Using psychedelics for depression is exciting area, says UK ex-vaccines chief


Kate Bingham, who chaired UK’s Covid vaccine taskforce, tells Hay festival she hopes mind-altering drugs could treat mental illness

Kate Bingham says data about the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs has improved. 

Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

Lucy Knight

THE GUARDIAN

Mon 29 May 2023 

The former chair of the UK’s Covid vaccine taskforce has described the use of psychedelics to treat depression as an “area of real excitement” in a talk at the Hay literary festival in Wales.

Speaking at a panel event alongside the UK government’s former chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, Kate Bingham said she was hopeful that the drugs could have a positive impact on mental ill health.

When asked by an audience member whether his 107-year-old grandmother, who has had depression for the last seven years, would benefit from psychedelic drugs or ecstasy, Bingham responded that “there is strong data now showing that different interventions can have effects on depression and mental health”.


The challenge so far when it comes to psychedelics, she said, is that “it’s been quite difficult to disassociate the trip from the actual reset of your mental health”. If such drugs were to be prescribed for depression, it would therefore be difficult to regulate, she added.

“How do you regulate psychedelics so they can be given safely to the over-85s or the young adolescents who are in a really bad way?” asked Bingham, though she added that she thought the research would “come through”.

Vallance said: “I don’t think you can slip your grandmother an ecstasy tablet. We’ve got to test these things.

“One of the really shocking things is how few people are in clinical trials,” he added. The Covid Recovery trial, which Vallance said was “the best study in the world for looking at interventions at its peak”, had about 11% of all Covid patients in UK hospitals on a clinical trial. “That is about 12 times more than you have for most diseases, when you have about 1%.”


Will psychedelic drugs transform mental health treatment? – podcast

“That can’t be right,” he said. Whatever you are testing he added, whether it is the possibility of treating depression with psychedelics or anything else, “the healthcare system needs to be much more geared towards testing these things properly, gaining answers as quickly as possible”.


Earlier this month, a number of psychiatrists and mental health charities wrote to the government calling for a change in legislation regarding psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms.

The campaigners, which included the charity Campaign Against Living Miserably (Calm), think it should be legal for the drug to be used on the NHS and in medical research.

According to research published in April 2022, psilocybin could be helpful for those with treatment-resistant depression. Professor David Nutt, the head of the Imperial Centre for Psychedelic Research, said at the time that the findings showed that psilocybin “works differently from conventional antidepressants, making the brain more flexible and fluid, and less entrenched in the negative thinking patterns associated with depression”.


The big idea: should doctors be able to prescribe psychedelics?

However, since psilocybin is both a class A drug and a schedule 1 drug (it is classed as having no therapeutic value) it is difficult for researchers and medical professionals to access it.

The call to reduce restrictions was backed by a cross-party group of MPs and was debated in the House of Commons on 18 May. MPs agreed that “an evidence-based approach is required in order for parliament and the government to pursue the most effective drugs policy in the future” and called on the government “to conduct an authoritative and independent cost-benefit analysis and impact assessment of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and to publish the results of those studies within the next 12 months.”

SEE

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for LSD 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PSYCHEDELIC 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PSYCHEDELIC SASKATCHEWAN 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for MAGIC MUSHROOMS 

Dangerous lab leaks happen far more often than the public is aware

Biological facilities in the US and around the world suffer breaches, including of potentially pandemic-causing pathogens, but are shrouded in secrecy

Alison Young
Tue 30 May 2023 

At biological research facilities across the United States and around the world, hundreds of safety breaches happen every year at labs experimenting with dangerous pathogens. Scientists and other lab workers are bitten by infected animals, stuck by contaminated needles and splashed with infectious fluids. They are put at risk of exposures when their protective gear malfunctions or critical building biosafety systems fail.

And, like all humans, the people working in laboratories make mistakes and they sometimes cut corners or ignore safety procedures – even when working with pathogens that have the potential to cause a global pandemic.

How did the Covid pandemic begin? We need to investigate all credible hypotheses

Yet the public rarely learns about these incidents, which tend to be shrouded in secrecy by labs and the government officials whose agencies often both fund and oversee the research. My new book, Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk, reveals how these and other kinds of lab accidents have happened with alarming frequency and how the lack of stringent, mandatory and transparent biosafety oversight and incident reporting is putting all of us at risk.

The book provides numerous case studies of near-miss incidents, infections and outbreaks caused by lax safety at some of the world’s top labs and shows the extraordinary efforts that have been taken to downplay the significance of safety breaches and keep accidents secret. This secrecy extends not just to the public at large, but also to the government agencies we all are trusting to head off disaster when things go wrong at these facilities.

For example, when a safety breach occurred in 2019 at a University of Wisconsin-Madison lab experimenting with a dangerous and highly controversial lab-created H5N1 avian influenza virus, the university never told the public – or local and state public health officials. The university made the decision to end the quarantine of a potentially exposed lab worker without consulting Wisconsin public health officials, despite representations going back years that these health departments would be notified of “any potential exposure” during this kind of especially risky research.

In another incident, a pipe burst on a lab waste-holding tank in 2018 at a US army research facility at Fort Detrick, near Washington DC. Workers initially dismissed that any safety breach had occurred. Then army officials belatedly issued public statements that left out key details and created the misleading impression that no dangerous pathogens could have left the base. Yet my reporting has uncovered government documents and even a photo showing the giant tank spewing an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 gallons of unsterilized lab wastewater near an open storm drain that feeds into a popular public waterway.

It’s been a shocking revelation for people living in Frederick, Maryland, including some who served on a citizen committee about the public safety of Fort Detrick’s labs. “We didn’t know about the extent of the wastewater breach … or the absolute inadequate paucity of environmental sampling that underlied the army’s assessment of ‘no risk to the community’ until Alison Young’s [reporting],” the committee’s former chairman, Matt Sharkey, a biologist, recently told the local newspaper.

Most of the time when accidents happen, labs get lucky and nobody is sickened. Many pathogens don’t spread easily from person to person, and it’s the people working inside lab facilities who are at greatest risk of infection. But some viruses and bacteria are capable of causing outbreaks if they are unleashed into the surrounding community and beyond. Of greatest concern are pathogens that have the potential to cause pandemics, especially certain types of influenza viruses and coronaviruses.

When will our luck run out?

Regulation of lab safety in the US and around the world is fragmented and often relies heavily on scientific institutions policing themselves. There is no comprehensive tracking of which labs hold collections of the most dangerous viruses, bacteria and toxins. And nobody appears to know how many facilities are manipulating pathogens in ways that make them more dangerous than what is found in nature, a category of controversial and risky experiments sometimes referred to as gain of function research of concern.

The World Health Organization has “no access to such information on who’s doing what in terms of gain of function (GOF) or similar research work that comes with an elevated risk”, Kazunobu Kojima, a WHO biosafety expert, told me.

Concerns that the Covid-19 pandemic may have been caused by a research-related accident in Wuhan, China, have raised public awareness in recent years of how lax safety in biological research can pose a public health threat. Yet this is not a new issue.

For decades, as high-containment biolabs have proliferated around the world, policy makers and scientific experts have discussed with concern the increasing risk of a lab accident causing a catastrophic outbreak. Before Covid and before Washington politics became so toxic, Republicans and Democrats in Congress held multiple bipartisan hearings examining the threats posed by laboratory accidents and they jointly requested studies about biosafety and biosecurity issues from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO).

“Many experts agree that as the number of high-containment laboratories has increased … the overall risk of an accidental or deliberate release of a dangerous pathogen will also increase,” the GAO’s Nancy Kingsbury testified at a hearing in 2014, noting that the GAO had been issuing findings and recommendations about fragmented lab oversight since 2009.

Yet despite the passage of so many years, little has been done to fix the current patchwork oversight that often shields the safety failings of labs – and the government agencies that oversee them – from public accountability. And now, the Covid-19 pandemic has spurred a new global biolab building boom, with even more labs planned or under construction – often in countries where a recent report found government stability and national biorisk management was lacking.

Because of China’s refusal to allow an independent forensic investigation into the natural or lab origin of Covid-19, we may never know the source of the coronavirus that has killed millions of people around the world. But it’s not too late to take actions to address gaps in biosafety and biosecurity oversight and transparency in the US and around the world – and reduce the potential for a lab accident causing a future pandemic.

Alison Young is an investigative reporter and the Curtis B Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Her book Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk was released on 25 April

Covid-resistant bats could be key to fighting the next pandemic

The only mammals that fly are not affected by coronaviruses. Scientists are trying to work out why

Robin McKie

THE GUARDIAN
Sat 20 May 2023 

Widely depicted as evil spirits or blood-sucking demons, bats have had a poor press over the years. No vampire film, from Dracula to Buffy, has been complete without an entrance of one of these harbingers of death.

But these grim portrayals demean the bat. We have much to learn from them, insist researchers who now believe bats could be crucial in helping us cope with future pandemics.

As a result, a global genetics project has been launched to discover how bats avoid the worst impacts of some of the world’s most pernicious viruses, including the agent responsible for Covid-19. “Bats have the potential to teach us a great deal about how to fight off disease,” said researcher Emma Teeling, of University College Dublin, who played a key role in setting up the project, Bat1K.

Bats are remarkable for a multitude of reasons, says Teeling. They are the only mammals that can fly; they live exceptionally long lives for creatures their size; and many of them use sound waves to locate their prey. They also come in a remarkable variety of shapes and sizes, ranging from the bumblebee bat, the size of an insect, to Australian fruit bats which have two-metre wingspans.

Some bats catch fish, other species feed on insects – and three drink blood: the common vampire bat; the hairy-legged vampire bat; and the white-winged vampire bat. “Other species have evolved the longest mammalian tongues so they can stick them down into huge long flowers, to get their nectar,” added Teeling.

However, the reason for scientists’ current bat ardour stems from the discovery that they can host a startling number of potentially lethal viruses – including the coronaviruses that caused the Sars and Mers epidemics as well as the Marburg, Nipah and Hendra viruses – but without suffering any apparent ill effects. “There is a kind of peace treaty between bats and the pathogens they host,” virologist Joshua Hayward, of Burnet Institute in Melbourne, said in Nature recently.

Bats are also thought to be the original source of the Sars-CoV-2 virus which causes Covid-19. “Horseshoe bats from Asia are considered to be the original reservoir of the virus that evolved to become Sars-CoV-2, which changed most likely in an intermediate species of mammal,” said Teeling. “That animal became infected by a bat, probably in a market, changing the viral progenitor of Sars-CoV-2 into an agent that could spread through humans. The end result was the Covid-19 pandemic.”

As a result, Teeling considers it most likely that Sars-CoV-2 was not created in a lab, given the amount of recent evidence suggesting that most likely happened accidentally during the mixing of animals in the market.

A large number of Kitti’s hog-nosed bats fly around a tree.

 Photograph: Nattawut Intavari/Shutterstock

These discoveries raise a key issue, however. How do bats act as reservoirs for so many viruses that are harmful to other animals, including humans, but are themselves left unaffected? It is a puzzle that scientists are now working to solve. “The answer has got to do with their ability to fly,” said Teeling.


Flight is enormously demanding, requiring the expenditure of massive amounts of energy for any creature that wants to take to the air. Releasing this intense energy within a mammal’s body should then lead to the breakdown of some of its cells. Bits of DNA would be expected to break off and float around its body.

In non-flying mammals, these pieces of genetic material are identified by immune cells and are often treated as signs that an invasion from a disease-causing organism is occurring. A counterattack is launched and this can trigger intense inflammation. In many cases – including those of Covid-19 – this inflammation is often the key cause of serious reactions that can lead to death.

“But bats lack that intense response,” said Teeling. “Over the course of their evolution – which began around 80 million years ago – they have modulated their immune systems so that their responses have dampened down. Inflammation does not occur nearly so often or severely. As a result they can carry all these viruses without suffering dangerous reactions.”

In other words, bats – because they evolved to fly – had to develop immune systems that are far less likely to trigger damaging inflammation. In this way, they are able to deal with viruses without suffering the intense reactions that bedevil other kinds of mammals. Exactly how they do this is not yet clear but it is now the subject of intense scrutiny.

One key approach involves the Bat1K project which was founded by Teeling along with Professor Sonja Vernes, of St Andrews University, with the involvement of other institutions such as the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, in Dresden, and the Sanger Institute near Cambridge.

Its goal is ambitious but straightforward: to create high-quality genomes for all bat species. In this way, it should be possible to unravel the entire DNA instructions – which come in billions of units – that are carried by the 1,450 or so species of bat that have evolved across our planet.

To date, only a handful of bat genomes have been sequenced, though scientists are confident that from these analyses it should soon be possible to unpick the precise ways by which bats avoid succumbing to the viruses they host – with the ultimate goal of using this knowledge to develop medicines that could mimic that behaviour in humans.

“Bats are not responsible for bringing disease to humans,” added Teeling.

“We have encroached on their lives, not the other way round. More importantly, we need to be prepared for the next pandemic and if bats can point out ways to modify our immune responses speedily, that will demonstrate just how important they are to our world.”

South China Sea shipwrecks give clues about historic Silk Road trade routes

Archaeologists begin excavation of two 500-year-old vessels filled with porcelain and timber

Helen Davidson in Taipei
THE GUARDIAN

Wed 24 May 2023 

Two 500-year-old shipwrecks in the South China Sea, filled with Ming-era porcelain and stacked timber, provide significant clues about the maritime Silk Road trade routes, Chinese archaeologists have said.

The two shipwrecks were discovered in October, and cultural and archaeological authorities have now begun a year-long process of deep-sea exploration and excavation, government officials announced.

Marine researchers found the two vessels in the north-west region of the South China Sea, about 1,500 metres below sea level. The officials said the wrecks were “relatively well preserved, with a large number of cultural relics”.

Experts said one of the wrecks dated back to the Ming dynasty’s Hongzhi period, which lasted from 1488 until 1505. It was carrying a cargo of stacked persimmon timber logs and some pottery.

The other wreck dates back to the Zhengde period of 1506 to 1521. The ship was laden with more than 100,000 pieces of porcelain crockery. Photographs show piles of stacked bowls, plates and jars, with intricate designs still visible underneath the sand and mud.

One of the vessels was filled with more than 100,000 pieces of Ming-era porcelain crockery. Photograph: State Administration of Cultural Heritage/Government of Hainan province

The archaeologists said the two ancient ships were travelling in different directions, and the wrecks were found less than 20km (12 miles) apart. They said it was the first time vessels returning and arriving had been found near each other, indicating they were travelling on an important trade route.

“It helps us study the maritime Silk Road’s reciprocal flow,” Tang Wei, the director of the Chinese National Centre for Archaeology, said.

The exact location of the wrecks was not disclosed, but the officials said markers were established on the site.

Chinese archaeological exploration has advanced into deeper waters in recent years, after the 2018 establishment of a deep-water archaeology laboratory by the National Centre for Archaeology and the Institute of Deep-Sea Science and Engineering.

Remains of the shipwrecks were captured during a preliminary search. 

Photograph: State Administration of Cultural Heritage/Government of Hainan province

The officials said researchers were taken underwater on Saturday by the submersible Shenhai Yongshi, or Deep Sea Warrior, which can carry people to a depth of 5,000 metres.

There are three phases to the planned research programme, with an estimated 50 dives to be conducted between now and April.

“We first need to figure out the condition of the shipwrecks, and then we can draft plans for archaeological excavation and conservation,” said Song Jianzhong, a researcher at the National Centre for Archaeology.

By mid-June, researchers plan to have assessed the distribution area of both wrecks, put together a widespread data collection and taken archaeological records, extracted some of the relics as specimens, and sampled the surrounding seafloor.

BEFORE CHEMTRAILS

Starwatch: Why ‘night shine’ clouds at edge of space may be product of pollution

NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS

Atmospheric methane and industrial pollutants suggested as reasons for lack of noctilucent cloud sightings before 1885


Stuart Clark
THE GUARDIAN

Mon 29 May 2023 

Late spring, early summer marks the beginning of noctilucent cloud season in the northern hemisphere. The name derives from Latin, where noctilucent means “night shine”. These beautiful cloud formations can often be seen during the summer months shining with an electric blue colour against the darkening western sky about 30 minutes after the sun sets.

The origin of the noctilucent clouds remains mysterious. They are the highest known clouds in Earth’s atmosphere, existing at an altitude of about 80km (50 miles), which is virtually the edge of space. They are regarded as being too high and too tenuous to have any effect on the weather at ground level.


A puzzling aspect is that there appears to be no recorded sightings of the noctilucent clouds before 1885. This seems strange considering how obvious they are. Some have suggested that perhaps they form when water freezes around industrial pollutants, which were first released into the atmosphere during the Industrial Revolution. Others suspect it is because the atmosphere now contains more of the greenhouse gas methane, which promotes the production of water vapour in the upper atmosphere.

In the southern hemisphere, the noctilucent cloud season begins around October.

Supermassive black hole at heart of ancient galaxy ‘far larger than expected’


Discovery of GS-9209, one of the furthest from the Milky Way, adds to evidence that large black holes prevent star formation, astronomers say

Ian Sample Science editor

THE GUARDIAN

Fri 26 May 2023 

A supermassive black hole discovered at the heart of an ancient galaxy is five times larger than expected for the number of stars it contains, astronomers say.

Researchers spotted the immense black hole in a galaxy known as GS-9209 that lies 25bn light-years from Earth, making it one of the most distant to have been observed and recorded.

The team at Edinburgh University used the James Webb space telescope (JWST) to observe the galaxy and reveal fresh details about its composition and history.


James Webb space telescope captures rare image of dying star

Dr Adam Carnall, who led the effort, said the telescope – the most powerful ever built – showed how galaxies were growing “larger and earlier” than astronomers expected in the first billion years of the universe.

“This work gives us our first really detailed look at the properties of these early galaxies, charting in detail the history of GS-9209, which managed to form as many stars as our own Milky Way in just 800m years after the big bang,” he said.

Carnall said the “very massive black hole” at the centre of GS-9209 was a “big surprise” that lent weight to the theory that such enormous black holes are responsible for shutting down star formation in early galaxies.

“The evidence we see for the supermassive black hole was really unexpected,” said Carnall. “This is the kind of detail we’d never have been able to see without JWST.”

A 3D model of the James Webb space telescope. 

Photograph: Alexandr Mitiuc/Alamy

The GS-9209 galaxy was discovered in 2004 by Karina Caputi, a former PhD student at Edinburgh who is now a professor of observational cosmology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.


While GS-9209 has roughly as many stars as our home galaxy, with a combined mass equal to 40bn suns, it is only one-tenth the size of the Milky Way. It is the earliest known example of a galaxy that has stopped forming stars, the researchers said.

Supermassive black holes can shut down star formation because their growth releases huge quantities of high-energy radiation, which can heat up and drive gas out of galaxies. Galaxies need vast clouds of gas and dust to collapse under their own gravity, thereby creating new stars.

“The fact [that the black hole] is so massive means it must have been very active in the past, with lots of gas falling in, which would have shone extremely brightly as a quasar,” Carnall said. “All that energy spewing out from the black hole in the centre of the galaxy would have seriously disrupted the whole galaxy, stopping gas from collapsing to form new stars.”

More details are published in Nature.

US ‘ready to fight in space if we have to’, says military official

Threat posed by ‘provocative’ Russia and China has left US no choice but to prepare for orbital skirmishes

Ian Sample 

Science editor

THE GUARDIAN

Sun 28 May 2023

The US is ready for conflict in outer space, according to a senior military official, after developing anti-satellite technologies to counter the threats posed by “provocative” countries such as Russia and China.

Brig Gen Jesse Morehouse at US Space Command, the arm of the military responsible for space operations, said Russian aggression and China’s vision to become the dominant space power by mid-century, had left the US with “no choice” but to prepare for orbital skirmishes.

“The United States of America is ready to fight tonight in space if we have to,” Morehouse told reporters in a briefing at the US embassy in London. “If someone was to threaten the United States of America, or any of our interests, including those of our allies and partners with whom we have treaties of mutual defence support, we are ready to fight tonight.”

Satellites underpin great swathes of modern life, from banking systems to weather forecasting, and are crucial for military operations through intelligence gathering, communications, navigation and guidance. But an overreliance on satellites means that an attack on a country’s orbital assets could have far-reaching consequences.

Four countries, namely China, the US, India and Russia, have tested anti-satellite capabilities by destroying their own satellites with missiles from the ground. But such demonstrations, which the US unilaterally banned last year, create vast clouds of debris that put other satellites at risk for decades.

When Russia shot down one of its own satellites in 2021, the explosion showered its orbit with more than 1,500 trackable fragments. “When you create that debris cloud and it lingers on orbit for decades, it’s almost like detonating a nuclear weapon in your own back yard,” Morehouse said. “You pay the price too.”

Faced with a new space race, Morehouse said on Thursday the US would continue to develop anti-satellite technologies “not because we want to fight tonight, but because that’s the best way to deter conflict from happening”, adding it would do so “without engaging in irresponsible tests”.

Russia and China are working on spacecraft capable of anti-satellite operations. In 2020, the US accused Russia of launching a projectile from one of two satellites that were trailing a US spy satellite.

Meanwhile, China has launched a satellite with a robotic arm capable of grabbing other satellites, and has developed a way to place explosives in the thruster nozzles of adversary’s satellites. The explosives are designed to go undetected for long periods and when detonated resemble an innocent engine malfunction.

Beyond weapons that grab, crash into or shoot down their targets are other approaches that jam satellite broadcasts, or damage the hardware with lasers, chemical sprays or high-power microwaves.

“We have a variety of capabilities we can bring to bear and we’ll continue to develop capabilities that allow us to maintain a credible deterrence posture,” Morehouse said. “Can you develop a capability that can be used to counter satellites, that works very well, and validate that it works without having to create a debris cloud on orbit every time you do so? Absolutely.”

Since its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has threatened to target western commercial satellites it considers to be involved in the war. Shortly after the invasion began, Elon Musk agreed to supply Starlink constellation satellites to Ukraine, which rapidly became crucial to the country’s military. But in February, Starlink said it would prevent the satellites from being used to control Ukrainian drones, saying it never intended the technology to be used for “offensive purposes”.

Morehouse said one of the lessons from the conflict was how resilient Starlink proved to be. The communications network comprises thousands of small satellites in low Earth orbit which are easily replaced and updated to counter the threats they face. “It makes no sense for Russia to even try to shoot one down because there’s thousands of them and they don’t have thousands of anti-satellite missiles,” he said.

“Clearly the Ukrainians have no organic military space capabilities to attack in any way shape or form,” he added. “But … they’ve been very aggressive in trying to negate those commercial services, which I think is going to be a normal part of warfare in the future. Satellite communications are becoming more and more common across many militaries, and so countering them is something that many nations are interested in.”

From fleeing Hitler to Mars: the scientist who changed space travel


The remarkable journey of Ben Abeles will be celebrated next week by the opening of a new archive

Robin McKie Science editor

THE GUARDIAN
Sun 28 May 2023 

Ben Abeles’ impact on science was out of this world. He helped develop alloys that were key components of the radioisotope generators that powered US robot space probes on their interplanetary journeys. Nasa was then able to reveal the wonders of the solar system, from the ancient river beds of Mars to the icy moons of Jupiter.

One of the devices is still in use, providing electricity for the Perseverance robot rover that currently trundles across the surface of the red planet.

Abeles was a brilliant scientist, yet his start in life could not have been grimmer. He arrived in Britain from Prague as a child refugee on the Kindertransport, the rescue effort that helped around 10,000 children flee Nazi-occupied Europe and settle in Britain.

This remarkable journey – from fleeing Hitler to extraterrestrial travel – will be celebrated next week when the University of Southampton opens an archive of documents and photographs that tell Abeles’ life story. Items will include the tag placed round his neck when he boarded the Kindertransport; the Stuart Ballantine medal, given to him in 1979 by the US Franklin Institute for his work on powering space probes; and a note, sent home in 1941, to tell his parents: “Am healthy. Working in kitchen.”

At the end of the war, Abeles returned to what was then Czechoslovakia to search for his parents and elder sister but discovered they had died in the Trawniki concentration camp in Poland. He stayed on to study at university in Prague before emigrating to Israel and then on to New Jersey in 1956, where he worked as a physicist for 53 years.

“Ben clearly went on to live a remarkable life after arriving on the Kindertransport and did great things,” said Tony Kushner, professor of history at the University of Southampton, who has been closely involved in establishing the archive. “But that is not the reason for allowing refugees into your country – because you think they will become brilliant scientists. You do it because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of their later careers. You take in refugees in order to save people’s lives.”

This point was supported by his wife, Helen Abeles. “Ben always said that the real heroes of the Kindertransport were the parents,” she said. “They let go of their children to give them a chance. I just got on the train, he used to say. Why are they making such a fuss?”

Ben Abeles died in December 2020, aged 95, and his family has given his archive to the university’s Parkes Institute, which houses one of the largest Jewish archives in western Europe.

“He was the most positive person I have ever met, which, given the tragedies that he lived through and the difficulties of his early life, has always amazed me,” Helen Abeles told the Observer. “He was always conscious about wanting to give something back to society. So when he retired, he volunteered at a soup kitchen in New Jersey, for example.”

However, it was the generator that he developed – working with co-inventor George Cody – that was his greatest gift to society, said Charlie Ryan, an astronautics expert based at the University of Southampton. “Ben helped to develop a type of power source that has been used on some of the most groundbreaking missions ever launched, such as the Voyager probes that have explored the outer solar system and beyond. It had a massive influence on space exploration.”

Will AI free us from drudgery – or leave us jobless and hungry?

Arwa Mahdawi

Opinion
Artificial intelligence (AI)

THE GUARDIAN
Tue 30 May 2023 

Artificial intelligence promises more leisure and creativity for workers. But at the same time, corporations are clamping down on unions and making plans to replace their expensive human employees

Goodbye humans, hello “Tessa”. The US-based National Eating Disorders Association (Neda) is making headlines after firing all its staff and replacing them with an AI-assisted chatbot called Tessa. This happened just four days after the six paid employees, who oversaw about 200 volunteers, successfully unionised. Coincidence? Oh, absolutely, Neda said; it was a long-anticipated change that had nothing to do with unionisation. A blogpost written by a helpline associate begs to differ and calls the move “union busting, plain and simple”.

Is this a harbinger of things to come? Are we about to see millions of jobs wiped out as humans are replaced by AI assistants with female names? After stealing all of our jobs, are the Tessas of the world going to unionise and stage a digital takeover of Earth?

The short answer is: maybe. All emerging technology goes through the “Gartner hype cycle”; now, we’re at the inflated expectations and breathless predictions stage of that cycle, and heading towards the “trough of disillusionment”, before things supposedly level out. I don’t think AI will lead to the end of civilisation as we know it in the near future. But I do think an awful lot of corporations are champing at the bit to replace as many expensive humans as they can with AI and will use the new technology as a way to clamp down on a recent wave of labour organising. In the next few years I think we are going to see a lot of chaotic experimentation as companies rush to cost-cut and bring their own “Tessas” to market.

Not everyone is admitting this, of course. It tends to be bad for employee morale when your boss is crowing about how many extra yachts they can buy when they replace you with an algorithm. IBM is one of the few companies sharing specifics about how many people AI might replace: in a recent interview CEO Arvind Krishna said the technology company will pause hiring for “back-office jobs” in the coming years and automate those roles. “I could easily see 30% of [about 26,000 workers] getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” Krishna told Bloomberg. That’s about 7,800 jobs.

What companies aren’t saying is also important. AI, and how it is used to create content, is a major sticking point in the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike. The WGA wants to ensure protections are put in place to stop the big Hollywood studios from training algorithms on writers’ work and then replacing the bulk of its creatives with AI. “Based on what we’re aiming for in this contract, there couldn’t be a movie that was released by a company that we work with that had no writer,” screenwriter John August told Vox. The studios didn’t agree to this in negotiations that took place before the strike. Instead, they magnanimously said they could have “annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology.” Which seems like code for: “We’re getting rid of as many as you as we possibly can ASAP.”

While all this sounds deeply depressing, there are lots of AI optimists eager to reassure us that artificial intelligence is actually going to make the world a better place. Yes, AI will replace some jobs, but it will also create better jobs. Technology will do all the drudge work and humans will have more free time to sit around writing poetry in the sun. Nobody is entirely sure how everyone will be able to feed themselves amid all this newfound leisure time but “universal basic income” (UBI) gets thrown around a lot in this scenario. (UBI is a libertarian scam and will absolutely not save us, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Jonah Peretti, the CEO of BuzzFeed, was one of these vocal AI optimists. “We see the breakthroughs in AI opening up a new era of creativity that will allow humans to harness creativity in new ways with endless opportunities and applications for good,” Peretti wrote in a memo to BuzzFeed employees in January. We all know what happened a few months later, don’t we? BuzzFeed shut down its news division, dismissed a bunch of people and leaned more heavily into AI. There is certainly a lot of potential for AI to change the world for the better. I just don’t think there’s an appetite among the people at the top to harness that potential.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Was ‘the first man to reach the North Pole’ a fraud?

Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the top of the world, but a new book says he was lying

Vanessa Thorpe
Sun 28 May 2023 

Who was the first person to reach the north pole? According to American adventurer Frederick Cook, it was him. But now a new book will set out the evidence that the explorer’s 114-year-old claim was an instance of fake news on a global scale.

In The Explorer and the Journalist, author Richard Evans has examined the greatest scandal in polar history, reigniting a debate that has smouldered since September 1909, when Cook, who had been missing for a year, sent out a telegram announcing he had reached the pole in 1908.

The son of German immigrants, Cook grew up in the foothills of New York state’s Catskill Mountains. He quickly became a popular hero, embraced by scientists because of his humble attitude and the credit he gave to the Inuit. “He had a mild manner that made him seem genuine and believable,” said Evans. “And he was seen as a kind of antidote to all the big personalities of other explorers, like his fellow American Robert Peary, and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen.”

Cook’s eventual undoing came in the shape of a British journalist, Philip Gibbs, who was sent by his newspaper, the Daily Chronicle, to secure the first interview with the triumphant American. Tracking him down to his berth on a boat off the coast of Denmark, Gibbs joined Cook for a fateful breakfast in the dining saloon, writing in his memoir: “I was favourably impressed by the first appearance of the man who says he reached the pole.

“Here, surely, was a typical sea rover. Under his Danish cap there was a mass of shaggy fair hair, a pair of smiling blue eyes, and a florid face with a powerful nose and a large mouth which, when he smiled, showed broken teeth. An honest face, surely, if any face is honest.”

Gibbs was keen to get the polar scoop. But as the putative explorer started to avoid the topic of his exploits, the reporter’s doubts grew. Cook had already made his name as part of the Belgica expedition, the first group to over-winter in Antarctica. And on that southern trip he had earned a favourable reputation by prescribing fresh meat to fight off scurvy and coming up with an idea to free the boat from ice. Also on board the Belgica was a young Amundsen, who remained a lifelong admirer of Cook even after scandal struck.

A photograph that Cook claimed was of him and two Inuit men at the North Pole. Photograph: ullstein bild/Getty Images

“I read Gibbs’s memoir about six years ago and it kept drawing me back,” said Evans, whose book was published last week. “I have set my book in Copenhagen in that year because at that moment it was like the centre of the world, with all the rival polar explorers and their backers in one place. Most journalists would have given their eye teeth for the kind of early access that Gibbs got. But although the Scientific Society in Copenhagen really believed Cook, Gibbs pushed on with his doubts and got his paper to publish this potentially libellous piece, suggesting that Cook was lying.”

When Gibbs filed his sceptical, explosive accusations he was 32 years old and on his fifth job in Fleet Street. The Cook story permanently elevated him to the rank of the leading British journalists of his day. Polar scholars have obsessed over details of the competing claims ever since. But after assessing the case and laying out the counterclaims, Evans concludes Gibbs was on to the truth: “For what it is worth, I agree.”

Lack of evidence was Cook’s main problem. He had told Gibbs his notes would prove his claim, but said he had given them to someone to take to New York. Conclusive documents never materialised.

Looking back: polar exploration

To complicate matters further, days after Cook got to Copenhagen, his former friend Peary also announced he had reached the north pole. Peary soon accused Cook of lying, while Cook attempted to rise above the allegations. Today, many believe both men were lying.

Cook went back to America to ride out the reputational storm, earning big money as a lecturer, but questions about his honesty persisted. Before his north pole expedition, he had been best known as the first person to reach the top of Mount McKinley – now called Denali – in Alaska. But when doubters looked back at this claim it seemed that the photograph of the summit Cook had submitted looked just like another much lower one in the range.

Some people still argue that Cook did reach the pole, and he himself spent the rest of his life trying to establish his claim. He went on to become a Texas oilman and was later accused of fraud, spending six years in prison.

While the race to the south pole has a clear winner in Amundsen, the truth about the race to the north pole is uncertain.

Some now give the credit to Amundsen once more, because he flew over it in an airship in 1926. American Ralph Plaisted reached it on a snowmobile in 1968 and British explorer Sir Walter Herbert got there on foot a year later.