Steve Mirsky: Welcome to Scientific American's Science Talk posted on February 16, 2016. I am Steve Mirsky. A small contingent of Scientific American editors was at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which ran from February 10th to February 15th in Washington, D.C. At the end of the day's sessions on February 13th, I met up with Scientific American's Mark Fischetti, Dina Maron, and Seth Fletcher to hear about what they had heard about.
It's a huge meeting with sometimes ten sessions going on at the same time. Each of us could therefore attend only a small fraction of the briefings. So what follows is an admittedly idiosyncratic slice of the science presented at the AAAS conference. Mark Fischetti, what have you come across while you've been here at the conference?
Mark Fischetti: Two things have stood out to me. One is about sea level rising. One of the cool things about AAAS conference or any really big science conferences, you have these general ideas, and then when you get into the technical sessions, you find out how much more interesting these stories are. So sea level rise, right? It's generally rising and everybody thinks about this as kind of like, oh, the oceans are a bathtub and so the water is just getting a little higher. But it varies a lot around the world, and why is that? We have tide gauges and we have other gauges out in the ocean. We have satellite measurements, which show that this actual measured sea level rise is different quite a lot in different parts of the world.
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So there's a few things going on. It's the glaciers that are melting, so there is more water entering the ocean, but it is also because the ocean water is heating up, it expands like anything else that heats up. But this one interesting thing, which I really wasn't aware of: as the glaciers get smaller and on Greenland or in Antarctica, they're so large that they actually have a gravitation pull of their own. So near those areas, they pull the ocean water up toward them. So as they get smaller, there's less pull, so they don't pull as much water up towards them. So that water has to go somewhere else, and that is a big factor in where sea level rise is actually higher or less or even going lower around Antarctica, lets' say.
Mirsky: Wow, and that's measure, the effect is so big?
Fischetti: Yeah, yeah. So the bottom line for the U.S. is that there are these so-called now "hot spots" of sea level rising. One of them, one of the largest around the world is the East Coast of the United States.
Mirsky: Well, bully for us.
Fischetti: [Laughs] So that's just kind of the neat stuff you get into when you're here. The other issue, the other topic that's really been a hot topic today has been this idea that there's a war on science. So there was a big media briefing, and then there's another session after that. Several good people were speaking about—well, I'll tell you who there were. We had Steve Strauss, who is a biotech guy from Oregon State, who was talking about sort of attacks on GMOs, right, and the sort of –
Mirsky: Genetically-modified organisms, like corn or in some cases animals.
Fischetti: Exactly.
Mirsky: A lot of people want their food to be absolutely pure, whatever that means, and so they don't want GMO foods. But the science is pretty clear that GMO stuff is safe to eat.
Fischetti: And it's all around us already. But he was sort of represented that so-called issue, and then there was another person who was talking about vaccines. His name was Mark Largent from Michigan State. Again, there's these pockets of parents who don't want their parents vaccinated, and they tend to group in communities where that opinion tends to take over a community. There was another person talking about climate change, and I think she was actually a professor of philosopher, Roberta Millstein from the University of California.
So they were all talking about is there actually a war on science because in these areas, as examples, there's a lot of pushback against science. Mark Largent actually said it best. He said, "You know, I don't think there's a war on science at all. If you really think about it –" and he's saying you, all you people in the audience, you scientists in the audience, right?—"if you think about what's actually going on, science has become so dominant in discourse in public issues now that people who are against an issue are actually looking for science that they can marshal for their argument against the other side, as it were."
So the people who are against vaccines, for example, they're saying, "Well, there's this research that—" this supposed research about autism, which was proven wrong, but they're marshaling science to prove their argument. The climate deniers, they have their whole group of their so-called scientists who are creating their so-called data. So he actually made a really interesting point, which was science, you scientists, you guys have the power because the people who are opposing these things are trying to call upon science to make their own argument.
Mirsky: So there's not a war on science. There's a war on the findings of science and the enemy is trying to appear to be as scientific?
Fischetti: Exactly, right, and the philosophy professor, Roberta Millstein, was saying the same thing. It's like if you continue to talk about the war on science, you're actually propping up this distinction that doesn't exist anymore that science is somehow embattled. It's not. Science is sort of the power to arguments on both sides of issues. So just stop talking about a war on science and show that your science is superior to people who are trying to argue against your findings, and that's the way to go about it.
Mirsky: Well, that's an interesting distinction that I had not thought about because I'm always wandering around under the impression that there is a war on science. But it's really a war on the results that people don't like. [Laughs]
Fischetti: The results or an ideology. I mean climate science is pretty clear now that people who are arguing against it, it's a political position they're taking. So it's not a war on science. It's a war—exactly, on someone who has got [Laughs] the other opinion or results that don't happen to support a position that people already have taken.
Mirsky: So, Dina, what about you? What did you happen on that was particularly interesting?
Dina Maron: Yesterday I went to a session, a Zika virus update, the mosquito-borne disease. Zika virus is something we've been following pretty closely at Scientific American, but it was interesting to hear a few officials in the World Health Organization and Anthony Fauci, who is the head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease, talk about sort of the latest news that we know. I was surprised how candid they were about what we really don't know so far.
There is news yesterday that came out of the UK that the virus has been found in the semen of a man who had the virus and recovered from it two months ago. That, of course, is much longer than we anticipated it being removed from the sexual fluids of a man, but we don't really know how long it exists and how long it would continue to also be potentially infectious.
So the World Health Organization official was very candid that we just don't have that much information yet about that and those studies are really ongoing. So as far as recommendations about ensuring Zika virus is not sexually transmitted, just the minimal information we have that a man that has traveled to an area where Zika virus is infected should be wearing a condom when having intercourse with a partner is really what we're knowing right now.
What I found interesting as well is I asked Christopher Dickey, who is the head of the World Health Organization's—he is director of strategy at the World Health Organization, and I asked him when we should expect to have more solid links linking Zika virus and microcephaly. That's the birth defect where a child is born with an abnormally-small head. He says that we're not really expecting an "ah-ha" moment; that it's really just about accumulating evidence.
Similarly, Zika virus has been linked with an autoimmune disease called Guillain–Barré syndrome. It's an autoimmune disease that can lead to paralysis, and we do not have a way to prevent that. This is a very tense situation right now and the World Health Organization has declared this a public health emergency of international concern, and so they are trying to marshal their resources and their scientists to make sure that we're acting quickly.
Mirsky: So for adults, the issue if you get a Zika infection is Guillain-Barré where you're basically locked in. Your body is completely immobilized. Usually, for Guillain-Barré, I think it's usually for about a year before you start to recover movement, and then the danger if a woman is pregnant when she's infected is that the baby could be born with the microencephaly. But do we know what the incidence of actual disease is versus infection? I mean just because you have an infection doesn't mean you're going to get either of these conditions.
Maron: That's correct, yeah. We don't have numbers on either of those yet, and that's something that they are trying to find out in their ongoing studies. What's interesting is with both of these conditions, we have seen them linked to other maladies. For example, with Guillain-Barré syndrome, this is something that happens typically after infections. So this is not the only—Zika virus is not the only infectious situation where you would expect this kind of outcome.
Similarly, with microcephaly, we know that women who have experienced rubella or herpes during pregnancy or who are exposed to toxic substances, their children also might have microcephaly. But we don't know common this is right now. Something that's raised eyebrows is in terms of how many microcephaly incidents have been linked to Zika virus. Though Brazil has said there's been more than 4,000 incidents so far, only a handful of those have been laboratory-confirmed, meaning only a handful of those infants had samples sent to the laboratory and, indeed, Zika virus was present in their system.
As far as Zika virus that's spread to other countries including El Salvador and Colombia, primarily we have not seen these increases in microcephaly as of yet. But the head of CDC, that's the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that's not particularly surprising because we're talking about a long timeline here between when, for example, if a woman encountered Zika virus in the first trimester of pregnancy, then obviously nine months later—well, not nine months later, pardon me. Six months later perhaps she would have this child, and that's when we would be looking at measuring the circumference of this baby's head and diagnosing microcephaly.
Mirsky: People are at the very beginning of trying to figure out what's going?
Maron: Yeah, exactly. So we don't have the benefit of much information until 2007, when there was the first large outbreak in Yap Island in Micronesia. There were perhaps 14 cases that were documented in the peer-reviewed literature of Zika virus at all. So that really underscores how little we know, and as far as even monies that were being put toward vaccine or diagnostic development here, Anthony Fauci, again the head of NIAID says we can't even put a figure on how much has been spent towards that. Because the Zika virus is relatively mild, causes for many people no symptoms, but for some people can cause just a week of flu-like symptoms.
So while we have put millions, or perhaps by this point billions, of dollars into research for flaviviruses in general, of which Zika virus is one, we haven't any dedicated efforts.
Mirsky: So this is probably a story that we're going to be following for years?
Maron: Potentially, yes. This doesn't look like it's something that's going away, and we're certainly expecting the number of Zika virus cases to heat up this summer when the weather is warmer, meaning more mosquitos will be out, but more people will be outside as well.
Mirsky: So, Seth, what did you happen on here that you found particularly interesting so far?
Seth Fletcher: Yesterday morning I went to see Gabriela Gonzalez, who is the spokesperson for LIGO, talk about the discovery of gravitational waves. That was a really interesting moment because the discovery had been announced the day before. She didn't tell us much that we didn't already know, but she was just glowing, and she was treated as a rock star. She played the sound of the black hole chirp on a loop, and there was a moment where she got kind of wistful, and I think she choked up a little bit. Then everybody applauded, and it was really nice.
Then afterward, there were all the young women scientists coming up and taking selfies with her and trailing her around. So it was pretty awesome. It was a nice moment. Then this afternoon, I went to a really interesting talk on AI and consciousness, and the first speaker was Demis Hassabis, who is with Google DeepMind, and they are the people who built the AI that could teach itself to play vintage Atari games and beat human opponents. That research was announced last year, and I'd read quite a bit about it, but I hadn't seen the video of the computer actually playing the games.
It was spooky and really cool, I mean because it just—it started out with game one, completely incompetent. Then by game 100, was getting the hang of it, and by game 300, was just superhuman in its abilities. It was amazing.
Mirsky: For those of us of a certain age, do you remember what specific Atari games?
Fletcher: Yeah, Space Invaders was the first one, and there was another one I can't remember the name of, but it involved—you know, you have the paddle thing that you move around on the bottom of the screen, and you bounce the ball up to break the blocks?
Mirsky: Right.
Fletcher: And you have to break all the blocks.
Mirsky: Block Breaker I think it was.
Fletcher: It's something like that, but that was really cool. What they're gearing up for now is to put this AI, or a new AI called AlphaGo, which is an artificially-intelligent Go player in competition with a professional Go grandmaster in Korea in a couple of months. That will be very interesting.
Mirsky: Go has been a real challenge, and it's much more difficult to program a computer to beat a Go champion than it is to program a computer to beat a, even a world chess champion.
Fletcher: That's right, because the game is tremendously complicated, much more so than chess. I think it's something like 10 to the 170 possible board configurations, which is more—there are not that many atoms in the universe. It's been a longstanding challenge, and Hassabis said that this advance came about a decade earlier than experts in the field had predicted. So it's really interesting, this deep learning. AI research is really accelerating at cool and interesting ways. He actually mentioned that there are ethical implications for this; that he doesn't think that a human-level general AI will come along for decades still. But we need to start talking now about what to do when that happens, and he seems to think that it will happen. So that was another highlight.
Mirsky: So the Skynet development is ten years ahead of schedule?
Fletcher: Basically, yeah. I saw a Skynet play Atari today, and yeah, there was a sense of—there was a little sense of it, like I was seeing the first frames in the intro montage for some sci-fi movie [Laughs] about robots taking over the world. But it's just—it was so impressive. You couldn't help but marvel at it and think, "I really hope that we put these things to good use."
Mirsky: For more about the gravitation waves finding, listen to astrophysicist and LIGO's co-founder Kip Thorne, talk with Scientific American's Josh Fischman on the previous episode of the Science Talk Podcast. You can read Robin Lloyd's coverage of the "War on Science" issue that Mark Fischetti mentioned at our Web site www.scientificamerican.com where you can get a whole bunch more of the latest news about science.
Follow us on Twitter where you'll get a Tweet whenever a new item hits the Web site. Out Twitter name is @sciam. For Scientific American science talk, I'm Steve Mirsky. Thanks for clicking on us.
