Recent advances in human enhancement technologies offer new opportunities to redesign ourselves.
Published May 15, 2018
By Marie Gentile, Mandy Carr, and Richard Birchard
Recent advances in human enhancement technologies offer new and unique opportunities to redesign ourselves. Such efforts have a long history, as people have been attempting to overcome their biological limitations or remove supposed flaws for millennia.
George Church, PhD, Wyss Institute at Harvard University
As George Church, PhD, from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University explained, before the 21st century human enhancements included anything from: vaccines preventing smallpox, polio, and measles; to cars and jets that moved people across the world at previously unimaginable speeds and distances; to the smartphone you may be reading this article on; and the cup of coffee you drink every morning to help wake up. Dr. Church believes that the latest human enhancement efforts in fields like gene editing and artificial intelligence are only following this well-trod path.
Human Enhancement Technologies
Eventually, Dr. Church suspects that human enhancement technologies could provide resistance to diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and Lyme disease, allow for up-to-date diagnostic readouts in healthcare, and even reverse aging. Advancement in genome editing technologies such as CRISPR could have the greatest impact by targeting, for example, human genes like CCR5 — an essential gene for HIV virus entry into target cell — and lead to a functional cure for HIV infection.
Such promises for the future of enhancement technologies are exciting, but not without potential risk. Critics have questioned the ethics of using these technologies to fundamentally alter human biology, and have called for careful investigations of the risks and potential complications before we can safely apply these new technologies. Moreover, there may be additional considerations if these new technologies are used for non-therapeutic purposes.
“If you have a sick person and you’re thinking about using a new drug to help them, risk is always tolerated — because the person’s life is at stake. But when you’re thinking about enhancement technology, it’s a slightly different risk-benefit calculus because that person isn’t necessarily dying or suffering, they’re receiving an enhancement,” says Josephine Johnston, LLB, MBHL from The Hastings Center.
The Ethics of Defining Enhancement Technologies
Josephine Johnston, LLB, MBHL, The Hastings Center
Additionally, she argued, “by definition, an enhancement technology claims to improve a person or a group of people. What it means to be improved, to be better, is very much a socially and culturally constructed notion. I would worry most about social pressure to conform to limited visions of the good and the improved, and our failure to adequately question and interrogate those visions.”
It is critical to discuss the principles that govern the ethical conduct of human enhancement. Dr. George Church stated that the NIH requires grantees to teach the responsible conduct of research to young scientists. He added that “most engineering disciplines have safety and security components and a code of ethics.”
However, Ms. Johnston maintained that individual scientists alone shouldn’t be required to focus on the ethics of the individual use of the technology they develop.
“I don’t think they should ignore it, but that’s not primarily the work that scientists are trained to do and it would be an unreasonable thing to place on [their] shoulders.” However, she continued, “I do think that it’s crucial for scientists as a collective group to be involved in discussions for developing policy.”
What Does it Mean to Be Human?
While there have been, and will continue to be major technology revolutions in human enhancement, Ms. Johnston believes that human enhancement raises long standing questions about what it means to be human.
“There are going to be upsides and downsides to these different enhancement technologies, but that complexity might be difficult to see at first and we might not agree on,” says Johnston. “How will we know when we’re seeing something that really, truly can improve people’s lives? These questions about what makes for a good — or even a better — life are questions we’ve been grappling with for a long time. I’m not sure that I see a brand new question. Just new iterations of old questions about what it means to live well.”
Imagine an “Intellicity,” where neural networks ensure everything works together.
Published May 1, 2018
By Lori Greene
Today’s students will be the inhabitants of tomorrow’s cities, so they want more sustainable ways of living and working in urban ecosystems.
That was the premise behind United Technologies’ Future of Buildings Innovation Challenge. This event was created by The New York Academy of Sciences and launched in September 2017.
Fifty-two teams of students 13 to 18 years old from across the globe competed. Their goal: to conceive the most inventive green building solution.
Imagining an “Intellicity,” was the creation of one team. Here, neural networks run a building’s systems to ensure people, machines and the environment work in concert to adroitly use and conserve resources.
Reducing Waste
In the “Intellicity” paradigm, little is wasted. Solar panels and wind turbines create an on-going source of clean, abundant, renewable energy. Rainwater collected from the roofs of buildings provide water for indoor plumbing and hydroponic systems. Once inside, hydroponic walls can repurpose rainwater for food growth. Intellicity’s student founders want to ensure that people are harnessing energy generated by city activity and putting it to use.
Floor tiles in larger structures convert footsteps into electrical energy, and waste is turned into fertilizer. Solar panels on windows maximize sunlight and capture the energy to help run a building’s lighting and temperature systems. Revolving doors connected to electric generators can be used to capture energy as people walk in and out. This creates another source to power the structure’s electricity, heating and cooling needs.
The Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Using artificial intelligence (AI), energy is redistributed to increase the comfort and productivity of building occupants. The AI system that would run the integrated interior and exterior building networks “learns” from several inputs and the resulting outputs. For example, during high usage times, the power could go towards controlling lighting as well as heating and cooling rooms. Over time, the network records occupant preferences and automatically adjusts the room, heat and light depending on who enters and leaves.
Similarly, the team sought to give people an opportunity to interact with their building using a “neural network.” This computer system was developed around the human nervous system. It aims to allow the building to communicate back through an app detailing the energy being collected, used and wasted in the structure.
Retrofitting Existing Infrastructure
With the flexibility of AI, the team theorizes that this can also be implemented in a variety of structures. This includes transportation hubs such as airports as well as offices and apartment buildings. According to the plan, each section of the building could provide sustainable energy with minimal impact to the environment around it. Rather than redesigning structures, the team suggests using sensors in every room. They also suggested monitoring software that can help devise a customized solution to precisely redistribute energy.
Integrating neural networks into buildings to create an energy efficient sustainable future is Intellicity’s ultimate goal.
Check: nyas.org/challenges for information about the UTC Future Buildings and Cities Challenge winners.
From global data-sharing efforts to local educational campaigns, new urban sustainability projects are shaping the cities of a greener future.
Published May 1, 2018
By Alan Dove, PhD
In 1900, about 13 percent of the world’s population lived in cities. Today, well over half of it does, and that proportion continues to grow. Cities now account for three-fourths of global gross domestic product, and about the same fraction of human-generated carbon emissions.
Because they concentrate huge amounts of human activity into small areas, cities are ideal test beds for new sustainability efforts. Inspired by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) new collaborations have sprung up between political leaders, scientists, communities and non-governmental organizations. From global data-sharing efforts to local educational campaigns, these new urban sustainability projects are shaping the cities of the future.
Christiana Figueres
The Political Climate
Nations formally sign international agreements such as the SDGs, but in the case of urban sustainability, it falls to the leaders of individual cities to implement relevant policies. Fortunately, compared to national or regional governments, “cities are much more in tune with the direct impact of their policies, and they are much more in tune with the quality of life of citizens … from day to day,” says Christiana Figueres, Vice Chair of the Brussels-based Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy.
Figueres’ group provides a global network through which city leaders can share their ideas and results in pursuing sustainability.
“We’re a very important platform for city officials to learn what has worked,” says Figueres, pointing to examples such as Seoul’s renewable energy campaign, Paris’ expanding bicycle infrastructure, and a multi-city effort in India that has exchanged over 700 million incandescent lightbulbs for high-efficiency ones.
The central focus of the Global Covenant of Mayors is helping cities design and implement ambitious climate action plans, but that remit intersects with many of the U.N.’s other SDGs.
“How we pursue building our cities for the future — such as using high-carbon or low-carbon infrastructure, the way we change our consumption and production patterns, the way we deliver economic growth — are all relevant to the sustainable development goals and will largely determine the quality of life on this planet,” says Figueres.
United by Common Problems, Divided by Different Regulations
While cities around the world face common problems, they’re also bound by the particular laws and circumstances of their nations. Figueres emphasizes that the Global Covenant of Mayors has neither the authority nor the desire to try to synchronize urban policies across national boundaries. Instead, the group serves as a clearinghouse for cities to share data, strategies and ideas and discuss their experiences and results.
Science is a central part of all of these efforts, in measuring greenhouse gas emissions, studying and predicting the potential impacts of future climate change and also identifying the most effective measures cities can take to reduce their environmental impact and mitigate risks. Figueres points to a project in Myanmar, where scientists are developing models that can predict storm surges from cyclones, and others that identify areas at the highest risk of earthquakes and fires.
That information will help local leaders plan disaster responses to focus on the areas with the greatest needs, while also guiding future infrastructure development. Data from that project could inform similar efforts in coastal cities around the world, as rising seas and temperatures will likely make natural disasters more frequent.
Fundamentally a Problem of Physics and Atmospheric Chemistry
Climate change is fundamentally a problem of physics and atmospheric chemistry, but responding to it will require many other disciplines. Figueres emphasizes that in cities especially, researchers need to focus on social aspects of sustainability.
“We have a tendency to dehumanize cities, as though the purpose of cities were to have buildings and infrastructure, [but] the purpose of cities is actually to be the home for human beings,” says Figueres.
For policymakers to make the best use of science, scientists also need to explain it in human terms. “It does no good to come with science, accurate as it may be, if it’s not made relevant and understandable,” says Figueres.
Melanie Uhde Photo: Sun Kim, skstudiosnyc
Hungry For Change
While the Global Covenant of Mayors is helping scientists and city leaders work together globally, individual researchers are also taking local action in their own towns. New York’s Urban17 Initiative exemplifies this trend.
“I wanted the students who are part of our team to focus on urban sustainability in New York City, because it’s a great city to model hypotheses,” says Melanie Uhde, Urban17’s founder and managing director.
Urban17 currently consists of about a half-dozen volunteer analysts, mostly graduate students and young researchers from different disciplines and universities around the city. Despite its small size and lack of funding, the ambitious group is already tackling a project with global relevance, studying the overlapping problems of obesity and hunger.
“We know that, for example, the rates of obesity and hunger in the Bronx are the highest [in the city], so they’re basically bedfellows, which is a very common phenomenon in urban environments throughout the world,” says Uhde.
The Paradoxical Overlap of Hunger and Obesity
It may seem paradoxical for hunger and obesity to overlap, but interconnected problems can yield exactly that result.
“It’s definitely poverty, but it’s unfortunately much more complicated,” says Uhde, adding “even if you have money, do you have access to food, do you have the education, do you know what’s actually good for you, [and] do you have the time to put effort into a nutritious meal?”
In poor urban neighborhoods, the answers to those questions are often ‘no,’ causing synergistic deficits that can produce the entire spectrum of dietary problems. To address that, Uhde and her team are combining data on obesity and hunger with the locations of groceries, parks, fitness centers and schools.
The Impact of Obesity and Hunger on Education
Public schools provide good anchors for the project, not only in mapping the extent of obesity and hunger in some of the most vulnerable populations, but also in implementing solutions.
“Education is a very important factor to achieve sustainability, and we’re seeing [how] other factors like obesity or hunger influence education,” says Uhde. Malnourished students aren’t likely to learn well, which in turn can perpetuate poverty and poor health. Improving school meal programs and health classes could help break that cycle.
Uhde hopes other scientists will start tackling sustainability problems in their own towns. “Sustainability … affects everyone in every aspect of life,” she says, adding that “we’re living in this era where we have to do something no matter what.”
Jennifer Costley, PhD, Director, Physical Sciences, Sustainability and Engineering, New York Academy of Sciences contributed to this story.
Researchers across the globe are doing their part to both fuel and sustain a healthy planet.
Published May 1, 2018
By Hallie Kapner
Patrick Schnable
To the untrained eye, the black dots speckling the corn leaves in the greenhouses at Iowa State University’s Plant Sciences Institute could be anything — blight, mold, rot. But to Patrick Schnable, the Institute’s director and the C.F. Curtiss Distinguished Professor and Iowa Corn Endowed Chair in Genetics at ISU, the dots are the future of precision irrigation — a simple and inexpensive window into how plants use a precious global resource: water.
Dubbed the “plant tattoo,” the dots are bits of graphene oxide deposited on a gas-permeable tape to form an easily applied sensor that precisely measures transpiration — water loss — on an individual-leaf basis. As leaves lose water, the moisture changes graphene’s electrical conductivity. By measuring those changes, Schnable and his collaborators can observe transpiration in real time.
“If you have a plant under drought stress and you water it or it rains, you can track water moving up through the plant,” Schnable said. “For the first time ever, we can observe plants reacting to an irrigation event as it happens.”
The plant tattoo is one of countless research initiatives underway worldwide that aim to conserve and maximize natural resources, improve access to nutrition, prevent and treat disease, and boost the health and well-being of the planet’s people and wildlife.
Schnable and his collaborator, Liang Dong, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at ISU, envision a day when farmers can use plant sensors to guide irrigation decisions and breeders can use them to create drought-resistant varietals. The researchers are already adapting the technology for use beyond the Iowa cornfields. While the current version requires connection to a control box to provide both voltage and transpiration rate analysis, plant tattoo 2.0 will be wireless and smartphone-compatible. Such refinements will drop the cost of the system even further, making the sensors accessible for areas of the developing world where every drop of water counts.
Cultivating “Black Rice”
Ujjawal Kr. S. Kushwaha
Maximizing efficiencies in breeding and irrigation of agricultural crops is one key part of meeting the global goals related to hunger, nutrition and stewardship of the land. Equally critical are efforts to identify and promote staple crops that pack maximum nutrition, explained Ujjawal Kr. S. Kushwaha, PhD Scholar in Genetics and Plant Breeding at G.B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology in Pantnagar, India.
More than half of the world’s population relies on rice for at least 20 percent of their daily calories. If Kushwaha had his way, the typical white rice of subsistence would be replaced by black rice, an heirloom variety sometimes called “forbidden” rice, and one of nature’s nutritional powerhouses.
“No other rice has higher nutritional content,” Kushwaha said. “It’s high in fiber, anthocyanins and other antioxidants, vitamins B and E, iron, thiamine, magnesium, niacin and phosphorous. Consumed at scale, it could have a significant impact on malnutrition.”
Decades of effort to boost the nutritional content of rice have yielded biofortified varietals rich in iron, zinc and provitamin A. While addressing these highly prevalent micronutrient deficiencies is critical, Kushwaha contends that black rice could address both a broad spectrum of nutritional deficiencies as well as provide anti-inflammatory and anti-atherogenic benefits.
However, black rice is not widely cultivated outside of China, and most varietals are relatively low-yield, which drives the crop’s high cost. Kushwaha is working to shift that equation, spreading the black rice gospel with the hope of boosting demand and incentives for farmers to develop higher-yield varietals, which could make a crop once reserved for royalty as affordable as white rice.
Anticipating the potential hurdles of acceptance — factors such as taste and color often determine whether new varietals are adopted or rejected — Kushwaha and others cultivating nutrient-rich rices have determined that black rice could be bred to minimize color while preserving much of its nutritional value. “Some of the qualities could be reduced, but it’s still far better than white rice,” he noted.
Plant Power
Plants already do far more than just feed the world — we derive fuel, fabrics, medicinal compounds and much more from them. Yet over the past two decades, a new role for plants has emerged — one that may revolutionize one of the most important pipelines for global health: vaccine production.
Conventional vaccine manufacturing relies on primary cells — like chicken eggs — mammalian cell lines, yeast cells or bacteria. These approaches have well-known limitations, such as long production times, variable yields and risk of contamination by other human pathogens. As Kathleen Hefferon, a virologist and Fulbright Canada Research Chair of Global Food Security at the University of Guelph explained, plants are not merely viable alternative bioreactors for many types of vaccines — they are production superstars.
First-generation plant-made biopharmaceuticals were derived from transgenic crops, but public concerns about GMOs, as well as variability in the amount of vaccine protein produced per plant, drove the development of a second — and now dominant — production method. Plant virus expression vectors are used to deliver genes for producing vaccine proteins into the leaves of plants such as tobacco and potato, turning common crops into factories capable of churning out huge quantities of vaccine protein faster and more cheaply than any other method.
Plant-made vaccine proteins carry no risk of contamination with mammalian pathogens, and better still, plants can produce similar post-translational modifications to human cells, which increases biocompatibility. Hefferon believes plant-made biopharmaceuticals will grow exponentially over the next five years, due in part to increased interest in stockpiling vaccines against pandemic flu and other diseases.
“It’s hard to stockpile vaccines produced in mammalian systems, and it’s very hard to produce enough vaccine in time to be helpful in an outbreak,” she said. “Plants offer a clear advantage here.”
Several pharmaceutical companies have plant-made vaccines and therapeutics in clinical trials, but the public is already familiar with one experimental drug that made headlines in 2015 — ZMapp, which was used to treat several Ebola-infected healthcare workers in West Africa. Hefferon is also quick to emphasize that the lower-cost profile of plant-made vaccines has special relevance for cancer prevention in the developing world, where rates of cancers linked to vaccine-preventable viruses, including HPV, are skyrocketing.
“We’re already in the running to advance the science toward pharmaceutical production in plants,” she said. “The current systems have so many limitations and plants are an incredible alternative.”
On Land and Sea
Just as human health is inextricably tied to the health of the air, soil, water and environment, so too is the health of the animals we rely on for work and food. In the tropical regions of Mexico, scientists including veterinarians Felipe Torres-Acosta and Carlos Sandoval-Castro, and organic chemist Gabriela Mancilla, of Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan (UADY), are studying how sheep and goats regulate their own health through diet.
The team at UADY has been devising strategies to improve the health of ruminants in tropical environments for 30 years. One of their standout findings is that malnourished animals are less resilient to native parasites, and while farmers can boost resilience with supplemental food, access to native flora is critical for keeping the host-parasite relationship in balance.
The UADY team showed that sheep and goats left to forage on their own in the Mexican jungle feast on an astonishing 60 different plant species per day, adjusting their food choices based on seasonal availability. Diving deeper into the connection between diet and immune resistance, Torres-Acosta’s team collected samples of ruminants’ preferred foods, analyzing them for nutritional content and the presence of anthelmintic activity.
Stephen Frattinii Photo: Hudson Rivers Fisheries Unit Staff
Analysis reveals that most local flora do contain anti-parasitic compounds, and Mancilla is working to discover the mechanisms by which they act to control parasite load. The team is investigating whether animals intentionally seek a diet rich in plants that naturally limit parasite infection. This work, as well as similar research in sheep and goats around the world, is already impacting how some small farmers treat infections.
“If animals have access to their native foods, they can keep parasites in check, which reduces the need for medication and allows farmers to treat only the sickest animals,” Torres-Acosta said. “The most interesting things we’re learning come directly from observing the animals — given the choice, animals know what they need to eat to stay healthy, and we can learn so much from their innate wisdom.”
Off the shores of Long Island, New York, Stephen Frattini, founder of the Center for Aquatic Animal Research and Management (CFAARM), is trying to bring a similar sensibility to the seafood industry, which supplies three billion people worldwide with their primary source of protein. Frattini, a veterinarian, focuses not just on how fisheries and aquaculture operations could improve fish welfare, though his passion for that subject runs deep.
His goals are bigger, and include uniting experts in animal welfare, engineering, health management, feed development and consumer psychology to transform the seafood industry from a profoundly siloed one, rife with inefficiencies and transparency issues, to an integrated one that places the health of the environment, people and fish front and center. Frattini believes that a more integrated seafood industry could revitalize coastal communities both in the United States and developing countries, as well as advance production strategies already known to improve fish health, such as emphasizing diversity over monoculture.
“We still need a much better understanding of fish behavior in captivity and what we can do to create happier, healthier animals, but I’m convinced we can increase efficiencies while increasing fish contentment, which is a win for animals, the environment and the industry,” he said.
A Matter of Will
William Haseltine
Decades of fast-paced discovery in medical research, coupled with high-tech advances in equipment, procedures and information technologies have yielded many of the solutions necessary to provide high-quality healthcare to all. No cohort in history has been better equipped than ours to identify problems, connect patients with preventative and acute care and measure and understand the outcomes. Yet nations around the globe, from the most developed to the least, struggle to manage the cost, logistics and delivery of basic human health services.
A desire to identify best practices and help spread their adoption drove William Haseltine, a biologist and former professor at Harvard Medical School, known for his pioneering research on HIV/AIDS and the human genome, to found the nonprofit ACCESS Health International 10 years ago.
ACCESS Health has since partnered with nations in every region of the world to better understand the systems that improve primary care, lower maternal and child mortality, and meet the needs of an aging population while maintaining affordability. From a revolutionary emergency-response system in India that serves 700 million people each year with greater efficiency and lower cost than any system in the West, to hospitals using information technology to implement radical transparency and accountability systems that are improving patient safety, Haseltine and the ACCESS Health team have found no shortage of strategies that save and improve lives within budget. Bringing them to bear on the global problem of healthcare access is mainly a matter of will.
“We have a lot of knowledge that can be deployed broadly across the globe, but there has to be a desire and incentive to change,” Haseltine said.
The 17 SDGs can be viewed as a tally of ways people and planet can suffer and struggle. But they can also be viewed as vision of hope, a commitment by 193 nations to alleviate pain and work toward a healthier, more equal future.
“We have come to the point where we have the ability to dramatically improve health outcomes, whether it’s in environmental health, or improving maternal and infant mortality,” said Haseltine. “It all comes down to the question: do we have the will to do it? When the answer is yes, it’s transformative.“
Drone Delivery Takes Off In Rwanda
Delivering goods via drones is not a new idea, but it’s providing an important sustainable lifeline to rural communities in Rwanda that are benefiting from the technology.
California-based automated logistics company, Zipline and the Government of Rwanda have collaborated on the world’s first national drone delivery service for on-demand emergency blood deliveries to transfusion clinics across the country. Since its launch in October, 2016, Zipline has flown more than 7,500 flights covering 300,000 km, and delivered 7,000 units of blood to physicians and medical workers in Rwandan villagers nationwide.
Zipline’s technology was developed for longer-haul flights than typical drones and have a round trip range of 160 kilometers. The drones can carry 1.5 kilos of cargo and cruise at 110 kilometers an hour.
More importantly the craft are built to handle the challenges of Rwanda’s mountainous terrain and extreme weather conditions. They look more like fixed wing airplanes than the typical quadcopter image, but it is one of the reasons why they are capable of flying faster and farther than standard craft; imperative for speeding-up the delivery of life-saving medical supplies to remote communities.
The airplanes are powered by lithium-ion battery packs. Two twin electric motors provide reliability at a low operating cost. Redundant motors, batteries, GPS and other electronics provide the safety features, in addition to a parachute-enabled landing system. The planes fly on predetermined routes and are monitored by a Zipline operator.
The components that were state-of-the-art two years ago are now obsolete in today’s world.
Published May 1, 2018
By Charles Cooper
In the decade following the debut of the first iPhone in 2007, Apple has released 18 different models of its iconic smartphone, some major, some minor — all designed with the idea of appealing to buyers thirsting for the latest and the greatest technology from Silicon Valley’s most iconic brand.
That’s the way our gadget-addicted economy works. Products rarely remain in their original owners’ hands for longer than a few years. Planned obsolescence is the rule as slick marketing campaigns encourage consumers to trade up to faster, cheaper and smaller devices that roll off assembly lines, because yesterday’s state-of-the-art technology won’t hold a candle to what’s coming tomorrow.
“The problem we run into in the IT industry is profound because the functionality of these devices advances so quickly,” said Dr. Matthew Realff, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “The components that were state-of-the-art two years ago are now obsolete in today’s world. This is not a technological problem but a societal one. Replacing your phones every six months or every year or two, may not, from a sustainability perspective, be needed. The problem is that the industry wants to drive functionality at every step.”
So as digitization transforms how society communicates and does business, there are now billions of smartphones, personal computers and connected devices in use worldwide. But what happens when these and other high-tech appliances — televisions, printers, scanners, fax machines and other technology peripherals — reach the end of their useful lives? That darker side of the digital revolution is having a major impact on the lives of millions of people and their environment every day.
The Fastest-Growing Stream of Municipal Solid Waste
Electronic waste (e-waste) now constitutes the fastest-growing stream of municipal solid waste in the world, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. People now generate some 40 million tons of e-waste each year — up 20 percent in just two years, leading the United Nations to warn of a veritable “tsunami of e-waste” inundating the Earth.
The toxic threat to health is so severe that scientists warn of a global safety threat linked to the release of harmful substances such as lead, mercury, cadmium and arsenic, in discarded electrical devices and equipment. The implications are particularly acute for developing nations where older products often get dumped in landfills. As more e-waste winds up in landfills, the exposure to environmental toxins creates health hazards for workers and residents, including greater risks of cancer and neurological disorders.
Alarm over the public health challenge has forced the issue onto the global agenda. In fact, one of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals (#12) is a pledge to “substantially reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling and reuse” by 2030. The success of that initiative will be closely intertwined with progress made battling e-waste.
Given the magnitude of the challenge, it’s too early to handicap the outcome. Experts in the field are guardedly optimistic, saying it will take a combination of smart engineering and equally smart public policies to help reverse a years-in-the-making problem paradoxically created by the very technology used to solve so many other societal problems.
Don’t Expect A Quick Fix
“Originally, you had a paradigm in which these products were never considered from an end-of-life cycle perspective,” said Nancy Gillis, Chief Executive Officer of the Green Electronics Council. “In fact, the IT sector was treated no differently from any other products in our consumer society. So when people asked the question, `What do we do with this stuff later on?’ the response was `We know … we’ll stick it all in a hole.’ Then we became aware of the fact that we don’t have enough holes. They’re not big enough and they’re costing us.”
Compounding the challenge, she said, is the incessant churn of new technology into the market. Projections vary, but tens of billions of IoT devices will be online by the end of this decade.
“When you start putting sensors in your shirts and shoes or when toys become as much IT as IT is considered, then we’re ill prepared for that also becoming part of the [e-waste] stream,” Gillis added. “It’d be great if technology just evolved along the same timeline as our understanding of its impact … we wouldn’t have a problem. But it’s not. This is a development cycle made up of many players and it involves an extremely complex supply chain.”
High-Tech Alternatives in Flux
Realff has thought a lot about how supply chain management could make a difference in controlling e-waste. One area where he sees potential is in the application of advanced computational methods, such as machine learning and mathematical programming to improve product tracking as materials flow through supply chains. By adding smart tags to products, companies will soon be able to wirelessly track items flowing through supply chains to customers to get a comprehensive picture.
“We’re getting to the point where our ability to label individual items and keep track of them is about to increase exponentially,” he said. “With the availability of inexpensive embedded sensors and ubiquitous wireless networks, we’ll know how long they are in use and when they eventually get retired.”
Big Data and the Internet of Things
As these and other technologies, including Big Data and IoT improve supply chain visibility, it should also clear the way for companies to do a better job retrieving value from discarded e-waste. There’s money to be made cleaning up e-waste as many products contain valuable materials — including gold, silver, copper and palladium — that can be resold. The International Telecommunication Union put the estimated value of recoverable material generated by e-waste in 2016 at $55 billion.
However, only 20 percent of that e-waste was found to have been collected and recycled despite the presence of those high-value recoverable materials. In other cases, perfectly fine machines still capable of productive service are getting discarded. That’s where better analytical insights into the data can give them a second life.
“We need to figure out how to reuse those systems in ways in which they benefit the less fortunate parts of the world,” said Realff. “We may not need top-of-the-line servers to do certain tasks, but how do we take servers that may not be used in a Google warehouse and use them where they could still have value? It’s less a technology issue, than an organizational issue.”
The Emergence of Nanotechnology and Synthetic Biology
From a sustainable development goal perspective, nanotechnology and synthetic biology are two emerging fields of science and technology that have attracted interest due to their broad applicability and their potential as alternative solutions.
Bart Kolodziejczyk, co-author of a recent paper on recycling standards to handle nanowaste, pointed to the history of polymers and plastic, which were originally hailed as game-changing developments. But they also led to unintended consequences.
“Not only are we surrounded by plastic waste that take decades to decompose in the environment, but only recently have we reached the point when the very first plastic waste finally starts degrading,” he said. “While we should be happy, there is another problem … the degradation of polymeric materials is incomplete; partially degraded plastic nanoparticles can be currently found in 83 percent of the world’s tap water, including most U.S. cities. You can imagine that these plastic fibers are not good for your health, cannot be easily digested and build up in your body.”
Similarly, he said there are still unanswered safety questions around nanowaste and synthetic biology waste.
“We certainly don’t know how to deal with hazards associated with these two very promising technologies. I am even more skeptical when I attend different workshops and conferences organized by international organizations because policy makers simply don’t know how to deal with this type of a threat.”
“Nanowaste disposal will be a big issue because different nanoparticles will require different and tailored waste treatment protocols,” Kolodziejczyk added. “While most organic nanoparticles, such as polymers, can be potentially digested by flame, inorganic nanoparticles, such as oxides known for high thermal stability will require more sophisticated methods.”
Reasons for Optimism
Despite the clear challenges, Gillis says that growing recognition of the e-waste problem is reason enough for optimism that things can improve.
“We’re starting to think seriously about end of life while designing products and there’s also a recognition that there’s money involved in getting those core resources back,” she said. “Companies are leaving money on the table which is foolish.”
As we wait for market forces and new technologies to come to the rescue, the easiest way to reduce the amount of e-waste would be for people and businesses to resist the urge to discard perfectly usable older products just because a newer, more robust version hit the market.
But is it reasonable to expect users to resist the siren call of advertising and change age-old consumption patterns? Maybe that’s asking for too much. For Realff, however, it’s a question that needs to get asked — if only to avoid the inevitable consequences of continuing along the current path.
“Maybe we can’t all have the latest and greatest,” he said. “And I’m not just referring to consumers here in the West but also to the billions of consumers in the rest of the world. We will not be talking about tsunamis of e-waste; we will be talking about a planet full of e-waste — which obviously is not feasible.”
Who Generates the Most E-Waste?
According to The Global E-waste Monitor 2017, a publication produced by the Global E-waste Statistics Partnership, Asia takes the lead followed by Europe and the Americas.
The Global E-waste Partnership is a collaborative effort of the United Nations University (UNU), represented through its Vice-Rectorate in Europe hosted Sustainable Cycles (SCYCLE) Programme, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA).
Dr. Lucianne Walkowicz is determining the ethics of exploring Mars.
Published January 19, 2018
By Marie Gentile, Mandy Carr, and Richard Birchard
Lucianne Walkowicz, PhD
While generations of stargazers have dreamt of the fantastic possibilities inherent in space exploration and colonization, few have concerned themselves with the ethics of such endeavors.
Dr. Walkowicz is adamant that space exploration has much to learn from the spread of humanity. Past mistakes should not be repeated.
“When we look at how we’ve explored this planet and, for example, our treatment of either indigenous people or indigenous species in places that we have explored, we haven’t exactly been exemplars in our treatment of those people or species. That’s resulted in damage to our relationships in new lands, and also to the lands themselves.”
Without current evidence for life on Mars, some view it as open territory, and therefore unencumbered by these considerations. Dr. Walkowicz disagrees, and advocates for the protection of Mars’ environment, living or not.
“In Mars’ case, we know that it used to be a habitable planet in the past, and that doesn’t mean that it had life, but it certainly means that there could’ve been a history of life there, and it is an environment that is sovereign in and of itself,” she said. “I think we can look at some of the behaviors that we have engaged in on Earth, and some of the choices we’ve made in the past that have, for example, compromised the environment, and ask ourselves how we can do that differently on Mars?”
Preserving Other Planets
We can start by ensuring that environments like Mars remain intact, and Dr. Walkowicz clarified who exactly is the “we” in this context, “This is complicated by the changing nature of exploration, which will no longer solely consist of nations, but companies within those nations.” Ensuring that both public and private interests are performing responsibly will be difficult to regulate.
As an example Dr. Walkowicz offered, “We have to determine how we might clean our spacecraft to explore Mars without contaminating it and extending that to not just organizations like NASA, but also private spaceflight companies that are engaging in their own activities on Mars … how do we protect Mars from ourselves?” She added, “If we want to send humans to Mars, then that’s an entirely different and more challenging problem than sending just spacecraft.”
The question of sending humans to other planets is so complex that Dr. Walkowicz believes it should not be left exclusively to members of the scientific community.
“That’s fine if what you’re talking about doing is science experiments on other worlds. But if actually what we are talking about is becoming humans that live on another world, we have to take into account that we have a human culture. And in order for us to think about how we might do that correctly, that requires us to think about how we choose our lives on Earth and what that might mean in its space iteration.” She finished, “Certainly, the history of Earth is full of a lot of mistakes and intentional actions that resulted in the massive inequality and some of the social problems we have today. If we want to live in space, how can we do that without necessarily reproducing a lot of the inequalities and injustices off Earth as well?”
Keeping the Public Engaged
The need for public input is a two-way street and Dr. Walkowicz wants scientists to keep the greater public engaged. Outside of the fact that the public has a right to know about the research they fund,.
“Science is a human undertaking in the same way that literature or art or music is a human undertaking. And I think we have a responsibility to share those scientific discoveries and the benefits that are created by them … People should be able to enjoy [these benefits] and it shouldn’t require being an actual scientist to do so. We certainly don’t tell people they can only enjoy music if they’re musicians. Science is a product of human activity that should be shared with all humanity.”
Whatever we find, and share, from our travels beyond Earth, Dr. Walkowicz sees planetary exploration as an opportunity to move beyond our relatively narrow breadth of experience.
“When we study astrobiology, I think one of the things we’re really limited by is that we only have one example of a planet that has life on it, so being able to study life in other environments is incredibly important scientifically, but can also help us understand what our greater relationship is to the universe,” she said.
Dr. Richard Gilbertson discusses his inspiration and the latest advances in pediatric cancer research.
Published January 8, 2018
By Marie Gentile and Richard Birchard
Dr. Richard Gilbertson
Richard Gilbertson, MD, PhD, Li Ka Shing Chair of Oncology and director of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre, did not initially set out for a career in pediatric cancer — the leading cause of death by disease past infancy for children and adolescents in the United States and Europe.
He “somewhat randomly,” as he says, chose to do his second-year research project on medulloblastoma, the most common malignant brain tumor in children. He was inspired early on by a caring mentor who went above and beyond in attention and enthusiasm and was further determined to pursue this path while getting to know the family of a child with brain cancer.
“One day I went onto the ward, and it was very dark, and all the curtains were closed, and I was told that this child was dying. After inquiring about available treatments, I was told there was nothing to be done. I was incredibly angry with the system that wasn’t able to offer a child a curative treatment.”
Deeply affected by this child’s death, when a friend and fellow medical student challenged him to produce a 15% reduction in mortality of any disease over beers at a pub, Dr. Gilbertson made it his career goal to “produce a 15% reduction in mortality, at least of medulloblastoma in pediatric cancer.”
Discoveries in Medulloblastoma
To that end, Dr. Gilbertson and his lab have made some profound discoveries in medulloblastoma. During the 1980s, medulloblastoma was considered a single disease, with a singular treatment, but “we’ve demonstrated that it is multiple diseases, and those diseases actually have different origins in the nervous system from very specific cell types, and they behave differently.”
This understanding has allowed treatments to be tailored to disease type, resulting in a reduction in the use of radiation therapy, the introduction of new treatments that target the signaling pathways of some forms of medulloblastoma, and insights into other brain tumors including Ependymoma and choroid plexus carcinoma.
His latest research is driven by the question of why cancer is so much less prevalent in children than expected, given that as they grow they have a large burden of cellular proliferation.
“Whereas one in two adults will get cancer eventually, only one in 600 children will, and the math doesn’t add up because children are growing faster than at any other point in their lives,” says Gilbertson.
Understanding the Mechanisms of Cancer Protection
Researchers have long suspected that children’s tissue provides protection against cancer to accommodate this growth, but they lacked definitive evidence or a mechanism for how this works. In a landmark paper published in Cell, Dr. Gilbertson’s lab mapped the functions of cells in numerous organs across the lifetime of mice and introduced tumor-inducing mutations to those cells.
They found that neonatal mouse cells are less likely to undergo tumorigenic transformation compared to adult cells with the same stem cell capacity, supporting the hypothesis that neonatal cells are somehow resistant to forming tumors — extrapolating to humans, this may explain why cancer rates are lower in children than adults.
Understanding the mechanism of this cancer protection has the potential to lead to better treatments not only for pediatric cancers, but adult cancers as well. “That’s critically important because if I can understand (how pediatric cells are protected from cancer), and then we can reactivate that in adult tissues, you’d have a very potent cancer preventative. If we could reactivate the mechanism in pediatric cells to allow them to grow and repair, but not cause cancer — imagine what we could do in adults. You could actually reactivate that pharmacologically with a medicine.”
Dr. Gilbertson is adamant about the need to develop innovative treatments that are proactive and integrated.
“My passion is to see cancers diagnosed as early as possible. Obviously, if you diagnose a cancer earlier, and this is particularly important for children, the required treatment is much less intense. The heroes of future cancer care may not so much be the life scientists, but the physicists, chemists, engineers, and mathematicians. They will be the people who generate innovative and inexpensive devices to detect cancer in its very earliest stages across the population,” he says.
The Need for International Collaboration
Dr. Gilbertson presented his groundbreaking work during the opening Keynote Lecture at the 2018 Sohn Conference: Accelerating Translation of Pediatric Cancer Research, which brought together the leaders in the field of pediatric oncology, and allowed interactions between more established scientists and clinicians with the next generation of graduate students, post-docs, and other young investigators from around the world. This was particularly exciting because due to the rarity of pediatric cancer, clinical trials to develop new treatments require international collaboration. “This disease is life threatening, there’s an imperative to do the best possible research.”
Every October, the world learns who will be the newest members of a very elite circle known as Nobel Laureates.
Whether or not you agree with the selection committee’s choices, the Nobel Prize is considered a career pinnacle of success and the annual announcement continues to captivate the media and general public in addition to the scientific community. This in part is due to the hefty prize purse, roughly $1.1 million, but also because of the body of work that the winners represent and its contributions to societal advances.
At the New York Academy of Sciences, we believe prizes like the Nobel and others help to advance scientific discovery, which in turn is good for the world. And if athletes and celebrities can be recognized for their achievements why shouldn’t scientists? But we also believe that acknowledgement of early-career work is equally important.
We administer two scientific prizes that in the past 15+ years have helped boost the careers of more than 450 young scientists pursuing unconventional ideas and new directions with the fearlessness and creativity of youth: the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists and the Innovators in Science Award. While many people may be familiar with the concept of a science grant, the purpose of a scientific prize—such as the Nobel or the Blavatnik Awards—may be less clear. Here are just a few of the reasons scientific prizes are important to the pursuit of science, the scientific community, and the public, at large.
1. Recognition
In addition to receiving cash and prestige, awardees receive recognition for their instrumental role in making key advances in areas of science in the service of humanity. This type of recognition can lead to acceptance of a paradigm-shifting idea, allocation of funding and resources to a particular area of research, and increased awareness of a research topic. For rising young talent, it can cement the shift from local player to the global stage. And while not every discipline’s importance may be readily understood by lay audiences, such as Astrophysics or Mathematics, the attention drawn from the award can still confirm the importance of the achievement.
2. Platform
Scientists are not always the most proactive advocates for their own work. So a nomination for an award, typically made by nominees’ respective institutions and/or colleagues, is itself a validation of their work. Being one’s own spokesperson also involves flexing a set of communication skills, not often utilized in the lab. Whether it is vying for a nomination, distilling complex ideas for a broader audience or giving TV or radio interviews about the research—these experiences help scientists fine-tune their skills in communicating science, not only to other scientists and stakeholders, but to funders and the general public.
3. Public Awareness and Engagement
Media buzz around awards can boost public awareness and engagement in science. Scientific innovation continues to shape the nature of modern life as we know it: from antibiotics and vaccination to the internet and smartphones. Actively promoting the role of science, and scientists, in the development of the tools and technologies we often take for granted today, reinforces the need for continued public funding of science. The voices of scientists and a scientifically literate public are equally important in the critical ongoing dialogue on science and evidence-based policy-making.
4. Role Models
Awards create positive role models in the scientific community. These men and women, drawn from across the globe, inspire young students to pursue careers in science, and drive current scientists to strive for excellence. Both are key to maintaining a strong pipeline of talent in STEM and essential if America is to remain competitive in a global economy.
5. Flexibility
As the funding climate for scientific research continues to grow increasingly challenging, awards can help ease financial tensions, whether personal or in the lab. More stable funding allows scientists to take on additional or high-risk, high-return projects not otherwise supported by traditional avenues of funding.
By recognizing and honoring those individuals that have made significant contributions to science, through the presentation of scientific awards, we continue to elevate the bar of scientific progress and its positive impact on humanity and promote the breakthroughs in science and tech that will define how our world will look over the next century.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn and has been updated.
Clinical trials to evaluate new drugs are typically built around one design, the randomized controlled trial, but this method has come under scrutiny in recent years for being expensive, lengthy, and cumbersome. In this podcast you’ll hear from experts asking if alternative designs would be better for determining the safety and efficacy of new therapies.
This podcast was produced following a conference on this topic held in partnership between the NYU School of Medicine and The New York Academy of Sciences. It was made possible with support from Johnson & Johnson.
The technological advances of the past few decades have triggered a conversation about the future of higher education.
Published October 1, 2017
By Nancy L. Zimpher
The technological advances of the past few decades have ushered in an era of distance-learning capability that has triggered a conversation about what, exactly, the future of higher education will look like.
Speculation ranges across the extremes: On the one hand, that the ability to earn entire credentials online, from certificates to PhDs, will inevitably force the extinction of brick-and-mortar campuses, to the other, in which critics argue that courses taken online are so much less rich than the traditional campus and classroom experience that they are “junk degrees.”
The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between. Importantly though, the determination of higher ed’s future is not an exercise in theory but rather a practical one with real-world outcomes that affect millions of people.
Every university and college leader today must be wide awake to this fact and accept the responsibility eagerly with both hands. In doing so they must do two things simultaneously: they need to know exactly who their students are and never take their eyes off the changing, fast-emerging needs of the world and workforce. With both of these things in sight, heads of colleges and universities need to create institutions or systems that can respond to the needs of students and sectors.
Closing the Gap
It will come as no surprise to this publication’s readership that today about 65 percent of jobs in the United States require a degree beyond high school.1 Moreover, the jobs that earn a middle-class living or better almost certainly, increasingly, require advanced education. New York State is even more competitive than average: nearly 70 percent of jobs will soon require a college degree, but right now only 46 percent of adult New Yorkers have one. This wide gap between the current reality and the projected need for educated, skilled citizens has created a fault line upon which we cannot expect to build stable, competitive, thriving economy and communities.
To close the gap we need to know who today’s students are. Unlike eras past, in which the picture of the typical college student was a young, white, male student living on campus and attending classes full time, today’s student profile is very different.2 Forty percent of college students are age 25 or older. Fifty-six percent are female. Twenty-eight percent are raising families while they earn their degree. Sixty-three percent of students are enrolled full-time, and 36 percent of students work part-time while taking classes and another 26 percent work full-time.
Today, 41 percent of students live on campus. The remainder, owing to their life obligations — juggling jobs, families, and expenses — commute. Fifty-eight percent of college students today are white; 17 percent are Hispanic and 15 percent are black — the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population and also the most underserved.
Expanding Options
The world has changed, and higher education needs to not only change with it but stay ahead of the curve, ready to receive the students who come to us. The future of higher education is flexibility.
This means expanding our operations so that we can meet students where they are, on their time. It means providing an array of avenues by which to earn a degree and support to ensure they complete. High-quality online learning opportunities are a critical piece of this.
One out of three New Yorkers who earn a college degree do it at The State University of New York. In the last three years, more than 320,000 of our students have taken online classes, and 8,000 have received a SUNY degree by taking the majority of their classes online. Our online learning platform, launched in 2014, is the largest in the world. But for SUNY it is not enough to be the biggest, we need to be the best. This is our commitment to New York: to prepare students by any and every high-quality means possible to earn a college degree and to build their best life.
About the Author
Nancy L. Zimpher served as the twelfth chancellor of The State University of New York from 2009 to 2017, during which time she was also chair of the New York Academy of Sciences Board of Governors from 2011 to 2016. In January 2018 Dr. Zimpher will become a senior fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, where she will also be the founding director of the nation’s first Center for Education Pipeline Systems Change.
Among many, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has done excellent work compiling college student demographics, including information that can be found here.
