The new Longitude Prize

Given the whole science, fuck yeah, theme of my blog, I can’t let the 2014 edition of the longitude prize pass by without voting, and explaining why I chose as I did.

To mark the 300^th anniversary of the original longitude prize, the lottery backed charity Nesta is putting a ten million pound fund for the scientific problem that wins a public vote run by the BBC.

If you have not read the account of John Harrison, and how his clock won the original prize of twenty thousand pounds, which in 1714 was literally a king’s ransom, then get yourself over to Amazon and get a copy.

From the dawn of the ocean going vessel, every sailor that lost sight of land was lost and could only guess their position by dead reckoning.  Latitude was easy.  Just measure the angle the sun climbs to in the sky, or where certain stars are, and combined with knowing what day it is, you can immediately work out how far north or south of the equator you are.  East and West were at the start of the eighteenth century unknowable in open water.  When the sun reached its highest point in the sky, it was midday, and if you knew the correct time at another point on the earth, you could tell how far you were from it, as the sun moves at a fixed speed across the sky.  A Yorkshire clock maker built a clock that could keep very good time on a pitching and rolling ship, which is why the whole world measures east and west from London, and a small island nation became the worlds undisputed naval power, and why to this day London houses the master clock for all the others.

The hope is that this recreation of the prize can recreate the drive to solve a problem that affects everybody, and in keeping with the spirit of the original, these are all problems we know about, and even know in principle how to solve, but not in practice.

For me there is only one outstanding choice amongst the six options presented.  All of them have their merits but ultimately five of them are nice to have, rather than imperative.

Paralysis

In the UK, which is only 1 percent of the human race, someone is paralysed every eight hours.  The dream of returning movement to those afflicted with debilitating diseases, or victims of serious accidents, has been with us for as long as we have understood the role of nerves in the body.  My own father was reduced from a six foot four bull of a man, to a shell trapped in a wheelchair he slowly lost the ability to control, by motor neuron disease.

But this is not the one I’m voting for, as despite the massive benefits to those it would help, this is a nice to have.

The technology for this is desperately cool, and normally that is enough for me.  Exoskeletons that can move a paralysed body following the instructions of the wearer, possibly even interpreting their brain waves directly to movement for the full, almost subconscious movement we all enjoy.  These systems will spill over in to all manner of applications.  Superhuman strength for rescue workers, augmentation for those who work in physically demanding jobs, soldiers that can carry heavy weapons in situations where armoured vehicles would escalate tensions.  The first people to Mars, after months of microgravity will be pinned in their capsule by muscle wastage. The first boots on the surface will belong to their exoskeletons.

Cells in the body communicate via electrical, and chemical path ways.  By manipulating the bio-electrical path ways, with genetic engineering, or drugs, or focused electric fields, it has been possible to restart regeneration in species that normally lose it later in life.  Older tadpoles have been made to regrow lost tails, something only young tadpoles naturally do.  Frogs, which cannot regenerate, have grown new legs.  Making the techniques work in mammals is a big challenge, but ultimately our cells use the same basic systems, we just need to learn how to control it.  There is no intrinsic reason that cells taken from one part of your body cannot be caused to become a type of stem cell, and then instructed to grow nerve tissue in a particular shape to reconnect a severed spinal cord.

Still not voting for it.

Low Carbon Flight

This is clearly a nice to have.  The single largest producer of carbon dioxide is agriculture, if change of land use is included.  Aviation is responsible for 3% of all CO2 emissions globally, live stock is 9%.  But I’m no sceptic, and 3% of thirty seven billion tons is well over one billion tons, and is well worth going after; if all human activities could cut a couple of billion here and a couple of billion there, the projections would look very different.

Again, there are some great technologies coming along in this area, since zero carbon flight can only be achieved by burning hydrogen, and so producing a water exhaust, or through electric engines.  The fact is that hydrocarbons are almost perfect as a fuel, easy to handle, with huge energy density.  Hydrogen does have more energy, but currently only as a cryogenic fuel, which is very hard to handle.  It might be possible to use metal hydride storage, and then burn it, which solves the storage and handling problem, but the fuel is going to be very heavy, on the other hand, If electrical systems can pull an order of magnitude more work out of the same mass, then they will rival fossil fuels for efficiency.  These aircraft are going to require some very advanced technology; ultra-light graphene composite fuselages, induced plasma drag reduction, super conducting electric motors, nanotechnology batteries and ultra-capacitors.  All cool stuff.  And I love planes anyway, but I’m not voting for it.

Dementia

With an ageing population, this is going to become a major factor in society, but this is also a nice to have.  It only really applies to the developed world, as most of the earth population live in countries with a growing youth population, as stability and growing wealth reduces infant mortality.

At present dealing with dementia is a design problem, as we really don’t know anything like enough about its underlying causes to enable a technological solution; robotic assistants seem to be the best option at present, but of course does nothing to the symptoms or the progress of the disease

Good design can be literally life changing to dementia sufferers.  The blue vinyl flooring universal in hospitals is confusing and people with dementia think the floor is wet, and they will slip. Lighting that creates pools of light and shade is disorientating, and a building you have to learn your way round is useless.  One NHS Hospital recently opened a garden where all the paths are circular, because you can’t get lost on a circle.  It’s good that such simple things can improve lives so much.

I’ve been reading design guidelines produced by the NHS, and while they are excellent in the context of what we know about changes in cognition from dementia, it does seem that a world designed around dementia patients will be pretty dull for the rest of us.

Food and Water

I’m going to lump these two together, because frankly they are very similar, both of them are on the bottom layer of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, along with sleep, air, sex, and wi-fi.  For every country with a food shortage there is one with a surplus.  It’s a wet world, with millions of tons of water for every person on the planet, but most of it is salty and undrinkable.  These are both very, very big issues with lots at stake, and national interests and national resources.  Ultimately I’m not voting for these two either as a ten million pound project in the UK will not make any difference.  Neither require a technological breakthrough; they need a political breakthrough.  If one country dams the river and reduces another to drought, then technology is not the answer, unless you’re going to blow the dams up, and that will just create more problems.

A technological solution to food shortages is either GM, or better still, synthetic biology, but there are so many idiots in Europe right now that this is not what the money would be spent on, so a vote for food would just be a waste.

Antibiotics

Finally, we arrive at the meat.  Of all the issues listed here only one is a civilisation stopper.  If humankind exits the period where routine infection cannot be dismissed with scarce an effort, then most of these other issue become null and void.  No one will need treating for their paralysis, because they won’t survive the surgery after their car accident.  Dementia will still happen, but only to the very few people who live to old age.  Man’s carbon emissions will drop as our populations, and economies shrink, and food and water shortages will retreat for the same reason.

This may seem a tad alarmist, and even excessive, but given the prospect of modern medicine ending, and the reversal of ever increasing life expectancy, for the first time in history, then I think we can be justifiably alarmed.  At the start of the 20^th century, illness from infections was second only to influenza as the biggest cause of death, by the end of the century, infections were nowhere on the list.

Think how many times you have taken antibiotics in your life, or how many times your children or parent have?  Now imagine if next time they are not available.  Every time you gain an infection there are no treatments, and it is just a case of you been strong enough to survive it, or you die.

And it's not just how infections are treated in medicine that will change.  Routine surgery will become extremely risky, and may even end.  Million of people have small operations on non life threatening conditions in order to have a better quality of life.  In the wealthy west it could possibly continue, with positive pressure operating rooms, sterilised air, and robotic surgeons, but the cost will be immense.

Given the billions spent by pharmaceuticals on research each year, it would seem that this ten million pounds would be fated to disappear in the same manner I mentioned with food and water.  But here there is a specific difference.  The golden age of antibiotic research was 1930 to 1970, during which almost all of the one hundred and fifty or so drugs, in twenty classes, were introduced.  No new classes were discovered between 1970 and 2000, and only a dozen drugs in four classes have been produced since then.  Big drug companies prefer to introduce molecules based on other molecules they already own.

By the time current drugs stop working, and there is a massive market for new one, it will be too late to start researching them.  In fact the best strategy is to find new classes of antibiotic and then not bring them to market so they are ready in reserve for when we need them.

There is a second part to this solution, and that is to prevent the misuse of antibiotics.  The reason that resistance has become so prevalent so quickly is because millions of courses of antibiotics are started but never finished, leaving the strongest bacteria alive.  Millions more courses are prescribed for illnesses that are not bacterial in cause.  This has allowed our world to become awash in antibiotics, and so bacteria are continuously exposed to the active elements, and evolution does the rest.  The incredibly short generations of bacteria allows them to outpace our technology, especially if we don’t concentrate on it.

Delivery systems that allow a whole course to be administered in a single dose will help cut the unfinished course problem and tests that can confirm a bacterial or viral pathology in seconds will avoid prescription errors.

For someone who is a big science champion, and finds himself genuinely impressed with his species ingenuity in figuring out new things, it is a sign of how serious I think this is, that I want the world to work hard simply to retain a technology.  Our society depends on our public health, and the biggest threat to public health is antibiotic resistance.

The vote closes on the 25^th of June, please do it.  Vote antibiotics here.  You can place three votes and all of mine went to antibiotics.