Recent progress in the understanding of human disease has led to an explosion in the number of new medicines and therapeutics available for adults — however, significantly fewer drugs are developed and evaluated specifically for children due to complex ethical and logistical issues. Listen to this podcast addressing topics on how to provide children with evidence-based treatments while protecting them from inappropriate research.
This podcast highlights discussions from the Ethical Considerations in Research for Pediatric Populations symposium presented by The New York Academy of Sciences and NYU Grossman School of Medicine and is made available thanks to funding provided by Johnson & Johnson.
From the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change, it’s no longer a question whether effective science communication is necessary to deal with crisis and avert further disaster. The way the scientific community communicates urgent messages can make or break how the public responds to a crisis. Ineffective communications result in inertia or skepticism – and have reduced our collective ability to respond to and reduce the impacts of crisis.
Dr. Sweta Chakraborty understood the importance of strategic communications early in her career as a scientist, long before many researchers began to reckon with the ways disinformation and misinformation are weaponized across the globe to prevent action on crises such as climate change.
Today, Dr. Chakraborty’s work is motivated by the need for clear, credible, science communication to urgently and proactively manage the risks that threaten human security and well-being. She is currently the US President of Operations at We Don’t Have Time, and a globally recognized risk and behavioral scientist. She is a trusted authority on proactive preparedness to mitigate against the impacts of climate change.
Dr. Chakraborty is an advisor to the International Science Reserve and strengthens the ISR with lessons she has gained from advising scientists, policymakers, and other experts on science communications.
Dr. Chakraborty recommends that scientists who care about responding to the multitude of crises our world faces must strengthen their ability to effectively communicate. Experts who are clear and pitch their messages for the audiences they need to reach will ultimately have stronger results. And we will all be better off for it.
Strong networks, open data sharing, and building public trust are key to addressing future global crises.
August 18, 2022
By Mila Rosenthal, PhD
Since our launch in early 2022, the International Science Reserve (ISR) has rapidly expanded a network of scientists who are poised to respond to the next big crisis. The ISR aims to take action on crises that are complex, international, and where science and technology can effectively respond.
The ISR works in two ways, one through preparing for crisis by helping scientists in the community practice how they would respond during a crisis and understand what resources they need. And two, through a coordinated response to a declared crisis where the ISR will add to existing networks and support access to specialized human and technological resources.
With these goals in mind, the ISR brings together colleagues from a range of disciplines around the world for discussions to learn from each other in a semi-monthly webinar series: Science Unusual: R&D for Global Crisis Response.
The first webinar in this series was “Science Unusual: Gearing up for the Next Global Crisis.” The recording is now available on-demand through The New York Academy of Science. I was honored to moderate the discussion, and our esteemed panelists included:
Dr. Fulya Aydin-Kandemir, Hydropolitics Association at Ankara & Akdeniz University (Turkey)
Dr. Lorna Thorpe, Professor and Director of the Division of Epidemiology, NYU Grossman School of Medicine in the Department of Population Health (United States of America)
Alex Wakefield, Senior Policy Adviser, Royal Society (United Kingdom)
It’s hard to narrow down all the lessons I gleaned from this panel, but I have three big takeaways on what the panelists learned through their own experience preparing for and responding to crises in public health and climate change.
1) Scientists Need Stronger Networks to Connect and Coordinate Crisis Response
Alex Wakefield began her career in science policy to help governments use evidence and science to make stronger policy decisions. When the COVID-19 crisis hit in 2020, the UK government needed scientific evidence – but like many governments around the world – they didn’t have the luxury of time to do long-term research. Ms. Wakefield worked under the government’s chief scientist to run scientific advisory groups that convened experts to quickly provide evidence for policymaking decisions. That mechanism existed before COVID-19 to help deal with emergencies, like major flooding events and public health emergencies, and Ms. Wakefield believes it was a real advantage of the UK’s response that this was already in place.
Dr. Lorna Thorpe added that the energy of scientists wanting to get involved locally, nationally, and globally was one of the most important components of the COVID-19 response. She saw a robust convening and collaboration among institutions and researchers in New York City’s response, and she believes that the ISR can play a big role in facilitating these connections during the next major crisis.
2) Open Data Sharing is Essential to Effective Analysis During a Crisis
Dr. Fulya Aydin-Kandemir shared her own story of facilitating research during massive wildfires in Greece and Turkey in 2021. In her view, crisis research needs stronger access to public data, in her case satellite imagery, in order to respond faster and effectively to natural disasters across borders. That way, she could share her results with stakeholders, like firefighters, to help them understand real-time distribution of fires and how to stop outbreaks that can damage communities and ecosystems.
Dr. Thorpe added that we need more coordination of networks that allow research institutions to work together, no matter what their focus issues are, on issues like data sharing. Access to data like satellite imagery is not only important to issues of wildfires caused by climate change, but can also be important for real-time public health issues, like the urban heat effect or migration patterns.
3) To Build Public Trust, Leadership and Communication is Key
Research shows that the public will generally trust the government to do the right thing in a crisis. However, if there is ambiguity in leadership, Dr. Thorpe shared that she has seen the public lose trust – which makes it harder for technical leaders, like public health researchers, to do their job.
Dr. Thorpe reinforced how important great leadership is in a time of crisis, especially among local officials like mayors or health officials. During COVID-19, there was ambiguity around data that mired the United States and caused delays. She believes that some of that can be attributed to the erosion of institutions in America, but it is really about trusting your local leaders to make the right choices.
Ms. Wakefield believes that another way to build public trust ahead of an emergency is to consult with the public about what types of crisis responses are acceptable. Now at the Royal Society in the UK, she recently held a public dialogue series on different emergencies, like flooding and pandemics. The researchers found that the public had an expectation around government use of data – and they expressed concerns about when the emergency ends, what the data will be used for. The researchers plan to take these results and advocate for setting up stronger processes and policies for future responses.
Do you want to watch the whole webinar? Here are three steps to rewatch Science Unusual on-demand:
The Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the United Kingdom are the largest unrestricted prize available to early career scientists in the Life Sciences, Physical Sciences & Engineering, and Chemistry in the UK. The three 2021 Laureates each received £100,000, and two Finalists in each category received £30,000 per person. The honorees are recognized for their research, which pushes the boundaries of our current technology and understanding of the world. In this event, held at the historic Banqueting House in London, the UK Laureates and Finalists had a chance to explain their work and its ramifications to the public.
Victoria Gill, a Science and Environment Correspondent for the BBC, introduced and moderated the event. She noted that “Science has saved the world and will continue to do so,” and stressed how important it is for scientists to engage the public and share their discoveries at events like this. This theme arose over and over again over the course of the day.
Symposium Highlights
Single-cell analyses can reveal how multicellular animals develop and how our immune systems deal with different pathogens we encounter over the course of our lives.
Viruses that attack bacteria—bacteriophages—may help us fight antibiotic resistant bacterial pathogens.
Fossils offer us a glimpse into what life on Earth was like for the millennia in which it thrived before mammals took over.
Stacking layers of single-atom-thick sheets can make new materials with desired, customizable properties.
Memristors are electronic components that can remember a variety of memory states, and can be used to build quicker and more versatile computer chips than currently used.
The detection of the Higgs boson, which had been posited for decades by mathematical theory but was very difficult to detect, confirmed the Standard Model of Physics.
Single molecule magnets can be utilized for high density data storage—if they can retain their magnetism at high enough temperatures.
When examining how life first arose on Earth, we must consider all of its requisite components and reactions in aggregate rather than assigning primacy to any one of them.
Speakers
Stephen L. Brusatte The University of Edinburgh
Sinéad Farrington The University of Edinburgh
John Marioni European Bioinformatics Institute and University of Cambridge
David P. Mills The University of Manchester
Artem Mishchenko The University of Manchester
Matthew Powner University College London
Themis Prodromakis University of Southampton
Edze Westra University of Exeter
Innovating in Life Sciences
Speakers
John Marioni, PhD European Bioinformatics Institute and University of Cambridge, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Life Sciences Finalist
Edze Westra, PhD University of Exeter, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Life Sciences Finalist
Stephen Brusatte, PhD The University of Edinburgh, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Life Sciences Laureate
How to Build an Animal
John Marioni, PhD, European Bioinformatics Institute and University of Cambridge, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Life Sciences Finalist
Animals grow from one single cell: a fertilized egg. During development, that cell splits into two, and then into four, and so on, creating an embryo that grows into the billions of cells comprising a whole animal. Along the way, the cells must differentiate into all of the different cell types necessary to create every aspect of that animal.
Each cell follows its own path to arrive at its eventual fate. Traditionally, the decisions each cell has to make along that path have been studied using large groups of cells or tissues; this is because scientific lab techniques have typically required a substantial amount of starting material to perform analyses. But now, thanks in large part to the discoveries of John Marioni and his lab group, we have the technology to track individual cells as they mature into different cell types.
Marioni has created analytical methods capable of observing patterns in all of the genes expressed by individual cells. Importantly, these computational and statistical methods can be used to analyze the enormous amounts of data generated from the gene expression patterns of many individual cells simultaneously. In addition to furthering our understanding of cell fate decisions in embryonic development, this area of research—single cell genomics—can also be applied to many other processes in the body.
One relevant application is to the immune system: single cell genomics can detect immune cell types that are activated by exposure to a particular pathogen. To illustrate this, Marioni showed many gorgeous, colorized images of individual cells, highlighting their unique morphology and function. Included in these images was histology showing profiles of different types of T cells elicited by infection with SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19).
The cells were computationally grouped by genetic profile and graphed to show how the different cell types correlated with disease severity. There are many other clinical applications of his research into genomics. For instance, he said, if we know exactly which cell types in the body express the targets of specific drugs, we will be better able to predict that drug’s effects (and side effects).
In addition to his lab work, Marioni is involved in the Human Cell Atlas initiative, a global collaborative project whose goal it is to genetically map all of the cell types in healthy human adults. When a cell uses a particular gene, it is said to “transcribe” that gene to make a particular protein—thus, the catalog of all of the genes one cell uses is called its “transcriptome.” The Human Cell Atlas is using these single cell transcriptomes to create the whole genetic map.
This research is currently completely redefining how we think of cell types by transforming our definition of a “cell” from the way it looks to the genetic profile.
Bacteria and Their Viruses: A Microbial Arms Race
Edze Westra, PhD University of Exeter, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Life Sciences Finalist
All organisms have viruses that target them for infection; bacteria are no exception. The viruses that infect bacteria are called bacteriophages, or phages.
Edze Westra’s lab studies how bacteria evolve to defend themselves against infection by phage and, specifically, how elements of their environment drive the evolution of their immune systems. Like humans, bacteria have two main types of immune systems: an innate immune system and an adaptive immune system. The innate immune system works similarly in both bacteria and humans by modifying molecules on the cell surface so that the phage can’t gain entry to the cell.
In humans, the adaptive immune system is what creates antibodies. In bacteria, the adaptive immune system works a little bit differently—a gene editing system, called CRISPR-Cas, cuts out pieces of the phage’s genome and uses it as a template to identify all other phages of the same type. Using this method, the bacterial cell can quickly discover and neutralize any infectious phage by destroying the phage’s genetic material. In recent years, scientists have harnessed the CRISPR-Cas system for use in gene editing technology.
Westra wanted to know under what conditions do bacteria use their innate immune system versus their adaptive immune system: How do they decide?
In studies using the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, his lab found that the decision to use adaptive vs. innate immunity is controlled almost exclusively by nutrient levels in the surrounding environment. When nutrient levels are low, the bacteria use the adaptive immune system, CRISPR-Cas; when nutrient levels are high, the bacteria rely on their innate immune system. He recognized that this means we can artificially guide the evolution of bacterial defense by controlling elements in their environment.
When we need to attack pathogenic bacteria for medical purposes, such as in a sick or infected patient, we turn to antibiotics. However, many strains of bacteria have developed resistance to antibiotics, leaving humans vulnerable to infection.
Additionally, our antibiotics tend to kill broad classes of microbes, often damaging the beneficial species we harbor in our bodies along with the pathogenic ones we are trying to eliminate. Phage therapy—a medical treatment where phages are administered to a patient with a severe bacterial infection—might be a good way to circumvent antibiotic resistance while also attacking bacteria in a more targeted manner, harming only those that harm us and leaving the others be.
Although it is difficult to manipulate bacterial nutrients within the context of a patient’s body, we can use antibiotics to direct this behavior. Antibiotics that are shown to limit bacterial growth will induce the bacteria to use the CRISPR-Cas strategy, mimicking the effects of a low-nutrient environment; antibiotics that work by killing bacteria will induce them to use their innate defenses. In this way, it may be possible to direct the evolution of bacterial defense systems in order to reveal their weaknesses and target them with phage therapy.
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
Stephen Brusatte, PhD The University of Edinburgh, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Life Sciences Laureate|
Stephen Brusatte is a paleontologist, “and paleontologists”, he says, “are really historians”. Just as historians study recorded history to learn about the past, paleontologists study prehistory for the same reasons.
The Earth is four and a half billion years old, and humans have only been around for the last three hundred and fifty thousand of those years. Dinosaurs were the largest living creatures to ever walk the earth; they started out around the size of house cats, and over eighty million years they evolved into the giant T. rexes, Stegosauruses, and Brontosauruses in our picture books.
They reigned until a six-mile-wide asteroid struck the Earth sixty-six million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, extinguishing them along with seventy-five percent of the other species on the planet. Brusatte called this day “the worst day in Earth’s history.” However, the demise of dinosaurs paved the way for mammals to take over.
Fossils can tell us a lot about how life on this planet used to be, how the earth and its occupants respond to climate and environmental changes, and how evolution works over long timescales. Particularly, fossils show how entirely new species and body plans emerge.
Each fossil can yield new knowledge and new discoveries about a lost world, he said. It can teach us how bodies change and, ultimately, how evolution works. It is from fossils that we know that today’s birds evolved from dinosaurs.
Life Sciences Panel Discussion
Victoria Gill started the life sciences panel discussion by asking all three of the awardees if, and how, the COVID-19 pandemic changed their professional lives: did it alter their scientific approach or were they asking different questions?
Westra replied that the lab shutdown forced different, non-experimental approaches, notably bioinformatics on old sequence data. He said that they found mobile genetic elements, and the models of how they moved through a population reminded him of epidemiological models of COVID spread.
Marioni shared that he was inspired by how the international scientific community came together to solve the problem posed by the pandemic. Everyone shared samples and worked as a team, instead of working in isolation as they usually do. Brusatte agreed that enhanced collaboration accelerated discoveries and should be maintained.
Questions from the audience, both in person and online, covered a similarly broad of a range of topics. An audience member asked about where new cell types come from; Marioni explained that if we computationally look at gene transcription changes in single cells over time, we can make phylogenetic trees showing how cells with different expression patterns arise.
A digital attendee asked Brusatte why birds survived the asteroid impact when other dinosaurs didn’t. Brusatte replied that the answer is not clear, but it is probably due to a number of factors: they have beaks so they can eat seeds, they can fly, and they grow fast. Plus, he said, most birds actually did not survive beyond the asteroid impact.
Another audience member asked Brusatte if the theory that the asteroid killed the dinosaurs was widely accepted. He replied that it is widely accepted that the impact ended the Cretaceous period, but some scientists still argue that other factors, like volcanic eruptions in India, were the prime mover behind the dinosaurs’ demise.
Another viewer asked Westra why the environment impacts a bacterium’s immune strategy. He answered that in the presence of antibiotics that slow growth, infection and metabolism are likewise slowed so the bacteria simply have more time to respond. He added that the level of diversity in the attacking phage may also play a role, as innate immunity is better able to deal with multiple variants.
To wrap up the session, Victoria Gill asked about the importance of diversity and representation and wondered how to make awards programs like this more inclusive. All three scientists agreed that it is hugely important, that the lack of diversity is a problem across all fields of research, that all voices must be heard, and that the only way to change it is by having hard metrics to rank universities and departments on the demographics of their faculty.
Innovating in Physical Sciences & Engineering
Speakers
Artem Mishchenko, PhD The University of Manchester, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Physical Sciences & Engineering Finalist
Themis Prodromakis, PhD University of Southampton, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Physical Sciences & Engineering Finalist
Sinead Farrington, PhD The University of Edinburgh, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Physical Sciences & Engineering Laureate
Programmable van der Waals Materials
Artem Mishchenko, PhD The University of Manchester, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Physical Sciences & Engineering Finalist
Materials science is vital because materials define what we can do, and thus define us. That’s why the different eras in prehistory are named for the materials used: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Copper Age. The properties of the materials available dictated the technologies that could be developed then, and the properties of the materials available still dictate the technologies that can be developed now.
Van der Waals materials are materials that are only one or a few atoms thick. The most well-known is probably graphene, which was discovered in 2004 and is made of carbon. But now hundreds of these two-dimensional materials are available, representing almost the whole periodic table, and each has different properties. They are the cutting edge of materials innovation.
Mishchenko studies how van der Waals materials can be made and manipulated into materials with customizable, programmable properties. He does this by stacking the materials and rotating the layers relative to each other. Rotating the layers used to be painstaking, time-consuming work, requiring a new rig to make each new angle of rotation. But his lab developed a single device that can twist the layers by any amount he wants. He can thus much more easily make and assess the properties of each different material generated when he rotates a layer by a given angle, since he can then just reset his device to turn the layer more or less to devise a new material. Every degree of rotation confers new properties.
His lab has found that rotating the layers can tune the conductivity of the materials and that the right combination of angle and current can make a transistor that can generate radio waves suitable for high frequency telecommunications. With infinite combinations of layers available to make new materials, this new field of “twistronics” may generate an entirely new physics, with quantum properties and exciting possibilities for biomedicine and sustainability.
Memristive Technologies: From Nano Devices to AI on a Chip
Themis Prodromakis, PhD University of Southampton, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Physical Sciences & Engineering Finalist
Transistors are key elements in our electronic devices. They process and store information by switching between on and off states. Traditionally, in order to increase the speed and efficiency of a device one increased the number of transistors it contained. This usually entailed making them smaller. Smartphones contain seven billion transistors! But now it has become more and more difficult to further shrink the size of transistors.
Themis Prodromakis and his team have been instrumental in developing a new electronic component: the memristor, or memory resistor. Memristors are a new kind of switch; they can store hundreds of memory states, beyond on and off states, on a single, nanometer-scale device. Sending a voltage pulse across a device allows to tune the resistance of the memristor at distinct levels, and the device remembers them all.
One benefit of memristors is that they allow for more computational capacity while using much less energy from conventional circuit components. Systems made out of memristors allow us to embed intelligence everywhere by processing and storing big data locally, rather than in the cloud. And by removing the need to share data with the cloud, electronic devices made out of memristors can remain secure and private. Prodromakis has not only developed and tested memristors, he is also quite invested in realizing their practical applications and bringing them to market.
Another amazing application of memristors is linking neural networks to artificial ones. Prodromakis and his team have already successfully connected biological and artificial neurons together and enabled them to communicate over the internet using memristors as synapses. He speculates that such neuroprosthetic devices might one day be used to fix or even augment human capabilities, for example by replacing dysfunctional regions of the brain in Alzheimer’s patients. And if memristors can be embedded in a human body, they can be embedded in other environments previously inaccessible to electronics as well.
What Do We Know About the Higgs Boson?
Sinead Farrington, PhD The University of Edinburgh, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Physical Sciences & Engineering Laureate
In the Standard Model of particle physics, the bedrock of modern physics, fermions are the elementary particles comprising all of the stable matter in the universe, while bosons—the other collection of elementary particles—are the ones that transmit forces. The Higgs boson, whose existence was theoretically proposed in 1964, is a unique particle; it gives mass to the other particles by coupling with them.
Sinéad Farrington led the group at CERN that further elucidated the properties of the Higgs boson and thus bolstered the Standard Model. The Standard Model “effectively encapsulates a remarkably small set of particles that make up everything we know about and are able to create,” explained Farrington.
“The Higgs boson is needed to maintain the compelling self-consistency of the Standard Model. It was there in theory, but the experimental observation of it was a really big deal. Nature did not have to work out that way,” Farrington said.
Farrington and her 100-person international team at the Large Hadron Collider demonstrated that the Higgs boson spontaneously decays into two fermions called tau leptons. This was experimentally challenging because tau is unstable, so the group had to infer that it was there based on its own degradation products. She then went on to develop the analytical tools needed to further record and interpret the tau lepton data and was the first to use machine learning to trigger, record, and analyze the massive amounts of data generated by experiments at the LHC.
Now she is looking to discover other long-lived but as yet unknown particles beyond the Standard Model that also decay into tau leptons, and plans to make more measurements using the Large Hadron Collider to further confirm that the Higgs boson behaves the way the Standard Model posits it will.
In addition to the satisfaction of verifying that a particle predicted by mathematical theorists actually does exist, Farrington said that another consequence of knowing about the Higgs boson is that it may shed light on dark matter and dark energy, which are not part of the Standard Model. Perhaps the Higgs boson gives mass to dark matter as well.
Physical Sciences & Engineering Panel Discussion
Victoria Gill started this session by asking the participants what they plan to do next. Farrington said that she would love to get more precise determinations on known processes, reducing the error bars upon them. And she will also embark on an open search for new long-lived particles—i.e. those that don’t decay rapidly—beyond the Standard Model.
Prodromakis wants to expand the possibilities of memristive devices, since they can be deployed anywhere and don’t need a lot of power. He envisions machine-machine interactions like those already in play in the Internet of Things as well as machine-human interactions. He knows he must grapple with the ethical implications of this new technology, and mentioned that it will also require a shift in how electricity, electronics, and computational fabrics are taught in schools.
Mishchenko is both seeking new properties in extant materials and making novel materials and seeing what they’ll do. He’s also searching for useful applications for all of his materials.
A member of the audience asked Farrington if, given all of the new research in quantum physics, we have new data to resolve the Schrӧedinger’s cat conundrum? But she said no, the puzzle still stands. That is the essence of quantum physics: there is uncertainty in the (quantum) world, and both states exist simultaneously.
Another wondered why she chose to look for the tau lepton as evidence of the Higgs boson’s degradation and not any other particles, and she noted that tau was the simplest to see over the background even though it does not make up the largest share of the breakdown products.
An online questioner asked Prodromakis if memristors could be used to make supercomputers since they allow greater computational capacity. He answered that they could, in principle, and could be linked to our brains to augment our capabilities.
Someone then asked Mishchenko if his technology could be applied into biological systems. He said that in biological systems current comes in the form of ions, whereas in electronic systems current comes in the form of electrons, so there would need to be an interface that could translate the current between the two systems. Some of his materials can do that by using electrochemical reactions that convert electrons into ions. But the materials must also be nontoxic in order to be incorporated into human tissues, so he thinks this innovation is thirty to forty years away.
The last query regarded whether the participants viewed themselves as scientists or engineers. Farrington said she is decidedly a physicist and not an engineer, though she collaborates with civil and electrical engineers and relies on them heavily to build and maintain the colliders and detectors she needs for her work.
Prodromakis was trained as an engineer, but now works at understanding the physics of devices so he can design them to reliably do what he wants them to do. And Mishchenko summarized the difference between them by saying the engineering problems are quite specific, while scientists mostly work in darkness. At this point, he considers himself an entrepreneur.
Innovating in Chemistry
Speakers
David P. Mills, PhD The University of Manchester, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Chemistry Finalist
Matthew Powner, PhD University College London, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Chemistry Finalist
Building High Temperature Single-Molecule Magnets
David P. Mills, PhD The University of Manchester, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Chemistry Finalist
David Mills’ lab “makes molecules that have no right to exist.” He is specifically interested in the synthesis of small molecules with unusual shapes that contain metal ions, and using these as tiny molecular magnets to increase data storage capacity to support high-performance computing. Mills offers a bottom-up approach to this problem: he wants to make new molecules for high density data storage. This could ultimately make computers smaller and reduce the amount of energy they use.
Single-Molecule Magnets (SMMs) were discovered about thirty years ago. They differ from regular magnets, which derive their magnetic properties from interactions between atoms, but they still have two states: up and down. These can be used to store data in a manner similar to the bits of binary code that computers currently use. Initially, SMMs could only work at extremely cold temperatures, just above absolute zero. For many years, scientists were unable to create an SMM capable of operation above −259oC, only 10oC above the temperature of liquid helium, which makes them decidedly less than practical for everyday use.
Mills works with a class of elements called the lanthanides, sometimes known as the rare-earth metals, that are already used in smartphones and hybrid vehicles. One of his students utilized one such element, dysprosium, in the creation of an SMM that was dubbed, dysprosocenium. Dysprosocenium briefly held its magnetic properties even at a blistering −213oC, the warmest temperature at which any SMM had ever functioned. This temperature is starting to approach the temperature of liquid nitrogen, which has a boiling point of −195.8°C. If an SMM could function indefinitely at that temperature, it could potentially be used in real-world applications.
When developing dysprosocenium, the Mills group and their collaborators learned that controlling molecular vibrations is essential to allowing the single-molecule magnet to work at such high temperatures. So, his plan for the future is to learn how to control these vibrations and work toward depositing single-molecule magnets on surfaces.
The Chemical Origins of Life
Matthew Powner, PhD University College London, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Chemistry Finalist
The emergence of life is the most profound transition in the history of Earth, and yet we don’t know how it came about. Earth formed four-and-a-half billion years ago, and it is believed that the earliest life-forms appeared almost a billion years later. However, we don’t know what happened in the interim.
Life’s Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) is believed to be much closer to modern life forms than to that primordial originator, so although we can learn about life’s common origins from LUCA, we can’t learn about the true Origin of Life. Where did life come from? How did the fundamental rules of chemistry give rise to life forms? Why did life organize itself the way that it did?
Matthew Powner thinks that to answer these vital existential questions, which lie at the nexus of chemistry and biology, we must simultaneously consider all of life’s components—nucleic acids, amino acids and peptides, metabolic reactions and pathways—and their interactions. We can’t just look at any one of them in isolation.
Since these events occurred in the distant past, we can’t discover it—we must reinvent it. To test how life came about, we must build it ourselves, from scratch, by generating and combining membranes, genomes, and catalysis, and eventually metabolism to generate energy.
In this presentation, Powner focused on his lab’s work with proteins. Our cells, which are highly organized and compartmentalized machines, use enzymes—proteins themselves—and other biological macromolecules to synthesize proteins. So how did the first proteins get made? Generally, the peptide bonds linking amino acids together to make proteins do not form at pH 7, the pH of water and therefore of most cells. But Powner’s lab showed that derivatives of amino acids could form peptide bonds at this pH in the presence of ultraviolet light from the sun, and sulfur and iron compounds, all of which were believed to have been present in the prebiotic Earth.
Chemistry Panel Discussion
Victoria Gill started this one off by asking the chemists how important it is to ask questions without a specific application in mind. Both agreed that curiosity defines and drives humanity, and that the most amazing discoveries arise just from trying to satisfy it. Powner says that science must fill all of the gaps in our understanding, and the new knowledge generated by this “blue sky research” (as Mills put it) will yield applications that will change the world but in unpredictable ways. Watson and Crick provide the perfect example; they didn’t set out to make PCR, but just to understand basic biological questions. Trying to drive technology forward may be essential, but it will never change the world the same way investigating fundamental phenomena for its own sake can.
One online viewer wanted to know if single-molecule magnets could be used to make levitating trains, but Mills said that they only work at the quantum scale; trains are much too big.
Other questions were about the origin of life. One wanted to know if life arose in hydrothermal vents, one was regarding the RNA hypothesis (which posits that RNA was the first biological molecule to arise since it can be both catalytic and self-replicating), and one wanted to know what Powner thought about synthetic biology. In terms of hydrothermal vents, Powner said that we know that metabolism is nothing if not adaptable—so it is difficult to put any constraints on the environment in which it arose.
He said that the RNA world is a useful framework in which to form research questions, but he no longer thinks it is a viable explanation for how life actually arose since any RNA reactions would need a membrane to contain them in order to be meaningful. And he said that synthetic biology—the venture of designing and generating cells from scratch, and even using non-canonical nucleic acids and amino acids beyond those typically used by life forms—is a complementary approach to the one his lab takes to investigate why biological systems are the way they are.
The Future of Research in the UK: How Will We Address the Biggest Challenges Facing Our Society?
Contributors
Stephen Brusatte, PhD The University of Edinburgh, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Life Sciences Laureate
Sinead Farrington, PhD The University of Edinburgh, 2021 Blavatnik Awards UK Physical Sciences & Engineering Laureate
Victoria Gill moderated this discussion with the Blavatnik laureates, Stephen Brusatte and Sinead Farrington. First, they discussed how COVID-19 affected their professional lives. Both of them spoke of how essential it was for them to support their students and postdocs throughout the pandemic. These people may live alone, or with multiple roommates, and they may be far from family and home, and both scientists said they spent a lot of time just talking to them and listening to them. This segued into a conversation about how the rampant misinformation on social media about COVID-19 highlighted the incredible need for science outreach, and how both laureates view it as a duty to communicate their work to the public by writing popular books and going into schools.
Next, they tackled the lack of diversity in STEM fields. Farrington said that she has quite a diverse research group—but that it took effort to achieve that. This led right back to public outreach and schooling. She said that one way to increase diversity would be to develop all children’s’ analytical thinking skills early on to yield “social leveling” and foment everyone’s interest in science. Brusatte agreed that increased outreach and engagement is an important way to reach larger audiences and counteract the deep-seated inequities in our society.
Lastly, they debated if science education in the UK is too specialized too early, and if it should be broader, given the interdisciplinary nature of so many breakthroughs today. Brusatte was educated under another system so didn’t really want to opine, but Farrington was loath to sacrifice depth for breadth. Deep expert knowledge is important.
One lesson from the COVID pandemic was the importance of preparation.
Published June 9, 2022
By Nicholas B. Dirks
My journey leading the New York Academy of Sciences roughly coincides with the global calamity of SARS-CoV-2. As I reflect on my two-year anniversary, I cannot help but consider how much we have depended on scientists for the development of vaccines and therapeutics. Even though we are still experiencing the long tail of the pandemic, we are beginning to feel the worst may be behind us. One consequence is that we can more fully turn our attention to other crises, especially the very real dangers of climate change.
The Academy convenes experts for the exchange of scientific knowledge. Photo: Roger Torda
The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic was remarkable, but there were shortfalls, too. One lesson was the importance of preparation, and it is to improve scientific preparation for the next global crisis—no matter what it might be—that we are making great strides with the International Science Reserve. It’s an ambitious program to pre-position resources that scientists will need—and to ready scientists themselves—to conduct research and find evidence-based solutions to global emergencies.
That’s a big part of our mission, along with improving science literacy, promoting interdisciplinary and innovative science, and supporting the training of new generations of scientists. While the Academy is 200 years old, as we head toward the mid-21st century we are fulfilling our mission in new, forward-looking ways. Let me provide some updates, and ask for your continued support for our critically-important work.
The International Science Reserve
We have just completed our first readiness exercise for the International Science Reserve (ISR). Scientists in our ISR Member Network—which stands a thousand strong, with representation from 90 countries—submitted research proposals in response to simulated wildfire emergencies in the U.S., Greece, and Indonesia. We are analyzing the proposals to learn:
What data, data-gathering resources, equipment, facilities, and personnel are needed to support scientists in crisis response;
What resources transcend specific types of crises and thus can be put in place now;
What systems for resource matching and the mobilization of scientists should be in place for quick responses to global emergencies.
The Academy supports early-career scientists through a variety of programs, including the Interstellar Initiative.
Early-Career Science
We are working on the ISR with IBM, UL, Google, Pfizer and other partners. But we need your support to run additional readiness exercises, and to use our findings in building an operations plan. The goal is nothing less than to maximize the power of science to save lives, livelihoods, and the environment.
The Academy is helping young scientists at the most critical stage of their careers, as they transition from graduate school toward success in professional research.
K-12 STEM
The Academy works with younger scientists too. We nurture early interest in science among ever more diverse groups of young people. With the support of EnCorps, for example, we’re placing scientists in in classrooms across New York City’s five boroughs. In a partnership with the Clifford Chance law firm and Ericcson, we’ve enrolled more than 500 students in Rwanda and Oman in STEM innovation challenges. We are working to diversify and expand STEM education in scores of countries around the world, including with a new program in Colombia.
Mentorship
We are helping scientists give back, across all levels of education. Our Mentors Program places experienced scientists with young people in classrooms and alongside student teams working on extracurricular projects. Our mentors also advise older students as they enter the workforce and our programs support scientists who may wish to change careers, to work as teachers themselves.
With this letter, I am announcing our partnership with the Leon Levy Foundation to support neuroscience post docs at universities and medical centers across the New York metropolitan area. The plan is to help remove barriers to advancement and provide significant support for the best and brightest young minds in the field.
Our Science Alliance brings graduate students and post docs together to gain communications and management skills, and to learn about professional opportunities and career strategies, including ways to fight bias in the workplace.
To support our belief that the best science takes place when problems are attacked with interdisciplinary perspectives by people from diverse backgrounds, we run the Interstellar Initiative with the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development. It is a 6-month workshop to support teams of young scientists from around the world in developing innovative research proposals in the life sciences.
Our awards programs focus on early career scientists, to help them advance to become leaders in their fields.
Recent Nobel Prize laureate David Julius presents at the Academy’s Advances in Pain conference in May. Photo: Roger Torda
Scientific Convenings
Of course, we continue to convene scientists and policy experts for the exchange of scientific knowledge. Each year, our conferences feature Nobel Prize laureates and dozens of other researchers at the leading edge of their fields. We help specialists work together, and we tackle topics that grab the attention of broader audiences. Examples include a series on new evidence for the therapeutic value of psychedelics, ways to recognize and reduce bias in the health sciences, and continuing reports on SARS-CoV-2.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Our multidisciplinary science journal, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, publishes research of current interest for the broad scientific community and society at large. Recent articles have presented work on mathematics anxiety and performance, the benefits of micronutrients during pregnancy, and the biodiversity and composition of bat communities.
We are an independent, democratic organization, open to all who want to help advance science. Now, more than ever, we believe that this commitment is critically important for the lives of our children and grandchildren. Geopolitical forces continue to drive us apart in ways that not only fracture the world but also the practice and advancement of science. We work to bridge those divides, and to foster collaboration, innovation, and the imagination we need to solve our global challenges.
We receive no government funding, and your support plays a critical role in helping science—and scientists—work toward a better, safe, and prosperous world. Please continue your valuable support for the New York Academy of Sciences.
The International Science Reserve, in coordination with The New York Academy of Sciences, is an ambitious future-proofing initiative for the public good.
Published April 14, 2022
By Nicholas B. Dirks
With its long history of championing science-based solutions to global challenges, the Academy is ideally situated to establish the International Science Reserve (ISR). The ISR will be a network of networks: of communities of experts across scientific disciplines, across sectors, and across borders. The Academy is building the ISR on the model of collaboration we have embodied throughout our 200+ year history as a trusted global convener of scientists across public, private, and academic domains. The ISR reaches across those domains to speed up research and solutions to help prepare for and then ameliorate the effects of complex global crises, such as a great earthquake, a water-borne pandemic, or a cyber-attack.
The goal of the ISR is to quickly connect scientists to scientific resources for faster and better crisis preparedness to help people and protect communities from further disaster. To do this, the ISR fosters collaborative networks and builds experience and expertise within those networks by rehearsing what would happen in a real crisis. These scenario-planning or readiness exercises will help scientists be well equipped in advance to respond to urgent challenges (as this video describes) that are not only possible but likely in future years. Filling an important gap in existing crisis response mechanisms, the ISR will not replace those mechanisms but strengthen them and make them more effective.
In working to prepare communities of scientists and scientific resource providers to respond to many crises, The ISR will be guided by our Executive Board. The ISR builds on the design of the High-Performance Computing Consortium (HPCC) whose work during the Covid-19 outbreak provided enormous and immediate benefits. The ISR expands that work by leveraging not just high computational resources but also specialized talent, labs, databases, and networks of researchers and institutions. It, therefore, relies on our communities of scientific experts, our relationships with industry, federal agencies, and global institutions, our ISR founding partners, as well as ISR members.
The ongoing pandemic and the range of responses around the world have shown us all the value of good preparation. In the scenario planning exercises that are a key step in pre-preparing the ISR science communities, different stakeholders can role-play what they would and could do in the event of a global crisis. The first ISR pilot exercises focus on wildfires, a phenomenon of increasing frequency and magnitude both in the United States and across the world, a direct result of climate change.
The success of the pilot will be measured by the extent to which we can test current wisdom about the resources that scientists need to help protect people and nature during wildfires and to set them up for faster and more equitable recovery afterwards. We can use the valuable information coming out of the wildfire pilot to keep improving processes to identify needed resources in advance, to match scientists to those resources, and to track the projects and lessons that result.
Indeed, science is a process and develops in real-time as we iterate in a constant improvement process, fine-tuning our systems of communication and collaboration. We expect to have the results of our pilot ready in mid-2022 and will announce our next ISR crisis focus areas soon after.
While we have just begun, we are satisfied to see strong indications that a wide range of people and partners are energized by the ISR’s ideas and ambition. We have in place an Executive Board, generous funding partners including IBM, Google, UL, and Pfizer, collaborators such as the National Science Foundation, and we have already recruited over 1,000 scientists into our engaged ISR community.
The wide range of responses we’ve seen to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the associated skepticism about scientific expertise, have shown a real need for science-informed leadership in the service of the public good – at both a national and global scale. The pandemic also revealed the need for a scientific appreciation of how existing disparities and inequalities will be worsened by these kinds of crises if public policy does not start by protecting the most vulnerable first. The ISR at The New York Academy of Sciences is stepping up to help drive evidence-based change.
It is only by heeding the hard lessons from the pandemic that the world can truly prepare to respond more effectively when the next global crisis comes. It is the Academy’s ambition for the ISR to strengthen response and recovery efforts to save lives, restore services, and offer hope for better outcomes in the future. The ultimate measure of our success is not the impact of the ISR on the scientific community. The measure of success is the impact on the lives of all people and the health of our planet.
In June 2020, we were all in one of the first waves of the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which had crippled our world. And back then, neither I nor anyone else could anticipate just how much damage and dread this disease would bring – and for many, feelings of uncertainty and nervousness about the future just wouldn’t go away.
But many of us were already thinking ahead. This crisis would eventually end, we assumed. But it most likely wouldn’t be the last one. In my conversations with leaders across governments and industries, there was a common thread from us all: we wanted the world to be ready for the next crisis ahead of time.
Today, this vision is becoming a reality with the International Science Reserve (ISR), powered by The New York Academy of Sciences with participation from IBM and other public and private sector leaders. This new organization intends to become a nimble network of academia, industry, and government, blurring geographical borders to collaboratively prepare for the next global emergency. Although ISR is at the very dawn of our journey – I am confident we will make a difference when the next crisis strikes.
Early at the start of the pandemic, our teams at IBM rapidly mobilized thousands of researchers to help fight the deadly virus. We weren’t working in a vacuum – a few months earlier, IBM, the White House, and the US Department of Energy had launched a new global body called the COVID-19 HPC Consortium. This organization rapidly expanded to include many partners from academia, industry, and US national labs, pooling together the world’s most powerful high-performance computing resources to offer to scientists fighting the disease.
Working together, the HPC Consortium (HPCC) was able to quickly aggregate and open unfettered access to the power of dozens of supercomputers to scientists searching for a vaccine or treatment against the virus. The success of the HPCC demonstrated the power of what’s possible when we break down borders and red tape to quickly collaborate and accelerate science in times when it’s needed most.
Ultimately, the HPCC delivered steady results thanks to the efforts of our members and the researchers worldwide using its computing resources. With partners including Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, NASA, MIT, NSF, the Department of Energy’s national labs, as well as government and academic organizations from beyond the US, the Consortium has so far helped more than 100 research teams to come up with new treatments, better understand the spread of COVID-19, and much more. Every milestone has been a testament to the crucial importance of global collaboration – and for the establishment of a new, broader, organization that would go beyond computing and enable us to prepare for future catastrophes from multiple fronts.
Ready for “Known Unknowns”
At IBM, we soon began to think about how we could make this broader vision a reality. An organization… a global body… always ready for ‘known unknowns’ and large-scale emergencies we could anticipate and prepare for ahead of time… similar to a military reserve always ready to defend in case of war.
Our world needs a reserve of scientists, of experts in different fields that would always be ready to address any future global crisis. An organization with the bottom-up nature of the reserve concept, comprised of researchers using the power of the network to prepare for a new emergency.
We know that another pandemic is very likely, possibly with some new, unknown pathogen. That the world will continue to have more devastating wildfires and deadly earthquakes. Cyberattacks could take out infrastructure on a massive scale and asteroids could threaten the Earth. That such ongoing problems as antibiotic resistance and climate change could trigger a catastrophe at any time. And if we start preparing for the next crisis early – unlike with COVID-19, scrambling in haste and panic – then we will be much more likely to save lives.
Over the past year, IBM has been working with The New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) to establish the International Science Reserve (ISR) to execute this vision. The ISR is still a very young organization, but we are gathering steam. We have a vision. Together with global talent from various scientific and technological fields, we will have an invaluable reserve of expertise – much-needed to tackle a future emergency.
Alondra Nelson and Nicholas Dirks discuss the priorities for the Biden-Harris Administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Published December 23, 2021
By Roger Torda
Alondra Nelson
Alondra Nelson, at The New York Academy of Sciences’ (the Academy’s) recent Annual Meeting, told an audience of Academy Members that science, like representative government, is always a work-in-progress. “There’s an interesting parallel between scientific research and democracy in the sense that they both are never quite realized, never quite finished, never quite perfected,” said Nelson, a sociologist who serves as the inaugural Deputy Director for Science and Society in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). She recently joined Academy President Nicholas Dirks for a virtual discussion titled “Renewed Investment in STEM.”
Nelson is a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Nelson’s earlier positions include President of the Social Science Research Council, an international research nonprofit organization, professor of sociology at Columbia University, and Columbia’s dean of social science. She has an extensive record of research on issues at the intersection of science, technology, and society.
“I have always been interested in race and racism and social inequality,” she said in her conversation with Dirks. “I’m particularly interested in how new and emerging technologies impact, for good and for bad, vulnerable communities…So that really has, I think, forged the experience that I brought into public service, this conviction that science and technology are inherently social things, and that when they enter the world, they do social things, they do political things.”
The Promise of Science and Technology
Nelson’s PhD dissertation at New York University grew into her first book, Body and Soul, about the Black Panther Party’s health activism in the late 1960s, especially its use of newly-available genetic screening tests for sickle cell anemia. “This new technology allowed a social movement to do these tests in the park and in auditoriums,” Nelson said. “It was really a new technology, SICKLEDEX, introduced in 1968, that allowed all of these social possibilities to happen around it, and allowed what we would call today ‘patient advocacy’ around a genetic disease.”
In her second book, The Social Life of DNA, Nelson was one of the first social scientists to write about direct-to-consumer genetic testing. The approach reflected her interests in inequality, the empowerment of communities, and the way communities make use of new technologies. As she told Dirks, the book explores complex issues in genetic genealogy, including how African Americans who are descendants of slavery can “use these technologies to try to look back to the past and … complete genealogical stories about themselves and about their families.” She said these new technological and scientific points in history are opportunities to think about how science and technology can “make our lives safer, better, fairer, more just.”
The Interplay of Science and Community
Nelson suggests that an awareness of the interplay of science and community is historically necessary and especially important right now:
[T]he Biden-Harris administration [faced] … some pretty pronounced crises, all of which have something to do with science and technology…There was this-once-in-a-century pandemic that’s still raging all around us. We’re obviously in the middle of a climate emergency…There’s a complex set of national security threats…ransomware attacks and cyber security issues…and then issues around injustice and inequity throughout society. Health outcomes during the pandemic, educational outcomes, and sort of everything in between.
Later in the discussion, Nelson used a campaign slogan of President Biden’s to frame this critical moment: “What does it mean to do science, and science and technology policy, in a way that ‘builds back better’?”
The answer, Dr. Nelson suggests, includes the recognition that hard science alone cannot do the job:
“It was amazing that we had SARS-CoV-2 decoded, the genome, in less than a month. And wow, it was like earth shattering and incredible that we had in 313 days, 314 days, a viable vaccine…[yet] we’ve spent all of the rest of the time trying to get people to use it…So, it was clear that social science, social issues, thinking about inequality, was going to have to be a course. And we had the…incredible, tragic disparities around race, around ethnicity, and immigration status, with regard to rates of people perishing.”
Reframing How We Think About the World
Nelson pointed out that her boss, Eric Lander, is the first Director of OSTP whose work has been in the life sciences, and that this is helping focus the Office’s work on healthcare issues, including pandemic preparedness. Nelson also described the value of the administration’s proposed ARPA-H agency, designed to fund advanced research projects to improve healthcare capabilities and platforms. She said this approach can support research in maternal health, maternal mortality rates, and behavioral science.
Nelson and Lander are also tackling problems resulting from bias in artificial intelligence data sets that can lead to discrimination in housing, employment, and healthcare. They are calling on the public to submit information about biometric technologies that might support a new “AI Bill of Rights.”
Amid global challenges and crises, Nelson seems optimistic. She refers to President Biden’s belief that difficult moments can lead to “promise and possibility” rather than peril. And she said of her own goals: “I really want to challenge folks in industry, folks in academia, to think about upstream issues, and to think about equity and justice, and safety in science and technology, as a kind of ‘innovation’, and to reframe how we think about that word.”
Nicholas Dirks used the occasion of the Academy’s Annual Meeting to outline plans for the International Science Reserve (ISR), a collaboration with IBM and other stakeholders to mobilize scientific communities to respond to global crises.
Do you want to be part of this impactful network of scientists? Join the ISR today
The Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in Israel is one of the largest prizes ever created for early-career researchers in Israel. Given annually to three outstanding, early-career faculty from Israeli universities in three categories—Life Sciences, Physical Sciences & Engineering, and Chemistry—the awards recognize extraordinary scientific achievements and promote excellence, originality, and innovation.
On August 2, 2021, the New York Academy of Sciences celebrated the 2020 and 2021 Laureates at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem, Israel. The multidisciplinary symposium, chaired by Israel Prize winners Adi Kimchi and Mordechai (Moti) Segev, featured a series of lectures on everything from a new class of RNA to self-assembling nanomaterials.
In this eBriefing, you’ll learn:
The secret life of bats, and how the brain shapes animal behavior
How genetic information in unchartered areas of the human genome—known as long noncoding RNA—could be used to develop treatments for cancer, brain injury, and epilepsy
Creative ways of generating light, X-rays, and other types of radiation for practical applications such as medical imaging and security scanners
The intricate choreography of protein assembly within cells, and how this dance may go awry in disease
Speakers
Yossi Yovel, PhD Tel Aviv University
Igor Ulitsky, PhD Weizmann Institute of Science
Emmanuel Levy, PhD Weizmann Institute of Science
Ido Kaminer, PhD Israel Institute of Technology
Life Sciences of Tomorrow
Speakers
Yossi Yovel, PhD Tel Aviv University
Igor Ulitsky, PhD Weizmann Institute of Science
From Bat Brains to Navigating Robots
Yossi Yovel, PhD, Tel Aviv University
In this presentation, Yossi Yovel describes his studies on bats and their use of echolocation to perceive and navigate through the world. To monitor bats behaving in their natural environment, he has developed miniaturized trackers—the smallest in the world—capable of simultaneously detecting location, ultrasonic sounds, movement, heart rate, brain activity, and body temperature changes.
By attaching these small sensors to many individual bats, Yovel is able to monitor large groups of free-flying bats—a task which would be almost impossible in other mammals. His current and future studies include applying bat echolocation theory to engineering acoustic control of autonomous vehicles.
Further Readings
Yovel
Moreno, K. R., Weinberg, M., Harten, L., Salinas Ramos, V. B., Herrera M, L. G., Czirják, G. Á., & Yovel, Y.
Igor Ulitsky outlines his investigation of the biology of a subtype of genetic material—long non-coding RNA (lncRNA)—an enigmatic class of RNA molecules. Similar to other classes of RNA molecules, lncRNAs are transcribed from DNA and have a single-strand structure; however, lncRNAs do not encode proteins. Even though non-coding regions of the genome comprise over 99% of our genetic material, little is actually known about how these regions function.
Ulitsky’s work has shown dynamic expression patterns across tissues and developmental stages, which appear to utilize diverse mechanisms of action that depend on their sub-cellular positions. These discoveries have unlocked the potential of using lncRNAs as both therapeutic agents and targets with promising leads for the treatment of diseases such as cancer, brain injury, and epilepsy.
Further Readings
Ulitsky
H. Hezroni, D. Koppstein, M.G. Schwartz, A. Avrutin, D.P. Bartel, I. Ulitsky.
Chemistry and Physical Sciences & Engineering of Tomorrow
Speakers
Emmanuel Levy, PhD Weizmann Institute of Science
Ido Kaminer, PhD Israel Institute of Technology
Playing LEGO with Proteins: Principles of Protein Assembly in Cells
Emmanuel Levy, PhD, Weizmann Institute of Science
In this presentation, Emmanuel Levy describes how defects in protein self-organization can lead to disease, and how protein self-organization can be exploited to create novel biomaterials. Levy has amassed a database of protein structural information that helps him to predict, browse, and curate the structural features—charged portions, hydrophobic and hydrophilic pockets, and point mutations—within a protein that govern the formation of quaternary structures. By combining this computational approach with experimental data Levy is able to uncover new mechanisms by which proteins operate within cells.
Further Readings
Levy
H. Garcia-Seisdedos, C. Empereur-Mot, N. Elad, E.D. Levy.
M. Meurer, Y. Duan, E. Sass, I. Kats, K. Herbst, B.C. Buchmuller, V. Dederer, F. Huber, D. Kirrmaier, M. Stefl, K. Van Laer, T.P. Dick, M.K. Lemberg, A. Khmelinskii, E.D. Levy, M. Knop.
Shining Light on the Quantum World with Ultrafast Electron Microscopy
Ido Kaminer, PhD, Israel Institute of Technology
Ido Kaminer discusses his research on light-matter interaction that spans a wide spectrum from fundamental physics to particle applications. Part of his presentation addressed the long-standing question in quantum theory over the predictability of motions quantum particles. He also demonstrated the first example of using free electrons to probe the motion of photons inside materials. Finally, he talked about the potential applications of tunable X-rays generated from the compact equipment in his lab, for biomedical imaging and other applications.
Further Readings
Kaminer
R. Dahan, S. Nehemia, M. Shentcis, et al., I. Kaminer.
In this pilot episode of the webinar series STEM Supremes: Conversations with Women in Science, the Academy’s Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Brooke Grindlinger, interviewed the ‘queen of telomeres,’ Australian-American scientist Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn. Light years on from her early work sequencing the DNA of the pond scum protozoan Tetrahymena, Blackburn unraveled our understanding of the function of telomeres—the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes—and the role they play in aging and diseases such as cancer. She has pioneered a path for women scientists, and received the pinnacle of scientific achievement—the Nobel Prize—for unlocking secrets about how we age at a fundamental level. The conversation spanned Blackburn’s teenage fascinations with science, the anxieties of transitioning from student to independent investigator, cultural and gender barriers she navigated along the way, and what excites her on the horizon of aging research.
In this eBriefing, You’ll Learn:
How sleep quality, exercise, diet, and chronic stress impact the length of human telomeres and, in turn, our genetic heritage
Studies underway to understand the effect of severe stress on how individuals will respond, long-term, to COVID-19 vaccination
Tactics for managing the transition from PhD student to post-doctoral fellow, and from post-doc to junior faculty member
Tangible actions academic leaders can take to better support parents, particularly women, as they navigate the competing demands of family and a research career
Goals of the Lindau Declaration 2020 on Sustainable Cooperative Open Science
Moderator
Brooke Grindlinger, PhD The New York Academy of Sciences
In Conversation with Elizabeth Blackburn
Speaker
Elizabeth Blackburn University of California San Francisco
A full transcript of this conversation is available for download here.
Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD
University of California San Francisco
Dr. Blackburn earned her BSc and MSc degrees from the University of Melbourne, and her PhD from the University of Cambridge in England. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department at Yale University, and later joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of Molecular Biology. She was Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at UC San Francisco, and later served as the first female president of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. Among her many career honors, Blackburn shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with collaborators Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase. Blackburn is currently Professor Emerita, Biochemistry and Biophysics, UC San Francisco.
Brooke Grindlinger, PhD
New York Academy of Sciences
Read more about Dr. Grindlinger, the Academy’s Chief Scientific Officer, here.
