Monthly Archives: March 2015

The Emperor of All Maladies, redux

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Posted on behalf of Boer Deng

One of the remarkable features of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), is its philosophical acuity. “Science embodies the human desire to understand nature; technology couples that desire with the ambition to control nature,” he writes. Cancer treatment is at the very edge of technological possibility, intervening in a disease that is our “desperate, malevolent, contemporary doppelganger”. To Mukherjee, cancer was not something, but someone.

Emperor

{credit}PBS{/credit}

Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, a three-part documentary, adapted from Mukherjee’s “biography” and directed by veteran filmmaker Barak Goodman, airs on PBS (the US Public Broadcasting Service) starting 30 March. It stands witness to the achievements of cancer research, but is also visceral and emotional.  Executive producer and co-writer Ken Burns, best known for his documentary series on the American Civil War and the Roosevelts, is adept at evoking empathy for those who feature — parents with sick children, wives learning of husbands’ prognoses, doctors faced with unspeakably difficult choices.

The structure hews closely to the book’s. Part 1 traces the disease to an ancient Egyptian record telling of an illness for which “there is no cure”, to rudimentary treatments that evolve from antiquity to modernity, to the mid-twentieth-century US “war on cancer”, for which pathologist Sidney Farber and socialite and philanthropist Mary Lasker galvanised support. Part 2, “The Blind Men and the Elephant”, looks at the shift towards piecing together the still-muddled puzzle of cancer genomics. It is proof of the progress over the past few years that immunotherapeutics, which Mukherjee’s book did not discuss, closes the series’ finale, “Achilles Heel”.

Yet as medicine advances on the screen, a subtler kind of progress can be detected in the voices of those whom cancer has touched. In 1978, essayist Susan Sontag, diagnosed with leukaemia, wrote in Illness as Metaphor of a peculiar sociological phenomenon — the “magic power” even the diseases’ names seem to hold. Until the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, cancer evoked a uniquely potent dread. Some oncologists even avoided telling patients they were ill, a practice that still goes on in some parts of the world. When cancer could not be fully understood and confronted, it demoralized.

The most profound aspect of Burns’s visual rendering of Emperor of All Maladies is that it allows us to see the clarity that cancer research has brought about. We can now read the mutations of an oncogene, and look with astonishing precision at where a tumour has formed. In the last two years, as the series shows, work by Steven Rosenberg on T-cell therapy and James Allison on targeted tumour recognition has revealed how harnessing the immune system can combat cancers.

Such advances have divested cancer of some of its slippery, amorphous capacity to invoke terror. “Cancer, we have discovered, is stitched into our genome,” writes Mukherjee. “Perhaps [it] defines the inherent outer limit of our survival.” Burns’s documentary ends with “tempered optimism”, speculating that one day soon the disease will be managed “like any chronic illness”. For now, at least we have reclaimed our agency in facing it.

Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies runs from 30 March to 1 April on PBS.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Audiofile: Music and the making of science

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© World History Archive / AlamyIs music simply a pleasant accompaniment to thought, or a driving force behind it? The third episode of Nature’s new podcast series on science and sound, Audiofile, examines music’s influence on the development of modern science and the foundations of acoustics (as did our essay series). It also suggests a tantalizing link between Galileo’s scientific mindset and his upbringing: his father, Vincenzo, was a lute maker who conducted what some suggest are the first experiments in acoustics. Father might have inspired in son the idea of measuring a physical system and producing a hypothesis from it.

Scientists often search for harmony and beauty, if not explicitly. But the link between music and other scholarly pursuits used to be much stronger. For centuries the Western academic curriculum blended music and science to a degree rarely experienced by today’s undergraduates. Students were taught the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.

Musical analogies continue to help scientists make sense of tricky concepts, as historian of science Jim Bennett explains in the podcast. “The insight – which plausibly came from music – that the world has a mathematical blueprint is fundamental to science.”

For more, listen to the episode or subscribe to the Nature Podcast.

For Books and Arts coverage of scientists and artists working with sound, see Q&As with electronic musician and computer scientist Tom Mitchell, audio sculptor Bill Fontana, acoustic archaeologist Rupert Till, sound artist Daniel Jones and bioacoustician Bernie Krause.  

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

A taste of tomorrow: Nesta’s Futurefest 2015

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Neurosis FutureFest 2015 006

Neurosis, the ‘world’s first neuro-driven thrill ride’.{credit}Nesta Futurefest 2015{/credit}

In his red ‘mad professor’ overalls, Brendan Walker runs through what will happen to me in the next few minutes. After a helmet of 14 electrodes has been fixed to my head, I will be strapped into a pneumatically controlled motion simulator, which is perched precariously above a crowd of people. I will then enter a virtual reality world controlled by my brain.

I’m taking part in Neurosis, billed as ‘the world’s first neuro-driven thrill ride’. It’s an exhibit at Futurefest 2015, a weekend-long event that aims to give visitors a taste of the coming decades. In the future, the brain will be another material for the entertainment industry to play with, says Walker, who as well as a ‘renaissance showman’ is an engineer and designer at the universities of Nottingham and Middlesex, UK.

It is a fascinating idea. Electrical activity across my scalp feed into the experience, and levels of excitement, boredom and focus dictate the frenzy or otherwise of the music, motions and visualizations as I disappear through psychedelic tunnels reminiscent of the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The more you concentrate, the easier the ride, so I cheat by doing some mental arithmetic, and hope it doesn’t ruin Walker’s research data.

Futurefest 2015 is the second such event run by Nesta, a UK charity focused on innovation. Formerly the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, it organised last year’s Longitude Prize. The festival’s scope is ambitious: to shine a light on coming trends and show possible futures for democracy, the planet, machines, money, music and thrills.

The Blind Robot.

The Blind Robot.{credit}Nesta Futurefest 2015{/credit}

Held in the cellars and arches of the wine bar Vinopolis on London’s South Bank on 14 and 15 March, the lively event pulled in a crowd of 3,000 people, who appeared as technology savvy and creative as the speakers (only Luciano Floridi – a philosopher and ethicist at the Oxford Internet Initiative who gave a mind-blowing talk on how there is no such thing as ‘things’ – sported a suit). At every turn was a new feast of performances, interactive experiences and talks, by the likes of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, whistle-blower Edward Snowden (in virtual form), and human rights barrister Helena Kennedy.

Trends and translations

Predicting the future is, of course, fraught. While global warming and population increase are juggernauts that cannot be stopped, huge uncertainties lie in how we deal with them. In curating the festival, Nesta – an organisation with its feet planted firmly in arts, social entrepreneurship and science camps – seem to have taken plausible trends and translated them to glimpses of possible futures. Often this was insightful and thought-provoking; occasionally the link felt a little tenuous.

One of my favourite exhibits was The Blind Robot, whose robotic arms tentatively explored each volunteer’s face. The intimate experience is not about technology, explained one of the project’s organisers, artist Geraldine Alger, but testing human reactions. Robots that look like humans but miss some crucial details have the ability to make us uncomfortable, she explained; yet interactions with robots may be ubiquitous in the future.

BitterSuite.

BitterSuite.{credit}Nesta Futurefest 2015{/credit}

Another delight was BitterSuite, whose performance combined music with taste, smell and touch sensory experiences. As Oxford psychologist Charles Spence explained after the show, some 80-90% of people have common associations between sensations (sweet, for example, goes with red things and high-pitched sounds). Inspired by this, BitterSuite has choreographed a wholly new and intense way to experience classical music, something that may well be popular in a future where stimulating one sense is not enough.

Sociable robots

Other events were less satisfying. The installation Emotive City, commissioned for the event, was intended to represent the future of cities, deemed by its creators from the architecture and design company Minimaforms as less top-down and more adaptive and regulated by the people within them. At its heart are robots controlled via their attraction to mobile phone lights, their level of ‘sociability’ dictated by a changing social media stream. Its relevance to self-organised cities was lost on me, and an abstract explanation from the creator left me none the wiser.

A talk and tasting session with food futurologist Morgaine Gaye and chocolatier Paul A Young also left me wondering. Future water shortages could well lead to a new reverence for water, but will it really mean we eat dehydrated vegetables covered in chocolate? The rising price of cacao could make chocolate bars tiny, but will a “fashion for disruption” mean they come in graffiti colours? And will “everyone” have a candyfloss lamp in their house in 2050? The audience for these might have been aspiring marketing executives, not inquiring minds.

At the start of Futurefest, chief executive Geoff Mulgan highlighted how Nesta championed the use of evidence in decision-making. That idea stayed with me throughout; while many of the visions of the future seemed solid, more than once I found myself asking how likely others actually were. Yet, if you can suppress your inner cynic, such playful explorations of possibility can be a pleasurable counterweight to more dystopian scenarios.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

 

To the lighthouse: luminous physics, art and literature

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Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, by John Singer Sargent, 1885.

Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife. John Singer Sargent, 1885.{credit}Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas{/credit}

In John Singer Sargent’s curious 1885 portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife, the novelist seems to be escaping from the composition. The author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped and the hallucinogenic Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was famously restless, and after sailing the South Seas, died in Samoa in 1894. As it turned out, that love of saltwater, ships and extreme adventure had a solid physical base: lighthouses.

Between them, generations of RLS’s extraordinary scientific family — the ‘Lighthouse Stevensons’ — built 97 lighthouses round the coasts of Scotland from 1790 to 1940. So Scottish poet Kate Clanchy told me after a Royal Society of Literature lecture on Sargent’s little masterpiece, now on show in the London National Portrait Gallery exhibition of this insightful and innovative painter’s work.

RLS was the odd one out in his sprawling clan of engineers, abandoning his studies in the field early on to pursue the building of books. He was nevertheless vastly proud of his stalwart relatives, writing in 1880:

There is scarce a deep sea light from the Isle of Man to North Berwick, but one of my blood designed it. The Bell Rock stands monument for my grandfather, the Skerry Vhor for my Uncle Alan and when the lights come on at sundown along the shores of Scotland, I am proud to think they burn more brightly for the genius of my father.

Bell Rock Lighthouse. Steel engraving by John Horsburgh after J. M. W. Turner, 1824.

Bell Rock Lighthouse. John Horsburgh, after J. M. W. Turner, 1824.{credit}US Library of Congress{/credit}

The star was arguably RSL’s grandfather, Robert. Bell Rock, his masterwork, is
35 metres of solid engineering jutting from a sea-washed rock in the North Sea, kilometres out from Dundee. Finished in 1811 after three years of punishing labour, it is a wonder of innovation, from the stone floors that prevent outward thrust to the tools used in its construction. (As engineer in charge, Robert invented the moveable jib crane, now used round the world, for the job.) Equally radical was its optical apparatus, a revolving parabolic reflector designed to flash red and white, operated by a clockwork mechanism.

The indefatigable Stevensons were tinkering away at catroptic or reflecting lighthouse lights years before Augustin Fresnel’s groundbreaking dioptric refracting system began its march round the world. (See Jo Baker’s review of Theresa Leavitt’s 2013 A Short Bright Flash, on the Fresnel revolution.) And they were at it long after:  Robert’s son Alan, for instance, improved Fresnel’s model by adding prismatic rings below the lenses.

As for Sargent, as Clanchy pointed out, his work has remarkable immediacy. Not unlike photographs, his paintings capture his subjects in mid-motion, even mid-thought (RLS will forever be walking out of that frame). She described it, in fact, as “flash” — an ideal quality for conveying the restive brilliance of a scion of luminaries.    

Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends shows at London’s National Portrait Gallery through 25 May. Bella Bathurst’s 1999 The Lighthouse Stevensons gives a full account of RLS’s remarkable family and their works.

 

 For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

 

Taste that hue: synaesthetic eats

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Which colour ‘matches’ which basic taste: salty, sour, sweet, bitter?{credit}Kitchen Theory{/credit}

Four egg yolk-sized orbs sit on my plate, cradled by translucent spoons. Each sphere is a different colour: red, green, black, white. The server explains that each represents one of the four tastes, salty, sour, sweet and bitter. But which colour goes with which taste?

Thus began a recent synaesthesia-inspired lunch, hosted by London-based Kitchen Theory. This “collaborative gastronomic project” and think tank is dishing up the meals through April in their West London space. The project came about after founder and head chef Jozef Youssef saw a talk on the blending of the senses.

There are many types of synaesthesia; I once wrote about a woman who felt disgust when she touched denim. Most common is an association of colours with letters, numbers and words. Researchers debate the neural basis of the phenomenon: one popular theory holds that it occurs as a result of neural cross-wiring between sensory areas and other brain regions. About 4% of the population experiences some form of synaesthesia, and there is some evidence that the experiences can be induced.

Youssef’s goal was not necessarily to conjure such feelings, but to remind his guests that we eat with our eyes, ears, noses (try telling the difference between a lemon and lime with your nose pinched) as well as mouths. And to serve a great meal: Youssef has worked at the Fat Duck, British chef Heston Blumenthal’s temple of molecular gastronomy.

He mostly succeeded. I guessed that the white sphere was salty, and when I plopped it into my mouth I got a savoury, spicy hit of raita, the yoghurt-based Indian condiment. Green I took for sour, working on its association with tart apple-flavoured candies. That spoon contained a more delicious concoction of lime, fennel and coriander. I wrongly associated red with bitter — it was sweetened cranberry and rose — and the black Guinness and coffee emulsion with sweet.

Safranal spritzers, smoke-filled bags

The synaesthesia associations didn’t work as well with the other dishes, though all were impeccably prepared. A saffron-infused white miso velouté entitled “The Sight and Sound of Flavour” was served with a spritzer of safranal, a prime organic compound of saffron, while calming panpipe and xylophone music played over the speakers. My lunch companion said the music made her eat more slowly, while I scarfed my soup, preferring its aromatic complexity to the one-note spritzer.

"Bouba & Kiki" from Kitchen Theory's synaesthesia menu.

“Bouba & Kiki” from Kitchen Theory’s synaesthesia menu.{credit}Kitchen Theory{/credit}

The main course arrived in a smoke-filled plastic bag. (The smell reminded me of campfire meals I enjoyed as a kid.) Here Youssef’s goal was to show how language triggers expectations about taste. Its title, “Born in Papua New Guinea,” was a play on words: the dish is guinea fowl served over a sweetcorn risotto. My vegetarian alternative, which also arrived in a bag, was an exquisite tempura egg with a cracker-crunchy shell, velvety smooth white and just-set yolk.

Before dessert, diners watched a video demonstrating a psychological phenomenon called the McGurk effect. When someone makes the sound “ba-ba-ba” but moves their lips as if they were saying “va-va-va”, our brains fool us into hearing “va-va-va”. However, beyond its name (“Believe Nothing of What You Hear”), I’m not sure how the McGurk effect related to the thing itself — chocolate mousse studded with toffee wedges and surrounded by caramel corn, pickled celery, a passion fruit sauce and popping candy. No matter. It was the most fun I’ve had eating dessert, and the sweet, salty, sour and…well…explosive notes offered much-needed contrast to the richness of the mousse.

I don’t mean to knock Kitchen Theory’s concept, which is full of fascinating side notes. The meal was developed with the help of experimental psychologist Charles Spence (whose 2014 The Perfect Meal: The Multisensory Science of Food and Dining is reviewed here) and Richard Cytowic, a neurologist interested in synaesthesia and author of The Man Who Tasted Shapes. I was just too busy enjoying the food to taste colours and sounds – let alone shapes.

Listen in to NeuroPod Multisensory Meals, Kerri Smith’s acute take on neurogastronomic dining. 

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

 

Resistance: the movie

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Resistance Tweets-05

{credit}Uji Films{/credit}

At the age of 12, I was knocked off my bicycle by a car, resulting in a compound fracture to my right leg that required pins and an external cage to enable the bone to reset and the wound to heal. Antibiotic therapy kept the threat of infection at bay. Recently during childbirth my wife contracted an infection that, fortunately, was cleared in her and our new-born baby following a brief course of antibiotics.

In each case, resistance to those drugs could easily have led to death. Something that, like many of those interviewed in Resistance, an alarming documentary film by Michael Graziano, I find almost incomprehensible in the twenty-first century. Campus screenings in the United States last year have now been followed by a release on ITunes.

The film weaves often harrowing personal tales to tell the story of the rise and fall of antibiotics over the past 85 years. We hear from adults and children who have suffered from infection — for example, Jesse Beam, a teenager who contracted MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) on a camping trip with his father. Some, like Jesse, survived with long term-health impacts; others, tragically, did not. We witness medical experts, such as Brad Spellberg from the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, their emotions clearly visible as their most powerful tools fail. Spellberg describes treating a woman in her twenties with leukemia who died after contracting Acinetobacter, which developed resistance to all of the antibiotics available.

A natural resource squandered

How have we squandered what one specialist rightly describes as a precious natural resource? Graziano takes us from the discovery of penicillin to the present day, showing how overuse of these wonder drugs has blunted their effectiveness to a point where we are now on the brink of a post-antibiotic era. He covers all the bases: overuse in medicine, where doctors still prescribe antibiotics to patients infected with viruses; overuse in agriculture, where antibiotics are still gratuitously used as growth promoters; a pharmaceutical industry that by its very structure has become inimical to the costly development of drugs that should be used only rarely.

Resistance paints a sobering picture, albeit a US-centric one. The challenges posed by antimicrobial resistance are global in nature and increasingly need to be dealt with internationally. The film also devotes too little time to those striving to develop solutions, such as people working on phage therapy or others mining drugs from previously unculturable bacteria.

Furthermore, in framing the ineffective government bodies, the agriculture industry and (to a lesser extent) overprescribing doctors as having gotten us into this mess, Graziano lets the public off the hook too easily. Why is it that in Denmark the agriculture industry took heed of public debate and voluntarily agreed to stop the use of antibiotics as growth-promoters, but in the United States and other parts of the world this hasn’t happened?

Graziano walks the line between covering the science in sufficient depth while delivering a narrative accessible to lay audiences. Hopefully this balance will ensure that the documentary is shown as widely as possible, in schools, on prime-time television, so that its message is heard clearly by the general public, the media who inform them and the politicians who represent them. Changing the way that we use antibiotics is hard, but it is a pill that we must all swallow.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.