already shifting. A late-Obama-era Interior Department ruling, intended to protect waterways from coal debris, appears headed for repeal. Hendryx called this “a very bad idea, in my view.” Still, he’s hoping that research like his will convince policymakers to take a more comprehensive view of environmental legislation generally.

HENDRYX: Try to pay attention — not just when it comes to mountaintop removal. But to any energy policy that we develop — pay attention to the full production cycle: to where it comes from, to how it’s produced, to how it’s extracted, to how it’s used, to how the wastes are disposed of. And not just to the consumption portion. We don’t do a very good job of that, and we should do that regardless of the energy source that we’re using.

DUBNER: But what do you do if your bread is buttered by, you know, the industry and maybe you see the potential downside of your activity and maybe you don’t, but people really dig their heels in and find a way to justify or confirm their position based on, you know, how they put food on their family’s table, or how they pay back their shareholders, and so on. That’s always going to be the case. There’s always going to be some industry or institution that, even if the evidence is not in their favor, they’ll make a strong argument and often win because they have a lot of leverage. So is there anything you’ve learned from your interactions on this issue that you could see would be a useful mechanism to kind of breaking that logjam to where we could perhaps align incentives more productively for the greater good?

HENDRYX: Well, you’re absolutely right that people’s self-interest trumps many other considerations, and finding ways to make that work in our favor rather than trying to struggle against it is probably a smart approach. Better incentives to promote clean energy development, for example, would be one thing that I would think would be a good idea, but how do you do that when you have to face the same entrenched political interests that tend to oppose those kinds of changes? We could talk about it in a rational way, but it’s still going to require — I hate to say this, but I think it may require a crisis before we’ll make real change.

DUBNER: But whenever there’s any change there are always winners and there are losers. So in this case, you know, what if the potential loser were somehow given a winning ticket? What if you could go to the coal industry, let’s say, and then say, “We are going to subsidize your clean-energy development to the tune of X, which is we’re giving everyone, plus 10%.” It’s going to be really hard for you to lose money for the next five years. Would something like that work?

HENDRYX: I don’t want to — this is going to sound like I’m trying to claim your idea, but that was something I’ve actually been thinking about, a while back, is that rather than having the West Virginia Coal Association, we should have the West Virginia Energy Association, and there should be incentives for them to develop a more sustainable long-term approach to the energy needs of West Virginia and of the country. So those sorts of incentives, I think, would be really smart to do, but I don’t know if we’ll be able to do them.

DUBNER: Was your idea for the West Virginia Energy Association met with open arms by the West Virginia coal industry?

HENDRYX: Well, it was one I discussed more with colleagues and friends privately; I never approached them about it.

DUBNER: Ah, so you too need to get out of your silo, though, perhaps, Professor Hendryx, right?

HENDRYX: I do, you’re right, you’re right. I’m sure they would have welcomed the idea with open arms.

[MUSIC: Grow and Twine, “Next To You” (from Wind Fool)]

DUBNER: Why are you no longer at West Virginia University?

HENDRYX: Oh, that’s a pretty boring story, too. My wife is a professor, she’s an epidemiologist, and she was at West Virginia University, too, and she got a great job offer here at Indiana that was an important career advancement for her. So we moved here support her career.

DUBNER: So your move from West Virginia wasn’t due to any kind of pressure — indirect or direct — against your research.

HENDRYX: No. I’m sure that’s a quick question that comes to people’s minds. I’ve been asked about it a number of times. But it’s just not the case. It’s just a personal decision.

DUBNER: Well, for those of us who appreciate academic research and freedom, whether from the individual level up to the provost/chancellor level, that’s very, very nice to hear, that you felt like the university really had your back, even though you were producing research that could have made things uncomfortable for them.

HENDRYX: I’m sure it did make things uncomfortable for them in some other ways, and I’m sure there were a few of the administrators who were happy to see me go. But they did allow me to pursue my work, so I appreciate that.

Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, another story about another industry. But unlike coal, this one has been booming:

Chris DeFARIA: Suddenly visual effects budgets went from let’s say five percent of the budget up into the fifties and sixties.

That’s great news if you run a visual-effects shop in Hollywood, right? Guess again:

Bill WESTENHOFER: We had just received this Academy Award and I worked for a company that at that time was going through a bankruptcy.

In a world where Hollywood movies are visually extravagant–why has the visual-effects industry in Hollywood vanished?

Bryan SINGER: It has everything to do with tax incentives! Come on, who’s fooling who?

That’s next time, on Freakonomics Radio.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky. Our staff also includes Shelley Lewis, Christopher Werth, Stephanie Tam, Merritt Jacob, Eliza Lambert, Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, and Brian Gutierrez. Special thanks to the band The Company Stores, which we played in the episode. Check out their music at TheCompanyStores.com. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should also check out our archive, at Freakonomics.com, where you can stream or download every episode we’ve ever made – or read the transcripts, and look up the underlying research.  You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via e-mail at radio@freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.

SOURCES

Michael Shawn Hendryx, professor of applied health science at Indiana University Bloomington School of Public Health

RESOURCES

“Unintended consequences of the Clean Air Act: Mortality rates in Appalachian coal mining communities,” by Michael Hendryx and Benjamin Holland, Environmental Science & Policy, 2016

“Hospitalization patterns associated with Appalachian coal mining,” by Michael Hendryx, Melissa M. Ahern, and T. Nurkiewicz, Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, 2007

“Relations between health indicators and residential proximity to coal mining in West Virginia,” by Michael Hendrix and Melissa M. Ahern,  American Journal of Public Health, 2008

“Mortality Rates in Appalachian Coal Mining Counties: 24 Years Behind the Nation,” by Michael Hendryx, Environmental Justice, 2008

“Lung cancer mortality is elevated in coal-mining areas of Appalachia,” by Michael Hendryx, K. O’Donnell, and K. Horn, Lung Cancer, 2008

“Mortality from heart, respiratory and kidney disease in coal mining areas of

Appalachia,” by Michael Hendryx, International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health, 2009

“Mortality in Appalachian coal mining regions: the value of statistical life lost,” by Michael Hendryx and Melissa M. Ahern, Public Health Reports, 2009

“Higher coronary heart disease and heart attack morbidity in Appalachian coal mining regions,” by Michael Hendryx and KJ Zullig, Preventive Medicine, 2009

“Consequences of mountaintop mining,” by Michael Hendryx et al, Science, 2010

“The association between mountaintop mining and birth defects among live births in Central Appalachia,” by Melissa M. Ahern et al, Environmental Research, 1996-2003

“The S02 Allowance Trading System and the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990: Reflections of Twenty Years of Policy Innovation,” by Gabriel Chan, Robert Stavins, Robert Stowe, and Richard Sweeney, Harvard Environmental Economics Program, January 2012

“Environmental carcinogen releases and lung cancer mortality in ruralurban areas of the United States,” by J. Luo and Michael Hendryx, Journal of Rural Health, 2011

“Chronic cardiovascular disease mortality in mountaintop mining areas of central Appalachian states,” by L. Esch and Michael Hendryx, Journal of Rural Health, 2011

“Cancer mortality rates in Appalachian mountaintop mining areas,” by Melissa Hern and Michael Hendryx, Journal of Occupational and Environmental Science, 2012

“2015 Statistical Report and Directory of Mines,” West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training, 2015

ETC.

“Pocket Change,” by Company Stores

Testimony of Michael Hendryx, House Committee on Natural Resources, YouTube, 5/14/15

“President Bush’s Clean Air Proposals,” C-Span, 6/13/1989

The post Professor Hendryx vs. Big Coal appeared first on Freakonomics.

[kathleenseiber]

Strategies behind the great vaccine race

The race is on for a vaccine that will bring the COVID-19 pandemic to heel. Dozens of contenders from around the world have leapt from the starting blocks, dashing towards the finish line as the whole world looks on with bated breath. “It’s definitely a strange world to be in,” says Keith Chappell from the University of Queensland in St Lu­cia. “We’re suddenly kind of famous – for scientists.”

The arduous trek from lab to jab has been com­pressed like never before. Taking a vaccine through pre-clinical animal studies, followed by three phas­es of human trials – Phase 1 for safety, Phase 2 to check it works and find the right dose, and Phase 3 testing in tens of thousands of people – usually takes decades. This time, some companies aim to deliver a finished product less than a year after the novel coro­navirus started making people ill in the Chinese city of Wuhan last December.

Governments, too, are eager. Many are bankroll­ing programs to accelerate development. Several, including the US, the UK and the EU, have inked deals with pharmaceutical companies for hundreds of mil­lions of doses of yet-to-be-approved vaccines.

“It’s been relentless,” says Chappell, who is co-leading the development of a vaccine to protect people from SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. The Phase 1 trial is under way, and – all going well – the team will progress to Phase 2 at the end of the year.

We’re suddenly kind of famous – for scientists.

There are many contenders. According to the World Health Organization’s end of July count, 139 had reached the pre-clinical phase and 25 more had moved into human trials. Two – one produced by Chinese company CanSino Biologics, the other developed in Russia – have been approved, though the Chinese vaccine is restricted to military per­sonnel, and the Russians have been criticised for eschewing Phase 3 tests. Nonetheless, “it’s a really great position to be in,” says Chappell. “We can select the best vaccine.” That means one that’s safe, that’s effective and that can be scaled up quickly to meet global demand.

Something old, something new

The COVID-19 vaccine field is unique as much for its diversity as for its size. Most of the vaccines target the SPIKE protein – the key that gives SARS-CoV-2 entry into our cells. But tried and true vaccine tech­nologies have been joined by newer – as yet untested – vaccine approaches.

“A lot of the vaccines we use are archaic,” says Col­in Pouton, a pharmaceutical scientist from Monash University. He’s leading a team that is testing a hand­ful of mRNA vaccines in mice.

Traditional vaccines provoke an immune response using inactivated virus or a viral protein. But mRNA vaccines deliver the genetic instructions for the body’s cells to make the viral protein that then provokes the immune response. No mRNA vaccines have ever reached the market, so it’s an unproven technology.

Nevertheless, they have leapt ahead. The US com­pany Moderna has attracted nearly US$1 billion from the US government and started enrolling 30,000 peo­ple in a Phase 3 trial of its mRNA vaccine.

That kind of support is a boon for the fledgling field, says Pouton. “If you said to some major compa­ny, ‘how about making an mRNA [vaccine]?’ they’d just laugh,” he says. “They’d say, ‘you’re never going to make a commercially viable product, when we’ve already got something that works’.”

COVID-19 could change that. “mRNA is not a technology that’s just a one-hit wonder,” Pouton says. Vaccines made using mRNA can be made and modi­fied quickly, and if multiple strains of a virus emerge, “you could mix and match different mRNAs to hit various strains or various mutations”.

Another newcomer notching up early successes is an adenovirus-based vaccine. These use a virus that’s harmless to humans to deliver coronavirus genes into our cells. When our cells manufacture proteins from the genetic instructions, they illicit an immune re­sponse. “Generally speaking, if you can trigger a cell to replicate parts of the virus, you stimulate a much broader range of the immune system than if you just gave a dead protein to an animal and expected it to mount an immune response,” says Trevor Drew, im­munologist and director of the CSIRO’s Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness in Geelong.

The Oxford vaccine group claims it could be producing vaccine by October. Credit: Steve Parsons Getty

Several adenovirus vaccines are in the race. Out in front is one that was developed by a group at the University of Oxford (and discussed in “The Virus Detectives”, in the previous issue of Cosmos). Drew’s team conducted crucial pre-clinical trials of that vaccine in ferrets, demonstrating that it was able to infect the animals and provoke an immune reaction. (Ferrets bear a near-identical cellular “lock” – a pro­tein called ACE2 – that binds to the SARS-CoV-2 “key” – the SPIKE protein – and are therefore a use­ful animal model.)

The Oxford team is working with the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca on Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials and claims that emergency vaccines – for healthcare workers or people in COVID hotspots – could roll off production lines in October.

At the other end of the scale is a vaccine that’s been around for nearly a century: Bacillus Cal­mette-Guerin (BCG), which contains a live but non-disease-causing strain of bovine tuberculosis. It is still given to newborns to lower their risk of catching tuberculosis in parts of the world where the disease is common. But the vaccine has been shown to have some unexpected perks.

“BCG is associated with reduced mortality, par­ticularly from other viral respiratory infections,” says microbiologist Jamie Triccas, from the University of Sydney. His team is combining the coronavirus SPIKE protein with BCG to boost the immune re­sponse. Another group, at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, is conducting a Phase 3 trial of the original BCG vaccine, to see if it offers any protection against SARS-CoV-2, even without any coronavirus proteins.

In it for the long haul

Vaccine makers leading the pack are attracting the lion’s share of attention. But others are pacing them­selves for a marathon, not a sprint. They hope to produce second- or third-generation vaccines that may ultimately prove better than the current front-runners.

“First is not always best,” says vaccine researcher Nikolai Petrovsky, from Flinders University in Ade­laide. His company, Vaxine, is completing a Phase 1 trial on a COVID-19 vaccine that combines the SPIKE protein with a plant-sugar-based adjuvant that amps up the immune response. A combined Phase 2/3 trial is planned to start before the end of the year.

Some of the leading candidates are already report­ing such side-effects as fever and headache, especially at higher doses. Sixty percent of participants in the Phase 2 trial of the Oxford vaccine, for instance, had adverse reactions, as did 75% of people given the CanSino vaccine. No severe reac­tions have been reported, but a second generation vaccine could prioritise tolerability, which could ultimately improve uptake of the vaccine.

Another problem that might arise in the first-to-the-finish vaccines is that protection could be fleeting. “Immunity doesn’t last for very long through natural infection,” says Drew. For a common cold coronavirus, the sniffles and sore throat only buy you two to three months of protection, which is why they can strike every year. SARS-CoV2 infection could be similar.

Vaccines should provoke longer-lasting immunity because of the way that they trigger immune respons­es, but how long immunity lasts is a big unknown.

Credit: NurPhoto / Getty Images

One way to optimise the immune response could be to step away from the standard jab in the arm that vaccine makers are currently best geared up to produce. Drew’s team is testing an intranasal formu­lation, which could be better able to illicit protection in the mucosal surfaces of the lungs and respiratory tract – the tissues the SARS-CoV2 virus uses as its gateway into the body.

At Monash University, they have their “eye on the aging population”, says Pouton. COVID-19 has proven especially deadly for elderly people, in part because of how their immune systems respond to the virus. One possibility, he says, is that “with a vaccine, they’ll get a similar sort of not-so-optimal response.” His team’s mRNA vaccine uses only a portion of the SPIKE protein. It’s also tinkering with the formula­tion of the lipid nanoparticle packages that protect the mRNA molecules and deliver them into our cells. The hope is that these measures reduce the chance of adverse side effects in the elderly.

Another reason to keep at least a few vaccines chugging down the pipeline is that rare vaccine re­actions – such as paralysis – might only turn up once very large numbers of people start being vaccinated.

A cut-throat business

“The danger is always that the first runners end up getting all the resources, not because they are neces­sarily the best, but because they are the most visible,” says Petrovsky.

Theoretically, any one of the 160-odd vaccines currently in development could prove itself. In real­ity, few will get that opportunity. “If second runners don’t get adequate resources, they are likely to get lost by the wayside, whereas if given the chance they could have offered the best solution. I think that’s where we’re headed.”

Three leading candidates – from Oxford/As­traZeneca, Moderna and a collaboration between German-based BioNTech and US pharmaceutical gi­ant Pfizer – have already swallowed up vast sums of public money, Petrovksy says. “Between the three of them, they’ve probably sucked up $10 billion of glob­al vaccine development resources, which is going to make it very hard for any second generation or third generation [vaccines].”

The other risk is that, should the COVID-19 pan­demic be brought under control, priorities will shift elsewhere. Petrovsky has seen it happen before. Af­ter the SARS outbreak in 2003, his team developed a vaccine – using the same technology as in its current Covax-19® vaccine – that looked promising in ani­mal studies. By the time it was ready to go to human trials, funding had moved elsewhere.

It’s either wait and buy when you can or do it yourself.

“Money for pandemic vaccine research is always exceptionally transient,” says Petrovsky. “If the whole problem goes away, all of that funding will dry up, guaranteed.”

Whichever vaccine – or vaccines – make it through the gauntlet of clinical trials, manufac­turing facilities and supply chains will need to be prepared to deliver the billions of doses required. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innova­tions – an international collaboration funded by public and private money to coordinate and expe­dite vaccine development – is already investigating how to manufacture vaccines in multi-dose vials to avert an anticipated glass vial shortage. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, meanwhile, is putting funds not only into vaccine R&D, but also into bol­stering manufacturing capacity.

Some Australian experts are calling for funding for local production. “If you look at it from an Aus­tralian point of view, it’s either wait and buy when you can or do it yourself,” says Pouton. Melbourne-based company CSL makes protein-based vaccines and has signed on to produce the UQ vaccine. But there are no mRNA vaccine facilities. Establishing one – whether to make a locally developed vaccine or one licensed from elsewhere – would be a prudent invest­ment, Pouton says, given the cost of buying on the commercial market.

The first vaccines could be approved as early as next year. But demand will undoubtedly outstrip supply. Vaccinating everyone who wants and needs a vaccine could take months, or possibly years: longer than it takes to produce the first protective shot. As Pouton says, “There’s going to be a big queue of peo­ple wanting a vaccine.”

This article is published in Issue 88 of Cosmos magazine. You can subscribe here.

Strategies behind the great vaccine race published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/