White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Wild, Fabulous Medical Frontier with Predictive AI

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When is a workplace at its happiest? I would submit that it is during the early stages of a project that is succeeding, whether it is a restaurant, an internet startup or a laboratory making phenomenal progress in its field of inquiry.

There is a sustained ebullience in a lab when the researchers know they are pushing back the frontiers of science, opening vistas of human possibility and reaping the extraordinary rewards that accompany just learning something big.

There has been a special euphoria in science ever since Archimedes jumped out of his bath in ancient Greece, supposedly shouting, “Eureka!”

I sensed this excitement when interviewing two exceptional scientists, Marina Sirota and Alice Tang, at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) for the independent PBS television program “White House Chronicle.”

Sirota and Tang have published a seminal paper on the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease — as much as 10 years before onset — with machine learning and artificial intelligence. The researchers were hugely excited by their findings and what their line of research will do for the early detection and avoidance of complex diseases like Alzheimer’s and many more.

It excited me — as someone who has been worried about the effect of AI on everything, from the integrity of elections to the loss of jobs — because the research at UCSF offers a clear example of the strides in medicine unfolding through computational science. “This time it’s different,” said Omar Hatamleh, who heads up AI for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Human expectations are being revolutionized in laboratories like the one in San Francisco.

Sirota said, “At my lab … the idea is to use both molecular data and clinical data (which is what you generate when you visit your doctor) and apply machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

Tang, who just finished her Ph.D. and is studying to be a medical doctor, explained, “It is the combination of diseases that allows our model to predict onset.”

In their study, Sirota and Tang found that osteoporosis is predictive of Alzheimer’s in women, highlighting the interplay between bone health and dementia risk.

The researchers used this approach to find predictive patterns from 5 million clinical patient records held by UCSF in its database. From these, there emerged a relationship between osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s, especially in women. This is important as two-thirds of Alzheimer’s sufferers are women.

The researchers cautioned that it isn’t axiomatic that osteoporosis leads to Alzheimer’s, but it is true in about 70 percent of cases. Also, they said they are critically aware of historical bias in available data — for example, that most of it is from White people in a particular socioeconomic class.

Sirota and Tang said there are contributory factors they found in Alzheimer’s. These include hypertension, vitamin D deficiency and heightened cholesterol. In men, erectile dysfunction and enlarged prostate are also predictive. These findings were published in “Nature Aging” early this year.

Predictive analysis has potential applications for many diseases. It will be possible to detect them well before onset and, therefore, to develop therapies.

This predictive analysis has been used to anticipate homelessness so that intervention — like rent assistance — can be applied before a family is thrown out on the street. Institutional charity is usually slow and often identifies at-risk people after a catastrophe.

AI is beginning to influence many aspects of our lives, from telephoning a banker to utilities’ efforts to spot and control at-risk vegetation before a spark ignites a wildfire.

While the challenges of AI, from its wrongful use by authoritarian rulers and its menace in war and social control, are real, the uses just in medicine are awesome.

In medicine, it is the beginning of a new time in human health, as the frontiers of disease are understood and pushed back as never before. Eureka! Eureka! Eureka!

The Battle for America Is the Battle for Science

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The man who popularized Greek-style yogurt, Hamdi Ulukaya, is probably one of the only, if not the only, billionaire of recent years who does not owe his fortune to the government. Jeff Bezos does, Bill Gates does, Mark Zuckerberg does, along with dozens of others who have amassed fortunes in the digital age.

They are smart men all who have exploited opportunities, which would not have existed but for the government’s presence in science. I applaud individuals who build on government discoveries to make their fortunes.

But government-backed science, which has brought us everything from GPS to the internet, is in for a radical reversal, as laid out in the Trump administration’s budget proposal.

It was greeted with derision when it was released, with many hoping Congress will reverse it. However in the science community, in the halls of the National Science Foundation, in the facilities of the National Institutes of Health, and in the sprawling world of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, there is fear and alarm.

There should be. There should be from the world of learning a great bellow of rage, too.

The Trump administration has declared essentially that the United States cannot afford to be wise, cannot afford to invent, cannot afford to cure or to minister, and cannot afford to continue the rate of scientific evolution, which has made science of the post-World War II period so thrilling, benefiting countless people.

The administration has identified 62 programs for elimination or severe cutbacks. It has done this in a mixture of ignorance, indifference and delusion. The ignorance is that it does not seem to know how we got where we are; the indifference is part of a broad, anti-intellectual tilt on the political right; and the delusion is the hapless belief that science and engineering’s forward leap of 75 years will be carried on in the private sector.

The broad antipathy to science, to learning in all but the most general sense, is the mark of the Trump budget proposal.

But science, whether it is coming from ARPA-E, (Advanced Projects Research Research Agency-Energy) or the National Science Foundation’s watering of the tender shoots of invention, the Department of Energy’s world-leading contribution to the Human Genome Project, or the National Institutes of Health’s endless war against disease (especially the small and awful diseases like Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and the rarest cancers) is the future. Without it, the nation is gobbling its seed corn.

In the Trump administration, there is money to build a giant wall but no money to surge forward into the future.

To the administration, as indicated in its budget proposal, the sciences and the engineering that flows from them is a luxury. It is not. It is the raw materials of peace and strength in this century and beyond.

To take just one of the follies implicit in the philistine budget, cutting funding for medical research will come just when there is need for more — research that if not funded by the government will not be done. New epidemics like bird flu, Zika and Ebola cry out for research.

Increasingly, the old paradigm that new drugs would come from the drug companies is broken. It now costs a drug company close to $2 billion to bring a new compound to market. That cost is reflected in new drug prices, as the companies struggle to recoup their investments before their drugs go off patent. Shareholder value does not encourage the taking of chances, but rather the buying up of the competition. And that is happening in the industry.

The world desperately needs a new generation of antibiotics. The drug companies are not developing them, and the bugs are mutating happily, developing resistance to the drugs that have held bacterial disease at bay since penicillin led the way 89 years ago.

Fighting the political folly that threatens science is the battle for America. In 50 years, without amply government-funded research and development, will we still be the incubator for invention, the shock troops against disease, the progenitors of a time of global abundance?

Our place in the world is not determined by our ideology, but by our invention. Sadly, the pace of invention is at stake, attacked by a particularly virulent and aberrant strain of governmental thinking.­­

Argonne National Laboratory Diary

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By Linda Gasparello

Where Scientists Sleep

Last week my husband, Llewellyn King, and I abandoned the delights of West Warwick, R.I., to visit Chicago – actually, a part of Chicagoland that few visitors get to see.

Llewellyn was a speaker at a conference held at Argonne National Laboratory, just outside of Chicago. Argonne is the multidisciplinary science and engineering research center, born out of the University of Chicago’s work on the Manhattan Project in the 1940s.

The lab, which occupies 1,500 acres, came as a total surprise for our Uber driver, a Chicago native who used to drive trucks professionally. “I’ve driven past this place many times, but I never knew what was goin’ on,” he said.

We had some difficulty finding Argonne’s Main North Gate and delay getting our ore-arranged passes. Once cleared for entry, we had to drive behind a security vehicle to our hotel: the Argonne Guest House, which is Building 240 on the “campus.” It is where most people stay for conferences, short research visits and invited tours of the site, thus avoiding the main security gate rigamarole.

Our driver thought all this cloak-and-dagger stuff was a hoot, but Llewellyn, who has visited Argonne many times, wasn’t entertained. He wanted his dinner and a glass, or two, of red wine.

The guest house is a fine example of 1970s university dormitory architecture, more Brutalist than humanist. But what the building lacks in design, it more than makes up for in setting: It backs onto some of the Argonne site’s wooded acres.

The lobby and the guest rooms don’t inspire one to linger. But you might want to hang out with colleagues in the elevator lobby on any of the guest floors. Each has comfortable club chairs, equipped with wooden swivel trays and a huge whiteboard hanging on a wall – perfect for a pre-breakfast solving of isotope burn-up equations.

Zen at Work

The Zen garden in the seven-story Theory and Computing Sciences Center. Photo: Linda Gasparello.

As you drive up to the Theory and Computing Sciences Center on the Argonne site, your heart will beat a little faster: This building – Building 240 — with its jutting, pierced concrete slabs and glass walls, houses state-of-the-art supercomputing systems. You sense from its great, gray exterior that the interior won’t be filled with floors of sensory-deprivation cubbies for techies.

It isn’t. The building, according to the lab, “was designed to be an open and flexible workspace to encourage the free flow of ideas between scientists at Argonne as well as the technology to connect researchers across the globe.” Its seven stories wrap around a Zen garden.

There are cloth-lined cubicles with whiteboards — on some of which I saw scrawled equations. But on the ground floor no glass walls separate them from the garden. Surely, gazing at the garden and ambling around it through the open hall must reduce workers’ stress; unless you’re a worker who is stressed by the thought of a snake curled up in your cubicle.

The garden’s raked, gray gravel sits upon dirt and occasionally critters – frogs, rodents and even garden-variety snakes — break through the garden’s surface and can be found among its plants and rocks.

“We like ’em. They’re engineers,” one ground-floor worker told me.

Behavioral Science

Door sign in the Theory and Computing Sciences Center. Photo: Linda Gasparello.

“Scientists are literal.” That’s how Gilbert Brown, director of the nuclear engineering program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, explained why the Theory and Computing Sciences Center’s bathrooms are called “toilet rooms.”

“The rooms have toilets but no baths,” he said.

Makes sense to me.

When I pointed out to another nuclear engineer that all the push pins on a bulletin board outside the center’s conference room were placed in a rectangle, he said unhesitatingly, “Scientists are neat as pins.”

Doe, Oh, Dear

The white fallow deer herd that has roamed the Argonne site since the lab’s inception in 1946 – and has caused visitors sometimes to speculate on the nature of the experiment that produced their unusual coloring – has dwindled to one doe.

“Prior to 1946, part of the land that is now Argonne was the country estate of Gustav Freund, inventor of ‘skinless’ casings for hot dogs. Freund had a small herd of the deer on his estate for several years. The naturally light-colored species – Dama dama – are native to North Africa, Europe and parts of Asia.

“When the federal government purchased the property, it was believed all of the herd had either been given away to parks and zoos or destroyed by the local game warden. It turned out there still were two does on the property, and one gave birth to a buck. The herd created from these three deer became a fixture on the Argonne property and a topic of interest and conversation for employees and visitors alike,” Donna Jones Pelkie wrote in Argonne Today, a lab publication.

Unfortunately, the white fallow deer didn’t reproduce at a normal rate because of a lack of genetic diversity; even when they do reproduce, they only give birth to one fawn per year – unlike the fecund, native white-tailed deer which also roam the site. The fawns were prey to coyotes, which have become city slinkers.

Efforts to preserve or replenish this historic herd were stymied by state regulations, which not only would’ve required any new white fallow deer brought onto the site to be deemed “livestock,” but also would’ve made Argonne responsible for the herd’s maintenance, including penning, feeding and veterinary care.

So the lab opted for natural attrition, which comports with “its thinking of keeping natural areas in balance with the native ecosystem,” according to the Jones Pelkie story.

No End to the Cold War’s Expensive Nuclear Legacy

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It was the Cold War, and it was a potential race to Armageddon. The Soviet Union produced an excessive number of nuclear warheads, and we did likewise.

Now another war rages bitterly — but not on the front pages — over what to do with the legacy of cold war: plutonium from the warheads.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and in the honeymoon period that followed between Russia and the United States, it was obvious that there were way too many warheads and the number needed to be reduced. In particular the key ingredient, plutonium, had to be contained and, preferably, disposed of.

In 2000, the United States and Russia agreed to dismantle large numbers of nuclear warheads known as “pits.”

But getting rid of plutonium is not easy. It is a transuranic element, made in special reactors and, up to this point in time, with only one purpose: to make hydrogen bombs. It also is possible to use it as a fuel in power reactors, if they are the light water reactors now in service around the world. This can be done by mixing the plutonium with uranium reactor fuel in the proportion of 95 percent uranium to 5 percent plutonium.

This is not a great rate of disposal, but it works.

The French process is the one the Clinton administration committed to using to burn up 34 metric tons of pit plutonium from warheads being dismantled at the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas.

The Russians committed to burning their equivalent excess plutonium in fast reactors. These are reactors with a high-neutron flux — a technology that the United States abandoned during the Carter administration.

To accomplish the U.S. commitment to the Russians and get rid of the plutonium, the Department of Energy commissioned the building of a facility at its huge Savannah River Site nuclear reservation (310 square miles) near Aiken, S.C., on the Georgia border.

The plant — a massive structure with double walls (each 10-feet thick) of the highest grade concrete and with a dense matrix of steel reinforcing — is as close as humans can come, in my view, to building something that will last for thousands of years. It is awesome.

But the plant is troubled.

The DOE wants to halt construction and abandon the idea in favor of mixing the plutonium with a granular substance and burying it in a waste facility in New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, which is having its own difficulties after an accident. The process is called “down blending.” It does not get rid of the plutonium which, with a half-life of 240,000 years, is essentially indestructible, unless it is burned in a reactor. It just stabilizes it and makes it hard to retrieve.

The suggested change has exacerbated tensions with Russia at a difficult time in U.S.-Russia relations. Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the proposed change of plan, saying, “This is not what we agreed on.”

John MacWilliams, the DOE’s point man on the issue, told me that the root of the problem is money. The South Carolina facility, known as the MOX (mixed oxide fuel) plant, has cost more than anticipated with $5 billion spent and a dispute over how far along construction is.

The DOE maintains that it is only 40 percent complete, and the contractor says it is 70 percent complete. Both have relied on outside consultants for their numbers.

Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz, himself a nuclear scientist, told a meeting in Washington on Sept. 13 that the South Carolina plant would cost $50 billion to $60 billion over its life-cycle. He estimated it would cost between $15 billion and $20 billion for the alternative down blending proposal. That is a number that is likely to be challenged in Congress.

The South Carolina congressional delegation and other supporters, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, are passionate in their support for MOX. But Congress is funding the construction at just $350 million a year, less than the $500 million needed to keep to the construction schedule, thus making the whole enterprise more expensive.

One way or another the Cold War is going to keep on costing for a long, long time.

For InsideSources

Please Stop Conflating Math and Science

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Here is a plea: Save the children. Save them from being harassed by the best intentioned and most visible public figures.

Please stop haranguing them about “math and science.” Math and science are not the same thing; related, yes, identical, no.

Math intimidates a lot of children. It intimidates those who do not have an early aptitude for figures. Consequently, many young minds are lost to the glorious world of science because they fear that they must pass through the Valley of the Shadow of Math.

Now if one believes that little Joanne ought to be a high-energy physicist, chasing atomic particles about with an atom smasher, she ought to be encouraged in the study of mathematics. But if little Joanne wants to devote her life to zoology, she should not be scared off by math before she has seen a primate.

Yet that is what we do through the endless exhortation by those who believe that it is only through applied science and  mathematics that the United States will continue to retain its leadership and prosperity in this century. Wringing our hands over U.S. students' lagging scores in math and science – always spoken of as though they were the same thing – is now a feature of our national life.

Not a word is heard about how we dominate the world in film, recorded music, franchising, creative uses of information technology (Google, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), oil and gas drilling technology and medical device technology.

Our creative footprint across this world is enormous, and it is not yet being usurped except in areas where inexpensive labor and government indifference to human and environmental costs prevails.

Creativity and curiosity drive science. Math is a discipline of curiosity not of creativity; it is the tool, not the driver. It will tell the inventor, scientist and entrepreneur how to get there, but not where to go. The prescription for the future, coming from many politicians and leaders,including former admirals and generals, is more math and science education linked to a passion for entrepreneurism.

While the passion for a poorly defined concept of the entrepreneur among public intellectuals is white-hot, many of these people do not pass the entrepreneurism test. For example, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, and Gen. James Jones, former nationalsecurity adviser.

Lately both men have been at the podiums, preaching about a world of small business and individual risk. But they have not run small companies, bet their homes on startups, nor have run up credit cards to meet payroll. Accomplished men in their own right,  they have neither of them walked the entrepreneurial walk,  nor have they followed the math and science catechism.

The fact is most engineers need math in some degree, some scientists need a lot of math, but others need surprising little.

Also most people can boost their performance in a subject, if it is important to them to do something they really want to do.  People who need math can usually acquire the math ability they need to function where they want to be. That will not make them brilliant mathematicians. They will not opine on string theory or challenge obscure concepts of the nature of matter. But that need not, in the age of computers, keep them from, say, working as ocean geologists.

I was arguably the very worst math student who ever tried addition. But I got better when I started running my own business, and better still when I wanted to fly light airplanes. Truth is I was scared off by teachers with the math and science mantra.

For years, literature teachers have been scaring off students by suggesting that Shakespeare, Tolstoy or James Joyce are difficult to read and good for them. Now these math-and-science preachers are scaring off students from the adventure of science.

For the good of the future, let us stop frightening the children. Math to the left. Science to the right. Converge as needed. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate