Talking Points
- The Vice-President's debate was light on both content and animosity
- The titanic Oracle-Google legal battle landed in the Supreme Court
- 1 in 10 may have been infected with coronavirus worldwide
- 86% of positive cases in UK lockdown showed no core symptoms
- Armenia and Azerbaijan are locked in the worst conflict since 1994
- Kyrgyzstan's election process collapsed as both rivals claim victory
- Mystery toxic pollution in Russia's far east killed 95% of sea creatures
- Controversial reforms were met with huge protests in Indonesia
- Thieves who stole $645m in artefacts were jailed in Hong Kong
- Petra, Jordan was named Lonely Planet's #1 destination (seconded!)
Deep Dive
We've all had our fair share of war, plague, biodiversity crises, climate change, imperial decline, and institutional failure this year. Rather than rehashing the spectacular failures and the systems of power that enable them, let's spend some time with those who are making a meaningful contribution in our world: here are the recipients of the 2020 Nobel Prizes.
DNA scissors and the future of biology
The title 'Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats' doesn't quite do justice to what Prof. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Dr. Jennifer A. Doudna proposed in 2012, but then again neither does CRISPR/Cas9 . A revolution in gene editing gets closer – one of the most important discoveries in the history of biology closer still. Charpentier is a native of France but works as the director of the Max Planck Unit for Science of Pathogens in Berlin. Doudna is a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. Together, they proposed the use of "genetic scissors" to alter minute pieces of genetic information – down to a single letter in a strand of DNA . Charpentier's research into the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes led her to unearth a mysterious molecule that cut into DNA in 2011. After publishing her findings she hunted down a world-renown expert in RNA to recreate, simplify, and reprogram the molecule to target DNA letter-by-letter.
The possible utilities of DNA scissors are limitless - and that's no exaggeration – their work has been cited on average three times per day, every day, since it was published in 2012. For this, the pair were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Their work can be used to remove debilitating predispositions to cancers in humans, to create stronger and more durable crops, or even to reduce the methane output of bovine gaseous expulsions. In China, as you'll recall, one rogue scientist used these genetic scissors to alter the DNA of three babies and afford them immunity to HIV. He is now in jail, understandably, given the veil of unknowing and ethical quandaries that surround the long-term impact of such groundbreaking biological tools.
Glass ceilings, black holes and Hepatitis C
This was the first time that women have clean swept the Chemistry prize, and Charpentier hopes it will inspire young women, "who would like to follow the path of science, and show them that, in principle, women in science can also be awarded prizes but, more importantly, that women in science can also have an impact through the research". It's the first time in over five decades that the prize has not been won outright, or shared by, men – Charpentier and Doudna are only the sixth and seventh women to win the Chemistry prize, and are in rather good company (think: Marie Curie).
If women breaking through in chemistry is rare, in physics it's nothing short of exceptional. A pair of US physicists, Reinhard Genzel of UC Berkeley and Andrea Ghez of UCLA shared one half of the Physics Prize this year for their discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. They worked out that in among the enormous gas clouds, there were a handful of stars orbiting an empty spot of space at ludicrous speeds. Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the prize in over a century. The old refrain that STEM is dominated by men is not quite true, they just dominate the honour rolls – a trend the Nobel Committee is commendably attempting to rectify.
The other half of the Physics prize was bestowed upon Oxford University's Roger Penrose, the theoretical physicist whose popular books are packed full of hand-drawn illustrations that bring complex celestial ideas to life. At its core, Penrose's work has led to the mathematical theories which prove that black holes can actually exist . Proving the existence of something that defies the human imagination (and most of our instruments) is a mean feat indeed. Penrose is not slowing down either. After winning the prize he had this to say, "The Big Bang was not the beginning. There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future. So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes evaporating away, via Hawking evaporation, and they would produce these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points." Keeping up? There was a universe before ours, and there'll be another after ours.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to trio Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton, and Charles M. Rice for their discovery and identification of hepatitis C , a condition that afflicts an estimated 70 million people around the globe. That's a little more straight forward.
Peace and poetry
If peace is your bag, then look no further than the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) – this year it's won the Nobel Peace prize. In this column we've been as critical as any of the naked expediency of the Security Council, but it can't be denied the good works are being done in the trenches. The WFP is a rare entity – a last resort. When national government equivocate, when religious organisations withdraw, when NGOs downsize, the WFP maintains a presence in over 80 countries, feeding just over 91m humans . What is more deserving of our accolades than the effort to combat hunger?
The Pulitzer-winning poet Louise Glück won the Literature prize late in the week, although she hardly seemed too pleased about it. Mobbed by reporters, the 77-year-old admitted she was "completely flabbergasted that they would choose a white American lyric poet. It doesn't make sense. Now my street is covered with journalists. People keep telling me how humble I am. I'm not humble. But I thought, I come from a country that is not thought of fondly now, and I'm white, and we've had all the prizes. So it seemed to be extremely unlikely that I would ever have this particular event to deal with in my life." A fair explanation for her surprise, but one that also contains all the elements that earned her the Nobel prize: candour, wit, and a searing gaze.
Glück may be a left-field choice, but her work couldn't be more fitting for these times: a piercing and wicked internal monologue for a year characterised by lockdowns and narrowed horizons. When describing her own practice , the master poet put it thus, "I want to be taken somewhere I know nothing about. I want to be a stranger to a territory". 2020 appears an apt response.
Worldlywise
Standard Oil to standard shipping
Apple sells iPhones. Google runs a search engine. Amazon sells books. Facebook connects people. In the 2000's, these companies acquired enormous wealth and power without any real scrutiny. And they all benefited from three things: technological illiteracy in most adults, the guise of functional consumer products, and a certain home-grown favouritism in the US. Then, they gorged on the untapped resource of our personal information , exploded in size, and spread their fingers across the globe and into the fabric of every aspect of our lives. But over the course of the last decade, a new idea has emerged. From the periphery of American political consciousness, a provocative question has taken root: are these companies too big?
This week ,the House Judiciary Committee of the United States Congress released a highly anticipated report into the market power of those four companies. The findings were unequivocal: each has abused its market power. Apple through its App Store rules. Google in search results and advertising. Amazon over the third-party seller market . And Facebook in social networking. Once the preserve of 'activist' politicians and conspiracy theorists, this critique of Big Tech's monopolistic power has now entered the mainstream. Here is the Committee Chair Jerry Nadler , "By controlling access to markets, these giants can pick winners and losers throughout our economy. They not only wield tremendous power, but they also abuse it by charging exorbitant fees, imposing oppressive contract terms, and extracting valuable data from the people and businesses that rely on them."
That's all the same as it ever was, really. There has always been a constant to-and-fro between free markets and regulators. Although, in this case it's been all "to" and no "fro". Moreover, it's questionable whether these companies can really be considered participants in a "free market" since many of the practices in question are anathema to the very notion of a market. But what will be done about it?
For all the talk about breaking up Big Tech , that's a lot harder said than done. Winding back the Facebook purchase of its erstwhile-competitor Instagram is possibly at the more achievable end of the scale. It will be fascinating to see how the companies respond to the report. Aside from Facebook, most of these companies are still viewed in a mostly positive light. Tellingly, the markets were not at all spooked by the report. That signals the uphill battle that House Democrats will face in honing their report into a workable piece of legislation.
A heady brew
A week has elapsed since the announcement of Donald Trump's coronavirus diagnosis and we can now discuss it without wincing from the irony. At some point last week, Covid-19 entered the president's system. By his own estimation, "It's very, very hard when you are with people from the military or from law enforcement, and they come over to you, and they want to hug you, and they want to kiss you, because we have done a really good job for them. And you get close. And things happen." Indeed. Well, things did happen. And now the president's inner sanctum all have coronavirus. Trump was hospitalised at Walter Reed in Washington on Saturday, and after a weekend of frenzied – truly manic – speculation about his health, on the third day he rose.
Leave aside for now the leaking and lying doctors, the ill-advised joy-ride, and the speculation that both he and Mike Pence suppressed their positive results until after their respective debates. Given what we know about Covid-19, and the president's epidemiological risk-profile, is it even remotely possible that Trump is already better? The treatment he received at Walter Reed was a course of the unproven drug cocktail remdesivir – a mixture of two lab-made monoclonal antibodies that mimic the action of naturally-produced antibodies in an immune response. And dexamethasone. The antibodies, which have yet to pass FDA clinical trials, are not responsible for Trump's perkier-than-usual demeanour. That is down to the second ingredient, dexamethasone, a powerful steroid . How does it feel , you ask? This, from a cancer patient who was prescribed the steroid, "Medically speaking, it was a miracle drug... But it also made me high as a kite, like I'd just mainlined a potent mixture of espresso beans and psychotropics. I could feel my heartbeat in my eyeballs. I was euphoric."
And so, regardless of whether or not Trump is actually better in a strictly medical sense, he's almost certainly feeling better (really good, in fact). And so, he left Walter Reed on Monday afternoon, cheerfully tapping away on the handrail as he descended the staircase. Upon arriving at the White House, the president removed his face-mask before entering the building, just long enough for cameras to catch him visibly struggling for breath. Maybe not so good after all. The president wants to get back onto the campaign trail as soon as today (!!!) and there is not a doctor in the land who can stop him. As late as Friday the presidential physician was tight-lipped as to whether Trump had tested negative, instead insisting that the illness had not progressed . In the absence of any data, we all just have to take him at his word.
The Best of Times
Mainland devils
After a 3,000-year hiatus, the Tasmanian devil has returned to the mainland of Australia to roam in the wild. This painstaking reintroduction project began 16 years ago to prevent the extinction of the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial — there are currently only 25,000 devils in Tasmania’s wild. The new lodgings in New South Wales will both provide a genetic safe-haven from a highly-contagious facial cancer which has smashed the Tasmanian population, and contribute to rebalancing the natural habitat.
Grey, sooty matter
Scientists have discovered brain cells – actual intact brain cells – inside the skull of a young man petrified in the Mount Vesuvius’ eruption almost 2,000 years ago. The extreme heat of the eruption followed by a quick cooling turned the moist grey matter into a glassy structure which retained its neuronal structure. Mind-blowing.
The Worst of Times
A hex on Mobil
ExxonMobil, one of the world's largest oil producers (and one of the largest companies by market capitalisation), has committed to increasing its carbon emissions by 21 billion tonnes each year between now and 2025. These figures come from ExxonMobil's own review of its $210b investment strategy – a 17% rise in annual emissions. It's the equivalent of building and running 26 coal-fired power plants – creating the same amount of emissions that the entire country of Greece produces. Thankfully the renewables giant NextEra surpassed ExxonMobil's market cap this month, and it's only a matter of time before the antiquities of Big Oil collapse entirely.
White, right-wing terror plot
Please turn your attention to Michigan, where 13 militiamen were arrested as part of a right-wing plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The "Wolverine Watchmen" militia may sound like an excitable pre-pubescent kids club, but consists of actual adults who had planned an attack on Whitmer's residence in order to kidnap and kill the "tyrant" before election day. The tyranny they sought to overthrow? Whitmer's eminently sensible statewide requirements on wearing masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19. What could possibly have given the group such an idea? Well, there is a Trump tweet for the occasion:
"LIBERATE MICHIGAN!"
Weekend Reading
The image
The quote
"guys lmao he's not doing any 'better'"
– Unofficial White House contact tracer Claudia Conway (daughter of Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway and Trump critic George Conway) spilling the beans on TikTok about President Trump's health.
The numbers
$31.85m
- Stan, a 4m-high and 12m-long Tyrannosaurus rex, was bought this week for a king's ransom of $31m — making him the most expensive fossil ever sold. Named after the archaeologist who found him, Stan is thought to be one of the most intact specimens of this unwieldy and somewhat unfairly maligned species. Now to find a suitably-proportioned sideboard or mantlepiece for him to sit on...
15,841
- The number of positive coronavirus cases who were left off the United Kingdom's tallies in late September. The culprit? Excel, as per. The local files which recorded the contact details of new cases were simply too large for the central computer system to handle. Said computer said no, and rather unhelpfully cut the Excel sheet down to a more manageable length. Rogue artificially intelligent weapons systems won't be the end of our species, rogue spreadsheets however...
The headline
"Earth is not the best place to live, scientists say" – The Independent . Don't shoot the messenger.
The special mention
The subjects of the 700-year-old Yuan dynasty painted scroll that depicted "Five Drunken Princes Returning on Horseback" which was sold this week for £31m. The exquisite work of art by Ren Renfa showed that sharing an ale and horsing around is a universal human experience across all eras. One of these inebriated equestrians even went on to become emperor!
A few choice long-reads
- Parenting is an unending stream of questions that are met with a limitless supply of suggestions. Emily Oster wants to apply data to the problems to sort it out – but Bloomberg Businessweek wants to know what it's like to raise a baby by the numbers.
- The pandemic has thrown the global economy into disarray. You can do shots in Wuhan nightclubs all night while London pubs are closing at 10pm. The Economist gauges the new speed of the global economy – some countries in 4th, some in neutral.
- Imagine a scenario in which Joe Biden wins the presidency of the United States. Can America go back to its head at the table in global affairs? Foreign Affairs argues that the US has lost credibility that can't easily be regained.
Tom Wharton
