Getting our heads round neuroscience at AEI

What an interesting afternoon, though an odd one as we sat for 4.5 hours without a break (well, we all took our own breaks, but odd all the same; and no chance to mingle). Video apparently will soon be posted, and I recommend you take a look. Roger Scruton kicked off in splendid style, with a strong supporting cast of Stephen Morse (Penn), Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke), Raymond Tallis (London) and Sally Satel (AEI).

The main focus of the afternoon was on the problem of reductionist approaches to the brain -especially in relation to law. If we are "only" chemically-induced brain states, how can we be morally or criminally accountable? The summary view seemed to be that the courts are basically ignoring the claims of fMRI-toting theorists because they have the gumption to realize that a common sense view is to be preferred - accepting the "folk psychology" view that led to and sustains our legal system. Otherwise, there would be no basis for finding anyone guilty, let alone punishing them, and juries have too much sense than to open that particular Pandora's Box.

More of interest to me - and the question I was set to ask had the chair called on my waving arm - is how the public is making out after a decade and more of news magazine covers telling us where and how our brains are doing this or that. As one speaker tartly noted, we are all good at looking for excuses. Neuroscience, seen as offering a reductionist explanation, would seem to offer the ultimate excuse.

Back in 2007, I moderated a day conference at the National Press Club that touched on both neuroscience and artificial intelligence (under the title, A Spotless Mind?), that included Pat Churchland, Congressman Brad Sherman, and critics of some current and prospective developments from the right and the left.

And I was reminded of a project in which I was involved, convened by Fred Goodwin, former NIMH director, under the auspices of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1997-98, under the title Neuroscience and the Human Spirit. It concluded in a 2-day conference at the National Press Club starring Bill Bennett, among others.

We can be glad that AEI is picking up this agenda.

ERBI 2009: Technology Networking and Peripheral Vision in Cambridge

The largest networking conference for European biotechs is hosted every summer by ERBI (acronyms tend to turn into names as they outgrow their original scope, and so it is with this one). The Cambridge BioPartnering Exchange. Participants were mainly UK-based, with a large number headquartered in and around Cambridge (where else, given the research, business, and cultural resources clustered on the banks of the Cam?). I had been invited to go along to chair a panel on emerging tech issues, and could hardly refuse. (Full disclosure: I am a Cambridge grad, so any excuse to visit home is appreciated.) And the Wellcome Trust set-up at Hinxton provides an excellent venue, and not only because of the ambient wifi (can anyone now run a serious professional event without it?).

A comment on the nature of the networking. I’m always interested in hanging out where worlds come together, and while this was a very biz-focused crowd it hosted many diversities – various internationals (especially Canadians, who were there in profusion), and a healthy cluster of CEOs, along with the biz dev types and the consultants who tend to pepper such gatherings. UKTI and consular tech people mingled with lawyers and a smattering of academics and networking leaders come to network their networks. My clutch of biz cards was I think representative: 5 out of 6 are on LinkedIn (mostly seriously, though a couple of people with two accounts and one actually with three – does that mean they are even more serious or less so?). Interestingly, almost all the LI people I connected with protect their own lists of connections. (I’ve never done that: love sharing old friends with new friends in our increasingly viral world.) And perhaps equally interestingly hardly anyone seemed to be on Twitter. Fiona Godsman (@fiona_godsman for those who know what that means!) and I gamely tweeted into the ether from time to time at #ERBI09, but without a lot of chums. It will be interesting to see if projecting a hashtag page during conference sessions catches on at events like this; and the extent to which it energizes rather than simply distracts from the presentations. It will certainly make them more responsive and engaged (in the same way as prohibiting PowerPoint, or limiting it to 3 slides, as some conferences do). Just some suggestions.

Our panel was focused on personalized medicine and other future developments – an opportunity for the kind of general discussion that most sessions did not permit. In my intro I was asked to explain something about the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET), and it set the context for the kind of interdisciplinary and wide-ranging discussion that should intersperse all our focused and necessarily narrow engagement with technical, commercial, ethical, and other issues. The reason is simple: the speed of change is so great that no-one can any longer be merely a specialist. Which is not to say that we can be merely generalists either. Perhaps a good model of an achievable aim is specialism at one level or another, plus excellent peripheral vision. So industry people can talk to finance people and policy people and ethics people and technology experts, and have enough overlap that they are really communicating. “Personalized medicine,” whether it is the Holy Grail or not, is a great example of the kind of issue that will yield only to that kind of discussion. Part of the value of panels like this at high-level professional/business conferences is to encourage those in attendance to “get peripheral” in the way they think. Peripherality, as it were, is no longer peripheral; it emerges as a key driver of success – especially when times are a-changing and paradigms a-fracturing. From the discussions I had with dozens of ERBI-ites, things don’t look bad at all from this perspective. The somewhat diminished attendance at our session owed as much to its timing (late afternoon) as its topic, though in general peripherality is not valued as it should be. (In the academic world, the equivalent attitude – spouted in response to almost any collaborative or novel project – is “how will this help me get tenure?”)

So I emphasized the importance of anticipatory discussion; of cross-sectoral discussion; and of mainstreaming the discussion since the more potentially transformative the question (and biotech, neuro, AI and other items we touched on are vastly so) the better prepared everyone has to be – even if we see “everyone” in terms only of markets and regulatory environments. Both stem ultimately from people’s understanding and tolerances. As it happens, greater “peripherality” among experts and leaders helps us all learn the language in which we can engage the people out there – not just the people in here - and develop a common grammar.

Our three expert panelists showed how good experts can get be at communicating across the lines. Barbara Sahakian, Professor of Clinical Neurophysiology at Cambridge and a leader in her field, set the pace by summing up her own research on diagnosing dementia and related themes. She pointed out what enormous sums could be saved if therapies could put off the onset of Alzheimer’s by even one year. Kieran Breen, former pharmacy lecturer at Dundee and now R and D Director of the Parkinson’s Disease Society, offered a patient’s-eye view, and reviewed many aspects of the prospect of personalized medicine (personal medical plans, the 5% of inherited factors, stem cells, gene therapy, neuro implants). Harald Schmidt, Assistant Director of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics – the UK’s de facto national bioethics body – reviewed their extensive work on the implications of the paradigm shift towards personalization – including the marketing of products to patients.

In discussion this all went a little further. What fundamental shifts in healthcare delivery might result? How do we cope with hyped expectations, with growing public enthusiasm for “cures” that may prove much harder to deliver than they believe? with threats to the public funding of science (and healthcare) in the unfolding economic climate? with broader issues such as intellectual property and developing world pressure for resource equity? As with all the best discussions, it ended with hands still in the air.

So thank you, ERBI, for the invitation, and to ERBI’s new leader Harriet Fear, whose debut event went swimmingly. Let’s keep encouraging peripheral vision to power discussion across sectors, and long-term strategic reflection in a context in which the next quarter and the next funding tranche tend to focus the mind too wonderfully. If all the talk about the “biotech” century” and technological convergence and exponential improvements in health is more than dubious hype and rhetoric, that’s the only way to go.

A Bridge to Somewhere: the Tech Policy Summit (and C-PET's Agenda)

Tech Policy Central's annual Summit this past week in San Mateo brought together luminaries from several worlds. In three packed days of panels, discussion flowed widely and expertly across fields from IP to broadband access to the haunting problem of the perceived lack of sympathetic understanding of the federal government for the tech community. Highlights were tweeted as we went along (#tps09). One such: that when President Obama handed the British Queen an iPod, he was probably breaking both the TOS and US copyright law. Another: that when you write an email, during its lifecycle it goes through probably eight different sets of legal status. Another: one speaker reeled off a list of ways in which the Obama administration, deemed to be far the most connected with tech leaders the US has known, is challenging its interests – from anti-trust to offshore earnings.

I was impressed - especially with the quality of the panelists. If representation from Washington was not at quite the highest levels, this was no great surprise. And it neatly illustrated the disconnect that ran through much of the discussion and that is one of the key reasons we are building C-PET.

TPS’s agenda was generally focused on the present and the near-term future -the cultural and legislative gaps between the feds and the Valley. Yet this current failure is a taproot of the key strategic issue around which C-PET is being formed – the fundamental lack of high-level policy interest in the future impact of emerging technologies. If the current situation were healthier, the question of the future would be simpler to address. Which is one reason why the current gaps, and TPS’s efforts to bridge them, are so important. Of course, there are others: we sorely need a vibrant and coherent address to such issues of privacy and IP in the context of current and emerging technologies.

Perhaps the most disappointing part of the program lay in the panels that were intended to touch on the Great Gap. Not that panelists lacked smarts and articulate reflection. But they seemed either to have despaired of change, or to believe that it would come about by additive efforts. One preached that we needed to do “more and more and more” to get the issues in front of our legislators. And one of the federal speakers himself made a plea for more lobbying.

This ain’t gonna cut it. And my disappointment lay in the fact that no-one – at least no-one when I was listening, as I sat and tweeted and emailed and did all the distracted things we now do at conferences in technoworld – said simply: this is a strategic issue; indeed, a series of strategic issues; they will not be resolved by lobbying and getting a smattering of people from the Valley into government; we face a vast question and need to come up with some quite fresh answers.

Here’s my take. Strategic issues include:

1. We are in the middle of a tech-driven Kulturkampf. A cultural revolution. Legislative process and political leadership in general (even the Blackberry-toting President) are the creatures of a way of understanding the world, and the relations between technology and the world, that were laid down (at best) in the days of Vannevar Bush and Eisenhower. Our approach to IP of course goes back much further, and has barely adapted (as illustrated by current lawsuits against Myriad Genetics on the breast-cancer gene, and Google on their use of trademarks as ad triggers). And the protection of privacy (as noted above) is a bizarre affair. Think Gestalt. Think tectonic shifts. Think Thomas_Kuhn.

2. It is not simply that things are changing. Our mechanisms to manage this change are very weak. The Science Committee of the House of Representatives is not exactly the capstone committee; the place where aspiring members want to top out their careers. Its members and staff have done a fine job. But they are not the leaders of opinion, even Hill opinion. It remains to be seen whether the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) will take more initiative in this administration than the last (and I expect it will), but most people, including (to my surprise; but on reflection perhaps not) assorted attendees at TPS, did not know what it was. The demise of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), which offered a non-partisan view of the implications of new technologies, goes back to Newt Gingrich’s reforms of Congress. If OTA were around today (and, interestingly, Hillary Clinton advocated its reinstatement during her campaign) it would have a lot on its docket. (And while some tech advocates assume that such assessments will always be negative, savvy investors – who know what GMO stands for – take a broader view of the value of social critique. We need many things – not just an Office of Technology Enthusiasm.) And when did the Washington Post, which has a lot to do with the federal agenda (setting and reflecting) last lead with a tech story (aside, perhaps, from stem cells, which should be filed under politics rather than tech).

3. Geography. If a key goal of TPS is to seek to build the Bridge to Somewhere (aka DC), why is it convened on the wrong coast? The United States has perhaps the most “geographical” government of any nation on the planet (though the phenomenon is characteristic of federal entities). What happens in Mexico may stay in Mexico. What happens in DC is what happens. I’m not making a practical criticism – if TPS09 had been convened in DC it might have garnered some more senior federal panelists, but would have lost maybe two-thirds of its attendees (and no-one in DC expects to pay to go to anything, let alone to have to sit through tree days of it!). Which says something about the reciprocal problem of DC and the Valley. But there’s no doubt about it: out-of-towners and lobbyists don’t cut the mustard. If you want to be taken seriously, strategically seriously, in the Beltway – at least on something other than a narrow money/language/vote issue - you need to hang out in the right zipcode. And it’s an interesting reflection on the subtle impacts of IT that “geographicality” is perhaps even more important now than it was; as it is constantly surprising us.

4. Which raises the question of the commitment of our political class, and the people they represent, to S and T. That’s the Big One. It lies behind the lackadaisical interest in the particulars in tech as such (rather than its ad hoc use) on the part of cultural and political leaders. The general disinterest of the major think tanks in the issues that will ultimately provide the context for all issues. The generally hobbyist treatment meted out by the press in their "technology" sections. And so on.

5. And that in turn brings us to C-PET’s agenda, which of course is more future-focused. The need is not just to bridge into today’s tech policy, but tomorrow’s.

So, thanks to Natalie and Marc and their colleagues. An agenda of profound importance laid bare – importance to entrepreneurs, and citizens, and the United States. We have much work to do.

Of "Social Networks"

The recent spate of twittering about Twitter prompts a somewhat longer than 140-character observation. As you will know if you tweet, the algorithms of this hottest “social network” are designed to encourage somewhat incestuous conversations; a battery of them resulted from the Nielsen research suggesting a 60% churn of members from month to month, twice that of FaceBook and MySpace when they were the same size. Yet given how different Twitter is from FB, the category “social network” (SN) becomes part of the problem.

I’ve been engaged in my own exploration; there really is no other way. Only by jumping in and swimming can you understand what the water is like. Theoretical reflection doesn’t cut it. Each SN has its own character; is sui generis, as we used to say when we looked to Latin rather than tweets to summarize. Hence one of my (and I know others’) pet peeves: people who post the same posts to several networks at once. A habit encouraged by platforms like TweetDeck (which I like for other reasons, like its built-in tiny url option; why doesn’t Twitter do that for you?). I’m not sure if Twitter:FB is as FB:LinkedIn. But it’s something like that. We are working by analogy. Sure, SNs are all the same kind of thing. But they are also very different kinds of that thing. (Not sure if anyone calls Second Life an SN site, but by rights it is. And one would have thought dating sites certainly were. And so on.) In any case, we have always had social networks; the significant feature of these sites is that they are web-based networks which may or may not have much of a “social” element.

Which reminds me, am I alone in being perplexed why journalists seem to feel obliged when they refer to FB, for example, to describe it as a social networking site? Or Twitter as a microblogging site? As if anyone who knew what a social networking site was would not know about FB. And a fortiori, as if anyone who would go around using the category microblogging would have a clue what it meant were they not the kind of people who were familiar with Twitter (and very likely first came across the generic term microblogging only as a result of that familiarity). I’m not sure if it is a sign of the rather aged novelty of the medium (my favorite free-wifi coffee house chain Panera Bread still invites one to “surf the internet” on its login page), of the angst of sub-editors who may only just have discovered the fax (oops, facsimile, as hotels still seem to want to call them), or of the precious stylistic tendencies of journos who want to look hip (I know more than you do about the cool stuff; you have heard of the site, I know the meta-narrative).

FB’s move to help us segment friends from, well, less-than friends is no doubt one straw in the SN wind. LinkedIn is immensely and very differently useful, seen as an opportunity to shape one’s online c.v. presence in the age of Google and as a self-updating address book for people we may or may not “know” but did at least exchange cards with. Just what Twitter “followers” (who include friends, bots, and seemingly quite random adherents) have in common with even FB “friends” is unclear. But some people have developed the knack of acquiring them in droves (and, of course, in certain cases, monetizing the fact).

Point being: the SN category is not helping us, any more than we would be helped by calling airlines, buses and motor cars transportation networking – and having solicitous sub-edited journos talking about “United Airlines, the transportation networking company” (it is annoying enough to have the Wall Street Journal insist in every single reference to American Airlines, per its house style, that it is “a unit of AMR”).

Back to Twitter. I think of the 100+ whom I am following only two actually answer the question and tell me what they are doing; and of those only one does it literally, without side comments, essentially offering snapshots of his schedule. I keep following as it makes him a curiosity. As to the other 100, they seem to be doing rather different things from each other. This is part of Twitter’s fascination: a very basic tool with many, many uses; a street one may walk down with very different destinations in mind – and indeed with now hundreds of external applications being developed to enhance such uses. Some may be monetizing, others merely self-aggrandizing (and which of us would not want to have our telegrams read by myriads?) or replicating in Twitland networks from outside, or indeed developing a “presence” simply because they are expected to set up shop in every e-venue. Why do some Twitters not understand that posting dozens of tweets is a turn-off? (It’s the only reason so far that I have unfollowed people.) That posting multi-tweet messages that therefore read backwards is bizarre, even when there are not intervening posts from elsewhere? That being “followed” by a celebrity (BarackObama seems to be following all over the place) offers a new level of weirdness (one assumes it is a crass, or perhaps not so crass, method of acquiring followers who wish to return the “compliment”)? Of course, all this goes some way to explain the high level of churn.

Needless to say, celebrities (political and otherwise) have found the perfect medium with which to communicate with fans/followers/voters – to pump out carefully message-controlled mini-bites without the messy need for journalists to get in the way (let alone ask pesky questions). The Obama campaign’s mastery of web strategy is rightly legendary (is it 13 million email addresses they acquired?), and the presence of Oprah and Brittney and Kuchner suggests smart adaptation to new PR opportunities. On the other hand, Twitter as-is is hardly designed for the readers of People Magazine (which once quoted me, so I can’t be too hard on it); expect more obviously and user-friendly PR platforms to follow. Which raises a broader point: there are many Twitters, and if microblogging continues to take off we may expect segmentation, both within the site and among twitteresque brands and functionalities.

Cloning deja vue; something to teach us?

Back in 1997 when the world heard the news of the first mammalian cloning (Dolly the sheep, of course) it gripped the imagination of a global audience and provided endless copy to the news media. More than once since then it has broken surface again - such as when the Raelian group claimed to have succeeded in human cloning efforts. In parallel, politicians in many countries (and diplomats at the United Nations) responded with assorted legislative and regulatory efforts. The cross-cutting debate about embryonic stem cells (which can be got from cloned embryos, even if so far they have usually been culled from embryos created by in vitro fertilisation), and the hyped prospect of "therapeutic cloning," gained political traction in many places - and had the effect of distracting attention from the cloning issue as such.

This time around, the story is not so big. But it has made it to the front pages, even though there seems no more in the way of substantiation that the work (to produce cloned born humans) has been or can be done than in the earlier press-conference explosions of the past decade. There's no doubt that publicity-hungry researchers (and cultists) can still milk the word, but it is yielding less as time passes.

Lessons? Well, for one, the five-letter word clone continues to have enormous drawing power. It fascinates, with some combination of the fascination of the horrible and the excitement of the future. The technology behind it (so-called somatic-cell nuclear transfer) may be rather passe - as Sir Ian Wilmut, Dolly's creator, re-stated on a panel we shared during the recent Cambridge (UK) Science Festival - he is now looking elsewhere for stem cell success. But like "genetically-modified foods" (mainly in Europe) "clone" is a word to be conjured with. And conjurors intent on media coverage or policy debate have shown its magical powers. Whether these technologies are good, bad, indifferent, tedious, exicting, or some combination of the above (and my own views on cloning itself have been made clear elsewhere), they grip the public imagination.

Secondly, the public does not - in general - have much understanding of S and T issues on which it may have very strong opinions. This is not to insult the public intelligence (though the wisdom of crowds is not necessarily wisdom) but to underline the problems that emerge when matters that have generally been considered "technical" explode onto the public stage. Perhaps the biggest problem lies in the area of risk. As our economy migrates increasingly into dependence on technology-driven innovation which in the nature of the case will prove disruptive and not simply replicate the products and processes it supersedes, where are the bombs buried? When public understanding is low, economic and social impact high, and something highly novel and sci-fi in character at stake, we have reason to be scared. Nanotechnology has offered the best and most widespread example of the problem so far.

The answer? Well, platitudes about the need for "public engagement" are true, though the problem of engaging the public early enough in the development of new things is one we have yet to solve.

Perhaps we should be grateful to Dr. Zavos, the self-promoting would-be cloner, for reminding us.

Our Brains and Us

As we focus on the financial collapse and its economic consequences – and the routines of elections and wars and whatever the New York Times and Washington Post deem to be “news” – in the background we hear the drip, drip, drip of something else. Technologies of this kind and that are slowly but surely enabling us to start remaking not Iraq and Afghanistan, or even Wall Street, but human nature itself.

To say that is to raise the $64,000 question: who picks the stories and decides what is “news”? Who decides the weighting of A and B and C? And were there an ombudsman or an internal affairs department to ask if they got it right, what would he or she say?

For some of us, while the lead news stories are important, there is something else at least equally so. And the latest illustration (brought to us, not least, by the New York Times, though on an inner page, is the development of drugs to enable individuals to get rid of unpleasant memories. Not in the way alcohol can – getting rid of all memories for a few hours; but as a surgical exercise in brain/memory management. Did you catch the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Go see it. It’s zany. But it’s on point. Do we want a world in which we can edit our memories? To which the answer is surely yes, and no, and yes, and no . . . .

Whatever the answer, the idea that we should be able to take charge of what we have remembered is, well, huge. Think about your own memories. Of love, of abuse, of disappointment, of triumph. Of guilt. Of childhood, which sets the memory patterns most of us spend our lives working through. This is big deal.

Of course, there is a lot more to the brain than memory. And efforts to harness its other capacities proceed apace. The brain-machine interface (BMI) may prove to be the biggest deal of the century. Implants to make us smarter or more connected (Google? Instant messaging?) are not any longer in the land of science fiction. Brainwaves, which sounds like a term from the black-and-white world of the 1950s along with ray-guns, are already being harnessed to control video games. Neuro-marketing (which may use MRIs to see how focus groups respond to ad messages) is up and running. The colonization of the brain is already in progress.

Good? Bad? Inevitable? I don’t think we know. Of enormous importance? Indubitably, yet how many of us have grasped that point? Its implications for just about all of human activity are hard to gauge. Hard, partly, because hardly anyone who is not an enthusiast has begin even to think about that they could be. For education, for security, for freedom and privacy, for jurisprudence, for democracy, for business?

We humans have been around a long time. It’s taken all that time for us to come to this particular point, where not only our bodies but our very brains are becoming the subject of our efforts at control and design and, to use the old term, dominion. Shouldn’t we be spending as much attention on this as we are on all the other stuff?



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/health/research/06brain.html

Prospecting C-PET

The Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET - say it see-pet, and think C-SPAN) has been a work in progress for two years, during which time we have built up an increasingly respected presence on the technology policy arena. We have many people involved – some “big names” and some behind-the-scenes volunteers; we have held key events and are creating an ever-growing development plan to ensure the organisation grows to meet its potential. We are well on the way to achieving our goal of becoming Washington’s authoritative think tank on US and global emerging technology policy.

And then the real work will start.

A well-funded, authoritative and widely supported non-governmental body that speaks with authority on emerging technologies is badly needed. Some might say that the start of the deepest recession that any of us has experienced is no time to be looking for funding to start another talking shop. But that is not the way to think.

When C-PET is fully operational and fully funded it will be good news for us all. Good news for potential tech investors who have concerns about the impact of tech projects and public reception of them. Good news for risk managers and reinsurers too. Good news for technophiles who don't want their apple carts upset. Good news for techno-critics who want to make sure the talking is done before the doing. Good news for policymakers, who always tend to ignore long-term impacts in favour of quick wins. In short, good news for society. And at a time when there is acute pressure on funding – in both the public and private sectors – there is an event greater need to invest today in robust long-term thinking - to prevent us from making decisions and indecision that cannot easily be undone tomorrow.

To this end, C-PET must encourage much more widespread discussion and debate on technology issues; start such discussions earlier; engage all of the relevant players including those with strong opinions. In short we must provide the forum in which informed, wise policy decision-making is supported.

C-PET is needed both in the US and worldwide. The previous lack of such a body - especially in Washington where none of the other major think tanks has a major interest (or generally any interest) in the emerging technologies that are the drivers of the innovation economy and future security - defies belief. The US dominates around 75% of these technologies, all the way from the ubiquitous but ever-shifting internet to artificial intelligence to the more distant prospects of synthetic biology.

Details of what we are doing can be found on our pro tem. website at c-pet.org. The purpose of this blog as we move ahead is for me to report on the process (not least of securing major funding for an innovative project in the current financial context) and to comment on some of the many reasons why we believe C-PET matters so much.

Your responses will be welcome!